The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (45 page)

Austria

Clara was safe. That had been his first priority. Kinski had dealt with it quickly, and there was no way anyone could get to her again. No way anyone would find her at Hildegard’s place.

And now, down to business. If they thought this was going to stop him, they could think again. Kinski was a big man but he could move fast. People stepped aside when they saw him coming down the corridor, eyes front, pressing forward with long determined strides. The look on his face was clear:
get out of my way.
Kinski wasn’t to be messed with when he wore that face. They’d seen it before, but never this intense. They parted like minnows for a shark.

He didn’t slow down for the door of the Chief’s office. He shouldered it aside and marched straight in.

Kinski had marched straight into his Chief’s office a hundred times before. Every time, he’d been confronted with the exact same thing. The same clutter of piled-up folders and papers, the same stale coffee smell from
a thousand cups that never got finished and sat cold around the office. The same grey, harassed, tired-looking Chief slumped at his desk. The Chief was part of the furniture, almost part of the building itself. It was a tradition to see him sitting there, something you’d never expect to change.

Today, Kinski burst into the office and everything was different.

The man behind the desk looked about half the Chief’s age. He had dark hair slicked back, and wore neat gold-rimmed glasses. His suit was pressed and his tie was perfectly straight. He was slender and clean-looking. Everything that the Chief wasn’t.

The office was tidy and smelled of air-freshener. The desk was clear of papers, just a small notebook computer whirring quietly to one side. There was a brand-new filing cabinet in place of the rusty, overflowing, scarred old hulk that had sat for the last decade and a half in the corner of the office. Even the windows had been cleaned.

‘Where’s Chief Schiller?’

The younger man looked up and met Kinski’s hard gaze. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Kinski. Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m Gessler.
Chief
Gessler to you, asshole. The next time you come into my office, you knock. Understood?’

Kinski said nothing.

‘So what the fuck did you want anyway?’

‘Where’s Chief Schiller?’ Kinski said again.

‘He’s gone,’ Gessler replied.

‘Gone where?’

Gessler ripped off his glasses and glared at Kinski. ‘What am I, a fucking travel agent? How the hell should I know where he’s gone? Sitting on a beach somewhere south of the equator. Sipping on a long cool drink and watching the girls go by. What else is there to do when you retire?’

‘He retired? I just talked to him yesterday. He didn’t say anything. I knew it was coming up, but—’

Gessler shrugged. ‘He got an opportunity, he took it. Now, Detective, did you actually have a reason for barging into my office? If not, I suggest you fuck off and find something useful to do.’ Gessler smiled.
‘OK?’

Somewhere in the Italian countryside

They waited until the flames were pouring from the windows of the truck, paintwork blistering on the doors and black smoke rising through the trees. Then they turned and walked away from the forest clearing.

It was getting dark, and the air was cold and damp. Ben’s bandaged arm was beginning to hurt badly, but the bullet had only creased the flesh. He’d been lucky.

They walked in silence for some distance along the empty country road. Below them in a valley were some lights from a building. A little way along the road they came to a gate and a sign on a post.

It was low season at the Rossi pony-trekking centre. Gino Rossi and his wife had five empty cabins that were rented out in summer to horse riders exploring the local countryside. It was a pleasant surprise to be offered cash from the two strangers in return for accommodation for the night. Rosalba Rossi prepared a big dish of tagliatelle with tomato sauce that filled the farmhouse with the scent of basil and fresh garlic,
while her husband dusted out the cabin and fired up the heating system.

After dinner Ben bought two bottles of Sangiovese from Gino, and he and Leigh said goodnight and retreated to their cabin. The accommodation was rustic, but warm and comfortable. There were two single wooden beds with patchwork quilts, and a crucifix hung on the whitewashed wall between them.

Ben had noticed that Leigh had only picked at her food. She slumped down on one of the beds, looking pale and exhausted. Ben sat with her and poured some wine. They sat in silence for a while, letting the wine relax them.

‘I can’t take much more of this,’ she said. Her voice sounded strained.

He gently put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. Their closeness felt a little strange. She rested her head against him and moved closer. He could feel her body heat, her thigh pressed against his and her heart beating against his arm. Then he realized that he was tenderly stroking her hair, enjoying the soft silky feel of it, letting his hand run down her neck and the curve of her shoulder without even thinking about it.

Suddenly self-conscious, he shifted away from her. He reached for the bottle and poured himself more wine. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘How did they know we were there?’ she asked softly.

He didn’t reply.

She seemed to read his thoughts. ‘It was my fault, wasn’t it? They were tapping his phone.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. I tried to call him too. Don’t think about it. You need to rest.’

‘But I gave my name,’ she went on. ‘You told me to keep it quiet, but I used it. I didn’t listen to you, and now because of me that poor old man is dead.’

‘You didn’t pull the trigger,’ he said.

‘I might as well have.’ She sighed. ‘Who
are
these people? They’re everywhere.’ She looked up at him with frightened eyes. ‘They’re going to kill us, too. I know it.’

He reassured her and his voice was calm, but his mind was working hard and fast. They’d come about twenty kilometres from Arno’s place. There was no way anyone could have followed them, and they were safe for the moment. But they wouldn’t be safe for long, and he had no idea where to go next. They still didn’t know where the letter was. Oliver’s trail seemed to have gone cold.

Arno’s words echoed in his mind.
It has gone home.
He’d put the letter somewhere safe-but where? Where could be home to the Mozart letter? Maybe the place it had been written. Austria?

Leigh slept eventually, her fingers still curled around the base of her empty wine glass as her body rose and fell gently. Ben took the glass away, covered her with a blanket and watched over her for a while as he sat on the other bed and finished the second bottle of wine with the last of his cigarettes. His mind was a swirl. All questions. No answers.

It was after eleven thirty when he stepped outside to clear his head in the cold night air. The frost was
hard under his feet, making the grass crunch. He looked up into the night sky, orientating himself with the North Star out of long habit.

Across from the row of cabins, on the far side of the moonlit yard, was a range of stone outbuildings, stables and ramshackle corrugated-iron sheds. A dog barked in the distance. One of the sheds had a light on in its dusty window, and Ben could hear the metallic sounds of someone working with tools inside. He approached and peered through a gap in the rust-streaked corrugated sheets. The shed was a rough workshop filled with battered farm equipment and racks of tools. A young curly-haired man was working on an old Fiat Strada, clattering around under the bonnet.

Ben walked round to the open doorway. ‘
C
i
ao
,’ he said. ‘I’m Steve.’

The young man turned. He was a younger version of Gino Rossi, about nineteen or twenty.

Ben pointed at the car. ‘Problems?’ he asked in Italian.

‘Ciao
, Steve. Sandro.’ Sandro grinned and waggled a spark-plug wrench to show the foreigner. ‘Changing the plugs, that’s all. I’m selling her, and I want her to go well.’ He finished tightening up the plugs, replaced the caps and slammed the rusty bonnet shut, then walked around to the open door and fired up the engine. Ben listened. There were no unhealthy rattles and the exhaust note was clean. No gaskets gone, not sucking air. No blue smoke.

‘How much are you asking?’ he said.

Sandro wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘She’s old, but good. Say a thousand and a half.’

Ben took cash from his pocket. ‘Is she ready for a run right now?’ he asked.

He drove quietly out of the farmyard and up the rutted drive, then turned right to follow the winding country road back the way they’d come. The yellowed reflectors of the old Strada picked out the lopsided road-signs and the landmarks he remembered from earlier. He passed the forest where they’d dumped the farm truck, and wished he had a weapon.

He hated going back to Arno’s place. It was tactically sloppy and possibly dangerous. But it was the only way. He bitterly regretted not having pressed the old man to say more about where he’d hidden the letter. He was making too many mistakes. Was the damn thing even worth finding? Maybe not, he thought, but clutching at straws was his only option right now. He had to hope he was clutching at the right one.

It was half past midnight by the time he found Arno’s villa. The front gates were set back from the road, across a neat border. He slowed. The driveway and gardens were lit up with the swirling lights of police cars and two fire engines.

As he swore and accelerated past the gates he looked past the vehicles at the house.

It wasn’t there any more. Hardly a wall was still standing. The villa was a levelled mess of blackened rubble and smoking timber, the collapsed roof lying
like the twisted spine of a giant carcass, tiles and charred woodwork and smashed windows scattered over a wide circle.

The fire had obviously raged a long time. The crews were calling it a night, packing up their equipment. There was nothing left worth saving.

Ben drove on, thinking about the options left open now. Either the blaze in the study had spread, or someone had made sure the place was thoroughly torched. It was more likely to be the latter. Whoever they were, these people liked their tracks to be covered. And fire was the best cleanser.

After a kilometre or so he turned into the farm entrance and followed the bumping, stony lane as far as the deserted yard where they’d stolen the truck earlier that day. Other than the shattered barn, there was no visible trace of what had happened there.

He turned off the engine and stepped out. He waited in the dark for a while. There was nobody around. He searched the buildings by the thin beam of his Mini Maglite but found nothing, not a single shell case left uncollected. They’d even cleaned the blood off the tool-shed door where he’d nailed the man to the frame. The nails had been pliered out too, leaving four neat holes in the wood.

There was a sudden movement behind him, and a crash of something falling. He whirled around in the darkness, every muscle tensing.

The black cat leapt down from its vantage point on a high shelf, landed next to the old nail tin it had knocked over, and darted out through a hole in the planking.

Ben cut across the dark farm and found the gap in the crumbled stone wall leading into Arno’s rambling parkland. He stayed back among the trees, watching the fire crews leave and the police strolling up and down the sides of the gutted villa. He knew he was wasting his time here. It was worthless.

He turned to go, heading back for the gap in the wall, picking his way between the slender tree trunks by moonlight. A cloud passed across the face of the moon, casting the woods in shadow.

He stopped. Lying among the leaves, half-hidden behind a mossy knot of tree roots, a man’s body was lying crumpled and grey on the ground with his arms flung out to the sides.

There was no head on the body.

He waited, perfectly still, watching it until the cloud passed and the moonlight brightened. He went over to it and nudged it with his foot. It wasn’t a body. It was something the clean-up team had missed.

Arno’s tweed jacket. He remembered Leigh dropping it as they ran across the grounds.

He picked it up. It felt cold and damp, and it was empty apart from an oblong shape in the left inside pocket.

He fished it out. It was a slim wallet.

‘Who’s there?’ Her voice sounded frightened in the darkness.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’ He shut the door of the cabin behind him.

‘Where were you?’

He told her.

‘You went back?’

‘The place has been torched, Leigh. There’s nothing left. But I found something.’ He held up the wallet. ‘It’s Arno’s.’

Leigh sat up in bed as he flipped on a sidelight. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her and she brushed the thick black hair out of her eyes. ‘Where did you find it?’ she asked sleepily.

‘Where you dropped his jacket, in the woods,’ he said. He opened the slim calf-leather wallet and unzipped one of the internal pockets. ‘There’s not much here,’ he said. ‘A library membership card, out of date. A couple of old cinema tickets. Fifteen euros in cash. And this.’ He took out a small slip of paper and showed it to her.

She took it and looked at him quizzically. ‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a receipt.’

‘The Museo Visconti in Milan,’ she said, reading the crumpled print.

‘Ever heard of it?’

She shook her head.

‘This is an acknowledgement of something Arno donated to the museum,’ he said. ‘The receipt doesn’t say what it is, but it’s dated last January, just a few days after Oliver’s death.’

She looked up from the slip of paper. ‘You think—’

‘The letter has gone to Milan? I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon find out. Get some sleep. We’re moving on at five.’

The kid had been right about the car. It was old, but it was dependable. It took them to Milan in a little over four hours. On the way they stopped at an
autostrada
service station where Leigh picked out a headscarf and a pair of wide sunglasses, new jeans and a warm jacket.

The Milan traffic was insane, and it was mid-morning by the time they found the Museo Visconti, an imposing eighteenth-century museum of music in the city suburbs. Its high porticoes overlooked a walled garden away from the street and the traffic rumble.

They went inside and breathed the old museum smell of must and wood polish. The place was almost empty, with just a few middle-aged visitors strolling quietly around the exhibits, talking to each other in subdued voices. The parquet floors were varnished and waxed to a slippery mirror sheen. Classical music played softly in the background. The doorways to each room were flanked by thick velvet curtains. The security guard on patrol looked about eighty.

They walked from room to room under the sweeping gaze of cameras, past displays of period brass instruments and a collection of magnificently ornate antique harps. Ben peered through a doorway into a large gallery space filled with old oil portraits of famous composers. ‘Nothing in here,’ he said. ‘Just a bunch of dead men in powdered wigs.’

‘Philistine,’ Leigh whispered at him.

From the main hall a curved flight of wooden stairs led up to the next floor. Ben went up, and Leigh followed. The creaking stairs took them to a long room whose walls were lined with tall glass cabinets displaying period opera costumes and other exhibits. Leigh stopped at one of them and read the small brass plaque. ‘This is the gown that Caruso wore in his first ever public appearance in 1894,’ she read out. She walked along and stopped at another. ‘Wow. Look. The dress that Maria Callas wore when she sang
Norma
in Milan in ’57. Incredible. How come I never knew about this place?’

‘Leigh. Please. We’re not here to gape at some old dress. The letter, remember?’

Back in the entrance foyer, the old security guard shook his head. ‘We do not have any letters or documents.’

‘Is there another Museo Visconti?’ Ben asked. He knew what the answer would be.

The old man shook his head again, like a mournful bloodhound. ‘I have been here for fifty years,’ he said. ‘There is only one.’

They walked away.

‘I had a feeling this wouldn’t lead anywhere,’ Leigh said.

‘But Arno donated something. The receipt proves it.’

They walked down a long corridor. On either side were rows of antique violins, violas and cellos behind glass. ‘He was a collector,’ she said. ‘He could have donated anything. A painting, an instrument.’ She pointed at the violins behind the glass. ‘Could have been one of these, for all we know.’

He stopped. ‘We’re idiots.’

‘What?’

‘It’s gone home,’ he said.

She stared at him in confusion.

‘It’s gone home
,’ he repeated. ‘Arno said the letter had gone home. It’s gone back to where it came from. He didn’t mean the museum itself. It’s never been here before.’

‘We’re in the wrong place?’

‘Maybe not,’ he said, looking up and down the corridor. ‘We need to find the piano exhibit.’

Understanding dawned on her face. ‘Shit, I think you might be right.’

‘Would you recognize your dad’s old piano if you saw it?’

‘You bet I would.’

Their footsteps rang fast off the parquet as they hurried back up the corridor to find the keyboard instruments section. Through an archway to the side, flanked with red drapes, they found it. The big room was full of old keyboard instruments, pianos, spinets and harpsichords, all highly restored and gleaming.
They stood on plinths, cordoned off with
DO NOT TOUCH
signs on them.

Ben walked in among them. ‘Can you see it anywhere?’ he asked.

‘This is it,’ she said, pointing. She ran over to the old instrument near the window. It was big and ornate. Its woodwork gleamed dully under the museum lights. She circled it. ‘Christ, last time I saw this it was half restored, all stripped down to the bare wood and bits chipped off everywhere. But it’s definitely the one.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’d know it anywhere.’

Ben studied the piano carefully, running his eye over the heavily varnished surface, the mother-of-pearl inlays and the gleaming ivory and ebony keys. Over the top of the keyboard, in gold letters, was the maker’s name: Josef Bohm, Vienna. It had three intricately carved legs, two at the front and one holding up the long tail at the back. It was about twelve feet long, solid and heavy. ‘So remind me,’ he said. ‘Which leg was hollow?’

Leigh put her finger to the corner of her mouth, thinking. ‘It was one of the front ones.’

‘Left or right?’

‘Right, I think. No, left.’

Ben leaned over the security cordon, but he couldn’t get close enough to examine the piano properly. He glanced around. There was nobody in sight. He could hear the footsteps of the old security guard pacing through one of the adjacent rooms.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Definitely the right front leg.’

‘You don’t sound too certain.’

‘I’m certain.’

Mounted on a bracket high in a corner, the small black eye of a security camera was watching them. Ben stepped away from the plinth and looked casual as he slipped into the camera’s blind spot and along the wall beneath it. He looked up. Then he walked back to the piano and stepped straight over the cordon. ‘The camera’s useless,’ he said to Leigh with a smile. ‘It’s almost as old as these pianos, and half the wires are disconnected at the back.’

‘That’s so typically Italian,’ Leigh replied.

‘Don’t knock it.’ He knelt down next to the piano and examined the front right leg up close. The instrument had been carefully restored and was in such perfect condition that it was hard to believe it was almost two centuries old. Ben couldn’t see anything. But then his eye picked out a small crack in the varnish three-quarters of the way up the leg. He scratched with his nail. Tiny scales of varnish flaked away to reveal what seemed to be a hairline saw-mark. He scratched a bit more. The saw-line extended right round the leg, but it was barely visible. Had someone been at the instrument since the last restoration, removed the hollowed-out leg, replaced it and then painted over the join with clear varnish?

There was only one way to find out.