Chord of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  I’m going to Toby’s party later this week on account of wanting to meet the fascinating Phineas Fox – Toby’s new neighbour – I told you about him, didn’t I? So far, I’ve only seen him from the window of Toby’s flat, but what I saw was very intriguing indeed! I’m hoping he isn’t indissolubly welded to some knock-out intellectual female who discourses academically on late-night BBC2 programmes about things nobody has heard of. I’m going to make a grand entrance at the party, then, like the old song, ‘After the Ball is Over …’ Well, you never know what might happen after the ball is over.

  Isn’t it remarkable that I can say things like that to you? I can’t to Toby – he’s astonishingly strait-laced when it comes to me. I didn’t dare tell him about that utter rat last Christmas, may he succumb to the Ten Plagues of Egypt. The one you said you’d horsewhip, do you remember? – which was gorgeously Victorian and protective of you.

  Now listen, when the roofing men come, in the name of the goddess Hestia will you please leave them to do all the work, and not caper around trying to help? [Scholarly footnote: Hestia is the virgin goddess of the hearth, architecture and the ‘right ordering of domesticity’. I know this because I looked it up so as to impress you.]

  I know the work’ll be disruptive and they’ll have to clear stuff out of the attics, but that might be quite interesting, because you never know what might be found. Forgotten Old Masters, and ancestors’ old mistresses.

  Lots of very high-quality love, Arabella.

  Toby folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. ‘She sounds as if she was all right when she wrote that, doesn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘Very much all right.’

  ‘I knew all about the rat last Christmas, of course, although I didn’t know Stefan threatened to horsewhip him.’ He sent Phin a grin. ‘She sounds quite smitten with you, doesn’t she? If it came to pistols at dawn between Arabella and your redhead, which one would you put money on?’

  ‘You’re sinking into fantasy,’ said Phin, repressively, but he was suddenly reminded that the lady with copper hair had the habit of taking command in almost any situation, and that – faced with Toby’s improbable duel – she might turn out to be rather unattractively aggressive. To quench this he said, ‘Do you feel reassured about Arabella?’

  ‘Well, I think I do. It’s still odd that she isn’t answering her phone, but she might be somewhere where the signal’s poor.’

  ‘What’s the other letter? Is it anything you should check?’

  ‘Looks like a circular,’ said Toby. ‘Probably a local mailing. Oh wait, there’s something enclosed …’

  The second letter was not a circular and the enclosure was a door key. The letter was from a firm of roofing contracts in Thornchurch, dated the previous day, and it said:

  Dear Mr Cain,

  Enclosed is our estimate for the re-felting work to the south side of the roof of Greymarsh, as discussed.

  We finished clearing out most of the attic in readiness for the work while you were out, and we put the majority of the stuff in your dining room, as you suggested. The roof hatch is back in place, and we cleared up the dust that got disturbed in the process. We will clean up more thoroughly after the work is completed, and we can take the attic things back up there at the same time. As you know, we hope to make a start early next week. Could you phone to confirm that this is all acceptable?

  The door key you lent me is enclosed.

  ‘That’s the roofing work Arabella mentioned. And the clearing out of the attics.’

  ‘Yes. Could it explain how a burglar might have got in?’ asked Phin. ‘If the men had a key … If a key was in circulation—’

  ‘It raises the question, doesn’t it? Especially if somebody in the roofing company’s a – what’s the expression? – “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”. I don’t know who said that, although I expect it was old Bill Shakespeare, because it usually was, and if it wasn’t him it was the Bible.’

  Phin said, ‘Could we see what’s been brought down from the attic?’

  NINE

  ‘I shouldn’t think,’ said Toby, leading the way across the hall, ‘that there was anything in the attics except household junk.’

  ‘It’s worth taking a look, though.’

  ‘In case there’re mouldering diaries in Christa’s fair hand?’

  ‘You never know. Is this the dining room?’ asked Phin as Toby opened the door, and switched on a light.

  ‘Yes. I always think there’s an atmosphere of old gravy and abandoned suet pudding in here. Stefan generally eats in the kitchen or off a tray if he’s on his own. Arabella probably jazzed the room up for the birthday dinner, though. An ice sculpture or imported Nautch dancers between the main course and the pudding.’

  From what Phin already knew of Arabella Tallis, either of these seemed perfectly likely.

  Several battered-looking cardboard boxes stood on the table, together with a bundle of what looked like old curtains, and a tea chest containing discarded kitchen utensils.

  ‘Did the roof people say they cleaned up after they’d stomped around in the attic?’ said Toby. ‘It doesn’t look as if they cleaned these up; they’re all thick with dust – oh, and a few spiders for good measure.’

  ‘It looks as if Stefan – or someone – did take a look at them,’ said Phin, swatting the spiders away. ‘That flap’s been prised up – quite recently by the look of it. And you can see marks where there might have been sticky tape or Sellotape across the top.’

  ‘And fingerprints in the dust. Although that might be the workmen, of course. Is it worth looking inside?’

  ‘We could make sure there isn’t anything about Christa,’ said Phin, sitting down at the table. ‘Although at first sight – this one’s mostly stuffed with old magazines and ancient gardening catalogues.’

  ‘This one’s got a stack of what look like the minutes from parish council meetings. 1960s, I think,’ said Toby, pulling up a dining chair and reaching for one of the other boxes. ‘And a handful of old postcards – the kind people used to send in the 1950s. Bognor and Bournemouth, and weather dreadful, wish you were here. None of this is the era we want, though, is it? Have you got anything more exciting?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Phin had been investigating a bundle of old books packed into the third box. The pages were badly foxed and the covers were so rubbed it was almost impossible to make out the titles.

  ‘These are nearly all in German,’ he said, after several moments. ‘They look like textbooks – from when your godfather taught those adult language classes, maybe.’

  But alongside the books was a large manila envelope, creased and with the edges curling. Phin started to open it, then hesitated.

  ‘Might this be private family stuff?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so after it’s been crumbling away in the attic for several decades. I’m near enough family, anyway. Let’s see what it is.’

  Trying not to hope there might be something about Christa or Giselle in the envelope, Phin reached inside. There was a faint dry rustle and the sensation of something old and forgotten stirring. He drew out the contents with care and laid them on the table, and the feeling vanished.

  ‘Music,’ said Toby, staring at the sheets Phin had spread out. ‘That’s unexpected. Or is it?’

  ‘They’re probably just discarded scores,’ said Phin, although a pulse of anticipation was already tapping against his mind. ‘There’re only three – no, four pages. But …’ He broke off, frowning.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The sheets are all handwritten. D’you see? Not printed. The music in Christa’s portrait is handwritten as well.’

  ‘The same music?’

  ‘No idea.’ Phin picked up the top sheet to see it more clearly. The inked notation had faded almost to sepia, but it was still readable. It was impossible to know if this was the hand that had written the portrait music, though, because music notation did not have characteristics in the way ha
ndwriting did. But at the top was a single word, as faded as the rest of the writing, but quite clear. And it did not proclaim this as Giselle’s Music. It proclaimed it as something else – something so entirely unexpected that, as Phin stared at it, a dizzying kaleidoscope began to whirl through his brain – a maelstrom of things half read, of fragmented stories half heard and imperfectly remembered, and of almost-forgotten rumours. He knew some of the stories and he had only ever quarter-believed them. He thought most people had only ever quarter-believed them. And yet there it was, written in sad, faded ink—

  Toby’s voice, asking what he had found, broke in, and it took a moment for Phin to realize where he was. He put the music carefully down on the table, and sat back, his eyes still on it.

  ‘Phin, for pity’s sake—’

  ‘The title,’ said Phin. ‘My God, that title—’

  ‘What about the title? Is it Giselle again, like the painting?’ Toby came round the table to see.

  ‘It’s not Giselle,’ said Phin. ‘It’s Siegreich.’

  Siegreich. The word spiked deep into Phin’s mind.

  Toby said, ‘What’s a siegreich? Whatever it is, it’s making you look bloody peculiar.’

  Phin said, ‘Music with that title is believed to have been composed sometime during the early 1940s, in Germany.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s a piece of music that’s almost a legend,’ said Phin. ‘One of those curious stories that sometimes emerge from wartime. The kind where you don’t know what’s true, and what’s embroidered truth, and what’s outright fiction. The story is that the Nazis got hold of a composer who was living in Germany and persuaded him to write a piece of music for them. And when the Nazis used persuasion—’

  ‘Point taken. For persuasion read force.’

  ‘As far as I can remember, the details of the actual persuasion vary a good deal,’ said Phin. ‘Everything from awarding the Iron Cross and handing over the deeds of a small Bavarian Schloss – to the other end of the scale, with incarceration in Auschwitz.’ A coldness trickled across his mind as he said this. ‘Most sources agree the concentration camp was the likeliest scenario,’ he said. ‘But the gist is that a fanatical and very high-ranking SS officer wanted to present Hitler with a triumphal march – a specially written piece – to accompany the Führer’s invasion of England. It was said to be a kind of affirmation of belief in Hitler’s ability to succeed. And the music’s title was Siegreich – which translates more or less as Victory or Triumph.’

  ‘And that’s the title of that music lying on the table,’ said Toby.

  ‘Yes.’ Phin supposed he should be feeling excited at the possibility of having uncovered the Siegreich – of perhaps being the person who would prove the legend was true. But the childhood memory of his grandfather was too strongly with him – the memory of how his grandfather had lain in a POW hospital, unable to shut out the sound of the Führer’s armies playing military marches in the square outside. It had been the day the doctors had told him his sight had been irretrievably lost – that the retinas had been destroyed in the burning plane. ‘Since then I’ve always found military music so sad,’ he had said to Phin.

  And now it seemed that a legendary piece of German military music was lying on the table in front of Phin. He stared at it, and thought: if this really is the Siegreich, it was spun during a dark and terrible time, and whoever composed it was probably tortured into doing so.

  ‘I didn’t know Hitler intended to invade this country,’ Toby was saying. ‘I mean, not to the extent that somebody decided it should be done to music. Did Hitler intend his armies would blitzkrieg their way down Whitehall to the sound of bugles and military marching bands?’

  Phin pulled his mind back to the present. ‘I don’t know about a military band,’ he said, ‘but the Third Reich certainly drew up actual invasion plans. Operation Seelöwe they called it. Operation Sea Lion. Churchill and the war cabinet knew about it. I think Hitler scheduled it for the spring of 1941, or thereabouts. Goering argued against it, but Hitler was insistent.’

  ‘He would be insistent. I’m impressed with your knowledge, by the way.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have known it all offhand if I wasn’t working on the commission about musicians who had to flee Hitlerite Germany,’ said Phin. ‘They call that kind of work deep background, these days. There’s a lot of material to sift – primary-source stuff in the main, some of it very grim, as you can imagine. It isn’t always easy to distinguish between fact and fiction, either.’

  ‘Separate the genuine from the urban or internet myth,’ said Toby, nodding.

  ‘Yes.’ Phin was grateful for Toby’s understanding. ‘But what does seem to be true is that there were SS officers who took a twisted pleasure in refining the punishments for musicians.’ He made an abrupt descriptive gesture with his hand. ‘They’d often focus on the musicians’ hands,’ he said. ‘Damage them so they wouldn’t be able to play again. In one of the camps – Sachsenhausen, I think – they had something called the strappado. Suspension from posts by the wrists, which were tied behind the prisoner’s back. They’d leave the poor creatures like that for hours on end.’

  Toby said, ‘And for a pianist or a violinist or any musician at all … Even if the bones survived, over time there’d be damage to tendons and nerves. Without treatment – and it would need to be specialist treatment – the hands would be ruined, certainly for music.’

  ‘That’s the medic speaking,’ said Phin, glancing at him.

  ‘I daresay some of the lectures get through,’ said Toby, as if he had been caught out in something vaguely discreditable. ‘What happened to the Siegreich?’

  ‘It vanished, if it ever existed.’ Phin reached into his memory for the scraps of knowledge he possessed about the music, trying to ignore the feeling that he was plunging his hands, wrist-deep, into something black and rancid, and something that was thick with old pain. Was it his grandfather’s pain he was feeling, or was it the imagined pain of the people who might have suffered during the creating of the Siegreich? ‘But whatever happened to it, it’s believed it was never played – never heard by anyone except its composer.’

  ‘Who was its composer?’

  ‘No one knows. But it’s generally agreed that he wouldn’t have been very well known. I mean it wasn’t anyone like Wagner or Richard Strauss. There were a few low-profile musicians and composers in Berlin and Munich at the time – it could have been any one of them, or none of them. There was one colourful character called Eisler who found his way on to a few concert platforms. I’ve come across a couple of mentions of him – I quite liked the sound of him. But probably,’ said Phin, determinedly, ‘the whole thing really is just a legend, and the title’s pure coincidence. There’s no copyright on titles, after all. There are several concertos called “Romance” for instance – well, several that are known just as “Romance”. Beethoven wrote one, and Mozart, and so did Chopin, and there’s a beautiful classical guitar piece … Sorry, I’m getting carried away.’

  ‘But,’ said Toby, thoughtfully, ‘looked at the other way round, this score is handwritten, and it’s been stored in the attics of a man who was a child in Germany in the early years of World War Two.’

  ‘Yes.’ Phin reached for the music, and stood up with an air of decision. ‘Where did we leave the portrait?’

  ‘In the hall.’ Toby looked at him. ‘You’re going to see if this is the music in the painting, aren’t you? You’re going to compare the two?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Phin. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  Phin’s stomach was churning with nervous anticipation as they carried Christa’s portrait into the dining room, and propped it up on a big sideboard, so that it leaned against the wall. I don’t want to do this, he thought. I don’t want to find that Christa was involved in any of this – or that Stefan was. But he knew that if he did not investigate, he would always wonder if this really was the secret victory march of some long-ago N
azi.

  ‘Is the painting clear enough to copy?’ said Toby, who had found a torch, and was shining it on to the canvas.

  ‘I think so. It’s a pity that only one sheet is visible, though. You can see two or three more beneath, but the painter’s only shown the edges of them. Did you find pen and paper – oh, good.’ He drew the staves out on the paper, sketching in the treble clef, with the staves for the bass below each one. He covered two pages, which ought to be enough, then took the paper over to the sideboard immediately next to the portrait, and flattened it out.

  As he began to copy the painted notes on to the paper, Toby, directing the torch, said, ‘I should have known you’d be able to read music.’

  ‘It’s useful, but it’ll never take me on to any concert platforms,’ said Phin. ‘And it doesn’t rank anywhere near to being able to set a broken bone or whip out an appendix.’

  ‘They haven’t quite let me do that yet,’ said Toby. ‘I can wield a stethoscope with the best, though, and I can identify Yersinia pestis through a microscope at ten paces.’

  ‘What on earth is Yersinia pestis?’

  ‘Bubonic plague. I can’t think why we were taught that in twenty-first-century England.’

  ‘You never know what might come in useful.’ Phin had got halfway down the painted score. ‘I’ll tell you another odd thing about this,’ he said. ‘The artist was very precise about painting this music – about painting the actual notation, I mean. Usually if you see a piece of music in a painting, the notes aren’t very clearly defined – they’re almost suggested. Often blurred. But this isn’t like that. He’s even put in the composer’s time instruction – d’you see that? 4,2,2. That’s fairly traditional marching time – Schubert’s Marche Militaire is in 2,4 – so it does look as if Giselle’s Music had a military flavour. Which you’d expect for the Siegreich.’ He continued to write. ‘B-flat, inverted chord,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Then a run of triads – that’s a three-note chord. And then the tritone.’