The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 29

Ben took his bag from the Alpina and left the car at the side of the road. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said, pointing at Lena’s little blue Nissan. He still didn’t trust her not to bolt at the first chance she got, so was keeping hold of her handbag with her purse and house keys inside.

‘You are crazy leaving a car like that out here. Someone is bound to steal it.’

‘I’ll just have to trust that not everyone’s a dirty thief,’ Ben said. ‘Now please get in the car.’

She climbed in the passenger side without a word, lips tight. The Nissan felt cramped after the BMW. He adjusted the driving seat further from the wheel, fired up the tinny-sounding motor and they took off.

As he drove, he took out his smartphone and handed it to her. ‘You know how to use that?’

‘You think I am an idiot? Of course I can use it.’

‘Wonderful. I want you to go online and tell me the location of the nearest big garden centre. We can stop off there en route to your place.’

She stared at him. ‘What for?’

‘Because I need some potassium nitrate for my tomato crop back home. You mix that stuff into the soil, they shoot up like nobody’s business.’

‘You really are crazy.’

‘Tell me something, Lena. Are you a good home-maker? Or are you one of those people who lives on takeaway food and doesn’t own a saucepan?’

‘I look after myself just fine,’ she replied, looking at him strangely.

‘I’m sure you do. I thought maybe I could whip something up for us tonight.’

‘You? What kind of a man cooks a meal for a woman?’

‘I’m a progressive kind of guy,’ he replied.

After searching online for a few moments, Lena read him out the location of a big out-of-town garden centre superstore that was open late, off the Oxford bypass at South Hinksey. Ben pushed the Nissan hard around the ring road and they were there within twenty minutes. ‘Come with me,’ he told her, ‘where I can keep an eye on you.’

Ben led her inside the superstore and between racks filled with garden tools, boots and gloves and a thousand kinds of miracle potions and plant food additives. Lena looked around her with a frown and commented, ‘This is a very weird place.’

‘People like to grow things other than cannabis,’ Ben said.

‘Only an asshole would come to a place like this.’ She was pouting now, like a teenager made to suffer the indignity of shopping with a parent. Ben shook his head and decided to ignore her.

He soon found what he was looking for. The store sold kilo bags of potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpetre. One kilo was more than enough for his tomatoes — or would have been, if Ben had had the remotest interest in cultivating fruit and vegetables. The three other items he purchased were a rubber hammer, a pack of strong plastic cable ties and a pair of latex gloves.

‘What is all this other stupid shit for?’ Lena asked on their way back to the car.

‘Why, these things have all kinds of uses around the garden,’ he replied. ‘It’s a healthy lifestyle. You should hang up your whip and try it sometime.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Now to your place. Let’s go.’

Lena lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a modern development off North Way in Barton, an area to the east of the city that had originally been built mostly as social housing and never quite shaken off its downtrodden aura. ‘Welcome to the shit hole where I live,’ she said as they got out of the car.

‘It’s a better neighbourhood than Dragan’s.’

‘I hate this place,’ she said sourly. ‘It is full of chavs.’

Which Ben thought was quite a statement, coming from the sibling and accomplice of a racketeer, blackmailer, murdering gangster, thief, drug dealer and gun runner. ‘Are you bringing that bag of shit inside my place?’ she asked, eyeing him as he grabbed the potassium nitrate from the car’s tiny boot.

‘Wouldn’t want the chavs to steal it, would we?’

Her apartment on the second floor was almost as small as her car, and in need of a clean-up. The carpets were floral, and every wall in the place was painted bright pink. Posters of cute ponies hung on the walls and cuddly toys lay piled on her armchairs and sofa, like a collection belonging to a little girl. Maybe that part of her, the little girl part, was something she needed to hold onto.

‘I would like to take a shower,’ she said stiffly. ‘Is that allowed? Don’t worry, I will not try to jump out of the bathroom window.’ When Ben looked into the bathroom, he could see why. The window was so narrow that a cat would have trouble squeezing through.

‘Okay. Take your time. Don’t bolt the bathroom door.’

‘You want to watch me?’

‘No, Lena, I don’t want to watch you.’

When he heard the water splashing a few moments later, he went into her poky bedroom and looked around. At the foot of the bed was a little dressing table with a mirror and shelves either side of it crowded with a collection of lipstick tubes and makeup products. A cheap photo frame held a picture of Lena and a guy who might have been a couple of years older and bore a slight facial resemblance to her, apart from being a foot taller and shaven headed, with muscular arms and a neck like a tree trunk laced with tattoos.

Ben picked a bottle of coloured nail varnish off the dressing table. Blue was obviously her favourite. He glanced at the contents label and slipped the bottle in his pocket, then opened Lena’s wardrobe. Some of the garments hanging inside were ordinary dresses, others were mail order items definitely not for everyday wear, like the nurse uniform and various costumes that mostly consisted of see-through lace, straps and buckles whose purpose he could only guess at. But he wasn’t interested in her clothing. At the bottom of the wardrobe he found a shoebox containing a pair of red high heels. He dumped those out and took the empty box, which he carried out of the bedroom and up the narrow passage to Lena’s kitchenette.

Like the rest of the place, it was built on a miniature scale, but she had all the essentials. Ben searched through the wall cupboards and found a large bag of sugar and a tub of baking soda, which he laid on the worktop. From another unit he took a plain water tumbler, five good-sized bowls and a heavy frying pan. In a drawer by the cooker he came across scissors, a ball of string and a roll of aluminium foil. Perfect. Everything he needed for a cosy cook-in, SAS style.

His first step was to dump the contents of the nail varnish bottle into the glass. Next he scissored off a two-foot length of string, coiled it up in the bottom of the glass and set it aside to soak for a while. Laying out the five bowls in a row, he measured out three parts of potassium nitrate to two parts sugar, then tipped the whole lot into the frying pan and started heating it gently on the electric hob, stirring it with a wooden spoon and taking care not to let it overcook. The mixture started to turn brown as the sugar caramelised. When it had turned into a gooey paste the right colour and consistency, he added a spoonful of baking soda, which made the goo bubble up and start turning turquoise-blue. He took the pan off the heat and set it aside to cool, removed the acetone-soaked string from the glass and dangled it over the sink to dry. The fumes from it made his eyes sting.

Next he turned his attention to the empty shoebox, which he lined with a big piece of aluminium foil. As he worked, he could hear the water stop pattering in the bathroom, and the sounds of Lena bustling around. He was nearly finished. The mixture in the frying pan had cooled off enough, and he poured it into the foil-lined box. As it cooled further it would harden solid, so while it was still soft he laid the acetone-coated string into the mixture with eighteen inches or so dangling over the side of the box. Then he wrapped the box over with more foil, to hide its strange contents.

He’d put everything away and was washing up the dishes when Lena came into the kitchen, wearing a fluffy white bathrobe and her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled of shampoo and soap. ‘That photo in your bedroom,’ Ben said. ‘The guy in it with you is Dragan, yes?’

She nodded, frowning. ‘So, you been sneaking in my room? You were probably looking for dirty pictures. I don’t do porno.’

‘Actually, I was looking for the kitchen.’

She sniffed. ‘What is that fucked-up disgusting smell in here?’

‘I had a go at making us a pasta sauce,’ he said ruefully. ‘Didn’t quite turn out right. We’ll have to order in a pizza instead.’

She humphed. ‘So much for the great chef, hmm? You let a man loose in the kitchen, this is the shit you get. This place will stink forever.’

The pizza was from Domino’s, and was brought straight to the door by a little guy on a scooter. By then, Lena had finished drying her hair and changed into jeans and a sweater. Ben had found a bottle of inexpensive white wine in her fridge, which would have been better used for cleaning paintbrushes but was still preferable to drinking the tap water. He poured out a glass for each of them and sliced up the pizza.

As they ate, Ben said, ‘So you grew up in the Yugoslav wars?’

‘I do not talk about it.’

‘I know how you feel.’

She looked sharply at him. ‘Bullshit, you know how I feel. If you had been a child in Banja Luka, like me, when the NATO forces drop a thousand bombs all around, then maybe I would believe you.’

Ben was familiar with the history of Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina after Sarajevo. During NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force between August and September 1995, devastating air strikes against VRS Bosnian Serb Army enclaves had been launched on over three hundred targets in that area. The true number of civilian casualties had never been openly disclosed.

‘That was a tough time.’

She shrugged, and replied with her mouth full, ‘Afterwards our family move to Serbia. But things in Belgrade were not much better. My mother die there. It is like I always say. All of life is tough. You are born, you suffer, then it is finished and you rot in hell.’

‘Sounds like you’ve been reading Schopenhauer.’

‘I never heard of this asshole. Who?’

‘I only caught the end of the conflict in your country,’ Ben said. ‘My squadron was supposed to be there for intelligence gathering, to support the UN troops. But there was more than that going on. I saw a lot of the things that were done there to innocent people. I was sorry about it. Later on, we went back there, hunting war criminals. We didn’t get enough of them.’

‘I have told you, I do not want to talk about those times.’

Lena chewed thoughtfully on a pizza slice for a while, gazing at her plate, then said, ‘This music paper, this—’ She paused, searching for the word.

‘It’s called a manuscript.’

‘This manuscript, is it really worth much money?’

‘Apparently so,’ Ben said. ‘Wherever it’s gone. I didn’t see it there among Graves’ things.’

‘Dragan has it. He is keeping it somewhere safe.’

‘I didn’t realise Dragan was musical.’

‘He is not,’ she said, missing Ben’s sarcasm. ‘He is going to sell it.’

‘Right. Through his academic contacts in the world of classical music, art and culture?’

‘He has contacts of a different kind,’ she said. She hesitated to say more, then added, ‘Like Zarko Kožul, back home.’

‘Zarko Kožul,’ Ben repeated. ‘Who’s that, a friend of his?’

A dark look washed over her face, like storm clouds passing behind her eyes. The corners of her mouth downturned and she shook her head. ‘Nobody gets close to Kožul. He has no friends. He trusts no one. And no enemies, none left living. You cross Kožul, you die. Everyone knows this.’

‘Serbian mafia?’ The wars and resulting massive economic destabilisation in the former Yugoslavia had been good for organised crime gangs in the Balkans. Their business empire was built on arms and drug trafficking, protection rackets, illegal gambling and prostitution, heists and smuggling. Ben had never run into those guys personally, but he’d known people who had.

‘Yes, mafia. Before that, he was in the war. He fight with the Scorpions. You understand what that means, yes?’

‘I know who the Scorpions were,’ Ben said.

That had been the self-styled name of the Serb so-called paramilitary unit who were involved in some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. They had used the conflict as an excuse to go on a rampage of rape and murder. Eight thousand innocent people slaughtered at Srebrenica. Thousands more women, children and elderly people beaten, abused and tortured in a systematic campaign of sadism and cruelty.

‘Then you understand what kind of man Zarko is,’ Lena said.

‘I also understand what kind of a man would work for him. Like your brother.’

Lena took another bite of pizza, pulled a face as if she’d bitten into a turd, and dropped the limp slice on her plate. ‘Dragan never work for Zarko. But he want to, very much. Before we come here, he always try to make an impression, so that Zarko will let him join his gang. One day Zarko say to him, “Go and make a name for yourself in UK, become big man, get experience, make connections. When you have something to offer me, then maybe you come back home and work for me.” That is how it works, in their world.’

Welcome to Britain, land of opportunity. ‘So that was why Dragan came to this country, to cut his teeth and learn how to be a real criminal? How come you tagged along with him?’

‘What else was there for me to do?’

‘So now Dragan plans on taking Nick’s manuscript to Zarko in Belgrade?’

‘If it is worth a lot of money, Zarko will want it. He will be pleased with Dragan and maybe take him into his gang. That is what Dragan is hoping.’

‘I’m so impressed by your dear brother’s enterprising talents that I’d like to congratulate him myself.’ Ben drained his wine glass and looked at his watch. ‘I think it’s time to pay a visit to Blackbird Leys. Give him a call.’

Lena’s eyes clouded with anxiety. ‘What should I tell him?’

‘Tell him there’s nothing good on TV, you’re bored and in the mood for a party, and you’re coming over to spend the evening with him and the gang.’

‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘I have to ask if it is okay that I am bringing a friend along. How else can I explain it when I turn up there with a strange man? Dragan will not like this.’

‘Say nothing. Do not mention me.’

She didn’t look convinced. ‘He will know something is up.’

‘You act out fantasy roles for a living,’ Ben said. ‘So act. Sound natural. Use the landline — that way I can listen in on speaker. Stick to what I told you to say. And remember, I understand Serb.’

The phone was in the hallway, perched on its base unit, which had a separate keypad and a speaker covered with a wire mesh that was furred with dust. Lena looked nervous as she stabbed a number on the keypad with a pointed blue fingernail, then pressed a button to put the call through the base unit’s speaker. She chewed her lip in agitation as the dial tone pulsed for several seconds. When someone answered, Ben could hear the boom — boom — boom throb of loud music thumping in the background, distorted and metallic-sounding over the speaker.

‘Yeah?’

‘Dragan, it’s me,’ Lena said in Serbian, shooting an anxious look Ben’s way as she spoke.

‘Hey, sis, whassup?’

Lena repeated it more or less exactly as Ben had told her to. ‘You partying tonight? I’m on my own, nothing to do. How about I zap round there?’ Her manner sounded relaxed, she was forcing herself to smile, and Ben didn’t pick up on any note of suspicion in Dragan’s tone of voice.

‘Yeah, sure, we’re having a good time, come on over.’

She glanced again at Ben, hesitated and said, ‘Is Radomir there with you? I’d like to see him.’

Ben frowned. Radomir?

Dragan paused, then replied, ‘Oh yeah, he’s coming round later. He’ll be glad to see you, too.’ Dragan laughed. ‘I’ll be expecting you, sister.’

There was a brief snatch of unintelligible conversation in the background, then Dragan hung up.

Lena put the phone back on its cradle. ‘What?’ she said to Ben.

‘I thought we agreed to stick to the script. What was that about Radomir?’

‘He is one of Dragan’s friends. I had to say something, or else Dragan would wonder why I am coming over just like that. If he thinks I have crush on Radomir, it makes it more okay.’

Ben looked at her. He could see no lie in those clear blue eyes.

‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it done.’