‘Well...’ she started to say.
‘Good, I’ll need someone to stop me from clapping at the wrong point. I’d prefer you to John Leaman if you can make it.’
‘John knows far more about classical music.’
‘But you’re better company. Have you got a little black dress? This sounds like a smart occasion.’
Ingeborg didn’t pursue the matter of the little black dress. She thought she had another escape route. ‘I heard these concerts are hard to get into. There’s a long waiting list.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get Georgina to pull some strings. She moves in high circles.’
‘Perhaps she’d like to partner you.’
‘Get outta here.’
The team descended on the Michael Tippett Centre early the same afternoon. They commandeered four practice rooms for interviews before any of the musicians showed up. As a result they were able to separate the quartet as they arrived. A united front might have been difficult to deal with.
Anthony Metcalf was the first. A glaze came over his eyes and he allowed himself to be escorted into a side room by Leaman. As a result, Ingeborg was able to inform Mel Farran when he showed up that interviewing was already under way.
She’d met Mel on her previous visit here. Knowing who she was, he should have been calm, if not relaxed. So it came as a surprise when he appeared startled and on the verge of panic, clutching his violin case to his chest as if Ingeborg was about to snatch it away.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’re not in any kind of trouble. We’re looking for help with an ongoing enquiry.’
Still twitchy, he allowed himself to be shown into the woodwind room.
Ivan Bogdanov was difficult in another way. ‘It’s out of the question,’ he told Halliwell. ‘We have a performance tomorrow and we need to practise.’
‘The sooner we get through, the more time you’ll have,’ Halliwell said.
‘And if I refuse?’
‘I arrest you and do it at the police station, ask to see your work permit and proof of identity, take your fingerprints and DNA.’
This put a swift end to Ivan’s protest.
Diamond was left to meet Cat Kinsella when she appeared, short of breath, grasping her cello. ‘Sorry, young man,’ she told him as he brandished his ID. ‘No autographs now. I’m late for rehearsal.’
He told her what he was there for. Shaking her head, she allowed him to escort her to the remaining practice room. Once she had rested her cello case against the wall and perched herself precariously on a stool behind a drum kit, Diamond drew up another stool and showed her a picture of Mari.
‘Ever seen this young woman before?’
She shook her head.
‘She’s a major fan. We think she came to Bath specially to see you.’
‘Not me, detective. One of the guys, possibly, but not me. I don’t have female fans, nor male, now I think about it. I’m past all that.’
‘The passions are on their side. You’d only find out if they threw themselves at you.’
She chuckled at that. ‘Get real. I’m a cellist. I don’t strut about the stage in skimpy underwear and sequins.’
‘But you won’t deny there are classical music groupies out there who follow the quartets?’
‘There may be a few crazies. Is that really what she was? She looks normal enough in the picture.’
‘She could have had a crush on one of you.’
‘You’d better find out from the men.’
‘We’re doing that right now. Have you ever performed in Yokohama?’
‘Never.’
‘Anywhere else in Japan?’
‘Tokyo a few times.’ Her face softened as she thought back. ‘There’s a place called Katsushika Symphony Hills. I remember it because of the Kat bit. Huge. Two halls, one seating over a thousand and the other three hundred. In my innocence I thought they’d booked the small hall for us. I was wrong. Every seat was taken in the thousand-seater, including one in the front row occupied by an urn containing the ashes of a man who’d booked to see us but died a few days before.’
‘That said a lot.’
‘Actually, no. Not a damn word.’
He smiled. ‘So if Mari had come to see you, she’d have had to travel to Tokyo. That’s not a vast distance from Yokohama.’
‘I’ll take your word for that. Geography passed me by when I was in school. Let me tell you something about quartet playing. You have the score on a stand in front of you with a little light over it. If you look up and you can see anything at all above the light, it’s rows of identical heads looking faintly like the beads on an abacus. You don’t recognise people.’
‘Thanks for explaining,’ Diamond said, genuinely pleased she was speaking more freely than she had at the start. ‘Let’s talk about the quartet. You were one of the founders, right?’
‘With Ivan, yes. Back in the last century, that was, when I was young and easy, as the poet said. To be truthful, I wasn’t easy, I was bloody difficult. Always have been. I’m surprised Ivan ever asked me to join, but the time was right and I jumped at the chance.’
‘You were a soloist before?’
‘Going right back, I was one of those child monsters, an infant prodigy. We’re Liverpool Irish, the Kinsellas, and my dad played the fiddle around the pubs. My mum was red-hot on the squeezebox. They got me started early and pushed me hard. Recorder, flute, piano, violin. I can knock out a tune on almost anything. Don’t ask me why, but I was drawn to the cello. There are all kinds of Freudian theories I draw the line at discussing in polite company, or police company, come to that. I started to play when I was nine and must have looked ridiculous wrestling with it. You need to be an athlete. It’s easy for a cellist to get musclebound. But I adored it — the sound, the sweet, rich voice was all that I wanted. So at a young age I got through the drudgery of mastering the thing and won a scholarship to music school in Manchester. You must have heard of Chetham’s.’
Diamond tried to look as if he had.
Cat was into her story anyway. ‘They worked wonders with me and put me in for Young Musician of the Year. Didn’t win, but made the final and got noticed. I must tell you — and you won’t believe this — in those days I was thin enough to slot into a toaster. Long, blonde hair that I wore in a pigtail. Anyway I learned the repertoire and at fourteen had the cheek to play the Dvorák with a youth orchestra and overnight I was touted as the next Jacqueline du Pré. They wanted me to loosen my hair and record the Elgar looking all frail and angelic. That’s what she made her debut with and is mainly remembered for, but of course she could play anything. She was the real deal. Did you see the movie?’
‘Somehow it passed me by,’ Diamond said.
‘Far better to watch some footage of Jackie herself. There’s a lovely video of her with Barbirolli. And to think that they wanted me to ape her just to get famous. Catriona Kinsella, aged fourteen and a half, dug her heels in and said she wanted to be herself. Sucks to the Elgar and sucks to wearing a long white dress. It was a teenage rebellion in a music context. Everyone, my parents, the school, the marketing people, bore down on me and said I was flushing a brilliant career down the toilet. The battle went on for almost a year. I started eating, seriously stuffing myself with chocolate, fried foods, pastry, the lot. In a matter of weeks it started showing and in a year I was the lump of lard I am today.’
‘Your way of taking control of your life?’
She raised her right thumb. ‘Tell that to Weightwatchers. I shaved my head as well in case anyone missed the point. I continued to play, of course. The joy has never gone away. I’ve played as a soloist with some of the great orchestras. Vivaldi wrote twenty-seven concertos and I’ve learned almost all of them. What I absolutely refused to do was put myself in the clutches of the popular classical music merchants. If you follow music at all you’ll know the process. They take second-rate artists with pretty faces, groom them, call them the voice or the player of the century and turn them into stars, whether they’re singers, violinists, pianists. The quality of the sound is crap, they’re off-key, and the great gullible public doesn’t seem to notice. I could find you literally hundreds of finer voices and better players completely overlooked.’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I’ve lost my thread, haven’t I? This is one of my pet beefs.’