The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 20

Professor Adrian Graves had been one of the estimated 74,000 listeners across the county to have heard the BBC Radio Oxford news broadcast over breakfast that morning, but he was the only one with such particular reason to be so shaken and upset by the announcement of last night’s sudden, violent, and apparently suspicious death of a yet-unnamed male in his forties at an address in north Oxford.

Now Graves was jumping into his car and speeding away from his house, still feeling weak and nauseous with rage and grief as he went to make the prearranged rendezvous with his partners in crime.

He knew, down to his bones, that the victim was Nick Hawthorne. It wasn’t meant to have happened this way. What had those idiots done? How could everything have gone so wrong? Tell me how? He banged the steering wheel and yelled it out loud, then thumped the wheel even harder, making the Bentley wobble on the road, and screamed it again. ‘HOW?’

The events of the last two days had moved at such a whirlwind pace that he’d felt stunned by it all, even before this awful news had hit him like a kick to the stomach. His jumbled thoughts came to him in flashes and bursts of memory as he drove, clutching the wheel with white-knuckled fists. When he thought of Angelique, he wanted to screw his eyes shut and cry.

He had been her client for over a year now, and in love with her for much of that time. It had all been business at first, just a need that had to be satisfied like scratching an itch — but as the months slid by and his visits to the Atreus Club had become more frequent and habitual, he’d come to adore that sweet girl.

Angelique. So beautiful. So mysterious. He knew so little about her — just that that wasn’t her real name, and that her wonderfully alluring accent placed her homeland as somewhere in Eastern Europe. He wanted to know everything.

Their conversations in the post-session glow had become longer and more personal. She had revealed little about herself, but he’d sensed a sadness in her that he wanted to heal, in return for all the joy she gave him, and so he’d taken to bringing her little gifts. She’d refused at first, because the club had policies about things like that, but in time she’d begun to accept his offerings, and they had grown more generous and expensive. He loved nothing more than to see the smile on her face when she opened a jewellery box to see some new ring or silver chain inside.

Slowly, slowly, he’d pressed to get her to open up to him. He harboured wild, impossible fantasies about leaving Clarissa, his wife of thirty-two years, and running away with Angelique. Love in a cottage. Perhaps up in Scotland, a romantic little croft in some remote glen near a village where he could teach music and support them. They might be poor, but they would manage, and they’d have each other.

He knew it was the craziest idea, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He’d persuaded her to give him her mobile phone number, and so many times he’d been burning with temptation to call it and arrange to meet her outside the club. It was only his fear of stepping into the unknown that made him hold back, and he hated himself for his cowardice.

Now, as he drove, his burning thoughts returned to that day two weeks ago when, after a particularly satisfying session, he’d made her a gift of a pair of diamond earrings and watched as she put them on. ‘Imagine,’ she’d laughed. ‘A poor Bosnian Serb girl like me, with rich men giving her diamonds.’

‘I’m not as rich as you think I am,’ he’d replied, chuckling. ‘Not even close.’

‘People like you, they do not realise what they have. Back home where I grew up, you would be like a billionaire.’

‘You had a hard childhood?’

‘All of life is hard. It does not stop when you get older. Then you die. This is how it is. Unless you are very lucky person.’

He’d paused, shocked by her sincerity and looking seriously at her. ‘It doesn’t have to be hard, Angelique.’ He’d wanted to add, ‘Come away from all this. Let’s throw caution to the wind, you and I. Happiness is there for the taking — all we have to do is grab it.’ But he still didn’t have the courage.

She’d snorted at his optimism. ‘You have no idea. You have never been hungry. You have never seen what poverty is, how it wrecks lives. I have seen it. Growing up in Banja Luka after the war, we had nothing. There was no work, no money. Sometimes not even any food. Then Dragan and I, we came to Britain, where everybody said it would be easy life for us. But it’s not.’ She’d shrugged. ‘That is why I have to do this work I do, and Dragan has to do the things he does. One day, maybe, we will both be free to do better things, make a better life.’

‘Dragan?’

‘My brother. He is six years older than me. He look after me when our parents are killed in the war. I was only seven.’

‘I had no idea,’ Graves had said, full of sympathy and hiding his relief that Dragan wasn’t a husband or boyfriend. ‘And what does Dragan do?’

‘He does what he can to get by. Know what I mean?’

‘I can’t say that I do. Are you saying that your brother does things that are… illegal?’

‘If you cannot earn money, you have to take it from people who have too much.’

‘That’s theft, isn’t it?’

‘You are like a child. You know nothing about the world.’

She was quite right, of course. Poverty, hardship and struggle were utterly alien to Adrian Graves’ comfortable life. He had never known anyone even indirectly connected to the criminal world. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, in all sincerity.

But he would be sorrier. And his cosseted existence was soon to be blown apart.

The bombshell had landed two days ago, in the form of a large brown envelope delivered to the Graves residence in Boars Hill. Just by luck, his wife hadn’t been the one to open it. When Graves had slit open the envelope and found the set of eight-by-six photo prints and the extortion demand that came with them, he’d almost died of shock.

The pictures were very professionally done. There was no possibility whatsoever of anyone seeing them and not instantly recognising him, Adrian Graves, in just about the most compromising positions imaginable: standing in the window of what was very obviously some kind of S&M brothel, naked and tethered with rubber chains, and receiving a whipping from a semi-nude blonde. Some of the images showed him with his eyes closed and mouth open in ecstasy. When he’d looked at the grisly collection as many times as he could bear to, he tore the lot up into pieces and burned them in his study fireplace. As if that would do him any good. There would be plenty more copies out there, ready to sink him.

It was a blackmailer’s dream. The extortion note stipulated a hundred thousand pounds in cash, in exchange for the SD card on which the images were stored. Graves had a week to pay up, or else.

It was too awful to contemplate. Graves spent the first day staggering about his home in a daze, waiting to wake up from the nightmare, racking his brain to think of ways to escape the quicksand. Could he somehow convince Clarissa that the man in the pictures wasn’t him? That the images had been digitally altered, as part of some mysterious conspiracy against an innocent man? Some hope.

The second day, the reality of his situation had begun to hit him even harder. The last thing he wanted, when he felt so wretched and strung-out, was to have to plaster on an artificial smile and attend a bloody social occasion with Clarissa, the buffet lunch at Nick Hawthorne’s place. But she kept insisting, and short of feigning the sudden onset of some acute illness he’d been unable to worm his way out of the engagement. He’d tried to console himself that maybe a few drinks, and meeting up again with an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen in a while, would help ease his mind and distract him from his situation.

That hadn’t been the case.

Instead, something incredible had happened.

The instant Graves had laid eyes on the faded sheets of handwritten music notation in their display case, he’d known it was the real thing.

The lost Silbermann manuscript. Here it was, by some incredible twist of fate, right under his nose. So old Birdlegs had been right after all. None of his peers at the time had ever wanted to believe him, dismissing him as a nutty professor with an overactive imagination — but the mad old coot had been dead right all along. It really did exist, and it was just as he’d described it to the young Adrian Graves, then a research student, all those years ago in Vienna, 1977.

Graves’ initial excitement was amplified tenfold soon afterwards when he’d managed to mention it casually in conversation with Nick. ‘That’s an interesting item you have there, Nicholas.’

‘Quite convincing, isn’t it?’ was the reply. ‘Whoever faked it didn’t do a bad job.’

Sweet Jesus, he really thinks it’s a fake!

‘Well, obviously it couldn’t be genuine,’ Graves said, affecting amusement. ‘Still, shame about that mark on it. Does spoil the effect somewhat.’

‘I think someone must have spilled coffee on it. Not that it really matters. It’s just a novelty item, at the end of the day.’

Coffee! Novelty item! Graves could scarcely believe his ears, much less his incredible good fortune.

‘May I ask where you got it?’ he’d asked, ever so nonchalantly, while his heart pounded so hard he thought he was going to pass out. Hawthorne had proceeded to tell him about the backstreet shop in Prague and the little man who’d sold it to him for a song.

Graves had studied his former student’s face very carefully as he related the story. There was no lie there. Hawthorne really believed that this rare and precious discovery was just another forgery.

‘I’ll give you fifty quid for it,’ Graves had offered, trying desperately to sound offhand. ‘A hundred.’ Any more, and it would have seemed suspicious.

‘I kind of like it,’ Hawthorne had replied. ‘It’s a fun thing to have around, you know?’

In other words, not for sale. It wasn’t as though Hawthorne needed the money.

But Graves had to have that manuscript. Suddenly, he could see a way out of the mess he was in. There was no other option, short of robbing a bank to pay off the blackmailers.

Robbing banks. Theft. Criminal acts. As if he could be capable of such a thing. But maybe he knew someone who might be. The more he entertained that terrifying thought in his mind, the more his resolve cemented itself. He’d hardly spoken another word to anyone at the party, becoming so taciturn that Clarissa kept asking him if he was all right. He’d used that opportunity to feign a migraine coming on so they could leave early. The instant he’d got home that afternoon, he’d managed to escape from Clarissa, locked himself in his study, put on some music and dialled the mobile number he’d never dared call until then.

‘Angelique? It’s — it’s me. Can you talk?’

She’d sounded amazed to hear from him. ‘Professor?’

‘Listen, I–I have a problem. You said your brother was, ah, involved in, ah, things of a certain nature.’

‘I don’t understand. What problem?’

He’d told her all of it, in a tumble of words. ‘Someone has pictures of me. Of us. It’s not your fault. You’re not in any trouble. But I am. A great deal of trouble. Whoever these people are, they want a hundred thousand pounds from me. I mean, well, that’s completely absurd. Ludicrous. I don’t have money like that. My wife’s the one with the money. And how can I tell her about this? She’d leave me in an instant. I’d be left with nothing. It’s awful.’

‘What can I do?’ she’d said after a long pause, sounding shocked.

‘I need help. I know where I can get money, fast. And your brother is the only person I can think of to help me pay these blackmailing bastards off.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He’d had to force himself to slow down and speak calmly. ‘There is something of great value that, if I could just get hold of it, would be the key to making this whole awful bloody nightmare go away just like that. I know exactly where it is. It will be easy to steal. The person who has it has no idea of its worth, so it’s not even like real stealing at all. A victimless crime is barely even a crime, if you think about it. I have the connections it can be sold through. But I need someone to do the stealing for me. That’s why I thought—’

‘Dragan? No. You should not be asking me this. Are you crazy?’

‘Please, Angelique, I have no other choice.’

The wild plan had come to Graves’ mind in such a feverish rush that he’d forgotten all about having offered money to Hawthorne for the Bach manuscript earlier that day. Remembering it now, he realised that its theft so soon afterwards might potentially point a finger of suspicion at him. But he couldn’t be worrying about every little detail at this moment. He’d leave that concern for later. As he’d said to Angelique, he really didn’t have a choice.

‘I’ll pay Dragan five thousand pounds. That’s really all I can afford now.’

‘Five thousand is not a lot of money when you are asking someone to risk their freedom.’

‘Then I’ll double it. Five up front, on the understanding that there’ll be another five later, when I can sell the item.’

‘Dragan will not like it if you make promises and then do not pay.’

‘There won’t be a problem,’ Graves had assured her, his mind speeding as he thought about how he could sell the manuscript under the table to a collector, how much of its value would be scrubbed off in the transaction, how much would be left over. Even allowing for the most punitive margins, he would still come away with more than enough to dig his way out of this situation. He might even make a small profit.

‘Ten thousand,’ she’d said.

‘Yes, ten thousand. Do we have a deal?’

‘You will hear from Dragan soon,’ she’d told him, then ended the call.