The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 19

Ben drove away from Nick’s place and headed north out of the city, passing through the suburb of Summertown before he hit the A40 dual carriageway going west. He had no particular destination in mind. Once on the open road he put on the CD that was currently living in the Alpina’s audio system, the Miles Davis Quintet live at the 1969 Antibes Jazz Festival. He turned it up loud and put his foot down. Driving hard, overtaking everything in front of him as the Oxfordshire countryside flashed by to the wild sounds of ‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’. His body was relaxed, but there was a fire burning inside.

Because while he’d been talking to McAllister, something had come to him. Now he needed the time and space to work his thoughts through, step by step, methodically, analytically. Some people did that by taking windy walks, others by sitting in a favourite chair with carpet slippers and pipe. Ben Hope did it by blazing down the road at a hundred miles an hour with frenetic jazz-rock fusion screaming in his ears.

He stayed on the A40 until he was nearing the market town of Witney some thirteen miles west of Oxford, then took a turnoff to the left and raced down a long, straight and narrow country road that took him to the village of Aston. Five miles the other side of Aston was another village called Little Denton. He hadn’t intentionally come this way, but as he rolled into the village he wondered what subconscious impulse had chosen the route for him. Who was he to argue with the subconscious mind?

He followed the familiar road through Little Denton and pulled up outside the gated driveway entrance to the old vicarage. The house was unoccupied, which Ben knew for a fact as he employed a private security company to keep an eye on it, and a gardening services firm to keep the lawn mown and the ivy around the windows trim. Despite the maintenance, the place looked sad. Or maybe it just looked that way because that was how it made him feel.

This had been the home of Michaela and Simeon Arundel for many years. Jude had grown up here, and the house technically belonged to him even if he didn’t use or look after it. He was currently in America, living with his girlfriend, Rae. Helping her to save the world, Ben supposed. Rae was the ideological type. Ben didn’t know how long the relationship would last, but as long as Jude was happy, it was fine with him.

Happy. As if anyone who’d had both their beloved parents brutally snatched from them in a horrific car wreck, only to discover that they’d been brought up believing a lie, could ever truly be happy ever again. Michaela and Simeon had raised Jude as though he were their biological son. The truth was a closely guarded family secret that had only been revealed after their deaths, both to Jude and to his real father. The revelation had come in the form of a letter that Michaela had written to Ben shortly before she died.

It was hard to say which of them, the child or the real father, had had the toughest time accepting it. Jude had flipped off the rails for a while, quitting his university studies, toying with ideas like joining the navy. As for Ben, it had come as no less of a shock to him to discover, right out of the blue, after all those years, that he had a grown-up son. He still sometimes had trouble believing it, even now. And he could only wonder at the saintliness of his dear old friend Simeon, who had been there to step in and support Michaela when Ben hadn’t been. Few men would have done what Simeon did, or shown as much selfless devotion. For all the high-risk challenges and crazy odds Ben had happily faced down in his life, he didn’t think he’d have had the courage or the integrity to raise another man’s child as though he were his own, and never speak of it to anyone.

As Ben had once said to Michaela, the very last time he’d been alone with her before she died, ‘You ended up with a much better man.’

Ben got out of the car and stood looking for a while at the empty vicarage, then heaved a sigh and drove on until he came to the Trout pub on the edge of the village. Inside, he took a corner table at the back where he could sit facing the entrance and watch the approach to the pub through the window. Defensive planning was a deeply ingrained habit of his that would never die. He ordered a pint of local real ale and a home-made beef pie, which he ate half-heartedly just to get something inside him. The pie was probably excellent, but he was too deep in thought to even register its taste.

After mulling it over all the way from Oxford, Ben was almost completely certain that the idea that had come to him back at Nick’s place was right. To eliminate all doubt, he now went back over it once more, flashing back to the events of yesterday like a movie replaying in slow motion through his mind. He saw himself standing by the display cabinet in Nick’s apartment, peering through the glass at the manuscript with J.S. Bach’s signature on the top. Then as if from faraway, he heard his friend’s echoing voice saying, ‘Don’t be taken in. It’s a fake.’ Followed by his own voice, replying, ‘You could have fooled me. It looks real enough. But then, I’m hardly an expert.’

Nick had sounded so sure. Had he been lying? Ben didn’t believe his friend had possessed a single deceitful bone in his body. He could have come on the big authority, but instead he’d been quite candid in his admission that he was far from being an expert himself, not one of the hardcore scholarly types who devoted themselves to collecting valuable, original music scores. Why would he have pretended?

But there was no doubt that someone out there believed it was real. Someone who knew about these things, and who knew the value of the manuscript if, indeed, it was what it purported to be.

What was it Nick had said? Ben replayed the words in his mind. Believe me, if it was the genuine item, it’d probably be worth as much as this apartment and everything in it, plus that daft car outside.

Which sounded like a lot of money for a piece of paper covered in funny little squiggles, even if those squiggles could be translated into heavenly music. Ben took out his smartphone and did a quick google of original music manuscript values. Within moments, his search took him to the site of the famous London auction house Christie’s, where he found that a rare, original copy of a Prelude in E flat major, catalogue number BWV 998, handwritten by J. S. Bach, had sold in July 2016 for over £2.5 million.

Ben whistled to himself and put the phone away, needing no further proof that there was, indeed, a lot of money to be made out of those funny little squiggles. Nick had been right about that. But assuming he’d been wrong about it being a fake, it would take a rare breed of expert to recognise the manuscript for what it was. Obviously someone who knew more about them than a hands-on performer like Nick Hawthorne.

As Ben had said to Tom McAllister, that already thinned out the list of potential suspects quite considerably. The more you narrowed down the profile, the closer you got. Like whittling a stick until its point is so sharp that it can only point to a single person.

That person would be a specialist. A highly distinguished music scholar. An academic, not a criminal. Someone who’d spent their life in museums and music libraries and poring over books, studying these things in extreme detail. Someone educated and refined, mild-mannered, middle-class, what they used to call a gent, who shared the same social circles as Nick Hawthorne and knew him well enough to have visited his home and seen the manuscript on display there.

Someone who, if they wanted something like this badly enough to be driven to steal it, would have to employ a rougher, more brutal breed of man to do the job for them. Even if they did so in the knowledge that the kind of rough, hard men whose services they could afford would likely commit violence to obtain it.

Therefore, someone with a pressing motive that overrode the bounds of morality and civilised behaviour by which such an individual would normally be constrained.

Someone desperate.

In Ben’s experience, desperately pressing motives usually boiled down, directly or indirectly, in whatever form, to money. Therefore, the mild-mannered scholarly academic of Ben’s developing psychological profile might well be someone under severe financial pressure. Debts, bad investments, secret addictions, blackmail, the list of potential factors was a long one. Whatever the cause, that person would be eaten up with stress, and that stress would show itself in all kinds of ways. Sudden displays of temper. Unexpected flare-ups of anger at polite social engagements. Just like the one Ben had witnessed with his own eyes, only the day before, at Nick’s lunchtime party. Just steps away from where the Bach manuscript had been sitting, exhibited for all to see.

The profile was complete. Every box was ticked. Ben knew he had to be right.

He decided to pay a visit to Professor Adrian Graves.

Ben took his phone out again. Finding Graves’ address was a simple task that took him a matter of seconds online, using the 192.com people finder. Most innocent members of the public didn’t realise just how easy they were to track down. Nor did some others who might not be so innocent. Adrian Graves lived in the exclusive, high-priced residential district of Boars Hill, which lay a little south of Oxford city and some eleven miles east of Little Denton.

Ben set off without finishing his lunch. Eleven fast miles later the sat nav was leading him down the wooded lanes of Boars Hill, past fine homes of Cotswold stone, until he found the place. Graves’ house was a handsome Victorian pile set a long way back from the road, barely visible through the trees. The gates were open. Ben contemplated a more discreet entry, then thought fuck it and drove straight in. He parked the Alpina beside a stately dark grey Bentley Arnage that was the only other vehicle in front of the house. The Bentley’s engine was still warm under the bonnet. Wherever Graves had been off to, he hadn’t been home long.

To his surprise, Ben found the front door open. For the second time in as many minutes, he thought fuck it and went inside without knocking. A grandly sweeping staircase led from the huge entrance hall. There were gleaming hardwood doors on both sides.

Ben was considering which one of them to try first when he heard the muffled gunshot from upstairs.