The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (5 page)

As Ben swept fragments of broken glass into the dustpan, he was considering the wisdom of pouring himself another drink. In fact, he was contemplating opening another bottle after the remnants of this one, and keeping it company for the rest of the evening. It seemed like a very inviting prospect.

You’ve had plenty enough already
, said one part of him.

Don’t know about that
, said another.

‘What the hell,’ he muttered out loud. He carried the remnants of the smashed tumbler through into the kitchen, dumped it in the recycling bin with the collection of empty bottles he’d already accumulated, chucked the dustpan and brush back in the cupboard and headed back into the living room with the thought of another generous measure of cask-strength Laphroaig looming large in his mind.

The night was young. He was just getting started.

He reached for the bottle and poured himself the last of its contents. He put the tumbler to his lips.

That was when he heard the sound outside.

A woman’s scream.

He slammed the bottle and tumbler down on the dresser and hurried over to the window. His movements weren’t perfectly coordinated and he bumped his hip against the corner of the table as he went, making a lamp sway on its pedestal. He stared out of the window and saw a figure, eighty or so yards from the cottage, running towards it for all she was worth.

Kristen.

Behind her, chasing her across the rocks, were two men. Both white, both fit and lean, both around Ben’s age or a little younger. One had dark hair shaved into a military-style buzz cut and wore a navy-blue jacket; the other was in a green hooded top. They were running fast. The one with the blue jacket had a distinctive cloth bag over his shoulder that Ben recognised as Kristen’s.

Ben blinked. For an instant he just stood there, unable to react or move.

Kristen screamed again, calling his name. Her voice was hoarse with fear. ‘Ben! Help me!’

Suddenly spurred into action, Ben raced to the door and burst outside. Kristen was just fifty yards away now, but the men had almost caught up with her.

He ran down the path towards the front gate, crashed it open and went bounding over the rocks towards her. He tripped on a boulder and almost went sprawling on his face.
You bloody idiot
, he seethed inside. Whatever the hell was happening here, this was the wrong time to be pissed.

The men caught up with Kristen. If they’d noticed Ben racing towards the scene, it didn’t seem to put them off. The one in the navy jacket grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her violently around, then shoved her harshly to the ground. She cried out as she fell.

Ben sprinted faster. His heart pounded and his breathing rasped in his ears. He saw Kristen trying to struggle to her feet and tear herself away from her attackers. Saw the second man, the one in the green hoodie, kick her brutally back down.

But now Ben was on them. He ran straight into the hoodie without slowing down, twisting slightly to ram his shoulder into the guy’s chest. Ben heard the grunt as the impact drove the wind out of him. Up close, he smelled a minty smell on the man’s breath. The man staggered but stayed on his feet. He reached behind him to draw a stubby black cylindrical object from his belt. Clutching it at one end, he gave it a sharp flick and the extending law-enforcement baton whipped out to its full length: an impact weapon prohibited from civilian use in most countries and capable of belting a man’s brains to jelly with a well-aimed strike.

Ben had been in dozens of fights against multiple armed attackers. In situations like these, gaining control of the weapon was always the first priority. He shouldered his way inside the arc of the coming blow and made a grab for the hand clutching the baton. But while years of training had sharpened his instincts to a fine edge, weeks and months of drinking and self-neglect had dulled them back down. Not all the way down to the defenceless, vulnerable level of Joe Public, but enough to make the difference when up against two men like these.

They were quick and determined. They weren’t afraid of him. They’d done this before.

Ben’s lunge for the weapon was too slow. The man side-stepped him and came back with a downward baton strike that hissed through the air an inch from Ben’s face.

He ducked back. Suddenly he was on the defensive. The other man was coming at him from the side, ripping an identical baton from his jacket and extending it with a practised flick of the wrist. Ben skipped backwards over the rocks, dodging a blow that would have smashed his collarbone. But as he moved, his heel caught a rock behind him and he fell. He rolled, twisted, ready to spring back to his feet.

Too slow again. A boot lashed out at him and his vision exploded white as the hard kick caught him in the side of the head. Pain bursting inside his skull, he managed to get upright just in time to see the guy in the navy jacket make another move at him. He was lucky this time. His right fist closed on the guy’s wrist. Yanked it sideways and downwards while he twisted the elbow upwards with a rising blow from the heel of his left hand. The man cried out and dropped the baton. Without letting go of his opponent’s wrist, Ben threw a kick and caught him in the belly. But it was a bad kick with not enough drive and power behind it, and failed to bring him down.

The next thing, it was Ben’s arm that was being trapped. He twisted his body around to wrench it free. The man had a strong grip. Ben punched him in the face and saw blood.

But now the other one was rushing back into the fight, and Ben didn’t react in time. The baton flashed towards him in a dark blur that his senses were too blunted to block quickly enough, and connected hard with his cheekbone.

Ben went straight down, blinded by agony.

Then the baton hit him a second time, and a third, and the lights went out.

From out of the dark depths, Ben felt himself rising. It was a long, slow swim to the surface. Sounds were faraway, all blended into a roar of meaningless noise that filled his head and made it feel about to explode with pain. He blinked, rubbed his eyes. The left one felt strange. It wouldn’t open at all. What little he could see through the right one was blurry and dancing with flashes and strobes of light. He couldn’t think straight or stand up. His head was pounding badly.

Slowly, things began to focus.

The twilit beach and the rocks were illuminated by a glow of swirling blue. Radios fizzed. Someone was helping him to sit up. He felt cold. He winced as another searing stab of pain pierced his head. He still couldn’t quite see straight, but could make out figures of people around him. Shapes that he made out to be a police car and an ambulance were parked a little way off, at the edge of the beach. No, two ambulances. Why were there two?

‘Let me go,’ he mumbled to the person who was helping him, brushing them away. Looking up, he saw the person was a woman. She was wearing overalls like a paramedic, and her voice was gentle and reassuring even though he couldn’t make out the words she was saying. He tried to stand up so he could see past the crowd of people and find out what was happening, but pain and dizziness made it impossible. The paramedic helped him patiently over to a rock, where he sat and bowed his aching head between his hands. He felt the wetness of his palms and stared at them in the flashing blue light. They were slick with blood. He touched his face and realised where the blood was coming from. It was all down the front of his T-shirt and spotted over the blanket that someone had draped around his shoulders. He put his fingers to his blind eye.

‘Try not to touch it,’ said the paramedic, her words sounding clearer now. His cheek felt swollen and hurt badly to the touch. He wiped the blood from his eye, and found he could make out blurry images with it again. He remembered that he’d been hit there. Hit very hard. He remembered the baton. Recalled the man holding it.

‘Kristen,’ he mumbled, his voice coming out garbled and indistinct. He looked around. ‘Where’s Kristen?’

A policewoman appeared out of the confusion and spoke to the paramedic. Ben heard her say, ‘We need to ask him some questions.’ The paramedic replied, ‘He’s got to be seen to first.’ And something about a hospital. It didn’t feel as if they were talking about him.

‘Where’s Kristen?’ Ben repeated. ‘I have to help her.’

The paramedic said something that sounded like, ‘You can’t help her.’

‘Those men … they were attacking her,’ he protested. But nobody seemed to pay any heed to what he was saying. Couldn’t they understand?

Finally he stopped trying to speak, as his voice was slurring and his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He felt himself being lifted and laid down on a stretcher.

Time seemed to drift. Then there was the sound of doors slamming and an engine, and he could sense he was in a moving vehicle. Someone was with him, maybe the same gentle female paramedic. Maybe someone else. He was somewhere very far away. He floated off and felt numb.

Then suddenly he was in a new environment, hard white light dazzling him, walls rushing past either side of him. Faces peering down. He realised he was lying on his back on a gurney being wheeled through a white corridor.

‘I’m okay,’ he tried to protest. ‘I just need to find Kristen …’ Then he passed out again.

The next several hours were a blur. How he got from the gurney to the couch in the curtained cubicle, his bloodied clothes replaced by a hospital robe, seemed to pass him by. He was half-conscious of the activity that milled around him. People came, people went. More faces looking down at him, as if he was some kind of specimen under observation. The nip of a needle, followed by a tickling sensation, he realised was the gash in his scalp being stitched. He vaguely remembered all the occasions in the past when he’d been sewn back together. This was nothing. Twice he tried to tell them so and get up, but dizziness overcame him and he slumped down against the couch.

His eyelids felt heavy, but they wouldn’t let him sleep. ‘I feel much better already,’ he kept saying. Still, he’d been through this routine enough times to know that was the procedure in suspected concussion cases. A grey-haired consultant named Dr Prendergast, sporting a florid bow tie and an ironic sense of humour to match, shone a light in his eyes and asked him a lot of questions about his headache, his vision, whether he felt any weakness down one side of his body, which he didn’t. Nor was he showing other telltale symptoms – he wasn’t vomiting, his skin wasn’t pale, his speech was no longer slurred and he didn’t have one pupil dilated larger than the other.

But Dr Prendergast seemed concerned about the severity of the headache and the dizziness. Ben was wheeled off to have his head X-rayed to check for a skull fracture before being taken back to the cubicle, where they still wouldn’t let him sleep, plied him with pills and as gently as possible refused to answer his questions about what had happened to Kristen, where she was, whether she was all right. He clearly remembered seeing two ambulances at the scene. Had she been in the other? Either they didn’t know, or they wouldn’t say.

Every hour, a different nurse returned to do a neuro check on him. ‘It was just a bang on the head,’ he told each one in turn. ‘If I was going to drop dead, I’d have done it by now.’

After half the night seemed to have dragged tortuously by and they finally seemed satisfied that he hadn’t suffered a major concussion and wouldn’t fall into a permanent coma the moment he shut his eyes, he was moved to a ward and allowed to sleep. He didn’t have much choice in the matter, because whatever cocktail of stuff they’d pumped him full of made him woozy. He laid his head on the pillow and was instantly floating.

But it was an uneasy sleep. He kept seeing Kristen in his mind, snatches of their conversation drifting through his consciousness but meaning little. Then his dream turned darker and he replayed the images of the two men chasing her along the beach. The fight. The baton held up in the air and then flashing down towards him—

He woke with a start. Blinked. Focused. White ceiling. Sunlight streaming through blinds. It was morning. He’d slept right through the night.

He craned his head to the side and saw that his bed was at the end of a ward. Most of the other beds were occupied by much older men. One of them couldn’t stop hacking and coughing. A large, intimidating matron was doing the rounds. A clock on the far wall read just after ten past eight.

Ben was feeling a little stronger, less hazy, but his headache was still thumping painfully. It was partly thanks to the smart couple of blows his skull had received, partly a hangover from the Laphroaig. He missed his Gauloises and wanted another drink.

He drew his hand up from under the crisp sheet and touched the thick dressing on his brow. It hurt, and so did the bruises on the rest of his body from the fight. But what really pained him was that he’d failed to protect someone who was vulnerable, who needed his help.

He’d never failed like that before. He lay restlessly in the bed, haunted by self-blame, tormented with questions. Where was Kristen? Was she okay? When could he see her?

The ward clock was showing eight thirty by the time Ben finally decided he needed to get out of here and find some answers before he went insane. He was just about to throw back the bedcovers and get up when a hospital orderly, an ancient man with wizened arms protruding from his blue smock, who looked like he should be in one of the beds himself, appeared with a trolley and brought Ben his meagre, tasteless breakfast. Ben told him he didn’t want anything and turned the tray away, inquiring urgently about Kristen. The old guy just blinked at him and tried to urge him to eat. Ben told him to go away.

The exchange drew the matron to his bedside. Up close, she was a veritable bison of a woman, who berated him for skipping breakfast and thrust some painkillers at him. After he’d grudgingly washed them down, he asked her the same questions, thought he saw a look flash through her eyes and wondered what it meant.

‘Where is she?’ he repeated. ‘Is she all right? Tell me. I need to know.’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Then I’ll find someone who can,’ he said, flipping back the sheet.

‘You can’t just wander about the place,’ she said fiercely, drawing herself up so that she looked even larger.

‘Where are my clothes?’ he demanded, getting out of the bed and eyeing the matron with a look of savage intent that made her back off a step.

‘I see our patient is feeling sprightlier this morning,’ said a voice. Ben turned to see Dr Prendergast walk in. His paisley bow tie was even more garish than the one he’d been wearing last night – but what instantly caught Ben’s eye instead were the grim-looking pair who had followed him into the ward. They certainly didn’t look like medical personnel.

‘You have visitors,’ the doctor said.