‘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.’