‘The part that matters is that we met the manager,’ Diamond said. ‘We weren’t there for the music.’
‘What did you make of him?’ Keith Halliwell asked.
‘Douglas Christmas?’ Ingeborg said. ‘A smooth operator. I guess you need someone like that fronting a cultural group. He’d make a good impression abroad with his old-world charm.’
‘Rather less with you?’ Halliwell said.
‘Charming people always have a hidden agenda.’
He grinned. ‘If you’re a blonde.’
The CID team were all present and there was a sense of anticipation. Diamond’s case conferences tended to be informal, for whoever happened to be around. This one had been scheduled in advance as not to be missed.
‘Listen up, people,’ he said. ‘Yesterday as you know an international dimension was added to the case. It emerged that another Japanese woman went missing in a city where the Staccati were performing – in this case, Vienna, in 2008 – and was found dead some time after in the Danube canal. We can’t be certain of a link, but it has to be investigated.’
While Diamond was speaking, Ingeborg pinned a new photo to the display board. Posed against a whitewashed wall, a woman’s face making no effort to please stared forward from the centre of the frame. This was no family snap. Everyone in the room knew a mugshot when they saw one.
Diamond continued, ‘Points of similarity. One, her nationality, of course. Two, the body was recovered from a city waterway. Three, she was submerged too long for a cause of death to be determined. Four, no obvious injuries. Five, she was clothed. Six, there was no great alarm when she went missing. And seven, she died at about the time the Staccati were in town.’
He waited for that to take root.
‘And these are the differences. One, this woman, Miss Emi Kojima, was about five years older than Mari Hitomi. Two, she’d been out of touch with her family for rather longer. Three, she was found with a netsuke under her T-shirt. That’s a small antique ornament of a particular design that led the Viennese police to deduce she took her own life.’
‘But it could have been planted by her killer,’ John Leaman said, keen as always to chip in.
‘Goes without saying.’ Diamond folded his arms and lulled everyone into thinking there was little else to report. ‘Nothing we don’t know already, you’re telling yourselves. But I asked Ingeborg to run a search on the Vienna victim and she’s discovered some background that I’m sure you’ll agree is new and significant.’ He turned to Ingeborg. ‘Over to you.’
‘Getting straight to it,’ she said, ‘from an early age Emi Kojima attended one of the famous Tokyo violin schools.’
Murmurs of interest rippled through the room.
‘Music again?’ John Leaman said.
‘She was said to have been an exceptionally gifted player. They take them young and get them up to an amazing standard. But at seventeen she was caught in possession of cocaine and asked to leave the school. After that she seems to have left home and drifted into petty crime and prostitution. She lived in one-room in a notorious Tokyo slum. The picture you see was taken after an arrest, one of many. Her family despaired of getting her back to some kind of normality. A sad story, but far from uncommon.’
Most eyes had returned to the photo on the display board. Emi Kojima’s jaded look seemed to confirm that she had been pulled in and charged so often that it had no meaning for her.
‘So,’ Diamond said, ‘we can add one more point of similarity: an interest in classical music. And one difference: this woman had a police record.’
‘How did she make it to Vienna if she was in poverty?’ Halliwell asked.
‘Three guesses. She wasn’t there on a city break.’
‘Are we talking organised crime?’
‘We could be.’
‘Trafficking?’
‘That’s well possible.’
‘To work as a hooker in Europe?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Excuse me,’ Paul Gilbert said, ‘but how would this link up with the string quartet? None of them are Japanese.’
‘Doesn’t stop one of them paying for sex with her,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Guys on tour for weeks on end.’
‘Classical musicians?’ Gilbert said in disbelief.
‘They need to get their rocks off, same as you, ducky,’ Ingeborg said.
Young Gilbert turned puce and everyone else enjoyed the moment.
‘He’s right to ask the question,’ Diamond said. ‘It comes down to this: did one of the Staccati pick up Miss Kojima in Vienna and kill her, and also Miss Hitomi in Bath?’