The Tooth Tattoo (35 page)

Frightened he certainly was. His lips gave an involuntary twitch before he got control. ‘I only learned about this through a mistake. Seven or eight years ago we were performing in Paris and I was stupid enough to invite a potential
client to the hotel. There was some kind of mix-up at the desk and they sent him to Harry’s room instead of mine. Of course Harry wanted to know everything. He questioned me repeatedly until I told him the truth about the dealing I did. He was deeply in debt from his gambling.’

‘And saw this as a way out of his troubles?’ Diamond said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Except that he chose to deal in netsuke?’

‘It’s more profitable than chess sets.’

‘The Japanese woman who was found dead in Vienna had a netsuke in her T-shirt. They took it to be a suicide emblem. Convenient.’

Ivan shrugged and didn’t comment. He seemed to feel he’d said enough already.

‘One more thing,’ Diamond said. He took out the photo of Emi Kojima. ‘On the evening of your last concert in Vienna, did you see this woman?’

It was obvious from Ivan’s eyes that he recognised Emi at once. He made a performance of studying the photo to take time to prepare an answer. ‘She was in the audience.’

‘Did she speak to you afterwards?’

Another silence followed. This was being played like the serious chess match they could have had.

‘She spoke to us all,’ Ivan said. ‘You might as well know.’

‘And did she end the evening in Harry’s company?’

A nod. ‘We saw them in the hotel bar together.’

‘When you say “we” …’

‘Anthony, Cat, Douglas and me. After a time they walked to the elevator. The bar was on the ground floor. They could only have been going up to Harry’s room.’

Diamond gave a voice to the conclusion he’s been heading towards for days. ‘And now Harry is alive and here in Bath secretly watching you all.’

T
he man in Mrs. Carlyle’s front room was instantly familiar to Mel from posters of the Staccati, the sort of well-proportioned, rugged face that attracted women and put men at ease, yet now looking creased with fatigue or strain. He couldn’t have shaved for days. He was in some kind of padded jacket with the hood turned down. Far from threatening, he was obviously ill at ease.

‘Hope you don’t mind me calling. I really do need to meet you. I’m Harry Cornell.’

The educated voice did not match the unkempt appearance. It was all so disarming that Mel reached for the hand that was offered. ‘Mel Farran.’

‘Can we talk here without being overheard?’

Mel thought about the Carlyle women and their interest in everything he did. ‘Probably not. We can go out if you want.’

‘I’d rather not. How about your room?’

They went upstairs. Mel sat on the bed and allowed Harry to use the chair.

‘I hate this cloak and dagger stuff,’ Harry said, ‘but I can’t take chances. What I have to say is for you alone.’

‘Okay. Want to take your coat off?’

He shook his head. He kept his hands buried in the pockets. ‘First, I want to say how sorry I am for knocking you down the other day.’

‘That was you in the Megane?’ Mel said more as a statement than a question, confirming what he had already worked out for himself.

‘You weren’t seriously injured?’

‘More shocked than hurt.’

‘I know you played in a concert that evening. It was unforgivable of me. I’m truly sorry. I panicked when it was obvious you were coming towards the car to speak. I wasn’t ready to meet you then. All I could think was I had to get the hell out of there.’

‘Why were you there at all?’

‘Making sure.’

‘Of what?’

‘Where you lived. I’d already followed a taxi as far as the street, but I didn’t see where you went in. If nothing else, I got that confirmed.’

‘What exactly do you want?’

‘You’re a fine musician,’ Harry said. ‘I heard you playing today. You bring out the best in the others.’

‘Thanks, but – ’

‘What’s your instrument?’

‘I thought you knew.’

‘The maker, I mean.’

‘Nicolò Amati.’

Harry’s eyes widened. ‘I thought it sounded out of this world. May I see it?’

A firm line was needed here. The man’s behaviour had done nothing to engender confidence. ‘Sorry, but no.’

‘You don’t think I’d damage it?’

‘It doesn’t belong to me.’

‘Ah.’ A short silence from Harry. ‘This is something I wanted to ask you about.’

No, no, no, a voice screamed in Mel’s head. ‘I can’t say any more.’

‘A very rich man owns your viola and wants it played to a high standard. Am I right?’

‘Shall we talk about something else?’

‘Soon after I joined the Staccati, I was given a Maggini to play,’ Harry said, smoothly overriding Mel’s request. ‘From 1610. Any of us would go through fire to own a fiddle like that. Extraordinary workmanship and a wonderful tone. You must have heard it on one of our recordings.’

‘I have,’ Mel said, ‘and I know exactly what you mean.’

‘None of us in the quartet owned our instruments,’ Harry said. ‘We were all indebted to the super-rich, but that’s the way things have been for as long as music has been played. Fat cats buying antique instruments as investments.’

‘I know.’

‘And then they’re horrified to discover the damn things need to be played to preserve their sound quality. Paganini presented his own Guarnerius to his native city of Genoa and they kept it in a glass case in the municipal palace and buggered the tone. To be fair, my patron may have been a fat cat, but he actually knew a lot about fiddles. He had an amazing collection from what I could gather. I don’t know if he owned an Amati.’

Mel didn’t rise to the bait.

‘A Japanese guy who didn’t speak much English,’ Harry went on. ‘I never discovered how he made his millions. You don’t like to ask, do you? Anyway, I was offered the little beauty on indefinite loan and I played it all the years I was in the quartet. I didn’t even get a chance to kiss goodbye to it.’

‘You had to return it?’

‘It was collected.’ His look was so bleak that he could have been saying a knife had been thrust into his gut.

Mel didn’t like the way this was heading. ‘So what do you play now?’

‘I don’t play at all.’

Difficult to believe. ‘Why? Did you take against it, or something?’

‘Long story,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t know how much the others told you.’

‘They don’t know anything. They thought you were dead.’

‘I might as well be.’

Mel didn’t comment. How can you follow a remark like that?

‘I’m constantly on the run,’ Harry said. ‘I sleep in the back of my car, never in the same place twice. That’s okay. I’ve lived on the streets and survived, but I can’t feel safe anywhere.’

This was all so alien to Mel’s idea of the life of a top musician that the best he could do was try to appear sympathetic.

‘Do they ever talk about me?’ Harry asked.

‘The quartet? Occasionally.’

‘What do they say?’

‘They have good memories of you.’

‘All of them?’

‘In their different ways, yes. They still have huge respect for your playing – and your company.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘After you went missing, they were devastated. Cat roamed the streets of Budapest looking for you. Anthony went all to pieces. They had to find work for him with the Hallé.’

‘And Ivan?’

‘He’s more philosophical, as you’d expect. He seems to think women were your problem. He saw me eyeing up some students in short skirts the other day and gave me quite a lecture about it.’

‘Using me as an example?’

‘Actually, yes.’

It was difficult to tell whether the twitch of Harry’s lips was a smile or a grimace. ‘But they think I’m dead?’

Mel avoided the direct answer. ‘As time went on …’

‘The other day,’ Harry said, fixing Mel with a steady, questing look, ‘out at the Michael Tippett Centre, I wasn’t sure, but I thought Ivan looked at the car and recognised me.’

This was a minefield. ‘I wouldn’t know. We’re all a bit jumpy now. Was that you in Sydney Gardens running away along the canal?’

A nod.

The conversation seemed to have ground to a halt. Mel felt more comfortable when Harry was talking. ‘What is the story?’

‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ Harry said after a pause. ‘Some of this you’ll have heard already. I used to play poker. Fancied I was a red-hot player. Whichever city we fetched up in, I’d seek out the casino, or, better still, a private game without the house edge. But most serious players these days use casinos.
We earned good money on tour so I could play big games. It turned out I wasn’t the wiz I thought I was. I was too much of a bloody optimist. Wouldn’t fold when I should have. I won a few times and then lost big. Started stacking up debts. In the end, it got silly. You must have heard some of this from Cat or Ivan.’

‘Hardly anything.’

‘I never borrowed from the others. Sometimes I’d ask Doug for a bit on spec.’

‘They weren’t sure if it was poker or women taking up your time.’

He smiled. ‘There were a few one-night stands, I admit. You know how they come onto you after a concert? Sometimes you’re in the right mood. But no, I wouldn’t say women are my weakness. Anthony is the one for that. Even before we’d check in at the hotel he’d ask the bellman where the red light district was. How’s the old goat doing these days?’

‘All right, I think.’

‘I like Anthony. Terrific fiddler. Better than Ivan, which is saying a lot. I was telling you about my poker debts. They got worse than serious. I was blacklisted in several of the major casinos. They’re syndicated, you see. They wouldn’t let me play, but they still chased me for what I owed, and some of the debts are collected by gentlemen who call themselves family.’

‘The mafia?’

‘You don’t mess with those guys. I needed another source of income – and fast. You may not know this, but Ivan, the crafty old bugger, has a nice little earner in hand-carved chess sets.’

‘That’s news to me.’

‘He wouldn’t tell you unless you asked. It’s all cash in hand, no tax. I only found out accidentally when the hotel in Paris sent one of his customers to my room by mistake. This French guy didn’t have much English, but he had a stack of Euros with him. He was waving them at me and talking about
les échecs
. I thought he was telling me cash is better than a cheque. Finally he produced a card with Ivan’s name on it and I sent him to the right room. In my cash-strapped
situation, I was more than a little curious what all this was about, I can tell you. I asked the concierge the meaning of
échecs
. When I put it to Ivan he was tight-lipped, as you’d expect, but I wormed out the truth. He has an arrangement with some craftsman in Archangel, that Russian port right up near the Arctic Circle.’

‘Making chess sets?’

‘Ivory chess sets.’

‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘Mammoth ivory isn’t. They’re digging it out of the permafrost in Northern Russia when the snow melts. It’s a huge resource. They believe millions – literally millions – of woolly mammoth skeleton remains are waiting to be uncovered. It’s cheap and legal and every bit as good as elephant ivory.’

‘Is Ivan selling it as elephant ivory?’

Harry shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t take the risk. He’s straight with his customers. He still has a sizeable mark-up on the chess-sets, hawking them everywhere the quartet goes on tour.’

‘And did you ask for a stake in it?’

‘Ask Ivan? No chance. You couldn’t blackmail him. What he’s doing is legal. Well, he’s paying no tax, but I wouldn’t shop him to the revenue. No, I thought a lot about it, how I might turn a few honest pennies. There are all sorts of ivory products in short supply because of the ban on killing elephants. The trading still goes on, obviously, and thousands of elephants are shot each year. The main market is the Far East. Decorative combs, chopsticks, fans, all that stuff. And netsuke. You know what they are?’

Mel nodded.

‘I decided to branch out on my own as a mammoth-ivory netsuke dealer. The idea wasn’t totally new. Netsuke were already being created and supplied. I just had to find my own carver and eventually I did. We gave a concert in Vladivostok and had two days to ourselves. I don’t know how good your geography is. Vladivostok is the last station on the Orient Express run, only a boat trip from Japan. It has a thriving
Japanese quarter. I found a whole street of shops selling ornaments, mostly antique. There were a few new netsuke for sale there, quite highly priced. By this time I’d read up about ivory and how you identify it, which is quite a study in itself. Basically, in a cross-section you look at the graining, called Schreger lines, and how narrow they are. I wasn’t an expert by any means, but I managed to convince the shopkeeper I was. With the help of a magnifying glass and some bluffing I let him think I was some kind of inspector from the Environmental Enforcement Agency. He was bricking it. He assured me his netsuke were legitimate mammoth ivory and produced the paperwork with the name and address of his carver. Just what I needed.’

‘Was the carver local?’

‘Three or four blocks away. I looked up my guy the same afternoon and did a deal. He was Japanese born, a sensational carver, and of course apart from the quality of the workmanship the beauty for me was that the product was small, light in weight and just about unbreakable – ideal for travel. Much more cost-effective than Ivan’s chess sets, which take up a lot of space in his luggage.’

‘Did you tell Ivan what you were up to?’

‘No. He’s a prickly character, as you must know by now.’

‘Then why are you telling me?’

‘I’ll come to that. My netsuke business really took off in Europe. I’d seek out the upmarket shops and sell at profit of more than a hundred percent. Even better, it was becoming a hobby, weaning me off the poker. I got a real kick out of having a product everyone admired and coveted. I was paying off my casino debts. I thought nothing could go wrong – which, as anyone knows, is exactly when you’re due for a kick where it hurts most.’

‘What happened?’ Mel asked.