‘It hasn’t held them back. They were very successful, up there with the best, doing concerts across the world and making recordings — until the viola player dropped out.’
‘Dropped out or dropped dead?’
‘He went missing on one of the foreign tours and wasn’t heard of again.’
‘Ah, yes. Harry...?’
‘Cornell.’
‘Cat told me about him.’
‘It threw them right off course. Big efforts were made to find him. Interpol were notified. The theory seems to be that he gambled heavily.’
‘On what?’
‘Casino stuff. They think he got on the wrong side of some bad people and was taken out.’
‘Gambling doesn’t fit my idea of a classical musician.’
‘It comes with the territory. Quartets, in particular. Four is the right number for card games. The Budapest were well known for playing bridge, and for high stakes. I think the Amadeus preferred poker.’
‘But that’s in-house. You’re telling me Harry Cornell played with professionals.’
‘And rather badly. It’s the best guess, that’s all.’
‘I still can’t see it, a serious musician wasting his time gambling.’
‘Plenty have, from Mozart to Elgar. It could be to do with calculating the odds. There’s a well-known link between music and maths.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Diamond said. ‘So when Harry went missing, why didn’t they get a quick replacement? They were famous. They could take their pick.’
‘It’s not so simple. For a long time they expected he would turn up again so they couldn’t offer anyone regular work. They performed with stand-ins who didn’t cut it for one reason or another. The mix has to be right. Everyone has to blend in. You may find a brilliant soloist who can’t work with others. It’s as much about temperament and team-building as musical ability. They were unlucky or unwise in their choices and for a time they went their own ways.’
‘Broke up?’
‘In all but name. Some time last spring they found this new man Mel Farran and he seems to be doing okay. It clinched the residency at Bath for them and soon they’ll be touring again.’
‘If they aren’t involved in a murder trial.’ Diamond picked up the printout of Leaman’s list. ‘Is this their itinerary? They certainly travelled. I heard about the Japan trip from Cat.’
‘They’ve been there a few times.’
‘Was this with Anthony on board?’
‘The last couple of visits.’
‘When Mari was probably in the audience. I’m assuming Anthony was the main attraction.’
‘Why him in particular?’ Leaman asked.
‘Obvious, isn’t it? Good-looking, intense and a brilliant violinist. I expect she wasn’t the only young girl who lay awake thinking about him.’ Diamond continued to study the list. ‘Budapest was where Harry went missing. Before that they were touring other European cities. Paris, Rome, Vienna.’ He stopped. ‘They performed in Vienna in October 2008?’
‘A city noted for its music,’ Leaman said.
‘I know. I was there this summer.’ A tingling sensation crept over his face. He called across the room to Ingeborg. ‘Remember the Japanese woman you researched for me who drowned in the Danube canal?’
‘Miss Kojima.’
‘I don’t recall the name. I doubt if I even asked you. This was something I didn’t want to get involved in for personal reasons.’
‘She took her own life.’
‘So they reckoned. They found the little ivory thingummy representing suicide.’
‘The netsuke.’
‘Didn’t you tell me this happened as much as four years before I was there?’
‘That’s right, guv. She wasn’t a student, like Mari. She was in her mid-twenties, from Tokyo, and she’d come to Europe as a tourist, apparently alone. Do you think there’s a link?’
‘I don’t know, but I intend to compare dates. If this happened while the Staccati were performing in Vienna, we could be on to something.’
‘I’ll check right away.’
Images that pained him coursed through his brain. The embankment beside the Danube canal. Paloma spotting the bunch of lilies on the ground and then seeing the other flowers, dead and brittle, forced between the lattice struts of the stone wall. He’d insisted on moving on and she’d refused to treat it as an unknown tragedy that didn’t concern them. She’d seemed to think discovering the lilies in their path and replacing them in the pathetic little shrine was significant, a symbolic call to find out the true facts about whoever had died.
Against all his instincts he’d pandered to her superstition, getting Ingeborg to check the story on the internet. The way he’d dealt with it, trying to steer Paloma away from the depressing story once he had related it to her, had led directly to another unhappy waterside encounter, this time beside the Avon, their argument and break-up. In her eyes he was a lost cause, a stony-hearted professional unwilling to open up to sympathy for others or even for himself.
The whole episode still pained him deeply. In an effort to move on, he’d been trying to put it out of his mind, but without much success.
And now it might touch on the case he was investigating.
Ingeborg looked up from her computer screen, ‘Found it, guv. The body in Vienna was discovered on the tenth of November, 2008.’
‘Yes, but when was she reported missing?’
‘I’m not sure if she was.’
‘Nobody noticed she’d gone?’
‘She wasn’t travelling with friends or family. When they found the body, they estimated she’d been in the water three to four weeks, which would make it October.’
Trying to sound calm, he checked the list in his hand. ‘When the Staccati were giving a series of concerts in Vienna. A Japanese girl. A canal. The quartet in town. I should have been on to this before now. Was there any evidence that the dead girl, Miss...’
‘Kojima.’
‘... was into classical music?’
Ingeborg shrugged. ‘I don’t recall anything like that. I can access the report again.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In one of the Vienna papers. It wasn’t a huge story. I had to read it in translation.’
‘Get it on screen again, everything you can. I’m going to call the Viennese police. And the Japanese embassy. They were helpful over Mari, but it always takes longer than you expect to get anything out of these government agencies.’ He’d written the name of the Vienna victim and the estimated date of her disappearance on a notepad he’d picked up from one of the desks and he now saw that the top sheet was smeared with black ink. It was all over his hand as well. In his fury with himself he’d squeezed the pen so hard that it had splintered and leaked. ‘Okay,’ he said, addressing the entire room. ‘I want the full life histories of each of the Staccati people — everything we know about them — on my desk before the end of the afternoon. And when I say Staccati I’m including previous members and the manager. What’s his name? Christmas.’
‘Douglas Christmas,’ Halliwell said.
‘Yes, he’s part of it. He may have an office in London, but he makes the key decisions and I wouldn’t mind betting he turns up for the foreign gigs.’
From across the room someone had started humming a tune.
‘Who’s that?’ Diamond said.
Silence shut everything down like a power cut.
‘Come on,’ Diamond said. ‘Share it with us.’
Everyone in the team knew it was best to come clean when the boss was in this sort of mood. The junior member, Paul Gilbert, cleared his throat and started up again with a halfhearted rendering of the old Band Aid number, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’