‘It’s not bad.’
He tried obliquely to get more on Harry’s disappearance. ‘He must have been with you some years.’
‘Harry? From the beginning. We’re not careless. We don’t keep losing violists like beads off a string.’
‘Did he have family?’
‘None he ever mentioned. It’s hard on partners, this wandering existence. Like the rest of us, he was self-reliant. Well, I’m saying that and it’s not entirely true. Anthony needs mothering, but he’s a special case. Sometimes I feel like smothering him. Harry was all man.’
‘In what sense?’
She smiled. ‘He took his chances when they came.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Groupies. We’re not much different to pop groups when it comes to fans. In our peak years we had a huge following. Invitations of all sorts flooded in, from billionaires wanting us to play on their Strads to schoolgirls asking us to autograph their bras. Asking the guys, that is. Even they got bored with it after a time.’
‘And you think Harry took advantage?’
‘Of schoolgirls? No, he wasn’t that way inclined. What he got up to was grown-up stuff and he didn’t like me asking about it.’
‘Was he gay?’
‘Harry? No, don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen how pleased he was when women came onto him. The first commandment of quartet life is that you don’t pry into each other’s goings-on, but laws are meant to be broken and I’m curious by nature, and it sounds like you are, too.’
‘He interests me for obvious reasons,’ Mel said. ‘I’ve stepped into his shoes.’
‘All I can tell you is that he covered his tracks. When we needed to get hold of him at short notice — as you do at times because of a change in arrangements — it was the devil’s own job trying to reach him. He was never at his lodgings. But you couldn’t fault him for reliability. He turned up at the hall in good time for concerts and rehearsals. Looked a little jaded on occasions, but I guess we all do from time to time.’
‘So when he disappeared, it came as a shock?’
‘Panic stations. We had to cancel that night’s concert with the audience already in their seats. I was all for improvising with some solo numbers, but the others couldn’t cope. Ivan was a dead loss. He’s no use at all when things go belly up. And Anthony is an ensemble player first and last. Doesn’t do solos. I could easily have given them “The Swan” and there are hundreds of pieces for the fiddle that Ivan could have picked from, but no, he insisted we cancel the show. Good thing Douglas was with us. He found a local stand-in for the remaining concerts and we got through somehow, but it wasn’t pretty.’
‘And you never heard any more from Harry?’
‘Nothing. None of us knew where he went in his time off. The embassy found that hard to believe, but it’s the way we are. So the local police didn’t know where to start looking.’
‘Do you think he’s dead?’
‘I hate to think it, because he was a lovely guy, but what else could have happened? If he’d gone on a bender that night he’d surely have got in touch when he got his head together. He needed the quartet. It was his living.’
‘He could have had an accident and lost his memory.’
‘Some kind of freak event? We can only hope, but as every day passes... You see, being the female in the group, I’m locked in, heart and soul. You guys belong to me, even bossy old Ivan, bless his little cotton socks.’
He was about to say something about the maternal instinct and stopped himself in time. She didn’t mean that at all. Behind all the brazen chat was a woman getting emotional — if not sexual — fulfilment from being so close to three men. ‘We’re lucky to have you.’
She smiled. ‘You’d better believe it.’
9
You couldn’t have mistaken it for anything else but an incident room. Desks, computers, phones. Graphic photos of the corpse, with a close-up of the tooth tattoo. A large-scale map of the Avon. Lines of enquiry listed on the whiteboard. Plenty of noise and movement from the CID regulars and civilian staff. Presiding over it all, Peter Diamond, much more his old imposing self.
‘I’ve asked for a second autopsy,’ he announced to the few members of the team who weren’t out of the building on active enquiries.
‘Can you do that?’ Halliwell asked. ‘Isn’t it the coroner’s call?’
‘The coroner isn’t God. He’s a public servant, same as you and me. I’m not satisfied, and I told him. The medic who did the first one wasn’t a forensic pathologist at all. He was a hospital man, a histopathologist. What’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Neither am I, not at all sure. He writes a two-sheet report and comes to no conclusion except that the woman had been dead for some time. I could have told him that.’
‘He found the tooth tattoo.’
‘No, he didn’t. He asked some dental expert to look at the teeth and she spotted it. No wonder I don’t have any confidence.’
John Leaman looked up from his computer screen. ‘Histopathology: the branch of medicine concerned with changes in tissues caused by disease.’
‘There you go. It’s not disease we’re bothered about, it’s crime. No use to us at all. I want a proper forensic man like Bert Sealy. Sarcastic swine, but at least he does the job and misses nothing. You don’t get short-changed by Sealy.’
‘What did the coroner say?’
‘He’ll look into it. He will.’
‘Does the ACC know you spoke to him?’
‘She’s away on some course, isn’t she? Can’t reach her. If I could, she’d be the first to know.’
Halliwell grinned.
Energised, Diamond stalked the CID room delegating duties to anyone unlucky enough to catch his eye.
‘Haven’t we heard back from Paul Gilbert? He’s taking his time round the hotels. What’s he doing — testing the beds? You.’
‘Me, sir?’ some hapless DC said.
‘Give Gilbert a call and tell him we need a progress report.’
‘Very good.’
‘It had better be. And why is Ingeborg so silent? She should have got some names out of the colleges by this time.’
Towards the end of the morning, he used the marker pen to list the hotels Gilbert had visited. ‘This is taking too long,’ he said. ‘We need more manpower. I’ll ask for back-up from uniform. The plods are as capable as we are of checking names.’
Ingeborg looked in at lunchtime. ‘It isn’t easy, guv. Some of the private colleges are hopeless at keeping records. They can tell you who joined and when, but there’s no check on day-to-day attendance. As one college secretary said to me, it’s the students’ loss if they don’t put in the hours.’
‘And if one goes missing altogether?’
‘Could be weeks or months before the system picks it up. Most have personal tutors, but the tutors aren’t overly concerned if the students don’t appear. There’s often a valid reason, they say, like a change of course or a transfer to another college, and they aren’t always notified.’
‘Sounds like the perfect set-up for absenteeism. It wasn’t like that when I went through police college.’
Ingeborg was briefly lost for words, struggling, no doubt, with the thought of Diamond as a police cadet. ‘I was told the attendance record for Japanese students is above average.’
He nodded. ‘They’re a law-abiding race. The Japanese police spend most of their time helping people find their way.’
‘Nice work if you can get it,’ Halliwell said.
‘Foreign students come here on visas,’ Diamond said. ‘There must be a record.’
John Leaman, the resident know-it-all, said, ‘That would be with the UK Border Agency.’
‘They decide who gets in, right?’