The Tooth Tattoo (37 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘Lived rough, begged for food, joined the homeless community. Vladivostok is already full of beggars and not the best place to be a vagrant. I spent a few nights in jail, got ill drinking bootleg vodka, survived two Russian winters. I’m not proud of some of the things I did to survive.’

‘You were there as long as that?’

‘A broken man. Psychologically, it took a long while to get over the shock of not being able to play the fiddle any longer. If I got back to the west I couldn’t foresee any future. From all I’d been told by my captors, I was the number one suspect for Emi’s murder in Vienna. The Brits would hand me over to the Viennese police. I didn’t have the strength to face all that. In the end I got some money – don’t ask how – and smartened up enough to travel again. Worked my way slowly across Europe. Actually passed through Vienna and visited the place where Emi’s body was found. Bit of a risk, but I wanted to do it. I know she wasn’t totally truthful with me, but she was under duress as well and she was sweet.’ He shrugged. ‘And here I am.’

‘Why? Why seek us out again?’

‘I saw in the papers about the Japanese girl murdered here
in Bath and thrown in the canal. The tooth tattoo. The interest in music. It seemed to link up with Emi’s murder and I want to find out the truth.’

Mel was trying to think how he could get rid of Harry. ‘I wish I could help, but …’

Harry shook his head. ‘I’m not looking for help from you. I’m here to warn you of what you could be getting into.’

Mel did his best to make light of it. ‘Good thing I don’t trade in ivory.’

‘I’m talking about that,’ Harry pointed under the bed. He’d spotted the viola case.

‘My instrument? Thanks, but I’m being ultra-careful with it, as you appreciate.’

‘I’m thinking about who owns it. I don’t know for certain that the guy who presented me with the Maggini is the same who owns your Amati. I don’t know for certain that he’s a high-up in the yakuza. All I can tell you is that I’ve looked online at the press accounts of when I was first reported missing in Budapest. They all say that when my hotel room was searched, my two Tertis Model violas were found. Not one of them mentions the Maggini. It must have been collected. For this to have happened so quickly, before even the police got there, someone must have known about my abduction – someone with inside knowledge of the yakuza, someone acting on behalf of the owner, Mr. Hamada.’

Mel felt a definite tingling sensation at the tip of his left little finger.

‘So, my friend, you’ve heard my story,’ Harry said, ‘and now it’s time for some straight talking from you.’

Mel shook his head. ‘I don’t have anything to say.’

‘I’m serious,’ Harry said. ‘This is how serious I am.’

The right hand had come out of his coat pocket holding a handgun, an automatic.

‘I
t’s bloody frustrating,’ Keith Halliwell said to those of the team who were listening, ‘but there’s no point in us buzzing around Bath like blue-arsed flies. The boss has put out an all-units call. Wait for the shout. It’ll come. Then we can reel him in.’

‘Is he dangerous?’ Paul Gilbert asked.

‘Lethal when DCs ask daft questions.’

‘I mean Harry Cornell.’

‘Anyone on the run has to be considered dangerous. After four years he’s probably got himself a shooter.’

‘He must know he’s taking a risk coming here. What’s he doing it for?’

‘How would I know? He’s the one you want to ask. Old scores, maybe. If he’s stalking the people he used to know, he must have something to settle with them.’

‘Could it be sour grapes that they replaced him in the band and he’s a forgotten man now?’

‘The
band
?’

‘Quartet.’

‘You could be right. These performers have inflated egos.’

‘The guy who replaced him had better watch out, then. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.’

Diamond treated himself to a later start. He’d worked overtime the evening before, not only visiting Ivan, but making a late trip to Manvers Street to set up the dragnet for Harry. He phoned in early. No news. It was too much to hope for a quick arrest.

He caught himself talking to the cat again as he put down food, a sure sign of stress. Raffles ignored him, and after a sniff ignored the pieces of salmon squeezed from the pouch and sat by the plate waiting, a way of informing a dim-witted owner that rabbit, lamb or beef were preferable every time. Cat food in packets of twelve always included some flavour Raffles rejected.

‘You’re too picky for your own good, Mr. Cat,’ Diamond said. ‘A contented mind is a continual feast. It’s a lesson in life.’

A short lesson. Ten minutes later he softened and put out a plate of lamb. Raffles had been Steph’s cat and he could almost hear her urging him to open another packet. So the cat got the continual feast and the contented mind.

The big man pottered around, making tea and toast until he noticed the message light winking on the kitchen phone. A call must have come in while he was shaving. He pressed
play
in case it was Manvers Street to say they’d found Harry Cornell.

The voice was Paloma’s.

He stopped everything, stood still and listened.

‘Peter, this is me. I expect you’re still hard at work on the case of those poor Japanese women. Well, I was thinking back to our Vienna trip and that little shrine of flowers we found by the canal. It may mean nothing at all, but on the other hand … Listen, I’ve been doing some research of my own and I ought to speak to you about it. Is there any chance we could meet? Let me know if you think I could be helpful.’

If you think I could be helpful
.

No need to think. This was Paloma wanting to meet again. He called her mobile.

She had switched it off. Nothing is ever simple. So he left a voicemail message saying he’d be grateful for any help she could give and would call her again to fix a time and place.

He’d not slept well. His brain had kept returning to Harry Cornell, asking why the missing violist had resurfaced after so long. Was the man dangerous, as Ivan believed? Almost certainly.

Emi Kojima had last been seen alive in Harry’s company late at night in October 2008, in the bar of their hotel in Vienna. She was a Tokyo prostitute who had mysteriously arrived in Vienna and turned up at one of the Staccati concerts. Working girls don’t make expensive trips to Europe. Someone must have funded her, and for a reason. She had some knowledge of classical music so she’d been chosen for this job. What was the job? Surely to learn more about Harry’s trading in netsuke – a lucrative private enterprise that was upsetting the big boys. Some criminal syndicate had arranged for Emi to sleep with Harry and get the truth about his dealings. She was later found dead with one of Harry’s netsuke hidden in her clothing. This suggested she’d stolen it as a sample of his wares, but was killed before she could report back and deliver the goods – which made Harry the prime suspect.

Any of the quartet, or Douglas Christmas, could testify in court that they’d witnessed the pair drinking together and stepping into the lift. It wasn’t too much to surmise that the action moved from the hotel bar to Harry’s room.

Harry, already deeply in debt to the mafia, needed his second income. He would have been alarmed when Emi got interested in his business activities.

Alarm, panic, violence. A deadly sequence.

The hotel where all this had happened backed onto the Wienfluss, which fed into the Danube canal, where the body was found.

Then Harry went missing in Budapest, the next stop on the quartet’s tour. With the mafia calling in his gambling debts and the yakuza closing in on his netsuke dealings, and the Vienna police likely to discover the body, his only sensible option had been to disappear.

As it turned out, Emi’s death was assumed to have been suicide and no one made the connection with the quartet. They had never been questioned about their enthusiastic fan and who she slept with.

Four years on, the quartet had re-formed and were based in Bath. If Harry took the slightest interest in his fellow
musicians, he’d have looked at the website. Curiosity may have brought him here, or envy, or the pull of the quartet-playing he loved and missed. Whatever the reason, he was in the city and a second Japanese woman had been strangled. By now, Harry would be desperate to know if there were fresh suspicions about the Vienna death and if his old companions had been questioned and how much they remembered.

This would explain the stalking.

Diamond tried putting himself in Harry’s situation. There was a limit to what he could learn from a distance. He needed to speak to one of the Staccati. Who would he approach? Not the prickly old Soviet defector, Ivan. Not Cat, who would blab to everyone and think it a huge joke. And certainly not Anthony whose tunnel vision recognised little else but music.

Which left Mel, the new man, an unknown quantity for Harry, but without direct knowledge of what had happened in Vienna. As a fellow violist Mel ought to be a twin soul. And well placed to report on what the others were saying these days. This explained why Harry’s car had been seen outside Mel’s lodgings. And why Mel had been followed into Sydney Gardens. It was even possible Harry had been on the point of approaching Mel that morning in the gardens – neutral ground – when Diamond and Ingeborg had appeared.

At the cost of a decent night’s sleep, Diamond had a better grasp of events. A meeting with Mel was next on his agenda.

But not quite.

As he was about to leave the house, his phone rang. He snatched it up and heard Paloma’s voice: ‘Peter? I was in the shower when you called. Any chance we could meet?’

‘Every chance,’ he said. ‘Can I come now?’

Her Georgian house in Lyncombe Vale doubled as home and business premises. Maybe it was understandable after their recent history that she chose to see him upstairs in her office with her mahogany desk between them and her personal assistant Judy in the same room working on the computer. Once in Vogue was a thriving international company that supplied
period illustrations for television and stage designers. Two large bedrooms had been knocked into one to store the prints, books, bound magazines and newspapers. It was a huge archive, yet you had the sense that everything had its place and Paloma knew exactly where each item was to be found.

‘Coffee?’

‘Too early, thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s not my caffeine rush hour yet. But don’t let me stop you.’

‘How’s work?’ Her unease was obvious. They were both as stiff-backed as guests at a state dinner. And Judy’s presence didn’t help.

‘Hectic, as usual. Yours?’

‘Much the same. You look tired.’

‘Do I? It must be all the clubbing.’

He wasn’t going to ask how her personal life was going. All too painfully he was minded of the tall guy he’d seen her with at the concert, the one he had dubbed the dog’s dinner.

‘I got your message about Vienna,’ he prompted her.

‘Oh, yes. Vienna,’ she said with obvious relief. ‘The little shrine of flowers by the canal. I’ve been thinking about them. The woman who died was Japanese, you discovered?’

‘Yes, and we thought she committed suicide, but we now believe she was murdered.’

‘Like the woman found in Bath?’

‘Strangled, yes. That’s the theory.’

‘Don’t you know for certain?’

‘The body was returned to Japan and cremated. Our suspicions are based on circumstantial evidence, a growing amount of it.’

‘You sound confident.’

‘I am. She’d been working as a prostitute in Tokyo. Then she turned up in Vienna at one of the Staccati concerts. We reckon she was employed by the Japanese mafia.’

‘Doing what – apart from the obvious?’

‘Basically, spying. One of the quartet – the one who later went missing – was dealing in netsuke made from mammoth ivory. It got up the noses of the mob because they wanted
the monopoly on the netsuke trade. So they ordered Emi to find out more.’

‘Who was the dealer?’

‘The violist. Not the one we heard at Corsham. He’s new. This was a man called Harry Cornell.’

‘And he was in Vienna?’

‘In two thousand and eight, when all this happened.’

‘Did he murder her?’

‘It looks a strong bet.’

‘Was he a Brit?’

Diamond nodded. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Let me tell you about the flowers. Do you remember the bunch I found lying on the pavement and pushed back into the wall?’

‘The lilies.’

‘We called them lilies and it’s true they are a variety of lily. There was no message with them that I could see. Most of the dead flowers were bunches of carnations, some with cards attached, with Japanese writing. I assume they were put there by Japanese people who knew the woman.’

‘I expect so.’

‘The Japanese like carnations. But I was more interested in the living flowers, the long-stemmed ones we called lilies. Do you remember them, with the pinkish-white star shapes and long yellow-tipped stamens?’

‘Just about,’ he said.

She opened a book that she’d marked with a Post-it note and handed it across the desk. ‘They were asphodels.’

He remembered them now. ‘I wouldn’t have known. Is it important?’

‘I don’t know. You must decide. They have a strong association with death. In Greek mythology, the underworld, where dead souls went, had asphodel meadows. The best place to find yourself in was the Elysian fields, where the blessed went. The asphodel meadows were a stage lower, for indifferent and ordinary souls. You’d probably sinned a bit if you ended up there.’

‘Just a bit?’

‘Let’s say you weren’t considered a total write-off.’

‘I think I know where the write-offs went.’

‘Happily it doesn’t concern us.’

‘Yet.’

She conjured up a smile. ‘Speak for yourself. Do you know about the language of the flowers?’

‘I’ve heard there is one,’ he said. ‘All Greek to me.’

‘No, this isn’t Greek. This is English. The asphodel has a meaning all its own, a precise message that hasn’t changed in two hundred years. You’ll find it in pre-Victorian books and even today on the internet. It’s this: “My regret follows you to the grave”.’