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”.’
He needed a moment to take it in. ‘Strange. Like a message to a dead person?’
‘All the main flowers have significance according to this system and most of the sentiments are pretty bland, like snowdrops meaning hope, campanulas gratitude.’
‘Roses for love?’
‘Red roses. But this one is specific. It may be pure chance that someone settled on asphodels, but if they were using the language of the flowers intentionally, they were making a statement that was very suitable for a shrine.’
‘ “My regret follows you to the grave.” Are you thinking this could have been left by the murderer?’