The Tooth Tattoo(90)

‘Someone who fancies Japanese girls?’ Halliwell said.

‘Or hates them.’

Paul Gilbert was still grappling with the concept. ‘Something doesn’t add up. If she was working as a prostitute in Vienna and got picked up and killed by one of the Staccati, the fact that she went to violin school is neither here nor there. That was all in the past.’

Ingeborg looked as if she was in free fall. In her eagerness to join up the dots she’d missed this basic flaw in the logic. ‘Now you put it like that, the music link may be a red herring. It must be what she was doing in Vienna that got her killed.’

‘That makes sense to me,’ Diamond said, moving smoothly on. ‘Let’s stay with it.’

‘If we’re talking about the Staccati in Vienna,’ Halliwell said, ‘this was before Mel Farran joined. There are only two males in the frame, the old guy and the silent one.’

‘ “Old” is a relative term,’ Diamond said. ‘He could be my age.’

No one else spoke a word.

‘Losing some of his hair doesn’t make him decrepit. But as you say, either of these might have gone looking for paid sex. And we shouldn’t ignore the third man.’ Diamond stopped and looked around the room. ‘Do I hear someone whistling?’

A few heads turned towards the source of the Harry Lime Theme.

Caught again.

Paul Gilbert seemed to shrink within himself.

Diamond could have hung the young man out to dry. Instead he gave a disarming comment. ‘It sounds better on a zither.’

Relief all round.

Diamond wasn’t departing from his script. ‘The third man – Harry Cornell – known to go off on missions he discussed with nobody. He’s in the frame with the others. It’s possible he was with this woman and killed her. The next city they visited was Budapest and he went missing there.’

Leaman was encouraged to develop the scenario. ‘He dumped her in the canal in Vienna and he expected the body would be discovered any time soon, so he went into hiding.’

‘Yeah, down the sewers,’ Halliwell said.

‘Don’t try me,’ Diamond said. ‘The joke’s been done.’

Halliwell clearly wasn’t impressed by the third man theory. ‘For this to make any sense, Harry would have stayed in hiding for four years and turned up again in Bath and killed another Japanese woman. For Christ’s sake, why?’

Ingeborg said, ‘We haven’t discussed the motive.’

Leaman agreed. ‘All we have is the vague idea that some nutter has a kink about Japanese women.’

‘Two very different women,’ Ingeborg added.

Gilbert said, ‘Should we be checking all the cities the Staccati have visited for unsolved murders of Japanese women?’

‘Speak for yourself,’ someone murmured.

‘A serial killer?’ Diamond said.

Gilbert hesitated. ‘That’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Fair point. Do that, would you, Paul? We have a list of all their gigs for sixteen years, thanks to John Leaman.’

Gilbert looked as if he’d just grown older by all of those years. ‘Me? How would I do that?’

‘Interpol. That’s why they exist, for something like this.’

The young man’s face relaxed. ‘Thanks, guv.’

‘Then if they’re unable to confirm anything it’s a matter of trawling through the international press.’

The appeal of teasing Gilbert was that every emotion was as vivid on his face as if he was a silent film actor.

‘Don’t despair. A lot of it’s digitised.’

‘The Japanese papers should be helpful,’ Halliwell said.

Ingeborg said, ‘This is getting mean. You’d better come clean, guv. Are we seriously looking at a serial killer?’

‘Personally, I think it’s unlikely,’ Diamond said. ‘A series of killings would have shown up on the radar before now. The Japanese police are no slouches. So it won’t be necessary to go back all those years, Paul. But it’s not impossible some maniac has just started on a psychopathic career, and I’m serious about checking for a similar case in the past five years. Meanwhile for the rest of us it’s back to the nitty-gritty of probing the secret lives of our musicians. And I’m not ruling out their manager. He flew out to Vienna while they were performing there.’

‘Is Mel still in the frame?’ Ingeborg said. Her tone suggested he ought not to be. Mel had made a favourable impression on her when she interviewed him. ‘He wasn’t around when the first girl was killed in Vienna.’

‘You saw him at the concert,’ Diamond said. ‘Of the four, who looked the most nervous?’