The Bach Manuscript

He was about to reply when there was the whoop of a siren and the street was suddenly swirling with blue light. The police car slid to a halt at the kerbside. A male and a female patrol officer got out. She was tall and sandy-haired, he was dark and reedy. The WPC ran over to the body on the ground while the male cop glared at Ben as though they’d stumbled across a murder scene.

‘I never touched him,’ Ben said, pointing. ‘He’s just fainted.’

As if to prove him right, the fat biker’s eyes suddenly snapped open. Like a man awakening from a nightmare only to find it really happening, he let out a yell and started trying to scramble to his feet. He took one look at the cops and broke into a lurching run, the best he could manage with his leather jeans full of warm shit. The WPC went to restrain him, but the biker shoved her out of the way and ran a couple more paces before he stumbled in his desperate haste to escape, and fell on his face. Before he could get up again, the male officer pinned him bodily to the deck and started cuffing his hands behind his back. ‘You’re under arrest!’

Then suddenly the male cop was recoiling off the fallen biker, staggering upright and looking down in alarm and disgust at the front of his nice, neat uniform, which Ben now saw was covered in the biker’s excrement. It was everywhere on him. His hands were dripping with it.

Ben started laughing so hard, he thought he was going to throw up all the whisky he’d drunk. Michaela became even angrier with him. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ben!’

She wasn’t the only one. The male cop came storming up to him, his face turning aubergine purple with rage. ‘What the hell are you laughing at, sonny?’

‘Like a pig in shit,’ Ben cackled. It was a whole new meaning to the expression, and he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever come up with.

‘Right! I’m taking you in too, for insulting a police officer!’

And so began Ben’s first ever arrest, though it wouldn’t be his last, followed by a night in the cells at St Aldate’s police station down the street from Christ Church. An incident that, later, would almost cost Ben his military career before it had even begun.

You never forget your first serious love. Just the same way you never forget your first serious brush with the law, and the face and name of the cop who booked you. In Ben’s case, the arresting officer that night was Constable Forbes, Thames Valley Police.

You live and learn. Ben never did anything quite like that again.

But it would be only a matter of a few weeks before he did something even worse.

Chapter 14 (#ulink_2ae23992-5572-51b1-8505-44e7295884b3)

It was ten in the morning when Ben saw the crusty appear from among the crowds and buses on busy Queen Street near Carfax Tower. The guy was doing the circuit, just as Ben expected from what Nick had told him. For an aggressive, intimidatory beggar like this one, the whole central area of Queen Street, Cornmarket, and all the little surrounding lanes and side streets, was a target-rich environment bound to yield decent takings for a dishonest morning’s work. Swaggering cockily about his hunting grounds, the crusty didn’t seem the least bit cowed from his experience just the previous morning.

Some people never learn.

Ben was skilled in the art of one-on-one surveillance, but it didn’t take much skill to follow a target like this one, who lived in his own world and cared about nothing much except where his next free handout was coming from. Nor was there much artistry in the way the crusty went about his business. Ben watched him collar three unsuspecting victims for money, two in Queen Street and a solitary woman he accosted in Shoe Lane. Both of his male targets were smaller than him, which generally applied to most men, and both were younger, underconfident guys who were easy to push around. Ben could have intervened on their behalf, but his strategy was to hold back for now. The time for intervention would come later, once Ben had him in a less public place.