Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  “I look at it this way,” Diamond tried to say in mitigation. “It’s a violent death we all believed must have happened, but didn’t. That’s good news. Harry’s woman isn’t buried here. She must have left him of her own free will.”

  The crime scene man said in support, “It isn’t the first time I’ve been called out to deal with an animal bone. Generally you can tell with a quick look. A complete femur from a sheep is going to be shorter, but of course this was just the end piece.”

  Diamond was moved to put his arm round Leaman’s drooping shoulders. “My mistake, not yours. Don’t take it personally.”

  Leaman stared ahead, still lost for words.

  Diamond tried to bolster him. “I need you back at the office. We may have identified the skeleton.”

  His words made no impact at all.

  “You’re more likely than anyone to discover what the hell went on here.”

  The crime scene man said bitterly, “We re-dug every inch of the fucking garden.”

  “And it had to be done,” Diamond said without sympathy. Right now he couldn’t deal with a second malcontent. “This is still the most likely crime scene, but the focus has shifted now.”

  Some of his earlier words had finally penetrated the avalanche of blighted hopes that had crushed his wretched colleague. “Have you put a name to the skeleton?”

  “Kind of. We’re not there yet.” He was casting around for something to alleviate the pain and by some miracle he thought of it. “Which is why you’re urgently needed. Shall we go?”

  The task of locating a picture of the conman Sidney Harrod was high priority and well suited to Leaman’s skills. A complete run of Bath City Life had been located in the Central Library. After Diamond had briefed him about Harrod’s likely theft of the eighteenth-century costume owned by Lord Deganwy, Leaman drove to the library with a recovering sense of purpose to search every issue between 1990 and 2000. He would look for photos of Beau Nash Society events and scan them into his computer. With the stimulus of a new assignment, the hurt of losing his status as Senior Investigating Officer would ease a little. Once the file was complete he would return to Concorde House and produce an electronic rogues’ gallery of likely candidates.

  The result would be shown to Algy, the key witness.

  That was the plan.

  Meanwhile Diamond briefed the team.

  “This man who called himself Sidney Harrod is by far the most likely individual yet to be our skeleton. He was a conman and his mark was an elderly man, Lord Deganwy, who seems to have been suffering from dementia. Harrod befriended the old man and allegedly took away a number of bits of antique furniture and we don’t know what else apart from the genuine eighteenth-century suit and wig that we believe our skeleton was dressed in.”

  “How do we know it wasn’t sold on?” Paul Gilbert asked. “The skeleton could be someone else.”

  “We don’t until we can prove Harrod is our man. The age is about right, the height is similar and he may well have worn dentures.”

  “Is there a definite link to Twerton?”

  There wasn’t and everyone knew it. “That’s something yet to be established. We need everything we can get on Harrod. It won’t be easy. Algy has told me all he remembers. I’ll be asking him to look at some old photos of the annual ball and see if he can pick Harrod out. John Leaman is assembling a file at this minute.”

  “Isn’t there anyone else who may have known him?” Keith Halliwell asked.

  “In the Beau Nash Society? No.”

  “His landlord?”

  “From twenty years ago?” Ingeborg said. “Where do you start?”

  “We definitely need a picture of the guy,” Halliwell said. “Get it into the media for the public to see.”

  “If one exists,” Diamond said. “A clever conman won’t have stepped forward and said cheese when a photographer came by.”

  “And if there isn’t a photo?”

  “He was living in the city for the best part of two years and using the name of Sidney Harrod. There must be some trace of him.”

  “He won’t have registered as an elector,” Gilbert said.

  “But he was sociable. He may have been known in clubs and pubs. You’re going to groan, but we ask around. Another possibility is the public library.”

  “The library?” Halliwell said as if it was the townswomen’s guild.

  “This was a con artist aiming to crash the Beau Nash Society. Where would he have gone for his information?”

  “The Internet?”

  “Would that lot have had a website in 1996? Do they even have one now? I’ve never seen one. It’s not that kind of organisation. I think he’d ask at the library, the ideal place to mug up on Nash. He had to be well in command to give them a lecture on the Beau’s humour, as he did.” Diamond’s eyes fixed on DC Gilbert. “Paul.”

  “Guv?”

  “There’s a book called The Jests of Beau Nash. They should have a copy in the reference section, not for taking out.”

  “Would anyone bother to take it out?” Halliwell said.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Diamond said. “It’s not Peter Kay, but that’s to our advantage. The book has a rarity value. The library would insist he signs for it, just to have a read. Ask to see their records.”

  Paul Gilbert didn’t look convinced. He’d spent most of the previous day fruitlessly going through records at the university to see if Perry Morgan had been a student. He gave a nod.

  Ingeborg started reading aloud from her iPhone. “‘The Jests of Beau Nash, late master of the ceremonies at Bath, consisting of a variety of humorous sallies, smart repartees and bon mots which passed between him and persons of the first distinction . . .’” She paused before adding, “You can buy it as a reprint on Amazon for £13.99. In paperback.”

  Most of the team sniggered, if not chuckled. What had got into them this morning? Not one of them was showing the seriousness Diamond demanded. He could only suppose they were overworked dealing with two murders at once.

  For an uncomfortable moment he had a return of that eerie sensation that Beau Nash himself had put the mockers on this investigation and was sitting at the back of the room in his white three-cornered hat and fancy frock coat with a grin spreading across his fat face.

  Get a grip, Diamond told himself. “We’re not wanting to read the bloody book. We only want to know if Harrod signed for it.”

  “If he did, he likely used another name,” Halliwell said.

  “We still check.”

  “It will be so much easier when we get a picture of the guy.”

  “Don’t raise your hopes.” This wasn’t going well. He was out on a limb. After a pause, he said, “We also feed the name into the PNC. He may have used the same identity in some other place. Would you see to that, Inge?”

  “If you don’t mind me saying, guv, we’re clutching at straws.”

  “It’s either that, or drown.”

  “When you think about it,” Ingeborg added, “this is the victim we’re trying to identify. We haven’t even started on the killer.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “We’re dealing in probabilities. We’re ninety percent sure Sidney Harrod is the victim and Harry, the tenant in the Twerton house, is the killer. Nothing less than certainty will do, which is why I’m asking for more effort.”

  “Meanwhile,” Ingeborg said, “we’re working our butts off trying to find who shot Perry Morgan.”

  Diamond didn’t say any more. He could have threatened them with DCI Charlie Crocker taking over the Morgan case. When he’d mentioned the possibility to Ingeborg before, she’d spooked. He wasn’t sure if she’d alerted the others. But they were at full stretch and they didn’t deserve more grief.

  Before returning to his office he stared across the desks and computers and made quite sure n
o stranger in eighteenth-century costume had been listening in. He’d got the shakes. The team didn’t know he was under more stress than any of them.

  That afternoon he and John Leaman drove out to the house on the Warminster Road where Algy Sutton had a ground-floor flat. When the most senior member of the Beau Nash Society came to the door he was in a modern wheelchair called a Blazer, electrically powered, compact and capable of turning on a five-pence coin, a vast improvement on the bath chair. His clothes, too, were more suited to modern life: a turtleneck sweater and black cord pants.

  “We’d like to show you some photos taken at the 1996 and 1997 balls,” Diamond said after they had been invited into a small front room hung with souvenirs of travel in Africa and Asia. “We’re hoping Sidney Harrod is there.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Algy said, taking reading glasses from his pocket. “I’ll spot him if he is.”

  Leaman opened the laptop and accessed the file he’d prepared. “Bath City Life showed twelve shots of the event in 1996 and fourteen the following year. We know you were there because you’re in both sets.”

  “Standing on my own two feet in those days,” Algy said. “Do you want me to name people?”

  “Only Harrod,” Diamond said.

  The first shot was on the screen, two women either side of a tall man in a white wig and frock coat. Regrettably the quality of the image was poor compared to modern high-resolution photography. The colour brown was dominant.

  “He’d be wearing a wig like this, rather than a black one, I take it,” Diamond said.

  “Yes, indeed. He was never the Beau,” Algy said. “But that’s not him. That’s Austen Carmichael, God rest his soul.” He’d already forgotten that names weren’t needed.

  Leaman moved the picture aside. Another took its place, this time of two men facing each other and holding drinks.

  “No,” Algy said.

  Quickly he rejected the next few.

  “Wait.” He leaned forward to examine a shot of six men. “Did I really look like that twenty years ago? I was overweight even then.”

  “Say the word and I can zoom in on any of them,” Leaman said.

  “Don’t zoom in on me, whatever you do. Actually I recognise them all and Sidney isn’t among them.” If nothing else, Algy’s brain seemed to be up to the task.

  Two more went through and Leaman said, “That’s all there is from 1996.”

  “Onwards and upwards,” Diamond said, trying to be positive.

  The 1997 pictures featured several people familiar from the previous set. One group included an elderly man in a long black wig. “Now that’s David Deganwy,” Algy said. “He looks out of it already, poor old darling.”

  “Is this in focus?” Diamond said to Leaman. “Can you get it any clearer?”

  “It’s about as good as it gets, guv. The pictures in the magazine weren’t the sharpest.”

  Squinting at the screen, Diamond tried masking the other figures with his hands to concentrate on Lord Deganwy. “The waistcoat he’s wearing looks awfully like the one our skeleton had on, what you can see of it. Do those look like oak leaves to you?”

  “Are you asking me?” Algy said.

  “Either of you.”

  “I can zoom in a bit,” Leaman offered, but the picture still wasn’t all that clear. “Is that a button or an acorn?”

  “Acorn,” Algy said. “It’s not in line with the other buttons.”

  “If we printed this out, I could look at it under magnification,” Diamond said. He was trying to think of a circumstance in which Lord Deganwy could have been the skeleton in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

  “You’d do better looking at the original magazine picture,” Leaman said. “But I think you’re right. They’re oak leaves and acorns.”

  “I thought you were interested in Sidney Harrod,” Algy said.

  “We are,” Diamond said, wrenching himself back to the real point of the exercise.

  “And we’re getting to the end,” Leaman said.

  Algy sighed. “I’m a dead loss as a witness.”

  “If he isn’t among them, it’s not your fault,” Diamond said.

  The final shot came on screen.

  “Afraid not,” Algy said. “Can I offer you a sherry?”

  Diamond could almost hear John Leaman grinding his teeth. Another line of enquiry had come to nothing. “Run them through again, John. There are shadowy figures in the background of some. We were concentrating on the ones in focus.”

  The second run-through was slower. Leaman worked the zoom facility to feature sections they might have missed, but there were limits to the technology dealing with pictures scanned from a magazine and they soon went out of focus.

  “Frustrating,” Algy said. “He would have been there somewhere. He definitely attended the balls.”

  “Stay with it.”

  Another group from 1996 came up. “That’s obviously a footman behind them,” Algy said. “You can see the tray of drinks.”

  “How about the man in the foreground with his back to the camera?” Diamond asked.

  “Impossible to tell. There isn’t enough of him.”

  The only part of the figure properly in shot was the hand curled around a champagne glass. The head and wig were a blur in the top left of the screen.

  Leaman dragged the next image across.

  “Wait,” Algy said. “Go back to the man holding the glass.”

  He whistled softly when it reappeared. “Look at the hand. Can you make it any larger?”

  “We’ll lose some definition,” Leaman said.

  “Hold it there, then,” Algy said. “Would you mind handing me the laptop?”

  Leaman did so.

  Algy held the screen six inches from his face and then passed it to Diamond. “You have a look. Funny.”

  Diamond studied the screen and saw that something was indeed funny, but not laughable. It was funny in the sense of odd. Most of that right hand was obscured by the lace sleeve, yet the fingers clutching the glass were visible and one—the forefinger—was only a stump below the knuckle.

  Algy said, “The things you forget over the years. If I’d had my wits about me I would have told you yesterday. It’s only just come back to me that Sidney Harrod had most of his right forefinger missing. This must be him.”

  Diamond wasn’t sure whether to hug him or thump him.

  Here was the defining detail they needed—and it should have come so much more quickly.

  In the autopsy, Dr. Waghorn had spoken about the forefinger of the right hand, telling his audience not to be deceived when they saw on screen that the skeleton was incomplete. He’d explained the absence of two sections of finger—calling them phalanxes—by saying they must have been lost when the skeleton was hoisted from the roof. Of far more interest, the anthropologist had said, was the left hand, and he’d gloried in pointing out the tiny nick he’d found, the proof of a defensive wound.

  To be fair to Waghorn, the left hand was the more interesting. But in his keenness to show his discovery, he had made a wrong assumption about the other hand. The missing bones from the right hand hadn’t been lost in the recovery operation. They were missing already.

  “Have you got your phone with you, John?” Diamond asked.

  Leaman produced it and tapped the screen.

  “Can you find a picture of the skeleton?”

  “This one?”

  “Not that one, for pity’s sake.”

  He’d brought up the infamous cherry-picker shot that had been in all the newspapers.

  “Sorry. It’s my wallpaper.”

  “Your what?”

  Leaman didn’t explain. He instantly replaced the offensive image with multiple tiny pictures and selected the skeleton seated in its chair in the partly demolished loft. “Wi
ll this one do?”

  “Okay. Let’s have a look. Can we zoom in on the right hand?”

  No question: the hand bones resting on the faded wool of the breeches were incomplete. The forefinger ended at the first joint. And the shot had been taken before the skeleton was moved.

  “This clinches it for me,” Diamond said. “Sidney Harrod is our man.”

  24

  Paul Gilbert drove to the Podium car park and rode the escalator to the Central Library, a place he rarely visited. Books didn’t interest him much. In fact, he felt uncomfortable confronted by so many. He was only here because the boss had picked him for this. Much as he respected Peter Diamond, he didn’t have any confidence that the conman who called himself Sidney Harrod had come here twenty-odd years ago, and he was willing to bet there wouldn’t be any record of it.

  The place was open plan and the reference section was at the far end, with rows of desks occupied mostly by students. He looked for a librarian his own age—which probably wasn’t a wise decision. The young woman he approached must have been an infant when Harrod was supposed to have used the library, but she was friendly and willing to check. Unsurprisingly she found nothing on her computer. “We do keep paper records from that time,” she told him, and insisted on going off to some storeroom to look for them.

  He found a rack of magazines while he waited and was leafing through the latest Autocar when his help came back, pushing a trolley loaded with ring binders. Thirty years of written requests to consult rare books were all recorded in loose-leaf files.

  “Are you going to leave me to it?” he asked with a bleak look.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s my job to check these. Data protection. I brought them out here because I didn’t want to spend an hour or more going through them and finding you’d got bored and gone away.”

  Would he have been so ill-mannered? He hoped not. He liked her. “Good thinking.”

  “So I’ll get on. You’d know all about data protection in the police.”

  “Right. I suppose I do.”

  “What was the title of the book this man may have asked to read?”

  Twenty minutes later, she’d done the job.