The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 25

Ben had expected a reaction from her. Perhaps angry denial that she’d ever heard of this Graves person. Or perhaps a cool upping of the price for information about him. But the suddenness and speed of her flight at the very mention of Graves’ name took him by surprise. Now she was crashing through the dense thicket of the roadside woods like a deer running from a huntsman.

Ben sprinted after her, twigs whipping in his face, brambles tearing at his trouser legs. She was fast, but the pursuit of predator and prey over difficult terrain was something he was much more accustomed to than she was, and the little flat shoes she was wearing weren’t designed for rough work. He was three strides behind her when her toe snagged on a hidden tree root and she fell hard, sprawling in the damp moss and leaf litter.

Ben knelt astride her body and pinned her down with his hands and knees. She fought him as if he was a rapist, trying to rake him with those blue claws, snapping her teeth, spitting, wriggling like a wild thing. He kept repeating, ‘Hey! Hey! Stop that, I’m not going to hurt you!’

Nothing he said could calm her down. In her position, Ben wouldn’t have believed him, either.

The gun in her face shut her up quite quickly. She froze and lay still on her back, her blond hair tangled and fanned out over the dirt, looking up at him with cool defiance in her eyes. But there was also a certain acceptance in her look, which Ben found interesting. When you point a gun at an innocent person, they’ll freak out even more and want to know why this awful thing is happening to them. She hadn’t even asked him who he was. Stick a pistol in the face of a guilty person, they’ll either fight you to the death or lie back and wait for what they know is coming to them. Live by the gun, die by the gun. Ben wondered what that said about Angelique.

‘Adrian Graves. Let’s have it. Everything you know.’

The repetition of the name got her going again. She spat and hissed, ‘Govno jedno, da bog dobio gljivice na jajima!’ Roughly translated, ‘You piece of shit, I hope you get fungus on your balls.’

‘That’s lovely,’ Ben said. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I make this easier for both of us, and tell you what I already know? First off, Graves is dead.’

The look in her eyes told him that she hadn’t known. Her gaze flicked to the pistol muzzle that was pointing inches from her face. ‘You killed him?’

‘Now why would I go and do a thing like that?’ Ben said. ‘Fact is, I didn’t have to. He did it to himself. How does that grab you?’

She humphed. ‘What the fuck do I care if the bastard is dead?’

True love. Nothing like it in the world.

‘Here’s my guess,’ Ben said. ‘You’re such a charming young lady, I can see why a man like Graves couldn’t stay away from you. Like a fly around a honey jar, even if it meant the ruination of his safe, cosseted little life. I think he spent all the money he had on you, and more. In fact, he got himself into so much hock, just to enjoy your delightful company, that he ended up doing something very, very stupid to pay his way out of the mess he was in. A friend of mine died because of it. How am I doing so far?’

‘You don’t know shit!’

‘That’s okay by me, because now I have you to fill in the blanks, Angelique. What’s your real name, anyway?’

‘Fuck you!’ She shouted it so loud that the sound of her cry echoed over the trees.

‘You’re going to talk to me.’

She spat up at him. ‘You would have to kill me first, pig!’

‘Have it your way,’ Ben said, and fired the gun.

The report made her scream, but the flat boom was so much louder that no sound appeared to come from her open mouth. He’d turned the pistol away just a few inches from her face before pressing the trigger. The bullet slammed into the ground by her right ear. The force of the impact and the jet of hot gases from the gun’s muzzle kicked up an explosion of dirt that plastered the side of her face. Bits of moss and dead leaves stuck in her hair. She would have tinnitus in that ear for a few days. That was as much harm as Ben was prepared to do to her. But she didn’t know that.

‘That was your warning,’ he told her. ‘You only get one. Now talk.’

The look of defiance was gone now, and real fear clouded her eyes. ‘My name is Lena,’ she blurted. ‘Lena Vuković. I know what happened to your friend, the musician man. But I swear, I did not have anything to do with it. I was not there!’

Ben had to pause a moment to take in what he was hearing. He’d approached this Angelique — now Lena — thinking that, at best, she might help to shine light on the secret life of Adrian Graves. Now she was telling him that she knew about Nick Hawthorne. He couldn’t understand the connection.

‘Who killed him?’

Lena’s face tightened and tears filled her eyes. She hesitated, then glanced at the gun and quavered, ‘I don’t know who. Dragan is head of the gang. Danilo and Miroslav were there too. I think maybe it was Dragan’s idea to kill him. They did it together.’

‘Who’s Dragan?’

‘He cannot know that I told you his name. He would kill me, too.’

Ben pressed the pistol under her chin. He repeated, ‘Who’s Dragan?’

‘Dragan Vuković. My brother.’

‘You’re telling me that your brother and his pals beat Nick Hawthorne half to death and then threw him out of a window.’

‘Yes! You do not understand. Dragan is violent. He is not a normal person. There is something wrong in here, inside his head. He is like this ever since the war in my country. That is why he could kill his own sister if he knew.’

‘Sounds like a close family,’ Ben said.

‘Dragan is all the family I have left.’

‘Is this the kind of thing he does for a living?’

‘He does what he can to get ahead. It is the same for me, no? For you, for everyone. But with Dragan, it is more than this. He likes to hurt people.’

‘How many in his gang?’

‘Danilo and Miroslav are the ones I know. There are others. Maybe five or six.’ Wide-eyed and streaming tears of fear, she reached up and grasped the folds of Ben’s jacket with both hands. ‘Promise me that you do not tell them I have told you this. I would do anything. You can screw me as many times as you like. Here, your place, my place. Now, anytime. You would not have to pay me. It is all I have to trade.’

He knocked her hands away with the butt of the pistol. ‘Get that out of your head, Lena. Why did they kill Nick?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘Graves paid them?’

‘Not to kill him. To steal. Your friend was some rich guy, no? He had something the professor man said was worth much money. He offer Dragan ten grands to get it from his place. Dragan said afterwards, they find a lot of grass there, and so they take that too. I don’t know why they killed him. Maybe he try to stop them. This was a stupid thing to do. He should not have got in Dragan’s way.’

Ben shook his head, thinking. None of it made sense. An Oxford music professor was in cahoots with a gang of hardcore Serb criminals, and just happened to be a client of the gang leader’s call-girl sister?

‘How could someone like Graves even know your brother? He was an academic, not a crook. Why would he get into something like this?’

‘He needed money,’ she said. ‘Because of the scam.’