The Bach Manuscript

by Scott Mariani

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Willard asked.

  ‘Bloodstains,’ McAllister said.

  They got to work, or Willard did, while McAllister twiddled his thumbs impatiently. The afternoon was rushing by and Forbsie would be getting his knickers in a twist wondering where the hell he’d gone, but this was important. At any rate, he hoped it was.

  It was the better part of two more hours before Willard came up for air. McAllister said, ‘Well?’

  ‘I think I found your bloodstain,’ Willard said, holding up a yellowed page covered in tiny German print.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s part of a paper Vogelbein wrote in 1974, about his search for the lost so-called Silbermann manuscript. According to Vogelbein, the music was a solfeggio study for clavichord composed by Bach in 1743, seven years before his death. It passed through the hands of various collectors, the last of whom was Abel Silbermann—’

  ‘The guy the Nazis stole it off of,’ McAllister said. ‘I know.’

  Willard frowned at the paper. ‘He doesn’t give his sources for the information, but he writes that the manuscript is recognisable by the distinctive alleged bloodstain on the lower right-hand corner of its front page. No indication as to where the blood came from, or how old the stain might be. Anyway, it seems that after the manuscript fell into the hands of the Nazis, it went to Berlin but was moved to Silesia in 1945, along with a lot of other Nazi loot, to protect it from the Allied bombings. Silesia was taken over by the Soviets at the end of the war.’

  ‘Okay. And?’

  Willard tapped the paper with a chewed fingernail. ‘Again, he doesn’t give sources, but Vogelbein claimed that the manuscript was among a whole consignment of stolen artifacts that were grabbed and stashed away by the KGB. That’s why, having tracked it that far, Vogelbein gave up hope of ever finding it. Is he still alive?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ McAllister said. ‘He’d be a hundred years old.’

  ‘In which case it appears to be a dead trail, I’m afraid.’

  McAllister recalled what Ben Hope had told him about Nick Hawthorne finding the manuscript in an old shop in Prague, only last year. The Soviet Union had collapsed in ’91. It was impossible to say how it might have found its way out of KGB hands, maybe sold on the sly and then drifted from place to place until Hawthorne eventually stumbled on it without even realising what it was.

  What mattered was two things. First, that it was almost certainly genuine, and highly sought after. Second, that Adrian Graves undoubtedly knew that, even if Hawthorne didn’t. The plot had just thickened.

  Willard was peering at McAllister over his glasses. ‘I don’t understand why this is urgent police business, Inspector?’

  ‘Thanks for your time, Dr Willard. Much appreciated, so it is.’

  McAllister walked back to his car. It was too late to go back to HQ, so he drove home. He lived alone, just him and Radar, in a remote riverside cottage on the banks of the Thames, near a minute hamlet called Chimney in west Oxfordshire. When he got home, he took the dog for a ramble along the river and through the woods, then fed him a plate of shredded boiled chicken supremes for dinner. Afterwards, McAllister started preparing his own evening meal in his small but very well-equipped kitchen.

  Cooking was his joy. Tonight he was making a classic cheese soufflé tart, a very delicate affair for which he’d carefully prepared the pastry the day before and kept it chilled overnight. He’d selected a fine bottle of Chablis Grand Cru to go with his meal. Tom McAllister often surprised people with his good taste. He could be a bit of a mystery to himself at times, too.

  The soft spring evening fell. He slowly began to relax and stop thinking about old music manuscripts with someone’s blood on them. Radar curled up in his basket by the fire. The Thames flowed gently by outside. A solitary owl hooted from the trees. All was well with the world and it was possible to imagine that that feckin eedjit Forbsie no longer existed.

  The table was set for one, McAllister’s soufflé tart was almost perfectly browned in the oven and the Chablis was at the exact right temperature, when the call came in.

  It was Billie.

  ‘Boss, you’d better get your skates on. There’s a major disturbance in Blackbird Leys and the cavalry are rolling. Reports of automatic gunfire, smoke, all hell breaking loose over there. It’s like a war started.’

  ‘Ah, shite. I’m on my way.’

  As he hurried to the Plymouth, McAllister was remembering the words he’d heard only that morning.

  ‘Don’t get in the way of what happens next.’

  And he was thinking,

  Hope.

  Chapter 29

  Earlier

  Ben took his bag from the Alpina and left the car at the side of the road. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said, pointing at Lena’s little blue Nissan. He still didn’t trust her not to bolt at the first chance she got, so was keeping hold of her handbag with her purse and house keys inside.

  ‘You are crazy leaving a car like that out here. Someone is bound to steal it.’

  ‘I’ll just have to trust that not everyone’s a dirty thief,’ Ben said. ‘Now please get in the car.’

  She climbed in the passenger side without a word, lips tight. The Nissan felt cramped after the BMW. He adjusted the driving seat further from the wheel, fired up the tinny-sounding motor and they took off.

  As he drove, he took out his smartphone and handed it to her. ‘You know how to use that?’

  ‘You think I am an idiot? Of course I can use it.’

  ‘Wonderful. I want you to go online and tell me the location of the nearest big garden centre. We can stop off there en route to your place.’

  She stared at him. ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I need some potassium nitrate for my tomato crop back home. You mix that stuff into the soil, they shoot up like nobody’s business.’

  ‘You really are crazy.’

  ‘Tell me something, Lena. Are you a good home-maker? Or are you one of those people who lives on takeaway food and doesn’t own a saucepan?’

  ‘I look after myself just fine,’ she replied, looking at him strangely.

  ‘I’m sure you do. I thought maybe I could whip something up for us tonight.’

  ‘You? What kind of a man cooks a meal for a woman?’

  ‘I’m a progressive kind of guy,’ he replied.

  After searching online for a few moments, Lena read him out the location of a big out-of-town garden centre superstore that was open late, off the Oxford bypass at South Hinksey. Ben pushed the Nissan hard around the ring road and they were there within twenty minutes. ‘Come with me,’ he told her, ‘where I can keep an eye on you.’

  Ben led her inside the superstore and between racks filled with garden tools, boots and gloves and a thousand kinds of miracle potions and plant food additives. Lena looked around her with a frown and commented, ‘This is a very weird place.’

  ‘People like to grow things other than cannabis,’ Ben said.

  ‘Only an asshole would come to a place like this.’ She was pouting now, like a teenager made to suffer the indignity of shopping with a parent. Ben shook his head and decided to ignore her.

  He soon found what he was looking for. The store sold kilo bags of potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpetre. One kilo was more than enough for his tomatoes – or would have been, if Ben had had the remotest interest in cultivating fruit and vegetables. The three other items he purchased were a rubber hammer, a pack of strong plastic cable ties and a pair of latex gloves.

  ‘What is all this other stupid shit for?’ Lena asked on their way back to the car.

  ‘Why, these things have all kinds of uses around the garden,’ he replied. ‘It’s a healthy lifestyle. You should hang up your whip and try it sometime.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Now to your place. Let’s go.’

  Lena lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a modern development off North Way in Barton, an area to the east of the ci
ty that had originally been built mostly as social housing and never quite shaken off its downtrodden aura. ‘Welcome to the shit hole where I live,’ she said as they got out of the car.

  ‘It’s a better neighbourhood than Dragan’s.’

  ‘I hate this place,’ she said sourly. ‘It is full of chavs.’

  Which Ben thought was quite a statement, coming from the sibling and accomplice of a racketeer, blackmailer, murdering gangster, thief, drug dealer and gun runner. ‘Are you bringing that bag of shit inside my place?’ she asked, eyeing him as he grabbed the potassium nitrate from the car’s tiny boot.

  ‘Wouldn’t want the chavs to steal it, would we?’

  Her apartment on the second floor was almost as small as her car, and in need of a clean-up. The carpets were floral, and every wall in the place was painted bright pink. Posters of cute ponies hung on the walls and cuddly toys lay piled on her armchairs and sofa, like a collection belonging to a little girl. Maybe that part of her, the little girl part, was something she needed to hold onto.

  ‘I would like to take a shower,’ she said stiffly. ‘Is that allowed? Don’t worry, I will not try to jump out of the bathroom window.’ When Ben looked into the bathroom, he could see why. The window was so narrow that a cat would have trouble squeezing through.

  ‘Okay. Take your time. Don’t bolt the bathroom door.’

  ‘You want to watch me?’

  ‘No, Lena, I don’t want to watch you.’

  When he heard the water splashing a few moments later, he went into her poky bedroom and looked around. At the foot of the bed was a little dressing table with a mirror and shelves either side of it crowded with a collection of lipstick tubes and makeup products. A cheap photo frame held a picture of Lena and a guy who might have been a couple of years older and bore a slight facial resemblance to her, apart from being a foot taller and shaven headed, with muscular arms and a neck like a tree trunk laced with tattoos.

  Ben picked a bottle of coloured nail varnish off the dressing table. Blue was obviously her favourite. He glanced at the contents label and slipped the bottle in his pocket, then opened Lena’s wardrobe. Some of the garments hanging inside were ordinary dresses, others were mail order items definitely not for everyday wear, like the nurse uniform and various costumes that mostly consisted of see-through lace, straps and buckles whose purpose he could only guess at. But he wasn’t interested in her clothing. At the bottom of the wardrobe he found a shoebox containing a pair of red high heels. He dumped those out and took the empty box, which he carried out of the bedroom and up the narrow passage to Lena’s kitchenette.

  Like the rest of the place, it was built on a miniature scale, but she had all the essentials. Ben searched through the wall cupboards and found a large bag of sugar and a tub of baking soda, which he laid on the worktop. From another unit he took a plain water tumbler, five good-sized bowls and a heavy frying pan. In a drawer by the cooker he came across scissors, a ball of string and a roll of aluminium foil. Perfect. Everything he needed for a cosy cook-in, SAS style.

  His first step was to dump the contents of the nail varnish bottle into the glass. Next he scissored off a two-foot length of string, coiled it up in the bottom of the glass and set it aside to soak for a while. Laying out the five bowls in a row, he measured out three parts of potassium nitrate to two parts sugar, then tipped the whole lot into the frying pan and started heating it gently on the electric hob, stirring it with a wooden spoon and taking care not to let it overcook. The mixture started to turn brown as the sugar caramelised. When it had turned into a gooey paste the right colour and consistency, he added a spoonful of baking soda, which made the goo bubble up and start turning turquoise-blue. He took the pan off the heat and set it aside to cool, removed the acetone-soaked string from the glass and dangled it over the sink to dry. The fumes from it made his eyes sting.

  Next he turned his attention to the empty shoebox, which he lined with a big piece of aluminium foil. As he worked, he could hear the water stop pattering in the bathroom, and the sounds of Lena bustling around. He was nearly finished. The mixture in the frying pan had cooled off enough, and he poured it into the foil-lined box. As it cooled further it would harden solid, so while it was still soft he laid the acetone-coated string into the mixture with eighteen inches or so dangling over the side of the box. Then he wrapped the box over with more foil, to hide its strange contents.

  He’d put everything away and was washing up the dishes when Lena came into the kitchen, wearing a fluffy white bathrobe and her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled of shampoo and soap. ‘That photo in your bedroom,’ Ben said. ‘The guy in it with you is Dragan, yes?’

  She nodded, frowning. ‘So, you been sneaking in my room? You were probably looking for dirty pictures. I don’t do porno.’

  ‘Actually, I was looking for the kitchen.’

  She sniffed. ‘What is that fucked-up disgusting smell in here?’

  ‘I had a go at making us a pasta sauce,’ he said ruefully. ‘Didn’t quite turn out right. We’ll have to order in a pizza instead.’

  She humphed. ‘So much for the great chef, hmm? You let a man loose in the kitchen, this is the shit you get. This place will stink forever.’

  The pizza was from Domino’s, and was brought straight to the door by a little guy on a scooter. By then, Lena had finished drying her hair and changed into jeans and a sweater. Ben had found a bottle of inexpensive white wine in her fridge, which would have been better used for cleaning paintbrushes but was still preferable to drinking the tap water. He poured out a glass for each of them and sliced up the pizza.

  As they ate, Ben said, ‘So you grew up in the Yugoslav wars?’

  ‘I do not talk about it.’

  ‘I know how you feel.’

  She looked sharply at him. ‘Bullshit, you know how I feel. If you had been a child in Banja Luka, like me, when the NATO forces drop a thousand bombs all around, then maybe I would believe you.’

  Ben was familiar with the history of Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina after Sarajevo. During NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force between August and September 1995, devastating air strikes against VRS Bosnian Serb Army enclaves had been launched on over three hundred targets in that area. The true number of civilian casualties had never been openly disclosed.

  ‘That was a tough time.’

  She shrugged, and replied with her mouth full, ‘Afterwards our family move to Serbia. But things in Belgrade were not much better. My mother die there. It is like I always say. All of life is tough. You are born, you suffer, then it is finished and you rot in hell.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been reading Schopenhauer.’

  ‘I never heard of this asshole. Who?’

  ‘I only caught the end of the conflict in your country,’ Ben said. ‘My squadron was supposed to be there for intelligence gathering, to support the UN troops. But there was more than that going on. I saw a lot of the things that were done there to innocent people. I was sorry about it. Later on, we went back there, hunting war criminals. We didn’t get enough of them.’

  ‘I have told you, I do not want to talk about those times.’

  Lena chewed thoughtfully on a pizza slice for a while, gazing at her plate, then said, ‘This music paper, this—’ She paused, searching for the word.

  ‘It’s called a manuscript.’

  ‘This manuscript, is it really worth much money?’

  ‘Apparently so,’ Ben said. ‘Wherever it’s gone. I didn’t see it there among Graves’ things.’

  ‘Dragan has it. He is keeping it somewhere safe.’

  ‘I didn’t realise Dragan was musical.’

  ‘He is not,’ she said, missing Ben’s sarcasm. ‘He is going to sell it.’

  ‘Right. Through his academic contacts in the world of classical music, art and culture?’

  ‘He has contacts of a different kind,’ she said. She hesitated to say more, then added, ‘Like Zarko Kožul, back home.�
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  ‘Zarko Kožul,’ Ben repeated. ‘Who’s that, a friend of his?’

  A dark look washed over her face, like storm clouds passing behind her eyes. The corners of her mouth downturned and she shook her head. ‘Nobody gets close to Kožul. He has no friends. He trusts no one. And no enemies, none left living. You cross Kožul, you die. Everyone knows this.’

  ‘Serbian mafia?’ The wars and resulting massive economic destabilisation in the former Yugoslavia had been good for organised crime gangs in the Balkans. Their business empire was built on arms and drug trafficking, protection rackets, illegal gambling and prostitution, heists and smuggling. Ben had never run into those guys personally, but he’d known people who had.

  ‘Yes, mafia. Before that, he was in the war. He fight with the Scorpions. You understand what that means, yes?’

  ‘I know who the Scorpions were,’ Ben said.

  That had been the self-styled name of the Serb so-called paramilitary unit who were involved in some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. They had used the conflict as an excuse to go on a rampage of rape and murder. Eight thousand innocent people slaughtered at Srebrenica. Thousands more women, children and elderly people beaten, abused and tortured in a systematic campaign of sadism and cruelty.

  ‘Then you understand what kind of man Zarko is,’ Lena said.

  ‘I also understand what kind of a man would work for him. Like your brother.’

  Lena took another bite of pizza, pulled a face as if she’d bitten into a turd, and dropped the limp slice on her plate. ‘Dragan never work for Zarko. But he want to, very much. Before we come here, he always try to make an impression, so that Zarko will let him join his gang. One day Zarko say to him, “Go and make a name for yourself in UK, become big man, get experience, make connections. When you have something to offer me, then maybe you come back home and work for me.” That is how it works, in their world.’