‘Can we speak to him?’ asked Leigh.
‘Tricky,’ Kinski said. ‘There might be an issue with availability.’
‘Dead?’ Ben asked.
Kinski nodded. ‘But that’s what’s interesting. He died on the ninth of January.’
‘The same day as Oliver,’ Leigh said quietly. She sat heavily down on a chair. Kinski could see the hurt in her eyes but he went on. She needed to know this. ‘Supposed to have been suicide,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never been happy with that. Didn’t check out at all. Suspicious.’
‘Suspicious how?’ Ben asked.
‘I’ve seen a lot of suicides,’ Kinski said. ‘There’s always a reason why a person makes that decision. Fred Meyer had none that I could find. He had everything to live for. Plus, I don’t like those kinds of coincidences. Two musicians both die on the same night, around the same time, just a few kilometres apart. One dies in an accident that doesn’t add up. The other dies in a suicide that nobody can explain. Tell me that’s not strange.’
‘And now it turns out he knew Oliver,’ Ben said.
Kinski nodded. ‘So now it’s even more suspicious. There’s another link, too. Meyer had a pair of opera tickets.’ He pointed at Leigh. ‘For the first night of your performance in
‘The one I cancelled,’ she said. ‘I was just about to fly over for rehearsals when I got the news that he was dead.’
‘These tickets were for a private box at the Staatsoper,’ Kinski went on. ‘And they cost a bomb, far more than a student can afford. I checked. Meyer was on a budget and big-time opera tickets were way out of his league. His family didn’t have a lot to spare either, so it wasn’t like someone got them as a present. So where did he get them?’
‘Oliver could easily have got them,’ Leigh said. ‘He could get free tickets for any of my performances, because he was my brother. No mystery there.’
‘So they must have known each other well, these two,’ Kinski said.
‘Olly never mentioned him.’ Leigh’s brow creased. ‘But what does it mean that they knew each other?’
‘If Oliver died because he knew something,’ Ben said, ‘why did Meyer die?’
‘Maybe they both witnessed this together?’ Leigh said.
Ben shook his head. ‘It’s clear that the clip was filmed by one person. Oliver was on his own in there. If there’d been two of them, we’d have heard them talking. We’d have seen flashes of the other guy as Oliver was running.’
‘So what did Fred know, and how?’ Leigh asked. ‘Did Olly tell him what he’d seen, show him the clip?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t think he’d have had time to show him the clip. Maybe he called him.’
‘Or they were planning something together.’
Ben thought about it. ‘We need to know more. I’d like to talk to the Meyer family.’
‘They won’t tell you anything they haven’t told the police,’ Kinski said.
‘I’d still like to talk to them.’ Ben paused, thinking hard. ‘Now, this place you’ve hidden your daughter Clara. Where is it?’
Kinski smiled. ‘We’re trusting one another now, then?’
‘I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t. I’d have left you dead in the car.’
‘Thanks,’ Kinski grunted. ‘OK. She’s in a convent. An old friend of mine is the Mother Superior there.’
‘Nearby?’
‘No, it’s out of the country,’ Kinski said. ‘Over the border into Slovenia, about five, six hours by car. In the mountains.’
‘Secure?’
‘Totally. Nobody could ever find her there, and nobody knows about it, not even the few cops I still trust.’
Ben looked Kinski in the eye. ‘Could Leigh go there too?’
Leigh exploded. ‘What?’
Kinski thought about it and nodded. ‘I could arrange that, sure.’
‘Good,’ Ben said. He turned to Leigh. ‘Because I think it’s getting far too dangerous for you. I want to put you somewhere safe until this is over.’
‘We’ve had this discussion,’ she said hotly. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Ben looked hard at her. ‘I wanted you to go to Ireland. You wouldn’t go. I gave in to you, and look what happened.’
‘You won’t dump me like that,’ she said. ‘I want to be involved, not out on a limb somewhere waiting for you to call.’
‘Make a choice,’ Ben said. ‘Either you let me do this my way, or I walk. Hire another bunch of steroid-poppers to look after you. You’ll be dead in a week.’
Kinski glanced at him. Ben was playing tough tactics, but it worked. Leigh sank her head into her hand. She let out a long sigh.
‘I’ll go crazy,’ she said. ‘I’ll be worried all the time.’
‘But you’ll be safe,’ Ben replied. ‘And if I know you’re protected I can work better.’
‘He’s right,’ Kinski said.
She let out a long sigh. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘You win.’
Ben nodded and turned to Kinski. ‘So now you need to tell me the way to this place.’
Kinski smiled. ‘I can do better than that.’
Kinski drove the Mercedes fast on the autobahn. They headed south past Graz, then Wolfsberg, Klagenfurt, and finally crossed over the border into Slovenia. Kinski’s police ID got the Mercedes waved through the border with no paper checks.
By the time they were approaching Lake Bled night had fallen and it was snowing hard. The forests were heavy with a canopy of white, and every so often a fallen branch blocked the road, snapped off by the weight of the snowfall. The roads became narrow and twisty, and Kinski had to concentrate hard as the windscreen wipers slapped quickly to and fro with a hypnotic beat. Leigh was asleep in the back seat. As Kinski drove, Ben went through everything he knew, telling it calmly, slowly, methodically.
‘The Order of Ra,’ Kinski snorted. ‘Give me a break.’
‘I knew an African dictator,’ Ben said. ‘He put a tin crown on his head and declared himself a deity. That sounded funny too, but people stopped laughing pretty fast when he had their arms and legs cut off and forced them to eat them in front of him.’
‘Holy shit,’ Kinski said.
‘I don’t care what these bastards call themselves. It doesn’t make them any less real or any less dangerous.’
Kinski didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he asked, ‘What happened to the dictator?’
Ben smiled in the darkness. ‘Someone ate him.’
Their destination was deep in the heart of the Julian Alps, situated in a long valley between snowy mountains. The only road leading to it was a rutted track, and the snowdrifts were deep. They had to stop and fasten snow-chains to the wheels of the Mercedes. Soon afterwards, Kinski pointed to a pinprick of light in the distance. ‘There it is.’
The old convent was almost in total darkness as they approached. The Mercedes’ headlights swept the craggy walls as they passed through a crumbling arch and pulled up in a little courtyard. The convent consisted of a rambling complex of buildings that looked as though they had grown up out of the valley and changed very little in the last five or six centuries. The main entrance was an iron-studded oak door, black with age and framed with ivy.
A warm glow of light appeared in an arched window as the Mercedes pulled up. The old door creaked open and little Clara Kinski came skipping out over the snow. Behind her stood a tall woman in a nun’s habit, carrying a
