Only three people had asked for The Jests of Beau Nash in thirty years and none of them was called Harrod.
“Not much demand for Mr. Nash’s jests, then,” Gilbert said. “It must have been the way he told them.”
The smile she gave him was nothing to do with library duties.
Gilbert made a snap decision that was nothing to do with police duties. He wouldn’t leave without asking for a date.
“Do you mind if I take a look?”
He expected her to plead data protection again, but she gave a shrug and another smile. “I suppose it’s all right. They were all filled in a long time ago.”
She showed him the retrieval forms. They required a name, address, signature and details of the material to be consulted. Each recorded the issue and return of the material and was co-signed by a librarian. There were actually five entries for the Nash book because one person had asked for it on three occasions in 1996, which happened to be the year Sidney Harrod had been caught on camera—partially—at the Beau Nash Society ball. But the name on the forms was Mason. The other retrievals were dated 1991 and 1992.
“Mind if I take a picture?” he asked.
“Of the forms?”
For one exquisite moment he thought she was inviting him to get a shot of her. He couldn’t be sure. Better not push my luck, he thought. “If photography isn’t allowed, I can make a copy in my notebook, but I’d really like to show the handwriting to my boss.”
She fingered her long hair nervously. “It’s not flash, is it?”
“No.”
“Go on, then.”
“Thanks.” He got busy with his iPhone. “This guy in 1996—Mr. Mason—seems to have come three days running. I don’t recognise the address, do you? The Laurels, Victoria Street, Bath. Do we have a Victoria Street in Bath? I know Victoria Road in Oldfield Park, but Victoria Street is new on me.”
She checked on her computer. “You’re right,” she said with admiration. “It doesn’t exist.”
“Then I don’t suppose Mr. A. Mason existed either.”
“Someone filled in the form.”
“But with a made-up name and address.”
“How peculiar,” she said. “He returned the book.”
“Certain people don’t like giving personal information,” Gilbert said with the air of a detective who has walked the mean streets all his life. “Me, I have no problem telling anyone my name. It’s Paul Gilbert. What’s yours?”
She turned an extra shade of pink and said after a moment’s hesitation, “Tulip.”
“Cool. How about a drink sometime soon, Tulip?” It wasn’t the best pick-up line in the world and she didn’t rise to it at once.
“Are you really a detective?”
“Of course. That’s why I’m here.”
“Honestly?”
“Want to see my warrant card?” He made it sound like seduction.
She smiled and shook her head. “I believe you.”
Detective work at Gilbert’s level was mostly plod, plod, but when a chance to make it work for you arrived you’d be a fool to back down. The date was fixed for Friday evening. By some miracle he also remembered to ask the boring question that would surely get him a grunt of approval from Peter Diamond. “Coming back to these forms, would you happen to recognise the initials of the librarian who issued the book in 1996? The letters look like M.S. and it’s the same person each time.”
She studied the form again. “I wish I could help, but I’ve not been here long.”
“Maybe one of your colleagues would know.”
“I can ask.” Tulip got up and crossed the room and Gilbert watched her movement in perilously high heels and was even more delighted he’d fixed that date.
She spoke to one of her colleagues at a computer and soon returned. “M.S. is Mike Sealyham.”
“You’re a star. Is he about?”
“Not any more. He relocated to the records office late last year. He’s an archivist now.”
With reluctance Gilbert wrenched himself away. The library visit had confounded all his expectations. He’d made the date with Tulip and there might even be something worth investigating, as Diamond had predicted.
Feeling buoyant enough to act on his own initiative, he took the short walk from the Podium to the Guildhall, where he was directed to the search room. Mike Sealyham had to be the silver-haired man behind the enquiry desk.
“You’ve come to the right bloke,” he said, after Gilbert had explained his mission. “I’m the old-stager here, one of the few who can remember working in that lovely building at eighteen Queen Square. I think it was 1993 when we all moved to the Podium.”
“This was later. I’m interested in 1996, when the book was last borrowed,” Gilbert said. “That would have been in the Podium.”
“Correct.”
“Would you happen to remember who requested it?”
“That’s asking a lot.” Mike Sealyham shook his head. “Valuable items like that were stored in the strong room. I would have collected it from there and returned it. More than twenty years ago? I’m sorry to tell you I don’t have any memory of this.”
“I’m thinking this guy may have been about seventy, good-looking, possibly with false teeth, charming, but not particularly well dressed. Gave his name as Mason, from Victoria Street.”
“We saw a lot of retired men in the library.”
“Missing a finger on his right hand.”
“Him?” Sealyham was suddenly as alert as a meerkat. “I do remember him.”
“You do?” Gilbert felt like giving him a hug.
“He was a regular in the library. I don’t know where Victoria Street is, but he didn’t live there and I don’t suppose his name was Mason either.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I used to see him most mornings on my way to work and he always came out of a house in Moon Street.”
“Moon Street?” Every police officer knew the notorious Moon Street estate, where drug busts were as regular as the postman.
“A turn off James Street West. Not the most salubrious street in Bath. I lived round the corner from him, in Mars Court. Couldn’t afford any better on the salary I got.”
“Did you challenge him about giving a false address?”
“I suppose I should have done, but no. I sympathised. I wasn’t proud of living there myself. He seemed all right. Didn’t deface the books or anything.”
“So you remember him pretty well?”
“When you mentioned the missing finger, yes. We had brief conversations about his researches. Nice man. He was writing something on eighteenth-century Bath, if I remember.”
“Beau Nash?”
“Possibly. The Beau is unavoidable if you’re studying that period. Oh, and it’s coming back to me. He was knowledgeable about old furniture—Hepplewhite and so forth. Must have dealt in it at some time, I reckon.”
Paul Gilbert was on a roll. A man with a missing finger who supplied a false name and address and was into antique furniture. This was looking awfully like the conman who had ended up as the skeleton in the loft.
“I don’t suppose you remember the number of the house.”
“Where he lived? Offhand, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Pity.”
“But I can show it to you on Google Earth.”
“Wicked.”
In seconds, Sealyham was using the website to zoom in on Britain, on Bath, on Moon Street and on a particular house in a two-storey terrace that turned out to be number 8.
What next for Paul Gilbert? The right thing was to call Peter Diamond, report on his findings and get further instructions. But when you’re really motoring, you don’t want to stop. Except that this wasn’t a motoring proposition. He was ten minutes’ walk away, maximum. He would d
efinitely walk. Park your car anywhere in the Moon Street estate and you might not see it again.
The buildings had been thrown up in the 1960s, replacing Victorian slums with twentieth-century slums said to be maisonettes when the word had some cachet. It was social housing on the cheap—built with that nauseous lemon-coloured reconstituted Bath stone—and now it screamed out for demolition.
Thanks to Google Earth, Gilbert knew precisely which house Mr. Mason—or Mr. Harrod—had occupied. The present tenant in number 8 wasn’t likely to know who had lived there twenty years ago, but there is an unwritten law that in any estate there will be someone who has been around forever and is the collective memory. He found her at number 11, and she invited him in for tea. She’d been born in Moon Street, she said, and it had been going downhill ever since, but she still loved the place. Her name was Flossie and she was a bus-sized, jolly woman with a laugh so hearty you feared for her health.
The tea came up in Prince George mugs, with pictures of the royal baby against the Union flag.
Number 8, Flossie told him, was always changing hands—which wasn’t what Gilbert wanted to hear. “It’s a crack house now, as if you didn’t know”—big laugh—“and before that it was a knocking shop for at least five years, but the girls were all right. They even hung a big flag from the bedroom window for the Diamond Jubilee. Didn’t stop them working, though”—another peal of laughter—“and always open for business, it was.”
“Going back a bit—” Gilbert started to say, but he was interrupted.
“Before them, we had an Indian family. They came the year Wills and Kate got hitched. I think they were Indian. Very quiet. Kept their children beautifully. Not like the little fiends next door to me, playing their so-called music at all hours.”
“I’m interested in the people who were living there in 1996.”
“1996. When was that? Princess Di was still alive, then. She went in 1997, poor lamb. I wept for a week.”
He’d cottoned on. Everything Flossie remembered was measured by royal events. He’d have to think of something. Had a royal baby been born in 1996? The royal family wasn’t his pet subject. He could have told you who finished top of the Premier League. No use here.
Happily Flossie came to his rescue herself. “It was the year Fergie’s divorce came through,” she said, with another chesty laugh. “That lass. You can’t help liking her in spite of everything. I remember talking to Miss Bowman about it over a cup of tea. She was the lady in number 8 and she and I got on fine, but she liked to be known as Miss Bowman. Fur coat and no knickers, I called her. You know what I’m saying?”
He knew and he was practically twitching with anticipation. In the pause for mirth, he managed to say, “This was the tenant in 1996? Miss Bowman? Was she there right through the year?”
“Oh yes. She was there a long time. She arrived just after Windsor Castle went up in flames. Which year was that?”
Gilbert didn’t know. “Did she live alone?”
The question brought a tsunami of laughter. “Now you’re asking. She was the sole tenant as far as the benefits people was concerned, but she took in lodgers. My gentlemen, she called them. Gentlemen—in Moon Street. Mind you, I don’t think there was any how’s-your-father going on. They had their own room and she did a bit of cooking for them.”
Gilbert’s hopes had plunged at the words “sole tenant” and now they soared again. “Was one of the lodgers a Mr. Mason, by any chance?”
“I wouldn’t know, dear.”
“About seventy, with a missing finger?”
“That wasn’t Mr. Mason. That was Mr. Fortnum.”
“Mr. Fortnum?” Gilbert got it at once. Fortnum and Mason. The posh shop in Piccadilly. There was a pattern to this conman’s false identities. From Harrods to Fortnum and Mason. Names picked to impress. “So you remember him?”
“Him and his little white van. Proper rogue, he was, always with a twinkle in his eye and some saucy remark. I used to tell him to act his age and he didn’t like that.”
“A white van?”
“Miss Bowman let him use her garage and added some extra on the rent but most times he left the van outside, the lazy blighter. We all have garages round the back and can’t afford cars. Mine’s full of junk. Don’t ask me what he needed a van for. Something naughty, I expect.”
“Did Miss Bowman have anything to say about him?”
“Not much. She was a bit hoity-toity, like I said. But she nearly burst a blood vessel when he upped and left without paying his rent. She told me he owed six months and she couldn’t do anything about it because she was claiming the housing benefit and hadn’t told them she had a lodger.”
“When you say ‘left,’ was it sudden?”
“He did a moonlight, didn’t he? Buzzed off in his van without a word and she never saw him again. She used a few words of her own, I can tell you.”
“Do you know when this was?”
“When did we say Fergie got divorced?”
“1996.”
“Mr. Fortnum did his bunk the year after, in the summer.”
“1997, then?”
“Terrible year, that was. Are you old enough to remember, dear? All them flowers in front of Kensington Palace. Heartbreaking. I went up to London specially to see them.”
“Did Mr. Fortnum leave anything behind in his room?”
“After he left? Funnily enough, he did. A few clothes and some bits and bobs. It was like he decided to get out fast. She thought he was coming back, so she left them in the room for a couple of weeks. Then she put them in a plastic sack in her garage. In the end she got rid of them. I don’t think she got anything for them.”
“‘Bits and bobs,’ you said. Was there anything personal—like photos or letters?”
“You’ve got some hopes,” Flossie said. “How would I know?”
“You seem to be well informed.”
“Miss Bowman used to say he was her mystery man. Well, she did find a stack of magazines, but she knew about them already. She’d been nosing round his room a few times when he was out, but she never found nothing personal. She reckoned he kept any private stuff locked up in his van.”
“What sort of magazines?”
“It wasn’t Homes and Gardens, I can tell you.” Pause for another outbreak of mirth. “Men’s magazines, they call them, don’t they? Tits and bums and other parts I won’t mention to a young gentleman like you. I don’t hold that against him. I know what you men are like. Well, we both knew what Mr. Fortnum was like.”
“Really?”
“You know the one about the landlady who thought babies came from God? ‘It weren’t the Almighty that lifted her nightie, it was Roger the lodger, the sod.’” Yet another bout of chesty laughter followed this.
“What happened to Miss Bowman?”
“A bit of slap and tickle when they passed on the stairs. It never came to more than that. She wasn’t the sort, even if he was.”
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I was asking if she’s still about.”
“Miss Bowman? No, she’s pushing up the daisies. She was gone before the Queen Mum went.”
There might have been more a young man like Paul Gilbert could have learned from Flossie, but not of relevance to the case. Outside, he took a long look at number 8 and decided against knocking on the door. If it was indeed a crack house, the drug squad would know about it and the residents might not welcome a visitor from the police.
He had enough new information already to make Peter Diamond’s day.
25
“All this?” Diamond said.
“That’s why it took so long,” Ingeborg told him. Knowing he was more comfortable working with paper than seeing it on a screen, she had handed him a printout of the contents of Perry Morgan’s phone running to several hundred sheets. “Have you looked at his con
tacts? He’s hit the upper limit of the app. That’s ten thousand.”
“How does anybody know that many people?”
“He was a professional schmoozer, guv. That was his business.”
“He couldn’t have known them all.”
“But he had the means to reach them. He will have paid some marketing firm to get most of these.”
“Talk about a needle in a haystack.”
“You have to come at it from the opposite direction. Think of a name and see if it’s there. The ACC is in it.”
“Georgina? You’re kidding.”
“I can show you.”
“Well, he did contact her, it’s true.”
“He doesn’t have your number.”
“He wouldn’t. He was interested in the high and mighty.” He paused as a new thought crossed his mind. “Makes me wonder what Beau Nash’s contact list would have looked like. Pretty impressive, I reckon. Some of the royal family and a lot of the peerage. All the high command in Bath and Tunbridge Wells. I keep thinking these two had things in common.”
“Except Beau Nash wasn’t murdered.”
That was still an open wound. Diamond continued leafing through the sheets. “Is anything here going to help us?”
“Loads of recent texts and emails connected with the fireworks. He worked hard to make a success of it.”
“I know that. What about his drug habit? Any leads?”
“If there are, I haven’t found them yet.”
“His bank account might be instructive.”
“Thought of that,” Ingeborg said. “He banked with Santander. That much is easy, but of course getting into the account isn’t.”
“Apply for a production order.”
“It’s been done—on the grounds that he was involved in the drug trade.”
“Shaky. He was a user, not a dealer.”
“The magistrate gave it the nod. We should get access today.”
He dropped the printed paper on his desk with a thump that seemed to say he wouldn’t pick it up again in a hurry. “Thanks for this.”
She eyed him with suspicion. “But . . . ?”
“I have a feeling this case is going to be solved by old-fashioned methods.”
Beau Death Page 30