SCOTT MARIANI
The Mozart Conspiracy

Copyright

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2008

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847563415

Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007329038

Version 2018-07-03

Dedication

To Mary, Lana and Richard

‘I know I must die.

Someone has given me aqua toffana and has calculated the precise time of my death -for which they have ordered a Requiem. It is for myself that I am writing this’

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1791

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Keep Reading

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Scott Mariani

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Austria

9 January

Breathless with shock and terror, Oliver Llewellyn stumbled away from the scene he had just witnessed. He paused to lean against a bare stone wall. Nausea washed over him. His mouth was dry.

He hadn’t known exactly what he would find when he’d slipped away to explore the house. But what he’d seen-what they’d done to the man in that strange vaulted room-was more horrible than anything he could have imagined.

He ran on. Up a winding flight of stone steps and through the connecting bridgeway, then back into the main part of the house with its classical architecture and décor. He could hear the chatter and laughter of the party guests. The string quartet in the ballroom had started up a Strauss waltz.

The Sony Ericsson phone was still switched on and in video mode. He turned it off and slipped it in his tuxedo pocket, then glanced at the old wind-up watch on his wrist. It was almost nine thirty-his recital was due to resume in fifteen minutes. Oliver straightened his tux and took a deep breath. He walked down the sweeping double staircase to rejoin the party, attempting to conceal the panic in his step. Chandeliers glittered. Waiters attended to the guests, carrying silver trays laden with champagne flutes. As he reached the bottom of the stairs he snatched a glass from a tray and gulped it down. Across the room, near a tall marble fireplace, he could see the gleaming Bechstein grand piano he’d been playing just a few minutes earlier. It seemed like hours ago.

A hand landed on his shoulder. He tensed and spun around. An elderly gentleman with wire-framed glasses and a trim beard was smiling at him.

‘May I congratulate you on a fine recital, Herr Meyer,’ the man said in German. ‘The Debussy was magnificent. I eagerly await the second half of your programme.’

‘D-Danke schön,’ Oliver stammered. He looked around him nervously. Could they have spotted him? He had to get away from this place.

‘But you look very pale, Herr Meyer,’ the old man said, frowning at him. ‘Are you unwell? Shall I fetch you a glass of water?’

Oliver searched for the words. ‘Krank,’ he muttered. ‘I’m feeling sick.’ He broke away from the old man and reeled through the crowd. He stumbled into a pretty woman in a sequin gown, spilling her drink. People stared at him. He blurted out an apology and pushed on.

He knew he was drawing attention to himself. Over his shoulder he spotted security guards with radios. They were coming down the stairs, mingling with the crowd, pointing in his direction. Someone must have seen him slip under the cordon. What else did they know?

The phone was in his pocket. If they found it, it would give him away and they’d kill him.

He made it to the main doorway. The cold, crisp air hit him and his breath billowed. The sweat on his forehead suddenly felt clammy.

The grounds of the mansion were deep in snow. A flash of lightning cut across the night sky, and for a moment the eighteenth-century façade of the house was lit up like daylight. His classic racing-green MG Midget was parked between a glistening Bentley and a Lamborghini, and he headed towards it. A voice behind him called out ‘Halt!’

Oliver ignored the security guard and climbed into his car. The engine fired up, he put his foot down, and the MG’s wheels spun on the icy cobbles. He headed up the long driveway towards the main gates. By the gatehouse, another security guard was standing talking on a radio.

The tall gilded wrought-iron gates were gliding shut.

Oliver aimed the MG at the closing gap and rammed them. He was thrown forward in his seat and the car’s front wings buckled, but he made it through and kept going. The guard yelled at him to stop. He accelerated hard down the icy road.

Within less than a minute he saw the lights of a car behind him, dazzling in his rear-view mirror as it gained in speed. Snow-laden conifers flashed by in the yellow glow of his headlights.

He saw the sheet ice up ahead but it was too late to do anything. He felt the car go into a skid as he hit it and grappled with the wheel, just managing to regain control. The car travelling behind him hit the glassy surface in his wake and spun into the trees at the side of the road.

Twenty minutes later he was back at the guesthouse. He parked the dented MG out of sight around the back and ran up to his room. The storm was gathering and wispy snow was giving way to torrential rain that drummed on the roof. The lamp on his desk flickered as he turned on the laptop.

It seemed to take forever to load up. He didn’t know how much time he had. ‘Come on. Come on,’ he implored.

Logging on to his email account, he scrolled urgently through the inbox to a message entitled The Mozart Letter. It was from the professor. He hit REPLY, his fingers jittery on the keys as he typed.

Professor—Must talk to you again about the letter. Urgent. Will call you. Have discovered something. Danger.

He hit SEND and fumbled for his phone, attaching it to the laptop with a USB cable. Calm. Stay calm. Working fast, he downloaded the video-clip file from the Sony Ericsson onto the hard drive.

He didn’t want to look at the video but knew he mustn’t be caught with it. There was only one place he could send it safely. He would email it to her. Then she’d definitely receive it, wherever she was.

The lights went out halfway through typing the email. In the darkened room, the screen was telling him his Internet connection was broken. He swore, picked up the phone. Dead. The storm had taken out the phone lines too.

Oliver bit his lip, thinking hard. The laptop was still running on its own power. He dug in his briefcase and found the CD-ROM he’d been using to store his research photographs. He slammed it into the laptop’s disk drive and hurriedly copied the video file onto it.

Fumbling in the dark he found the box-set of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. He’d been meaning to post it back to her anyway and had already stamped and addressed the padded envelope. He nodded to himself. It was the only way. He pulled out one of the Mozart discs and put the CD he’d just copied in its place. Grabbing a marker pen, he scribbled a few quick words on the disc’s shiny surface before he placed the music CD on top of it and shut the box. He prayed that if she saw it before he got there, she’d take his warning seriously.

He knew there was a post box not far from the guesthouse, off the square at the end of Fischer Strasse, and he ran downstairs and out into the street. The power was still down, the houses in darkness. The lashing rain had turned to sleet and his tuxedo was quickly soaked as he jogged down the slushy pavements. Dirty snow lay piled against the sleeping buildings. The streets were deserted.

Oliver shoved his package into the post box, his fingers shaking with cold and fear, and turned back to the guesthouse. Now to pack his things and get the hell out of here-fast.

He was fifty yards from the darkened guesthouse when the powerful headlamps came around the street corner and washed over him. The big car bore down on him. He turned to run back the other way but slipped and grazed a knee on the pavement. The Mercedes pulled up next to him. There were four men inside. The back doors opened and two of them stepped out and seized his arms. Their faces were grim. They bundled him into the back seat and the car powered away up through the quiet village.

Nobody spoke. Oliver sat staring at his feet in the darkness. The Mercedes came to a halt, and the men pulled him roughly out of the car.

They were at the side of a lake. The sleet had stopped, and pale moonlight shone down across the water’s frozen surface. The village lights had come back on and glimmered in the distance.

All four men stepped out of the car. They hauled Oliver out too and slammed him against the side. One of his arms was twisted up painfully behind his back and someone kicked his feet apart. He felt expert hands frisking him.

He remembered the phone just a second before they found it in his jacket pocket. Fear rose within him as he realized that in his haste he hadn’t deleted the video-clip.

The men hauled Oliver off the cold metal of the car and he saw the pistol glint in the moonlight. The man holding it was tall, about six-four, and heavily built. His eyes were impassive, and below the line of his sandy crew-cut one of his earlobes was twisted and mangled.

Oliver stared at him. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘Walk.’ The man with the gun motioned towards the lake.

Oliver stepped through the rushes and placed one foot on the ice. He walked out across the lake. Ten yards, fifteen. The ice was thick and solid underneath him. Every nerve in his body was screaming, his heart thudding in the base of his throat. There had to be a way out of this.

But there wasn’t, and he knew it. He walked on, slipping on the hard, smooth ice. His tuxedo was soaked with sweat.

He’d walked about thirty yards from the lakeside when he heard the gunshot. He flinched-but there was no impact, no pain. He felt the strike of the bullet resonate through the ice under his feet.

That was when he realized they weren’t going to shoot him.

He watched helplessly as the blue fissure spread from the bullet-hole in the ice and ran past his feet with a slow, ripping crackle. He glanced back at the lakeside. Saw another man reach inside the car, come out with a stubby submachine gun and hand it to the tall man.

Oliver closed his eyes.

The tall man had a wide grin on his face as he held the weapon tightly at the hip and squeezed off a short fully-automatic blast at Oliver’s feet.

The ice was churned into flying splinters. A spider’s web of cracks appeared all around him. There was nowhere to run. The frozen surface beneath his feet groaned, and then gave way.

The stunning shock of the icy water drove the breath out of him. He clawed at the ragged edge of the hole, but lost his grip. The water closed over his head, filled his nose and mouth, pressure roaring in his ears as he kicked and struggled. In the blackness, he knew he’d slipped under the ice sheet. His fingers slithered helplessly against its underside as he drifted away from the hole. Bubbles streamed from his lips. There was no way up, no way back.

He held his breath, and fought and kicked against the ice until he couldn’t hold it any longer. His body convulsed as the freezing water poured into his lungs.

And as he died, he thought he could hear the killers laughing.

Chapter Two

Southern Turkey

Eleven months later

The two men playing cards at the kitchen table heard the sudden roar of an engine and looked up just in time to see the pickup truck looming in the patio windows.

Then it hit. Glass shards, splinters of timber and shattered brickwork exploded into the room. The truck lurched to a halt with its front wheels and its rust-pitted, plaster-covered bonnet protruding through the ragged hole in the wall.

The men dived for cover, scattering beer bottles, but they were too slow. The truck door flew open. The man who stepped out from behind the dusty windscreen was dressed all in black. Black combat jacket, black ski-mask, black gloves. He watched for a moment as the card players backed away across the room. Then he drew the silenced 9mm Browning from its holster and shot them both twice in the chest, rapid-fire. The bodies slumped to the floor. A spent case tinkled across the tiles. He walked over to the nearest body and put a bullet in its head. Then the other.

The man in black had been observing the secluded house for three days, taking his time, well concealed in the trees beyond the fence. He knew the routine. He knew that round the back of the house was a garage block that housed a rusted Ford pickup with the keys left in it, and that he could slip over the wall and reach it without being seen from the rear windows where the guys usually sat, playing cards and drinking beer.

He also knew where the girl was.

The dust was beginning to settle in the wrecked kitchen. When he’d made sure the two men were permanently down, the intruder replaced the warm Browning in its holster and made his way through the house. He looked at his watch. Less than two minutes since he’d come over the wall. Things were going according to plan.

The girl’s door was flimsy and buckled off its hinges at the third kick. By then, he could hear her screaming inside the room. He burst in. She was curled up at the far end of the bed, sheets drawn over her, terror in her eyes. He knew that she had just turned thirteen.

The man walked over to her and paused at the edge of the bed. She screamed harder. He wondered whether he would have to give her one of the tranquillizers he always carried with him. He took off the ski-mask, revealing his lean, tanned face and thick blond hair. He put out his hand to her. ‘Come with me,’ he said softly.

She stopped screaming and looked up at him hesitantly. The other men had hard eyes. This man was different.

He reached into his jacket and showed her the photo of him together with her parents. She hadn’t seen them for a long time. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘My name’s Ben, and I’m here to help you. Your family sent me, Catherine. They’re waiting. I’ll take you to them.’

Her cheeks were moist with tears. ‘Are you a policeman?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a friend.’

He reached his hand out further, gently, and she let him take her arm to guide her to her feet. Her arm felt wasted under the grubby blouse she was wearing. She didn’t protest as he led her out of the room, and she didn’t react at the sight of the two dead men lying on the kitchen floor.

Back outside, she blinked at the sunlight. It had been a while since she’d last left the confines of the house. She was unsteady on her feet, and Ben carried her to the Land Rover he’d left parked fifty yards from the house, hidden in a clump of bushes. He opened the passenger door and put the girl into the seat. She was shivering. There was a blanket in the back and he covered her with it.

He checked his watch again. Five minutes before the other three men would be back, if they kept to their routine. ‘Let’s go,’ he muttered, and walked round to the driver’s side.

The girl said something in reply, but her voice was weak.

‘What?’ he said.

‘What about Maria?’ she repeated, looking up at him.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Maria?’

Catherine pointed back at the house. ‘She’s still in there.’

‘Is Maria a girl like you? They’re holding her?’

Catherine nodded solemnly.

He made a decision. ‘OK, I need you to stay put for a minute. Can I trust you?’

She nodded again.

‘Where is she?’

In three minutes he’d found where they were keeping Maria. To get there he had to walk through a dingy room where some cameras were set up on tripods around a rumpled single bed, with cheap lighting equipment dumped in a corner and a TV and video sitting on a squat table. The VCR had been left running, the sound off. He paused and looked at the images, then realized what he was seeing. He recognized one of the men he’d shot earlier. The naked, writhing girl in the crudely shot film was no more than eleven or twelve.

Rage flashed through him and he kicked the TV off the table. It hit the floor and imploded in a shower of sparks.

Maria’s door wasn’t locked, and when he went into the squalid room his first thought was that she was dead.

She was the girl in the video. She was still breathing, but heavily doped. A grimy vest and knickers were all that covered her thin body. He lifted her carefully from the bed and carried her back through the house and out to the Land Rover. He gently laid her on the back seat, took off his jacket and placed it over her. Catherine reached out for her hand and looked up at Ben with questioning eyes.

‘She’ll be all right,’ he said softly.

The sound of an approaching vehicle made him tense. They were back. The Land Rover was well hidden from their view. So was the pickup truck, which was still sitting half-buried in the hole in the kitchen wall at the back of the house, but they’d find that soon enough.

Ben climbed into the driver’s seat and listened. He heard voices as one of the three men got out. The creak of the iron gates. The roll and crunch of the Suzuki’s tyres on the gravel. The engine burbling through a shot muffler as it pulled up in front of the house. Car doors opening and slamming. Footsteps and laughter.

He pulled his door quietly shut and went to twist the key. They’d be out of here before anyone could react. Then Catherine would be back with her family and he’d hand Maria over to the authorities he could still trust.

His hand stopped halfway to the ignition. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He saw them again. The images on the TV. Big hands pawing at young flesh. Bad teeth flashing in wide grins. The imploring eyes of the girl on the bed.

He looked over his shoulder at Maria’s slight body lying slumped in the back. Catherine was frowning at him from the passenger seat.

Fuck it. He reached down under his seat and drew out his back-up weapon. The shotgun was an Ithaca 12-gauge, black and brutal, less than two feet long from its pistol grip to its sawn-off muzzle. Its tube magazine was loaded up with 00-Buck rounds, the type that would let you into a barricaded room without needing to open the door.

He swung his legs out of the Land Rover. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told Catherine.

The three men were just at the front porch by the time he walked up behind them. Two of them, the fat one and the long-haired one, were joking about something in Turkish. The third guy looked serious, tattoos, slicked-back hair, jangling a bunch of keys. He had a Chinese Colt 1911-A1 copy tucked in his belt, behind the hip, hammer down in amateur fashion.

When the metallic clack-clunk of the Ithaca slide-action cut the air, all three of them wheeled around with wide eyes. Nobody had time to reach for a gun. A cigarette dropped from an open mouth.

He stared at them coldly for half a second before he emptied the Ithaca’s magazine into their bodies at point-blank range.

Chapter Three

Somewhere over France

Two days later

Benedict Hope gazed out of the window of the 747 and took another long sip of whisky as he watched the white ocean of cloud drift by below. Ice clinked in his glass. The whisky traced a burning path across his tongue. Airline Scotch, some nameless blended thing, but better than nothing. It was his fourth. Or maybe his fifth. He couldn’t remember any more.

The seat next to him was empty, as was much of the business-class section of the plane. He turned away from the window, stretched out and closed his eyes.

Three jobs this year. He’d been busy, and he was tired. It had taken two months in Turkey to track down the men who were holding Catherine Petersen. Two long months of dirt and sweat, following false trails, chasing up dud information, overturning every stone. The girl’s parents had despaired many times of ever seeing her alive again. He never made promises to people. He knew there was always a chance of sending the subject home in a body-bag.

That had only happened to him once. Mexico City, one of the big kidnap-and-ransom hotspots of the world. It hadn’t been his fault. The kidnappers had slaughtered the child even before the ransom demands. Ben had been the one who found the body. A young boy, just short of his eleventh birthday, stuffed in a barrel. He had no ears and no fingers. Sometimes the kidnappers weren’t even doing it for the money. He still didn’t like to think of it, but the half-repressed memory drove him on.

He’d persisted in Turkey, just as he always persisted. He’d never given up on anyone, even though there were plenty of times when it seemed hopeless. Like with a lot of these jobs, there had been nothing, no leads, just a lot of people too frightened to talk. Then a chance piece of information unlocked the whole thing and led him right to the house. People had died for it. But now Catherine Petersen was back with her parents and little Maria was being looked after until her family could be traced.

Now all Ben wanted to do was go home, back to the sanctuary of the old house on the remote west coast of Ireland. He thought about his private, lonely stretch of beach, the rocky cove where he liked to spend time alone with the waves, the gulls and his thoughts. His plan after the Turkish job had been to rest there quietly for as long as he could. Until the next call. That was one thing he could be sure of. There’d always be another call.

And it had come sooner than he’d expected. Around midnight the night before, and he’d been sitting in the hotel bar with nothing more to occupy him than a row of drinks, counting the hours before he could get out of Istanbul. He’d checked his phone for the first time in a week. There had been a message waiting for him, and the voice was one he knew well.

It was Leigh Llewellyn. She was about the last person he’d expected to hear from. He’d listened to the message several times. She sounded tense, nervous, a little breathless.

‘Ben, I don’t know where you are or when you might get this message. But I need to see you. I don’t know who else to call. I’m staying in London, at the Dorchester. Come and find me. I’ll wait here as long as I can for you.’ A pause. Then, in a tight voice: ‘Ben, I’m scared. Please, come quick if you can.’

The message was five days old, dated the fourth of December. On hearing it he’d cancelled the Dublin flight. He’d be at Heathrow in less than an hour.

What could she want from him? They hadn’t spoken for fifteen years.

The last time he’d seen Leigh Llewellyn was at Oliver’s funeral back in January, back on that terrible day, watching his old friend’s coffin go into the ground as the icy Welsh rain lashed over the desolate cemetery. With her long black hair streaming in the wind she’d stood at the edge of the grave. She’d already lost her parents, a long time ago. Now her brother was gone too, tragically drowned in an accident. Someone held an umbrella over her. She didn’t seem to notice. Her beautiful features were pale and drawn. Those jade-green eyes, whose glitter Ben remembered so well from years before, gazed dully into the void. She was oblivious of the photographers, hovering like vultures to get a snap of the opera star who had cut short her European tour to bring her brother’s coffin back from Vienna by private jet to her native Wales.

He’d wanted to talk to her that day, but there was too much pain between them. She hadn’t seen him, and he’d kept away from her. On his way out of the cemetery he’d pressed a business card into her PA’s hand. It was all he could do. Then he’d slipped away unseen.

After the funeral, Leigh had disappeared from public view and retreated to her home in Monte Carlo. He thought about her often, but he couldn’t call her.

Not after what he’d done to her fifteen years ago.

Chapter Four

Ballykelly, Northern Ireland

Fifteen years earlier

On a washed-out Tuesday night, Lance-Corporal Benedict Hope turned in off the street and walked down the puddled alley past the bins and the fresh graffiti that said FUCK THE POPE. The sign for the little wine bar creaked in the wind.

He went in through the stone entrance and shook the rain from his clothes, glad to be out of uniform. A rusty iron stairway led up to the double doors of the bar. As he got nearer he could hear the sound of the piano drifting down. He pushed through the doors and walked across the peeling linoleum floor. The place was almost empty.

Ben pulled up a stool at the bar. The barman was polishing a pint glass with a cloth.

‘How’re you doing, Joe?’

Joe smiled through his heavy beard. ‘Doin’ rightly, thanks. Same as usual?’

‘Why not?’ Ben said.

Joe grabbed a spirit glass and filled it from the bottle of Black Bush that hung behind the bar.‘You’ll be through that one soon,’ he said, gazing at the level in the bottle.

The pianist started up again. The battered old upright was missing most of its finish and badly in need of a tuning, but it sounded good under his fingers. He was doing a pretty good rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis boogie-woogie, keeping up a thumping stride rhythm with his left hand as his right churned out lightning blues scales.

‘Not bad, is he?’ said Joe. ‘One of your lot, from the look of him.’

Ben turned round on the bar stool. ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact he is.’

‘Pity. I was thinking of hiring him. Might bring in a bit o’ trade.’

Ben knew his name, too. Private Oliver Llewellyn. He was tall and slender, and his black hair was cropped short in a severe buzz-cut. He was too busy at the keyboard to notice Ben sitting watching him.

A pretty young blonde of about twenty was leaning against the side of the piano, gazing admiringly as Oliver’s fingers shot up and down the keys. He suddenly played a fast downward run that terminated in a series of shimmering jazzy chords as Jerry Lee Lewis gave way to Oscar Peterson.

‘You’re fantastic, so you are,’ the girl breathed. ‘You’re not really a soldier, are you?’

‘Sure I am.’ Oliver smiled up at her, still playing. ‘SAS.’

‘You’re kidding,’ she said.

‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘I never kid. SAS. Sexy-Attractive-Sophisticated. That’s me.’

She giggled and thumped him playfully on the shoulder, and he kept playing with his right hand while he slipped his left arm around her waist and tugged her towards him. ‘There’s plenty of room on this piano stool for two of us,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll teach you a duet.’

She sat up close next to him, her thigh pressing against his. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Bernie.’

Ben grinned and turned back to his drink, exchanging a knowing look with Joe. Private Llewellyn didn’t waste time.

The doors swung open and four guys walked in and took a table in the middle of the room. They were in their mid-twenties, surly, overconfident. One of them went to the bar for pints of lager, ignoring Ben’s friendly nod. One of his friends, the big overweight one with the pasty face, twisted heavily in his seat and called over to the girl as Oliver was showing her a simple duet. ‘Bernie! Get over here!’ His narrowed eyes shot a long glance at Oliver’s back.

Bernie broke away from the piano and got nervously to her feet. ‘Got to go,’ she whispered to Oliver. Oliver shrugged sadly and launched into a Chopin Nocturne.

Bernie sat down with the four lads. ‘Fuck were you doing with him?’ the fat one demanded, staring at her hard. ‘Can’t you see what he is?’

‘Just having a giggle,’ she said quietly. ‘Leave him alone, Gary.’

Oliver stopped playing. He grabbed the half-finished pint from the top of the piano and drained it, glanced at his watch and walked out of the bar. Bernie craned her head and gave him a wistful smile as he went by.

The four guys exchanged looks. Gary raised his eyebrows and jerked his chin at the door. ‘You wait here,’ he growled at Bernie. He pushed his chair back from the table. The four of them slurped down the last of their beer and stood up. They headed for the door. Bernie looked worried. ‘Gary…’ she started.

‘You-shut-your-hole.’ Gary pointed a stubby warning finger in her face. ‘This is your fault, you slag. I told you not to hang around with them fuckin’ soldiers.’

The four of them filed out purposefully.

Ben had been watching. He sighed. He set his glass on the bar and slid down from his stool.

Outside in the alleyway, the four guys had already caught up with Oliver. They had him shoved up against the wall. Two of them had lock-knives. Gary aimed a punch at Oliver’s stomach that doubled him up. Oliver straightened suddenly and head-butted him between the eyes. The fat guy let out a scream and reeled backwards, blood pouring from a broken nose. The other three started on Oliver, two holding him with knives to his throat as the third kicked him in the belly. They had his wallet, ripping notes out of it.

Ben had come up silently behind them. Gary was too busy with his broken nose, so he focused on the others. A fistful of hair and a sharp kick to the back of the knee, and one of the knifemen was writhing on his back. Ben could easily have killed him then. Instead he stamped hard on his genitals. The guy let out an animal scream. The other two let go of Oliver and ran.

Gary raised his fists. His face was slicked with blood. Ben knew exactly what to expect from him. He was the typical sloppy brawler, no brains and no discipline. Rage and strength and luck would be the only things going for him. He’d come roaring in like a big dumb bull. His punches would be slow and fly in a curved arc that a trained fighter could take his time blocking. Once you blocked it and got inside the arc you could hit him hard.

Gary came on just the way Ben had thought. The only problem was thinking of the best way to stop him without causing major injury. He caught the fist that swung at him, locked it and broke the wrist. He followed that up with a jab that pulverized Gary’s lips and sent him crashing headlong into a row of bins. Gary flopped down on the wet concrete and lay still next to his friend, who was still squirming on his back, screaming in agony and clutching his crushed balls.

Ben helped Oliver to his feet. He was fighting for air after the heavy kick in the stomach. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Ben said, supporting him. Something hard and brittle crunched underfoot. He looked down at the splintered pieces of Gary’s teeth on the ground.

‘Good thing you turned up when you did,’ Oliver wheezed. ‘I might have killed them.’ He frowned at Ben, recognition showing on his face. ‘Sir,’ he added.

‘Oh, I noticed that. SAS, huh?’ Oliver’s wallet was lying on the wet ground. Ben knelt down and picked up the papers that had fallen out of it. Driving licence, money, a photo. Ben folded it into the wallet and was about to hand it back to Oliver.

Then he stopped. He opened the wallet again. Took out the photo. Unfolded it and looked at it again. He took a good long look at it.

It was a shot of Oliver with a girl, taken at a party. He had his arm round her, fooling about, pulling a stupid face.

But Ben wasn’t looking at Oliver.

She was wearing a green evening dress that brought out the colour of her eyes, and her lustrous black hair cascaded over her bare shoulders.

For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. It took an effort to tear his gaze away. He waved it at Oliver before he finally folded it up again and replaced it in the wallet. ‘If I had a girlfriend like that,’ he said sternly, ‘I wouldn’t be getting myself into trouble chasing after the likes of Bernie up there.’

Oliver took the wallet and dropped it in his pocket. He wiped blood from his upper lip. ‘Sound advice, sir,’ he said. ‘But that’s not my girlfriend. She’s my little sister.’

Chapter Five

London

The present day

Ben walked through the opulent foyer of the Dorchester Hotel and approached the reception desk. ‘Is Miss Llewellyn still in room 1221?’ he asked.

Three minutes later he was walking fast over the soft carpet of the corridor approaching her door. He was thinking of what she wanted and what he could say to her after all this time.

He rounded a corner. There was a guy standing just up ahead. He didn’t look like he was waiting for anyone, and he didn’t look like a guest. He was just standing there with his back to one of the doors. Ben checked the number on it. 1221.

He looked the guy up and down. He was a very big man. He was five inches taller than Ben, about six-four. And he was broad. Probably about twice his weight, maybe 350 pounds. He was wearing a dark polyester suit that stretched too tight over his chest and shoulders. His arms looked as though they were ready to pop the jacket sleeves apart at the seams. A decade or more of heavy steroid use had left his face cratered with acne scars. His tiny head was shaven to a polish and sat on his massive shoulders like a pea on a ruler.

Ben walked up to him without breaking stride. ‘I’m here to see Leigh Llewellyn.’

The big man folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. A flicker of amusement passed over his face. ‘Nobody sees her,’ he said in a bass rumble. ‘She’s not to be disturbed.’

‘I’m a friend. She’s expecting me.’

The wide-set eyes bored hard into his. ‘Not that I’ve been told.’

‘Can you tell her I’m here?’ Ben said. ‘The name’s Hope.’

A short shake of the head. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

‘You’d better let me through.’

‘Piss off, dwarf.’

Ben reached across to knock on the door. The man’s square hand shot out and the stubby fingers closed around his wrist.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Ben said.

The big man was about to answer when Ben twisted his hand into a lock that was a fraction away from breaking the wrist joint. He bent the arm up behind the guy’s back and forced him down on his knees. Pain was like that. It didn’t matter how big they were.

‘Maybe we should start again,’ Ben said softly. ‘I came here to see Leigh Llewellyn. I don’t want to hurt you unless you make me. All I want is to be let inside. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘OK, OK. Let go.’ The big man’s voice was high-pitched and panicky and he was beginning to shake.

The door opened. Two more men appeared in the doorway. They were both wearing the same cheap suits, but neither was as big as the first guy.

Ben threw them a warning look. ‘You men had better let me in,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll break his arm off.’

A familiar face appeared behind them. They moved aside for her. ‘It’s all right,’ she said to them. ‘I know him.’

‘Hello, Leigh,’ he said.

She stared at him. ‘What are you doing with my bodyguard?’

He couldn’t help but smile at the sound of her voice. There was still that melodic Welsh lilt in her accent, only slightly tempered by the years of travelling around the world and living abroad.

Ben let the guy go and he slumped heavily to the floor. ‘Is that what you call this sack of shit?’ he said.

The other two bodyguards were hovering around the doorway, exchanging nervous looks. The big one picked himself slowly up off the floor, sheepish, rubbing his hand and groaning.

‘You’d better come inside,’ she said to Ben.

He shouldered past the two men and stepped into the room.

Room 1221 was a vast suite filled with the scent of flowers. Pale sunlight filtered in through three tall windows, flanked with heavy drapes. Leigh led him inside and closed the door quietly, shutting the bodyguards out in the corridor.

They faced one another uncertainly.

‘Fifteen years,’ he said. She was still the same Leigh he remembered, still beautiful. The same willowy figure, the same perfect skin. Those green eyes. She was wearing faded jeans and a navy sweater. No makeup. She didn’t need it. The only piece of jewellery she had on was a gold locket on a thin chain around her neck. Her hair hung down loose over her shoulders, black and glossy, just as he’d remembered it.

‘Ben Hope,’ she said frostily, looking up at him. ‘I promised myself that the next time I saw you I was going to slap your face.’

‘Is that what you called me for?’ he said. ‘Now I’m here, feel free.’

‘It didn’t look like you were going to turn up.’

‘I just got your message last night. I came straight here.’

‘I left it days ago.’

‘I was busy,’ he said.

‘Right,’ she snorted.

‘I got the impression you needed my help,’ he said. ‘Now it seems as though I’m not exactly welcome.’

She looked at him defiantly. ‘I don’t need you any more. I panicked, that’s all. I shouldn’t have called you. I’ve got things under control now.’

‘Your reception committee? I noticed.’

‘If you’ve gone out of your way to get here, I’ll make it worth your while.’ Her handbag was lying on an armchair. She walked over to it, took out her purse and started counting banknotes.

‘I don’t want your money, Leigh. I want to know what’s going on.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘You’re putting on a circus?’

She put the purse down. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why else would you hire a bunch of clowns?’

‘They’re for protection.’

‘They couldn’t protect you from a gang of Quakers.’

‘I had to hire someone. You weren’t there. Just like the other time.’

‘I’m here now,’ he said. ‘I’ve come all this way-at least tell me what’s going on.’

She sighed, relenting. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I’m tired and I’m scared. I need a drink. Want one?’

Ben laid his brown leather jacket on the back of a settee. ‘That sounds like a good start,’ he said. ‘I could do with a decent Scotch, after that crap they gave me on the flight.’

‘You still like your whisky.’ Leigh opened an oriental drinks cabinet and took out a green bottle. He thought he could see a slight tremor in her hand. ‘Single malt?’ she asked. She filled her own glass as full as his. He couldn’t recall that she drank. But then, she’d been a girl of nineteen in those days. So much time had passed. He realized he hardly knew her any more.

She took an agitated sip of the whisky, pulled a disgusted face and gave a little splutter. ‘I’m in trouble. Something happened to me.’

‘Sit down and tell me everything,’ he said.

They sat facing one another in comfortable armchairs either side of a coffee table with an ornate etched glass top. His glass was already empty. He reached for the bottle and poured another double measure.

Leigh brushed a strand of hair away from her face. She swivelled her whisky glass on the tabletop as she spoke. ‘I’ve been in London for six weeks for work,’ she said. ‘Doing Tosca at the Royal Opera. I rent a little flat not far from the Opera House. It was the morning after the last show. I was planning to hang around for a while. I’d been doing some shopping in Covent Garden. I was walking back towards the flat. It’s in a quiet street where there’s often nobody about. I could sense that someone was watching me. You know, that feeling that you’re not alone?’

‘Go on.’

‘They were in a car, a big dark-coloured car. I don’t remember what type. Just following me along at walking pace. At first I thought it was photographers, or some kind of kerb crawler. I was trying to ignore them, walking faster. Then the car swerved up onto the pavement in front of me, cut me off. I tried to go round the other way, but they got out and blocked me.’

‘Can you describe them?’

She nodded. ‘There were three, the driver plus two more. Well-dressed, dark suits. They looked like businessmen. One of them told me to get into the car. When I tried to run, he grabbed me.’

‘How did you manage to get away?’

She smiled darkly. ‘One thing about living in Monte Carlo-some people say it’s a bit of a police state, but at least it’s safe for women to walk the streets. Anywhere else I go, Europe or the USA, I always carry a can of Mace.’

He blinked. ‘You had Mace?’

She shook her head. ‘In free Britain? You must be kidding. I carry a little can of hairspray. While he was hanging on to my arm, I sprayed him in the eyes with it.’

‘Crude, but effective.’

She sighed, leaning her head on her hands, the thick black hair hiding her face. ‘I never thought I’d have to use it,’ she said quietly. ‘It was terrible. I keep seeing it, over and over in my mind. He let go, screaming and rubbing his eyes. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun. I ran like crazy. They came after me. I’m a fast runner but they would have caught me if it hadn’t been for the cab that just happened to come by. I told the cabbie drive, just drive. I haven’t been back to the flat since.’ She looked at him with worry in her eyes. ‘So what do you think?’

‘I think that your friends outside aren’t going to help you with this.’

‘It was a kidnap attempt, wasn’t it?’

‘Sounds like it,’ he agreed. ‘People in your position are a target. You’re high profile, you’re wealthy. Unless, of course, someone is out to do you some harm. Do you have any particular enemies?’

Leigh pursed her lips. ‘Not that I can think of. Why would I? I’m just a singer.’

‘A pretty well-known singer, though. Have you ever thought anyone was stalking you, ever received any strange phone calls, emails, letters?’

She shrugged. ‘I get fans trying to contact me through Pam, my PA. People sometimes recognize me and want an autograph for a CD cover, things like that. But never anything you’d call strange or threatening.’

‘When you got away from your attackers and took the cab, did you come straight here?’

‘I’m not that stupid. I thought they might get the number of the cab and trace me.’

He nodded. ‘So nobody knows you’re here apart from the hotel staff?’

‘Just the police.’

‘They’re never much use in these cases.’

‘Well, they took a statement from me and said they’d look into it.’

‘I don’t suppose you got the number of the car?’

‘Ben, it happened so fast…’

‘That’s all right. It was probably either a false plate or a stolen car anyway.’ He paused, measuring his words for what he wanted to say next. ‘Leigh, I have to ask…it’s been a long time since…’

‘Since you ditched me and vanished?’

He ignored that. ‘I meant, we haven’t been in touch for a long time. Did you ever marry?’

‘Strange question, Ben. I’m not sure I—’

‘It might be important.’

She hesitated before replying. ‘It was a long time after you,’ she said.

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s a composer, writes film scores. His name’s Chris. Chris Anderson.’

‘You’re still together?’

‘It only lasted about two years,’ she said. ‘It just didn’t work out. We still meet occasionally, as friends.’ She frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Kidnapping is just a business like any other, Leigh. It’s not personal. It’s all about money, and if there’s no family or spouse to pay for your safe return, there’s no motive. It’s the ultimate emotional blackmail. It only works if there’s a third party who’s scared enough of losing someone they love.’ He took a swig of Scotch, draining the glass almost to the bottom. ‘There’s only one exception to that rule, and that’s if the victim has K&R insurance.’

‘K&R?’

‘Kidnap and ransom.’

‘I didn’t even know you could take out insurance against that.’

‘So I take it you haven’t got any?’

She shook her head.

‘That means we can largely rule out a financial motive,’ he said. ‘Unless it was an amateur job. Snatch the person first and worry about the details later. But these guys sound more professional than that. And I don’t think it was a case of mistaken identity either. They knew where you were living. Someone had done their homework.’ He paused to take another long drink of whisky. He laid the empty glass down with a clunk on the table. ‘What are you planning to do now?’ he asked.

‘I want to get out of London, for a start. I can’t stand it here any more, trapped like an animal in this hotel. I’ve got to be in Venice in mid-January for The Magic Flute. But first I’m heading for west Oxfordshire, in the country. Dave and his team are escorting me there.’

‘Why there?’

‘It’s a place I bought a while ago. I’ve been thinking of setting up an opera school.’

‘Who knows about it?’

‘Nobody yet, apart from myself, my PA and my business manager,’ she said. ‘At the moment it’s still just a big old empty house with nothing but a few boxes of stuff sent over from Monte Carlo. I haven’t got around to furnishing it. But it’s liveable in. I’ll stay there for a few days until I decide what to do next.’

‘I’ll tell you what you need to do,’ Ben said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door. ‘First thing, you need to ditch those idiots outside. They’re a liability. I could have been anybody walking in here. They didn’t even slow me down.’

She nodded. ‘You’ve put things into perspective a little. So, say I agree to ditch them right away. What next?’

‘You want me to step in?’

‘That’s what I was hoping,’ she said.

‘I’m not a bodyguard, Leigh. It isn’t what I do. But I know people. We’ll get you some proper protection.’

She looked unhappy. ‘Why should I exchange one bunch of heavies for another?’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘The people I have in mind are professionals. The real thing. You would barely even know they were there, but you’d be safe. I know, I trained them.’

‘I’d feel safer with you,’ she said.

‘Even after what I did to you?’

‘You won’t let me down again?’ she asked. ‘Not this time?’

He sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t let you down again.’

Chapter Six

Berne, Switzerland

Heini Müller huddled closer to the fire and warmed his hands. Snowflakes were spiralling down from the night sky, sizzling against the metal sides of the brazier.

It had been a long day, and some of the protesters were getting restless waiting for something to happen. He ran his eye over the crowd. They weren’t as vociferous as they’d been that afternoon. People were standing around smoking herbal cigarettes, sipping blackcurrant tea and decaf from their flasks, talking in groups, kicking their feet, looking tired and cold. Some people had given up and gone home, but there were still about four hundred of them.

They’d tried earlier to get inside the hotel grounds, but when these bastards had their conferences the security was tight. The place was locked up solid and they’d had to content themselves with waving banners outside the tall gates. The police were keeping their distance, vans and motorcycles parked some way up the road, and more inside the grounds. The cops were nervous. They knew they were seriously outnumbered.

The big hotel stood a few hundred yards away, across snowy lawns. There were thirteen limos parked outside the conference building, black, identical. A few minutes ago, Heini’s girlfriend Franka had spotted a bunch of drivers emerge from a side entrance to wipe snow off the cars. It looked like something was beginning to happen at last.

‘Here they come,’ someone yelled. The protesters picked up their banners like weapons. STOP CLIMATE CHAOS. ARAGON FOR EUROPE.

Heini watched through Franka’s binoculars as the conference building opened and the attendees filed out under the snow. The youngest of the men were middle-aged. They were all smartly dressed and some of the older ones wore hats. The hotel forecourt had been salted and swept for the Important Men, and the drivers and hotel staff were in attendance with umbrellas. Motorcycle police mounted their white Honda Pan Europeans, and plain-clothed security men stood around talking on radios.

Thirteen drivers simultaneously opened thirteen limo rear doors, and the passengers got in. The doors slammed and the hotel staff gathered respectfully under the snow as the cars pulled away. The procession purred softly down the private road towards the tall gates where the protesters were waiting. Flanking motorcycles led the way, and four security cars brought up the rear.

In the back of the lead limousine a slightly built, smartly dressed man in his late sixties reclined into the leather seat. His name was Werner Kroll and he was the committee president. He folded his hands delicately on his lap and waited patiently as the limo approached the thronging, raging crowd.

Kroll’s assistant sat opposite him. He was a younger man, in his early forties. He was muscular and still wore his hair the way he had in his military days. He turned to watch the waving banners with a scowl of derision. ‘Idiots,’ he said, pointing a gloved finger. ‘Look at them. What do they think they’re achieving?’

‘Democracy gives them the illusion of freedom,’ Kroll replied softly, gazing at them.

The gates swung open automatically to let the limousines through. The protesters immediately swarmed around the cars, yelling slogans and shaking their banners angrily. There were a lot more of them than usual, Kroll observed. Two years ago the demonstrators outside these meetings would be little more than a disordered band of hippies, sixty or seventy at the most and easily within the police’s power to subdue. Things were different now.

The crowd surrounded the car. The police were mingling with the demonstrators now, grabbing people and dragging them away to the waiting vans. The pitch was rising fast. Three officers grabbed hold of a young man carrying an ARAGON FOR EUROPE banner who was blocking the car’s path. The banner clattered against the windscreen, the rough painted words large against the glass.

Kroll knew the name Aragon very well. Aragon was the man who was giving these people their power. In a few short years the charismatic young Europolitician had risen from obscurity to being able to command massive popular support for his Green and anti-nuclear policies. It wasn’t just a group of hippies, radicals and committed lefties protesting any longer. Aragon was appealing to the middle classes. And that was dangerous.

Heini Müller reached into his bag and took out a box of eggs. He was a vegan and didn’t normally buy them, but for this he’d made an exception. The eggs were months old. Heini stood grinning as the lead limo approached, its headlights blazing. He grabbed an egg out of the box and raised his arm to hurl it against the window of the limo. Someone else was shaking up a spray-can of red paint.

As Heini was about to smash the egg against the first car, it stopped. The opaque window whirred down.

Heini froze. Suddenly the roar of the crowd was silent in his ears. The old man in the back of the limo was staring at him. His gaze was like ice. It seemed to drain the blood out of Heini, who stood transfixed with the egg in his hand. His arm fell limp, and something cracked. The window whirred up again and the gleaming black limo moved silently on.

Heini Müller looked down at his hand. The rotten yolk dripped from his fingers. The cars went by him and he just stood there. Then the yelling filled his ears again. A policeman grabbed his hair and he was on the ground, kicking and squirming.

* * *

Kroll eased back in his seat as the car swept away between the flanking police outriders. His phone rang, and he picked it up slowly.

‘Llewellyn left before we could get to her,’ said the voice on the line. He sounded apologetic and frightened. ‘We were half an hour late.’

Kroll listened impassively, looking at the snowy hills rolling past.

The voice went on, sounding more hopeful. ‘But we have found her again. I have an address for you.’

Kroll reached for a notepad and wrote as he listened. He ended the call without a word, then pressed a button on his console. A small flat-screen TV flashed into life and he pressed play on the DVD control. Kroll looked intently at the screen. He’d seen this before. He enjoyed watching her.

She was reclining in a large armchair in a television studio in London. Her face was animated as she spoke to her interviewer. She wore a creamy cashmere dress and a string of glittering pearls that contrasted strikingly with her jet-black hair.

‘She’s something, isn’t she?’ said Kroll’s assistant.

Kroll didn’t look away from the screen. ‘She certainly is,’ he replied softly. He stopped the video playback. The screen went dark. He fixed the other man with cold eyes for a second before glancing down to the notebook on the seat next to him. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to the younger man. ‘Make the necessary arrangements, Jack,’ he said.

Chapter Seven

The village of Aston

West Oxfordshire

It was dark by the time they reached the sleepy village. Ben had the taxi drop them in the square. They bought a few provisions from the village shop and called a local taxi service to take them the two miles to Langton Hall.

The country house lay secluded in its own land, among wintry oaks and willows at the end of a long, twisty driveway. Its gables and chimney-stacks stood silhouetted against the dark blue sky, and moonlit frost glittered on the roof. The windows were in darkness. An owl hooted from a nearby tree.

Leigh unlocked the heavy oak front door and quickly punched a number into a wall panel to disable the alarm system. She turned on the lights.

‘Nice place.’ Ben’s voice echoed in the empty entrance hall. He looked around him, admiring the ornate wood panelling and the sweep of the wide staircase.

‘It will be when it’s all done up,’ she said. She shivered. ‘Cold, though. The boiler’s almost as old as the rest of the place and the heating doesn’t work.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the fires going. We’ll soon warm the place up.’

‘Thanks, Ben. There’s a pile of logs in the woodshed.’

He followed her into a large stone-floored country kitchen and laid the plastic bags of shopping on a long pine table. He checked that the old-fashioned lock on the kitchen door worked, then quietly slid open a drawer and found what he was looking for. He discreetly slipped the carving knife inside his jacket.

‘Leigh, I’m going to fetch some logs and take a look around the place. Lock the door after me.’

‘What…’

‘Don’t worry, just being cautious.’

Leigh did what he said. The big iron key turned smoothly in the lock and she heard his footsteps moving away up the corridor.

She opened a bottle of village-shop wine. There were some beakers and basic cooking equipment stored in the walk-in pantry. She took a heavy cast-iron skillet down from a hook and laid it on the gas range.

She smiled to herself as she took a box of eggs out of one of the shopping bags. It was strange, having Ben Hope around her again after all these years. She’d loved him once, loved him madly enough to have thought about giving up her career for him even before it had begun.

‘You’ll like him,’ Oliver had said that day. And he’d been right. Her brother’s new army friend wasn’t like the others she’d met. She’d just turned nineteen, and Benedict-as he’d been introduced-was four years older. He had an easy smile and a quick mind. He’d talked to her like no other boy had ever done before. Until then she’d thought love at first sight was a fairy-tale, but it had happened to her with him. It hadn’t happened to her since, and she could still remember every day of those five months they’d been together.

Had he changed a lot since those days? Physically he didn’t seem that different. His face was a little leaner, perhaps. A little more careworn, with more frown-lines than laugh-lines. He was still toned and in perfect physical shape. But he had changed. The Ben she’d known back then had been softer and gentler. He could even seem vulnerable at times.

Not any more. Through Oliver she’d heard enough about Ben’s life during the intervening fifteen years to know that he’d seen, and perhaps done, some terrible things. Experiences like that had to leave a mark on a person. There were moments when she could see a cold kind of light in his blue eyes, a glacial hardness that hadn’t been there before.

They ate sitting on the hearth-rug in the unfurnished study. It was the smallest room in the cavernous house, and Ben’s crackling log blaze had quickly chased the chill from the air. Firelight danced on the oak panels. In the shadowy corners of the room, packing cases and tape-sealed cardboard boxes were still piled up unopened from the move.

‘Fried egg butties and cheap wine,’ he said. ‘You should have been a soldier.’

‘When you work the hours I do, you learn to appreciate the quick and simple things in life,’ she said with a smile. The bottle between them was half-empty now and she was feeling more relaxed than she had for days. They sat in silence for a while, and she let her gaze be drawn by the hypnotic rhythm of the flames.

Ben watched her face in the firelight. He had a clear image in his mind of the last time they’d sat alone together like this, a decade and a half earlier. He and Oliver had been on leave from the army and had travelled up to mid-Wales together to the Llewellyn family home in Builth Wells. The old merchant townhouse, once grand, had by then grown tatty and neglected with the decline of Richard Llewellyn’s antique piano restoration business. Ben had only briefly met Leigh and Oliver’s father, a kindly, heavy man in his mid-sixties, with a greying beard, a face reddened by a little too much port and the sad eyes of a man widowed for six years.

It had been evening, the rain lashing down outside, wind howling through the chimney. Oliver was taking advantage of his week’s freedom to go in search of pulchritude, as he had put it. Richard Llewellyn was up in his private study, as he always seemed to be, poring over old books and papers.

Alone downstairs, Ben had built a roaring log fire and Leigh had sat by him. They’d talked quietly for hours. That had been the night of their first kiss. There hadn’t been many.

He smiled to himself, returning to the present-watching her now, the flickering glow on her cheek. Neither time nor fame had changed her.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.

She turned away from the fire to look at him. ‘Thinking about you,’ she said.

‘What about me?’

‘Did you ever marry, find someone?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s hard for me, with the life I lead. I don’t think I’m the settling kind.’

‘You haven’t changed, then.’

He felt the sting of her words, but said nothing.

‘I hated you for a long time,’ she said quietly, looking into the flames. ‘After what you did to me.’

He said nothing.

‘Why didn’t you turn up that night?’ she asked, looking round at him.

He sighed and paused a long time before replying. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He’d thought about it so often.

‘I loved you,’ she said.

‘I loved you,’ he answered.

‘Did you, really?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘But you loved the regiment more.’

‘I was young, Leigh. I thought I knew what I wanted.’

She looked back into the fire. ‘I waited for you that night after the show. I was so excited. It was my debut. I thought you were in the audience. I sang my heart out for you. You said you’d meet me backstage and we’d go to the party together. But you never came. You just disappeared.’

He didn’t know what to say to her.

‘You really broke my heart,’ she said. ‘Maybe you don’t realize that.’

He reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘I’ve always felt bad about what I did. I’ve never forgotten it, and I’ve often thought about you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t drag out the past. It was a long time ago.’

They sat in silence for a while. He tossed another log on the fire, gazing at the orange sparks flying up the chimney. He didn’t know what more to say to her.

‘I miss Oliver,’ she said suddenly.

‘I miss him too,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d seen more of him in the last few years.’

‘He talked about you a lot.’

Ben shook his head. ‘What the hell was he doing on that lake?’

‘Nobody really knows,’ she said. ‘The only witness to the accident was his lady companion for the evening.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Madeleine Laurent. Wife of some diplomat. It caused a bit of a scandal. There were people behind the scenes trying to keep the investigation under wraps. Some of the details were pretty hazy.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ he said.

‘All I know is that apparently they’d been at a party, some black-tie affair with a bunch of important people. I don’t know where it was or who else was there. If there were witnesses, maybe they didn’t want to get involved.’

‘Black ties and VIPs,’ Ben said. ‘It doesn’t sound like Oliver’s kind of party.’

‘He went along with her. She said he’d been chasing her around. The husband was away somewhere. And there was champagne. He drank a lot of it.’

‘That does sound like him,’ Ben admitted.

‘They were dancing and drinking. She’d had quite a bit too, but not as much as him. One thing started leading to another. He wanted to get her away somewhere private. She said he kept insisting he wanted to drive her to a hotel, get a room together.’

‘They couldn’t have sneaked into a bedroom?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘That doesn’t sound like him. Drinking and driving wasn’t his style.’

‘I didn’t think so either,’ Leigh said. ‘But he pranged the car on the way to the hotel. That’s true. I saw the damage.’

‘That old MG of his?’

‘He smashed it up pretty badly. The front was all dented in. Looked like he’d hit a wall or something.’

‘If he turned up drunk at the hotel with a damaged car, there must have been other witnesses,’ Ben said.

She shook her head. ‘They never made it to the hotel. Apparently they couldn’t wait. They stopped off somewhere quiet on the way.’

‘At the lakeside?’

She nodded. Her face tightened. ‘That’s when it happened. According to the woman, he thought it’d be a laugh to have a skate on the ice.’

‘That really doesn’t sound like him.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it looks like that’s what happened. He got this crazy idea in his head and he went out on the ice. She thought it was funny at first. Then she got bored and went back to the car. She fell asleep on the seat.’

‘Drunk enough to pass out,’ he said. ‘But she remembered a lot of detail afterwards.’

‘I’m only telling you what she claimed happened. There’s no evidence that it didn’t happen the way she said it did.’

‘He went out on the ice before or after the sex?’

‘She said it never went that far.’

‘So he was too horny to wait to get to the hotel, but then he decides to go skating first?’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I thought about that too. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I guess if he’d been drinking—’

He sighed. ‘OK. Tell me the rest.’

‘She woke up shivering with the cold. She reckoned she’d been out of it for about half an hour.’ Leigh paused, sighed, closed her eyes, sipped a little more wine. ‘And that was it. She was alone. He hadn’t come back from the ice. There was no sign of him. Just a hole where he’d gone through.’

Ben flipped the burning log in the fire. He said nothing, turning it over in his mind. Dammit, Oliver, you were trained not to do things like that. Bloody fool, dying so stupidly. ‘What was he doing in Austria?’ he asked.

‘He was there researching his book.’

Ben laid down the poker and turned to look at her. ‘A book? What was it, a novel?’

‘No, it was about Mozart.’

‘A biography or something?’

‘It wasn’t the story of Mozart’s life,’ she said. ‘That’s been written about a million times. This was the story of Mozart’s death.’

‘Strange subject. Not that I’d know anything much about it.’

‘Olly was devoted to it. He was always sending me his notes, keeping me up-to-date on his research. I was funding him, so I think he felt obliged. I never had much time to read the stuff, and then when…when he had the accident, I couldn’t bring myself to look at it any more. He even posted me something on the day he died. I’ve never opened it.’ She hung her head, sipped her wine, and went on. ‘But in the last couple of months I’ve started getting the idea of carrying on where he left off.’

‘You mean finish his book for him?’

‘Yeah. I think I’d like to do that in his memory.’ She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. ‘I had all his notes sent over from Monte Carlo. They’re still packed up in one of those boxes over there.’ She smiled. ‘You think it’s a crazy idea?’

‘Finishing his book? No, I think it’s a great idea. You reckon you can do it?’

‘I’m a singer, not a writer,’ she replied. ‘But it’s an interesting subject, and yes, I reckon I can do it. Maybe it’ll be good for me, too. You know, help me come to terms with death, and loss.’

Ben nodded thoughtfully. He filled their glasses. The bottle was empty now, and he thought about fetching another. ‘Mozart’s death,’ he said. ‘I thought people already knew what happened to Mozart.’

‘That a jealous rival composer poisoned him?’ She chuckled. ‘That old theory. It’s just one of those myths that got blown up.’

Ben held up his beaker so that he could watch the dancing flames filtered redly through the wine. ‘What was Oliver’s angle?’ he asked.

‘He said his research uncovered a whole new take on the Mozart murder theory. That’s what made his book so important.’

‘So who did it?’

‘I think he believed it might have been the Freemasons,’ she said.

‘A bunch of guys in sashes with one trouser-leg rolled up.’

She looked at him hard. ‘Oliver took it seriously enough.’

‘Why would the Masons have gone and done something like that?’

‘Because of The Magic Flute.’

‘The opera you mentioned. Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess?’

‘The Magic Flute is full of Masonic symbolism,’ she explained patiently. ‘Secrets that Masons are sworn to protect.’

‘So how did Mozart know all these secrets?’

‘Because he was a Freemason himself.’

‘I didn’t know that. So, what? He blabbed, and they knocked him on the head?’

‘That’s the idea. I don’t know much, though.’

‘Should make for an interesting read.’ Ben smiled. ‘And where was Oliver getting all this stuff from?’

‘From Dad’s discovery,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

He did. ‘The letter.’

Leigh nodded. ‘It was the centre of his research. The book’s named after it. The Mozart Letter’

He was about to reply when Leigh’s phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket. ‘Leigh Llewellyn.’

Ben could hear a man’s voice on the other end. Leigh listened, frowning. ‘I’m not at the Dorchester any more,’ she said. A pause. ‘I’m at my country house, Langton Hall…What’s this about?’

Ben couldn’t make out what the caller was saying. He watched Leigh closely.

Her eyes opened wide. ‘Oh my God…The whole place?’ Pause. She looked agitated. ‘They weren’t touched? No…OK…’ Another pause. She put her head in her hand, ruffling her hair. ‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘I will…thanks for letting me know.’

She ended the call with a deep sigh. ‘Jesus,’ she muttered.

‘What is it?’

‘That was the police. My flat in London…it’s been torn apart.’

Chapter Eight

Vienna

Detective Sergeant Markus Kinski never forgot a face. And when he’d spotted the woman across the crowded square he’d instinctively followed her.

It was a cold afternoon in Vienna and snow threatened from a heavy sky. She filtered through the crowds of tourists and shoppers. She was wearing a navy-blue cape and matching beret, casual but expensive. Kinski was hanging back thirty yards, locked on to his target, his old greatcoat flapping in the December chill, when he saw her go inside the tearoom.

He paused at the entrance and watched her through the glass. It was one of those frilly kinds of joints, like an over-decorated wedding cake, which Vienna was full of and which Kinski, still an East Berliner in his heart, hated.

She took a table in the far corner. Laying her blue cape beside her, she took a paperback from her handbag and began to read. Kinski went inside and sat himself down where he could observe her over the top of his newspaper. He was too bulky for the little round marble-topped table and the slender chair felt creaky and rickety under him. Everything was so fucking dainty.

Kinski had been the officer in charge and was in the interview room when they’d brought Madeleine Laurent in for questioning, almost a year ago, after the Llewellyn drowning case. She’d been blonde, with long hair. The woman sitting opposite him now was a brunette, her hair cut in a bob that disguised the contours of her face. But the features were the same. The dark-brown eyes that were scanning the menu and then flashing up as the waiter came to her table-those were the same too. She ordered Sacchertorte and a hot cocoa with cream and a dash of green chartreuse.

Greedy bitch, he thought. And your German suddenly got a whole lot better. But it had to be her. It was her.

Kinski ordered an espresso. Straight, black, no sugar. He leaned back in his creaking chair and pretended to read the paper. He cast his mind back to the Llewellyn case.

Madeleine Laurent. Twenty-six years of age. Nationality French. Married to Pierre Laurent, a French diplomat posted in Vienna. The scandal had been neatly covered up. Laurent’s people had leaned hard on the cops to keep quiet about Madeleine’s indiscretion with the foreigner Oliver Llewellyn. Her tearful statement had been recorded and filed-and then suddenly nobody could find it any more. It seemed just to vanish from the records. By then the coroner’s report was already in, so nobody had made much of the clerical snafu.

Nobody except Kinski. But when he’d asked questions he’d been formally instructed to leave off. It was a sensitive matter. The case was closed. A few days later they’d heard that the diplomat was being pulled out of Austria and given a new three-year posting, somewhere conveniently far away. Venezuela, Kinski remembered. He’d smarted over it for weeks afterwards.

If it was the same woman, what was she doing back here? Visiting friends for Christmas? Maybe he should just give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was wasting his time.

But his gut told him differently, and twenty-six years as a cop-the first nine of those served in the hard streets of Communist East Berlin-had taught Markus Kinski not to ignore a hunch.

He went to the gents and shut himself in a cubicle, then dialled the number he’d memorized from the tearoom menu.

Kinski was back finishing his coffee when the manageress called out across the counter. ‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen-is there a Madeleine Laurent here? I have an urgent message for her. No?’ The manageress scanned around the room, shrugged, and went back to what she was doing.

The woman had frozen when the name was called. Her cup stopped an inch from her mouth, then she collected herself and set it down without drinking. She looked around her nervously. Kinski smiled behind his paper. Got you.

The woman gathered her cape and bag, abandoned the half-eaten Sacchertorte. She hurried to the counter, paid, and left the tearoom.

Kinski tossed money down on the table and followed her. She slipped between the bustling shoppers and hailed a taxi. Kinski’s path was blocked by bodies. He pushed through angrily. He was twenty feet from her when she hopped into the car. A slim leg disappeared inside, the door slammed and the taxi melted into the traffic.

‘Scheisse!’

Back at the tearoom, he asked for the manageress. When she appeared he flashed his badge. ‘Polizei. A woman left here two minutes ago. She paid by card. I want her name.’

The manager went coolly over to the stack of credit-card slips on the counter. She handed him the topmost one. Kinski glanced at it.

The name and signature on the credit-card slip wasn’t Madeleine Laurent. It was Erika Mann.

Chapter Nine

Langton Hall, Oxfordshire

Ben spent a restless night in the draughty passageway outside Leigh’s bedroom door. She’d tried to persuade him to sleep in one of Langton Hall’s eight empty bedrooms, but he’d wanted to stay close to her and this was the closest he could be without sleeping in her room.

As he sat there leaning uncomfortably against the wall, his mind was full of thoughts of Leigh. It was strange to think that she was just on the other side of the wall. They’d been so close once, and it saddened him to be near to her now, yet so far away.

He managed to stay awake until sometime before six, chain-smoking his way through most of a pack of Turkish cigarettes. As the dawn light began to creep across the hallway through the dusty window, he was thinking about the phone call from the police the night before. He went back over and over the details in his mind. Leigh’s flat in Covent Garden could have been ransacked any time in the last five days. The neighbours had returned from a holiday to find her door ajar, and had called the police when they saw the damage.

It had been no ordinary burglary. They’d lifted carpets and floorboards, ripped through every piece of furniture, even slashed pillows and cushions. But nothing had been stolen. The police had found her string of pearls, gold watch and diamond earrings on her bedside table, just where she’d left them. He couldn’t make sense of it.

He got up and stretched, folded away his sleeping-bag and went downstairs. He was making coffee when Leigh came in shivering, her hair tousled. They drank mugs of hot coffee and spoke little as they watched the sunrise from the kitchen window. Leigh was clutching her mug with both hands to warm her fingers. Ben could see from the pallor of her face that she felt almost as tired as he did.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Are you sticking around, or making that call?’

‘I’d feel better if you had the right kind of protection,’ he said. ‘I can’t be with you twenty-four-seven, going everywhere you go, watching your back every moment.’ He paused. ‘But I want to know what’s happening here.’

‘So you’re staying?’

He nodded. ‘For a while, at least.’

She laid down her cup. ‘OK. And if I’m going to be stuck here for a while, I might as well get started on unpacking some of the stuff in those boxes. I’ve got some jumpers in there and it’s freezing in this house.’

Ben fetched more logs and kindling from the woodshed and carried them into the study. Leigh watched as he quickly cleaned out the cold grate and piled up the sticks of kindling. He lit the fire and the orange flames began to roar up the chimney. He sensed a movement behind him. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked, looking up at her.

She stopped jumping up and down. ‘This reminds me of years ago in the old house in Builth Wells,’ she said, laughing. ‘We were so strapped for cash, Dad would have us jumping and running around so he could save on the heating. He’d take us on long walks, and when we’d come home all rosy-cheeked that freezing old place seemed nice and warm again.’

Ben piled on a couple of logs. ‘Sounds like the army,’ he said. ‘I think they call it character building’

Leigh gazed out of the window. The sun was rising over the treetops. ‘I wouldn’t mind a walk, you know. I’ve been cooped up for days. D’you feel like some air?’

‘Sure, you can show me around your estate.’

She shut the heavy back door and put the key in the pocket of her tan suede coat. She raised her face to the sun, closed her eyes and smiled sadly.

They walked in silence for a while. The grounds of the house sloped gently away over lawns and an ornamental lake into a rambling stretch of woodland. They followed a path that was strewn with fallen twigs and dead leaves softened by the winter rains, and passed through an evergreen tunnel of arching cherry laurels. Cold bright sunlight sparkled through the gaps in the canopy overhead.

‘This is my favourite part,’ she smiled, pointing ahead. As they turned a corner the lush green tunnel opened up to a clear view across the meadows and a glittering river beyond. Some horses were grazing by the riverbank in the distance.

‘Come the summer, I’m going to have some benches put here,’ Leigh said. ‘It’s such a lovely spot.’ Her smile faded as she gazed across the valley.

Ben could see her troubled thoughts clouding her eyes. ‘I know you don’t want to go over all this again,’ he said. ‘But we need to know what’s happening.’

She looked down at her feet. ‘I can’t understand it.’

‘Are you positive they couldn’t have been after something in your flat?’

Leigh sighed. ‘I told you, I only used the place as a base for the Opera House. I hardly had anything there, I didn’t spend much time there.’

‘And you’re absolutely sure that the place was empty when you moved in? There’s nothing that could have been left behind by the previous occupants?’

She shook her head. ‘Like I said, it was all cleaned out when I rented it. No, it’s me they’re after. Something to do with me, but what it is I…’

Ben didn’t reply. He reached out his arm and gently squeezed her shoulder, feeling the tension in her muscles. She took a step away from him, breaking the contact.

He looked up at the sky. It was threatening to rain. They’d been walking for almost an hour. ‘Let’s go back,’ he said.

Gunmetal clouds had passed over the sun’s face by the time they had walked the path back through the woods and up the gently sloping lawns to the manor. A thin, steady drizzle was drifting on the rising wind. Leigh opened the back door and Ben led the way up the passage to the kitchen, where he’d left his haversack. He was reaching for his phone when he froze. His eyes narrowed.

Leigh saw his expression. ‘What’s up?’

He looked at her hard and pressed a finger to his lips. She made a gesture to say ‘I don’t understand’.

He said nothing. He reached out, grasped her by the upper arm and jerked her roughly across the room. He tore open the door of the walk-in pantry and pushed her inside.

‘Ben…’ Leigh’s eyes were wide with fear and confusion.

‘Don’t move, don’t make a sound,’ he whispered, and shut her in.

He looked around him and quietly grabbed the heavy cast-iron skillet from the range. He slipped through the gap in the kitchen door and moved fast and silently up the panelled hallway.

He found them in the study. There were two of them, their backs to him. They were masked and armed. Identical combat jackets and semi-automatic pistols in cordura rigs.

They’d been busy. Packing cases were overturned, their contents spilled across the bare floorboards. Music manuscripts were scattered everywhere. Letters, business documents. The guy on the left was rifling through a trunk, tossing clothes in a rough pile on the floor. The guy on the right was kneeling down near the fire place and using a double-edged killing knife to slice open a large cardboard box that was wrapped up in brown packing tape.

Neither one heard Ben step into the room.

The cardboard box fell open and the contents tumbled out-papers, books, folders. The man reached inside and pulled out a slim box-file. He studied it for a moment and waved it at his companion.

The guy on the left was half turned round when Ben buried the edge of the iron skillet in his skull. It went in like an axe and he dropped to the floor with his legs kicking.

The other threw aside the box-file and went for his pistol. Ben was faster. He hit him a blow to the throat that was meant to disorientate rather than kill. He kept a pincer grip on the man’s windpipe as he went down. ‘Who are you working for?’ he asked quietly. As he spoke he took the gun from the man’s trembling fingers with his free hand. It was a big, heavy pistol. A Para-Ordnance .45, high-capacity magazine, stainless steel, cocked and locked. It was shiny and smelled of fresh gun oil.

Ben was a believer in simple, straightforward interrogation. He flicked off the safety, then pressed the muzzle of the .45 against the intruder’s temple. ‘Tell me quick or you’re dead,’ he said.

The man’s eyes rolled in the oval slits in his mask. Ben let some pressure off his windpipe. He looked down at the slim box-file. It was lying on the floor, face-up. Written across its front in neat marker pen were the words THE MOZART LETTER.

Ben pressed the gun harder into the man’s head. ‘What’s this about?’ he said.

The door crashed open. A third intruder burst inside the room shooting. The room was filled with gunfire. Ben had nowhere to take cover. He felt the shockwave of a heavy bullet passing close by his head.

He grasped his prisoner by the collar and swung his body up and round in front of him, using him as a shield. The man screamed and jerked as bullets thudded into him. His thrashing foot caught the box-file. It burst open and papers flew into the fireplace.

Ben aimed the Para-Ordnance over the man’s shoulder. The pistol kicked and boomed twice in his hand. The attacker twisted, slammed against the wall, slumped to the floor.

Ben let the dead body of his human shield fall. The contents of the file were strewn across the hearth. Paper curled and blackened as the flames spread hungrily. The corner of the rug was burning. He stamped out the flames and kicked the blackened fragments of paper away from the fireplace.

He strode across the study and squatted down to examine the third man. His mask, weapon and clothing were identical to the others’. The first bullet had caught him in the chest. The second, rising on recoil, had taken the top off his head. Ben sighed. None of the three would be doing much talking to him.

He tensed. A door had slammed somewhere in the house. Leigh? He sprang to his feet and ran out across the wide hallway. He could hear shouts and the noise of a diesel engine revving hard outside. Rapid footsteps across the gravel at the front of the house. He ran up the passage into the front entrance hall, slipping on the polished parquet. He ripped the front door open just in time to see a fourth intruder jump into the Transit van. It took off down the drive with its wheels spinning.

He raised the .45 and punched a line of six holes across the back doors of the van. The rear windows shattered.

The van slewed and kept going. Ben fired three more rounds at the tyres, the target diminishing now. A plastic hubcap spun across the gravel. The van disappeared down the drive. Then it was gone.

Ben swore and ran back into the house. He hurried to the kitchen and opened the pantry door.

Leigh flew at him with a scream and swung the long steel Maglite torch at his head with all her strength. If it had landed it would have put him in a coma. He dodged it and caught her wrist. She was panting. Her eyes were wild. She didn’t seem to recognize him.

He shook her. ‘Leigh-it’s me. It’s Ben.’

She came to her senses and looked up at him. Her face was white.

‘We’ve had some unexpected visitors,’ he said. ‘You’re safe now. But we need to leave quickly. More of them will be coming back here.’ He turned to head out of the room.

She was shaking. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Get your things together,’ he said. He picked up his bag and carried it to the study. Closing the door behind him, he knelt down and gathered up the fire-damaged papers. He sighed as some of them crumbled apart in his hands.

Among the documents was a small padded envelope, about four inches square, light and slim. One of its corners was singed from the fire but otherwise it was undamaged. It hadn’t been opened. It was addressed to Leigh in Monte Carlo. The postmark was Vienna-stamped just the day after Oliver’s death.

Ben tossed everything together into the box-file. Across the label THE MOZART LETTER, a spatter of blood was still wet and glistening. He unbuckled the straps of his bag and put the file inside.

He collected the two identical .45 pistols from the dead men and took the spare magazines from the pouches on their tactical rigs. Clearly these men had been professionals. He searched them. No papers, no ID of any kind.

He looked up to see the door handle turning. Before he could stop her, Leigh had stepped into the study.

She froze as she took it all in. The three dead men lying there with their eyes glazed and staring through the holes in their ski-masks, arms and legs out-flung. The pool of blood on the floor. The long smear of it on the far wall. The handle of the skillet still protruding from the head of one of the corpses. She reeled, swaying a little on her feet.

‘I didn’t mean for you to see this,’ he said, steadying her. He took her by the elbow and guided her out of the room.

‘Did you do this?’ Her voice was barely audible.

‘Look, we haven’t got time to discuss it now. Are you ready to leave?’ She nodded weakly.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes had gone by since the attackers had fled. ‘We’ll have to cut across the meadow and see where we can get some transport.’

‘I have a car here,’ Leigh said. ‘It’s in the garage out the back.’

Chapter Ten

Austria

Eve locked the bedroom door behind her and leaned against it for a few moments with her eyes tightly shut. How long had the big cop been tailing her? What was his name? She remembered. Kinski. Detective Markus Kinski.

Two big screw-ups. They wouldn’t be happy with her. First, she should have left the café the moment she recognized him. She should have acted casual, walked away. Taken a cab and got out of there before she left any traces.

The traces were the second big mistake. She’d failed to carry enough cash on her, the way they’d always told her to. She’d panicked in her rush to get out of there, and had had to use the Erika Mann credit card. That cover would be blown now. Kinski was bound to chase up the false name, and when it led him down a blind alley he’d become even more suspicious. She’d been lucky this time and managed to lose him-but if he was on to her he’d be back.

Eve’s neck and shoulders felt rigid and her mouth was dry. What was he doing following her? Was he sniffing around the Llewellyn case again? Why would he? It had been closed months ago, and as far as the police were concerned it had stayed closed. Only a small number of people knew differently.

She reached inside her handbag and brought out the tiny Black Widow .22 Magnum revolver. She turned the miniature stainless-steel pistol over in her hands. It was only six inches long and weighed just eight ounces, but the five slim cartridges in its cylinder would drill straight through a man’s skull. She’d never shot anyone with it, but she knew how to use it.

She wondered what it would feel like to point the gun at a living person and pull the trigger. She’d do it if she had to. She was in too precarious a position to risk exposure.

Maybe it would have been better to let Kinski follow her, she thought. She could have lured him somewhere. Used her charms. That was something she had done before. Then killing him would have been easy.

She thought of Oliver Llewellyn and wondered how long it would be before they caught up with the sister. There was no escape from these people. Eve knew that.

She walked to the bed, still holding the little pistol. There was something lying on her pillow, red velvet against the white silk. It was a jewel case. She opened it. It was the Lalique Art Nouveau brooch she’d admired in the antique-shop window in Vienna the week before. It was exquisite. Gold, inlaid with diamonds and sapphires. There was a note inside, neatly folded. She opened it.

It was from him. ‘Wear this tonight,’ it read.

Eve closed the jewel case and tossed it away across the bed. She lay down as the darkness closed over her.

Slowly, she brought the Black Widow revolver up until she could feel the coldness of its muzzle against her temple. She closed her eyes and listened to the snick-snack of its oiled action as she thumbed back the little hammer. Just a flick of a finger and she could be free of the whole thing.

Her fingers relaxed around the gun and she let out a long breath.

She couldn’t do it.

No escape.

Chapter Eleven

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.’

Chapter Twelve

Near Vienna

It was a murky, foggy mid-afternoon, and getting cold. The lake was beginning to freeze over, and light powdery snow was settling on its surface. Four hundred yards out across the thin ice, the pine forest was a black jagged silhouette against the grey sky.

Markus Kinski clapped his hands together and pulled up his jacket collar. He leaned back against the side of the four-wheel drive, remembering the last time he’d been back here. The day the foreigner had been brought out from under the ice.

The year was coming full circle, winter closing in again. So what was he doing back here? Maybe Monika had been right when she’d said he was obsessive by nature.

For a moment he thought about his wife. She’d been gone nearly three years now. Too young to die. Misdiagnosed twice. He missed her.

He sighed and his mind drifted back to the Llewellyn case. It had been shut months ago, but the damn thing haunted him. There was something not right about it. It had been closed too neatly, dealt with too efficiently, even by perfectionist Austrian standards. Things just didn’t happen like that. It had taken him months to get it out of his head, and then just when he was beginning to forget about the whole damn thing, who should pop up out of nowhere but Madeleine Laurent. Or whoever she was.

So far, the search for Laurent was going nowhere. The Erika Mann credit card had been real enough, but who was she? The address from the credit company had led him to a deserted warehouse in an industrial zone of the city. No big surprise.

So now there was more to add to the bunch of unanswered, nagging questions that already clustered around the Llewellyn case.

Madeleine Laurent wasn’t the only mystery connected to the drowned man. There was the matter of Fred Meyer, too. Meyer had a lot in common with Llewellyn. Too much. Both musicians, both pianists, both dead. Just a few kilometres apart, and both on the same night. Llewellyn’s watch, an old clockwork relic, had stopped when the water hit it and they pretty much knew the exact time of death. When they’d found Fred Meyer hanging in his student digs, he’d been dead about twelve hours. Which meant the two pianists had met their end within a short time of one another. Meyer first, probably, then Llewellyn soon after.

There’d been no suicide note in the Meyer case, no apparent motive. Interviews with family had thrown up no history of depression. As for most students money was tight, but he’d been careful and there was no significant debt hanging over him. No emotional problems either, and from all accounts he was getting on well with his steady girlfriend. He’d recently landed a job teaching music at a school in Salzburg and was looking forward to starting after the summer, when his studies at the Vienna Conservatoire were over. Life had been pretty good for Fred Meyer. Until he’d found himself on the end of a rope.

OK, coincidences happened and maybe there wasn’t anything to connect one musician’s foolish accident to another’s pointless suicide. At least, that was what Kinski had been trying to make himself believe over the last few months. Just one other detail stuck in his craw, like a breadcrumb that wouldn’t go down. It was the matter of the opera tickets found in Meyer’s room.

Kinski sighed and looked out across the misty lake. The ice was still too thin to walk on, but in a few weeks it would have thickened enough to take the weight of a man. He’d seen people out here skating on the lake sometimes.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to fall through ice. The shock of the freezing water, enough to stop a man’s heart. The current carrying you away under the solid ice sheet, so hard it would take a sledgehammer to fight your way back to the air just a couple of inches away.

He thought about all the different types of death he’d seen, and the looks on the faces of all the dead people his work had brought him into contact with. The look on Oliver Llewellyn’s blue, half-frozen face had been one of the worst things he’d ever seen. For months afterwards he only had to close his eyes and it was there staring at him. No shutting it out. Standing here by the lakeside was bringing that image back sharp in his mind.

He glanced at his watch. He’d been here too long. His misgivings about the case seemed to hold him here, when he should be getting back. He’d told Helga, Clara’s sitter, that he’d pick the kid up from school himself today for a change. She was growing up fast, coming on nine and a half now, and he was missing a lot of it. It would be a nice surprise for her. He was determined to spend the evening doing something fun, like taking her skating, or going to a movie. He threw everything at his child-the private bilingual school that would give her the best education, the violin lessons, the expensive toys. Clara had everything, except time with her father.

He heard footsteps coming up behind him in the frosty grass. He turned. ‘Hey, Max, where were you?’

The dog sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly with his big black head slightly cocked to one side, the rubber ball clenched in his powerful jaws. The gentle Rottweiler was old for his breed but Kinski kept him in shape.

‘Give it, then,’ Kinski said gently. ‘One throw, and then we’re out of here. Should never have come here in the first place,’ he added.

The dog dropped the ball delicately in his hand. It was slimy with saliva and mud. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Kinski said to him. ‘Chasing balls all day would suit me just fine. Better than the shit I have to deal with, believe me, my friend.’ He tossed the ball away into the long grass and watched as the dog thundered after it, sending up a spray of frosty mud.

Max hunted around for the ball, snuffling in the reeds. He looked hesitant, pawing the ground and turning his big head this way and that.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve lost it again,’ Kinski called out in exasperation. He walked over and searched among the reeds for a glimpse of blue rubber among the frosty grass and mud. The dog had flattened a lot of the rushes searching for the ball. ‘Nice going, Max,’ he muttered. ‘You know, those fucking things cost eight euros each, and how many is that you’ve lost now? Du Arschloch.’

There were cigarette butts in the mud. Kinski drew his hand away, thinking of hypodermics. Fucking junkies shitting the place up.

But then he looked more closely. He picked one up and examined it. It wasn’t a cigarette butt. It was a spent cartridge case. The brass was tarnished and dull, green in places. The rusted primer was indented in the middle where the firing pin had hit. Around the bottom of the case’s rim were stamped in tiny letters the words 9mm Parabellum—CBC.

Who’s been firing nine-mil out here? Kinski thought. He rummaged in the grass. Max stood over him, watching fixedly. He bent back a frosty clump and found another. It was just the same. Then another, and then two more, lying half-buried in the yellowed roots. He pulled the grass back in fistfuls and kept finding more. After three minutes’ searching he’d gathered up twenty-one of them, using the end of a ballpoint to pick them up and lay them in a little pile.

Twenty-one was a lot of brass. All lying in one spot. That meant a single shooter, firing all the shots from a fixed position. Too many rounds for a standard pistol, unless he was using an extended magazine. It was more likely a burst from a fully automatic weapon, about a second and a half from a typical submachine gun. Serious. Disconcerting.

He examined each cartridge case carefully in turn on the end of his pen, careful not to handle them. They all had the same scrape marks where they’d been slotted into a tight-fitting magazine, and the same slight dent on the lip where they’d been violently spat through the ejector port. The scent of cordite was long gone. He dropped the cases one by one in a small plastic bag and stored it in his jacket pocket. He straightened up. He’d forgotten the ball. He estimated the throw from the ejector and tried to figure out where the shooter might have been standing.

A thought began to form in his mind. There was nobody about. He reached down and brushed the dog’s head pensively with his fingers. ‘Come, boy.’ They walked back to the car. He opened the hatch and Max bounded inside, tongue lolling. The spare wheel was strapped to the inside wheel arch, and he unfastened it. He rolled it back down to the lakeside.

The fog was thickening all the time, and when Kinski sent the spare wheel trundling out across the frozen lake all he could see was a fuzzy patch of blackness against the grey ice. The wheel rolled to a halt, then fell over and lay still. The ice held its weight.

He reached inside his jacket and popped open the thumb-strap of his holster. He flipped off the safety on his service SIG-Sauer P226, looked around him, then fired at the ice where the wheel lay. The flat report of the 9mm pistol jabbed painfully at his eardrums and echoed far across the lake. He fired again, and again, then waited.

The ice cracked. Fifteen yards from the shore, the spare wheel slipped into the water with a gurgle.

Kinski wasn’t thinking about the cost of replacing an expensive Mercedes wheel. He was thinking about the weight of a man. Thicker ice would take more cracking. How much more? Would twenty-one rounds of 9mm do it? He felt in his pocket and heard the dull jangle of the spent cases that his gut was now telling him had been lying here since last January.

Chapter Thirteen

Oxfordshire

The video-clip was shaky and the picture quality was poor and grainy. The camera panned slowly around a big stone-walled room that was lit orange-gold by hundreds of candles. Long shadows lay across the black and white tiled floor. Three thick stone pillars stood in a wide-spaced triangle around the edges of the room, reaching to the vaulted ceiling. Against the far wall stood a raised platform, looking like a small stage. Above it, a golden sculpture of a ram’s head with long, curled horns glittered in the flickering light.

Leigh frowned. ‘What the hell is this place?’

‘I can hear something,’ Ben muttered. He turned up the volume on the laptop. The sound was the heavy breathing of whoever had been filming. Suddenly the camera whipped sideways and the picture became confused. ‘Oh, fuck’, said a frightened voice, close into the microphone.

‘That’s Oliver’s voice,’ Leigh whispered. She was gripping the edge of the table with white fingers.

They watched. The camera righted itself. A dark, craggy edge obscured a third of the picture. ‘He’s hiding behind a pillar,’ Ben said.

Some people were coming into the room. Blurred at first, the picture jerky, then sharpening up as the autofocus kicked in. The men filtered in through an archway. There were twelve or fifteen of them, all wearing black suits. The camera retreated further behind the pillar.

‘Olly, what were you doing?’ Leigh said with a sob in her voice.

Now the men were arranging themselves in a semicircle around the raised platform. They all stood in the same way, like soldiers standing to attention with their feet together and their arms clasped behind their backs. Their faces were hard to make out. The nearest was standing only a few feet from where Oliver was hiding. The camera hovered on the man’s back, travelled up to his neck and his cropped sandy hair. It autofocused on his ear. It was mangled and scarred, as though it had once been half torn off and sewn back on.

Ben turned his gaze on the platform, straining to make out the details. He realized what he was looking at was an altar. It was the focus of the room, illuminated by dozens of candles set in recesses in the wall. The centre of whatever was about to happen. It was like some kind of religious ceremony. But none that he’d ever seen before.

In the middle of the altar was an upright wooden post, maybe a foot and a half thick and about eight feet high, rough and unvarnished. Lengths of chain hung from it, two of them, thick and heavy, fastened to a riveted steel belt around the top of it.

Now there was movement. A tall iron door behind the altar swung open. Three more men came into the large room. Two were wearing black hoods. The third seemed to be their prisoner. They were clutching his arms. He was struggling. They dragged him across the platform to the altar.

The camera wobbled and the heavy breathing was quickening. In the background, the prisoner’s cries were echoing off the stone walls.

‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ben said. He could feel his own heartbeat beginning to race. He reached for the Stop button.

‘Let it play on,’ she snapped back.

The men in black hoods shoved the prisoner against the wooden post and manacled him to the chains. His cries were louder now.

One of the hooded men stepped forward with something in his hand. He went up to the prisoner and raised his hands up to the man’s face. He had his back to the camera and it was hard to see what was happening. The prisoner’s screams were becoming shriller and he was struggling wildly against the chains.

Then the hooded man stepped away. There was something hanging from the prisoner’s mouth. It was a thin rope or cable. As the hooded man stepped away the cable was pulled tauter and Ben realized with a horrified lurch what was happening. The camera was beginning to shake badly.

‘Oh Jesus!’ Leigh exclaimed in horror. ‘They put a hook through his tongue!’

The hooded man stopped and turned to face the audience. The cable was pulled as tight as it would go. The prisoner couldn’t scream any more. His tongue was stretched six inches out of his mouth. His eyes were bulging, his body quaking.

The second hooded man came forward. Something glinted in the candlelight. He raised the ceremonial dagger above his head.

It came down in a flashing arc. The prisoner’s head was thrown backwards as his tongue was sliced off. The cable snaked away like a bowstring with the glistening tongue attached. Blood spurted from the prisoner’s mouth and his head jerked from side to side, his eyes rolling.

But his suffering was cut short. The hooded knifeman stepped forward again. The dagger came in low and stuck deep into the man’s abdomen. The blade sawed and stabbed like a butcher’s knife, slicing a path from groin to ribcage.

When his guts began to spill, even Ben had to look away.

Chapter Fourteen

It had taken a long time to calm Leigh afterwards. Eventually, the tranquillizers began to take effect and she lay sleeping on the hotel bed, her black hair spread across the pillow and her body rising and falling slowly.

Ben covered her with a blanket and sat beside her on the edge of the bed, watching over her and thinking hard. Then he stood up, went back to the desk and watched the video-clip again.

He watched it three times, pausing it frequently to study the details. He watched it right to the end. After the victim was disembowelled the cameraman had had enough. The picture went jerky, dark, then jerky again. He could hear Oliver’s ragged breathing. He was running.

Ben kept pausing the clip, staring at the screen. Stone walls. Some kind of staircase. The picture was crazy but by pausing frame by frame he could just about make it out. As Oliver ran on, the rough stone walls disappeared and he seemed to be in what looked like a very opulent house. A doorway, then a corridor. Shiny wood panels. A painting, brightly illuminated by a lamp above its frame. Ben paused the clip and studied it closely.

It was hard to tell, but the painting seemed to show some kind of meeting. The setting was a big hall. There were columns that looked a lot like the ones in the room where the victim had been executed. The same tiles on the floor. The men in the painting wore wigs and were dressed in what looked like eighteenth-century clothes-brocade jackets and silk stockings. There were symbols around the walls, but he couldn’t make them out.

He let the clip run on. Oliver’s breath was rasping out of the speaker as he staggered down the corridor. He stopped, swung round as if looking back to see if someone was following him. Nobody was.

Ben paused the clip again. He could see something. An alcove in the wall. Inside the alcove stood a statue that looked Egyptian, like a Pharaoh’s death mask.

Then the clip came to an end. Oliver must have turned off the camera. Ben was left staring at a black screen.

He struggled to understand what he’d seen. He clicked on the file properties. The video-clip had been created at 9.26 on the night Oliver died.

None of this made sense. The official version of the story, that Oliver had been drunkenly messing about on the lake with some woman he’d picked up at a party, was impossible to reconcile with the fact that, not long before his death, he’d witnessed a brutal ritualistic murder. Would Oliver have been capable of putting such a thing out of his mind to go off and enjoy himself? Who would?

Ben ran over what he knew. Oliver had witnessed a crime carried out by some highly organized and very dangerous people. He’d had evidence and he’d been desperate to hide it. Soon after he’d posted the CD to Leigh, he’d drowned in the frozen lake. The investigation into his death had been a little too rushed, a little too sketchy. And ever since Leigh had mentioned to a TV audience that she was in possession of Oliver’s notes, someone had been out to do her harm.

He looked down at Leigh as she slept and resisted the impulse to brush a lock of hair away from her face. Just as she’d been starting to come to terms with Oliver’s accident, she was going to have to go through the whole thing again-only this time knowing, almost for certain, that her brother’s death had been no accident. He hadn’t died messing around in a cheerfully drunken state. He’d died in fear. Someone had coldly and calculatedly ended his life.

Who did it, Oliver?

Ben moved away from the bed and settled into the armchair in the far corner of the hotel room. He reached for his Turkish cigarettes, flipped the wheel of his Zippo lighter and leaned back as he inhaled the strong, thick smoke. He closed his eyes, feeling fatigue wash over him. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in four weeks.

His thoughts wandered as he smoked. He recalled fragments of old memories. He remembered Oliver’s face as a younger man, the sound of his old friend’s voice.

And he remembered the day, all those years ago, when Oliver had saved his life.

It had been the coldest winter he could remember. After three years of army service, Lance-Corporal Benedict Hope had travelled to Hereford in the Welsh borders along with 138 other hopefuls from other regiments for what he knew was going to be the toughest endurance test of his life. Selection for 22 Special Air Service, the most elite fighting force in the British Army.

Quite why Oliver had wanted to come along with him, Ben didn’t know. For the food, Oliver had joked. 22 SAS was famous for the mountains of roast beef and lamb chops on which selection candidates feasted before being sent into the hellish ‘Sickener 1’, the first phase of selection training.

As the convoy of trucks left the base in Hereford at dawn on day one and headed deep into the Cambrian Mountains of mid-Wales in driving snow, Oliver had been one of the only men able to joke about the long day ahead. Ben had sat in the corner of the rocking Bedford, cradling his rifle and steeling himself for the nightmare of physical and mental torture that would mark the start of the toughest few weeks of his life. He knew that the small minority who survived the initial selection process would be subjected to fourteen more torturous weeks of advanced weapons and survival instruction, a parachute course, jungle warfare training, language and initiative testing, a one-thousand-yard swim in uniform, and interrogation resistance exercises designed to stress a man’s spirit past the limits of endurance. Only the very best would get through to be awarded the coveted winged dagger badge and entry into the legendary regiment. Some years, nobody got through at all.

As it turned out, Sickener 1 was every bit as tough as he’d expected and a bit more. With each freezing cold dawn the number of exhausted men setting off for another round of torture dwindled a little further. Base camp each night was a huddled circle of silent bodies under dripping canvas. Oliver’s expectations of a nightly feast had been quickly dashed and his morale plummeted accordingly. That was the idea.

The following week was way beyond even Ben’s expectations. Weather conditions were the worst in years. Pain, injury and absolute demoralization had reduced the 138 men to only a dozen. During a twenty-hour march through a howling blizzard, an SAS major who had volunteered for the course to prove to himself he still had what it took in his mid-thirties had collapsed and been found dead in a snowdrift.

But Ben had willed himself to go on, trudging through the pain barrier and finding new heights of endurance. His only stops were to drink a little melted snow now and then and take a bite from one of the rock-hard Mars Bars he’d stowed in his bergen. The rush from the sugar gave his depleted body the energy to keep going. In his mind he fought a furious battle to quell the desire to give up this madness. He could end the agony at any time, just by deciding to. Sometimes the temptation was unbearable. That was also the idea, and he knew it. Every moment was a test.

And it didn’t get easier. Every night the exhaustion was worse. Back at camp he meticulously soaked his socks in olive oil to ease the torment of blistered feet, and he passed each day in a trance of grim determination as the marches got longer and their packs got heavier. All that mattered was the next step forward. Then the next. He kept his mind clear of the distance still ahead of him. And the pain that was only going to get worse.

By the fourth day of week three there were only eight men left. Pausing for breath on a high ridge near the summit of the notorious Pen-y-fan Mountain, Ben looked back and could see some of the others as distant green dots labouring across the blanket of snow between the trees far below.

Oliver was thirty yards behind him. Ben waited for him to catch up. It took a while. He was amazed that his friend had got this far, but now Oliver was visibly flagging. His steady trudge had deteriorated to a desperate plod and from there to a stagger. He sank to his knees, clutching his rifle. ‘You go on,’ he wheezed. ‘I’m whacked. I’ll see you at camp.’

Ben looked at him with concern. ‘Come on, there’s just a few miles to go.’

‘No chance. I can’t fucking move another inch.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ Ben said, meaning it.

Oliver wiped snow from his eyes as he looked up. He coughed. ‘You will not,’ he said. ‘You need to keep moving. Go. Get out of here.’

Ben’s feet were stripped raw and he could feel his clothes stuck to the bleeding sores on his back where his bergen was constantly rubbing. It was all he could do to support his own weight. There was no way he could help Oliver walk very far, let alone carry him. And the slightest sign of hesitation could mean the humiliation of a Return To Unit order. The rules were brutal. They were intended that way. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘There’s an instructor coming up the mountain. He’ll take you back.’

Oliver waved him on. ‘Yes, I’ll be OK. Now piss off before you get RTU’d. You want the badge, don’t you? Don’t wait for me.’

Racked with guilt now as well as pain, Ben walked on. The wind tore at his smock. He struggled down a near-vertical rocky slope, his boots slipping in the snow. He reached the ice-crusted rim of a collapsed rock mound and saw a movement through the mist of exhaustion. A hooded figure emerged from a clump of pines.

Ben recognized his face. He was a lieutenant of the Royal Fusiliers. Ben hadn’t seen him since setting out at dawn. The tough, craggy Londoner had kept himself apart from the others ever since arriving at Hereford and Ben detected a cold remoteness in his grey eyes that he mistrusted.

‘Didn’t think you’d make it this far, Hope,’ he said.

‘No? Then you were wrong. Sir.’

The lieutenant was watching him with a faint smile. ‘Got a light?’

‘There’s no time to sm—’

Suddenly Ben felt a broad hand shove him hard in the chest and he was tumbling down the slope, the weight of his fifty-pound pack dragging him down. He scrabbled for grip, losing his rifle. His legs crashed through thin ice and into the stinking mud of a stagnant bog.

Above him, the lieutenant stared at him for a moment, then trudged on.

Ben was sinking into the bog. He fought to unsaddle his bergen but the straps were tight around his shoulders, the weight dragging him down deeper. His fingers closed on a clump of ice-frosted reeds and he pulled hard, kicking back with his legs. The reeds ripped out of the mud with a gurgle and he sank down another six inches. He felt the cold, soft clay sucking at his waist, gaining another inch every few seconds. He sank in up to his belt, then to the bottom of his ribcage. He splashed weakly in the mud, his shouts deadened by the wind.

Now the cloying bog was drawing him deeper still. He could feel himself sliding steadily down. It was swallowing him. His legs were starting to feel numb. He tried kicking again, but the mud felt heavy and his legs were starting to become numb and unresponsive. In a few minutes he would start to go hypothermic unless he could get out. He gave up kicking and scrabbled at the bank, his fingers raking through loose mud and bits of coarse, sharp flint. There was no grip and his strength was ebbing fast. The mud was up to his chest now and it was getting harder to breathe.

He wasn’t going to get out. He was going to die here, sucked down and drowned in this shitty bog. He kicked again. His legs were too weak to move.

‘Ben!’

Someone was calling his name. He looked up. Through the drifting snowflakes he could make out the shape of a soldier scrambling down the slope towards him. He blinked, wiped snow from his eyes with his muddy fingers. The figure came closer.

It was Oliver.

‘Grab this.’ Oliver extended the butt of his rifle and Ben reached out for it, wrapping the webbing sling around his wrist. Oliver braced his feet against the rocks and grunted with effort as he gripped the rifle barrel with both hands and heaved. Ben felt himself rising out of the bog. An inch, then another. The mud made a loud sucking noise. He kicked with his legs again and gained a foothold.

Then he was out, and he gasped as Oliver helped him to crawl up onto solid ground. Ben collapsed onto his stomach and lay panting hard.

Oliver slung the muddy rifle over his shoulder and reached out his hand. ‘Come on, brother,’ he grinned. ‘On your feet. You’ve got a badge to earn.’

Only half a dozen men made it to the end of that day, the rest limping dejected and exhausted for the railway station at Hereford and back to their units.

One of the six weary survivors to return to base in the now almost empty truck was the lieutenant who had shoved Ben down the bank. Ben avoided his eye and said nothing. There were no witnesses and he was outranked. To speak out could mean an RTU, or worse. Anyway, people trying to kill him was something he was going to have to get used to if he made it into 22 SAS.

That night, the eve of the endurance march that was to be the final test of initial selection, Oliver produced a smuggled half-bottle of whisky and the two friends shared it in the dormitory, sitting side by side on a canvas bunk.

‘One more day,’ Ben said, as he felt the welcome sting on his tongue.

‘Not for me,’ Oliver said, staring into his tin mug. His face was pale and his eyes ringed with pain. ‘No badge is worth this. I’ve had enough.’

‘You’ll make it. You’re nearly there.’

Oliver chuckled. ‘I don’t give a shit if I make it or not. I’m done with this madness. I’ve been thinking. I’m not like you, Ben. I’m not a soldier. I’m just a middle-class kid at heart, who wanted to rebel against Dad and all the music shit. As soon as I get the chance, I’m leaving the army.’

Ben turned to stare at his friend. ‘What’ll you do?’

Oliver shrugged. ‘Get back into the music, I guess. It’s in the blood. OK, maybe I haven’t got the talent Leigh has-she’ll go far.’

Ben looked uncomfortably at his feet.

Oliver went on. ‘But I have my degree. I’m a passable pianist. I’ll do the odd recital. Maybe teach a bit too. I’ll make do. Then I’ll find meself a good wee Welsh woman and settle down.’

‘That’ll be the day.’ Ben drank down a gulp of whisky and lay on the bunk, wincing at the pain in his back.

‘And talking of my sister,’ Oliver continued, wagging a finger at Ben, ‘you do realize that it’s my official duty as the elder sibling to beat the shit out of you?’ He poured them both another shot of whisky. ‘I can’t, of course, because you’re a better fighter than me and you’d break both my arms. But consider yourself reprimanded nonetheless.’

Ben closed his eyes and sighed.

‘She’s not a kid,’ Oliver said. ‘She’s serious about what she does. And she was serious about you, too. You broke her heart, Ben. She’s always asking me if I’ve seen you. She wants to know why you walked out on her. What am I supposed to tell her?’

Ben was silent for a while. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, and meant it. ‘I didn’t want to hurt her. The truth is, Ol, I think she deserves someone better than me.’

Oliver slurped back more whisky and smacked his lips, then turned to Ben. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about all this,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me? Forget about this fighting-for-Queen-and-country crap. Who Dares Wins? Who cares who wins? Even if they do take you in, you won’t even retain rank-you’ll be busted right down to Trooper.’

Ben nodded. ‘I know.’

‘And then what? Get shot to bits in a stupid war that you don’t even understand? Die in some stinking jungle? Your name up on the clock-tower at Hereford for the sake of a bunch of double-dealing suits in Whitehall?’

Ben had no answer to that.

‘Look, man, think about it for a minute. Come back to Builth with me. We’re a good team, you and I. We’ll set up in business together.’

Ben laughed wearily, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Yeah, I can just see that. Doing what?’

‘Details, details. We’ll think of something. Something nice and easy that’ll make us rich and fat. You can get down on your knee and beg Leigh’s forgiveness, then she’ll marry you and we’ll all be happy.’ Oliver smiled.

Ben glanced over at his friend and marvelled at his view of life. It really was as simple as that for Oliver. ‘You think she’d still want me?’ he asked. ‘After what I did?’

‘Ask her yourself.’

Ben raised his head off the bunk. For a few seconds it all seemed to make such perfect sense. He wavered on the brink.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘If I get through tomorrow, I’m going on with it. I want the badge.’

Fifteen years later, Ben Hope stubbed out the Turkish cigarette and looked across the hotel room. Leigh was still fast asleep, with just the occasional flicker of a frown passing over her face that hinted at the unsettled dreams in her mind.

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