Calvin Osgood is a music producer whose identity has been stolen by an unknown person.
When Strike and Robin visit Kenneth Ramsay to discuss ‘William Wright’ and the body that was found in his vault, he tells them that a ‘strange email’ had been sent from the Ramsay Silver email address to a man called Osgood, a week before the murder took place. Ramsay had not heard of Osgood and assumes the email was sent by the man calling himself William Wright (Ch 14).
Strike emails Osgood, who takes his time replying. He eventually leaves a voicemail on the agency answering machine asking someone to call him back (Ch 20).
Strike does so, and Osgood is described as having ‘the thin, whiny voice Strike imagined a mosquito might have, should it be granted speech’ (Ch 20). Osgood denies any knowledge of Ramsay Silver and tells him that his identity has been stolen. The fake ‘Oz’ had created an Instagram account and linked it to Osgood’s real LinkedIn profile. Osgood had also received an email about buying a van, and one from a girl saying that Osgood had played a prank on her cousin. He deleted all these emails.
Strike finds Osgood’s LinkedIn profile ‘featured a man with a chubby, though not unhandsome, face who Strike judged to be in his mid-thirties, but what interested him most was that Osgood had dark, curly hair.’ (Ch 20). Strike reads that Osgood produced incidental music for television shows.
The fake Instagram page doesn’t feature any pictures of Osgood and Strike discovers that ‘all had been stolen from other accounts, with portions of Oz’s curly hair photoshopped in’ (Ch 20).