Alone in the woods with a bunch of hardened criminals who had just, to his certain knowledge, murdered someone, Graves should have been intimidated and terrified, but at this moment he was too furious for either. He got out of the car and marched towards them. ‘You promised!’ he yelled. ‘You told me nobody would be hurt! You killed him, didn’t you? Why did you do that?’
Dragan uncrossed his arms and leaned back against the side of the van, taking out his cigarettes. ‘He saw our faces.’
With that simple statement, all of Graves’ worst fears became stark, inescapable reality.
‘Why weren’t you wearing masks or something? I thought you people were professionals at this! And you didn’t have to … My God, this is so awful. Don’t you realise what you’ve done?’
‘Hey, cool it, professor man,’ Dragan said. ‘Shit happens.’ He puffed smoke, then turned and reached into the open door of the van. He came out with a sports bag, zippered it open and produced from inside a large padded envelope which he held up for Graves to see, but didn’t give it to him. ‘You got what you wanted, right? So forget about this piece of govno.’
Graves was sweating, still palpitating with rage. But he couldn’t forget what he was here for. His own survival depended on what was inside that envelope. ‘Give it to me. You have no idea how valuable it is.’
Dragan looked pensively at the envelope. ‘This weird writing is music, right? Just a bunch of old shit some dead guy wrote hundreds of years ago. How can this garbage be worth money?’
‘Believe me, it’s worth plenty. Please, be very careful with it.’
‘Speaking of money, you forgetting something, professor man?’
Graves stepped back to the car and took out his own Jiffy bag he’d brought. ‘Five thousand, as agreed,’ he said, tossing it to Dragan. ‘The other five, you’ll have as soon as I sell the item. It shouldn’t take more than a few days.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You have my word,’ Graves said. ‘Some people keep their promises.’
Dragan frowned, making the flesh on his brow corrugate into rubbery folds. He cracked a predator’s smile and waved the manuscript at Graves, still not letting him have it. ‘If it’s worth so much, then why should I let you have it for ten thousand? Maybe I hold onto it, hmm? See what we can get for it ourselves.’
Graves stared at him, then at Angelique, who was looking back at him with a coldness in her eyes that stabbed his heart. ‘You can’t do that. We had an agreement.’
‘Do not tell me what I can and cannot do, mister pervert. Here is a deal. You give me fifty thousand for this piece of shit paper. On top of the hundred thousand you already owe me.’
‘What?’
‘A hundred and fifty thousand. For that you get the music, the photographs, and we let you walk free. Okay?’
At which point Graves realised, in a moment of utter horror that almost caused his bowels to let go, that he’d been set up from the start. ‘You bitch, you planned this whole thing!’ he yelled at Angelique, or whatever her real name was. All he got back from her was an icy stare.
‘The rich guy doesn’t like to spend his money,’ said one of Dragan’s guys.
‘On some things, he has no problem spending it,’ Dragan said. ‘Like my sister.’
‘I never touched her.’
‘Oh, we know all about what you did. You are one sick little creep, my pervert friend. Now you pay. And remember, creep, we know where you live. We can come for you any time.’
Graves reeled with shock. He was in free fall now, plummeting headlong into the abyss. As bad as the prospect of exposure and humiliation, divorce, scandal had seemed to him, now he not only faced responsibility for murder but personal harm at the hands of these mindless thugs.
‘I’ll pay,’ he croaked.
‘Sure you will, professor pervert. You have three days to get the money.’
Graves knew it was useless to protest. ‘I’ll do what I can. Give me the manuscript.’
Dragan shook his head. ‘You think I am fucking stupid?’
‘I can’t get the money without it.’
‘That is your tough shit. Use your imagination. You say you have no money, then get it from your bitch of a wife that you love so much. What the fuck do I care? Just get it.’
‘Are you insane? I can’t possibly tell her anything about this.’
‘Three days,’ Dragan said. ‘Or we will come visit you and tell her ourselves. And break your motherfucking legs.’
Graves stood there limp, breathing hard. He looked at Angelique and his eyes filled. ‘I loved you.’ It was all he had left to say.
Her expression was full of nothing but derision and contempt for him. ‘Go fuck yourself. You don’t love nobody.’
‘Tell me your real name. Do that one thing for me. Please.’
But she just snorted and got back into the van. The negotiations were over. Dragan and his two guys climbed in after her. ‘Three days,’ Dragan repeated through the window as he started the engine. The van took off, spewing dirt from its tyres.
Graves went wobbling back to his car and drove home as though in a trance. His life, as he’d known it, had just come to a sudden and jerking halt. With nothing to trade, how was he supposed to raise a hundred and fifty thousand in three days?
Home again, he stumbled in through the front door and left it open behind him, not caring. The big house was empty and very quiet. He vaguely recalled Clarissa saying she would be spending the morning with friends.
Graves dragged his feet upstairs to the study. He dumped his car keys on the desk and fell into the leather chair. The finality of the situation had become clearer to him with every mile towards home. No way out. He was done.
He reached for his wallet, took out the Atreus Club business card with Angelique’s name and mobile number on the back and sat gazing at it for a long time. Suddenly, he wanted to talk to her again one last time. Tell her once more that he loved her. Let her voice be the last human voice he ever heard before—
He took out his mobile phone and dialled the number from the back of the business card. As it began to ring, he quickly killed the call.
What was there to say? She hated him. She’d only used him.
What a fool he’d been.
Despair enveloped him like a thick, black blanket. He took a sheet of paper from the desk drawer, a fountain pen from the leather holder on the desktop, and in his scratchy handwriting composed his brief goodbye note. It was the sum total of everything he was feeling at this moment. All he could think of or bring himself to express.
I’m so sorry.
Sorry for his stupidity in falling for a girl who despised him. Sorry for betraying Clarissa. Sorry for causing the death of poor Nicholas Hawthorne. A decent man, a highly talented musician. Snuffed out for money, for no good reason at all.
He didn’t even have the energy to sign his name at the bottom of the brief note, so he just scrawled his initials: AG.
Eleven letters. The final statement of Adrian Graves.
From another drawer of the desk he took a ring with two keys. He slowly rose from his chair and stepped over to the grandfather clock by the bookcase. He unlocked the hidden gun cabinet that the clock case concealed, quite numb and detached as he considered his options. As well as his legally-held guns, the safe contained a few items that his father had left him. The pistols were strictly prohibited, but he’d kept them fondly all these years, never imagining there would come a moment when he’d contemplate using one. Least of all for this purpose.
A pistol would be easier for the job he had in mind. Under the chin, or against the temple. But there was less of a guarantee with a pistol. What if something went wrong and he only brain-damaged himself? No. If it must be done, let it be done as thoroughly as possible. One squeeze, and oblivion.
He reached inside the cabinet for the twelve-bore. Took a single cartridge from the safe’s ammo compartment, loaded it and returned to the desk to sit in the chair
with the gun’s butt resting between his feet and the barrels pointing upwards. Then he pressed the cold steel muzzles against the fleshy underside of his jaw, reaching down to make sure the tang safety catch was off. It was awkward doing it this way. But he wouldn’t be the first to make it work. He put his thumb through the trigger guard and felt the curve of the slender trigger. Now all he had to do was apply a light downward pressure, and the nightmare would be over for him.
It hadn’t been a bad life, really. If it hadn’t been for one terrible, terrible error of judgement, it could have gone on a bit longer.
Oh, well.
Graves pushed down with his thumb and his world disintegrated in a white flash.
Chapter 22
Standing in Graves’ hallway, Ben froze at the sound. It had come from an upstairs room.
A single report of a gunshot from behind a closed door, followed by deathly hush, was one of the more ominously telling sound combinations in the wide repertoire of human damage. There were just three things it could signify. At the most mundane end of the scale, an accidental discharge while messing with or cleaning a firearm whose user would protest ‘I didn’t know it was loaded’, would generally be met by a stunned and guilty silence, unless other people around began yelling at the idiot who had done it, or unless the idiot had gone and accidentally shot someone – in which case the yelling would quickly turn to screaming. At the most fanciful end of the scale, the solitary gunshot could signify the presence of an armed assassin, now standing quietly surveying his dead victim and ready to flee any second after listening for the sound of running footsteps.
But there was a more common reason for the single, flat report Ben had just heard coming from upstairs. In the majority of cases it meant that someone had just taken a self-inflicted step they would never live to regret. The ultimate solution to all of life’s problems, or so it might seem in the desperation of the moment. Tragic in some cases, less tragic in others.
Ben paced up the grandiose staircase, the luxury carpet thick underfoot, and reached the first floor towards where his instincts told him was the source of the shot. Years of sweeping buildings where a closed room might contain either a bound and captive hostage or a terrorist or kidnapper waiting for you with a machine gun had honed his naturally sharp sense of directional orientation to a razor edge. He was certain the shot had come from behind the handsome oak door at the top of the stairs. Reaching the door in absolute silence, he stood immobile for a full two minutes and heard only the utter stillness that told him he was the only living person inside the house. He eased the door open and stepped through it.
He found himself inside a richly-appointed study. Burnished wood, fine antique furnishings, a whole collection of old stringed instruments on stands and hangers – lutes or mandolins, Ben couldn’t tell them apart. Matching oak bookcases stood ceiling high at opposite sides of the room and were filled with leather-backed volumes. The tall double window offered a view of meadow and woodland. The study walls were decorated with beautiful silks and oil paintings that must be centuries old. By contrast the section of wall behind the broad Chesterfield desk at the far end of the room had been much more recently decorated with something else, much less pleasant. The ugly spatter of blood and brains was about five feet wide and had reached up as far as the ornate coving, from which it was dripping back down to the floor.
Ben had seen a lot worse sights in his life. That still didn’t make it a nice experience. Not wanting to touch anything he pushed the door shut after him with his elbow, and approached the desk. The room was full of the stink of blood and burnt nitroglycerine propellant from the gunshot.
The corpse was seated on the other side of the desk, still upright in his leather chair and facing Ben like a company director greeting a client, though he no longer had a face. The twelve-bore clamped between his knees had done the business. Shotguns might provide an effective means of suicide, but those who picked that route were mighty inconsiderate of the unfortunate folks who would have to clean up afterwards.
The dead man was Graves, all right. Aside from the fact that he was in his own house, Ben could identify him from the same yellow bow tie he’d been wearing yesterday, now yellow and red. The clincher was the initialled signature on the suicide note that lay in front of him on the desktop, beside the fountain pen that had been used to write it. The note was written in the chicken scratch of a person more used to typing on a keyboard, and said simply:
I’m so sorry.
A.G.
Maybe it was a note to the cleaners, Graves apologising for the mess. Or perhaps he’d been tormented with contrition for something else he’d done, like being involved in the murder of an innocent man.
‘What are you so sorry for, Graves?’
No reply. If only they could talk.
Ben ran his eyes over the desk. The most incongruous item sitting on its top was the box of 12-gauge shotgun cartridges, freshly opened with one missing. Aside from that were a leather wallet and a set of car keys with a Bentley fob, a mobile phone, a compact laptop whose keyboard was sprinkled with dandruff, a brass banker’s lamp, a leather holder with a selection of pens, a pair of reading glasses, a box of Kleenex tissues, a couple of books on ancient music, a business card printed in glossy black and gold, and a small alabaster bust of J.S. Bach similar to the one Nick had possessed. Whoever sold these things was obviously doing a roaring trade among music scholars. Ben was getting to recognise the composer’s face quite well by now.
But that wasn’t the item on the desk that drew Ben’s attention. The glossy business card lay just inches from the suicide note, as though Graves had it to hand in his final moments. The last thing a despairing man looked at before blowing his brains out couldn’t but be important somehow.
Ben took out the switchblade and used its point to spear the card and pick it up off the desk. Examining it more closely, he saw that the elegant gold script on the front of the card was the name of something called the Atreus Club. Below that, two short lines of smaller script read:
Exclusive Membership
Discretion Assured
There was no address, no phone number, no website URL. Whoever these people were, they weren’t in the business of making themselves easy to contact.
Ben said, ‘Hmm.’
The printers had left the reverse of the card plain white. Scrawled on the back in the same scratchy handwriting as the suicide note, the ink a little faded from contact with the wallet in which Graves might have carried it, were the name ‘Angelique’ and a mobile phone number.
Graves’ own mobile lay close by on the desk. On a hunch, Ben plucked a tissue from the box of Kleenex and wrapped it around the phone to pick it up. He used the point of the knife to open the menu of recent calls, and wasn’t immensely surprised to find that Graves had called the number for this Angelique, whoever she was, only minutes before shooting himself. People didn’t make insignificant phone calls just prior to blowing their brains out.
Ben slipped both Graves’ mobile and the card into his pocket.
Next Ben used the knife again to flip open Graves’ wallet on the desk and shake out its contents, which were the usual collection of credit and debit cards, driving licence, eighty-five pounds cash and two more business cards, one for a Bentley dealership in Berkshire and the other for a specialist violin restoration firm in Headington. Nothing too interesting there.
The same was the case when he went through the drawers of Graves’ desk. Discovering anything obvious there to connect the late professor to Nick Hawthorne’s murder was probably too much to hope for, and Ben wasn’t surprised when he found nothing beyond the usual paperwork, receipts, tax documents, printouts of music-related articles, and a ream of other useless stuff.
More interesting things were to be found elsewhere in the study. Turning away from the desk, Ben noticed the grandfather clock standing against the wall by one of the twin bookcases. The clock was unusual, because the case where the pendulum should be in
stead comprised a secret panel that would, if it hadn’t been hanging ajar, cleverly conceal a hidden steel-lined gun cabinet. That explained where the twelve-bore had come from.
Prying the heavy panel door a little wider with the knife blade Ben saw a couple of other weapons inside, a little .22 rifle for hunting small game and an expensive Italian 16-gauge pigeon gun. Nothing suspicious about those: like the suicide weapon they would be legally registered to Graves and entered on his shotgun ticket.
By contrast, a separate compartment of the gun safe contained some items that were definitely not legally registered to anyone, because to be caught with such a collection in Britain meant an automatic five-year stretch in prison. They were wrapped up in lightly-oiled cloths, which Ben delicately peeled away with his knife to reveal the collection of pistols: a couple of old Colt revolvers, a C96 ‘Broomhandle’ Mauser and a Yugoslav variant of the Soviet-era Tokarev automatic.
From their age, which ranged from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, he guessed they were family hand-me-downs, perhaps with sentimental value, that Adrian Graves must have chosen to keep rather than hand in to the British government for destruction – or in reality to be sold off to dubious dictatorships overseas – under the draconian 1996 handgun ban. His having the illegal weapons didn’t necessarily point a finger of suspicion with regard to Nick’s death, but it said something about Graves’ potentially flexible attitude to the law.
Of one thing, Ben was quite certain. Graves might or might not have had a hand in orchestrating Nick’s death, but he hadn’t been the one to personally put him through the window. Bad men were out there, and Ben’s path was going to take him on a collision course with them.
Turning back to the grandfather clock, he knelt down and checked the contents of the unlocked ammunition compartment at the bottom of the safe. He found two more cartons of shotgun cartridges, a small supply of subsonic hollowpoints for the .22 rabbit rifle, plus what he’d hoped to find: fifty boxed rounds apiece for the Colts, the Mauser and the Tokarev.
The Bach Manuscript Page 13