While Diamond was speaking, Ingeborg pinned a new photo to the display board. Posed against a whitewashed wall, a woman’s face making no effort to please stared forward from the centre of the frame. This was no family snap. Everyone in the room knew a mugshot when they saw one.
Diamond continued, ‘Points of similarity. One, her nationality, of course. Two, the body was recovered from a city waterway. Three, she was submerged too long for a cause of death to be determined. Four, no obvious injuries. Five, she was clothed. Six, there was no great alarm when she went missing. And seven, she died at about the time the Staccati were in town.’
He waited for that to take root.
‘And these are the differences. One, this woman, Miss Emi Kojima, was about five years older than Mari Hitomi. Two, she’d been out of touch with her family for rather longer. Three, she was found with a netsuke under her T-shirt. That’s a small antique ornament of a particular design that led the Viennese police to deduce she took her own life.’
‘But it could have been planted by her killer,’ John Leaman said, keen as always to chip in.
‘Goes without saying.’ Diamond folded his arms and lulled everyone into thinking there was little else to report. ‘Nothing we don’t know already, you’re telling yourselves. But I asked Ingeborg to run a search on the Vienna victim and she’s discovered some background that I’m sure you’ll agree is new and significant.’ He turned to Ingeborg. ‘Over to you.’
‘Getting straight to it,’ she said, ‘from an early age Emi Kojima attended one of the famous Tokyo violin schools.’
Murmurs of interest rippled through the room.
‘Music again?’ John Leaman said.
‘She was said to have been an exceptionally gifted player. They take them young and get them up to an amazing standard. But at seventeen she was caught in possession of cocaine and asked to leave the school. After that she seems to have left home and drifted into petty crime and prostitution. She lived in one-room in a notorious Tokyo slum. The picture you see was taken after an arrest, one of many. Her family despaired of getting her back to some kind of normality. A sad story, but far from uncommon.’
Most eyes had returned to the photo on the display board. Emi Kojima’s jaded look seemed to confirm that she had been pulled in and charged so often that it had no meaning for her.
‘So,’ Diamond said, ‘we can add one more point of similarity: an interest in classical music. And one difference: this woman had a police record.’
‘How did she make it to Vienna if she was in poverty?’ Halliwell asked.
‘Three guesses. She wasn’t there on a city break.’
‘Are we talking organised crime?’
‘We could be.’
‘Trafficking?’
‘That’s well possible.’
‘To work as a hooker in Europe?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Excuse me,’ Paul Gilbert said, ‘but how would this link up with the string quartet? None of them are Japanese.’
‘Doesn’t stop one of them paying for sex with her,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Guys on tour for weeks on end.’
‘Classical musicians?’ Gilbert said in disbelief.
‘They need to get their rocks off, same as you, ducky,’ Ingeborg said.
Young Gilbert turned puce and everyone else enjoyed the moment.
‘He’s right to ask the question,’ Diamond said. ‘It comes down to this: did one of the Staccati pick up Miss Kojima in Vienna and kill her, and also Miss Hitomi in Bath?’
‘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.’