The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  They ate a rushed breakfast in the pensione and drove the Citroën into Ravenna. They parked near the centre and walked through a pedestrian zone over the cobbled streets. It was out of season, and the town was quiet.

  Past the Church of St Vitale, the Istituto Monteverdi was a tall and narrow building fronted with white stone columns and a flight of steps. A glass doorway led into a reception foyer. Their footsteps rang off the marble floor and echoed up to a high ceiling. From somewhere above them they could hear a cello playing, and from another room the sound of a woman singing arpeggios to piano accompaniment. The music mixed together in a discordant swirl that reverberated off the stone walls of the old building.

  They approached the desk. The receptionist was a steely-haired woman dressed in black. She scowled at them. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘We’re looking for Professor Arno,’ Ben said in Italian.

  The woman shook her head. ‘Professore Arno does not teach here any longer. He is retired.’

  ‘Perhaps you could give me his phone number?’ As Ben asked, he knew he’d be refused.

  ‘We do not give out numbers.’

  ‘I understand, but this is very important.’

  The woman crossed her arms with a severe look. ‘I am sorry. It is not possible.’

  Ben was reaching for his wallet. Bribery was always an option, although this one didn’t look the sort. Leigh stopped him. ‘Let me deal with her,’ she said in English.

  The woman was staring at them with a hostile expression. Leigh smiled and spoke in fluent Italian. ‘Signora, please call your Director.’

  The woman looked shocked. ‘Why?’

  Leigh smiled again. ‘Tell him Leigh Llewellyn is here and would like to speak to him. It’s urgent.’

  The mention of Leigh’s name had an immediate, almost magical effect. The hostile receptionist was suddenly all smiles and apologies for not having recognized the famous soprano before. She led them up a flight of stone stairs to the first floor.

  Leigh caught Ben’s look. ‘What?’ she whispered.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I thought we’d agreed you were to keep a low profile.’

  ‘Can you think of a better way?’

  ‘I’m sure I could.’

  ‘Like putting a gun to her head?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ he muttered.

  The receptionist hammered on a door and stuck her head through. She fired a burst of rapid Italian that Ben didn’t follow. A man’s voice replied from inside the room. ‘La Llewellyn? Qui?’

  The Director burst out of the office. He was a short man, plump and round in a dark suit. He greeted them with furious pumping handshakes and ordered the receptionist to bring coffee and biscuits. ‘I am Alberto Fabiani,’ he said with a broad smile. He couldn’t take his eyes off Leigh. ‘This is a great honour, Maestra. What can I do for you?’

  They sat at his desk and Leigh repeated their need to see Professor Arno. Was it possible to be put in contact with him?

  Fabiani looked unsure. He breathed in through his teeth.

  ‘He’s not dead, is he?’ Leigh asked.

  ‘No, no, he is not dead,’ Fabiani said hastily. ‘Not yet. He lives in the countryside about ten kilometres from here. I will gladly put you in touch with him. But I feel I should warn you…’ The Director paused. ‘Francesco Arno is a good man. In his day, he was thought of as one of the greatest Mozartian scholars of all time. But he is old now. Over the years he has become-how should I say it—strano.’

  ‘Strange? How?’ Ben asked.

  Fabiani shrugged. ‘His beliefs. His obsession. He became more eccentric as time passed, and he clashed more and more with his peers until, frankly, my old friend and colleague was becoming something of an embarrassment to the Istituto. Even the students came to mock him. They would take a delight in winding him up. Once they got him started he would rant on for hours. His lectures became a farce.’ Fabiani smiled sadly. ‘I have to say that I was not entirely sorry when he announced his retirement.’

  ‘What were these beliefs of his?’ Ben asked.

  Fabiani rolled his eyes. ‘If you speak to him, you will find out soon enough.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Austria

  The same morning

  The man was solid and powerful. He was an inch under six and a half feet tall and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds-none of it fat. He walked naked to the edge of the springboard, feeling it flex under his weight, and bounced a couple of times. His strong leg muscles hardened. He took a breath and launched himself.

  His body hit the water in a perfect dive, hardly making a splash, and he knifed deep into the pool, then surfaced and swam fast. He forced thirty lengths out of himself, then heaved himself out of the water and walked to the chair, where his clothes were lying neatly folded. He was barely out of breath. Through the windows of the indoor pool, the snow-covered grounds of the estate swept away to the pinewoods in the distance.

  The man scraped back his sandy hair. He reached for a towel, and as he dried himself he admired his trim shape. His muscled arms and torso bore the scars of nine bullet wounds and three knife slashes. He remembered exactly how and where he’d got each of them. Each had its own story. What they all had in common was that none of the people who’d given them to him had lived for more than three minutes afterwards.

  The man was forty-three years old. He was a Londoner by birth and a former British Army soldier. His name was Jack Glass.

  When he was drunk he would sometimes boast about his exploits in the legendary SAS. He even had the regimental winged dagger emblem tattooed on his upper right arm. He liked people to see it.

  The truth was that he’d been rejected for service in the regiment many years before. A psychological evaluation had exposed certain traits that the regimental heads felt would not be an asset. His unsuitability for the Special Air Service had been confirmed when he’d tried to throttle the officer who’d informed him of his failure to make the grade. He’d been returned to his regular unit in disgrace, court-martialled and kicked out of the army.

  He’d drifted around after that, run out of money. Like a lot of army leavers he’d been forced to take on menial jobs for a while. With his court-martial record he couldn’t even get security work.

  One rainy London night he’d been at the bar of a pub when he’d met an old contact who had offered him paramilitary work in Africa. The money was excellent and the work was perfect for Glass. He’d accepted immediately and was on a flight three days later. He’d never returned to Britain.

  In the Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, he’d worked for whoever paid the most. Suppressed anti-government rebels. Burned schools. Destroyed villages. Executed whole families caught up in bloody tribal wars. He did whatever he was told to do, took the cash and asked no questions.

  Liberia was where he’d picked up the scar on his ear. The lobe had been ripped off by a bullet from an AK-47. The person holding the rifle was a black child of nine or ten, a little girl. It was the last round in the magazine of her AK. When she saw him standing there clutching his ear and screaming at her, she dropped the rifle and ran.

  Glass had gone after her. He chased the screaming child deep into the bush. Brought her down, knelt on her chest, pinned her arms over her head with one hand. With the other hand he’d drawn out his bayonet, placed the point against her ribs. When he drove the blade slowly deep inside her little body he felt the struggles diminish and saw the life leak out of her eyes.

  He could still remember it now. Someday, he’d like to do that again.

  After Africa came the Bosnian conflict, where Glass had become involved in gun-running. He quit the battlefields, wore a suit and carried a briefcase instead of an M16. The case was usually filled with banknotes. He discovered you could make more money getting someone else to pull the trigger. Two years later, now a full-blown businessman with a lot of connections and cash rolling in, he’d met and struck up an alliance with an Austrian call
ed Werner Kroll at an arms fair in Berlin.

  At the age of thirty-six, Glass had gone to work for Kroll as a personal secretary and general aide. Glass was used to money by now, but selling Kalashnikovs to warring tribes was nickels and dimes next to the things Kroll was into. He was a little more than just an ordinary businessman. But he took fanatical care to cover his tracks, and only a very select few had any notion of the real scope of his activities.

  Glass knew a little about the history of Werner Kroll’s family business. It had been around a long time, and had come a long way since its origins. He also knew that Kroll wouldn’t hesitate to have him, or anyone else, killed if they betrayed him or informed on him. The old Austrian was small and looked harmless. He was a little odd in his ways, and he had the air of an old-world schoolmaster. But he was the most dangerous man Jack Glass had ever met in his life, and he’d met a great many dangerous people.

  Glass pictured Kroll’s wrinkled, pinched grey face in his mind. One day, he was going to kill the old bastard and fuck that little whore he kept as his mistress.

  He dressed in a white shirt and grey slacks, did his tie up loosely and put on his blazer. In his office he found a sheet waiting for him on the fax machine. It was from London. He studied it up close. This was interesting.

  Werner Kroll was sitting in his conservatory breakfast room with Eve. He ate in silence with his back to the window and the ornamental lake with the snowy mountains beyond. Kroll had been eating the exact same breakfast every morning for six years, poached eggs with slivers of toast cut into precisely the same sizes, arranged the same way on a porcelain plate. No butter. He ate delicately, almost daintily.

  Glass came in carrying a folder. Kroll’s fork halted midway between his plate and his mouth. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and glared at him. ‘I’ve told you not to disturb me at breakfast,’ he said in an icy voice. His nose twitched. ‘My God, man, are you chewing gum again?’

  Glass smiled to himself and took the gum out of his mouth. He loved to wind the old man up. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to see this. It just came through.’ He opened the file and handed Kroll a sheet of fax paper.

  Kroll put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and peered down his nose at the sheet. It was a copy of the front page of last night’s Evening Standard. It showed a grainy photo of Leigh Llewellyn surrounded by fans. Kroll recognized the Oxford landscape, the Sheldonian theatre behind her. To her left stood a man he hadn’t seen before. They were holding hands. The headline read ‘WHO’S LEIGH’S LEADING MAN?’

  Kroll lowered the sheet and looked at Glass over the top of his lenses. ‘Is this the person who killed one of our best men with…what was it?’

  ‘A skillet, sir,’ Glass said.

  Eve picked up the sheet and peered at the man in the photo. She liked the look of him, tall and fit-looking. Glass was watching her face.

  ‘I would also like to find out who Leigh’s leading man is,’ Kroll said. He glanced at Eve. She’d been looking at the picture a moment too long. He snatched it away from her.

  ‘I think I know who he is, sir,’ Glass said.

  ‘A professional bodyguard?’ asked Kroll.

  ‘I think he might be a little more than that,’ Glass said. ‘I’ll have to check my contacts. It might take a few days. But I’m certain it’s him.’

  Kroll dismissed him and went back to his eggs. They were cold. He pushed them away in disgust.

  Eve was heading back to her room after breakfast when she met Glass in the corridor. He was standing at her doorway, leaning casually against the wall with one big hand against the door-frame.

  She stopped and looked at him. ‘Aren’t you going to let me through?’

  He grinned, eyeing her up and down. She tried to shove past him. His powerful hand gripped her arm and he whirled her around.

  ‘Get your paws off me,’ she warned him.

  Glass pulled her closer and roughly fondled her breasts through her blouse. ‘Nice.’

  She tore away from him and slapped him across the face, felt the hardness of his jaw against her hand. Her palm stung.

  Glass smiled. ‘I’m watching you,’ he said. ‘I know what you want.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘Once a whore, always a whore. You want to fuck a real man for a change?’

  ‘If I can find one,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got one right here.’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  Glass’s smile stretched into a grin. ‘One day, bitch. One day soon.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Italy

  Later that day

  Professor Arno invited them into a large, sunlit study and offered them a glass of grappa. His English was heavily accented but fluent. He walked with a stick and the ancient tweed jacket was two sizes too large for him. His movements were slow and his frail hands shook slightly as he poured the drinks from a crystal decanter, then took off his jacket and hung it on a hat stand. He motioned them to a cluttered desk that sat in front of a pair of arched windows overlooking the villa’s pretty gardens.

  The study was filled with a heavy, sickly vanilla-like smell from the three large scented church candles burning in an antique silver candle-holder. The elderly professor walked stiffly around the desk and lowered his wiry frame into a button-leather chair with his back to the windows.

  Ben and Leigh sat facing him. Ben drank the burning spirit down and laid his empty glass in front of him on the desk. Leigh took a tiny sip and cradled her glass nervously on her knee, preparing in her mind what she wanted to say.

  The professor leaned back in his chair, his wispy white hair silhouetted against the sunlight streaming in through the glass. He watched Leigh for a few moments with a glimmer in his eye. ‘I heard you sing Lucia di Lammermoor at the Rocca Brancaleone,’ he said to her. ‘I thought you were magnificent, the greatest Lucia since Maria Callas.’

  Leigh smiled graciously. ‘Thank you, Professor. That’s a great compliment, and I’m sure I don’t deserve it.’ She paused. ‘But unfortunately we didn’t come here to talk about opera.’

  ‘I did not think you had,’ the old man said.

  ‘I believe my brother Oliver came here to see you last winter. What can you tell me about his visit?’

  ‘I found him a charming young man,’ Arno said sadly. ‘We got on very well. He only planned a short stay, but we talked for many hours. In the end he remained here for nearly two whole days. I was very impressed with his passion for music. He played for me, pieces from the Goldberg Variations and some Clementi sonatas. A gifted pianist. His Clementi interpretation was very nearly in the same league as Maria Tipo, in my opinion.’

  ‘He was here to discuss the research for his book,’ Leigh said.

  ‘Yes. Oliver asked me to clarify certain things that were unclear to him.’

  ‘Things about the letter?’ she asked.

  The professor nodded. ‘The Mozart letter I obtained from your father long ago. Your brother had a photocopy that your father had made of it, but he could not understand its full and true meaning.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to Oliver shortly after you saw him?’

  Arno sighed. ‘I know that he went to Vienna.’

  ‘Where he was killed. I believe he was murdered.’

  Arno didn’t look surprised. He nodded. ‘I feared as much.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘I received an email message from him. He told me he needed very urgently to talk to me, that he had made a discovery, and that there was danger.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The night he died, I believe. I was very sorry to hear of his death.’ Arno shook his head sadly.

  ‘What kind of danger did he say he was in?’ Ben asked.

  ‘He did not say. The message seemed to have been written in a hurry.’

  Ben glanced at the computer on the old man’s desk. ‘Do you still have that email?’

 
‘I deleted it immediately after reading it.’

  ‘You realize that information would have been very important at the inquest into the cause of Oliver’s death?’

  ‘Yes,’ Arno said softly.

  ‘But you decided to keep it to yourself that the circumstances might have been suspicious-that it might not have been an accident?’ Ben felt his face flush. Beside him, Leigh was staring at her hands on her lap, and he worried that he was pushing the old man too hard.

  Arno sighed heavily and ran his fingers through his thin white hair. ‘I am not proud of what I did. I had my suspicions but no proof. There was a witness to the accident. Who would have believed a crazy old Italian with the reputation of a crank, a conspiracy theorist?’ He paused. ‘And I was afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’ Leigh asked.

  ‘That I was also in danger,’ Arno replied. ‘Soon afterwards, intruders came in the night.’

  ‘Came here?’

  ‘Yes. I was in the hospital. My blood-it is not healthy. When I returned home, I found that the house had been ransacked. They were searching for something.’

  ‘What were they searching for?’ Ben asked.

  ‘For the letter, I believe.’

  ‘Did they steal it?’

  ‘No,’ Arno replied. ‘After your brother sent me the message, I put the letter somewhere very secret. Somewhere nobody could ever find it.’

  ‘May we know where it is?’ Ben asked.

  Arno smiled. ‘It is safe,’ he said softly. ‘It has gone home.’

  Ben wondered what he meant by that.

  Arno went on. ‘But for a long time I myself did not feel safe,’ he said. ‘I felt I was being watched. It went on for months.’

  ‘I think the letter had something to do with Oliver’s death,’ Leigh said.

  The professor looked grim. ‘You may be right.’

  ‘Can you explain?’

  Arno hesitated as he gathered his thoughts. ‘I think I had better start at the beginning. As you know, the subject of your brother’s book was one that I have been studying for many years.’