And yet Harry the tenant hadn’t carried on living in Twerton forever. He’d moved elsewhere. Could it have been to Larkhall?
There had never been any mention of a child living in that Twerton house. Perry would have been six at the time of the murder.
On consideration, he wouldn’t have lived there. His parents had separated and he was living with his mother.
Worth mentioning to Diamond. She didn’t like to predict his reaction.
The Rugby Club ticket office is a shop on the iconic Pulteney Bridge over the Avon. Painted in Bath RFC blue and next to the club shop selling kit and souvenirs, it has the advantage of being no more than a fullback’s kick away from the ground itself, the famous Rec.
“I’m hoping you can help,” she said after showing her ID to the friendly woman behind the counter. “I’m wondering if anyone here recalls a young assistant called Perry Morgan.”
“Perry who was shot at the fireworks?” the woman said immediately. “I was saying only yesterday that could have been our Perry.”
And you didn’t think to inform the police? Every media outlet howling for information and you stayed silent. Bloody typical of Bath’s buttoned-up population.
Maybe the woman read the expression on Ingeborg’s face because she added, “It was a long time ago.”
“Were you working here at the time?”
“I’ve been here since January 2003, and the years just flashed by. I love it, all the regulars coming in. A lot of them know me by name.”
“And what’s that?”
“Isla. I was born in Scotland.”
“So, Isla, you remember Perry first coming here? It would have been 2007.”
“I do. He was a bit lost at first. His dad had died recently in a traffic accident and he didn’t seem to have any family at all. One of the local cab drivers helped him get the job. That was because the father drove a taxi.”
“You called him ‘our Perry,’ so he must have settled into the job.”
“We did our best to make a fuss of him, knowing his story. Yes, he was a bright lad. He soon got to know how we do things here and made himself useful.”
“Did he talk about his family situation?”
Isla shook her head. “Obviously, it was a painful subject, so we kept off it.”
“While he was here did he make any friends?”
“In the shop, you mean?”
“Or outside?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“He got into bad company at some stage and we want to discover how soon it started.”
“Bad company?”
“He used drugs.”
“Not while he was here, he didn’t. He wouldn’t have stayed in the job five minutes.”
“It isn’t always obvious.”
“A young kid like that?”
Ingeborg didn’t see much point in enlightening Isla on drug use by adolescents. “How long was he working here?”
“Not all that long. A matter of months.”
“What happened? Did he get another job?”
“He wasn’t sacked. I know that,” Isla said. “He was ambitious, I suppose. He found something that paid better. I have a faint memory of him working for one of the bus tour companies. Open-top, doing the commentary. I bet he was good at it. He was confident for his age.”
It fitted the profile. “So you don’t recall any friends he may have had, people who called here to see him or met up with him when he finished work?”
“No. He liked to be independent. He didn’t welcome anyone getting too near. He made it very clear he didn’t want mothering from any of us. There isn’t much else I can tell you. Sorry.”
Ingeborg had reached the same conclusion. She thanked Isla and walked back to where she had left the car.
26
Sleep had been difficult for Diamond after speaking to Ingeborg. Instead of phoning, she’d driven all the way back to Concorde House the evening before to make her report in person. She’d told him what she’d discovered at the taxi rank and the ticket office about the early career of Perry Morgan, vital background information that had fleshed out their knowledge of an unusually evasive young man.
But that hadn’t kept the head of CID awake.
What had given him such a brute of a night wasn’t Perry’s life history. It was when Ingeborg fixed him with her you’d-better-be-listening look and said she’d been thinking outside the box and there was one more thing she wanted to get his opinion on. “I expect it’s a red herring, guv, and I’m sure you thought of it yonks ago and kicked it straight into the long grass. Can you do that with a red herring? Anyway, for what it’s worth, here goes. It’s about Perry’s father, Henry Morgan. We’ve been calling him Henry in all our talk about the case because that’s how we know him—as Henry—in formal language from reports of his death and on his death certificate. But—here’s what zoomed me out—the guy I met, the taxi driver on the rank, called him Harry. Fair enough, it’s what people named Henry have been called for hundreds of years. Anyone who’s read Shakespeare knows that. And then off the top of my head I remembered Harry from our other case, the guy who was the tenant of the Twerton house at the time of the murder there. Am I totally out of order or is it remotely possible that the two Harrys were the same man?”
Simple as that.
Diamond’s immediate response had been muted. Harry was a boringly common name. The phrase “every Tom, Dick or Harry” was proof of that. Out of consideration for Ingeborg, he’d offered to think about it. Once or twice lately he’d seen a look come into her eyes suggesting he wasn’t open to debate about anything. He’d show her he didn’t reject her ideas without weighing them carefully.
In the deep of the night, that so-called red herring swam into his thoughts and refused to leave. The little that was known about Harry the tenant didn’t conflict with any of the facts about Harry the taxi driver. What if they were the same man? Harry the tenant had lived in Twerton with a woman called Sarah who had apparently left him in 1997. He’d carried on living at the same address for a couple more years until Jerzy the electrician took over the tenancy. He’d been described by the Twerton newsagent as in his thirties, white, with dark hair and not too talkative. He’d always paid in cash rather than by card. After he’d left the Twerton house the trail had gone cold.
Harry the taxi driver lived on the other side of town, in Larkhall, but nothing was known of his whereabouts before that. Could he have moved there from Twerton about 1999? His age at death had been forty-three, which fitted with Harry the tenant in his thirties in the late 1990s. Both had said little about themselves. The taxi driver was “a cagey character” and the tenant “didn’t have much to say for himself.”
How did this fusion of the two men fit the events they were involved in? Perry’s father, the taxi driver, had formed a relationship with a woman called Fiona Glyn who gave birth to their child at Dolemeads in 1990. Both their names were on Perry’s birth certificate. But Fiona had raised the child alone. Only after her death in 2002 did Harry take full responsibility. So there were these twelve years or so needing to be accounted for, years when the guy clearly hadn’t left the area. Was he paying Fiona some form of maintenance and leading a double life?
Switch back to Harry in Twerton, living with another woman, called Sarah, until 1997, when she left him or was murdered, the same year a corpse in a Beau Nash costume was entombed in the loft of the terraced house they shared.
About 1999, Harry moved out of the house, leaving its gruesome secret so well concealed that the skeleton would not be found until the place was demolished. Nothing conflicted with him starting up again in Larkhall, taking on taxi work and providing a home for his young son in 2002 after Fiona died.
But then in 2007 came the fatal accident on the M4. Harry the taxi driver was killed and if he was also Harry the tenant he�
��d died with the secret of what really happened in the Twerton house in 1997.
Diamond heaved himself out of bed at four in the morning to make himself strong tea and see if it all made sense downstairs. He fed the cat and pondered the matter. He couldn’t find a flaw in the reasoning. Each date, each event, slotted in. Ingeborg’s red herring didn’t smell fishy. It was the true explanation. Had to be.
Harry Morgan may have got away with murder. But the fates had dealt with him.
Case closed?
Not to the point of absolute proof. Even so, the match-up of the Harrys was a breakthrough. He felt like calling Ingeborg to tell her, but she might not appreciate a call at this hour. Texting was still a skill he had to learn.
He could now put all his effort into finding who had murdered Perry. He returned to bed and fitted in two hours of untroubled sleep.
He was first in to work.
Ingeborg arrived at Concorde House soon after 8:30 and he called her into his office straight away. She stepped in apprehensively.
“Well done.”
“What for, guv?”
“What you told me last night. The two Harrys being the same person. Everything fits. You’ve cracked it.”
She actually blushed. Compliments from Diamond were as rare as rich uncles.
“Sorry I didn’t show much excitement when you spoke of it last night,” he said. “This hasn’t been easy, dealing with two cases twenty years apart, and now to find a link between them is a shock to the system.”
“If you’re certain,” Ingeborg said. “It was just an idea.”
“An inspiration. Yesterday changed everything. We now know the name of the victim.” He spoke on a rising note, as if testing her.
“Sidney Harrod.”
“And who did it.”
“Harry Morgan.”
“Even better, we don’t have to flog ourselves finding Harry because he’s dead. We can focus on Perry.”
“Good.”
“That doesn’t sound like a hundred percent good,” he said. “What’s bugging you?”
“Before we close the case,” she said, “what was Harry’s motive?”
“I thought you’d ask me that and the obvious answer is NOTS.”
An acronym from Diamond, who despised them? He was in a heady mood today. “What’s that?”
“Now open to suggestions. We already know Harrod was a conman, a particularly unpleasant individual who leeched on to a rich old man in the early stages of dementia and was stealing and selling items from his house.”
“Did Harry know that?”
“Can’t tell. What I’m saying is it’s well possible Sidney Harrod became a threat to Harry.”
“How come?”
“Harry was leading a double life, with a son he probably hadn’t mentioned to Sarah, the woman he was living with in Twerton. Let’s say Harrod got to know about his secret and demanded money in return for silence.”
“Blackmail?” she said, frowning. “Do you have any evidence for that?”
“We know Sarah left.”
“You think she got to know the truth?”
“That’s my best guess. Either she quit because Harrod tipped her off about the other woman or it was after the murder and she legged it fast.”
“If you’re right, it may not have been murder,” Ingeborg said. “The two men could have had a huge argument that turned violent.”
“With a sharp implement?”
“The first thing that came to hand.”
“Now you’re talking like a defence lawyer,” Diamond said. “They’d have a field day with this. Good thing the case will never come to court.”
Paul Gilbert was waiting to see him after Ingeborg left his office. The young DC had just received copies of the documents Diamond had asked to see—Lord Deganwy’s death certificate and will.
“So what do they say he died of?”
Gilbert passed the certificate across. “Vascular dementia and cardiac arrest.”
“No surprise there.” He glanced through the details. “This was April 1998, then. Not long after he gave up the presidency of the Beau Nash Society. Died at home, in Widcombe Hall . . . Funny.”
“What’s funny, guv?” Gilbert asked.
“Funny peculiar.” Without saying any more he placed the certificate on his desk. “Give me the will.”
Simple to dissect, a shorter document than he expected from a rich landowner. Basically, everything Lord Deganwy had owned, including Widcombe Hall, was to be sold. The proceeds were to go to the Electoral Reform Society, apart from a few legacies to his staff.
Electoral reform? The old peer’s politics hadn’t been discussed so far in this investigation. Evidently he’d espoused the cause of proportional representation and he must have been deeply committed to leave the bulk of his fortune to a society that after more than a century of existence was still a long way from achieving its aim. The two main parties in Britain had a vested interest in retaining the first-past-the-post system for the foreseeable future.
Diamond shook his head. The money was wasted, in his opinion. Personally, he didn’t give a toss for politics and politicians even though he was at the sharp end of decisions made in parliament. He voted at elections and let them get on with it. The corruption scandals of recent years had hardened his cynicism.
The other legacies in Lord Deganwy’s will were small beer compared to the millions destined for the ERS, but at least they would have gone to real people. Of those, one name stood out for Diamond.
“To my estate steward, James Spearman, I give ten thousand pounds free of duty, in recognition of his loyal service.”
“Here’s a thing,” he said to Gilbert. “I know one of the beneficiaries and he’s mentioned on the death certificate as well. Ask Keith Halliwell to join us, will you?”
Hearing the catch of urgency in Diamond’s voice, Gilbert fairly scooted out and returned with Halliwell.
“It may be nothing,” Diamond said as he handed his deputy the will, “but take a look.”
Halliwell was quick. “Sir Ed Paris’s chauffeur?”
“That’s what I thought. His name is Jim, isn’t it?”
“Certainly is, but we didn’t know he once worked for Lord Deganwy. ‘My estate steward,’ it says here. Sounds a high-powered job.”
“Very. He’d have his own office and a large budget for managing the place, hiring staff, buying equipment and materials, maintaining the upkeep. He’d be the top man on the staff. The Deganwy estate wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to need someone like that.”
“Can this be the same guy?”
“The name’s not all that common,” Diamond said, unsure if he could take yet another rise and plunge of the switchback.
“Yes, but this was a long time ago. What age is Spearman?”
“Around fifty, I’d say. He could have been thirty at the time.”
“Young, for a position like that.”
“Some people in their twenties are running business empires.”
“True, but how come he ends up as a chauffeur? That’s a comedown.”
Diamond wouldn’t let go. “As he was employed by one president of the Beau Nash Society, it’s not impossible he was later offered a job by another. Ed Paris doesn’t have an estate. It’s a nice big garden, but he wouldn’t need a steward for it. On the other hand, he needs someone to drive him around in the Bentley and the Range Rover.”
“I guess estate steward jobs don’t come up too often these days.”
“We’ll find out,” Diamond said. “We’ll ask him. There’s something else I haven’t shown you.” He picked up the death certificate and handed it to Halliwell. “Look at the name of the informant.”
Halliwell read it aloud. “‘James Spearman, present at the death.’ Wasn’t the doctor presen
t?”
“Evidently not. The doctor certified the cause as dementia and cardiac arrest. He’d have been treating the old man, so he’d sign it off when he confirmed that life was extinct, but he wouldn’t have needed to be there.”
“And Spearman inherits ten grand. We’d definitely better see this guy.”
Paul Gilbert had heard all this from two seasoned investigators and his eyes were the size of the spotlights above the desk.
Diamond picked up the phone and switched to speaker for the others to listen. “Get me Sir Edward Paris, will you?”
He was through straight away and reminded Paris who he was. “I’d like to come and see your chauffeur if he’s with you.”
“What’s that about, then, my old chum? In some kind of trouble, is he?” As soon as the first words came out, the bluff, no-nonsense, twenty-first-century Beau materialised in Diamond’s head like a pantomime genie.
“Not at all, Sir Edward. It’s a routine enquiry.”
“No big deal, then?”
“It’s got to be done. We need to speak to him about something that’s cropped up.”
“And you’re not saying what?”
“Not to anyone else. It concerns Mr. Spearman, nobody else.”
“You’ll have to try later, then. He’s not here.”
“Gone away, you mean?”
“Gone shopping. We’re having a garden party here and this afternoon is going to be a belter, the weathermen say. Needed some last-minute items, extra sunshades, those super-sized beauties on stands. Spearman knows where to go for stuff like that. I can safely leave it up to him.”
“So he’s more than just your chauffeur?”
“Chauffeur, shopper, window cleaner, TV maintenance man. He can turn his hand to anything, just about.”
“How long have you employed him?”
“Ten years, easy, and I’d be lost without him. He used to work for David Deganwy, who was the Beau when I joined the society.”
Diamond glanced across at Halliwell. All uncertainty was removed. They needed to see this man of many parts—and soon. “We can be at Charlcombe in, say, an hour. He’ll be back by then, won’t he?”
Beau Death Page 32
