by Rhys Bowen
“Oh, there you are, Bron. I was looking for you,” he said. He definitely looked worried. It must be a strain, carrying on a murder investigation, Bronwen thought.
“I was down in Bangor, shopping. How’s your investigation coming along?”
“Not going anywhere at the moment,” Evan said. “I’m stumped on this one, Bron.”
“Maybe we can talk it through some more on Saturday. Two heads are better than one, aren’t they?”
Evan’s face fell. “About Saturday,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone our date.”
“I see.” Bronwen’s face was a mask of stone.
“We could do it next weekend, maybe?”
“I might be busy next weekend,” Bronwen said. “There are some friends I might go hiking with—old friends from university I haven’t seen for a while. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“Okay,” Evan said. “Some other time then.”
“Maybe. It depends.”
“On what?”
“A lot of things.” Bronwen walked calmly past Evan toward the schoolhouse. Evan watched her go. Something was going on here he didn’t quite understand.
Chapter 17
“Now I know why I don’t come to London more often,” Sergeant Watkins said as they fought their way through the crowds inside Paddington Station. A large woman almost knocked him flying with her luggage cart. “Too many bloody people and all of them in a hurry.”
Evan nodded. “I grew up in Swansea, which I always thought of as a big city, but it’s nothing compared to this.”
They came out into smoggy sunlight. Buses roared past, taxis honked, the lights changed, and a solid mass of people streamed across the street. Evan and Watkins stood there, looking and feeling like a pair of country bumpkins.
“Where first?” Watkins asked. “Check into the hotel, do you think?”
“We don’t want to carry around these bags, do we?” Evan agreed.
“So we need the taxi rank.”
“Does the North Wales police spring for taxis?” Evan asked. “There’s the tube station right there.”
“When we’re carrying luggage, it does,” Watkins said firmly. He glanced down at the small sports bag in his hand. “And to me this counts as luggage.”
“Okay, after we’ve checked in, do we go to the colonel’s flat?” Evan suggested.
“Maybe we should start off with Ted Morgan,” Watkins said thoughtfully as they joined the line for taxis. “If we want to check on his business contacts, they probably won’t be in the city tomorrow. They’ll have gone home to their country estates for the weekend.”
“Good thinking, sarge,” Evan said.
“The address we have for him isn’t too far from our hotel, is it?” Watkins asked.
“It’s Mayfair and the hotel is near Victoria. I don’t know about walking distance.”
“I thought you were the one who tramped over all those bloody hills.”
“That’s different. Pavements are hard on the feet and I’ve got my good shoes on.”
Watkins chuckled.
“Funny, that, about his address,” Evan said thoughtfully.
“What’s funny?”
“That the only address we could find for him was the one his father had.” He looked at Watkins. “If you were a businessman, wouldn’t you carry cards everywhere with you? And yet he had nothing with him—no paperwork, no cards, nothing at all to do with his business in London.”
“Perhaps he wanted to get away from it all?”
Evan shook his head. “Successful businessmen never want to get away from it all. They take their cell phone and their electronic diaries.”
“Yes, maybe you’ve got something there.”
They reached the head of the queue.
“Where to, mates?” the taxi driver asked cheerfully.
“The Buckingham Arms Hotel,” Watkins said, climbing in. “Do you know it?”
“Yeah. Down near Victoria, ain’t it?”
“What’s it like?”
“Well, it ain’t no Buckingham Palace,” the cable said. “But yer gets what yer pays for, don’t yer.”
“And in the case of the North Wales police, they don’t pay much,” Watkins commented to Evan.
The taxi took them down the Edgeware Road and past Marble Arch.
“The missus loves this kind of thing,” Watkins commented, peering out at Speakers’ Corner, the Dorchester Hotel, and then horsemen riding, turned out in traditional bowler hats and hacking jackets, through Hyde Park. “She was really put out that I was going to London and not taking her. She said she’d been dying to take our Tiffany and show her the sights and this would be a perfect opportunity. I had to tell her that the officer I was going with was a stickler for rules and would report me if she came along.”
“Thanks a lot, sarge.”
“Sorry, old son. It was that or have the wife and Tiffany wanting money for Harrods and the theatre.”
“I think you owe me a beer for that,” Evan said.
“I wouldn’t mind a beer right now. It’s muggy isn’t it, and it was hot in that train, too. But I suppose work has to come first. You’ve got the map. Look up how we get to the street in Mayfair. We’ll drop off our bags and then start checking on Mr. Ted Morgan.”
Evan had just located Ted Morgan’s address in Mayfair as the cab pulled up outside a row of tall Victorian houses behind Victoria Station. The Buckingham Arms was one of several that had been converted into hotels.
“He’s right,” Watkins muttered to Evan. “It’s not Buckingham Palace. It’s not even as impressive as the hotels on the esplanade at Llandudno.”
“It shows how highly the North Wales police values you, sarge,” Evan said as he got out of the cab after the sergeant.
They signed in and got two keys from an uninterested German girl at the front desk and then climbed the four flights to their rooms. There was no elevator. The rooms were small and spartan and looked out on the railway tracks. They came straight down again without bothering to unpack and took another cab back to Mayfair.
“Posh, isn’t it?” Watkins said as they stood outside an elegant glass-and-marble fronted building squeezed between Georgian houses on a quiet square just behind Park Lane. “I reckon Mr. Morgan did alright for himself. Let’s go and see if anyone’s at home.”
The front door opened with a remote buzzer and they found themselves at a glass fronted reception desk. A young girl with pouty red lips and fake eyelashes was filing long red fingernails.
“We’re looking for suite 2B. Mr. Ted Morgan,” Sergeant Watkins said. “Is anyone in residence at the moment?”
“Mr. Morgan isn’t here,” the girl said in a bored voice. The upper class veneer to her voice couldn’t quite hide its cockney undertones.
Watkins produced an ID card. “We’re police officers. Can you show us the suite, please.”
“There’s no suite,” she said. “Mr. Morgan doesn’t live here. We just hold his mail for him.”
“Then do you have his real address?”
“No, we don’t.”
“You don’t have any way of contacting him?”
“No. He sends someone in to get the mail once a week.”
“What about recently?”
“Nobody’s been in for a while. In fact our last bill hasn’t been paid.”
“So his mail has been piling up. May we see it?”
She looked at him defiantly. “Nothing’s come except junk mail and we thow that away.”
“So he’s had no letters at all recently? No bills?”
The cold defiant look didn’t waver. “I told you, didn’t I.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know his real business address? You don’t have any contact address at all for him?”
“I told you. I don’t know anything.”
“And you’re sure there are no letters waiting for him?”
“No.” She gave them a cold, insolent stare.
“We’re police officers, you know. We could come back with a search warrant,” Watkins said angrily.
“Come back with what you like. Turn the place upside down. You won’t find anything here. We just held his mail.”
* * *
“I’m afraid she was telling the truth, sarge,” Evan said as they closed the front door behind them. “What’s the betting he just used that address to impress people like his father.”
“That would explain why no letters have come for a few weeks. So what now?”
“We could try looking him up in the phone book.”
“He’s hardly going to answer, is he?” Watkins chuckled.
“No, but somebody might. I got the feeling he was a ladies’ man. He could have had a live-in.”
“Alright. Let’s find a phone booth.” He glanced back at the building they had just left. “I don’t think that young lady would offer us the use of her phone somehow.”
Evan smiled. “We need to find out where he lived so that we can talk to the neighbors.”
“And we need to find where he worked too. He must have made his money somehow, so he must have a business address somewhere. And he had to have held a business license. That would tell us if he was operating under a fictitious name.”
“All that information would be on his tax forms too, wouldn’t it?” Evan suggested.
“Oh yes, don’t worry. We’ll catch up with him somehow,” Watkins said confidently as they reached a phone booth.
“Here we are, Evans. Write these down,” Watkins said, scanning the phone book. “There are three Edward Morgans in greater London.”
Evan scribbled down the numbers and Watkins dialled the first number. “Mr. Edward Morgan?” he asked as the phone was picked up.
“Yeah? What do yer want?” a harsh cockney voice demanded.
“Obviously not him,” Watkins muttered as he replaced the receiver. “Still very much alive and kicking.”
The next phone call was answered by Mrs. Edward Morgan who said her husband was at work and said they could get hold of him at the London Transport garage. He drove a number 32 bus.
“Of course, our Ted Morgan might not live in London. He’d probably live out in the commuter belt in one of those pseudotudors,” Evan commented as Watkins dialled the third number. “They wouldn’t be in this book.”
“Hello?” The accent was definitely Welsh.
“Mrs. Morgan?” Watkins motioned for Evan to be quiet. “I wondered if I could talk to your husband.”
“Oh, but he’s not here at the moment. He’s away on business.”
“Where, exactly?”
“I’m not rightly sure,” she said. “He travels a lot.”
“Has he been away long?”
“About a month now. Has there been some kind of trouble?”
“I couldn’t say,” Watkins said. “We’re from the North Wales police, trying to trace a Mr. Edward Morgan. Maybe we could come round to see you?”
“I suppose so. Nothing’s happened to Eddy, has it? He was right as rain when he called last weekend.”
* * *
The house was a typical semidetached on an ordinary street in Ealing. Nicely kept but humble. Mrs. Morgan was ordinary-looking too: chubby, middle-aged, and wearing a floral print polyester dress. “Please come inside,” she said, her face a mask of fear. “It’s not bad news, is it? I always hate it when he goes off on these sales trips like this and I don’t hear from him.”
“Are you from Wales then, Mrs. Morgan?” Sergeant Watkins asked as she showed them into a neat little sitting room with a plush blue three-piece suite and a telly in the corner.
“Oh yes. We’re both from Wales, but I’m from south and Eddy’s from north. We tease each other about it—about which part is better, you know.”
“Do you have a recent photo of your husband, Mrs. Morgan?” Evan asked gently.
“Oh, yes. Here’s one on the mantelpiece, taken at our Sandra’s wedding,” she said with pride in her voice. She handed it to the policemen. They found themselves looking at a large, round, balding man, standing beside a rather plain girl in a white wedding dress.
Evan handed back the photo. “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” he said, “but it’s not the man we’re looking for.”
“You mean he’s alright?” A big smile spread across her face. “Oh, what a relief. You’ve made my day.”
“It takes all types, doesn’t it,” Watkins muttered to Evan as they went back to the Ealing Broadway tube station.
Evan looked up enquiringly.
“I mean that Mr. Morgan was no oil painting, but she looked as if you’d told her she’d won the pools when you said he was alright. It just proves there’s someone for everyone in this world.”
“But we’re no nearer to finding Ted Morgan’s real address,” Evan said. “Would the Greater London Council hold the business licenses?”
* * *
By the time government offices were closing, they had failed to find any trace of Ted Morgan’s existence. No business license had been issued to him. He paid no tax on property in any of the London boroughs. A call to Newcastle failed to find him in an initial income tax search. It was as if Ted Morgan didn’t exist.
“So where do we go from here, sarge?” Evan asked.
They were sitting at an outdoor table at a pub called the Grapes in Shepherd Market with pints of beer in front of them.
“Don’t ask me, I haven’t a clue.” He took a big gulp of beer. “Bloody watery London beer. Not a patch on Brains.”
“He must live somewhere, mustn’t he?” Evan said. “And he must have made money somehow. He was expensively dressed. He drove a nice car.”
“Damn,” Sergeant Watkins said. “We should have traced the registration on the car. We’ll try to do that tomorrow, if anyone works on Saturdays these days.”
“We could also contact Scotland Yard and see if they’ve got any kind of file on him.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I’m thinking that a man who could afford nice things had to have some sort of income, and if we can’t trace it, it has to be illegal.”
“Or he had a rich girlfriend to keep him.”
“That’s a possibility too, but I don’t know how we’d ever trace her.”
“We could make sure all the London papers publish the news of his murder and see who comes out of the woodwork. If he was rich, I’d imagine there would be interested parties wanting to get their share. Possibly people he owes money to as well.”
“So we check with Scotland Yard in the morning, then we get in touch with the newspapers,” Evan said, jotting it down in his notebook. “Now I’m beginning to wonder whether he really lived in London at all. Maybe he just wanted to look like a bigshot to his dad and the people at home and he was really working somewhere humble like Stoke on Trent.”
“The car registration should help,” Watkins said. “I think I’ll call HQ on that right now.”
Evan looked around him, taking in the fashionable London clothes and listening to conversations as commuters gathered for afterwork drinks. He found it hard to follow their conversations, and not just because they were speaking English with London accents. The group of young, casually dressed men next to him peppered their conversation with words like gigabytes and Web sites, making Evan, who didn’t yet own a computer, feel that English wasn’t the only foreign language being spoken here. The group of dark-suited young women was talking about networking and promos and launches. It really was a different world here, he decided.
He had just finished his beer when Watkins came back. “That was a bloody waste of time. It was leased to Ted Morgan Productions, address at his dad’s farm, and he paid cash. So we’re none the wiser.”
“Maybe we should forget about Ted for a while and concentrate on the colonel first,” Evan said. “At least we have an address for him. Let’s go and visit his flat in the morning. Then we can go to Scotland Yard and find out if they know any
thing we don’t know about Ted Morgan.”
“And what do you fancy doing tonight?” Watkins asked. “A slap-up dinner, a show, a nightclub?”
“Is the North Wales police paying?”
“If we base our activities on what the North Wales police is paying, it’s McDonald’s or fish and chips followed by a look at the lights in Piccadilly Circus.”
In the end they settled for an Indian restaurant just behind Victoria Station where they had a meal of lamb biriani and tandoori chicken before returning to the Buckingham Arms Hotel.
“At least it’s clean, I suppose you can say that for it,” Watkins commented as they walked up four flights of stairs to their rooms. “And I could do with the exercise to walk off all those chapattis.”
“I just wish they hadn’t made the rooms for thin people,” Evan said. “My room is so narrow that there’s no space beside the bed to get dressed.”
“I suppose it discourages visitors and hanky-panky.” Watkins laughed.
“It certainly does,” Evan agreed. “There’s no way two people would ever fit in one of these rooms, let alone these beds.”
As he closed his door behind him, he found himself thinking about Bronwen. Was she angry about his breaking their date, or didn’t she even care that much? Would she rather spend a weekend with friends from university than with him? He just wished he knew what was going on inside her head, and what he really felt about her.
Chapter 18
Their hotel redeemed itself in Evan’s eyes by producing a hearty, if cholesterol-laden, English breakfast down in a dark basement room. The three strips of lean bacon, the fat juicy sausage, two eggs, fried bread, and grilled tomatoes were not quite up to Mrs. Williams standard but they would definitely keep him going all day.
“My wife’s not going to like this,” Sergeant Watkins said, patting his stomach. “She’s always onto me to watch my weight.”
“You’ll just have to make sure you walk it off today, sarge,” Evan said. “And we can start by walking to the colonel’s place in Kensington.”
“Kensington? Isn’t that bloody miles?”
“We can go through the park. It will do you good.”
Sergeant Watkins sighed. “I don’t know why I brought you along. You’re a bloody slave driver.”