The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 27

‘Here you go,’ Billie said, setting McAllister’s coffee cup down on the tiny patch of desk that wasn’t heaped high with clutter.

‘Thanks, Billie,’ he murmured distractedly, not taking his eyes off his screen. He was staring at it so intently that the glass might melt.

The vending machine at Thames Valley Police HQ in Kidlington vomited out something resembling sewage; this was the good stuff from the nearby deli. Tom McAllister was the only superior officer she’d fetch coffee for, just like she didn’t tolerate anyone else in the department calling her Billie and not Detective Sergeant Flowers. Likewise, he was the only one of her colleagues who knew that she sang in jazz clubs in the evenings. They enjoyed a cosy working relationship, unlike the one he had with Forbsie. It had been that way ever since McAllister had broken two knuckles of his right fist teaching an arrested drug dealer not to refer to her as a ‘jungle bunny’. Things like that brought people closer together, even if it had almost cost him his job at the time.

She looked around her and asked, ‘What was it, a seven-point-five magnitude?’

‘A what?’

‘The earthquake that hit this office. You should tidy up once in a while.’

‘I like the mess,’ McAllister said, slurping the coffee. ‘That way I know where everything is. Hmm, that’s good.’

‘Full-on day?’

‘Shaping up to be, aye.’ It was half an hour since McAllister’s return from Boars Hill, after the discovery of Professor Adrian Graves, dead from a single close-range gunshot wound to the head, presumed self-inflicted. Not the prettiest suicide Tom had ever been called out to, but not half as messy as the guy who’d thrown himself in front of the 12.18 from London to Stratford-upon-Avon outside Bicester that time. Yugh. The things you had to do for money.

‘How’s the wife doing?’ Billie asked, frowning. Clarissa Graves had been the one who found him and called the police.

‘You know. It’s not every day you come home and find your husband sitting at his desk with his face dripping from the ceiling.’

‘Maybe the gun went off while he was cleaning it.’

‘Yeah, and maybe the Devil ice-skates into work every morning.’

He returned to his screen. Billie touched his shoulder and left him to it, giving the earthquake zone a last disapproving look on her way out.

Tom McAllister had spent the first part of the day fretting about this worrisome Ben Hope character who’d burst into the picture the night of Nick Hawthorne’s death. Now he had other fish to fry, in the shape of the second dead classical music nerd to turn up on his turf in as many days.

He’d sensed immediately that it couldn’t be a coincidence. Now, as he sat looking into the background of this Adrian Graves, the link between the two dead men was growing right in front of his eyes.

First, and most glaringly obvious, the pair had known each other. Graves had been Hawthorne’s music professor, years back. McAllister found an old picture in the university archives of the two of them together, along with an article about some grant that had been awarded for the restoration of the cathedral organ.

Second, and even more interesting to McAllister, was the matter of the old music manuscripts. It hadn’t taken a lot of research to uncover that Graves was something of an expert in that department. More than that, he was recognised as one of the top authorities in the world on the matter.

To Tom McAllister, classical music was just something you could listen to while cooking, his favourite pastime. He’d had no idea until now that there was a whole academic sub-industry devoted to locating and rescuing forgotten, stolen or otherwise lost works of great composers, which otherwise would never come to light. Nor had he ever given any thought — although it made a lot of sense now as he went on digging — to the potential value of these old bits of paper. He’d been astonished to learn that collectors routinely bid six-and even seven-figure sums of money for them at auction, especially when the composer in question was one of the biggies, a ‘name’.

J.S. Bach was definitely a name. Even a big ignorant savage from the Falls Road had heard of that one.

McAllister leaned away from the computer, slurping his cooling coffee and thinking about what Ben Hope had told him about the manuscript allegedly missing from Hawthorne’s flat. Hope didn’t strike him as the kind of man to get the details wrong, and his description of the missing item had been pretty clear, right down to the brown coffee-or-maybe-something-else stain on the front page and the composer’s signature at the top.

According to Hope, Hawthorne had believed the manuscript was a fake. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if, hypothetically, there were people in the world far better qualified than Hawthorne, for all his performance expertise, to tell what was genuine and what wasn’t? And what were the odds that Hawthorne had just happened to be buddies with one of the top guys in the field — who just happened to show up dead soon afterwards?

‘You don’t have to be Inspector frigging Morse to see there’s a connection here,’ McAllister growled under his breath. It was time to take a closer look at Professor Adrian Graves.

McAllister’s computer skills were self-taught and he was clumsy on the keys, but he had a sharp instinct for needling out information. He soon found a more detailed biography of the reputed academic on a specialist music institute site. Graves had been born in London in 1953, the son of a museum director, and gone on to study music at New College, Oxford in the seventies. Before returning to Oxford to pursue his postgraduate studies, Graves had spent eighteen months in Vienna cutting his teeth under the tutelage of one Professor Jürgen Vogelbein at the Wiener Institut für Musikwissenschaft. McAllister wasn’t even going to try and pronounce it.

From what he could gather, it was there in Austria, and thanks to the influence of his mentor Vogelbein who by all accounts was a legend in that field, that Graves had first formed his interest in old music manuscripts. McAllister followed his nose and ran a more specific search on Vogelbein. Born in Dortmund in 1918, the young Vogelbein had interrupted his music studies to take up military service at the outbreak of the Second World War, which had seen him in the thick of the Battle of Berlin in 1945 as the final push of the Soviet invasion crushed the remnants of the Third Reich.

After the war, Vogelbein had returned to his former studies and eventually become one of the world’s most prolific researchers, famously devoted to tracking down lost music manuscripts. He’d received acclaim in 1973 for unearthing a trove of priceless medieval chants thought to have been destroyed centuries earlier. But Vogelbein’s true passion was for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the quest to restore his lost works to the treasure trove of musical heritage.

McAllister was surprised to learn that only an estimated fifty per cent or so of Bach’s compositions were thought to have survived to the present day. A vast number were said to have been lost in the years following his death in 1750, when the composer’s mountain of musical manuscripts were bequeathed to various members of his large family and then subsequently scattered. Others had been destroyed in wars, others still were believed to have drifted into private collections and simply vanished. Before the age of recording, once the physical paper on which it was written came to harm, the music died with it. Preventing that tragic loss was perceived by music historians as a race against the clock, before the ravages of time ate the precious manuscripts away to nothing.

McAllister was definitely learning stuff here, but it wasn’t what he wanted to know. ‘Ah, bollocks to this,’ he muttered to himself.

Just as he was about to abandon his reading about this Vogelbein guy… that was when he stumbled on it.