Beau Death

3

A summer evening in Paloma’s garden on Lyncombe Hill had done much to restore Peter Diamond’s spirits. They were seated on patio chairs at a white metal table overlooking the sloping lawn. A bottle of good red was uncorked on the table. The scent of stocks wafted to them from a raised flowerbed. The light was fading fast, but on the roof of the house a blackbird was singing its heart out.

The big detective murmured, ‘Sanctuary.’

Paloma raised her eyebrows.

‘A famous scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ he said. ‘The 1939 version, with Charles Laughton. He rescues the gipsy girl Esmeralda — that’s Maureen O’Hara — from the gallows and scales the front of the cathedral with her in his arms repeatedly shouting, “Sanctuary!”’

‘You and your old films,’ she said. ‘What put that in your head?’

‘Your garden, a place of sanctuary.’

‘Still hurting from that stupid picture in the papers, are you?’

She’d seen it, too. The whole world was enjoying the joke. He took a long sip of wine. ‘Hurting, no. Smarting, possibly.’

‘What’s this talk of sanctuary, then?’

‘Escaping from another day at the office.’

‘Don’t you like it where you are now? Bigger than Manvers Street, isn’t it? Better than the custody suite at Keynsham?’

‘I’m not on about being relocated, not today. No, it’s tensions on the team. We’re getting on one another’s nerves. They’re good detectives, all of them, but there are personality clashes not helped by a case we’re not equipped to take up.’

‘The skeleton?’

‘It grins like it’s enjoying my frustrations.’

‘Come on, Peter. They all look like that with the teeth exposed.’

‘It’s got no teeth and it still manages to grin. Jesus, what was that?’

A large explosion had shattered the idyll.

Diamond was out of his chair.

‘Fireworks, I expect,’ Paloma said, still seated, wine glass in hand. ‘Someone having a party.’

Another huge bang rattled the table. She steadied the bottle.

‘You’re right,’ Diamond said. ‘See? Above the trees. Big shower of green and red. And there goes another. It’s a bit bloody much when you can’t sit in your own garden on a summer evening. Could have been a bomb going off.’

Paloma laughed. ‘Just when you were getting gooey-eyed, talking about sanctuary, too. Shall we go indoors?’

‘I think so. This could go on some time. I was in the Met when the IRA bombing campaign came to London. 1990, just before I got the job here. A massive one went off when we were driving past the Stock Exchange. I’ve been sensitive to sudden blasts ever since.’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘There’s another.’

‘You must have been glad to escape to Bath.’

‘Until now.’

‘Oh come on.’ Paloma stood up and collected the wine glasses. ‘Would you bring the bottle?’

He closed the patio door, still muttering about the fireworks. ‘I’ve brought some photos with me.’

‘Photos of what?’

‘The skeleton.’

‘The skeleton and you together?’ she said. ‘I’ll try not to laugh.’

‘Not that damned press picture. The police photographer took these. We always get a record of the scene.’ He spread them on a coffee table, six shots taken from the cherry picker at various angles.

She faked a disappointed sigh. ‘I was wondering what you had in the envelope. Could it be a travel brochure, I thought. Venice? Florence? Foolish woman.’

‘I want your expert opinion on the clothes he’s wearing, if you can make out what they are under all the dust and debris.’

‘Haven’t you got him out yet?’

‘It’s a tricky job, impossible to do without spoiling the integrity of the scene. He’s covered with a canopy now. A special crane had to be brought in. We’re hoping to lift him out more or less in one piece tomorrow.’

She picked up one of the photos. ‘Mid-eighteenth-century or shortly after, as far as I can tell from the tailoring of the frock coat. The long-skirted, loose-fitting look was on the way out by 1750. Older men might prefer it, but the smart dressers went in for tighter fits like this. I’m interested in the standing collars on the coat and the waistcoat. They would have been called high ton about 1760. This appears to have been a fine brocade once. Rather tattered now. He’s definitely a gent. Pity the shoes aren’t visible.’

‘You think the collar makes it more like 1760. That’s helpful.’

‘The dark wig is unusual for the time,’ Paloma said. ‘White or off-white wigs were almost universal. They powdered them. This is obviously coated in dust, but I’d say it’s black underneath. He may have been eccentric.’

‘Because of the wig?’

‘It’s a strong statement, more than shoulder-length. A rug like that wouldn’t have disgraced King William the third.’

‘Did the kings have dark wigs?’

‘In the 1760s? No. The Hanover kings went for the short white look, George the second and third, at any rate. The first George did sport a brownish wig, but he was dead by 1730.’

‘The reason I asked,’ he said, ‘is that two or three people called in suggesting our skeleton might be Beau Nash, who was known as the King of Bath.’

‘The Beau?’ she said. ‘Are you serious?’

‘When we get a tip like that, we can’t ignore it.’ He could understand her disbelief.

Paloma laughed. ‘Forgive me, Pete. You make them sound like informers. Beau Nash is history.’

‘So we’ve been checking the history.’

She couldn’t contain her amusement. ‘What’s the thinking behind this? The wig?’

‘That’s a factor, yes. I gather Mr. Nash saw himself as a fashion icon who wanted to be seen in his black wig.’

‘He did. It’s no secret. There are plenty of pictures of him. He liked to stand out from the crowd, obviously. He’s often pictured in a white tricorne, which I’m sure he chose for dramatic contrast. But none of this means he ended up in a loft space in Twerton.’

‘Agreed. We made some searches. Well, Ingeborg did, and we found he didn’t die there.’

‘He died in the house next to the theatre, now an Italian restaurant. Didn’t you lot know that?’

‘We do now.’

‘Your man is obviously someone else.’

‘Was he buried in the Abbey?’

She shrugged. ‘Nobody seems to know. There’s a large marble tablet in the south aisle, but it’s only a memorial, not a gravestone, and it wasn’t put up until about thirty years after his death.’

Paloma’s grasp of Bath lore always impressed him. She’d know about Nash as the supreme arbiter of fashion in his lifetime.

‘So if he wasn’t buried in the Abbey, where did they put him?’

‘It’s rather sad.’

He turned to look into Paloma’s face and see if she was kidding. She was good at hiding a smile, but her eyes always gave her away. Not this time. ‘You mean that?’

‘There’s a strong belief that he was buried in a pauper’s grave.’

‘Get away.’

But she was as serious as if she had just come back from the interment.

‘After a funeral on the scale he was given?’ he said. ‘A procession to the Abbey? The town band? Muffled bells? The full monty? He was the king. He made the city what it is. Would the people of Bath allow such a star to end up in an unmarked grave?’

‘Well, I can’t see them removing the corpse from the coffin and parking it in a chair in the loft of some small terraced house in Twerton, if that’s what you’re suggesting. That’s even harder to believe.’

Diamond didn’t comment. He was weighing all kinds of bizarre possibilities. ‘Was he officially a pauper?’

‘I suppose he was. He must have run up debts. Easy to check. I’ve got books I can lend you.’

‘Thanks. I’ll look at them. It’s all balls, I reckon, but I must make the effort.’

‘You need to talk to an expert, if only to discover for sure what happened to the body,’ Paloma said. ‘Let me think about that. Meanwhile, be an angel and pour me another glass of wine while I track down those books.’

The recovery of the remains was fixed for first light when the tricky operation could be done without attracting much attention. A strong police presence controlled who entered the site. If the press came, as they probably would, they’d need to get their pictures from behind the fence. Diamond was there with Keith Halliwell, both in regulation hard hats, and so was Dr. Claude Waghorn, the forensic anthropologist brought in from the university to carry out the postmortem, a small man with a big personality who had already clashed with the manager of the recovery team. He’d insisted on directing the operation himself from the cherry picker at top-floor level and being in radio contact with the crane operator.

‘A nit-picker in a cherry picker,’ Diamond commented to Halliwell.

‘No bad thing, guv. We need an expert eye on the job.’

Halliwell was right. Only the clothes and the chair were keeping the skeleton together. Waghorn had decided the best strategy was to lift it seated in the chair, a precision assignment. A telescopic truck-mounted crane had been brought in by the contractors and the chair and its fragile occupant would be hoisted from the loft using a sling. But before that, the canopy had to be removed and all the bits of rubble round the base of the chair picked up or there was a serious risk of trapping the feet and legs and parting them from the rest of the skeleton. All this had to be done mechanically.

The task was painstaking and Dr. Waghorn made it more so by personally selecting each chunk of debris to be lifted. From his basket high above everyone else he couldn’t have been more animated if he were conducting the last night of the Proms. He was saying plenty, too, but he had a barely audible voice and Diamond and Halliwell were spared the commentary. The crane driver bore the brunt.

Diamond looked at his watch. ‘Best part of two hours. I thought we’d be out of here by now. By the time we finally move him, half of Bath will be watching.’

‘Ah, but only through the observation windows. They won’t get on the site.’

‘Who are those two, then — the guys in suits on the other side? They’re not police or workmen.’

One of the two he was looking at was squat, overweight and bald. The head definitely wasn’t shaved. His pinstripe suit looked expensive and his whole demeanour oozed self-importance. In fact he wasn’t doing anything other than watching Waghorn’s performance and making occasional comments. His brown-suited companion didn’t give out the same aura at all and seemed to be there in a supportive role, nodding agreement and saying little himself.

‘Check ’em out, Keith.’

Halliwell went over and approached the sidekick.

When asked, the man in the brown suit said, ‘What’s it to you?’ Seeing the police ID, he quickly added, ‘I’m with my boss.’

‘And who’s he?’

‘Don’t you know him? Sir Edward Paris, Edpari Properties.’

Halliwell had heard of the company, even if he didn’t know the man. Edpari was emblazoned in large letters over developments across the city. ‘Does he own this?’

A shrug. ‘If he wants to, he will before long.’

‘Do you work for him?’

‘Chauffeur mainly.’

‘Name?’

‘Spearman. Jim Spearman.’

‘The car’s nearby, is it?’

‘The Range Rover with the others. The clean one. The Bentley is being serviced.’

‘And how did you get in?’

‘Through the gate like you. Nothing gets in Sir Ed’s way.’

Halliwell returned to Diamond and reported back.

‘I’ve seen the name around. How did he say the last part?’

‘Like the French say Paris.’

‘Makes sense, I suppose, if that’s his name: Ed Paris. Is he French?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Funny. I would have said it like Campari. That’s Italian.’

‘I know,’ Halliwell said, and added after a pause, ‘I do know that much.’

‘Shouldn’t be long now,’ Diamond said, returning his attention to the work going on in the loft.

How wrong he was. Fitting the huge sling was like herding cats. Each time the straps were swung towards the chair, Dr. Waghorn aborted the attempt. He had his own idea how the job should be done and he wanted perfection. After numerous attempts, he came down from the cherry picker for a consultation with the manager who was nominally in charge.

The two detectives were close enough to hear everything.

‘It’s not working,’ Waghorn said in his small, clipped voice.

‘You’re telling me, mate. It’s never going to work with you,’ he was told.

‘It’s a disarticulated skeleton. I don’t want to end up with bones flying everywhere.’

‘That floor is going to collapse sometime soon and the whole bloody lot will disarticulate and fall through the hole. Don’t hold me responsible if you won’t let us do our job. We’re not without experience. I’ve moved a Bechstein grand from the top of a tower block and it didn’t take a single scratch.’

‘This is not a piano.’

‘It’s child’s play compared to that.’

‘Speaking of experience, I have thirty-seven years of recovering bones from difficult locations,’ Dr. Waghorn said through gritted teeth.

‘Can you operate the bloody crane?’

‘Of course not. I expect your people to do that.’

The manager folded his arms and said nothing. The movement in a telescopic crane is controlled through hydraulics. The boom is made up of many tubes fitted inside each other and the jib at the top works from the tower, swinging the lifting apparatus through wide angles. The hoisting block is heavy and capable of damage if misused.

‘Very well,’ Waghorn said finally. ‘Attach the sling your way. I’ll watch from here — if I can bring myself to look.’

Without more fuss the sling was passed under the chair and secured.

The man in the cab had been waiting hours for this. The cables tightened and took the strain and the chair and its fragile burden ascended at a rate that seemed quite shocking after the long wait. There were some cheers and a few laughs at what was quite a comic spectacle.

‘Not very dignified,’ Diamond said. ‘I don’t think the King of Bath is enjoying this.’

‘He doesn’t have much choice,’ Halliwell said.

Looking uncannily like a rider on a chairoplane, the skeleton was swung clear of the building and out towards the deck of an open lorry, where it was lowered and steadied by a couple of assistants and secured to the sides. The skull had shifted position and some finger bones had to be recovered from the sling, but otherwise everything seemed to be in place.

‘Job done,’ Halliwell said and called out, ‘Happy, Dr. Waghorn?’

‘Hardly the word I’d use,’ said the anthropologist. ‘I’ve aged ten years in the last ten minutes.’ He marched over for a closer look.

‘A coffee would be good after that,’ Halliwell said, unstrapping his hard hat.

Diamond appeared not to hear.

‘Shall we go?’ Halliwell said.

His boss was gazing at what was left of the terrace. ‘The demolition men are going to move in soon and finish the job.’

‘That’s for sure. Delays cost money in the building trade.’

‘I want one more look inside the loft before they reduce it to rubble.’

Halliwell sighed. Coffee would have to wait.

Diamond was pensive. ‘I wonder if I can do any better with the cherry picker than I did before.’

He stepped across and climbed into the basket. Waghorn had controlled the thing like a professional. Diamond needed to remind himself which of the small levers gave upward movement. The one he chose simply caused a judder. Trial and error, he told himself. Another did the job and he was borne smoothly to the height he wanted. Now it was a matter of finding forward movement.

He managed it without mishap and got his aerial view of the space the skeleton and chair had occupied. More of the boards were revealed, some of them splintered and caved in, and he saw just how unstable the flooring was. Nowhere would it be safe to stand.

A little to the left of where the chair had been was what he first took to be some sort of mould. On closer inspection he saw it was a piece of dust-covered fabric.

Curious, he manoeuvred the basket a short way to the side and then forward and leaned over cautiously for a better view.

Now he could see what it was, flat as a dried cowpat but distinctive in shape.

A white three-cornered hat.

The Archway café was the only choice for coffee in Twerton. Located under the railway embankment arches on the Lower Bristol Road, it was more spacious inside than the temporary-looking shopfront suggested. On entering and catching the whiff of fried bacon, the two detectives remembered how hungry they were and ordered the full English.

The place was busy and they were lucky to find a table for three against the wall on the far side. Not wishing anyone to join them, Diamond put a claim on the spare chair with the flattened tricorne belonging to the skeleton. Before leaving the demolition site he had borrowed a useful tool resembling a litter picker and fished the hat out of the loft with that.

‘Will it be all right there?’ Halliwell said.

‘Best place,’ Diamond said. ‘I’m not putting it on the floor.’

‘It’s a bit spooky.’

‘Why?’

‘Like Beau Nash left his hat on the chair and is coming back for it.’

‘Maybe we should order him a breakfast.’

‘You’re freaking me out, guv.’

Two mugs of coffee were put in front of them.

They had barely taken a sip when someone from behind Diamond said, ‘What’s your opinion, then, officer? Is it really Beau Nash?’

He didn’t recognise the voice. As a film buff, he thought it resembled Alfred Hitchcock’s ponderous delivery, trying to sound grand but with a touch of cockney in the vowel sounds. And when he turned, the large-bellied figure standing over him was not unlike Hitchcock. Sir Edward Paris, with Spearman the chauffeur a little to the rear.

‘Were you listening to our conversation?’ Diamond said without getting up or even making eye contact. He was annoyed at being waylaid like this and he didn’t give a toss for titled people.

‘Not at all,’ Paris said. ‘I happen to take an interest in Beau Nash, that’s all.’

At the mention of the name, Diamond turned to face him. ‘What’s your opinion, then?’

‘I’m just a humble rate-payer who helps to fund your salaries,’ Paris said. ‘You’re the investigators.’

‘We investigate crime.’

‘Is that his hat on the chair?’

‘I can move it if you want to join us.’

‘No, we just had our coffee. We’re on the way out. I didn’t want you to think we had a guilty conscience and were trying to avoid you.’

‘We hadn’t even noticed you,’ Diamond said.

‘You noticed us at the demolition site. Bloody trespassers, you thought, what do they want? We got through the security, no problem. I’m well known for that.’

‘And for other things, no doubt,’ Diamond said.

‘We won’t go into that,’ Paris said. ‘But if you have a decent-sized piece of land you want to sell, I’m your man.’ He nodded to his chauffeur and made for the door.

After watching them leave, Diamond said, ‘Pompous twit. I’m glad they didn’t stay. I’ve had enough of him already.’

‘What were they doing at the site?’ Halliwell asked.

‘I thought you asked the chauffeur that. Getting a close view, so Paris can boast about it to his friends.’

‘How would he have known?’

‘About the skeleton? Come on, it’s in all the papers, much as I wish it wasn’t.’

‘About Nash.’

‘He isn’t the first to come up with that. People have been calling since yesterday.’

‘Is the hat the clincher?’ Halliwell asked.

‘Not unless we can think of a reason why he ended up in that loft. But there are strange coincidences. Nash owned a white hat and wore a black wig. Unusual in both cases. Paloma told me the clothes are right for 1761, the year he died. There were no teeth left in the skull, which is what you’d expect of an old man. He lived to eighty-six. That ticks a lot of boxes.’

‘They can estimate someone’s age at postmortem, but not with much accuracy.’ No one in CID was better qualified to speak about postmortems than Keith Halliwell.

‘We’ll see what Waghorn comes up with. He may discover something else that ties in with what we’re thinking.’

‘Would DNA prove it? Can it be extracted from bones?’

‘Yes, even old bones. But it’s no use having a DNA profile if you’ve nothing to match it against.’

‘His descendants?’

‘He didn’t marry, so there’s no official bloodline. I expect there were offspring, because he put himself about, but where do you start? No, I can’t see the DNA thing helping us.’

‘It’s new territory for us, trying to work out what happened more than two hundred years ago. What was Twerton like in those days?’

‘Before the railway came? Very different. Mainly cloth mills and weaving. The industry went on for centuries. The terraced houses would have been workmen’s dwellings. Not the class of place Beau Nash was used to. I doubt if he came here very much at all.’

‘He was doing his MC bit, lording it over the Assembly Rooms.’

‘Right. But that’s beside the point if he was brought here after his death.’

‘Is that what you think happened?’

Diamond sighed. He was forced to get serious about the Beau Nash thing. ‘Someone else would have moved the body here. If they wanted a secret place to put him, Twerton in 1761 was a smart choice.’

‘But why? Why would they move him?’

‘This is just a theory,’ Diamond said, airing the knowledge he’d gleaned overnight from the books he’d borrowed. ‘He was a hero for much of his life. He made Bath the most fashionable town in the land. Grand buildings went up, fine streets. You know all this. I don’t have to labour it. But in his last years he was a sad case, old and decrepit and running up debts.’

‘I expect he was still well known.’

‘For sure. He was master of ceremonies to the end of his life. Visitors wanted to catch a sight of him even while he was being carted about in a sedan chair. The great days were gone, but Beau Nash was a name everyone knew. You only have to read accounts of the funeral procession. People filled the streets, watched from upstairs windows and even the rooftops. After a show like that, every seat taken in the Abbey, can you imagine them burying him in a pauper’s grave? I can’t.’

‘Is that true — about the pauper’s grave?’

‘I heard it from Paloma last night. It’s treated as a fact in the books she lent me. Hard to disprove.’

‘But was it the law?’

‘If someone didn’t leave enough to pay for his funeral, you mean?’

‘Wasn’t there something called the Poor Law?’ Halliwell said. ‘The state bears the cost.’

‘I’m sure you’re right and this is my point. Nash had run up debts and was officially a pauper and the law had to be observed.’

‘You’d think they’d have started a fund.’

‘Funds take time to organise. They had a body ready for burial. The city paid for the funeral but they weren’t going to take on his debts. My theory is this. A few of his friends decided there was no way the great Beau Nash would end up in an unmarked grave, so they secretly took him out of his coffin.’

Halliwell’s face formed a slack-jawed expression of disbelief.

Diamond wasn’t stopping for anything. ‘The burial went ahead, but without the corpse. The coffin was weighted with sacks of earth. Under cover of darkness the body was moved to the house in Twerton and hidden in the loft.’

‘Sitting up in a chair?’

‘That’s weird, I agree. I expect it looked more dignified than laying him out on the floor. Obviously he was going to decompose, so they left him there for nature to take its course, intending to remove what was left of him at a later date and bury him somewhere more fitting. I can’t believe they meant the loft to be his final tomb, but in the meantime they would have sealed the access hatch and made the loft appear inaccessible.’

‘And then what? They forgot about him?’

Diamond shook his head. ‘Unlikely. We’re talking about loyal friends, maybe as few as two or three, who took a big risk for him. Something went badly wrong. There’s always a leader in a conspiracy like this. It’s possible he was struck down. Sudden illness, or an accident. Anyway, when the main man was out of it, the others couldn’t think what to do. They delayed and delayed. In the end they did nothing at all.’

‘Did you think of all this while we were at the site?’ Halliwell asked, impressed, and not for the first time, by his boss’s ability to find a rational scenario for extraordinary events.

‘It’s been a couple of days,’ Diamond said. ‘That’s just one hypothesis. Do you want to hear another?’

‘Not right now, guv. I can see our breakfasts coming this way.’

‘That was quick,’ Diamond said to the waiter who put a well-filled plate in front of him. ‘We’re going to enjoy this.’

‘Is there someone with you?’ the waiter asked, seeing the third chair.

‘I hope not,’ Halliwell said. ‘I do hope not.’

‘You ordered two breakfasts, I thought.’

‘And you’re right,’ Diamond said. ‘Thanks, but our friend Beau didn’t show up. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.’ When the waiter had left, he said, ‘Will it put you off eating if I go on?’

Halliwell shook his head.

‘The second scenario, then.’ Diamond was already into his breakfast. ‘This is unbelievably good bacon. There’s a woman involved.’

‘With the funny name — Popjoy?’

‘Juliana Popjoy, yes. All the women liked him, but Popjoy was the one who came back when he was well past it. On his deathbed he told her he was in debt and would die a pauper and he couldn’t bear the thought of an unmarked grave. She promised she would never allow it to happen. She was thinking she’d give him a decent burial by selling off bits of his furniture. But she had no conception how much he owed until after he was dead.’

‘This sounds good,’ Halliwell said, ‘and I can see where it’s going.’

‘She’d made a promise, and she kept it,’ Diamond went on. ‘She went to the city authorities and did a deal with them. She’d pay off as many of his outstanding debts as he could afford. In return, she’d be given his body to dispose of. Officially, he’d be buried according to the law as a pauper and this would be announced. In reality, she’d find a final resting place for him.’

‘Definitely more believable.’

‘What happened after that is not so clear, but it may have gone like this. She was skint herself so she moved into the humble little place in Twerton.’

‘With the body?’

‘Exactly. She hadn’t enough left to buy him a burial plot. But it soon became obvious that cohabiting with a corpse isn’t practical, so she got someone she trusted to move him up to the loft and seal it. She had every intention of bringing him down later and carrying out his dying wish, but something went wrong. She may have died herself, or turned senile and forgot what she had upstairs. The upshot was that poor old Beau was stuck in the loft until the wrecking ball disturbed him.’

‘Or how about this?’ Halliwell said. ‘She was a bit of a weirdo and she liked going up to the loft and talking to him.’

‘You read too many horror stories.’

‘It’s not impossible. People who live alone—’

Diamond stabbed a finger at him. ‘Don’t go there.’

‘Sorry, guv. My big mouth.’

They went back to chewing bacon and mushrooms for a while. This breakfast was as good as any they’d tried in Bath.

Finally, Diamond said, ‘I’m not lonely. I’ve got a cat who keeps me sane.’