Rage flashed through him and he kicked the TV off the table. It hit the floor and imploded in a shower of sparks.

Maria’s door wasn’t locked, and when he went into the squalid room his first thought was that she was dead.

She was the girl in the video. She was still breathing, but heavily doped. A grimy vest and knickers were all that covered her thin body. He lifted her carefully from the bed and carried her back through the house and out to the Land Rover. He gently laid her on the back seat, took off his jacket and placed it over her. Catherine reached out for her hand and looked up at Ben with questioning eyes.

‘She’ll be all right,’ he said softly.

The sound of an approaching vehicle made him tense. They were back. The Land Rover was well hidden from their view. So was the pickup truck, which was still sitting half-buried in the hole in the kitchen wall at the back of the house, but they’d find that soon enough.

Ben climbed into the driver’s seat and listened. He heard voices as one of the three men got out. The creak of the iron gates. The roll and crunch of the Suzuki’s tyres on the gravel. The engine burbling through a shot muffler as it pulled up in front of the house. Car doors opening and slamming. Footsteps and laughter.

He pulled his door quietly shut and went to twist the key. They’d be out of here before anyone could react. Then Catherine would be back with her family and he’d hand Maria over to the authorities he could still trust.

His hand stopped halfway to the ignition. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He saw them again. The images on the TV. Big hands pawing at young flesh. Bad teeth flashing in wide grins. The imploring eyes of the girl on the bed.

He looked over his shoulder at Maria’s slight body lying slumped in the back. Catherine was frowning at him from the passenger seat.

Fuck it. He reached down under his seat and drew out his back-up weapon. The shotgun was an Ithaca 12-gauge, black and brutal, less than two feet long from its pistol grip to its sawn-off muzzle. Its tube magazine was loaded up with 00-Buck rounds, the type that would let you into a barricaded room without needing to open the door.

He swung his legs out of the Land Rover. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told Catherine.

The three men were just at the front porch by the time he walked up behind them. Two of them, the fat one and the long-haired one, were joking about something in Turkish. The third guy looked serious, tattoos, slicked-back hair, jangling a bunch of keys. He had a Chinese Colt 1911-A1 copy tucked in his belt, behind the hip, hammer down in amateur fashion.

When the metallic clack-clunk of the Ithaca slide-action cut the air, all three of them wheeled around with wide eyes. Nobody had time to reach for a gun. A cigarette dropped from an open mouth.

He stared at them coldly for half a second before he emptied the Ithaca’s magazine into their bodies at point-blank range.

Somewhere over France

Two days later

Benedict Hope gazed out of the window of the 747 and took another long sip of whisky as he watched the white ocean of cloud drift by below. Ice clinked in his glass. The whisky traced a burning path across his tongue. Airline Scotch, some nameless blended thing, but better than nothing. It was his fourth. Or maybe his fifth. He couldn’t remember any more.

The seat next to him was empty, as was much of the business-class section of the plane. He turned away from the window, stretched out and closed his eyes.

Three jobs this year. He’d been busy, and he was tired. It had taken two months in Turkey to track down the men who were holding Catherine Petersen. Two long months of dirt and sweat, following false trails, chasing up dud information, overturning every stone. The girl’s parents had despaired many times of ever seeing her alive again. He never made promises to people. He knew there was always a chance of sending the subject home in a body-bag.

That had only happened to him once. Mexico City, one of the big kidnap-and-ransom hotspots of the world. It hadn’t been his fault. The kidnappers had slaughtered the child even before the ransom demands. Ben had been the one who found the body. A young boy, just short of his eleventh birthday, stuffed in a barrel. He had no ears and no fingers. Sometimes the kidnappers weren’t even doing it for the money. He still didn’t like to think of it, but the half-repressed memory drove him on.

He’d persisted in Turkey, just as he always persisted. He’d never given up on anyone, even though there were plenty of times when it seemed hopeless. Like with a lot of these jobs, there had been nothing, no leads, just a lot of people too frightened to talk. Then a chance piece of information unlocked the whole thing and led him right to the house. People had died for it. But now Catherine Petersen was back with her parents and little Maria was being looked after until her family could be traced.

Now all Ben wanted to do was go home, back to the sanctuary of the old house on the remote west coast of Ireland. He thought about his private, lonely stretch of beach, the rocky cove where he liked to spend time alone with the waves, the gulls and his thoughts. His plan after the Turkish job had been to rest there quietly for as long as he could. Until the next call. That was one thing he could be sure of. There’d always be another call.

And it had come sooner than he’d expected. Around midnight the night before, and he’d been sitting in the hotel bar with nothing more to occupy him than a row of drinks, counting the hours before he could get out of Istanbul. He’d checked his phone for the first time in a week. There had been a message waiting for him, and the voice was one he knew well.

It was Leigh Llewellyn. She was about the last person he’d expected to hear from. He’d listened to the message several times. She sounded tense, nervous, a little breathless.

‘Ben, I don’t know where you are or when you might get this message. But I need to see you. I don’t know who else to call. I’m staying in London, at the Dorchester. Come and find me. I’ll wait here as long as I can for you.’ A pause. Then, in a tight voice: ‘Ben, I’m scared. Please, come quick if you can.’

The message was five days old, dated the fourth of December. On hearing it he’d cancelled the Dublin flight. He’d be at Heathrow in less than an hour.

What could she want from him? They hadn’t spoken for fifteen years.

The last time he’d seen Leigh Llewellyn was at Oliver’s funeral back in January, back on that terrible day, watching his old friend’s coffin go into the ground as the icy Welsh rain lashed over the desolate cemetery. With her long black hair streaming in the wind she’d stood at the edge of the grave. She’d already lost her parents, a long time ago. Now her brother was gone too, tragically drowned in an accident. Someone held an umbrella over her. She didn’t seem to notice. Her beautiful features were pale and drawn. Those jade-green eyes, whose glitter Ben remembered so well from years before, gazed dully into the void. She was oblivious of the photographers, hovering like vultures to get a snap of the opera star who had cut short her European tour to bring her brother’s coffin back from Vienna by private jet to her native Wales.

He’d wanted to talk to her that day, but there was too much pain between them. She hadn’t seen him, and he’d kept away from her. On his way out of the cemetery he’d pressed a business card into her PA’s hand. It was all he could do. Then he’d slipped away unseen.

After the funeral, Leigh had disappeared from public view and retreated to her home in Monte Carlo. He thought about her often, but he couldn’t call her.