The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 22

Standing in Graves’ hallway, Ben froze at the sound. It had come from an upstairs room.

A single report of a gunshot from behind a closed door, followed by deathly hush, was one of the more ominously telling sound combinations in the wide repertoire of human damage. There were just three things it could signify. At the most mundane end of the scale, an accidental discharge while messing with or cleaning a firearm whose user would protest ‘I didn’t know it was loaded’, would generally be met by a stunned and guilty silence, unless other people around began yelling at the idiot who had done it, or unless the idiot had gone and accidentally shot someone — in which case the yelling would quickly turn to screaming. At the most fanciful end of the scale, the solitary gunshot could signify the presence of an armed assassin, now standing quietly surveying his dead victim and ready to flee any second after listening for the sound of running footsteps.

But there was a more common reason for the single, flat report Ben had just heard coming from upstairs. In the majority of cases it meant that someone had just taken a self-inflicted step they would never live to regret. The ultimate solution to all of life’s problems, or so it might seem in the desperation of the moment. Tragic in some cases, less tragic in others.

Ben paced up the grandiose staircase, the luxury carpet thick underfoot, and reached the first floor towards where his instincts told him was the source of the shot. Years of sweeping buildings where a closed room might contain either a bound and captive hostage or a terrorist or kidnapper waiting for you with a machine gun had honed his naturally sharp sense of directional orientation to a razor edge. He was certain the shot had come from behind the handsome oak door at the top of the stairs. Reaching the door in absolute silence, he stood immobile for a full two minutes and heard only the utter stillness that told him he was the only living person inside the house. He eased the door open and stepped through it.

He found himself inside a richly-appointed study. Burnished wood, fine antique furnishings, a whole collection of old stringed instruments on stands and hangers — lutes or mandolins, Ben couldn’t tell them apart. Matching oak bookcases stood ceiling high at opposite sides of the room and were filled with leather-backed volumes. The tall double window offered a view of meadow and woodland. The study walls were decorated with beautiful silks and oil paintings that must be centuries old. By contrast the section of wall behind the broad Chesterfield desk at the far end of the room had been much more recently decorated with something else, much less pleasant. The ugly spatter of blood and brains was about five feet wide and had reached up as far as the ornate coving, from which it was dripping back down to the floor.

Ben had seen a lot worse sights in his life. That still didn’t make it a nice experience. Not wanting to touch anything he pushed the door shut after him with his elbow, and approached the desk. The room was full of the stink of blood and burnt nitroglycerine propellant from the gunshot.

The corpse was seated on the other side of the desk, still upright in his leather chair and facing Ben like a company director greeting a client, though he no longer had a face. The twelve-bore clamped between his knees had done the business. Shotguns might provide an effective means of suicide, but those who picked that route were mighty inconsiderate of the unfortunate folks who would have to clean up afterwards.

The dead man was Graves, all right. Aside from the fact that he was in his own house, Ben could identify him from the same yellow bow tie he’d been wearing yesterday, now yellow and red. The clincher was the initialled signature on the suicide note that lay in front of him on the desktop, beside the fountain pen that had been used to write it. The note was written in the chicken scratch of a person more used to typing on a keyboard, and said simply:

Maybe it was a note to the cleaners, Graves apologising for the mess. Or perhaps he’d been tormented with contrition for something else he’d done, like being involved in the murder of an innocent man.

‘What are you so sorry for, Graves?’

No reply. If only they could talk.

Ben ran his eyes over the desk. The most incongruous item sitting on its top was the box of 12-gauge shotgun cartridges, freshly opened with one missing. Aside from that were a leather wallet and a set of car keys with a Bentley fob, a mobile phone, a compact laptop whose keyboard was sprinkled with dandruff, a brass banker’s lamp, a leather holder with a selection of pens, a pair of reading glasses, a box of Kleenex tissues, a couple of books on ancient music, a business card printed in glossy black and gold, and a small alabaster bust of J.S. Bach similar to the one Nick had possessed. Whoever sold these things was obviously doing a roaring trade among music scholars. Ben was getting to recognise the composer’s face quite well by now.

But that wasn’t the item on the desk that drew Ben’s attention. The glossy business card lay just inches from the suicide note, as though Graves had it to hand in his final moments. The last thing a despairing man looked at before blowing his brains out couldn’t but be important somehow.

Ben took out the switchblade and used its point to spear the card and pick it up off the desk. Examining it more closely, he saw that the elegant gold script on the front of the card was the name of something called the Atreus Club. Below that, two short lines of smaller script read:

There was no address, no phone number, no website URL. Whoever these people were, they weren’t in the business of making themselves easy to contact.

Ben said, ‘Hmm.’

The printers had left the reverse of the card plain white. Scrawled on the back in the same scratchy handwriting as the suicide note, the ink a little faded from contact with the wallet in which Graves might have carried it, were the name ‘Angelique’ and a mobile phone number.

Graves’ own mobile lay close by on the desk. On a hunch, Ben plucked a tissue from the box of Kleenex and wrapped it around the phone to pick it up. He used the point of the knife to open the menu of recent calls, and wasn’t immensely surprised to find that Graves had called the number for this Angelique, whoever she was, only minutes before shooting himself. People didn’t make insignificant phone calls just prior to blowing their brains out.

Ben slipped both Graves’ mobile and the card into his pocket.

Next Ben used the knife again to flip open Graves’ wallet on the desk and shake out its contents, which were the usual collection of credit and debit cards, driving licence, eighty-five pounds cash and two more business cards, one for a Bentley dealership in Berkshire and the other for a specialist violin restoration firm in Headington. Nothing too interesting there.

The same was the case when he went through the drawers of Graves’ desk. Discovering anything obvious there to connect the late professor to Nick Hawthorne’s murder was probably too much to hope for, and Ben wasn’t surprised when he found nothing beyond the usual paperwork, receipts, tax documents, printouts of music-related articles, and a ream of other useless stuff.

More interesting things were to be found elsewhere in the study. Turning away from the desk, Ben noticed the grandfather clock standing against the wall by one of the twin bookcases. The clock was unusual, because the case where the pendulum should be instead comprised a secret panel that would, if it hadn’t been hanging ajar, cleverly conceal a hidden steel-lined gun cabinet. That explained where the twelve-bore had come from.

Prying the heavy panel door a little wider with the knife blade Ben saw a couple of other weapons inside, a little .22 rifle for hunting small game and an expensive Italian 16-gauge pigeon gun. Nothing suspicious about those: like the suicide weapon they would be legally registered to Graves and entered on his shotgun ticket.

By contrast, a separate compartment of the gun safe contained some items that were definitely not legally registered to anyone, because to be caught with such a collection in Britain meant an automatic five-year stretch in prison. They were wrapped up in lightly-oiled cloths, which Ben delicately peeled away with his knife to reveal the collection of pistols: a couple of old Colt revolvers, a C96 ‘Broomhandle’ Mauser and a Yugoslav variant of the Soviet-era Tokarev automatic.

From their age, which ranged from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, he guessed they were family hand-me-downs, perhaps with sentimental value, that Adrian Graves must have chosen to keep rather than hand in to the British government for destruction — or in reality to be sold off to dubious dictatorships overseas — under the draconian 1996 handgun ban. His having the illegal weapons didn’t necessarily point a finger of suspicion with regard to Nick’s death, but it said something about Graves’ potentially flexible attitude to the law.

Of one thing, Ben was quite certain. Graves might or might not have had a hand in orchestrating Nick’s death, but he hadn’t been the one to personally put him through the window. Bad men were out there, and Ben’s path was going to take him on a collision course with them.

Turning back to the grandfather clock, he knelt down and checked the contents of the unlocked ammunition compartment at the bottom of the safe. He found two more cartons of shotgun cartridges, a small supply of subsonic hollowpoints for the .22 rabbit rifle, plus what he’d hoped to find: fifty boxed rounds apiece for the Colts, the Mauser and the Tokarev.

It might have been his old SAS comrade Boonzie McCulloch who’d once said to him, ‘Better tae have it an’ no need it, than tae need it an’ no have it, laddie.’ In Ben’s experience, need often arose when you were least prepared. He’d lived by that saying for a long time, and its wisdom had saved him on more occasions than he cared to count. He picked up the Tokarev, checked it over, slipped it in the waistband of his jeans, then dumped the fifty rounds of 7.62x25mm ammo in his jacket pocket, next to the business card for the Atreus Club.

Ben as yet had no idea what that was, any more than he understood the significance of the woman called Angelique whose name Graves had written on the back of the card. His intuition was telling him that, somehow, the secrets of the late Adrian Graves were all intertwined together in one ugly little knot. Ben intended to unravel it.

The last item he removed from Graves’ study was the set of keys for the Bentley. Then he left the empty house and its silent occupant. Outside, he glanced about him to check nobody was around, then unlocked the car, got in and turned on the ignition without starting the engine. It was the inbuilt sat nav system he was interested in. After taking a moment to familiarise himself with how it worked, he found the recent destinations folder and scrolled through it, copying addresses, postcodes and GPS coordinates into his notebook. When he’d finished he wiped everything down and closed up the car. He left the key in the ignition. Graves wouldn’t complain.

Minutes later, Ben pulled his BMW into a quiet layby near Hinksey Hill and spent a few minutes going back through the Bentley’s sat nav destinations list, checking each one on his smartphone. Graves was a frequent visitor to music museums like the Bate Collection in Oxford and the Royal College of Music, Royal Academy, the Victoria and Albert, and the British Museum in London. Other destinations were tagged with labels, such as one that said ‘MOTHER’ and led Ben to a private residential care home in the Cotswolds.

But another frequent destination, mysteriously tagged ‘AC’, showed far more promise. The sat nav’s data log indicated that Graves had visited ‘AC’ several times within the last month alone.

When Ben checked the GPS location, he came up with an address for a manor and country estate called Wychstone House, just outside the Oxfordshire village of Wychstone, not far from Kirtlington to the north of the city. Twenty minutes’ drive away, if you were a sedate academic behind the wheel of a stately Bentley. Twelve to fifteen, if you were Ben Hope.

It was a beautiful afternoon. What else was there to do, with the stink of a dead man’s blood still clinging to your clothes like smoke and the vision of your friend impaled on the railings still hovering before your eyes, than to take a scenic drive in the countryside?

Ben waited for a chubby young woman to walk by with her cavalier spaniel tugging like a miniature locomotive at its leash, gave her a friendly smile and a wave which she returned cheerfully, then took out the Tokarev. A tough, rugged weapon, the handgun equivalent of the Red Army’s virtually indestructible AK-47. It weighed thirty ounces in Ben’s hand, with plastic ribbed grips emblazoned with a Soviet star and the Cyrillic letters standing for Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialistichskikh Republics. It was one of the unaltered models with no safety, except for the half-cock notch on the hammer. Safety catches. Who needed them, anyway? Just one more impediment to letting the tool do its job.

Keeping the weapon below the level of the window he locked open the slide, dropped out the magazine, and laid the pistol in his lap while he pressed loose rounds from his pocket into the mag until it was full. He reinserted the mag, popped the slide release to chamber the top round, lowered the hammer to half cock, and the gun was ready to rock and roll.

So was he.

Ben started the car.