The Tooth Tattoo (39 page)

‘That’s no, is it? I want to hear you say it.’

Anthony, expressionless, said, ‘No.’

Ivan said, ‘Isn’t that obvious? He wasn’t there when it happened. None of us were. We know Harry was carrying a gun and he put it to his head and took his own life.’

‘Did I hear right?’ Diamond said. ‘You knew he was in possession of a gun?’

‘He showed it to Mel and Mel warned us all last night on the phone.’

Mel cleared his throat. ‘I decided everyone had a right to be told.’

‘I’m obviously missing something here,’ Diamond said, turning to Mel. ‘Did you have a meeting with Harry?’

‘Last night. He came to see me at my lodgings.’ Mel launched into an account of almost everything Harry had told him, about the poker debts; the mammoth ivory; the netsuke carver he had found in Vladivostok; the sex with Emi Kojima in Vienna; the gift to her of the netsuke piece; his capture by the yakuza in Budapest; the long, uncomfortable journey by car to Vladivostok; the mysterious disappearance of the carver; the refusal of the yakuza to believe Harry knew nothing about Emi’s killing; the amputation of his finger joints; his escape; and his eventual return to Britain.

A short silence followed, time required to absorb the extraordinary sequence of events.

Diamond couldn’t see any way Mel had invented such an elaborate story. Nothing in it conflicted with his own discoveries. Moreover it was evident from Ivan’s twitchy reactions that each mention of his personal influence on events touched raw nerves.

‘The one thing you haven’t spoken about is the gun,’ Diamond said.

‘He only produced it after he’d said all this,’ Mel said. ‘I was shocked.’

‘Who wouldn’t be?’ Cat said. ‘None of us slept last night wondering if Harry would come knocking – or without knocking.’

‘Did he threaten you with it?’ Diamond asked Mel.

‘Not at any point. He made enough of an impact by simply producing it. He held it out in the palm of his hand. It scared me.’

‘What did he want from you?’

‘An update on what the others were saying about him.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘No, but it was clear he was feeling insecure.’

‘How did you answer?’

‘With the truth as I understood it. I told him straight there had been the full range of feelings from annoyance that he
failed to turn up for the Budapest concert to concern when he went missing, to resignation after years went by that he could well be dead. He asked if the quartet really believed he’d killed Emi and I said nobody had ever suggested he was a murderer.’

‘It didn’t cross our minds,’ Ivan said, ‘but in view of what’s happened this morning …’

Cat said, ‘What are you trying to tell us, Comrade Bogdanov? Do you think he shot himself because of a guilty conscience?’

Ivan spread his hands. ‘We’ll find out, presumably.’

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Diamond pressed Mel. ‘What else did he want to know?’

‘The name of the person who supplied my new viola. I didn’t tell him. I’m strictly bound to keep that a secret.’

‘Even at gunpoint you held out?’ Ivan said.

Mel clicked his tongue in impatience. ‘I told you he didn’t once point the gun. He had no intention of shooting me. He told me the gun was for his own protection and I believed him. He’d escaped from the yakuza, as I told you, and he thought they were still after him.’

‘Not to mention the mafia wanting their poker debts settled,’ Cat said. ‘If that wasn’t a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is. Poor old rascal didn’t know where to turn.’

‘And then the second girl was strangled and the two cases were linked,’ Ivan said. ‘He became a suspect for the first, if not the second. We don’t know how long he’s been in England, do we?’

‘He didn’t say,’ Mel said.

‘Could Harry have murdered Mari Hitomi?’ Cat asked, big-eyed. ‘I can’t think why.’

‘Maybe she also was working for the yakuza,’ Ivan said.

She took a sharp breath. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

The speculation wasn’t helping Diamond. He’d run through similar possibilities in his own mind already. He picked up the last point Mel had made. ‘Why was he interested in your viola?’

‘It’s a beautiful instrument, an Amati,’ Mel said, nodding. ‘As a fellow violist, he wanted to handle it, but I didn’t let
him. He didn’t insist. He knew the owners of these fabulous instruments set strict conditions about their use.’

Cat said, ‘Harry knew that. He had a Maggini on loan to him. None of us can afford the beautiful toys we play with.’

Diamond asked Mel, ‘Was anything else said that might help me to understand Harry’s mind-set?’

‘I’ve covered it,’ Mel said. ‘He acted more like someone on the run than a threat to me or anyone else. I know he had the gun, but in the end he put it away and left quite tamely.’

‘Would you say he was suicidal?’

‘Under stress, for sure. He did make one remark.’ Mel put his hand to his head and scraped it through his hair. ‘I’m trying to think back to how it came up. Yes, I was telling him that while he was missing for so long we gave him up for dead and he said, “I might as well be.” ’

‘Poor lamb!’ Cat said.

‘Did he say where he was going next?’ Diamond asked.

‘No. It was getting late by then. After ten, anyway.’

‘But you phoned each of the others to let them know?’

‘Because they had a right to be told Harry was around, and armed. And if I’m honest, I was shaken up by the visit. I felt I wanted to speak to someone who would understand.’

Diamond glanced out of the window. A forensic tent was being erected around Harry’s car. The police surgeon had arrived and was struggling into a blue protective overall.

‘And this morning,’ Diamond said, turning back to the group, ‘what happened after Anthony’s landlady got on the phone?’

‘I phoned the others and we met here and decided the right thing to do was call 999,’ Cat said.

‘Who was first here?’

‘I was,’ Ivan said. ‘I took a taxi. Cat wasn’t long after me. She came on foot, living nearby, as she does. We were outside looking at the car when Mel’s taxi arrived.’

‘Did you touch anything?’

‘Naturally we did,’ he said as if the question shouldn’t have been asked. ‘We looked inside to see if he was still breathing.
When it was obvious he wasn’t, we shut the door and came in here and made the emergency call.’

Cat had a better idea what Diamond was thinking. ‘You don’t even need to say it. Our prints are all over the car. If there’s anything dodgy about the suicide theory, Ivan and I are going to be the prime suspects, but what else could we have done? We had to check whether life was extinct. Don’t they always say the first few minutes are critical?’

‘Do we know when he died?’ Mel asked.

‘We may get an estimate from the doctor,’ Diamond said, ‘but times of death are difficult to pin down. If someone heard the shot we’ll have a better idea. We’ll ask at all the houses.’

‘Could have been last night, I was thinking.’

‘What would he have been doing here last night?’ Cat asked.

‘What was he doing here at all? Visiting Anthony, obviously.’

‘Except he stayed in the car and shot himself.’

Diamond glanced outside again and saw that Ingeborg’s car had arrived on the other side of the taped-off section. ‘I’ll be needing statements from each of you.’

Ivan folded his arms in a defiant way. ‘It had better not take long. We’re booked for a digital recording session this afternoon.’

‘Where?’

‘At the Michael Tippett Centre. The technicians are expecting us.’

Mel said, ‘In view of what’s happened, maybe we should cancel out of respect.’

‘Not at all,’ Ivan said. ‘Harry would have wished us to go ahead. And I asked Douglas to come back for it.’

‘You’re right for once,’ Cat said. ‘We’ve got to do this for Harry, we really must. He loved the
Grosse Fuge
, for all its challenges.’

This was getting a momentum that Diamond would find difficult to stop. For the moment he said, ‘We’ll see how long it takes to get those statements.’

‘You can’t hold us indefinitely,’ Ivan said. ‘Besides, we have very little to make statements about.’

‘Apart from Mel,’ Cat said. ‘His will take the rest of today
and tomorrow, I should think. All that stuff Harry told him last night. Can he record it?’

Diamond shrugged. ‘It still has to be written down and signed. A statement is a document.’

‘Best get started, then.’

Ivan was at his most crotchety. ‘I really don’t see the urgency of this. The man is dead. He shot himself. It’s not as if anyone else was involved. We could take all week and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s clear to me that Harry was murdered.’

O
ut in the street, Ingeborg Smith and Keith Halliwell were awaiting instructions.

Diamond was chirpier than he had been for weeks. ‘Top of the morning to you. Raring to go, are you?’

All he got was puzzled looks.

‘I need statements from all four, an account of their movements from nine last night until I arrived this morning. They’ll probably tell lies and I want it as evidence.’

‘All of them will lie?’ Ingeborg said.

‘Maybe not. Anthony may not say anything at all.’

‘Really?’

‘The little he does say is going to be true. He’ll need drawing out, though. I’m not sure how much he knows.’

‘Is it a conspiracy then?’ Halliwell asked.

‘It could become one. This is like nothing else I’ve come across, four strikingly different individuals who don’t mind sniping at each other, but in reality are as close as atoms in a nucleus. They must stick together to survive as performers and their music-making matters more to them than morality or law-breaking. They’re not comfortable going it alone, any of them. They have no family commitments. The Staccati is their family and quartet-playing is what they do. One goes, and it’s curtains for all of them.’

‘A few mixed metaphors there, but we get the point,’ Ingeborg said.

Diamond gave her a pained look. ‘Do you want to go through it with a red pen?’

She bit her lip. ‘Sorry, guv.’

‘Are they as good as they think they are?’ Halliwell said to defuse the tension.

‘Musically as good as it gets. Morally, the jury are out,’ Ingeborg said, diplomatically picking up Diamond’s theme.

‘Better dive in, then,’ he told them. ‘Who’s going to be first to split the atom?’

With that, he lifted the Do Not Cross tape and entered the secure area.

He was handed a package wrapped in polythene.

‘XL for you,’ the crime scene woman said.

‘I’m taking that as a compliment.’ He stepped to one side and started the undignified process of stepping into the protective suit. These things weren’t designed for people with more flesh than figure. A well-cut suit hides a lot.

Inside the forensic tent three similarly clad crime scene officers were at work. He had to squeeze around the open doors of the car and step over legs and equipment to make his presence known to the police surgeon, who was standing over Harry Cornell’s corpse.

‘Anything I should be told, doc?’ Diamond asked.

‘I can tell you one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You need a forensic pathologist for this, not a family doctor. They’ve sent for Bertram Sealy. He knows his stuff, whatever you and I may feel about his corpse-side manner. I’ve done my bit. Life is extinct. I’m off to see someone who really needs me.’

‘Before you go, did you look at the bullet hole?’

‘I did, and the bullet passed right through the head,’ the doctor said. ‘But don’t expect any CSI stuff from me.’

The body was still in the position Diamond had first seen, head against the steering wheel with only the right side of the face visible. ‘Would this be the exit wound?’

‘We can agree on that, going by the stellate shape,’ the doctor said, ignoring his own injunction. ‘I believe that’s due to bone fragments being forced out by the action of the bullet. If you lift the head to look at the other side, you’ll
find a neat round hole where it went in. Is that what you wanted to know?’

‘Thanks. It confirms what I thought.’ He paused. ‘No chance you could estimate the time of death?’

‘Yes.’

Diamond’s eyes opened wide. ‘You can?’

‘I mean yes, there’s no chance.’

Still wearing his forensic jumpsuit, Diamond returned to the house. Ivan and Cat remained in the sitting room, sombre and silent. They each gave his mode of dress a long look, but passed no comment.

‘Are we under way with the statement-taking?’ he asked.

Cat nodded. ‘They’re limited by the poky accommodation. The young woman is in the kitchen with Anthony, and Mel is upstairs with the man. We were just saying it could take a while.’

Ivan made a point of looking at his watch. ‘We’d better be through before lunch, all of us. We’re due in the recording studio at two.’

‘What are you hoping to record?’ Diamond asked.

‘There’s no hoping about it. The session is fixed. The
Grosse Fuge
.’

‘Can’t say I know it,’ Diamond said. ‘Can you whistle a few bars?’

Ivan scowled.

‘Beethoven,’ Cat said. ‘It’s in our contract to cut a disc in aid of the university.’

‘If you get there I may listen in.’

Ivan stared through him. Obviously anyone who hadn’t heard of the
Grosse Fuge
was a waste of space.

Dr. Bertram Sealy arrived within the hour holding his trademark flask of coffee and the case he called his guts-bag. Diamond watched from a distance, allowing him to make some progress before going out to join him, wondering what insult Bath’s least congenial pathologist would have for him.

Clad in his own rather superior pale blue overall, Sealy was
on his knees by the car studying the victim’s hands. Without looking up, he said, ‘Right up your alley, this, Peter Diamond. Grotty little backstreet tucked away between the railway and the cemetery. Home from home for you with your charity-shop suits. Are you enjoying yourself?’

‘I always enjoy seeing a genius at work,’ Diamond said. ‘Where did you buy your Andy Pandy outfit? The pound shop?’