Diamond, too, was developing a difficult new subject. The music wasn’t entirely lost on him; he expected to evoke moods of disquiet and dissonance that matched. ‘For the moment let’s leave Harry sitting in his car outside Anthony’s place. I want to return to the night Emi Kojima was murdered in Vienna. Remember she was a talented musician herself. She’d been chosen by the yakuza as the honey trap for Harry, to get the lowdown on his ivory trading. She attended the recital at the Konzerthaus and made a point of approaching the artists afterwards and talking intelligently about the music. She was there to pull Harry, and she did. Later in the evening the other players were drinking in the hotel bar and saw Harry get into the lift with Emi, the last time she was seen alive.’ Diamond turned to Douglas. ‘You were there that night.’
Douglas jerked as if he’d been punched. Up to now he’d been staring through the glass, obviously trying to give the impression he wasn’t listening to Diamond. ‘Aren’t you interested in the music?’
‘It’s over my head,’ Diamond said. ‘You’ll be able to hear it on disc later. I’m asking about Vienna, what was said in the hotel bar.’
‘I hope you’re not suggesting I had something to do with these tragic events.’
Diamond smiled. ‘I don’t mind telling you I’ve had my suspicions. You seemed to be around at the critical times.’
‘It’s my job. I’m their manager.’
‘Yes, and just to be certain, I made a call before coming here to check if you were in London this morning, and you were. You couldn’t have shot Harry.’
‘I’m glad that’s clear, then. I don’t kill my own clients, even ex-clients. What did you just ask?’
‘What was the talk about Harry in the Vienna hotel bar?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Douglas said. ‘I think we passed a few remarks. He was up to his old ways with the ladies, that sort of thing. He had a spicy reputation.’
‘Anything else?’
A shrug and a sigh. ‘We were all quite relaxed about it, as I recall. We recognised the young woman as the music buff who came up after the concert. Someone – it may have been me – laughingly suggested she might have been trying to lure Harry away to the Tokyo Quartet. Good violists, you see, are much in demand. And Vienna is the place where musical wheeling and dealing is done.’
‘It wasn’t a serious remark?’
‘Not from me, of all people. I didn’t want anyone to defect.’
‘Would the others have taken it lightly?’
Douglas tilted his head one way and the other like a parrot under scrutiny. ‘Cat will have laughed it off, or topped it with something more outrageous. You never know how Ivan or Anthony will react. They can get far too uptight and obsessive about the quartet, but I don’t think they rose to the bait. I honestly can’t remember how it was left. Soon after, we all went to bed ourselves.’
As if on cue, the quartet had started the third part, a more accessible sequence at a slower tempo, tender by contrast with what had just gone before. The players’ faces reflected the lyrical nature of the theme. The lines of anxiety had gone from Ivan’s brow. Beside him, Anthony’s lips had formed into something near a smile. Mel was leaning back as he played. And Cat had time to brush away a wayward strand of hair.
Diamond resumed. ‘Emi didn’t remain all night with Harry. She left after they’d had sex and she’d persuaded him to part with the netsuke. Earlier, she’d given the impression she was a guest at the hotel, but this wasn’t true. She was under instructions to report back to the yakuza with the netsuke. She took the route beside the river Wien that links to the canal and she must have been followed. Someone was deeply alarmed about her.’
‘Harry?’ Halliwell said. ‘He’d worked out what this was all about?’
‘Unlikely. He wouldn’t have dropped her into the canal without recovering the netsuke. After all, it linked her to him. But someone attacked her and almost certainly strangled her and dumped the body in the canal. The reason, the motive, is the key to this whole mystery.’
In the studio, a dramatic change in the music sent the players careering into the fourth part. The jarring fugal themes returned at full pitch, outrageous in complexity, skewed into ever-changing variations, playing havoc, twisting, reversing, rollercoasting into dissonance and darkness. Eyes wide, the musicians strove to stay with it, the strain as extreme as it gets.
‘We can’t consider the killing of Emi without leaping forward to Mari Hitomi,’ Diamond said. ‘The deaths are related. We know for certain that Mari was strangled and thrown into the Kennet and Avon canal. The same method of disposal. And why? Because up to this time the killer appeared to have got away with the first murder this way. A rotting corpse recovered after weeks in water doesn’t yield many clues. If she hadn’t been identified from the tooth tattoo we might never have made the connection. Once we had the facts, the parallels were striking. Two Japanese women with knowledge of classical music who attended Staccati concerts and approached the players afterwards as fans. Two women who ended up murdered in canals. What can we get from that?’