Ben hadn’t intended to stay long in his company that night. He didn’t like the guy any more than he enjoyed talking to a drunk, and Jaco was already slurring his words when they grabbed a corner table away from the music and the crowd. Just a quick drink or two was Ben’s plan, for old times’ sake. Chat, catch up, a few minutes of small talk, nothing too involved: then back to his hotel to work out his next move on the case. But the few minutes became an hour. Then two. By then, Jaco was too drunk to say much more.
Which didn’t matter. Because he’d already said plenty.
It hadn’t taken Ben long that night to realise that Jaco Lennox was a man struggling under the weight of an enormous burden. It wasn’t the drink, the drugs, the STDs or even the debts. He admitted to Ben what Ben could already clearly tell from his bloodshot eyes and pallid, shiny skin: that he hadn’t slept properly in weeks, months, even years, from the nightmares that kept him staring at the ceiling all night and haunted him throughout each day. He was falling apart mentally and emotionally. He was no longer fit for war; whisky no longer helped; and women would no longer touch him, other than those who might do so for cash in the hand — and he could no longer afford those.
Which was telling, in itself. Former SAS men could do very well for themselves in the security industries, especially overseas, where tax-free earnings flowed like water for experts with the right credentials. In terms of admitting its owner to an exclusive and top-paid élite, the winged dagger badge was better than the best first-class Oxford University degree. Even the least distinguished ex-soldier bearing that coveted stamp on his CV could, with a little networking, expect to pull down a handsome paycheque for the rest of his working life. But one look at a broken-down babbling wreck like Jaco Lennox, and prospective employers were shying away. He hadn’t landed a job since quitting the army.
What it was that made Lennox open up the way he did, Ben would never know for sure. It was obvious he was a man wrestling with a secret that was bursting to get out, but Ben wasn’t sure if Lennox’s long and detailed confession was motivated purely by deep-seated shame and the need to talk to someone, or whether it was just the drink loosening his tongue. Either way, it didn’t matter. After years in the SAS, Ben had thought nothing could shock or surprise him any longer.
He was wrong.
The story Jaco Lennox told him was seven years old. It was one everybody in the world already knew. Or thought they did. Very few people would have been willing to even contemplate the reality of the version Lennox revealed to Ben that night. Not even Ben himself.
He didn’t really believe it at first. Lennox must be out of his mind, or must have frazzled his brain down to the size of a grape with coke and crystal meth and LSD. Ben worked over a thousand possible explanations, each crazier and more improbable than the last — but he was willing to accept almost anything rather than what Lennox had confessed to him. It was easier to dismiss the whole thing, put it out of his head and get on with the job at hand.
Which was what Ben had duly done, ploughing every ounce of energy he had into tracking the missing girl, following up more leads, kicking down doors and dealing with the situation the only way he knew how, and as only he could.
Two weeks later, the case was happily resolved, the kid was safely back in the arms of her parents, and the ex-nanny who, it turned out, had indeed hatched the plan to kidnap her for ransom had been anonymously delivered into the hands of the police (who hadn’t themselves managed to unravel a single lead). The ex-nanny’s boyfriend had been less fortunate. Which had been his own choice, and his own undoing. His first mistake had been to get involved in the first place. His second mistake had been not to cut and run before Ben got to him. The exact details of his demise would never be known. Nor would his remains ever be found, except, perhaps, by the fish that lived in one of England’s biggest and deepest quarry lakes.
Ben only collected payment for his services from those who could well afford them. With the money in his pocket, no further employment offers to chase up, and the things Jaco Lennox had confessed to him still just an unpleasant question mark in his mind, he’d returned to his rambling home on the windswept west coast of Ireland.
There he’d done what he always did in his downtime: cracked open a fresh bottle of Laphroaig single malt, let himself be fussed and nannied by Winnie, his housekeeper, gone for long lonely walks on the beach and smoked and gazed out at the cold implacable ocean and waited for the next call to rouse him back to action. Sooner or later, usually sooner, there was always another call.
When the call had come, it hadn’t been quite what Ben might have expected.
‘Did ye hear the news, laddie?’ said the familiar gruff voice. No “Hello Ben, how are you doing?” No “It’s been a while; what are you up to these days?” But then, his old regimental pal Boonzie McCulloch had always been known for getting right to the point.
‘What news?’ For all Ben knew, England might have been invaded, or London totally flattened in a nuclear blast. He didn’t watch TV, didn’t buy any newspapers. Life on the Galway coast got a little isolated at times. That was how Ben liked it.
‘Lennox is deid.’ Boonzie had long ago retired to live in Italy, but he would take the Glaswegian accent to his grave.
‘Jaco Lennox?’ As if it could have been anyone else.
‘They found the fucker hangin’ from a tree in Epping Forest. Topped hisself.’
Ben wasn’t entirely surprised to hear it. But he could tell from Boonzie’s tone, and the pregnant pause that followed, that there was going to be more to the story. He could almost visualise the knowing look on the grizzled old wardog’s whiskery face.
‘At least,’ Boonzie added cryptically, ‘that’s what we’re told.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning, there’re certain details left oot. Such as the fact that said stiff managed to cuff his ain haunds behind his back and put two boolits in his heid before he stretched his neck. Looks like our Jaco must’ve made some bad acquaintances. Guid riddance, if ye ask me. He had it comin’ a long time.’
‘Would it be too much to ask how you came by this information, Boonzie?’
Another low chuckle. ‘Och, let’s just say someone in CID owed me a wee favour.’ Which was all Ben would ever get out of Boonzie, and he didn’t press the matter. Soon afterwards, they hung up the phone. Boonzie went back to his peaceful retirement, and Ben went for another walk on the beach.
For three days afterwards, Ben struggled to reconcile the news of Lennox’s sorry end with what the dead man had revealed to him that night in Peckham. There were suicides, and there were ‘suicides’. Some more discreet than others. But always for a reason. And when certain people went to certain lengths to make sure certain secrets were kept that way, in Ben’s experience it tended to suggest that those secrets were, however unbelievable, however unthinkable, most probably true.
That was why, at dawn on the fourth day, Ben said ‘Fuck it’ and grabbed his bag and was off again. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He needed to find out for himself.
Yet back then in late October, it had all seemed too impossible, too monstrous. Even to him, the man who couldn’t sleep at night because of the things he’d done in the course of what he had once considered his duty, his profession, his calling. ‘Queen and country’, they called it. He’d often thought about that expression, and had eventually come to decide it was a misnomer, for two reasons. Firstly, Ben very much doubted whether the Queen of England, or for that matter whoever might succeed her, or any modern-day reigning monarch, or for that matter again any ruler figure whose face and name were known to the public, knew half of what really went on in the dirty, bloody world of international politics and the conflicts it gave rise to. Secondly, the unsuspecting public who made up the vast majority of the country knew, or were allowed to know, even less. So, by logical deduction, it was clear that these activities were not carried out either for Queen, or for country, or on their behalf, with their consent or even with their knowledge. They went on purely in order to further the agenda of those few, those invisible and nameless few, who held the only true power — not just on a national level, but a global level.