“Sounds a real bundle of joy,” Halliwell said.
“Actually he was admired for it. As time went on and his influence increased, he was more like a mayor than a master of ceremonies. With his young friends Ralph Allen and John Wood he transformed Bath into one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Many of the great buildings went up during his reign as MC.”
“He was the King of Bath,” Halliwell said. “We got that. Can we cut to the chase—his sad end?”
“In Twerton,” Leaman said with scorn. “I don’t think so.”
Diamond gave them both a glare and told Ingeborg to keep going.
“He ran into financial problems. He’d never drawn any kind of salary as master of ceremonies. He made his living out of the gaming, which was pretty smart considering how many were unsuccessful at it. He’d been living in style in a large Baroque-style house he’d had built in St. John’s Court that’s basically still there as the Garrick’s Head.”
“We’ve all been there,” Leaman said with what sounded like a yawn. “Remember when Georgina insisted we watched her in Sweeney Todd and bought the tickets? We all needed a drink after that.”
Ingeborg smiled at the memory. “Back to Beau Nash. He dressed in expensive clothes, including a distinctive white three-cornered hat. And when he visited Tunbridge Wells to play the tables he’d travel in a carriage pulled by six greys and surrounded by footmen, outriders and French horn players. He appointed himself master of ceremonies in Tunbridge as well as Bath. His reputation was huge. When the Prince of Wales visited Bath in 1738, it was Nash who acted as host and put up the obelisk in Queen Square to mark the royal visit.”
“That whacking great column in the middle?” Gilbert said. “He paid for that?”
“It was even higher originally and surrounded by a pool.”
“You were telling us what went wrong,” Halliwell reminded her.
She read on. “The rot set in with the government bringing in gaming laws banning some of the most lucrative games like Hazard, Ace of Hearts and Faro.”
“This is when?” Diamond asked.
“1739. But the gambling industry hit back. New games were introduced and one of these was EO.”
“Say that again.”
“EO. The letters E and O, standing for Evens and Odds.”
“Do we have to go into all this?” Leaman asked, looking round. There were definite stirrings of impatience.
“Hold on. I must get this right.” She switched to another website. “A simple idea that eventually was later developed into Roly Poly, or roulette.”
“Roly Poly,” Diamond said to lighten the mood. “Love it.”
“EO is played with a wheel with forty sections marked even and odd. The wheel is turned and the punters place their bets and win or lose according to which section the ball ends up in. Get the picture, everyone?” She swiped back to the main story. “Nash saw the game being played at Tunbridge Wells and cleverly decided it was the coming thing. It was going to be huge, and he was right. He decided to invest. He made an agreement with the inventor to bring EO to Bath in return for a percentage of the profits. But he soon suspected something was wrong and that the Tunbridge Wells guy had cheated him. He brought a court action, but lost the case. That was bad enough. Worse, he was forced to admit in court that he’d made his living for years by taking a cut from the professional gaming managers.”
“Like a protection racket?”
“There was no threat of violence.”
“Extortion, then?”
“I suppose you could call it that. He vetted everyone who played at the tables and ruled whether they were suitable. The gambling bosses couldn’t stay in business without his support.”
“And nobody else knew?”
“It was a massive scandal when the news broke. I don’t know where the public thought he got his fortune from, but his reputation went into free fall and so did his income. Eventually he was forced to exist on a handout of ten guineas a month from city funds.”
Diamond interrupted again. “Exist where? Where was he living?”
Ingeborg had been speed-reading from some website, summing up the key facts for the others. She was as eager as they were to discover how the story turned out.
“According to this,” she said, “he was forced to sell the large house he’d had built for himself in St. John’s Court and move into a smaller place nearby in Sawclose. And that’s where he”—she clapped her hand to her mouth—“where he died.”
An awkward silence followed.
John Leaman didn’t hold back for long. “What a fucking letdown. We’ve listened to you rabbiting on for the past twenty minutes for this? He can’t be the skeleton in the loft if he died in Sawclose.”
“Hang on a bit, John,” Diamond was quick to say. “You can lay off Inge. I was the one who asked her to give us the facts.”
Leaman couldn’t stop his rant. “She could have saved her breath if you’d listened to what I said at the start—that there was no way Beau Nash ended up dying in a poky terraced house in Twerton without anyone knowing.”
Now Halliwell made the mistake of getting involved. “She just told us he fell on hard times.”
“Hard times, my arse,” Leaman said. “Ten guineas a month wasn’t poverty. Scale it up to modern money values and he was well fixed. The so-called smaller house where he ended up wasn’t a hovel. It’s still there. It’s a restaurant, for Christ’s sake.”
“Next door to the Theatre Royal?” Paul Gilbert said.
“You’ve got it. Am I exaggerating? Big grand entrance flanked by two stone eagles. The place is called something else now, even if most people still think of it as Popjoy’s, and if you’ve ever been inside you’ll know the rooms are big. Fine staircase, plenty of sash windows, nice fireplaces.”
“The point is can we be certain he died there?” Gilbert asked. Each of them was doing his best to take the sting out of Leaman’s tongue-lashing.
“Ever looked at the plaque outside?” Leaman said.
There was a pause. It seemed that Bath’s detective force, trained to miss nothing, didn’t read plaques.
“Wait a bit,” Leaman said, taking out his iPhone. “There.” He brandished the image in triumph. in this house resided the celebrated beau nash and here he died feby 1761.
From their reaction, you could believe the death had just happened.
“If you knew all along, why didn’t you speak up earlier?” Halliwell asked.
“I was waiting for the twist that didn’t come.”
“John’s right,” Ingeborg said. She’d been using her tablet again. “He died in that house, aged eighty-six, nursed by his mistress, Juliana Popjoy, and he was given a funeral in the Abbey fit for the King of Bath, paid for by the Corporation. Muffled bells, a procession through the streets with choristers and the town band together with his own bandsmen from the Pump Room and six aldermen carrying the coffin.”
If Leaman had been made up to chief constable he couldn’t have looked more jubilant. “Enough said?”
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 w
as 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.”
Beau Death Page 3
