Authors: Scott Mariani
Ben hadn’t even heard the question. ‘Thanks, Ally. I had a lovely time,’ he said, and drove away.
CHAPTER THREE
The place Ben had rented during his leave was a little ivied stone cottage right on the River Usk, in wooded countryside a few miles outside the Welsh market town of Brecon. Low ceilings, exposed beams, thatched roof, old-fashioned leaded windows that peeked out through ivy and climbing roses. The stone fireplace was adorned with brass ornaments, and in a nod to tradition a pair of crossed cricket bats hung over the mantelpiece.
Ben didn’t care too much for cricket, but he did care for the peace and quiet of the place, as far as you could get from the boiling white heat and madness of the desert war front line. He could have spent these few weeks at his house near Galway Bay on the western Irish coast, but they didn’t hold annual international jazz festivals there and the gunman who’d almost managed to kill him had kindly done so at just the right time to allow him to catch some acts he’d long wanted to check out.
Jazz was the last thing on his mind that night as he burst inside the cottage and went straight over to flip on the TV. Scanning through the channels in search of a news programme he grabbed a fresh bottle of Laphroaig from the cardboard box that served as his temporary drinks cabinet, ripped off the cap and poured himself out a triple measure.
When he found a news programme he wasn’t surprised to see that the Cayman Islands air crash was one of the headline items. He listened and watched intently: interviews with shocked island airport authorities; grim-faced mourners; aerial footage of Royal Cayman Island Police and Navy rescue craft pulling wreckage from the water. From the air it was clear that the inter-island shuttle aircraft must have come down on a bar of exposed coral reef in the middle of the sea while on a routine crossing from the tiny island of Little Cayman to Grand Cayman, its larger sister seventy-five miles south-west. The plane appeared to have detonated on impact. Judging by the charred state of the bodies so far recovered, nobody had stood a chance of escaping a horrible fiery death.
Ben gulped whisky and went on watching. The three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander being too small a plane to carry a ‘black box’ flight data or cockpit voice recorder, the primary witness on whose testimony the suicide theory hung was the air traffic controller reported to have been in radio contact with the pilot shortly before the crash, struggling to talk him out of bringing the plane down. In the aftermath of the crash, the controller was unavailable for comment.
Four of the dozen passengers aboard the CIC inter-island flight had been British: a holiday couple, their son, and a retired dentist. But the main focus was on the man the media were already branding ‘kamikaze pilot’ and ‘suicide killer’, Nick Chapman. His final words to the air traffic controller, captured on tape moments before the crash, were a distorted, muffled yell over the chaos of the screaming passengers and the roar of the propeller engines.
‘I’m taking her down! I’m taking her down!’
As the dramatic audio clip played, the TV screen flashed up a photo of the man who’d said those words and plunged fourteen people to their deaths along with him. A tanned, lean-faced man of forty-six, smiling warmly for the camera. His hair was greyer than Ben remembered it.
But there was no doubt about it. He was the same Nick Chapman that Ben had served with in 22 SAS, not so many years ago.
CHAPTER FOUR
Five days later, Ben was standing on the edge of the family burial plot in a little churchyard near Bath, where Nick Chapman – or what remains of him the Cayman Islands salvage teams had managed to retrieve from the sea and flown to the UK – was being laid to rest.
Other than the few reporters and photographers who’d tried to get in and been turned away at the gate, only a smattering of people had turned up to pay their last respects to the deceased. Ben looked around for Chapman’s ex-wife, Joan, but there was no sign of her. The only face he recognised was that of Hilary, their daughter. Last time he’d seen her had been a few years earlier, when he’d been one of the twenty or so regimental guys invited to her engagement party. Then, she’d been the happy fiancée, bubbly and full of laughter. Now, even with her face half hidden behind oversized sunglasses and her straggly blond hair, she looked pinched and haggard and aged way beyond her twenty-four years.
It was warm under the sun. The minister read a few words. His manner was somewhat forbidding, somewhat disapproving, a distant echo of the days when suicides hadn’t been allowed church burials. Ben quickly tuned out and stood there watching the coffin being lowered into the grave, lost in his own thoughts and memories of the man inside it. Nick Chapman had done a lot of brave and worthy things in his time. None of them would be remembered now. It was a miserable, deeply saddening end to what should have been an honourable life.
What saddened Ben most of all was the thought that, perhaps, the tragedy of July 23 had been inevitable. Of the troubled soldiers he’d known – and the extreme physical and psychological demands of the life of an SAS soldier took its toll on a few – Nick had been the one most ravaged by depression. After many years in the army, his problems had finally become too crippling a burden for him, and with drug and alcohol dependency mounting, the trauma of his divorce from Joan tearing him apart, he’d finally hit rock bottom. During an SAS operation in Serbia, Nick had barricaded himself into a room with a bottle of gin and threatened to blow his own brains out. Shortly after that incident, in October 1998, he’d been quietly dismissed from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces.
Many months had passed during which Ben had heard nothing from his friend, and often feared the worst. Then, out of the blue, two years ago, a card in the mail: Nick was up on his feet, had qualified as a commercial pilot and had set up a successful little air charter business in the Caribbean. He’d found Paradise, he’d said. He’d sounded truly happy, freed from his demons, as if the dark days had finally been put behind him. Ben had fervently wished it would stay that way.
And now this.
Ben didn’t want to judge Chapman for what he’d done. He was trying not to. Trying hard. He could scarcely bring himself to believe his friend had done this. And yet …
Sensing a presence next to him, Ben looked round and recognised the face of McNeill from B Squadron. He smiled sadly. ‘Hello, Mac. I didn’t expect to see anyone else here.’
‘Almost didn’t come,’ McNeill said dourly. ‘Now I’m here I feel like spitting on the grave.’
Ben said nothing.
Afterwards, he was walking slowly back towards his car when he heard footsteps running up behind him and a woman’s voice calling his name. He stopped.
‘You probably don’t even remember me,’ she said, catching up. Her face was flushed behind the dark glasses, her voice husky from weeping.
‘Of course I remember you, Hilary. My deepest condolences.’
She hung her head. ‘Thanks, Ben. Or should I say Major?’
Ben disliked using his title. ‘Just Ben,’ he said.
Hilary glanced quickly to one side, then the other. He could see something was alarming her. ‘Can I talk to you?’ she said abruptly.
He shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Not here. Can we go somewhere?’ She moved towards his BMW. Another glance over her shoulder, as if she thought there was someone else there behind the gravestones and the bushes.
‘What about your car?’ he said.
‘Please, can we just go? I really need to talk to you.’
There was only one road through the village. Quarter of a mile beyond the last house, Ben saw a country pub up ahead on the right. ‘Buy you a drink?’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I could use one.’
The gravelled car park was almost empty. It was quarter to twelve and the lunchtime clientele obviously hadn’t turned up yet. Ben pulled up a chair for Hilary at one of the outside tables.
She shook her head. ‘I’d rather not be outside.’ The sunglasses hid much of her expression, but the tone of her voice was edgy.
‘Whatever you want,’ Ben said. He noticed the way she kept glancing back over her shoulder as he led her into the coolness of the building. She walked straight across to a corner alcove by the window. Laid her handbag on the table and sat with her back to the wall so that she could watch the car park and the road. Ben asked her what she wanted to drink. ‘I don’t care, as long as it’s strong,’ she replied.
He came back with a whisky for himself, a gin and tonic for her. She sipped it gratefully, then took off her shades. Her eyes were raw from crying. She kept glancing nervously at the window to her right. Her hands were curled into tight fists on the table. No wedding ring, Ben noticed.
‘You came alone,’ he said diplomatically.
‘You’re referring to Danny?’ Hilary shook her head ruefully, staring into her drink. ‘That was over a long time ago. I should never have married the arsehole.’
Which was pretty much what Nick had confided to Ben at the time, though he’d kept his mouth shut for fear of hurting his daughter’s feelings.
‘Your dad was a good man,’ Ben said softly. He touched her hand, then withdrew his, not sure it was the right thing. ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Whatever he might have been going through …’
Hilary glanced sharply up at him. ‘It’s all lies, Ben.’
‘What’s all lies?’
‘That dad killed himself. All lies.’
Ben looked at her. He could feel her pain. What could he say to her? That he’d been there himself once, after his mother’s own suicide? That back then, in his teens, he’d have done anything to persuade himself that she hadn’t ended her own life – believed almost anything rather than accept the truth?
‘The cops said they found antidepressants at his house,’ she said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’
‘You know, maybe they did,’ Ben ventured. ‘It wouldn’t have been the first time, Hilary. Maybe we just need to accept that.’
She shook her head harder, breathing noisily with emotion. Her face was so tight that the muscles of her jaws were bunched up under the skin. ‘
No
, Ben,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t realise the hell he went through to get away from all that. And anyway, I just know. I
know
, all right? Don’t you understand?’
‘I understand that you’re in a lot of pain,’ he said gently. ‘But we all need to try to reconcile ourselves with what’s happened. It’s not going to be easy, but I promise you that, in time, it will get better.’
‘No, Ben, you
don’t
understand. How could you?’ Hilary paused, as if she was struggling with herself over whether to come out with whatever it was she was clearly desperate to say next. She leaned across the table, lowered her voice and came out with it. ‘I have proof that dad didn’t kill himself.’
Ben stared at her.
‘I know. It sounds crazy. But you’ve got to believe me.’
Ben could see the absolute earnestness in her eyes. ‘What kind of proof?’ he asked.
With another furtive glance at the window, Hilary reached into her handbag and took out a mobile phone. ‘This kind,’ she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hilary thumbed the keys of the phone, held it to her ear for a moment and then passed it to Ben. ‘Listen,’ she hissed.
Not knowing what to say, he took the phone from her, put it to his own ear and heard the robotic voice of the Orange answering service. There was a pause; then the message began.
Ben’s brows knitted at the sound of his old friend’s voice, barely audible above a background of crackling and white noise and a roaring screech that was hard to identify. Nick sounded extremely agitated and frightened, clearly fighting to keep his voice calm.
‘Darling, it’s me, it’s dad … Listen to me … Something’s …’
For a few seconds, Nick’s voice was lost in the noise. Ben thought he could hear other voices, a distorted, incomprehensible pandemonium of yelling and screaming. There was no question that something terrible was happening in the background.
‘The plane …’ Nick Chapman shouted over the chaos. ‘It’s …’ He seemed to pause. When he spoke again, his voice sounded strained to breaking point with sadness. ‘Hilary, I love you. Dad loves you. Remem—’
Whatever last words Nick had spoken after that, they were dissolved in a storm of fuzz and static. Then it was the voice of the answer-phone service in Ben’s ear again:
‘To listen to the message again, press one. To save it, press two …’
Ben pressed one and closed his eyes as the message played over again. At the end, he pressed two to save it, then laid the phone on the table. His ribs were burning as if he’d been shot again.
Hilary was staring at him expectantly, her eyes moist with tears. She snatched up the phone with a trembling hand. ‘What did that sound like to you? Like a man who wanted to die? A man about to kill himself? Tell me.’
Ben’s mind swam. None of this made any sense. He remembered the audio recording of Nick’s radio communication with the air traffic controller.
‘I’m taking her down!’
‘Let me hear it again,’ he said.
Her expression hardened. ‘You don’t believe it, do you?’