He’d stopped running. His muscles were refusing to function, his brain spinning between disbelief and panic.
Why? What malice drives anyone to such an act?
‘Bastard!’
Already the cyclist was moving off left. And now Mel saw he’d get clean away, under the bridge and past the London Eye. All day there is a queue outside the huge observation wheel. But the place closed at nine-thirty. Nobody would be there to stop him at this hour.
In reality his attention wasn’t on the thief any longer. He could go. Mel wasn’t thinking about justice or revenge. He wanted the impossible: to put the last five minutes into reverse and undo what had happened. Real life isn’t like that.
He’d got the shakes now. The shock was consuming him.
He knew he should mount the steps and look over the edge. It was too late to leap over and recover the poor, damaged thing. The only reason for jumping would be suicide. He was almost of a mind to do it.
He forced himself upwards, stiff-legged, still shaking, right up to the railing, and peered over. It was too far down and too dark to spot anything floating there. All the filth of the river spreads to the banks like scum in a sink. The black water caught some ripples of reflected light from the ornate globe lamp-stand and that was all.
Out in the middle there were lights. A small vessel was chugging past the pier towards Waterloo Bridge. A police launch? No such luck. It was more like a powerboat moving sedately because of the conditions. Too far out to hail.
He heard water slurping against the embankment wall below him. The boat’s backwash had reached there. He stared down and saw nothing.
Hours later, in his flat, he drank coffee and replayed the scene in his mind. He’d recalled it already for the police, given them such descriptions as he could — the Japanese girl with the red scrunch, the guy on the bike, and his poor, benighted instrument. The constable taking the statement hadn’t understood his desolation. He hadn’t even promised to pursue the thieves. ‘Look at it from our point of view,’ he’d said. ‘Where would we start? I don’t suppose they’ll try it with anyone else.’
Obviously they had conspired to rob Mel and it wasn’t an opportunist crime. There had been planning behind it. But what was the reason? Surely not malice alone? They don’t know Mel, so why should they hate him? There was no profit in it. A good, much valued instrument was lost and his livelihood put at risk. They couldn’t know if he had other violas.
Senseless.
Or was it? His memory retrieved an image, the powerboat he’d noticed out in the middle of the river. Could it have come close enough for someone aboard to catch the viola as it was slung over the railing? This would provide a cruel logic to what had happened, a well organised plan to rob him.
Now that the finality of his loss had come home to him, he was discovering dark places in his psyche that he didn’t know existed. He believed he could kill those two if he met them again.
Would he recognise the girl? He thought so. The light hadn’t been good, but he’d seen her up close. He could remember the eyes wide in appeal when they’d first met, catching the light of the streetlamps, yet shot with scorn when she was sure he’d been suckered. He had a clear, raw memory of how her mouth had opened to mock him and most of all he could hear the cruel glissando of her laughter. Was he right in thinking she had been a music student? If so, the mugging was even harder to understand.
Of her partner in crime he could recall only the clothes. He hadn’t seen his face.
Did it matter any more? Did he want to hunt them down? He could search the common rooms of all the music colleges in London and maybe find them, but he wouldn’t get his viola back.
Anger didn’t begin to describe his state of mind.
2
Vienna, 2012
‘How much longer does it last?’ Paloma Kean asked Peter Diamond.
‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’
‘I’m trying not to breathe.’
Diamond felt in his pocket and produced a tube of peppermints. ‘The man who thinks of everything.’
‘Thanks, but an oxygen mask would be better.’
There are days when the Vienna sewer tour is more odorous than others. Wise tourists take note of the humidity before booking. Diamond and Paloma, on their weekend city break, had no choice, Saturday afternoon or nothing. It happened that this Saturday in July was warm, with a thunderstorm threatening. Even Diamond had noticed that the smell was not Chanel No. 5.
‘After this, you’ll appreciate the Ferris wheel,’ he told her.
She was silent. She’d brought this on herself when reminding him that his favourite film, The Third Man, was set in Vienna. At the time, she’d congratulated herself for thinking of it. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been here.
The adventure had begun back in April with a scratch-card she had found on the floor of his car. Diamond hadn’t bothered to check it. He’d said they were giving them away at the petrol station.
She’d revealed three matching symbols and told him he was a winner.
‘Everyone is.’
She had insisted on phoning the number on the back of the card.
Deeply sceptical, Diamond had told her, ‘That’s how they make their money.’
But it had turned out that he really had won a weekend break for two in a city of his choice: Paris, Amsterdam or Vienna. True to form, he’d dismissed Europe’s historic capitals with a dogmatic, ‘I don’t do abroad.’
‘Come on,’ Paloma had said. ‘Lighten up, Peter. This could be so romantic.’
‘I’m too busy at work.’ Work for Diamond was heading the CID section at Bath police station. There were always matters to be investigated.
Then Paloma had remembered The Third Man and whistled the Harry Lime Theme.
‘What did you say those cities were?’ he’d said, looking up.
And here they were trudging through a reeking sewer with a bunch of elderly tourists carrying flashlights. At intervals everyone stopped to be shown a clip of the film projected on to the brick wall opposite. Paloma could see Diamond’s lips move silently in sync with the soundtrack. ‘It’s the main sewer. Runs into the blue Danube.’ So obviously was he relishing the experience that it would have been churlish to complain.
The day had started agreeably enough in the Café Mozart, another of the film locations. The coffee and Sachertorte were expensive, even for a couple used to Bath prices, but Diamond had basked in the ambience and said the experience was worth every Euro and talked about Graham Greene being a regular there in 1947 when he was researching the story. From there they’d moved on to a side street off the Naschmarkt and he’d stressed how fortunate they were to be here on a Saturday, the only day of the week the Third Man Museum opened. Displayed along with countless stills and posters was the actual zither Anton Karas had used to play the haunting theme. You could select from four hundred cover versions of the tune. Paloma had left the place with a headache that Diamond said was surely something to do with the weather. A short walk had brought them to Esperanto Park and the brick-built spiral staircase down to the oldest part of Vienna’s sewer system. Proceedings underground had begun with a film explaining how the cholera epidemic of 1830 had made a better sanitation system necessary. Then, after warnings to watch their footing, the guide had led them into the glistening brick-lined drains.
Atmospheric? Paloma couldn’t argue with that. She just wished every film clip wasn’t punctuated with another head-numbing burst of the zither music.