The Bach Manuscript

by Scott Mariani

  Ben shook his head, thinking. None of it made sense. An Oxford music professor was in cahoots with a gang of hardcore Serb criminals, and just happened to be a client of the gang leader’s call-girl sister?

  ‘How could someone like Graves even know your brother? He was an academic, not a crook. Why would he get into something like this?’

  ‘He needed money,’ she said. ‘Because of the scam.’

  Chapter 26

  Ben looked at her, more confused than ever. ‘What scam?’

  ‘You are hurting me. Get off me and take that gun out of my face, and I tell you, if you do not hurt me any more.’

  Ben stood up and lowered the pistol, but kept hold of it in case she tried to run. Lena sat up, brushed the dirt from her face and plucked leaves from her hair.

  ‘You have a cigarette? Mine are in the car.’

  Ben tossed her the pack of Gauloises and his Zippo.

  As she knelt in the leaves and smoked her cigarette like a condemned prisoner with nothing left to hide, soul bared to God, Lena made her confession.

  The scam had been Dragan’s brainchild, a new addition to the range of profitable criminal enterprises that he and his gang were already running. Lena’s line of work had given him the idea that snaring plump, middle-aged Atreus Club members with dirty little secrets and everything to lose could be a highly lucrative operation.

  In short, it was an extortion racket. Miroslav was Dragan’s cousin, as well as being a skilled photographer and the owner of a camera with a long lens. Miroslav was pretty good at climbing trees, too. He’d used the big oak in the manor house gardens to achieve a bird’s-eye view of the window behind which her clients received their regular chastisements at the business end of Lena’s well-practised whip. She explained to Ben that was her speciality, the S&M stuff. With the juicy pictures in the bag, all that remained was to deliver the blackmail demand: pay up or face scandal, humiliation, divorce.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not long. Graves was the first. Dragan say, if it works we will do others. Like, how you say? An experiment.’

  ‘Why pick on Graves, with dozens of others to choose from?’

  Lena shrugged. ‘Because he like me. He say he was in love with me. He buy me expensive presents all the time.’

  ‘And that’s how you decided to repay his affections.’

  ‘I told you, it was Dragan’s idea. Once he makes his mind up about something, you cannot say no to him. So they tell Graves he must pay a hundred thousand or they show the pictures to his wife. He have three days to come up with the cash.’

  Now Ben understood why Graves had seemed so stressed-out at Nick’s lunch buffet, with a blackmail demand crushing him into the ground. ‘But why would he offer money to the crooks who were already extorting him for ten times that much?’

  ‘Are you dumb? He did not know it was Dragan, until this morning.’

  ‘Then how did he come to approach Dragan in the first place?’

  ‘Because I had told him about my brother, the poor Serbian immigrant who cannot find honest work and must make his living stealing things.’

  ‘Nice job, Lena. If he hadn’t known that, none of this would have happened. A man like Graves wouldn’t have known which way to turn. There would have been no robbery. And Nick would still be alive.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Hey, what do you want? This man, he know nothing about real life. He annoy me with his attitude, like the world is this big happy place where everyone is so fucking civilised and a girl like me only sell herself because she like it. He was an asshole.’ Lena’s favourite word.

  ‘I don’t give a damn about Adrian Graves,’ Ben said. ‘You want to run your little schemes, entrapping a bunch of perverts and putting them through the grinder, fine by me. They had it coming. But Nick Hawthorne didn’t.’

  ‘How was I to know what would happen? It is bad luck for him, that is all.’

  ‘Bad luck for Dragan, too,’ Ben said. ‘Because I’m in this now.’

  She looked up at him. ‘I do not even know who you are.’

  ‘Dragan will find out who I am, soon enough. So will Miroslav and Danilo, and whoever else gets in my path.’

  Her eyes went to the gun. ‘You will kill them?’

  ‘Then at least you wouldn’t have to worry about what they might do to you for selling them out.’

  ‘This would not be so easy to handle as you think. They have dogs.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Ben said. ‘Dogs love me.’

  ‘Not these dogs. And they have guns, too. Some to sell, others for defence. Like I tell you, Dragan is a bad man.’

  ‘Whatever he is, I’m worse.’

  Lena looked at him. She nodded. ‘I can see you are not afraid. Maybe you are crazy. Or maybe you are dangerous. Dragan is still my brother. I don’t want him to die.’

  ‘Help me to catch him,’ Ben said, ‘and maybe he won’t have to. He can spend the next few years in a prison cell instead.’

  Lena said, ‘You want me to betray my own blood?’

  ‘You already have,’ Ben said. ‘Now’s the time to make good.’

  ‘And if I say no?’

  ‘Worse for him, worse for you. You’re not in a position to refuse, Lena. Where does Dragan live?’

  ‘He has a place in Blackbird Leys,’ she said after a reluctant pause.

  Ben knew where it was. A sprawling estate the other side of Cowley on the eastern side of Oxford, built in the fifties and sixties to relieve the dilapidated inner city and house the workforce of the then-booming Morris Motors car plant. Across the town-and-gown divide that dominated the social identity of the city, Blackbird Leys was the extreme opposite pole to the serenity and beauty of a sanctuary like Christ Church. By the early nineties the estate had earned itself an ugly reputation for knife crime, riots and joyriding. Ben was sure it had become a culture haven for tourists since those days.

  ‘What about the rest of them?’

  ‘They live close together. They are always together. Hang out together. Party late every night, with girls, booze, smoke dope, do meth.’

  ‘Sounds like my kind of social occasion,’ Ben said. ‘What about you, where do you live?’

  ‘Barton.’

  ‘Alone or with someone?’

  ‘I get enough of men in my work. Men are dirty, smelly, like apes.’ She pulled a disgusted face, then looked at Ben. ‘Maybe not all,’ she conceded, with a sly glimmer in her eye. ‘Anyhow, I like to be by myself.’

  ‘Sure about that? I wouldn’t like to think there’s a seven-foot rugby player waiting in your front hallway. He might get a nasty surprise, you turning up with someone like me.’

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  ‘Of course, I forgot. You’re a paragon of truth, Angelique. Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going back to your place for a few hours. Bide our time, wait until evening.’

  Lena looked as if she was still waiting for him to take her up on her earlier offer of a trade. She frowned, then asked, ‘And then what?’

  Ben said, ‘And then you and I are going to crash a party.’

  Chapter 27

  ‘Here you go,’ Billie said, setting McAllister’s coffee cup down on the tiny patch of desk that wasn’t heaped high with clutter.

  ‘Thanks, Billie,’ he murmured distractedly, not taking his eyes off his screen. He was staring at it so intently that the glass might melt.

  The vending machine at Thames Valley Police HQ in Kidlington vomited out something resembling sewage; this was the good stuff from the nearby deli. Tom McAllister was the only superior officer she’d fetch coffee for, just like she didn’t tolerate anyone else in the department calling her Billie and not Detective Sergeant Flowers. Likewise, he was the only one of her colleagues who knew that she sang in jazz clubs in the evenings. They enjoyed a cosy working relationship, unlike the one he had with Forbsie. It had been that way ever since McAllister had broken two knuckles of
his right fist teaching an arrested drug dealer not to refer to her as a ‘jungle bunny’. Things like that brought people closer together, even if it had almost cost him his job at the time.

  She looked around her and asked, ‘What was it, a seven-point-five magnitude?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘The earthquake that hit this office. You should tidy up once in a while.’

  ‘I like the mess,’ McAllister said, slurping the coffee. ‘That way I know where everything is. Hmm, that’s good.’

  ‘Full-on day?’

  ‘Shaping up to be, aye.’ It was half an hour since McAllister’s return from Boars Hill, after the discovery of Professor Adrian Graves, dead from a single close-range gunshot wound to the head, presumed self-inflicted. Not the prettiest suicide Tom had ever been called out to, but not half as messy as the guy who’d thrown himself in front of the 12.18 from London to Stratford-upon-Avon outside Bicester that time. Yugh. The things you had to do for money.

  ‘How’s the wife doing?’ Billie asked, frowning. Clarissa Graves had been the one who found him and called the police.

  ‘You know. It’s not every day you come home and find your husband sitting at his desk with his face dripping from the ceiling.’

  ‘Maybe the gun went off while he was cleaning it.’

  ‘Yeah, and maybe the Devil ice-skates into work every morning.’

  He returned to his screen. Billie touched his shoulder and left him to it, giving the earthquake zone a last disapproving look on her way out.

  Tom McAllister had spent the first part of the day fretting about this worrisome Ben Hope character who’d burst into the picture the night of Nick Hawthorne’s death. Now he had other fish to fry, in the shape of the second dead classical music nerd to turn up on his turf in as many days.

  He’d sensed immediately that it couldn’t be a coincidence. Now, as he sat looking into the background of this Adrian Graves, the link between the two dead men was growing right in front of his eyes.

  First, and most glaringly obvious, the pair had known each other. Graves had been Hawthorne’s music professor, years back. McAllister found an old picture in the university archives of the two of them together, along with an article about some grant that had been awarded for the restoration of the cathedral organ.

  Second, and even more interesting to McAllister, was the matter of the old music manuscripts. It hadn’t taken a lot of research to uncover that Graves was something of an expert in that department. More than that, he was recognised as one of the top authorities in the world on the matter.

  To Tom McAllister, classical music was just something you could listen to while cooking, his favourite pastime. He’d had no idea until now that there was a whole academic sub-industry devoted to locating and rescuing forgotten, stolen or otherwise lost works of great composers, which otherwise would never come to light. Nor had he ever given any thought – although it made a lot of sense now as he went on digging – to the potential value of these old bits of paper. He’d been astonished to learn that collectors routinely bid six-and even seven-figure sums of money for them at auction, especially when the composer in question was one of the biggies, a ‘name’.

  J.S. Bach was definitely a name. Even a big ignorant savage from the Falls Road had heard of that one.

  McAllister leaned away from the computer, slurping his cooling coffee and thinking about what Ben Hope had told him about the manuscript allegedly missing from Hawthorne’s flat. Hope didn’t strike him as the kind of man to get the details wrong, and his description of the missing item had been pretty clear, right down to the brown coffee-or-maybe-something-else stain on the front page and the composer’s signature at the top.

  According to Hope, Hawthorne had believed the manuscript was a fake. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if, hypothetically, there were people in the world far better qualified than Hawthorne, for all his performance expertise, to tell what was genuine and what wasn’t? And what were the odds that Hawthorne had just happened to be buddies with one of the top guys in the field – who just happened to show up dead soon afterwards?

  ‘You don’t have to be Inspector frigging Morse to see there’s a connection here,’ McAllister growled under his breath. It was time to take a closer look at Professor Adrian Graves.

  McAllister’s computer skills were self-taught and he was clumsy on the keys, but he had a sharp instinct for needling out information. He soon found a more detailed biography of the reputed academic on a specialist music institute site. Graves had been born in London in 1953, the son of a museum director, and gone on to study music at New College, Oxford in the seventies. Before returning to Oxford to pursue his postgraduate studies, Graves had spent eighteen months in Vienna cutting his teeth under the tutelage of one Professor Jürgen Vogelbein at the Wiener Institut für Musikwissenschaft. McAllister wasn’t even going to try and pronounce it.

  From what he could gather, it was there in Austria, and thanks to the influence of his mentor Vogelbein who by all accounts was a legend in that field, that Graves had first formed his interest in old music manuscripts. McAllister followed his nose and ran a more specific search on Vogelbein. Born in Dortmund in 1918, the young Vogelbein had interrupted his music studies to take up military service at the outbreak of the Second World War, which had seen him in the thick of the Battle of Berlin in 1945 as the final push of the Soviet invasion crushed the remnants of the Third Reich.

  After the war, Vogelbein had returned to his former studies and eventually become one of the world’s most prolific researchers, famously devoted to tracking down lost music manuscripts. He’d received acclaim in 1973 for unearthing a trove of priceless medieval chants thought to have been destroyed centuries earlier. But Vogelbein’s true passion was for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the quest to restore his lost works to the treasure trove of musical heritage.

  McAllister was surprised to learn that only an estimated fifty per cent or so of Bach’s compositions were thought to have survived to the present day. A vast number were said to have been lost in the years following his death in 1750, when the composer’s mountain of musical manuscripts were bequeathed to various members of his large family and then subsequently scattered. Others had been destroyed in wars, others still were believed to have drifted into private collections and simply vanished. Before the age of recording, once the physical paper on which it was written came to harm, the music died with it. Preventing that tragic loss was perceived by music historians as a race against the clock, before the ravages of time ate the precious manuscripts away to nothing.

  McAllister was definitely learning stuff here, but it wasn’t what he wanted to know. ‘Ah, bollocks to this,’ he muttered to himself.

  Just as he was about to abandon his reading about this Vogelbein guy … that was when he stumbled on it.

  Chapter 28

  The small article McAllister found was buried deep in the website of the Viennese music institute at which Vogelbein had worked for most of his life. Judging from the date, the piece had been reproduced from an old edition of an academic journal, presumably part of some initiative to digitise all their archives.

  The text was in German, and McAllister had to depend on the Google auto-translation to understand any of it.

  PROF. JÜRGEN VOGELBEIN: DIE JAGD NACH DEM SILBERMANN-MANUSKRIPT. Juni, 1980.

  The Hunt for the Silbermann Manuscript. June, 1980.

  Professor Jürgen Vogelbein has conceded that his long search for the legendary J.S. Bach composition, said to have been taken from its owner Abel Silbermann by the Nazis during the French Occupation in 1942 and since vanished into obscurity, may never come to fruition. Professor Vogelbein has long maintained his belief in the existence of this obscure composition, claiming to be the only living Bach scholar to have actually laid eyes on it while a soldier in Berlin, 1945. However, its existence has been disputed by Vogelbein’s academic peers. Professor Heinz Busch of Berlin University has dismissed his claims,
and further insisted that the mysterious bloodstains rumoured to mark the lost manuscript are nothing more than a figment of the academic imagination … READ MORE

  McAllister looked at the empty mug on his desk. ‘Coffee stain, my arse,’ he muttered. Damn right, he wanted to read more. But when he clicked on the link, it took him to an error message that said, ‘Sorry, the link you selected can’t be used.’

  He swore, grabbed his coat and ran to the Plymouth, telling Billie on his way out of the HQ building that he’d be back later. ‘Where’re you going?’ she called after him, but he was in too much of a rush to explain.

  McAllister gunned it all the way from Kidlington into the city centre to Broad Street, past the Sheldonian Theatre. He couldn’t find a parking space for love or money, so parked illegally on the corner of Broad Street and Catte Street and dared any bloody traffic warden to lay a ticket on him. The reason he was here was the grand Bodleian Library, which had to have a copy of every book, periodical and article published anywhere in the world, going back forever. Which was why the place was so damned big, with vaults and tunnels mining deep under Broad Street, filled with archives so ancient and dusty that most hadn’t seen the light of day for decades and centuries, and probably never would.

  McAllister charged into the venerable old library with his police warrant card drawn like a pistol, and told the dead-faced woman behind the desk that he needed to see everything they had by a certain Professor Jürgen Vogelbein. He had to spell it twice for her. ‘It means a bird’s leg,’ he added, proud of his new knowledge of German. Not that the dead-faced lady really needed to know.

  The library staff kept him waiting for more than an hour, during which time McAllister hustled across the street to Hertford College and, with a good deal of urging and a little bit of bullying, was able to collar a reedy, bespectacled lecturer named Dr Willard from the Modern Languages department to help him with his ‘urgent police business’. Willard might have been reluctant to oblige, but he was too overwhelmed by McAllister’s powers of persuasion to say so. By the time McAllister returned to the library with his press-ganged lecturer in tow, the library gofers had come up with the goods: a stack of fusty old academic music periodicals and journals from some recess of the Bodleian’s underground bowels.