Читать книгу The Ben Hope Collection - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 101

Oxfordshire

The TVR Tuscan skidded out of the drive and Ben accelerated hard away from Langton Hall. He didn’t know where he was going. Traffic was thin on the country roads and he drove fast for six miles, keeping the revs high and the gears low, constantly checking the mirrors. He saw nothing.

He pulled up in a lay-by and turned off the engine. Leigh was sitting quietly beside him, ashen-faced. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. He twisted round and grabbed his haversack from behind the seat. There was still some whisky in his flask. ‘I know you don’t like this stuff very much,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘But it’ll take the edge off.’

Leigh took a sip of the whisky and winced at the burn on her lips. She coughed. ‘Thanks.’ She screwed the cap of the flask back on and handed it back to him.

He finished what was left. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked as she took out her phone.

‘Calling the police.’

He grabbed the phone from her before she could finish dialling 999. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Until last night nobody knew where we were. Then you told the police where to find us, and the next thing we have company.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying I don’t like coincidences,’ he replied. ‘And there’s also the slight problem of three dead men lying in your house, Leigh. I killed them, and you’re an accomplice. I’m not sticking around to be arrested.’ He took the file out of the bag and showed her. ‘This is what they were looking for,’ he said. The spots of blood on the label were turning russety-brown.

‘The Mozart letter? Oliver’s work? But…’ She looked at him helplessly. ‘Why would anyone want—’

‘I think it’s time we had a look at this stuff,’ he said. He pushed the haversack to his feet with a dull metallic clunk from the guns inside, and rested the box-file on his lap against the steering wheel. He popped the catch and opened the lid of the file.

‘What happened?’ Leigh gasped. ‘They’re all burnt.’

The small padded envelope fell out and landed in the foot-well. Ben ignored it and sifted carefully through the rest of the file’s contents, trying not to damage the brittle papers any further.

Some of the documents had been handwritten, some computer-printed. Many were barely legible any longer, just singed fragments showing names, dates, and scraps of what looked like historical information. Here and there he could make out the name Mozart.

Leigh reached across and lifted out a badly singed sheet. It crumbled into pieces as she lifted it up. ‘This was Oliver’s writing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘One of the notes he sent me during his travels.’

‘They’re ruined,’ Ben muttered. He laid the fragments back inside the file and closed the lid. He turned to her. ‘So what’s this about, Leigh? What did they want with Oliver’s stuff?’

‘How should I know?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You told me last night you’d had the notes for months. Now all of a sudden someone’s very interested in them. Why? What was in here? And how would they know you even had them?’

She looked blank.

‘Who else knows about this book project?’

There was sudden realization in her eyes. ‘Oh shit’

‘What?’

She turned to look at him. ‘About two million people know about it.’

‘What the hell are you on about?’

‘The TV interview. I was on a BBC music programme talking about next year’s European tour. I told them about my plan to carry on with the book. How Oliver had been sending me his research material, right up until the day he died, and that I’d always been too upset to look at any of it.’

‘And when was this programme on?’

She made a face. ‘Two days before they tried to snatch me in London.’

Ben felt something resting against his foot and remembered the fallen package. He leaned down and picked it up.

‘God. I recognize this,’ Leigh whispered, taking it from him. ‘It’s the package I told you about. The last one he ever sent me.’ She turned it over in her hands. ‘It was there waiting for me after the funeral. I had Pam put it in the box with the rest of the stuff.’

‘It’s got to be opened now,’ he told her.

‘I know.’

Ben tore open the singed envelope. Inside the thin layer of bubble-wrap, undamaged by the heat of the fire, was a CD case. He took it out. ‘It’s music,’ he said, showing her the cover. ‘Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Why did he send you this?’

She sighed. ‘It’s mine. He’d borrowed it from me. He must have been returning it.’

‘So that’s all it was.’

She slumped in her seat. ‘What’s happening, Ben?’

He opened the CD case. The yellow and silver Deutsche Grammophon disc had come loose from its fastening. It dropped in his lap. Behind it was another disc. Printed on its surface was the legend

CD-Recordable.

Underneath it, in marker pen, was an urgent scrawl:

LEIGH —Do NOT RUN THIS DISC UNDER ANY

CIRCUMSTANCES .

KEEP IT HIDDEN. I’M COMING HOME.

OLLY.

‘What the…’ Leigh reached out and pressed a button on the dashboard. The car’s CD player lit up. ‘Let’s play it.’

‘It’s not an audio disc,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll need a computer.’

An hour later they were checked into a small nearby hotel as Mr and Mrs Connors. On the way there, Ben had made a quick shopping detour. He ripped the protective wrapping off the new laptop and laid it down on the hotel-room table. In a few minutes he had the machine set up and ready to play the disc. He took the CD-ROM out of the Magic Flute case and inserted it into the computer’s disk drive. The machine whirred into action, and after a few seconds a window opened on the flat screen.

As he waited for the disc to load, Ben went to the minibar and found two miniatures of Bell’s Scotch. He cracked them open and poured them both into a single glass.

Leigh sat at the desk and peered at the screen. ‘These all seem to be photo files taken in different parts of Europe,’ she said. ‘It’s like a photo diary of Olly’s research trip.’

Ben frowned. ‘Why would he put a CD of travel snapshots into your Mozart box?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ She clicked, and the face of an old man appeared on the screen. He was in his late seventies. His face was grey and deeply scoured with wrinkles, but there was an inquisitive twinkle to the eyes. Behind him was a tall open-fronted bookcase, and Ben could make out titles of volumes bearing the names of famous composers-Chopin, Beethoven, Elgar.

‘Who’s that?’ Ben asked.

‘I don’t know him,’ she said. She clicked again. The old man disappeared and a new picture filled the screen. It was of a white stone building that looked to Ben like a small temple or some kind of monument. It had a domed top and a classical frontage. ‘This I recognize,’ she said. ‘Ravenna, Italy. That’s Dante’s tomb. I’ve been there.’

‘Why would Oliver go to Italy if his research was in Vienna?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did Mozart spend a lot of time in Italy?’

She thought for a moment. ‘If I remember rightly from music school, I think he spent some time in Bologna in his teens,’ she said. ‘But apart from that, I don’t think he did more than travel there occasionally.’

‘This isn’t helping us,’ Ben said. ‘Move on to the next one.’

Click. The next picture showed Oliver at a party with two pretty girls, one on each arm. They were kissing him on the cheeks as he happily toasted the camera with a cocktail.

Leigh clicked again. It was another shot from the same party. This time Oliver was sitting at a piano. On the double stool next to him sat a younger man, mid-twenties or so, and the two were playing a duet together. They seemed to be having a good time, Oliver’s face caught in mid-laugh as he hammered the keys. Around the piano there were women in party dresses, resting on it, watching him play, smiling at him, smiling at one another, drinks in their hands. Faces were glowing. It was a very natural shot of happy-looking people enjoying themselves.

Leigh couldn’t look at it for long. She clicked and moved on.

A shot of a snowy village flashed up. There were trees and mountains in the background, laced with white. Leigh frowned. ‘Switzerland?’

Ben studied it. ‘Could be. Or it could be Austria.’ He reached across, clicked and scrolled down to reveal the properties of the picture. It had been taken three days before Oliver’s death.

Leigh sighed. ‘Still doesn’t tell us anything.’

Ben walked away from the desk and left her to browse through the rest of the photographs. He went over to the bed, sat down and drained his glass in one swallow. Beside him, spread out on sheets of newspaper laid across the bed, were the charred remnants of the box-file’s contents. Sifting through them gingerly, he turned over one of the papers and winced as it crumbled away at the edges.

Underneath it he saw the burnt, tattered remains of a document that looked different from the others. The fire had eaten away most of the text in black-edged bites that looked like missing pieces from a jigsaw puzzle. Nearly all the rest was so charred that the German handwriting was barely readable. All that was left were a few disjointed phrases that meant nothing to him.

For an instant Ben thought he was holding the original, and he caught his breath. No. It was just a photocopy.

It was the Mozart letter. Richard Llewellyn’s discovery. Oliver had told the story so often that Ben still remembered it clearly.

Many years ago, the Llewellyn antique piano restoration workshop and showroom had been situated in a busy street in the centre of Builth Wells. After the death of his wife Margaret in 1987, when Leigh had been thirteen and Oliver seventeen, Richard Llewellyn had gone into decline and taken his business with him. He was drinking too much to do his work well. Custom had tailed off dramatically. Then one day a chance find in the attic of an old house promised to change Richard Llewellyn’s fortunes forever.

The decaying pianoforte had been made in the early nineteenth century by the celebrated Viennese craftsman Josef Bohm. It had travelled to Britain sometime in the 1930s and fallen out of use a long time ago. It hadn’t been stored very carefully Woodworm had infected much of the casework and it needed a major overhaul to get it back into prime condition. But even in that poor state it was one of the most beautiful instruments that Richard Llewellyn had ever come across, and he was excited by the price it might fetch at auction once it was restored-maybe ten thousand pounds, maybe even more. He put away the port and sherry bottles and got to work.

He’d never finished the job. It was while restoring one of the instrument’s legs that Llewellyn had made his discovery. The leg was hollow, and inside it he found a rolled-up document, old and yellowed and bound with a ribbon. It was a letter written in German, and dated November 1791.

When Richard Llewellyn had seen the signature at the bottom, his heart had almost given out.

The last surviving letter written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart before his death just weeks later. How it had found its way into the hollow piano leg was a mystery, and would remain that way forever. All Llewellyn knew was that he’d found a historic treasure that was going to change his life.

At the time, the discovery had been all Oliver could talk about. His father had taken his prize to London for the scrutiny of expert musicologists and antiquarians. But his vision of the fortune the Mozart letter was going to earn him crumbled away when the experts declared it a fake.

‘Maybe it wasn’t, though,’ Ben said out loud.

Leigh turned with a quizzical look. ‘Maybe what?’

‘Your dad’s letter. Is it possible it wasn’t a fake after all, and that’s why these people are after you? What would it be worth?’

She shook her head. ‘Dad sold it, remember? Maybe you don’t. Years ago, about the time we stopped seeing each other.’

‘Someone bought it, even though nobody believed it was genuine?’

‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Just when Dad was becoming completely despondent about the whole thing, this crazy collector got in touch with him. An Italian music scholar. He made an offer for the letter. It wasn’t the kind of money Dad had dreamed of, but he accepted it right away. Then the Italian said he wanted to buy the old piano, too. It was only half-restored but he paid top dollar for it anyway. I remember it being crated up and taken away in a big van. Then Dad was solvent again. He was still hurting over the response from the experts, but at least he had some money in his pocket. That was how I was able to go to New York, to study at the music academy.’

‘What was the Italian’s name?’ Ben asked.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘It was a long time ago, and I never met him. Oliver did. He said he was ancient. I suppose he’d be dead by now.’

Ben put down the fragment of the photocopied letter and sifted through some of the other documents. Something caught his eye and he looked more closely.

The fire had eaten away the right margin of the lined notepaper. The scribbled writing on the page was Oliver’s. Ben’s eye followed a line that was written in large bold capitals, triple-underlined as though out of frustration. The end of the sentence was burnt away where the paper had darkened from yellow to brown to crumbled ash. ‘“What is the Order of R—?”’ he read aloud. ‘Do you know what that might be?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

He chucked the sheet down with the rest of the papers. ‘Shit. What a mess.’

Leigh had finished going through the photographs. There was just one file left on the disc. He leaned on the back of her chair as she opened it up.

‘It’s not a photo file,’ he said. ‘It’s a video-clip.’