Diamond wasn’t put off. Cat had clearly decided to bluff her way through this and he hadn’t expected her to tell all after the first salvo. ‘So in spite of all the risk you took,’ he continued in the same steady manner, ‘the quartet was in trouble. All credit to you and Ivan for trying to keep it going.’
‘Desperate times.’ She took up the narrative as smoothly as if nothing had passed between them. ‘I had Anthony throwing tantrums because he wanted work. You’ve no idea how childish he can be. And Ivan had to be stopped from jumping ship. I kept reminding them both that we had a brand name and a fan base and a backlist of recordings.’
The solicitor touched her arm to silence her, but Cat wasn’t of a mind to underplay her achievement. ‘You’ve no idea how much competition there is among quartets. All these pushy kids coming out of Eastern Europe and the Far East were only too keen to fill the vacuum.’
‘And you didn’t know at the time that Harry had been kidnapped by the Japanese mafia?’
‘We thought he was dead. What else could we think after so long? That’s why we hired Mel to replace him – eventually. Years had gone by. We weren’t even history. We were forgotten. We needed to build our reputation all over again.’
‘So you got the residency here.’
‘Thanks to Doug. He kept the faith. Top man.’
‘And everything was coming up roses until you gave your first concert and a small Japanese woman said she was a fan and started cosying up to the men. To you it must have seemed like a rerun of Vienna in 2008, except that this time Anthony was getting the attention. She talked intelligently to him about the music. She’d played the violin to a high level herself. Do you remember the shock this gave you, Cat?’
White-faced, she was about to say she didn’t, but Diamond added, ‘Anthony does, and he’s selective in his memories. He particularly noted her tooth tattoo.’
Again, the solicitor put a restraining hand over Cat’s forearm.
She wouldn’t be silenced. ‘Anthony wouldn’t stitch me up. He needs me. He can’t function without me.’
‘His mind doesn’t work like that,’ Diamond said. ‘He takes each day as it comes. He didn’t stitch you up, as you put it. You stitched yourself up. You were incensed. You weren’t going to allow Mari Hitomi to threaten the Staccati after the tough times you’d been through. I don’t know what went through your mind, whether you believed she was trying to recruit Anthony for another quartet, or if it was pure jealousy that she was young and pretty and might sleep with him. You weren’t having it. You spoke to her yourself and offered some kind of lure – perhaps a private meeting with the quartet. She was to meet you after dark at Green Park, that remote patch of ground just across the river from where you live.’
‘This is the biggest load of horse hooey I’ve ever heard,’ Cat said.
The solicitor said, ‘Miss Kinsella, in your own best interest-’
‘I’m not giving anything away, darling,’ Cat said with an effort to sound unconcerned. She looked Diamond squarely in the eye. ‘On with the fairy story, matey. We’re dying to hear what the wicked witch did next.’
‘I prefer the image of the tigress,’ Diamond said. ‘You had your cubs to protect.’
‘Oh, give me strength.’
‘Your boys, then. This unfortunate young woman – who simply came to that concert as a fan wanting to meet the musicians she adored – was grabbed and strangled and dragged to the river and dropped in. You’d got away with it in Vienna, you figured, so why not a second time?’
She gave no sign of caving in. ‘You can do better than this,’ she said, trying to bait him. ‘What about the hundreds of other fans I killed because they came on strong with the boys? It’s farcical when you think about it.’
‘There was another victim, and that was Harry.’
‘I knew we’d get around to him,’ she said, rolling her eyes upwards. ‘And how are you going to slot dear old Harry into this catalogue of slaughter? He was one of my boys, a Staccati player and a lovely guy in spite of all his demons.’
‘No longer a Staccati player.’
‘Because of his missing finger? True, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t family.’
‘Yes, I believe you really liked Harry,’ Diamond said, ‘but he made the fatal mistake of trying to find out the truth of what happened in Vienna, and how Emi Kojima’s murder linked up with Mari Hitomi’s. If he could discover who killed Emi he’d have an answer for the yakuza if they caught up with him again. Harry wasn’t behaving as family should. He was poking the tigress with a pointed stick.’