The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 28

The small article McAllister found was buried deep in the website of the Viennese music institute at which Vogelbein had worked for most of his life. Judging from the date, the piece had been reproduced from an old edition of an academic journal, presumably part of some initiative to digitise all their archives.

The text was in German, and McAllister had to depend on the Google auto-translation to understand any of it.

McAllister looked at the empty mug on his desk. ‘Coffee stain, my arse,’ he muttered. Damn right, he wanted to read more. But when he clicked on the link, it took him to an error message that said, ‘Sorry, the link you selected can’t be used.’

He swore, grabbed his coat and ran to the Plymouth, telling Billie on his way out of the HQ building that he’d be back later. ‘Where’re you going?’ she called after him, but he was in too much of a rush to explain.

McAllister gunned it all the way from Kidlington into the city centre to Broad Street, past the Sheldonian Theatre. He couldn’t find a parking space for love or money, so parked illegally on the corner of Broad Street and Catte Street and dared any bloody traffic warden to lay a ticket on him. The reason he was here was the grand Bodleian Library, which had to have a copy of every book, periodical and article published anywhere in the world, going back forever. Which was why the place was so damned big, with vaults and tunnels mining deep under Broad Street, filled with archives so ancient and dusty that most hadn’t seen the light of day for decades and centuries, and probably never would.

McAllister charged into the venerable old library with his police warrant card drawn like a pistol, and told the dead-faced woman behind the desk that he needed to see everything they had by a certain Professor Jürgen Vogelbein. He had to spell it twice for her. ‘It means a bird’s leg,’ he added, proud of his new knowledge of German. Not that the dead-faced lady really needed to know.

The library staff kept him waiting for more than an hour, during which time McAllister hustled across the street to Hertford College and, with a good deal of urging and a little bit of bullying, was able to collar a reedy, bespectacled lecturer named Dr Willard from the Modern Languages department to help him with his ‘urgent police business’. Willard might have been reluctant to oblige, but he was too overwhelmed by McAllister’s powers of persuasion to say so. By the time McAllister returned to the library with his press-ganged lecturer in tow, the library gofers had come up with the goods: a stack of fusty old academic music periodicals and journals from some recess of the Bodleian’s underground bowels.

‘What are we looking for?’ Willard asked.

‘Bloodstains,’ McAllister said.

They got to work, or Willard did, while McAllister twiddled his thumbs impatiently. The afternoon was rushing by and Forbsie would be getting his knickers in a twist wondering where the hell he’d gone, but this was important. At any rate, he hoped it was.

It was the better part of two more hours before Willard came up for air. McAllister said, ‘Well?’

‘I think I found your bloodstain,’ Willard said, holding up a yellowed page covered in tiny German print.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s part of a paper Vogelbein wrote in 1974, about his search for the lost so-called Silbermann manuscript. According to Vogelbein, the music was a solfeggio study for clavichord composed by Bach in 1743, seven years before his death. It passed through the hands of various collectors, the last of whom was Abel Silbermann—’

‘The guy the Nazis stole it off of,’ McAllister said. ‘I know.’

Willard frowned at the paper. ‘He doesn’t give his sources for the information, but he writes that the manuscript is recognisable by the distinctive alleged bloodstain on the lower right-hand corner of its front page. No indication as to where the blood came from, or how old the stain might be. Anyway, it seems that after the manuscript fell into the hands of the Nazis, it went to Berlin but was moved to Silesia in 1945, along with a lot of other Nazi loot, to protect it from the Allied bombings. Silesia was taken over by the Soviets at the end of the war.’

‘Okay. And?’

Willard tapped the paper with a chewed fingernail. ‘Again, he doesn’t give sources, but Vogelbein claimed that the manuscript was among a whole consignment of stolen artifacts that were grabbed and stashed away by the KGB. That’s why, having tracked it that far, Vogelbein gave up hope of ever finding it. Is he still alive?’

‘I doubt it,’ McAllister said. ‘He’d be a hundred years old.’

‘In which case it appears to be a dead trail, I’m afraid.’

McAllister recalled what Ben Hope had told him about Nick Hawthorne finding the manuscript in an old shop in Prague, only last year. The Soviet Union had collapsed in ’91. It was impossible to say how it might have found its way out of KGB hands, maybe sold on the sly and then drifted from place to place until Hawthorne eventually stumbled on it without even realising what it was.

What mattered was two things. First, that it was almost certainly genuine, and highly sought after. Second, that Adrian Graves undoubtedly knew that, even if Hawthorne didn’t. The plot had just thickened.

Willard was peering at McAllister over his glasses. ‘I don’t understand why this is urgent police business, Inspector?’

‘Thanks for your time, Dr Willard. Much appreciated, so it is.’

McAllister walked back to his car. It was too late to go back to HQ, so he drove home. He lived alone, just him and Radar, in a remote riverside cottage on the banks of the Thames, near a minute hamlet called Chimney in west Oxfordshire. When he got home, he took the dog for a ramble along the river and through the woods, then fed him a plate of shredded boiled chicken supremes for dinner. Afterwards, McAllister started preparing his own evening meal in his small but very well-equipped kitchen.

Cooking was his joy. Tonight he was making a classic cheese soufflé tart, a very delicate affair for which he’d carefully prepared the pastry the day before and kept it chilled overnight. He’d selected a fine bottle of Chablis Grand Cru to go with his meal. Tom McAllister often surprised people with his good taste. He could be a bit of a mystery to himself at times, too.

The soft spring evening fell. He slowly began to relax and stop thinking about old music manuscripts with someone’s blood on them. Radar curled up in his basket by the fire. The Thames flowed gently by outside. A solitary owl hooted from the trees. All was well with the world and it was possible to imagine that that feckin eedjit Forbsie no longer existed.

The table was set for one, McAllister’s soufflé tart was almost perfectly browned in the oven and the Chablis was at the exact right temperature, when the call came in.

It was Billie.

‘Boss, you’d better get your skates on. There’s a major disturbance in Blackbird Leys and the cavalry are rolling. Reports of automatic gunfire, smoke, all hell breaking loose over there. It’s like a war started.’

‘Ah, shite. I’m on my way.’

As he hurried to the Plymouth, McAllister was remembering the words he’d heard only that morning.

‘Don’t get in the way of what happens next.’

And he was thinking,

Hope.