Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  “If you want a straight answer, yes. I’m trying to restore some dignity to our department. We need to be clear about what happens next in this affair. The eyes of the world are on us. One more episode like yesterday and we might as well all hand in our resignations. What are you doing about the man in the loft?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It’s not a CID matter. There’s no crime I’m aware of. Someone from uniform should take over.”

  “But you promised to report on further developments. It’s in the paper.”

  “I promised nothing. Some pressman made that up. Anyhow, the building’s unsafe. Until the scaffolding is in place no one can get at him without dropping through the floor.”

  “We don’t know for certain how he died.”

  “And we may never know, ma’am. Anyone can see it’s an ancient set of bones. It’s history, almost archaeology.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you talk like this, Peter. There are deeply troubling elements in the case. How did the poor man come to be shut in the loft in the first place?”

  “I doubt if we’ll ever know. He could have gone up there for some peace and quiet, in which case he has my sympathy.”

  “He was in a wooden armchair, I gather?”

  “Probably in the habit of using it as a bolt-hole.”

  “And died there?”

  “It happens. Not a bad way to go, sitting in your favourite chair.”

  “Was he elderly?”

  “Hard to tell from where I was.”

  “You must have seen his teeth.”

  “He hasn’t got any.”

  “In that case he must be old. Mind you, ‘old’ was probably about forty in those days. I can’t think how he could have remained undiscovered so long.”

  “I expect he lived alone.”

  “You’re not convincing me, Peter. I get the impression you’re doing your best to portray this death as natural so that you can be shot of it.”

  “Someone else might enjoy taking it on. As for me I seem to have made a right balls-up. I only got involved because it was an unexplained death and now I’m thinking it would be better from every point of view if I tiptoed away.”

  Georgina drew herself up in her chair in a way that brought stress to her silver buttons and Diamond at the same time. “You’ve never tiptoed anywhere and you won’t now. I want this death investigated properly and you will be in charge. Thanks to your tomfoolery we’re under intense scrutiny now. You attracted all this media attention and you can deal with it. Have the building treated as a crime scene. See that the remains are collected and given a postmortem. No shortcuts. Get to it, Peter.”

  He knew when it was useless to interrupt. “Tomfoolery” was below the belt, but he let it pass. In this mood Georgina was implacable.

  Only one space in Concorde House was suitable for a private session with the entire CID team. Known as the meeting room, it was so little used it still smelt of paint, but nobody complained when they gathered around the large table. They were pleased to get away from their computer screens.

  Diamond could have taken a seat like the rest of them, but he chose to stand. His authority had been dented and he felt the need to remind them who was boss. “I know what you’ve got on your mobile phones,” he said, getting straight to the source of his indignity. “That photographer shouldn’t have been on the site yesterday and if it takes me the rest of this year I’m going to find out who he is and stuff his Nikon where the sun never shines.” He paused and switched to a more reasoned tone. “But that’s not what this is about. I just came out of a meeting with the ACC and she has instructed us to investigate the death of the skeleton in the loft. If, like me, you’re thinking we’re about three hundred years too late, then think again. To quote Georgina, the eyes of the world are on us. She wants a result.”

  “What kind of result?” Halliwell asked. “We’re not going to find his name.”

  Negativity like that from any of them would have been deplorable. From Keith, his deputy, it came as a shock.

  “Get with it, all of you,” Diamond said, slamming one hand on the table and making a fist of the other. “We’re professionals. We’ve faced bigger challenges than this. Who knows what we might find when we pull out all the stops? We haven’t searched his pockets and we haven’t sent in the scenes of crime team yet.”

  “Was there a crime?” John Leaman asked. He was the logic man ever ready to pick holes. Like Halliwell, he needed bringing into line.

  “That’s what we need to find out.”

  Leaman raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

  Now Sergeant Ingeborg Smith spoke up, and she wasn’t entirely unhelpful. “Is the body still in place, guv?”

  “Can’t call it a body or John will object. Bones is all it is. Yes, it’s there, but no longer on public view. Scaffolding and a canopy are being erected as we speak. The trouble is that the whole building is dangerously unstable and they can’t work from inside. He’ll have to remain there until we find a safe way to remove him.”

  “A crane?” Leaman said.

  “For lifting a skeleton? No way. It would fall apart and leave us with a heap of bones. There must be people who specialise in this kind of recovery exercise. It’s delicate work.”

  “The Velvet Glove Pick-up People,” Halliwell said.

  “Where are they based?”

  “Joke.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to lower the tension.”

  He glared at Halliwell. Maybe that was really the intention. Better give him the benefit of the doubt. “I walked into that, didn’t I? Well, I’m dead serious.” He switched attention to Ingeborg. “See if you can locate someone capable of taking this on.”

  She gave a nod and touched the controls on her tablet.

  Diamond told Leaman to research the history of the house. “I assume it was built in the eighteenth century. There may be documents in the local records office.”

  “If it’s that old, it must be listed,” Leaman said. “I’ll try the Preservation Trust.” Try them he would, in more ways than one. Nobody was more thorough than Leaman. He’d pester the life out of the people in the records office and the trust.

  “Good thinking.” Diamond didn’t mind giving credit for a positive contribution, the first indication that he might be winning the team over. “Looking ahead, when we succeed in recovering the body, we’ll insist on a proper postmortem. Just because the corpse is reduced to bones, I don’t want some junior doctor given the job. See that we get the best available, Keith.”

  It almost went without saying that Halliwell would be the police presence at the autopsy. He regularly stood in for his squeamish boss when the pathologist was at work on a body. “We might be better off with a forensic anthropologist.”

  “Oh yes?” The big man was wary. He’d taken more than enough flak from his deputy this morning. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

  “A bones man.”

  He gave a nod. Halliwell might be trying to redeem himself. “Good thinking. Is there one locally?”

  “Must be. I’ll make enquiries.”

  “You can find out a lot from bones,” Leaman said.

  Ingeborg looked up from her internet search. “You watch far too much TV.”

  “Then there are the clothes,” Diamond said, “what’s left of them. A fashion expert can tell you within five years or so when a garment was made. I happen to know someone who can help here.”

  No one winked or nudged the person next to them, even if the temptation was there. The “someone” was undoubtedly Paloma Kean, Diamond’s friend and occasional lover. Paloma owned a successful agency providing costume illustrations for television, film and the stage.

  “Has anyone taken photos?” DC Paul Gilbert asked. He was the younge
st on the team, eager to be involved, and sometimes forgotten.

  Diamond eyed him. Photography was a sore point. But the remark seemed to have been innocent. “Done. A cameraman went up in the cherry picker and got good shots from several angles.” He frowned. “Now that I think about it, five or six people went up in that damned contraption for a look yesterday. Why was I the unlucky one who got his picture in the papers?”

  Not a question any member of the team was willing to answer. All eyes turned to the windows or the ceiling.

  “If you like,” Gilbert said, “I could start a display board with the photos, like we have in an incident room.”

  “Waste of time,” Leaman said.

  Diamond agreed with him really. The days of whiteboards in incident rooms were over, if they had ever existed except on TV shows, but he didn’t like the way clever-clogs had said it. “For this inquiry, seeing as none of us knows much about the eighteenth century, that’s not a bad suggestion.”

  “In here?” Gilbert asked.

  “Why not? We’ll stake our claim for this as our base. Is there anything I’ve overlooked?”

  “We’re getting a big response to your picture in the paper,” Ingeborg said.

  He bristled again. “Is this another dig at me?”

  “Let me rephrase it, guv. There’s a lot of interest in the skeleton. People like nothing better than a mystery. Most of what comes in will be no help, but I’m saying all suggestions ought to be examined, just in case.”

  “Have you looked at any of this stuff yourself?”

  “I did this morning. Two or three callers said the skeleton might be that of Beau Nash.”

  “Beau Nash?” The name was familiar to anyone who had lived in Bath for any length of time, central to the history of the place. Familiar, but hardly a missing person.

  Leaman rolled his eyes and said, “Because he’s the only eighteenth-century man they’ve heard of.”

  “It’s indisputable that he lived here.”

  “In a small terraced house in Twerton? Give me strength.”

  Ingeborg shot Leaman a look that would have pierced armour plating. “Do you want to hear about this, or not?”

  Diamond said, “Go on, Inge.”

  “The caller said the description of the clothes matched the things Nash usually wore. He had a black wig, which was unusual in those days. Most of them wore white ones. He dared to be different.”

  “I can’t say I know much about the man. He made Bath fashionable, didn’t he? The Beau bit turns me off.”

  “The skeleton was wearing a black wig,” Ingeborg said in case the point had been missed.

  “It was, I grant you. See what you can bring up on your tablet about this guy, will you? And, yes, you’re right about the public response. We always take an interest in what people have to say.”

  “What exactly is the ACC expecting us to do?” Halliwell asked.

  “What we’d do for any unexplained death,” Diamond said. “Investigate and discover whatever we can for the coroner.”

  “And the media,” Leaman murmured.

  “Screw the media. I’m not pandering to that lot.”

  Brave words, but everyone knew that media interest was driving this enquiry.

  Ingeborg had been busy on the internet. “Beau Nash was a Welshman, born in Swansea in 1674, and quite a ladies’ man, going by this. Sent down from Jesus College, Oxford, for neglecting his studies and getting engaged to one of the local girls.”

  “Was that against the rules?” Halliwell said.

  “He was only sixteen at the time. He tried the army next, liking the idea of a red coat, and that didn’t last long either when he found there was more to soldiering than showing off, so he moved to London to study law at the Middle Temple.”

  “And show off in a wig and gown?”

  “I expect so.” She was quick to digest the information and rehash it for the team. “Doesn’t seem to have spent much time with his law books. Lives beyond his means, buys expensive clothes and gets a reputation as a dandy. You’d think it was a recipe for disaster, but he’d found the thing he excelled at. And when the king—that’s William III—makes a visit to the Middle Temple, Nash is the only possible choice to stage a royal pageant. Naturally the show is a stunning success and the king offers him a knighthood, which he declines.”

  “Why?”

  “Hang on,” she said, scrolling some more. “You’re getting ahead of me.”

  She didn’t take long to catch up.

  “He was only twenty at the time and on his beam-ends and you needed funds—a small fortune, in fact—to live the life of a titled man. But his reputation was made and from that time he was a fashion leader and an arbiter of good taste. He seems to have been extremely popular with women and—” she clicked her tongue as she read on—“a big spender of their money. At one time, someone questioned all this high living and said his money must have been acquired dishonestly, so Nash produced a wad of love letters from twenty girls who, basically, were keeping him.”

  “Unknown to each other?”

  “You bet,” Halliwell said.

  Ingeborg looked up from the tablet. “I don’t like saying this about my own sex, but when they’re daft they’re really daft. He must have broken a lot of hearts.”

  “I’ve never thought of him as a letch,” Halliwell said. “Anyone with a name like Beau Nash sounds to me like some old queen.”

  “Please,” Ingeborg said with a look she normally reserved for stale bread. “A beau was a good-looking guy who knew how to chat up girls. Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough?”

  “Can we fast forward to when he arrives in Bath?”

  She took a moment more to check. “That’s 1705, it says here.”

  “Listen up, people,” Diamond said. “We’ve come to the crunch.” He hoped it was the crunch. He’d invited Ingeborg to brief the team, but the chance of any of this stuff being useful to the enquiry was remote.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is where his life really takes off. Bath was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Vegas. Entertainments of all kinds: music, dances, eating, the theatre, riding in sedan chairs, bathing and drinking the spa water, but the main attraction was the gambling. Gamesters came to the public rooms and huge sums were won and lost at dice games and cards. Nash had got a taste for it and in his first season he had an amazing run of luck at the tables, winning over a thousand pounds.”

  “How much is that in modern money?” Halliwell asked.

  “At least a hundred and fifty grand,” Leaman, the walking encyclopedia, informed them.

  “From then on he was made,” Ingeborg went on. “Everyone wanted to know him. The master of ceremonies, a Captain Webster, invited him to be his ADC.”

  “What’s that?” young Gilbert asked.

  “Aide-de-camp. Military term,” Leaman said.

  “Personal assistant,” Ingeborg said. “A massive honour. The MC presided over all the big occasions, so Nash got to see how things were done. And shortly after that there was another extraordinary piece of luck. Captain Webster got into an argument with a man who’d lost heavily to him in a game of cards. He was challenged to a duel that took place by torchlight in Orange Grove and was killed. That was the bad news. The good news was that Beau Nash was the only possible choice as his replacement.”

  “Convenient,” Leaman said.

  “Too bloody convenient,” Halliwell said. “If the police were any use they’d have wanted to know more about that duel.”

  “What police?” Leaman said.

  “They had watchmen and constables, didn’t they?”

  “Are you thinking Nash had something to do with it?” Paul Gilbert said.

  “Don’t you know anything about duelling?” Leaman said. “They always brought along friends as seconds. Nash was W
ebster’s ADC, so it’s more than likely he was involved. Webster was a military man and ought to have known how to use a sword, but he was killed. Did Nash have anything to do with it? You bet he did.”

  “Pure speculation,” Halliwell said.

  “And we’re getting sidetracked,” Diamond said, increasingly irritated by all the sniping. He gave Ingeborg the cue to go on. “He gets to be master of ceremonies.”

  “The king, it says here,” she said. “He was known as the King of Bath, and now he was in his element. Under Captain Webster, the management had been slack. Public rooms a disgrace, people drinking to excess and arguments breaking out. The gamblers carried swords for protection and no one could feel safe because there would always be losers. The swords were often drawn as a threat and tore the women’s gowns. There were card sharps in plenty, prostitutes, beggars and the rooms stayed open all night. Beau Nash used his authority to change all that. The carrying of swords was banned. Duelling was suppressed. The wearing of riding boots in the public rooms had to stop and women were forbidden from wearing white aprons.”

  “White aprons?” Leaman said.

  “Why?” Diamond asked.

  “I’m not sure. Let me read on a bit.” She dragged the text down with her finger. “Ah, according to Goldsmith, only Abigails were clothed in aprons.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Historical slang for a lady’s maid. The aprons were a fashion item our man disapproved of. He once found the Duchess of Queensberry wearing one—a very smart apron made of Brussels lace—in the Assembly Rooms and snatched it from her and threw it to her ladies-in-waiting. He was just as strict with the men. If one appeared in top-boots, the Beau would march up to him and ask him archly if he had ‘forgot his horse.’”

  “And they tolerated this?” Diamond said.

  “From him, yes. He sounds like a tyrant over the dress code, but he was mostly good-humoured, it says here. That duchess made no fuss. People felt safer after he insisted all dancing should end at eleven. He brought in rules that changed the way everyone behaved, and they were widely agreed to be sensible and needed. The city’s reputation improved out of all recognition and there was hardly a VIP in the land who didn’t visit. The Prince of Wales, dukes and duchesses, prime ministers, poets and novelists. And they all had to obey the rules. Even when the King’s daughter, the young Princess Amelia, only seventeen, pleaded for one more dance after the official closing of a ball at eleven p.m., Nash wouldn’t bend his rules. ‘But I’m a princess,’ she told him. ‘Yes, madam,’ he answered, ‘but I reign here.’”