The Tooth Tattoo

28

Out in the street, Ingeborg Smith and Keith Halliwell were awaiting instructions.

Diamond was chirpier than he had been for weeks. ‘Top of the morning to you. Raring to go, are you?’

All he got was puzzled looks.

‘I need statements from all four, an account of their movements from nine last night until I arrived this morning. They’ll probably tell lies and I want it as evidence.’

‘All of them will lie?’ Ingeborg said.

‘Maybe not. Anthony may not say anything at all.’

‘Really?’

‘The little he does say is going to be true. He’ll need drawing out, though. I’m not sure how much he knows.’

‘Is it a conspiracy then?’ Halliwell asked.

‘It could become one. This is like nothing else I’ve come across, four strikingly different individuals who don’t mind sniping at each other, but in reality are as close as atoms in a nucleus. They must stick together to survive as performers and their music-making matters more to them than morality or law-breaking. They’re not comfortable going it alone, any of them. They have no family commitments. The Staccati is their family and quartet-playing is what they do. One goes, and it’s curtains for all of them.’

‘A few mixed metaphors there, but we get the point,’ Ingeborg said.

Diamond gave her a pained look. ‘Do you want to go through it with a red pen?’

She bit her lip. ‘Sorry, guv.’

‘Are they as good as they think they are?’ Halliwell said to defuse the tension.

‘Musically as good as it gets. Morally, the jury are out,’ Ingeborg said, diplomatically picking up Diamond’s theme.

‘Better dive in, then,’ he told them. ‘Who’s going to be first to split the atom?’

With that, he lifted the Do Not Cross tape and entered the secure area.

He was handed a package wrapped in polythene.

‘XL for you,’ the crime scene woman said.

‘I’m taking that as a compliment.’ He stepped to one side and started the undignified process of stepping into the protective suit. These things weren’t designed for people with more flesh than figure. A well-cut suit hides a lot.

Inside the forensic tent three similarly clad crime scene officers were at work. He had to squeeze around the open doors of the car and step over legs and equipment to make his presence known to the police surgeon, who was standing over Harry Cornell’s corpse.

‘Anything I should be told, doc?’ Diamond asked.

‘I can tell you one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You need a forensic pathologist for this, not a family doctor. They’ve sent for Bertram Sealy. He knows his stuff, whatever you and I may feel about his corpse-side manner. I’ve done my bit. Life is extinct. I’m off to see someone who really needs me.’

‘Before you go, did you look at the bullet hole?’

‘I did, and the bullet passed right through the head,’ the doctor said. ‘But don’t expect any CSI stuff from me.’

The body was still in the position Diamond had first seen, head against the steering wheel with only the right side of the face visible. ‘Would this be the exit wound?’

‘We can agree on that, going by the stellate shape,’ the doctor said, ignoring his own injunction. ‘I believe that’s due to bone fragments being forced out by the action of the bullet. If you lift the head to look at the other side, you’ll find a neat round hole where it went in. Is that what you wanted to know?’

‘Thanks. It confirms what I thought.’ He paused. ‘No chance you could estimate the time of death?’

‘Yes.’

Diamond’s eyes opened wide. ‘You can?’

‘I mean yes, there’s no chance.’

Still wearing his forensic jumpsuit, Diamond returned to the house. Ivan and Cat remained in the sitting room, sombre and silent. They each gave his mode of dress a long look, but passed no comment.

‘Are we under way with the statement-taking?’ he asked.

Cat nodded. ‘They’re limited by the poky accommodation. The young woman is in the kitchen with Anthony, and Mel is upstairs with the man. We were just saying it could take a while.’

Ivan made a point of looking at his watch. ‘We’d better be through before lunch, all of us. We’re due in the recording studio at two.’

‘What are you hoping to record?’ Diamond asked.

‘There’s no hoping about it. The session is fixed. The Grosse Fuge.’

‘Can’t say I know it,’ Diamond said. ‘Can you whistle a few bars?’

Ivan scowled.

‘Beethoven,’ Cat said. ‘It’s in our contract to cut a disc in aid of the university.’

‘If you get there I may listen in.’

Ivan stared through him. Obviously anyone who hadn’t heard of the Grosse Fuge was a waste of space.

Dr. Bertram Sealy arrived within the hour holding his trademark flask of coffee and the case he called his guts-bag. Diamond watched from a distance, allowing him to make some progress before going out to join him, wondering what insult Bath’s least congenial pathologist would have for him.

Clad in his own rather superior pale blue overall, Sealy was on his knees by the car studying the victim’s hands. Without looking up, he said, ‘Right up your alley, this, Peter Diamond. Grotty little backstreet tucked away between the railway and the cemetery. Home from home for you with your charity-shop suits. Are you enjoying yourself?’

‘I always enjoy seeing a genius at work,’ Diamond said. ‘Where did you buy your Andy Pandy outfit? The pound shop?’

Sealy stood up. Ever prepared with all the comforts, he’d been kneeling on a rubber cushion. ‘The deceased isn’t much of a fashion plate either. Do we know who he is?’

‘A viola player who was once in a famous quartet.’

‘He wouldn’t have played too famously with a digit missing from his left hand,’ Sealy said.

‘It hadn’t passed me by.’

‘I presume he was like Charlie Chaplin.’

Diamond frowned. ‘How does Chaplin come into it?’

‘Played the fiddle left-handed, didn’t he? You want to sharpen up your observational skills. What I’m saying is that this fellow must have done the same, used his left hand to hold the bow, so as to do the fingering with his right.’

‘That isn’t so,’ Diamond said. ‘He played the orthodox way. Couldn’t play at all after losing the finger.’

‘Should have been more careful, then.’

‘It wasn’t an accident. Have you looked at the head wound yet?’

Sealy was not ready to move on. ‘Are you one hundred percent certain he was right-handed?’

‘I’ve seen pictures of him playing.’

Sealy tapped his chin with his surgical-gloved finger. ‘That’s odd.’

‘The exit wound being on the right side of the head?’

Diamond said.

‘Well, yes.’

‘I thought so, too.’ Diamond aired his new bit of expertise. ‘It is the exit wound because it’s stellate, agreed?’

‘Swallowed a forensic manual, have we?’ Sealy said. ‘This is the problem. The bullet entered the head from the left side. Did a right-handed man put the gun to his left temple? Or use his left hand to fire with? Difficult and unlikely. Ergo if he really was right-handed he didn’t fire the gun himself. It was murder.’

‘From close range?’

‘Look at this.’ Sealy grasped the hair on the dead man’s head and pulled it back far enough to display the circular hole on the left side. ‘It’s too neat for a contact discharge and there’s no muzzle stamp, but there is what we call an abrasion collar caused by friction, heating and dirt. That’s close range.’

‘Right.’

‘The burning and powder tattooing wouldn’t be present if the gun was fired from a distance of more than, let’s say, a metre. Do you have any suspects?’

‘Several.’

‘Better look for GSR, then.’

‘You’ve got me there.’ Diamond had a blind spot for acronyms and abbreviations.

‘Gunshot residue. The thing was fired in a confined space. And don’t just check the hands and clothes. It can get into nostrils, ear canals, places you wouldn’t think of.’

Diamond wasn’t ignorant of forensic procedures, but he didn’t look forward to literally getting up the noses of the quartet without arresting them. He’d only just confirmed that murder had been committed and any evidence he had against the four was circumstantial. They wouldn’t think it a privilege to be asked for swab samples.

Sealy was still talking about the gun. ‘I wonder where the bullet ended up if it didn’t smash the window.’

‘He may have ducked,’ Diamond said, ‘in which case the angle could have been downwards and we’d find it lodged in the bodywork.’

One of the CSI team spoke up. ‘We already found it in the offside door, sir.’

‘Where is it, then?’

‘In an evidence bag with my boss. It’s a nine millimetre. Fits the Glock 17 that you see between the seats.’

‘Thanks.’ Diamond turned back to Sealy. ‘Is it too much to ask for an estimate?’

‘Of what? My fee?’

‘Time of death.’

‘Has any pathologist ever given you an accurate time of death? If so, he was either a bloody good guesser or the killer.’

‘Thanks for nothing, then.’

‘If I could give you an answer, believe me I would triple my fee.’

Diamond exited the tent and squirmed out of the protective suit. He’d formed a pretty clear picture of the killing. At some point last evening or early this morning Harry had parked the car opposite Anthony’s lodging with the intention of visiting him. His proven method was to sit in the car and observe before doing anything else. He may have spent the night there. The gun, his protection, would be kept somewhere handy, in a pocket, or the glove compartment, or lying on the passenger seat.

The killer had approached the car and seen Harry sitting behind the wheel. They knew each other, so it was not immediately a conflict situation. Harry hadn’t apparently wound down his window to speak. He must have reached across and opened the door on the passenger side, allowing the killer to lean inside or sit beside him and talk. At some point Harry must have mentioned the gun, as he had when speaking to Mel. The moment it was produced was the opportunity for the killer to grab it and fire at point blank range.

An impulsive killing.

The short period following the shot was critical. Had anyone in the nearby houses overheard? Quite likely. But if they went to their windows and looked out, what was there to see? Just the usual line of parked cars. The killer would wait five or ten minutes before quitting the scene. And there was time for a decision. Take the murder weapon away, or leave it close to Harry’s hand to suggest suicide? Maybe attempt to wipe it clean of prints and DNA first. Press it against Harry’s hand before placing it between the seats, and then slip quietly away.

But in the pressure of the moment basic errors had been made. The most obvious had already been made clear: a right-handed man doesn’t put a gun to the left side of his head. Suicide was never an option.

Firing the shot inside the car was another mistake. Sealy was right about gun shot residue, but in addition there would be DNA from the killer deposited on and around the passenger seat. It was a maxim of forensic science that every contact leaves a trace. Wiping the gun wouldn’t work either. These weren’t sterile conditions. Traces would remain.

All very encouraging for the investigation.

But there’s always a snag. The snag here was the familiar one that bedevilled modern detectives. Forensic science won’t be hurried. This was a complex scene. The car had been lived in for days, if not weeks. Talk about traces: it teemed with traces, of skin particles, hair, food, blanket fibres and all the other droplets and driblets that are deposited in a car every time it is used.

The evidence would be agonisingly slow in emerging. Weeks, probably.

Diamond needed a swifter result. He returned to the house.

Ivan and Cat were still waiting to have their statements taken. Ivan was like a corked volcano.

‘Can’t you speed this up? You’re supposed to be in charge.’

This was a helpful opening. ‘All right,’ Diamond said. ‘We can make a start right away.’

‘On what?’ Ivan said. ‘My statement as to where I was last night? It comes down to one sentence. You visited me yourself and I didn’t leave my lodgings until this morning when I got the call from Cat.’

Cat said, ‘Mine is a one-sentence statement, too. A seven forty-five call from Anthony’s landlady.’

‘Before we go into that,’ Diamond said, ‘I need some help from you both about what happened four years ago in Budapest.’

‘Budapest?’ Ivan said as if Diamond had named Timbuktu.

Cat was faster onto it. ‘Where Harry went AWOL? Not much we can help with there, your honour. It was a mystery at the time and I’m not much clearer now.’

‘You told me you searched the streets for him.’

‘It was panic stations. Ivan can tell you. We had a concert to give. Brilliant and talented as we are, we haven’t yet discovered how to play a string quartet without a violist.’

‘Was it unusual for Harry to let you down?’

‘Unheard of,’ Cat said. ‘Ivan will bear that out.’ She almost had to nudge him to speak up.

‘That is true,’ Ivan said after a pause for thought. ‘He would go off alone for hours on end — and we now know where — and always be in time for concerts and rehearsals. He had a playboy streak, but there was a responsibility there as well.’

‘And a sensitive side,’ Cat said.

‘Sensitive in what way?’

‘Whenever we performed in Vienna, he would visit Beethoven’s grave in the Central Cemetery and place a single sprig of rosemary there, for remembrance.’

‘The language of flowers?’ Diamond said with an upsurge of interest.

‘It is, isn’t it? I don’t know all the meanings, but Harry must have.’

He tucked that away in his memory. ‘What interests me in particular is what happened to his viola after he disappeared.’

‘The Maggini?’

‘Going by what he told Mel, it must have gone missing from his hotel room before the police made their search. A valuable antique instrument.’

‘A thing of beauty,’ Ivan said.

Cat asked Diamond, ‘What are you getting at? Do you think he took it with him?’

‘Highly unlikely,’ Diamond said. ‘He was doing the rounds of the shops trying to offload the ivory netsuke when the yakuza kidnapped him.’

‘Well now. That is a point,’ Cat said. ‘Of course he wouldn’t take the Maggini with him. He had it on trust and he looked after it. We’re all using priceless pieces of wood and gut to make music, including Mel. My cello is a Strad. Are you thinking our instruments are behind these crimes?’

‘People are behind them,’ Ivan said.

‘Of course, O Wise One,’ she said, ‘but people can be motivated by greed.’

Ivan snorted in impatience.

Diamond turned to him. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘The instruments have nothing to do with any of this,’ Ivan said emphatically.

‘You sound confident.’

‘Because I am.’

‘So was it you who removed the Maggini from Harry’s room?’

Ivan flushed scarlet as if the suggestion was monstrous. He took in a deep breath. Then he sighed, his shoulders sagged and he admitted, ‘I took it into safe-keeping as a precaution. It was eventually returned to the true owner.’

‘I wish you’d told me earlier.’

‘There was an issue of confidence. The same owner presented me with the Guarnerius I play. He pledges us to secrecy.’

‘Who is the owner?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say.’

‘You won’t be at liberty much longer if you don’t say.’

Another sigh. For all his tough talk, Ivan’s resistance was habitually paper-thin. ‘His name is Hamada and he is a Japanese collector of rare and beautiful instruments. He heard of Harry’s disappearance and asked me to make sure that the viola was safe. I gave a generous tip to one of the chambermaids and she let me into the room knowing I was a colleague of Harry’s.’

‘When you say “heard of Harry’s disappearance” it begs a question.’

‘Was Mr. Hamada a party to the kidnapping? Definitely not,’ Ivan said. ‘He’s a powerful man who guards his privacy, but his intentions towards us are wholly supportive.’

Diamond wasn’t convinced. ‘He knew about the kidnapping before the police were on the case. He must have links to the yakuza.’

‘That’s not impossible,’ Ivan admitted. ‘But yakuza isn’t a unified group. It’s a generic name given to more than twenty Japanese gangs who compete for the best pickings from organised crime. Their codes and traditions, including the amputation of fingers, may be similar, but they rival each other. Mr. Hamada’s interest in the quartet has been positive from the start. I’ve known him for years and he wants his instruments played by the best musicians and in the world’s top concert halls. Not long ago he came to Bath and presented our new member Mel with a priceless Amati viola. That isn’t a man who would be party to the kidnapping of one of us.’

This was a new insight for Diamond, and believable. A super-rich man might well keep tabs on the yakuza to know what crimes were committed by some of its many factions.

‘You say you’ve known him years.’

‘I’ve only met him a few times, but we keep in touch. I delivered the Maggini to him personally in London some months after recovering it. He entrusted me with it until I could place it into his hands.’

‘You didn’t tell the rest of us,’ Cat said.

Ivan shrugged. ‘You know what he’s like.’

Cat turned to Diamond. ‘If it’s any help, I can also vouch for Mr. Hamada. He’s on our side. I’m sure if he’d had the power to stop them kidnapping Harry, he would have done so.’

‘It was a disaster for us all,’ Ivan said. ‘Harry should never have got into so much financial trouble.’

‘If we’d known the full facts, we would have rallied round,’ Cat said. ‘We suspected he was into something flaky at the time, but none of us guessed it was so serious.’

Ivan said with a shake of the head, ‘The idiot.’

‘Too late in the day to chuck insults after him,’ Cat said. ‘The poor boy’s had a hellish time ever since and now he’s dead.’

‘We all had a huge stake in the quartet’s existence,’ Ivan said, addressing Diamond. ‘Our professional lives were bound up in it. We tried to look out for each other. I was usually the spokesman and leader. Cat was like a mother to us all and kept us in good spirits. Anthony with his focused brain is like a child in some ways and needs practical help. And Harry with his laid-back manner kept us from getting too intense about our music or anything else. It was a nice balance.’

This touching tribute to the Staccati came to an end just as Ingeborg emerged from the kitchen with Anthony.

‘All done?’ Diamond asked.

Ingeborg nodded and ran a hand through her blonde hair. The session had obviously been stressful.

‘Anything I should be told?’

She shook her head.

Then Keith Halliwell came down the stairs followed by Mel.

‘We could murder a coffee,’ he said.

‘They did it!’ Cat said at once. ‘Take them down to the nick and throw the book at them.’

‘Do you want one?’ Halliwell asked Ingeborg.

She shook her head. ‘Why do you think I picked the kitchen for my interviewing?’

Diamond said, ‘The last two statements shouldn’t take long.’

Ivan said, ‘After that, are we free to go?’

‘I’ll need you all to read them through and sign them, but that can be done at the end of this afternoon’s recording.’

There were smiles of relief from three of the musicians. Even Anthony managed a nod.