‘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.
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.