Valley of Death. Scott Mariani

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СКАЧАТЬ olden days of the British Empire. Ben walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in behind the wheel. The car smelled brand new. He was glad to be free of Prem, and also glad to have their own transport. He was fast running out of countries where he wasn’t banned from booking a rental vehicle. He had absolutely no idea why. Weren’t rental companies insured against their property getting shot to pieces, blown up, flattened or sunk in canals?

      Brooke got in the passenger side. Her hair brushed his face as they settled in. ‘It’s keyless,’ she said. ‘You just press the button.’

      Ben had already found it. The Jaguar purred into life, not as whisper-softly as the Maybach, but you couldn’t have everything. He pulled out of the garage and started down the driveway, pausing for a peacock that strutted unhurriedly across their path. The gates wafted open for them at the bottom of the drive. Brooke guided him left and down the street. Ben was breathing in her perfume and remembering the last occasion they’d travelled in a car together. It had been back in England, during the short time they’d rented a house in the Jericho district of Oxford. A totally different life, filled with wedding plans and the excitement of the big day looming. Ben had quit Le Val and handed the reins over to Jeff, not intending to return. Those days had been over for him, he’d promised himself and Brooke. Having resumed the theology studies he’d abandoned many years earlier, he’d been looking ahead to a whole new future.

      And look at us now, he reflected. Brooke married to someone else, and him back in the same old game as before, with the added twist that he had to help her get her beloved husband back. Life could be strangely ironic at times. His life, especially.

      When the armed guards at the gated checkpoint saw Brooke in the Jaguar’s passenger seat they waved them through with friendly smiles and barely a glance at her driver. ‘It’s like living on a bloody military base,’ she said bitterly. ‘You’d know all about that, I suppose.’

      ‘Just a little bit,’ Ben said.

      ‘But at least it’s safe. I should never have made him leave home that night. It’s all my fault.’

      ‘It happened,’ Ben said. ‘We can’t change it. We can only deal with it.’

      ‘I suppose.’

      ‘So don’t beat yourself up.’

      ‘Okay. I’ll try.’

      ‘Anyhow, what were you going to do, stay hunkered down behind locked gates forever? If they wanted him, sooner or later they’d have had their chance.’

      ‘They,’ she said. ‘Whoever they are.’

      ‘That’s what we’re going to figure out.’

      ‘Ben?’

      He turned, and saw she was looking at him. ‘What?’

      ‘Thanks for being here.’

      ‘It’s what I do,’ he said.

      The twenty-minute route that Brooke and Amal had followed on foot took just three or four by car. Beyond the limits of the serene, upscale residential area they entered a profusion of narrower, humbler and dingier streets crammed to the maximum with activity. Row after row of food stalls and street vendors sprawled over the pavements. Ben fell into line with the slow-moving procession of cars and motor scooters and tuk-tuks that filtered through the jostling crowds of pedestrians. Gangs of children swarmed around the Jaguar, clamouring and waving through the tinted glass.

      ‘We can stop here and walk the rest of the way,’ Brooke said. Ben pulled over and wedged the car into a parking space between two stalls. The throng of kids closed around them. As Brooke stepped out she tossed them some coins and said something in Hindi that seemed to please them. The biggest kid grabbed the lion’s share of the money and planted himself beside the car like a terrier on guard duty.

      ‘I’ve been learning a bit of the language,’ she explained to Ben, with a shrug that could have been a little self-conscious.

      ‘What did you say to them?’

      ‘That there’d be more rupees if we come back and find the car still in one piece,’ she said. ‘Come on, it’s this way.’

      Ben accompanied her through the food market, pressing their way between jostling bodies. The air was intense with the smell of motor fumes mingled with the scents of herbs and exotic spices and aromatic basmati rice and grilled mutton kebab from the vendors up and down the street. The place easily rivalled the grand bazaars of Marrakech, Tehran and Istanbul for sheer buzz and hubbub. Seafood merchants were pulling in scrums of customers for fresh crab and clams and shrimp. There were handicrafts and tourist trinkets and clothes and more exotic varieties of fruit and vegetables than Ben could identify. They passed cafés and small restaurants and musicians and stalls selling mountains of chillies and okra and nuts and teas, all adding to the sensory overload of smells, sounds and colours.

      Brooke’s fair skin and auburn hair were drawing a lot of looks from men. Hence the shawl that covered her shoulders and protected her from more prying eyes. Ben threw back a few warning glances at the oglers, who quickly looked away. The white knight, protecting the damsel. Who, in this instance, was someone else’s damsel. Another painful reminder, but he only had himself to blame.

      ‘It happened down there.’ Brooke pointed down a narrow lane to their left, and turned off the main street away from the bustle. Ben followed. There were no stalls along here, and just enough space for a vehicle to squeeze between the crumbly buildings. She stopped and looked uncomfortably around her, then at Ben. ‘This is it. The restaurant we wanted to go to is at the bottom of this lane. Needless to say, we didn’t get that far.’

      ‘Pretty public spot to pull off a kidnapping,’ he commented.

      ‘It’s so much busier by day. There was hardly anyone around to witness what happened. And if anyone did, they soon disappeared.’

      Ben stood in the middle of the lane and turned a slow three-sixty, scanning details and forming a scene in his mind. He pictured a couple walking. Not a happy pair, because of the troubles weighing on their minds. But things were about to get much worse for them.

      He said, ‘Okay, describe it to me.’

       Chapter 12

      Brooke said, ‘By the time we got here I was already regretting that I’d dragged him out of the house. We’d walked in silence for the last few minutes. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t tell me what Kabir had told him, and I could sense that he was feeling bad about the whole thing. I think he really wanted to share it with me. Maybe he would have, over dinner, or later that evening. But there was no later that evening.’

      She turned to face back towards the lane entrance. ‘The van came from that direction. It turned into the lane, came right for us and screeched to a halt right here.’ She pointed at the ground. ‘You can still see the tyre marks.’

      Ben had already clocked the black stains on the road. Nothing of any great forensic value to discern from those, except that a heavy vehicle had come to an abrupt stop and shed some rubber.

      ‘It happened so fast that neither of us reacted in time. We were caught like a couple of deer in the headlights. Totally defenceless.’

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