The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (34 page)

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.’