‘All of them will lie?’ Ingeborg said.
‘Maybe not. Anthony may not say anything at all.’
‘Really?’
‘The little he does say is going to be true. He’ll need drawing out, though. I’m not sure how much he knows.’
‘Is it a conspiracy then?’ Halliwell asked.
‘It could become one. This is like nothing else I’ve come across, four strikingly different individuals who don’t mind sniping at each other, but in reality are as close as atoms in a nucleus. They must stick together to survive as performers and their music-making matters more to them than morality or law-breaking. They’re not comfortable going it alone, any of them. They have no family commitments. The Staccati is their family and quartet-playing is what they do. One goes, and it’s curtains for all of them.’
‘A few mixed metaphors there, but we get the point,’ Ingeborg said.
Diamond gave her a pained look. ‘Do you want to go through it with a red pen?’
She bit her lip. ‘Sorry, guv.’
‘Are they as good as they think they are?’ Halliwell said to defuse the tension.
‘Musically as good as it gets. Morally, the jury are out,’ Ingeborg said, diplomatically picking up Diamond’s theme.
‘Better dive in, then,’ he told them. ‘Who’s going to be first to split the atom?’
With that, he lifted the Do Not Cross tape and entered the secure area.
He was handed a package wrapped in polythene.
‘XL for you,’ the crime scene woman said.
‘I’m taking that as a compliment.’ He stepped to one side and started the undignified process of stepping into the protective suit. These things weren’t designed for people with more flesh than figure. A well-cut suit hides a lot.
Inside the forensic tent three similarly clad crime scene officers were at work. He had to squeeze around the open doors of the car and step over legs and equipment to make his presence known to the police surgeon, who was standing over Harry Cornell’s corpse.
‘Anything I should be told, doc?’ Diamond asked.
‘I can tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You need a forensic pathologist for this, not a family doctor. They’ve sent for Bertram Sealy. He knows his stuff, whatever you and I may feel about his corpse-side manner. I’ve done my bit. Life is extinct. I’m off to see someone who really needs me.’
‘Before you go, did you look at the bullet hole?’
‘I did, and the bullet passed right through the head,’ the doctor said. ‘But don’t expect any CSI stuff from me.’
The body was still in the position Diamond had first seen, head against the steering wheel with only the right side of the face visible. ‘Would this be the exit wound?’
‘We can agree on that, going by the stellate shape,’ the doctor said, ignoring his own injunction. ‘I believe that’s due to bone fragments being forced out by the action of the bullet. If you lift the head to look at the other side, you’ll find a neat round hole where it went in. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Thanks. It confirms what I thought.’ He paused. ‘No chance you could estimate the time of death?’
‘Yes.’
Diamond’s eyes opened wide. ‘You can?’
‘I mean yes, there’s no chance.’
Still wearing his forensic jumpsuit, Diamond returned to the house. Ivan and Cat remained in the sitting room, sombre and silent. They each gave his mode of dress a long look, but passed no comment.
‘Are we under way with the statement-taking?’ he asked.
Cat nodded. ‘They’re limited by the poky accommodation. The young woman is in the kitchen with Anthony, and Mel is upstairs with the man. We were just saying it could take a while.’
Ivan made a point of looking at his watch. ‘We’d better be through before lunch, all of us. We’re due in the recording studio at two.’
‘What are you hoping to record?’ Diamond asked.
‘There’s no hoping about it. The session is fixed. The Grosse Fuge.’
‘Can’t say I know it,’ Diamond said. ‘Can you whistle a few bars?’
Ivan scowled.
‘Beethoven,’ Cat said. ‘It’s in our contract to cut a disc in aid of the university.’
‘If you get there I may listen in.’
Ivan stared through him. Obviously anyone who hadn’t heard of the Grosse Fuge was a waste of space.
Dr. Bertram Sealy arrived within the hour holding his trademark flask of coffee and the case he called his guts-bag. Diamond watched from a distance, allowing him to make some progress before going out to join him, wondering what insult Bath’s least congenial pathologist would have for him.
Clad in his own rather superior pale blue overall, Sealy was on his knees by the car studying the victim’s hands. Without looking up, he said, ‘Right up your alley, this, Peter Diamond. Grotty little backstreet tucked away between the railway and the cemetery. Home from home for you with your charity-shop suits. Are you enjoying yourself?’
‘I always enjoy seeing a genius at work,’ Diamond said. ‘Where did you buy your Andy Pandy outfit? The pound shop?’
Sealy stood up. Ever prepared with all the comforts, he’d been kneeling on a rubber cushion. ‘The deceased isn’t much of a fashion plate either. Do we know who he is?’
‘A viola player who was once in a famous quartet.’
‘He wouldn’t have played too famously with a digit missing from his left hand,’ Sealy said.
‘It hadn’t passed me by.’
‘I presume he was like Charlie Chaplin.’
Diamond frowned. ‘How does Chaplin come into it?’
‘Played the fiddle left-handed, didn’t he? You want to sharpen up your observational skills. What I’m saying is that this fellow must have done the same, used his left hand to hold the bow, so as to do the fingering with his right.’
‘That isn’t so,’ Diamond said. ‘He played the orthodox way. Couldn’t play at all after losing the finger.’
‘Should have been more careful, then.’
‘It wasn’t an accident. Have you looked at the head wound yet?’
Sealy was not ready to move on. ‘Are you one hundred percent certain he was right-handed?’
‘I’ve seen pictures of him playing.’
Sealy tapped his chin with his surgical-gloved finger. ‘That’s odd.’
‘The exit wound being on the right side of the head?’
Diamond said.
‘Well, yes.’
‘I thought so, too.’ Diamond aired his new bit of expertise. ‘It is the exit wound because it’s stellate, agreed?’
‘Swallowed a forensic manual, have we?’ Sealy said. ‘This is the problem. The bullet entered the head from the left side. Did a right-handed man put the gun to his left temple? Or use his left hand to fire with? Difficult and unlikely. Ergo if he really was right-handed he didn’t fire the gun himself. It was murder.’
‘From close range?’
‘Look at this.’ Sealy grasped the hair on the dead man’s head and pulled it back far enough to display the circular hole on the left side. ‘It’s too neat for a contact discharge and there’s no muzzle stamp, but there is what we call an abrasion collar caused by friction, heating and dirt. That’s close range.’
‘Right.’
‘The burning and powder tattooing wouldn’t be present if the gun was fired from a distance of more than, let’s say, a metre. Do you have any suspects?’
‘Several.’
‘Better look for GSR, then.’
‘You’ve got me there.’ Diamond had a blind spot for acronyms and abbreviations.
‘Gunshot residue. The thing was fired in a confined space. And don’t just check the hands and clothes. It can get into nostrils, ear canals, places you wouldn’t think of.’