Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  Tank had to be serious to make a speech as long as that.

  “Look at it this way,” Cat said. “I don’t suppose the neighbours were too thrilled when they heard about the oriental medicine.”

  “Right.”

  “They ought to be glad to get us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where is this amazing gaff?”

  “The best address in Bath. The Royal Crescent.”

  6

  The meeting in Las Iguanas threw everyone off course. Estella was forced to plan a rewrite of her final chapters, and Diamond to examine the role of the fearsome Mrs. Hill. He didn’t mind. He was fascinated that in the twenty-first century a case done and dusted more than two hundred years ago was producing twists from hour to hour. There could be no arrests here, no questioning of witnesses, but someone had behaved improperly and quite possibly with criminal intent. The coroner would need to consider the facts before reaching a conclusion on the identity of the skeleton and where, when and how the death occurred.

  Dr. Waghorn’s findings at the autopsy would be the next piece in the puzzle. All sorts of information can be gleaned from examining bones. Diamond was impatient to get it done, but there was a snag. Anthropologists won’t be hurried. Old bones aren’t like rotting flesh. They’ve waited a long time and can easily wait longer. Waghorn was a self-important cuss who’d delay things even more if you tried to hurry him along.

  Instead of returning directly to the CID office after the Mexican meal, Diamond drove into Twerton for another look at the demolition site.

  It had been levelled.

  Any possibility of finding more clues was remote. The entire row of eighteenth-century terraced dwellings was gone. Hundreds of noisy gulls were wheeling over the rubble. The wrecking ball was already at work on some nearby nineteenth-century houses. “What are the plans for the site?” he asked a foreman.

  “Supermarket.”

  “Haven’t we got enough?”

  “It’s progress, mate.”

  “Don’t know about that. I quite like old buildings.”

  “These were condemned.”

  “Who by?”

  “Housing inspector, isn’t it? Bath’s got enough old buildings already and better built than these. You should be wearing a hard hat. Do you have permission to be here?”

  No point arguing with him.

  Diamond returned to his car and drove off.

  In the meeting room at Concorde House, young DC Gilbert had done a good job putting together the information board, except for one thing. Diamond stepped up and unpinned the press picture of himself eye to eye—more accurately eye to eye socket—with the skull. “We don’t need this.”

  Gilbert had turned crimson. He was obviously as surprised as his boss.

  “Didn’t you put it there?” Diamond said.

  “I’d rather not say, guv.”

  “Someone else did. There’s no loyalty any more.” He tore the photo in half and stuffed the pieces into the nearest bin. “Is that Beau Nash top right?”

  “Yes. It’s the one everyone knows.”

  “Blue eyes with bags under them, double chin, cheeks like mangos. I don’t get the ‘Beau.’ I don’t get it at all. Who’s the woman with the cleavage?” He was already looking at another portrait, a dark-haired young woman in a ballgown. Unusually for the period she wasn’t wearing a wig.

  “Juliana Popjoy, his mistress.”

  “Papjoy.”

  “I thought—”

  “Never mind. We won’t go into that.” He wouldn’t be filling the gaps in Gilbert’s sex education. “She’s one pin-up we won’t be needing. I’ll be telling you why when I speak to the team. The one I’d like up there is Mrs. Hill, if we can find a picture. I don’t even know her first name yet. She was his last companion—and if you feel sorry for any woman living with a lump of lard like Nash, don’t. Mrs. Hill was a toughie who knew what she was taking on.” He stood for some seconds more inspecting the rest of the board: shots of the half-demolished house and the skeleton bizarrely seated in the loft space; a map of the Twerton area with the site marked with a red pushpin. None of it necessary, in truth, except to bolster the lad’s self-esteem. “It’s a fine effort.”

  “Thanks, guv.”

  Some inner emotion stirred and it was almost fatherly. “They still treat you as if you’re wet behind the ears, don’t they?”

  “Not all the time.”

  “I’m guilty of it myself. We’ve all been through it, but you’ve taken more than most. In better times we blooded young detectives on a regular basis, but with government cutbacks . . . I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

  Gilbert smiled faintly.

  “Want some advice?”

  The young constable couldn’t say no to that.

  “Fight fire with fire when they try it on. Let them know you’re every bit as smart as they are. I did when I was in the Met and making my way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Didn’t work every time, but they got to know I wasn’t a baa-lamb.”

  Diamond as a baa-lamb was clearly too much for Paul Gilbert to grasp, but he seemed to appreciate the advice. “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Good man. Not with me, mind. I’m your guv’nor. But enough of this. Where’s John Leaman?” He needed to know if Leaman had learned anything useful about the early history of the now-demolished house.

  “In the office.”

  The murder squad’s ace researcher was at his desk in the CID room wearing earphones. It required some hand-waving to get him to lift them off.

  “What’s this? Listening to Beyoncé while on duty?”

  Difficult to think of anyone less likely to be listening to modern pop than Leaman.

  “It’s an audiobook: Edith Sitwell on Bath.”

  “Famous poet—bit eccentric?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Helpful, is it?”

  “Different. In her words, Beau Nash was a magnificent butterfly.”

  “All show and no substance?”

  “Well . . .” Leaman wouldn’t be drawn. He preferred facts to interpretations.

  “A butterfly starts off as a caterpillar. Is that what she meant? Underneath the finery he was a grub?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Later she says he was a poor and lovable creature who knew pleasure but no happiness.”

  Diamond shook his head. “I don’t know what it is with this guy. He can charm the ladies even centuries after he died. What does she say about his last years?”

  “I haven’t got to that.”

  “Can’t you fast forward?”

  “I could, but I wasn’t planning to. If I’m reading something, I like to read every word.”

  Must stop grinding my teeth, Diamond thought. It can’t be good for them. “I know Edith Sitwell might be helpful, but you’re doing this in police time and there are heaps of other books about Bath. Have you done the research on the Twerton house?”

  “As much as I can. The row of terraces was condemned two years ago and boarded up. Before that it was rented accommodation owned by an offshore company known as Lovemore Holdings.”

  Echoes of Restoration comedy again, but better not go down that route with Leaman. “And did you discover when it was built?”

  “There’s no documentation.”

  “You mean you haven’t found it yet. There must have been some legal agreement originally. Purchase of land, deeds or some such.”

  Leaman sidestepped. “Going by map evidence it was built between 1743 and 1750, a typical row of workmen’s dwellings from the early Georgian period. Almost certainly it would have been used by people in the wool trade. They worked from home.”

  “Cottage industry.”

  “Carding and spinning went on for centuries.”

 
“I know a bit about that.” The team had once worked on a murder that touched on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Diamond hadn’t forgotten that as long ago as the fourteenth century the locals were weaving and making cloth. “Working at home, you say. When did the Twerton mill open?”

  “1791.”

  “Quite a bit later. So in 1761, the year that interests us, the house would still have been an outpost of the cloth trade?”

  “The wool was sheared locally and scoured and taken into the houses. They will have had a spinning wheel in the living room and maybe a loom going sixteen hours a day.”

  “Hell of a life. You’d never escape from work.” Diamond glanced around him and shrugged. “And now in our superfast broadband age we’ll soon be back to everyone working from home again. Instead of a loom, it’s a laptop. Wasn’t there any other work in Twerton apart from the cloth business?”

  “Farming, but these were typical cloth-workers’ dwellings. At the time we’re interested in, when Nash died, the house would have been occupied round the clock, and probably by a family sleeping several to a room.”

  “Making it difficult to cart a corpse upstairs without being noticed. You’re not helping, John.”

  “I’m telling it like it was.”

  “Are you sure you’re not enjoying it? You haven’t believed in our working hypothesis from the word go.”

  “I don’t disbelieve the skeleton in the loft.”

  “Thanks for that,” Diamond said with irony.

  “But it’s not Beau Nash.”

  “You made that clear from the beginning. Sometimes you might do better to keep your doubts to yourself. I don’t think you fully understand the effect it has on the rest of the team when you rubbish their ideas—and mine.”

  “You want a team of yes-men, then?”

  “No, but if you can’t say things without suggesting everyone except you is an idiot it’s better not to say them at all.”

  “Is that how it sounds?”

  “Quite often, yes.”

  “Fine. Gag me if you want.”

  “For Christ’s sake, John, don’t make a martyr of yourself. Time and again you’ve been right about things the rest of us got carried away with. You’re the cool head I need when everyone else is hyped up and I value you more than I ever say.”

  Leaman blinked at that.

  “It’s a matter of tone, of bearing in mind how your words are going to sound to other people.” Diamond wasn’t best suited to lecturing anyone on tact. Wisely he stopped there. “You and I are going to differ over Beau Nash, but you’re doing the research and I appreciate that. Was Twerton a no-go area for the higher-class types from the city centre?”

  “No.”

  After the heart-to-heart, Leaman appeared unwilling to pick up where they left off. Diamond could almost tap into the conflict going on in his head.

  He waited for more, and finally got it.

  “They had to drive through if they wanted to visit Bristol. And not all of it was working-class housing. There were pubs.”

  “But the house we’re interested in was essentially a cloth-worker’s cottage, right?”

  “Yes. Most of them were knocked down by the Victorians and built over, and there was another building boom in the 1950s. Somehow this old terrace survived. Eventually it deteriorated.”

  “I’d like to know who owned the place in the year Nash died. Some wool merchant, I expect. There must be title deeds.”

  “I don’t think they exist. A change in the law in 1925 meant it was no longer necessary to store deeds going back generations and a lot were destroyed. The best bet is the records office and I contacted them, but they couldn’t find anything.”

  “Is there anything else we can do—apart from reading Edith Sitwell?”

  He got a glare for that. “I’ve compared street maps from the eighteenth century, which is how I fixed on 1743 to 1750. I found a history of Twerton online. Understandably it doesn’t go into the kind of detail we’re hoping to find.”

  “Leave it for now, then. I’ve got some new information myself and I’m about to update everyone in the meeting room—or the incident room, as we’d better call it now Paul Gilbert has done his work on the whiteboard.”

  “Are we definitely treating this death as suspicious, then?” Keith Halliwell asked after Diamond had finished updating the team on the role of the mysterious Mrs. Hill in Beau Nash’s last years.

  “I’m not suggesting she murdered him,” Diamond said.

  “No? Someone prevented the lawful and decent disposal of a body, and that’s an offence under common law.”

  “You’re thinking Mrs. Hill?”

  “She’s the obvious one.”

  “Why would she do it?”

  “I’ll give you one good reason right away,” Halliwell said. “She did murder him and she didn’t want the body examined in a postmortem.”

  “For crying out loud, Keith,” Ingeborg said at once, flushing with outrage. “We’ve heard nothing but malice about this woman, and all based on what? One man’s assessment of her character two hundred and fifty years ago. She stayed with Nash twenty years—and he was old and disgusting by then—so she can’t be totally bad. Casting her as his killer is a bit bloody rich. What was her motive?”

  Halliwell came back at once. “She couldn’t wait to cash in the bond and get her £250. The money was leeching from his household. He’d sold almost everything of value. She couldn’t allow it to go on or she’d find herself homeless and with no funds at all when he died.”

  The reasoning was persuasive, forcing Ingeborg to shift the attack. “How is she supposed to have killed him?”

  “Poison, I expect.”

  “Spare us that.”

  “They knew about arsenic in the 1760s.”

  Paul Gilbert said, “In that case, we can find out. Arsenic leaves traces.”

  Halliwell said without even a glance at the young man, “After all this time? We’re dealing with a skeleton, not a fresh corpse.”

  Fired up by his recent pep-talk from the boss, Gilbert insisted, “It can be detected in hair and probably in bones.”

  “Well, let’s hope so,” Ingeborg said, “if only to get a negative result and prove there’s nothing in this crackpot theory. You can bank on it: whenever poisoning is mentioned, the next tired old cliché the sexists come up with is that it’s a woman’s weapon. She’s the carer and the cook, so she’s best placed to add the deadly powder to the old man’s nightcap.”

  “The fact that she’s a woman doesn’t come into it,” Halliwell said. “Mrs. Hill is the one with motive and opportunity and there isn’t anyone else we know about.”

  Ingeborg gave a sigh of impatience. “Get real, Keith. Beau Nash died of old age. He was eighty-six, for heaven’s sake. That’s about a hundred and ten these days. When is the postmortem taking place?”

  “It isn’t, as yet,” Diamond said. “We’re waiting to hear from Dr. Waghorn.”

  “Why the delay?”

  “He deals with bones. He would say, ‘What’s the hurry?’ Time pressures are unknown to him.”

  “Can’t we call him and say it’s urgent?”

  “Having met the old tosser, I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

  “What if it came from the coroner?”

  “That might work, but in a long career I’ve found that coroners don’t appreciate being pressured either.”

  “Georgina?”

  Diamond pondered the suggestion for a moment. After all, it was the ACC who had called for a full investigation, and no one was better at cracking the whip. “I’ll speak to her shortly.”

  Ingeborg rolled her eyes and said nothing.

  Georgina was staring out of her window at the M4 motorway across the office park. “I miss the view I had in Manvers Street.”

&
nbsp; “It wasn’t that special, was it?” Diamond said. “You overlooked the car park.”

  “No, but I could see all the comings and goings. You can learn a lot about your staff if you watch their movements. Time of arrival, body language, the company they keep. Here, I look out of the window and all I can think about is escaping over the Severn Crossing and into Wales.”

  A rare insight into Georgina’s secret yearnings.

  “You’re not Welsh, are you, ma’am?”

  “Me? Not in the least. I go there for the music. It’s everywhere, even in the accent.”

  He’d forgotten his boss was a mainstay of the choral society.

  “What’s your view?” Georgina asked.

  “They produce some wonderful rugby players, I’ll say that.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The Welsh.”

  “I meant the view from your window.”

  “Ah.” He grinned. “Couldn’t tell you. With all the work that comes in, I don’t get time to look out of windows.”

  She turned to face him. “You never miss a trick, do you? What are you here for?”

  “It’s the media—the press, TV, radio.”

  “Where?”

  “All around, circling like vultures.”

  “Here?”

  “They will be soon, swooping in.”

  “I thought they’d gone away after getting that embarrassing picture of you.”

  “Temporary reprieve,” he said. “They haven’t yet caught up with our theory that the skeleton might be Beau Nash. When they do, I don’t want to be anywhere near a fan, if you understand me.”

  “Because it’s such a big story?”

  “It will go viral, global and galactic.”

  “Good gracious.” Georgina put a hand to her tinted blue curls. “How long have we got?”

  “The news could break any time.”

  “From one of our own?”