The Tooth Tattoo(126)

Fair warning.

The sound was relayed to the control room for the benefit of the little audience. The technicians in their headphones concentrated on getting the ideal mix, oblivious of any conversation from behind them. There was a voice speaking. At the back, Diamond had begun a performance of his own.

‘While this goes on I’m going to explore the evidence and see if we can agree what actually happened. We have three unexplained deaths, three murders as it turns out, with the Staccati featuring in some way in each one.’

‘The common factor,’ Halliwell said, rather like the second violin developing the theme.

‘Let’s start in reverse order,’ Diamond went on. ‘Why was Harry killed? On impulse, apparently. The opportunity presented itself and the killer snatched the gun and shot him. If you’re planning a murder you can’t expect your victim to supply the loaded weapon. So it was unplanned. A crude attempt was made afterwards to suggest it was suicide. Crude and poorly executed.’

‘There must have been a reason for the killing,’ Ingeborg said.

‘There was. Harry had to be silenced.’

‘Why?’

‘It goes back a long way. He had unfinished business with the quartet. He naively supposed he could return and get their support in proving he was innocent of Emi Kojima’s murder in Vienna in 2008. The Austrian police had been led to believe she drowned herself, but the yakuza knew better. They knew the netsuke she was carrying in her clothes – a suicide emblem – wasn’t a statement of intent, but a sample obtained on their instructions and for their inspection. She had been working for them, brought to Vienna to get the inside story of the trade in ivory objects, and they were angry. They decided, rightly, that she had been murdered. Harry was the obvious suspect and they removed two of his finger joints to try and extract a confession. But Emi’s death was a mystery to Harry. He couldn’t say who killed her, or why.’

‘What a nightmare,’ Ingeborg said. ‘It’s bad enough being tortured for information, but when you don’t have the information to give, that’s too horrible to imagine.’

Diamond was trying to keep imagination out of it. ‘Harry remained in terror of the yakuza. He’d escaped and gone into hiding, but he lived in constant fear of being caught again and put through more agony, or executed. When he learned that the Staccati were fully functioning again and were in Bath with a new violist he decided to visit his former colleagues and ask if they knew the truth of what happened in Vienna in 2008. He returned to Britain, rented a car, drove to Bath with the idea of observing them first, armed with a gun for his own protection. After so much had gone wrong in his life he was cautious.’

‘Can’t blame the guy, after all he’d gone through,’ Ingeborg said.

Diamond continued the story. ‘But first came the shock of Mari’s body being discovered in the canal, another Japanese woman murdered and disposed of in the same way. What was he to make of it? Could one of his old colleagues be the killer? He wasn’t sure which of them he could trust.’

‘Mel,’ Halliwell said. ‘Mel was the new man. And he thought Mel hadn’t been in Vienna.’

‘As we later discovered, he had, playing with the London Symphony Orchestra, but Harry didn’t know that. To Harry, Mel was clean, the new man, his replacement as viola player. So Harry tracked him down to where he was living and after watching the house for a time and nearly getting caught at it, he plucked up courage and visited there to find out from Mel how things currently stood. A calculated risk. Fortunately they got on well, particularly because there was no threat of Harry claiming back his place in the quartet. After the loss of his finger he would never play again. The meeting passed off peaceably and Harry planned his next move. He would make an approach to Anthony.’

‘Why Anthony?’ Ingeborg asked.

‘Because he could rely on him to tell the truth. There’s no sophistry with Anthony. He gives it to you straight if he gives you anything at all. That’s a symptom of his condition. So if Anthony knew what really happened in Vienna – even if he had killed the woman himself – Harry had a chance of extracting a truthful account. He drove to Westmoreland Street last night and waited for the right moment.’

The quartet were already into the second section and it was complex. The essence of any fugue is that a melody or theme known as the subject is introduced and then taken up by each of the other players until all four are weaving an elaborate mesh. Connective passages lead on to other variations of the theme. That can be demanding enough. Here, Beethoven had a double fugue in play from the start, a remorseless deluge of counterpoint, savage in its intensity. The term ‘brutal’ that Douglas had used was not unwarranted. Fingering too quick for the eye to follow, frenetic bowing and faces taut with concentration testified to the severity of the journey through this jungle. The players were at the limit of what was musically possible.