The Tooth Tattoo(114)

He’d not slept well. His brain had kept returning to Harry Cornell, asking why the missing violist had resurfaced after so long. Was the man dangerous, as Ivan believed? Almost certainly.

Emi Kojima had last been seen alive in Harry’s company late at night in October 2008, in the bar of their hotel in Vienna. She was a Tokyo prostitute who had mysteriously arrived in Vienna and turned up at one of the Staccati concerts. Working girls don’t make expensive trips to Europe. Someone must have funded her, and for a reason. She had some knowledge of classical music so she’d been chosen for this job. What was the job? Surely to learn more about Harry’s trading in netsuke – a lucrative private enterprise that was upsetting the big boys. Some criminal syndicate had arranged for Emi to sleep with Harry and get the truth about his dealings. She was later found dead with one of Harry’s netsuke hidden in her clothing. This suggested she’d stolen it as a sample of his wares, but was killed before she could report back and deliver the goods – which made Harry the prime suspect.

Any of the quartet, or Douglas Christmas, could testify in court that they’d witnessed the pair drinking together and stepping into the lift. It wasn’t too much to surmise that the action moved from the hotel bar to Harry’s room.

Harry, already deeply in debt to the mafia, needed his second income. He would have been alarmed when Emi got interested in his business activities.

Alarm, panic, violence. A deadly sequence.

The hotel where all this had happened backed onto the Wienfluss, which fed into the Danube canal, where the body was found.

Then Harry went missing in Budapest, the next stop on the quartet’s tour. With the mafia calling in his gambling debts and the yakuza closing in on his netsuke dealings, and the Vienna police likely to discover the body, his only sensible option had been to disappear.

As it turned out, Emi’s death was assumed to have been suicide and no one made the connection with the quartet. They had never been questioned about their enthusiastic fan and who she slept with.

Four years on, the quartet had re-formed and were based in Bath. If Harry took the slightest interest in his fellow musicians, he’d have looked at the website. Curiosity may have brought him here, or envy, or the pull of the quartet-playing he loved and missed. Whatever the reason, he was in the city and a second Japanese woman had been strangled. By now, Harry would be desperate to know if there were fresh suspicions about the Vienna death and if his old companions had been questioned and how much they remembered.

This would explain the stalking.

Diamond tried putting himself in Harry’s situation. There was a limit to what he could learn from a distance. He needed to speak to one of the Staccati. Who would he approach? Not the prickly old Soviet defector, Ivan. Not Cat, who would blab to everyone and think it a huge joke. And certainly not Anthony whose tunnel vision recognised little else but music.

Which left Mel, the new man, an unknown quantity for Harry, but without direct knowledge of what had happened in Vienna. As a fellow violist Mel ought to be a twin soul. And well placed to report on what the others were saying these days. This explained why Harry’s car had been seen outside Mel’s lodgings. And why Mel had been followed into Sydney Gardens. It was even possible Harry had been on the point of approaching Mel that morning in the gardens – neutral ground – when Diamond and Ingeborg had appeared.

At the cost of a decent night’s sleep, Diamond had a better grasp of events. A meeting with Mel was next on his agenda.

But not quite.

As he was about to leave the house, his phone rang. He snatched it up and heard Paloma’s voice: ‘Peter? I was in the shower when you called. Any chance we could meet?’

‘Every chance,’ he said. ‘Can I come now?’


Her Georgian house in Lyncombe Vale doubled as home and business premises. Maybe it was understandable after their recent history that she chose to see him upstairs in her office with her mahogany desk between them and her personal assistant Judy in the same room working on the computer. Once in Vogue was a thriving international company that supplied period illustrations for television and stage designers. Two large bedrooms had been knocked into one to store the prints, books, bound magazines and newspapers. It was a huge archive, yet you had the sense that everything had its place and Paloma knew exactly where each item was to be found.

‘Coffee?’

‘Too early, thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s not my caffeine rush hour yet. But don’t let me stop you.’

‘How’s work?’ Her unease was obvious. They were both as stiff-backed as guests at a state dinner. And Judy’s presence didn’t help.