The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani
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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.
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