Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  Understandably after all the trouble she’d taken, Ingeborg was scathing. “Beating the truth out of someone who knows?”

  “Not that old-fashioned. I mean looking at motive, means and opportunity.”

  “Means and opportunity are obvious,” she said. “The killer had a handgun and used it. That was the means. And the opportunity was the fireworks display when there were major distractions. Motive is all we have to work with.”

  “Yep, and it’s a brute,” Diamond agreed. “We know he was a cokehead and drugs attract violent people, but I can’t see how his death was necessary. Even if he missed a payment, he was due a big profit from the fireworks contest and would be able to settle up later.”

  “It was a free show.”

  “The finale was. The competition went on all week. The ones at the Rec brought in gate money. Wasn’t payment discussed in the emails?”

  She clicked her tongue, annoyed with herself. “I must be blitzed from reading them. Now you mention it, there was a down payment.”

  “This is stuff I rely on you to tell me.” He was feeling as frayed as she.

  If he expected a show of contrition he didn’t get it. She folded her arms and stared him out.

  “Anyhow,” he went on, “dealers don’t murder their users. They want them alive and paying.”

  “Unless he’d threatened to name names.”

  “Unlikely. He had a reputation to keep up. He wouldn’t want it known he was on cocaine. The drugs may be a red herring.”

  “What else is there? He didn’t seem to have any rivals putting on shows.”

  “He may have seriously upset someone with the kind of thing he was doing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Setting off the fireworks. Objections from the residents.”

  “The people living in the crescent? With gunfire? Come off it, guv.”

  “They’ve had to endure displays before, but always set off behind the terrace, not in front on their precious lawn. I’m thinking some elderly army officer may have been so incensed that he went out there with his service weapon and shot the organiser. Simple as that.”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding?”

  He shook his head. “An Englishman’s home is his castle. Never underrate an angry Bathonian.”

  “He would have shown himself by now. We’ve had a team knocking on doors at the terrace, haven’t we?”

  “For possible witnesses, not looking for Nimbys.”

  “Have you done a debrief?”

  “To see if any of them spoke to a mad colonel? Actually, it wasn’t mentioned as such. Seriously, we shouldn’t discount the crazy person with a grudge against Perry. Anyone running big public events is going to ruffle feathers. There could be some nutcase with a grievance following the guy around with the idea of shooting him when the chance came.”

  She wasn’t persuaded. “Did anything come back from ballistics?”

  “You saw their report. No match with any known weapon, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I know that much. They were going to get back to us later with more findings.”

  He riffled through the paper stuffed into his in-tray. In the computer age most people had long ago dispensed with in-trays. Diamond had moved on, but only from wire to plastic. He found the document he wanted and handed it to Ingeborg. “This came in yesterday. Didn’t excite me much or I’d have shared it with everyone.”

  She glanced through the summary of findings. “‘Five bullets examined, but no casings . . . likely to have been a revolver.’ Does anyone use revolvers now?”

  “You mean in the services?”

  “Army, police. It’s all semi-automatic, isn’t it? They stopped issuing service revolvers back in the 1960s.”

  “Still used in crimes,” he said.

  “But this one isn’t on the database. It hasn’t been fired in the course of a crime and certainly not a murder.”

  “What’s the point you’re making, Inge?”

  “Our killer used an old-fashioned weapon not on the NABIS database. The chance is high that this was a one-off. Unprofessional.”

  The last time Ingeborg had made this point, he’d made some unkind remark about the killer keeping the weapon in his sock drawer. She’d stuck with her theory, and now he gave it more respect. “Okay. Where does that get us?”

  “To somebody with a personal issue. It’s unlikely to have been a contract killing or something to do with a drug war. I say we should home in on Perry’s close circle, people he dealt with from day to day, family, friends.”

  “There weren’t any.”

  “That was according to his landlady, Miss Divine, but how much did she know?”

  “Quite a bit, I thought. ‘I don’t believe in prying,’ she told us and clearly did the opposite. She had the combination and could enter the flat at will. Not much got past that lady.”

  “The cocaine in the cornflakes did.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got me there.”

  Ingeborg was in full flow. “Perry was smart enough to hide that part of his private life from Miss Divine, so why not the rest? He was born in Bath and lived here all his life. There must be people in this dozy town who know more about him than Miss Divine does. Got to be. He wasn’t a recluse. He was a social animal, confident.”

  “We’ve been down this route before,” he said. “What did we get from social media? Masses of flimflam about the shows he put on, but about the man, zilch. There’s no family, no close friends, no obvious points of contact. All the press coverage brought in nothing we didn’t have already. Paul Gilbert wasted most of a day checking the university registers.”

  “That was always a long shot,” she said.

  “All right, I’ll put my hand up to that one. It was only a hunch because we couldn’t think where his confidence came from. I’d like to look at it from another angle—the low point in his life when his parents died, first his mother, from cancer, and then his dad in the car crash.”

  “Where does that lead us?”

  “His dad was a taxi driver. They spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for fares. They all know each other, those guys. Haven’t you seen them sitting in each other’s cabs? They’re the bush telegraph.”

  “It was a while ago.”

  “2007, the year Henry Morgan died. That’s not the dark ages.”

  “I’ve no memory of it.”

  “CID weren’t involved, that’s why. It was an accident. Some of the older cabbies will remember. It must have been a big event in their lives, one of their number killed. And if they remember him, they’ll remember Perry, how he took the shock and what happened after.”

  “I’ll go.” She was already halfway to the door. She said she’d try the rank at the railway station.

  Paul Gilbert reported back shortly after Ingeborg had left.

  “You took your time,” Diamond said, still grouchy. “Chatting up the library staff, were you?”

  He would never guess how close he came to the truth. Gilbert told the boss everything he needed to know. The date with Tulip wasn’t included.

  “And you got out of the Moon Street estate in one piece?” Diamond said with more admiration when he’d heard the story. “You’re a legend. I only ever visit there with an armed back-up.”

  “It was quiet, guv.”

  “That’s when I start worrying.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Brave man. The pieces are falling into place now. Fortnum and Mason—I like that. I wonder which other names he went under.”

  “Flossie didn’t mention any others.”

  “Mr. Harvey on the driving licence and Mr. Nichols on the bus pass?”

  The joke passed Paul Gilbert by. His clothes came from T.K. Maxx.

  Diamond went on, “He’d have t
o be careful what he called himself in Moon Street. Flossie sounds a sharp lady.”

  “Razor sharp.”

  “And you say the last she and Miss Bowman saw of him was 1997. Did she say precisely when?”

  He shook his head. “The summer. He arrived in 1996 and left the next summer.”

  “It chimes in with what we heard from the Beau Nash Society. He surfaced there in 1996 and vanished suddenly the following year. And now we need to know why his body turned up in Twerton—eventually. Is there a connection with Moon Street?”

  “It was another rundown place.”

  “But Sidney Harrod was all about aspiration, upwardly mobile, getting to know the cream of society, hobnobbing with them and fleecing them. He wouldn’t find toffs living in a Twerton slum. He had no reason to be there. Have you looked at it on your map? It’s across the river and a mile west of Moon Street.”

  “Are you thinking he was taken there by force?”

  “By force? Who by? Harry, the Twerton tenant, and his woman? Why would they want to kill him? He wasn’t rich pickings. It’s become clear from your good work this morning that he was just a blagger living by his wits, but on a modest scale. He’d fastened on to that sad old gent on Widcombe Hill.”

  “Lord Deganwy?”

  “Yes, and he was systematically stealing choice items of furniture, but he’d have to fence them. He wouldn’t get anything like their true value.”

  “Could the guy living in the Twerton house have been his fence?” Gilbert asked.

  “Harry? That’s a thought.” Diamond became more interested. “That is a thought. We can check the records for known fences operating in that area at the time.”

  “What records, guv? Was it on computer then?”

  He nodded. “But not all that efficient. As far as I can recall, we used HOLMES in those days, and the Criminal Records Bureau were still issuing paper certificates. The system was upgraded in 2000 and several times since. We may find out more from asking people who were around at the time.”

  “Like yourself?”

  “Watch it, lad. You can soon run out of the goodwill you earned this morning. I used criminal records back then, but it was never my main job. There should be people in uniform who covered stolen goods.”

  “I’ll ask,” Gilbert said. “The thing that’s really odd is that the skeleton was wearing the Beau Nash outfit.”

  “You don’t have to remind me.”

  “Do you think he was killed for that?”

  “They’d have stripped it off the body if that was what they were after.”

  “It was genuine eighteenth-century, wasn’t it? How much would it be worth?”

  “The real thing? A couple of grand or so, depending on the condition and the provenance. That’s the problem for a thief—provenance. There aren’t many of these costumes about. Any expert would know where it came from, in this case the Deganwy family. Anyhow, it was ripped and bloodstained.”

  “Not worth stealing?”

  “Antique furniture is easier to fence because thousands of pieces were made and many have survived.”

  “Shame all this happened so long ago.”

  Diamond didn’t think of it as long ago, but it was almost a lifetime to DC Gilbert.

  The eager young man was off on another tack. “What happened to Lord Deganwy’s house after his death? Did one of the family inherit?”

  “He was the last of the line. The title died with him and Widcombe Hall was sold. It belongs to some company now. They hire out the house as a conference centre.”

  “Someone must have come into a small fortune from the sale. I could make some enquiries.”

  “Good man. Search the probate records and get a copy of the will. And Deganwy’s death certificate while you’re at it. I’d like to be sure he died naturally.”

  Ingeborg was glad to get out of the office. She had a high regard for Diamond’s intellect but didn’t enjoy his moods. It wasn’t misogyny or she would have quit years ago. Actually he had an old-fashioned respect for women that bordered on the patronising and could be equally hard to take. He was complex, huffy one day and affable the next, well defended, a strong leader and a smart detective scarred by the tragedy of his wife’s murder before Ingeborg even joined the police. She suspected there had always been this crossgrain of melancholy in his personality redeemed to some extent by a sharp sense of humour. And for all his faults, he was a good man.

  On second thoughts, it was simpler than that. He was a man. They expected you to make allowances. Why the hell should you?

  The taxi rank in front of the railway station looked promising in numbers, a double line of cars waiting for the next train from London. She knew better than to go to the front and raise hopes she was a fare, so she stood on the forecourt watching for a while, on the lookout for an older driver who might have a memory of the accident eleven years ago.

  She settled on one towards the back of the line leaning against the passenger door of his cab. Poor choice. When she asked, he’d taken to driving taxis on retiring from teaching two years ago. He pointed to a much younger guy. “Tony’s been driving longer than any of us. He’s your man.”

  Hard to believe. Tony was the fresh-faced one she’d already decided couldn’t possibly be any help.

  Being near the front of the line, he wasn’t keen to talk. “Soon as a fare turns up, I’m off, right? The train’s overdue already.”

  Ingeborg toyed with the idea of hiring the taxi herself and then remembered she didn’t have more than five pounds in her pocket. She had her warrant card and she showed that. “I’m asking about a driver called Henry Morgan.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Killed in an accident on the M4 in 2007.”

  “That was Harry.”

  “Harry, then. It amounts to the same thing, a nickname for Henry, isn’t it?” Even as she spoke the obvious, Ingeborg had a lightbulb moment. The tenant of the Twerton house at the time the skeleton was killed had been called Harry. The thought hadn’t entered her head until now.

  So what? That was another case unconnected to the shooting of Perry Morgan. Harry wasn’t an unusual first name.

  Leave it, she thought. Concentrate on the Harry you’ve come to ask about, Perry’s father.

  Tony the taxi man glanced at his watch. “Supposed to be the fifty-nine.”

  “So you do remember Harry Morgan?”

  “We had a proper cabby’s funeral for him,” he told her, eyes now fixed on the arched station entrance. “More than fifty of us stopped work and followed the hearse and when we got to his house in St. Saviour’s Road we pulled up and sounded our horns for a minute. It was a tribute, like.”

  “St. Saviour’s? Where’s that?”

  “Larkhall. Off the London Road. I remember when we took our hands off the horns, we’d started loads of dogs barking.”

  Larkhall was the other side of the city from Twerton.

  “Obviously a popular guy if you gave him such a send-off.” He still wasn’t making eye contact and she tried not to get annoyed.

  “I wouldn’t say that, not specially. He was a cagy character. Never said much. We’d have done the same for any other driver we knew.”

  “And you all knew Harry Morgan?”

  “I’ll say this for him. He was a career driver, not like these oldies who do it in retirement to top up their pensions.”

  “Do you remember if he had any family?” she asked as if she didn’t know already.

  He had to think about that. “There was a kid, a boy. Harry was bringing him up on his own. The mother was dead. He was only a schoolkid, about fifteen or sixteen, and there was a lot of sympathy. I don’t think Harry left much, so we had a whip-round for the boy and raised more than fifteen hundred quid.”

  “What became of him? Did you hear any more?”
/>   “I’m trying to think. Can’t even remember his name.”

  “Perry.”

  “You could be right about that.”

  This guy was so annoying.

  “Some of the other drivers took an interest, made sure the money was put to good use. I think it covered his rent for a bit, until he found a job with the rugby club in their ticket office.”

  “This is Bath rugby club you’re talking about?”

  “They took him on as the office boy, I reckon, making the tea and posting the letters. I don’t suppose they let him sell the tickets. He wasn’t idle. There’s a youth theatre company called Zenith that puts on shows at Kingswood School on Lansdown. Posh school. They’ve got their own theatre. Harry’s boy joined and did a bit of acting and publicity for them.”

  The life history was coming together, making sense. The job in the ticket office, the acting and the publicity work. Through his link with the rugby club, Perry must have learned the basics about dealing with the public and how big events at the Rec were organised. All good grounding for a future impresario. Ingeborg had heard of Zenith and the shows at Kingswood. They were amateur only in the sense that they were run by and for volunteers. The shows were top class, mostly musicals.

  There was movement at the station entrance. People were emerging in numbers.

  “Train’s in,” Tony said. “That’s your lot.” He moved round to the driver’s side. “You want to ask at the ticket office—on Pulteney Bridge.”

  Among the stream of passengers from London stepping into taxis she spotted Diamond’s friend Paloma with a young black woman. Both were clutching designer carrier bags. The friend—who’d shopped at MaxMara in Bond Street—was likely to be Estella, the Beau Nash expert. Ingeborg had heard a lot about her from Diamond. The two women shared a cab and were driven away.

  Taking Tony’s advice, Ingeborg walked the short way up Manvers Street and Pierrepont reflecting on what she had learned. The two Harrys were a coincidence she should have picked up before today. Harry the Twerton tenant and Harry Morgan the taxi driver. Couldn’t be the same man, surely? The murders under investigation were divided by twenty years, divided by everything she could think of except that both took place in Bath.