‘He only produced it after he’d said all this,’ Mel said. ‘I was shocked.’
‘Who wouldn’t be?’ Cat said. ‘None of us slept last night wondering if Harry would come knocking — or without knocking.’
‘Did he threaten you with it?’ Diamond asked Mel.
‘Not at any point. He made enough of an impact by simply producing it. He held it out in the palm of his hand. It scared me.’
‘What did he want from you?’
‘An update on what the others were saying about him.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘No, but it was clear he was feeling insecure.’
‘How did you answer?’
‘With the truth as I understood it. I told him straight there had been the full range of feelings from annoyance that he failed to turn up for the Budapest concert to concern when he went missing, to resignation after years went by that he could well be dead. He asked if the quartet really believed he’d killed Emi and I said nobody had ever suggested he was a murderer.’
‘It didn’t cross our minds,’ Ivan said, ‘but in view of what’s happened this morning...’
Cat said, ‘What are you trying to tell us, Comrade Bogdanov? Do you think he shot himself because of a guilty conscience?’
Ivan spread his hands. ‘We’ll find out, presumably.’
‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Diamond pressed Mel. ‘What else did he want to know?’
‘The name of the person who supplied my new viola. I didn’t tell him. I’m strictly bound to keep that a secret.’
‘Even at gunpoint you held out?’ Ivan said.
Mel clicked his tongue in impatience. ‘I told you he didn’t once point the gun. He had no intention of shooting me. He told me the gun was for his own protection and I believed him. He’d escaped from the yakuza, as I told you, and he thought they were still after him.’
‘Not to mention the mafia wanting their poker debts settled,’ Cat said. ‘If that wasn’t a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is. Poor old rascal didn’t know where to turn.’
‘And then the second girl was strangled and the two cases were linked,’ Ivan said. ‘He became a suspect for the first, if not the second. We don’t know how long he’s been in England, do we?’
‘He didn’t say,’ Mel said.
‘Could Harry have murdered Mari Hitomi?’ Cat asked, big-eyed. ‘I can’t think why.’
‘Maybe she also was working for the yakuza,’ Ivan said.
She took a sharp breath. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
The speculation wasn’t helping Diamond. He’d run through similar possibilities in his own mind already. He picked up the last point Mel had made. ‘Why was he interested in your viola?’
‘It’s a beautiful instrument, an Amati,’ Mel said, nodding. ‘As a fellow violist, he wanted to handle it, but I didn’t let him. He didn’t insist. He knew the owners of these fabulous instruments set strict conditions about their use.’
Cat said, ‘Harry knew that. He had a Maggini on loan to him. None of us can afford the beautiful toys we play with.’
Diamond asked Mel, ‘Was anything else said that might help me to understand Harry’s mind-set?’
‘I’ve covered it,’ Mel said. ‘He acted more like someone on the run than a threat to me or anyone else. I know he had the gun, but in the end he put it away and left quite tamely.’
‘Would you say he was suicidal?’
‘Under stress, for sure. He did make one remark.’ Mel put his hand to his head and scraped it through his hair. ‘I’m trying to think back to how it came up. Yes, I was telling him that while he was missing for so long we gave him up for dead and he said, “I might as well be.” ’
‘Poor lamb!’ Cat said.
‘Did he say where he was going next?’ Diamond asked.
‘No. It was getting late by then. After ten, anyway.’
‘But you phoned each of the others to let them know?’
‘Because they had a right to be told Harry was around, and armed. And if I’m honest, I was shaken up by the visit. I felt I wanted to speak to someone who would understand.’
Diamond glanced out of the window. A forensic tent was being erected around Harry’s car. The police surgeon had arrived and was struggling into a blue protective overall.
‘And this morning,’ Diamond said, turning back to the group, ‘what happened after Anthony’s landlady got on the phone?’
‘I phoned the others and we met here and decided the right thing to do was call 999,’ Cat said.
‘Who was first here?’
‘I was,’ Ivan said. ‘I took a taxi. Cat wasn’t long after me. She came on foot, living nearby, as she does. We were outside looking at the car when Mel’s taxi arrived.’
‘Did you touch anything?’
‘Naturally we did,’ he said as if the question shouldn’t have been asked. ‘We looked inside to see if he was still breathing. When it was obvious he wasn’t, we shut the door and came in here and made the emergency call.’
Cat had a better idea what Diamond was thinking. ‘You don’t even need to say it. Our prints are all over the car. If there’s anything dodgy about the suicide theory, Ivan and I are going to be the prime suspects, but what else could we have done? We had to check whether life was extinct. Don’t they always say the first few minutes are critical?’
‘Do we know when he died?’ Mel asked.
‘We may get an estimate from the doctor,’ Diamond said, ‘but times of death are difficult to pin down. If someone heard the shot we’ll have a better idea. We’ll ask at all the houses.’
‘Could have been last night, I was thinking.’
‘What would he have been doing here last night?’ Cat asked.
‘What was he doing here at all? Visiting Anthony, obviously.’
‘Except he stayed in the car and shot himself.’
Diamond glanced outside again and saw that Ingeborg’s car had arrived on the other side of the taped-off section. ‘I’ll be needing statements from each of you.’
Ivan folded his arms in a defiant way. ‘It had better not take long. We’re booked for a digital recording session this afternoon.’
‘Where?’
‘At the Michael Tippett Centre. The technicians are expecting us.’
Mel said, ‘In view of what’s happened, maybe we should cancel out of respect.’
‘Not at all,’ Ivan said. ‘Harry would have wished us to go ahead. And I asked Douglas to come back for it.’
‘You’re right for once,’ Cat said. ‘We’ve got to do this for Harry, we really must. He loved the Grosse Fuge, for all its challenges.’
This was getting a momentum that Diamond would find difficult to stop. For the moment he said, ‘We’ll see how long it takes to get those statements.’
‘You can’t hold us indefinitely,’ Ivan said. ‘Besides, we have very little to make statements about.’
‘Apart from Mel,’ Cat said. ‘His will take the rest of today and tomorrow, I should think. All that stuff Harry told him last night. Can he record it?’
Diamond shrugged. ‘It still has to be written down and signed. A statement is a document.’
‘Best get started, then.’
Ivan was at his most crotchety. ‘I really don’t see the urgency of this. The man is dead. He shot himself. It’s not as if anyone else was involved. We could take all week and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s clear to me that Harry was murdered.’
28
Out in the street, Ingeborg Smith and Keith Halliwell were awaiting instructions.
Diamond was chirpier than he had been for weeks. ‘Top of the morning to you. Raring to go, are you?’
All he got was puzzled looks.
‘I need statements from all four, an account of their movements from nine last night until I arrived this morning. They’ll probably tell lies and I want it as evidence.’