The Bach Manuscript
Ben returned to the college on foot rather than taking a bus. The April sunshine was warm, and he took off his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder as he walked. He liked walking, because it forced him to slow down. And because he could smoke without getting arrested, even though he was almost out of Gauloises.
On Ben’s way back towards the city centre he walked by a beggar who was slumped in a doorway opposite St John’s College. He was a man in his forties with sunken cheeks and matted hair and a cardboard sign made from a torn-up box that said HUNGRY + HOMLESS PLESE HELP. No knife. That counted for something. No dog, either. Some of these guys used their pets to extract sympathy from folks, when in fact it wasn’t the animal’s best interests they were most concerned about. Ben had once triggered one of them into a rage by giving him canned dog meat instead of money. But this guy looked as genuine as he did pitiful. Ben stopped and dug out from his pocket the fifty pounds he’d taken from the crusty. ‘Here you go, buddy,’ he said, and walked on as the guy sat there clutching his money and staring after him.
Ben spent the next couple of hours wandering through the grounds of Christ Church Meadow and down to the river beyond. The air was full of spring and the scent of daffodils as he followed the footpath along the bank of the Isis to the college boathouses, where he stopped a while and watched the shimmer of the sunlight on the water, letting thoughts and memories play freely through his mind.
For all the bittersweet emotions it kindled for Ben to be back here, Oxford was an undeniably beautiful place to live and he was happy that Nick had found his niche here, enjoying a normal and safe and happily closeted existence doing what he loved. Just like Simeon and Michaela, in the cosy comfortable warmth of the country vicarage not far from Oxford. Normal people, living out their blissfully sheltered lives. Until one day, the real world reached out and snapped them up and it was over.
Ben wondered what it must be like to be a normal person like the members of the old gang. He envied them in a lot of ways, but at the same time he knew that if he had his own life to live all over again, most of the choices he’d made in his time, however crazy or reckless they might have seemed on the outside, would remain unchanged. Maybe he was simply preordained, deep down in his DNA, not to be like normal folks.
Afterwards he slowly made his way back up the path and past the moored narrowboats and river cruisers to Folly Bridge, where he rejoined the busy streets and headed up past Tom Tower and the front of Christ Church to the city centre. Remembering that he was short on cigarettes he strolled down the High Street in search of the venerable pipe shop and tobacconist’s he used to frequent long ago, only to find to his chagrin that it had closed down and become a blasted travel agent.
But some things hadn’t changed. He crossed the street and walked inside the old covered market, which was exactly as he remembered it from years ago. He spent a while exploring, and bought a bottle of good wine to drink in his room later that evening after the concert. Thinking of the concert made him think of the dinner in Hall that would precede it, which in turn brought to mind that Seraphina’s email had stipulated that gowns had to be worn for the event. With mixed feelings Ben recrossed the street and walked down to the university outfitters to buy one. There were different types of academic gowns, depending on status. Ben’s lowly status required a Commoners’ gown, which was a truncated waist-length affair made of flimsy black material that made you look like some kind of half-arsed Batman. His very first action on dropping out of university all those years ago had been to douse his gown with lighter fluid and torch it. The new one was identical. Ben hated the thing, but rules were rules.
Dinner was dinner, too. Feeling stupid in his gown, Ben found himself seated among strangers and said little to anyone. It was his second depressing social experience of the day, and he left before the main course. He ditched the gown, jogged up the hill to the centre, bought fish and chips at Carfax Chippy, and took the satisfyingly greasy package back to Old Library 7 where he washed it down with some of his wine. In France, drinking claret this good straight from the bottle would probably have been regarded as a crime of sorts, but what the hell. Then it was time for the concert, to which he was looking forward in the hopes of seeing Nick again.
It was a leisurely thirty-second walk around the corner from Old Library to the arched doorway of the cathedral. The famous Seraphina Lewis was there on duty, as diligent as an army sentry but a lot noisier, to meet and greet the arrivals, tick off names on a register and usher them through the grand entrance. Ben liked cathedrals, not because he was particularly pious, but for their serenity. As a student, he’d often attended evensong and other choral services, just to drink in the atmosphere.
Christ Church Cathedral was exactly as he remembered it. If things had gone the way they should have between him and Brooke, they’d have been married here. Privilege of being an old member. Needless to say, things had not gone as they should have.
But Ben wasn’t here to dwell on unhappy memories. He’d come to hear Nick.
The concert began promptly at eight-thirty. For the next hour and a half, the cathedral was filled with the celestial voice of the great organ. From the thunderous put-the-fear-of-God-into-you tones of Johann Sebastian Bach toccatas and fugues to the intriguing dissonances of Olivier Messiaen, Ben enjoyed every note of it. It wiped his mind clear and transported him to another place. He was proud of his friend. Nick was up there doing what he loved, and doing a damn fine job of it. When the final notes of the last piece died away, Ben would have stayed another ninety minutes.
He hung around afterwards and was the last to leave, but didn’t see Nick and supposed he must have been waylaid or had things to attend to. Ben gave up waiting for him, sorry that he was missing this last chance to see his friend. As much as he’d have liked to stay in Oxford another day so they could go out for a few drinks together, he had to leave first thing in the morning for the meeting with Hobart at Bisley ranges, an hour’s drive away. Shame.
On his way back to Old Library, Ben turned his phone on and found there was a text message there from someone who’d tried calling him during the concert.
It was Pam Hobart, Lenny’s wife, informing Ben very apologetically on her husband’s behalf that tomorrow’s rendezvous would have to be cancelled as Lenny had been taken ill with a bout of gastric flu.
And just like that, Ben’s plans were suddenly all in pieces. He texted back to say he was sorry to hear the news, wishing Lenny a speedy recovery and promising to set up another meeting when he was better.
Great. Now he’d have to go home empty-handed; the rifle shooting activities at Le Val would just have to make do without the world’s greatest bipod for the moment. Ben was mildly irritated, but he couldn’t call his trip a complete waste of time. He was pleased to have hooked up with Nick again. Now they’d re-established contact, Ben was determined not to let it lapse.
Maybe he would stick around Oxford, after all. There was no pressing need to dash straight back to France, as Jeff and Tuesday could manage fine without him for just a little longer. He’d pay a visit to the college admin office in the morning to check that he was clear to hold onto the room another day.
His mind made up, Ben ambled back through the cloister and up the groaning bare wooden staircase to his room. The remainder of the wine he’d bought earlier was there waiting for him, seductively calling, ‘Drink me’. He was about to flop in the armchair when he changed his mind, and for old times’ sake grabbed the bottle and went back down to the cloister. He sat on the same cold stone ledge he used to sit on, and in the peace of the night he smoked his last three Gauloises, listened to the bats flapping about the cathedral tower and savoured the rest of the wine.
He thought about lost friends and wished they were there, but he wasn’t lonely. He’d been alone for most of his life, and he relished solitude as much as he liked the darkness.
Sometime in the early hours, he carried the empty bottle upstairs and went to bed.
Chapter 10
Nick Hawthorne treated himself to a taxi home after the concert. He was happy with the evening, and thought he hadn’t performed too badly. The organ had sounded great as it ever had, in all the years he’d known it. The truth was, the only remaining original part of it was the case, dating back to about 1680. The actual guts of the instrument were a modern replacement from the late seventies. He often wondered what the old one would have been like to play.
All in all, a successful night. The only downside was that his hands hurt after the performance. He couldn’t flex his fingers without wincing. Of all the rotten luck, for someone in his line of work to get arthritis of the hands at such an early age. Nick had two consolations. One was that the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson had suffered from the same condition for much of his life. If it didn’t stop Oscar, it wouldn’t stop him.
The second consolation was waiting for Nick back home. On arrival he hurried straight to the spare bedroom, unlocked the door, slipped inside and turned on an infrared side lamp that filled the room with a crimson glow. Out of habit, he locked the door behind him.
The reason Nick Hawthorne kept the spare bedroom locked at all times was because it contained his large collection of plants. When it came to horticulture, he was highly specialised: cannabis sativa was the only species he’d ever attempted to grow. He was pretty adept at it, too – so much so that it had become something of a hobby with him. Only the females produced smokable marijuana; the males were there for pollination purposes only. He’d learned how to nurture his crop with all the right light conditions and nutrients, maintaining the soil pH in perfect balance for optimum growth. The resulting overproduction was far more than he could actually use himself, even if he’d planned on spending all day every day stoned out of his wits, which was far from the case. So many plants filled the room that it looked like a set from a jungle movie. He’d taken out the bed long ago to make room for them all. Aside from the sideboard and tables all covered in pots, the only remaining furniture was the large recliner chair in which he often spent his evenings, bathed in the submarine glow of the infrared lamp and drifting through an extremely pleasant haze as he partook of the evil weed.
Nick’s cannabis use was the only illegality he had ever committed in his life. He felt absolutely no guilt about it whatsoever, as he justified it on purely medical grounds after having tried every noxious pill and potion the doctors could offer him, and all they’d done was cause a whole raft of side-effects without relieving the symptoms of his condition. Deciding the medical profession were essentially no more than quack salesmen for pharmaceutical corporate giants set on poisoning everyone, he’d gone natural and never regretted it. The stuff worked. It was the only medicine that eased the pain in his hands after playing. Plus, it relaxed him, and that was just what he needed after a gig.
The room was kept much warmer than the rest of the apartment. Nick bolted the door shut behind him, then slipped off his coat and dumped it carelessly on the floor in his haste to attend to his needs. He opened the sideboard cupboard where he kept his stash of the crumbled dried leaves, along with his extra-large-size Rizla papers. He spent a few moments carefully rolling up a joint, which made little lances of pain jolt through his fingers, but the discomfort would soon be relieved. Then he went over to the recliner, settled deep into it, relished lighting up the joint with his Dupont Mozart lighter, and began to puff away contentedly.
It wasn’t long before he felt the herb working its magic. The delicious familiar sensations began to wash over him, his muscles drooping, heart rate slackening until he could have sworn it was beating once a minute. A smile curled his lips and he closed his eyes, letting the recliner support him like a big, soft hand gently cupping him in its palm. The echoing remnants of the evening’s performance played in his head. Then they, too, relaxed and softened, gradually slowly faded away to transcendent silence … and Nick Hawthorne was one with the Cosmos.
Some eons later, Nick’s eyes snapped open. At first, disorientated, he thought it was the vividness of his dream that had startled him awake. But the bubble of the dream was popped, and the thumping sound that had woken him was still there.
Thud.
Crash.
Nick stopped breathing and he went rigid with sudden tension. He peered at his watch by the dim light of the infrared lamp and saw that it was ten to four in the morning. He’d been asleep for five hours.
He sat bolt upright in the chair as he heard another muffled thump from somewhere beyond the bolted bedroom door, not far away.
There could be no question. Someone was inside the apartment! But who? His mind was still clouded from sleep and the lingering after-effects of the cannabis, and for a couple of moments he thought maybe some of his music pals had turned up in search of a late-night party. Or maybe one of the lunchtime guests had left something behind and come back to get it. But no, that couldn’t be. Nick was certain he’d locked the front door on his way in.
That was when he clearly heard the heavy, aggressive footsteps thumping about the apartment, and the strange voices of at least two men, and his guts twisted up with the realisation that whoever was inside his place, it wasn’t his friends. They were intruders.
Nick struggled to contain his panic and think straight. From some part of his brain bubbled up the memory of something he’d read: that what the Americans called home invasions, or what the British police called ‘creeper burglaries’, were reportedly on the rise in the UK. Creeper burglars were the kind who were content to enter their victims’ properties even when someone was at home, because in the case of a confrontation they had no qualms about beating your brains out with a hammer or stabbing you to death.
All sliced and diced with a knife hanging out of your guts.
Except these guys weren’t doing a lot of creeping. It sounded like a herd of elephants in there.
Nick slowly rose from his chair and advanced through the red-lit jungle towards the bedroom door. He placed the palms of his shaking hands flat against it and pressed his ear to the wood, listening, barely daring to breathe in case they detected his presence in here. The thought suddenly hit him that they might see the streak of infrared light under the door, and he reached out and turned off the lamp, plunging the jungle into pitch black. He froze in the darkness, listening to the intruders crashing about. As terrified as he was of what they might do to him if they found him, the thought of the mindless damage they could be causing to his precious possessions, just for the hell of it, frightened him even more. Any moment now they might start smashing his instruments to pieces, or urinating on them and God knew what else. His beautiful Bosendörfer. Worse still, the irreplaceable Kirckman.
But what could he do? He was completely helpless to prevent the worst from happening. This wasn’t America, where you could come bursting out brandishing a homedefence shotgun and send the bad guys packing, or even give them the blasting they deserved and still be on the right side of the law.
Call the police, quick. Nick fumbled in the darkness for his coat, thrown down on the floor earlier. Finding it, he fished his mobile phone from the pocket. He was poised to start dialling 999 when he stopped.
What are you thinking, you bloody fool?
Here he was standing among enough home-grown cannabis plants to stock a garden centre, and he was about to invite the police into his home. Madness. Not in a thousand years would they believe all this was for his personal use only. He could see the headline in the Oxford Mail: CLASSICAL PERFORMER CHARGED WITH DEALING DRUGS. Reputation in shreds. Career gone. He’d have to sell the apartment. His mother would be scandalised. It was all too awful to contemplate.
Get a grip on yourself, Nick. Do something!
But what?
He could still hear the burglars banging about, and the sound of their voices through the door. One of them was making a joke about something. The other one laughed. They weren’t speaking English. Was it Polish? Romanian?
That was when it suddenly occurred to Nick that the solution to his problem was staring him in the face. He couldn’t call the cops, but he could call someone. Someone who wouldn’t be afraid, like him. Someone who could wade in and handle this situation like swatting a couple of flies. The human equivalent of that home-defence shotgun Nick was so badly lacking right now.
Ben Hope.
Nick fell to his knees on the floor and groped in his coat pockets for the business card Ben had given him earlier that day. He shone the glow of his phone over the back of the card and saw the mobile number handwritten there. He punched in the digits with a trembling finger and clamped the phone to his ear, crouched on the floor of the dark room as though he was saying a prayer of penitence.
Nick almost wanted to sob with relief when he heard Ben’s voice in his ear before the second ring. Four in the morning, but he sounded wide awake and alert. Like a kick-ass justice-dealing machine ready to spring into action.
Nick cupped his hand over the phone and spoke in a raspy, urgent whisper. ‘Ben, it’s me, Nick. Listen—’
‘Why are you whispering? What’s up?’
‘I need your help, right now,’ Nick croaked. ‘There are intruders in my apartment.’
Ben Hope wasn’t one to waste time on idle chat. ‘Call 999. Stay safe. On my way.’
‘I can’t call the pol—’ Nick began to explain, but then the line went dead. He stood up, still clutching the phone, listening through the door and realising that something was different. He could no longer hear the intruders. He stalked closer to the door and pressed his ear against it.
Dead silence.
Had they gone? They must have.
A moment earlier, that would have been the most wonderful relief in the world. Now, Nick was almost disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see Ben Hope kicking their sorry arses after all.
He slowly, tentatively, unbolted the door and eased it open a crack. Still not a breath of sound or movement from out there. The worst of the danger seemed to have passed, but all the same his heart was fluttering with mixed dread and fury at the thought of what evidence of horrible damage he was about to find in his home.
Nick stepped nervously out into the pitch-dark hallway and turned towards the living room at the top of the passage, where he could see a faint rectangular outline of light around the edges of the door. His legs felt shaky under him. He reached out a hand to find the light switch.
Then a powerful grip clamped hold of his arm and he cried out in terror as he felt himself being jerked forward off his feet. As he fell, something hard and solid hit him a brutal blow to the face and he felt his nose break.
The light came on. Nick was on the floor, groaning, blood bubbling from his broken nose. He peered through a veil of pain, craned his neck upwards to look at the trio of men standing over him and looking down at him as if he was a dog turd they’d stepped in. The one who had kneed him in the face reached down and grabbed a fistful of Nick’s hair, making him cry out again as he forced him to stagger upright. The man pressed the web of his hand against Nick’s throat and pinned him against the wall.
Helpless and unable to speak or move, Nick stared at his trio of attackers. Big, hard-looking men, all wearing dark clothes. They had broad shoulders and angular, ruddy faces, and eyes that gazed back at him without any trace of compassion. As though he was just an object to them, not even human. To Nick, that was the most terrifying thing of all.
One of them shouldered past, yanked open the spare bedroom door and peered through, flashing a small torch around the inside. He grinned.
‘Like I said, boys. It’s a fuckin’ greenhouse in here.’ Speaking English now, thick with the accent of the language Nick had heard them talking in before. Eastern European, but he still couldn’t place it.
Such things were the least of Nick Hawthorne’s worries now. The man pinning him by the throat drew back his other hand in a clenched fist.
Nick saw little after that. The punches kept coming, hard and violent. He felt his teeth break, with a horrible crack that filled his head. Then he was back down on the floor, heavy kicks striking at his stomach and sides and groin and legs, with nothing he could do except curl up and try to protect himself and hope it would be over soon.
One of the thugs said something that Nick couldn’t have understood, even in English. Then he felt the pincer grips seize him by the arms, and his body being lifted off the floor. They half-carried him into the living room, dragging his limp feet along the floor. He was groaning and half blind with pain, and only caught a fleeting glimpse of the wreckage of the room. Why were they doing this to him? He didn’t understand. He didn’t deserve this.
‘No,’ he tried to plead. But all that came out from his shattered lips was a bubbling moan.
They dragged him towards the window.
Chapter 11
Ben had wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t call the police, but there was no time to lose over questions. He hurriedly pulled on his jeans and boots, put his leather jacket on over the dark T-shirt he’d been sleeping in, and left Old Library at a sprint.
The BMW was in the college car park to the rear of Meadow Buildings, across the quad and through a gated arch. Ben threw himself behind the wheel, and moments later the snarl of his exhausts broke the serenity of the silent meadow.
He skidded out of the college grounds and sped up St Aldate’s. One-way systems and pedestrianised zones weren’t a priority for him, and nor were speed limits as he hustled northwards through the night. Oxford never quite sleeps, but at four in the morning its centre comes closer to being deserted than most modern cities. He hit seventy miles an hour on Cornmarket, and eighty on Banbury Road, before he had to brake to avoid running down a bunch of drunks clowning around in the middle of the street. Moments later, he was roaring into the tranquil part of north Oxford where Nick lived.
Only to find that it was no longer so tranquil. And that he wasn’t the first emergency responder to arrive on the scene.
The houses and trees of Nick’s street were lit by the swirl of blue from the squad of vehicles that half blocked the road. Ben kerbed the BMW opposite and got out. The other side of the street he could see the door to Nick’s place hanging open, police hovering outside like guards. The top-floor windows were lit, and more lights were coming on in neighbouring houses all around as residents woke up to the goings-on. An old man stood framed in his doorway on Ben’s side of the street, wrapped in a dressing gown and squinting across at the police cars and the glare of blue lights. He looked confused and distressed. ‘What’s going on?’
Ben made no reply. A short distance away, a female uniformed officer was taking what looked like a witness statement from a young man and woman in their early twenties who stood huddled and pale at the side of the pavement. They were dressed as though they’d been to a party. Passers-by, rather than neighbours. The guy was clutching a phone at his side. Ben thought he must have been the one who called 999, if Nick hadn’t.