The Devil's Harmony Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Sarah Rayne From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Also by Sarah Rayne from Severn House

  The Phineas Fox mysteries

  DEATH NOTES

  CHORD OF EVIL

  SONG OF THE DAMNED

  MUSIC MACABRE

  The Nell West and Michael Flint series

  PROPERTY OF A LADY

  THE SIN EATER

  THE SILENCE

  THE WHISPERING

  DEADLIGHT HALL

  THE BELL TOWER

  THE DEVIL’S HARMONY

  Sarah Rayne

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Rayne.

  The right of Sarah Rayne to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8988-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-747-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0475-2 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  ‘It’s a fake,’ said Professor Liripine, glaring at the faded scrapbook lying on his desk. Scraps of bubble wrap, untidily removed from the package, lay around his study. He frowned, turned a few pages over, then said, very firmly, ‘It can’t be anything but a fake.’ He sat back and looked challengingly at his companion.

  ‘We can’t be sure,’ said Dr Purslove, who was examining the scrapbook for himself. ‘If it really was found on the site of the Chopin Library—’

  ‘It could have been planted,’ said the professor. ‘Anyway, no one actually knows exactly where the Chopin Library stood.’

  ‘How did it end up on your desk?’ asked Dr Purslove, inspecting the scrapbook. ‘It’s a long way from Warsaw to your study at Durham University.’

  ‘A former student sent it to me,’ said the professor. ‘Her name’s Nina Randall, and she’s doing research in an archives office in Warsaw. Apparently a young graduate from Łódź University found the scrapbook on a building site. He was earning a bit of cash after graduating, and they were demolishing an office block. The bulldozers crunched open part of the old foundations without realizing what they were doing.’

  ‘So this could have been there since … well, since the 1940s,’ said Dr Purslove. ‘You know, most of these documents do look genuine. Some of them have been pasted in – you can see where strands of glue are still on the pages. It’s infuriating that almost all of it seems to be in Polish, though. Didn’t your student send a translation?’

  ‘I got the impression that she wanted to get the thing off her hands as quickly as she could. She says – wait a minute, where’s her letter? Oh, it’s here. She explains about the student, then she says:

  ‘“I don’t feel that it’s something I can look into myself. Partly because of pressure of my own work, but also because I have a feeling that my bosses here wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about our department getting involved in investigating this. There’s almost a superstition about the Chopin Library, even after so many years. But I can’t let this fragile but promising link to the past vanish, so here it is.”

  ‘She’s only on a very low rung of the career ladder yet,’ said Professor Liripine, a bit defensively. ‘So she wouldn’t want to risk making a wrong judgement. More to the point, she wouldn’t want to be seen to make it.’

  ‘In case it really is a fake? Yes, I see that.’ Dr Purslove was cautiously turning over the thick card pages. He said, ‘There’s an untidy look to this that’s quite convincing. You could almost imagine that somebody grabbed sheaves of documents and thrust them inside.’

  ‘Yes, but why? To preserve them? None of them looks particularly valuable,’ said the professor.

  ‘Then why would anyone bother creating a fake with them? There’s no motive, and you’re a shocking cynic, Ernest.’

  ‘Whatever I am, I’m in agreement with Nina about keeping this quiet for the moment,’ said Professor Liripine.

  Dr Purslove said, slowly, ‘In case it’s a fake, but also …’

  He broke off and the two men looked at one another. Then the professor said, ‘You know perfectly well why we need to keep this under wraps, Theodore.’ He turned the pages back and indicated the dim faded oblong of paper near the front.

  ‘To the untutored eye, it simply looks like a handwritten draft for a concert programme cover,’ he said. ‘A quartet’s name at the top, a date, and—’

  ‘And a piece of music to be performed.’

  ‘Yes. But we both know that such a piece of music would never have been performed at a concert, even if—’

  ‘Even if that piece of music had ever been written down,’ said Dr Purslove.

  ‘And even if it had actually existed in the first place,’ said the professor. ‘You do see, don’t you, that we can’t afford to let it be known we’re giving any credence to this?’ He was still looking at the programme cover.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Dr Purslove, rather wistfully.

  ‘Of course not,’ said the professor, in some exasperation. ‘Think about it logically. If we look into this and it does turn out to
be a fake, we’d be the laughing stock of both our universities – in fact of half the academic music world. Let’s remember all the famous fakes there’ve been. Piltdown Man. The Cottingley photographs – Conan Doyle was completely taken in by those photographs. And what about William Ireland?’

  ‘We’re hardly going to be as gullible as poor old Conan Doyle, with smudgy shots of gauzy fairies at the bottom of the garden,’ said Dr Purslove. ‘I’ll allow you William Ireland, though. Late 1700s, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was. Faked Shakespeare papers, including a full-length play that even got itself on to the stage. It hoodwinked a great many people.’

  ‘Wasn’t it virtually booed off the stage on the first night?’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is that reputations have been toppled by good fakes.’ The professor looked at Dr Purslove over his glasses, which was a look that was normally moderately successful in quelling unruly undergraduates.

  Dr Purslove, who was not going to be quelled by Ernest Liripine’s lecture-room tricks, said, ‘But we still ought to try getting this authenticated. Only I can’t think of anyone we could involve who … Oh wait, what about Phineas Fox? We could certainly rely on his discretion.’

  The professor considered this, and said, ‘That’s quite a good idea. But would Phin be interested? It’s always been a very vague legend.’

  ‘It’s a persistent one, though. Centuries old, I believe,’ said Dr Purslove. ‘And I think it would fascinate Phin Fox. In fact I suspect him of being a bit of a romantic under that quiet exterior.’

  ‘Being a romantic isn’t always a good thing,’ said the professor, solemnly. ‘Still, we could talk to him. And I should think we could scrape up a bit of a fee to cover his time for a few days. I can probably squeeze something from this quarter’s budget towards it, and I could add a bit out of my own pocket as well if necessary.’

  ‘I’d contribute, too.’ Theo Purslove thought that although old Liripine had many faults, it had to be said that meanness was not one of them. He said, ‘What about the translations, though? Some of it looks like Russian as well as Polish.’

  ‘I think Phin’s got a smattering of German, but I shouldn’t think he’s got any Polish or Russian,’ said Professor Liripine. ‘But there’s that girlfriend he has – Arabella. Isn’t she a bit of a linguist?’

  ‘Arabella Tallis,’ said Dr Purslove, sitting back in his chair and smiling. ‘And you’re right about her language skills. We both met her when Phin brought her to that drinks thing for publication of the Liszt book we did1 – she got stuck in the lift on the way up to the supper room at the hotel, d’you remember? Well, of course you remember. You were one of the people who tried to haul the cable up by hand.’

  ‘They had to call out the fire brigade in the end. But we could see if she might be able to do a bit of translation for us,’ said Professor Liripine, thoughtfully. ‘This is all starting to sound promising. I’ll phone Phineas tomorrow, and try to set up a meeting.’

  ‘Good idea. I might email him, too.’

  ‘I don’t expect you’d want to be bothered to come along to a meeting with him, would you?’ said the professor, off-handedly, wrapping the scrapbook up in the discarded bubble wrap. ‘I know you don’t like leaving your ivory tower for very long, and especially not for the rigours of London; in fact you’re only in Durham this weekend for the symposium, so—’

  ‘Yes, I would want to be bothered,’ said Theodore Purslove, at once. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I don’t know where you’ve got the idea that I don’t like London, because I do. And there’s no need to make spiky comments about ivory towers, either, because I’m a good deal more in touch with the world than you are, Ernest!’

  Phineas Fox only just managed not to sound startled by the phone call from Professor Liripine.

  ‘This is all very unofficial and informal,’ the professor said. ‘It’s simply that we – that’s to say Theo Purslove and I – would like to have a bit of a chat with you. Something’s come to my attention that might be worth investigating, and we think it could be very much your field of expertise. I won’t say any more about it on the phone – you never know who might be in earshot.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Phin, who had been trying to work on a rather dull commission involving an obscure jazz musician, but who was much more intrigued by this hint of cloaks and daggers.

  ‘Could you manage a meeting reasonably soon?’ asked Professor Liripine. ‘If so, we could both travel to London and stay over for a night. That’s for Purslove’s benefit, you understand – he never likes to be away from Cambridge for too long. He’s always thinking there’s going to be a palace revolution in his absence and that he’ll find himself bundled out of a comfortable tenure when he gets back.’

  ‘Would one day next week fit?’ said Phin. ‘I could book a table at the trattoria near my flat, and we can come back here afterwards to talk.’

  ‘That sounds splendid. I’ll let Theodore know. Very grateful to you,’ said the professor, and rang off.

  Dr Purslove’s email arrived that evening, and was in more or less the same vein, if somewhat breezier.

  ‘Looking forward to meeting you again, Phin,’ he wrote. ‘Old Liripine’s getting a bit past jaunting around these days, so just the one night in London will be enough for him. It’s a very interesting discovery that we’re bringing along.’

  Phin, returning to the very uninteresting jazz musician, tried not to waste too much time in speculating as to what the two had unearthed. He also tried not to worry whether he would be able to maintain harmony between them.

  But when they met the following week, they seemed pleased to see Phin, and in reasonable amity with one another.

  ‘We’ll talk properly when we get back to your flat,’ said Professor Liripine, surveying his plate of tagliatelle with pleased anticipation. ‘It’ll be more private.’

  ‘In a minute he’ll say walls have ears, and glance furtively over his shoulder like somebody in a French farce.’

  ‘No, I shan’t. Pass the parmesan and don’t talk rubbish, Theo.’

  The meal progressed smoothly enough, with Dr Purslove wanting to know about Phin’s current commission, and offering a few suggestions. The professor disclosed that he had once visited New Orleans where he had taken part in a jam session, which he had greatly enjoyed. ‘I was a lot younger then, of course.’

  Phin tried, and failed, to visualize this scenario. As they left the restaurant, Dr Purslove expressed concern as to whether the professor would manage to walk as far as Phin’s flat.

  ‘It’s only a few hundred yards,’ said Phin, who had not thought of this.

  ‘Yes, but weren’t your feet troubling you, again, Ernest?’

  ‘There’s never been anything wrong with my feet. I can outpace you any day, and I could certainly do so after that enormous meal you ate.’

  Walking to the flat, they were rather endearingly interested in their surroundings. It was not, they explained, a part of London that either of them knew.

  ‘It’s very nice, isn’t it?’ said Dr Purslove, looking admiringly at some of the houses which were tall and still retained faint traces of former grandeur. ‘It’s a pity when these lovely old places have to be chopped up into flats, but it looks as if they’ve been converted very tastefully. Ah, is this the house, Phin?’

  ‘Yes. The flat’s on the first floor.’

  ‘No lift?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Then Ernest might need a bit of help with the stairs,’ said Dr Purslove, gleefully.

  But they both went very spryly up to Phin’s flat, and through to the study, which Phin had tried to tidy up that afternoon.

  ‘I always like seeing where people work,’ said Dr Purslove, looking around. ‘Beautifully high ceilings and deep windows you’ve got here, Phin. Shockingly expensive to heat, I expect.’

  ‘Tact was never your strong suit, Purslove,’ said the professor, sarcastically.

/>   ‘I wasn’t being tactless, I was diplomatically letting Phin know that we’re aware that people have to pay bills and that living in London is ruinous, so we won’t be expecting him to do anything without a fee.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t say so straight out then.’

  Phin went out to the kitchen to make coffee, leaving them to explore. When he returned to the study with the tray, the professor had ensconced himself in the Victorian leather chair which Arabella had found in an antique shop and had restored for Phin as a present.

  ‘This is very comfortable,’ he said, and Phin hoped that the castors did not suddenly propel him across the room, because Arabella had fitted the wrong ones and they were apt to skid the chair forward unexpectedly. ‘No piano anywhere though, I notice,’ he added. ‘You do play, don’t you, Phin?’

  ‘Well, a bit, but I’m very out of practice—’

  ‘Of course Phin hasn’t got a piano, Ernest,’ said Theo Purslove, who was inspecting the contents of the bookshelves. ‘For one thing you’d never get a piano up those stairs, and for another you’d have neighbours banging on the walls if you took to belting out concertos at midnight. Phin, did you know that these bookshelves are a bit—’

  ‘Lopsided? Yes, I did.’ Phin passed the coffee round, and said, firmly, ‘A friend of Arabella’s had just started up a DIY business – you remember Arabella, I expect? – and she wanted to help get it going, and I did need more shelves, so … No, don’t move those books, doctor, because they’re all that’s keeping the end of the shelves weighted down.’

  ‘Yes, I see that, and … Well, yes, I’d enjoy a drop of brandy with the coffee. I daresay Liripine won’t refuse, either.’

  The brandy poured, Phin sat down at his desk with the idea that it might make him feel at least nominally in charge of the proceedings. Professor Liripine rummaged in a large, somewhat battered briefcase, finally producing a large bundle swathed in bubble wrap, which he handed to Phin.