He was quick to scotch that suggestion. “My team are discreet. No, the name is already out there. We’ve had people calling in to ask if the skeleton could be Nash. Actually I’m surprised the press aren’t on to it yet.”
“We must be ready for them however they approach us. On the telephone, on the internet, in the streets,” she said in Churchillian mode.
“A united front,” he said.
“United is the word. They’re going to push for a press release, and we need to be clear what we say.”
Diamond waited for her train of thought to shunt past and return again.
Georgina was frowning. “But we can’t be clear without the facts. Why haven’t we heard from the pathologist? Hasn’t the autopsy been carried out? Without his findings we can’t tell them anything of use.”
He explained about Dr. Waghorn being a bones man and in no hurry.
“Then he must be told,” she said. “Doesn’t he understand the urgency? Has anyone told him what we may be dealing with? Do you have his number? Get him on the line and I’ll put a rocket under this man.”
In the CID room, Diamond was able to announce that the postmortem would be at eight the next morning.
“I’ll set my alarm,” Keith Halliwell said automatically. Because of Diamond’s aversion to blood and gore, every autopsy in the past ten years had been assigned to his deputy.
“Did I say I wanted you there?” the big man said.
There was a general raising of eyebrows.
Halliwell had turned as pale as any of the corpses he’d met on the slab. “You’re sending someone else?”
“I’m going myself. What’s up with you lot?” Diamond said. “I’ve never had a problem getting up early.”
After a moment to grasp the fact that Diamond could stomach an autopsy on a skeleton, Halliwell produced a wide, relieved grin. “I’ll have a lie-in, then.”
John Leaman left his chair and asked the boss if he could have a quiet word.
They went into Diamond’s office.
“Something personal?”
“No, but you’ll want to hear it in private.”
“Now you’ve got me interested.”
“It’s about Beau Nash.”
“Okay.”
“And how he’s supposed to have ended up in Twerton. I disbelieved it from the start.”
“You made that clear to one and all, John.”
“But then we discovered this rumour that he was buried in an unmarked grave because of all the debts he ran up.”
“It’s more than a rumour,” Diamond said. “It’s widely accepted.”
“I know, guv. The biographies, all the guide books, the internet, Wikipedia.”
A warning bell sounded in Diamond’s head. “I don’t rely on the internet for evidence, John. I’m talking about experts, people who’ve devoted years to the subject. Even the latest biography from America states that nobody knows where he’s buried and asks the question whether it was a pauper’s grave.”
“And I don’t rely on modern academics when I can go to contemporary sources,” Leaman said with the stiff-necked bluntness typical of him. “People who write biographies ought to take the trouble to check every detail, but they don’t. They repeat what others have already written and mistakes creep in.”
“By contemporary sources you mean Goldsmith?”
“Goldsmith? No.”
“Come on then, out with it.”
“Goldsmith says nothing at all about an unmarked grave—but he isn’t my source. I’ve found newspaper reports of the funeral.”
“From 1761?” Diamond said.
“The same week Nash was buried.”
“And?”
Leaman was enjoying this. “The Burney collection of eighteenth-century newspapers is a resource these biographers should have consulted if they were any good at their job.”
“What are you talking about? Where is this?”
“The British Library.”
“You haven’t been up to St. Pancras?”
“You can access it. The papers are digitised. I looked at the London Intelligencer for 21 February 1761, four days after the funeral. Care to see a printout?” With the air of a magician he opened a folded sheet he’d kept out of sight in his hand.
How could Diamond say no?
“You don’t have to read the whole report,” Leaman said as he handed it across. “It goes on a bit. The first two lines say it all, really.”
Diamond looked at the sentence helpfully highlighted by Leaman in bright yellow: Laft Tuefday Evening the remains of Richard Nafh, Efq; were interred in the Abbey Church, Bath.
“Not much doubt about that,” the head of CID muttered as everything he had deduced crashed down like the Twerton terrace, all the work of the past few days suddenly turned to dust and rubble.
“Several other papers carry similar accounts,” the human wrecking ball smacked in with another hit. “There’s no suggestion anywhere that the coffin was taken after the service to some undisclosed graveyard and buried in the paupers’ section. I didn’t ever believe that story.”
Deeply shaken, Diamond spoke in a voice that sounded—even to himself—a million miles from where he was. “I wonder where it started.”
“With some Victorian storyteller professing to write history. They loved wallowing in misery, all the tear-jerking bits like the death of Little Nell and Oliver Twist asking for more. The unmarked grave is horseshit, to put it mildly, just as the stuff about Juliana Papjoy coming back to nurse him in old age was wrong. Sentimental slush.”
“You don’t need to rub it in, John.”
“Shall we tell the others? You can see why I thought you’d like to hear it first.”
“Because you want the pleasure of telling it twice over?”
Leaman rolled his eyes upwards, but that was one thing Diamond was right about.
Late in the day, after a dispiriting team meeting when Diamond had left most of the talking to Leaman, the head of CID retired to his office with a book about the history of the Abbey. He’d never been much of a reader, but he felt the need to mug up. After twenty minutes Ingeborg Smith surprised him by bringing in a glass of fizz and a slice of apricot flan. “I thought you might appreciate this, guv. I was saying to the others that we haven’t celebrated moving in here.”
“Celebrated?”
“Cheered ourselves up, then. So we all chipped in. It’s only Prosecco.”
“You should have asked me for a contribution,” he said, thinking far too late he should have provided drinks himself. The idea hadn’t crossed his mind, possibly because the rows of desks in the new CID office reminded him of nothing else but a prison visiting area.
“You’ve had a lot to deal with.”
“I’ll come out and join you all.”
John Leaman, basking in his latest success, was chatting animatedly with two of the civilian staff.
Unable to stomach any more of that, Diamond chose the other end of the room and was joined there by Paul Gilbert.
“I wanted to ask if I should unpin everything from the board,” the young man said.
“Why?”
“Well . . .” He spread his hands as if it was obvious.
“Leave it for now,” Diamond said. “We might get some autopsy pictures for you tomorrow.”
“I thought if the skeleton isn’t Beau Nash—”
“It’s still a dead person and we have to try and explain how it got there. You may need to take down the pictures of Nash and his mistress, but I wouldn’t do that until we’re totally sure.”
“But if he was buried in the Abbey like those old newspapers say—”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, even eighteenth-century papers.”
Gilbert almost choked on a crumb.
“What do you think happened, guv?”
Diamond hadn’t given up on the skeleton being Beau Nash. He couldn’t banish the image of the dusty old bones in eighteenth-century clothes. He hadn’t mentioned his private theory in the meeting. Now he tried it out on the youngest member of the team, youngest but by no means dimmest.
Gilbert heard him out in silence.
“You have to remember we’re starting from something extraordinary,” the big man stressed. “If the skeleton in the loft is Beau Nash, then the explanation must be just as extraordinary.”
“I see that,” Gilbert said. “I can’t get my head round the idea that this enormous funeral took place without a body in the coffin.”
“It had to, else how did he end up in Twerton?”
That kind of logic was difficult to fault.
7
Late the same evening Georgina was at the wheel of her silver Mercedes coming over Bannerdown, returning to Bath on the Fosse Way northeast of the city. How clever of her sister, Jelly, to have bought a cottage at South Wraxall right beside the arrow-straight Roman road that runs from Exeter to Lincoln—Georgina’s favourite road in all of the southwest. The journey home felt like a private drive on evenings such as this.
Or should have done. Tonight her nerves were playing havoc.
Jelly (silly name, but she was stuck with it, being christened Angelica and unable to get her tongue round all the syllables as a child) was seven years younger than Georgina and couldn’t be more different in personality. She’d been married three times and the weddings had got more and more extravagant. For the latest, to Wallace, who was “something in the film world,” all the guests had been flown out to Bermuda and the ceremony had taken place on a beach. Unfortunately Wallace hadn’t lasted any longer than Damian or Jules. Worse, the settlement was taking far too long because of the lawyers. Jelly now said the rest of her life would consist of casual relationships. She was currently using the internet to see what was available.
Georgina had never mentioned Jelly to any of her police colleagues.
Despite the different paths their lives had taken, the sisters got on well and Georgina regularly helped Jelly over her emotional crises. Truth to tell, she enjoyed hearing what some of these oversexed men seemed to think was natural and normal. She didn’t even blink, acting the experienced older sister who knew it all, unshockable, sympathetic and never short of advice. Jelly’s action-packed private life made a welcome change from reading crushingly dull screeds from the Home Office and trying to apply them at police-station level.
Jelly’s latest escapade had been related tearfully over a gin and tonic. She had arranged online to meet a man with an MG Midget. Yesterday he had turned up on time in this dinky red sports car from the 1960s and taken her for a “spin.” He hadn’t looked anything like his picture and was probably twenty years her senior, but Jelly was willing to compromise, assuming that any owner of a valuable vintage car knew how to treat a lady. Sadly this wasn’t the case. Somewhere north of Bristol, Cedric had said he could feel a touch of cramp in his leg. Jelly decided the reason was obvious: he was about six foot six and quite the wrong shape to fit into a car that size. A mile or two further along the road he’d started groaning, so Jelly had suggested they pulled into a layby. Conveniently one appeared almost straight away.
Jelly had expected Cedric to get out and have a stretch, but he’d made even more alarming noises and said he couldn’t move and would she massage the muscle, which had seemed to have gone rigid. Tentatively Jelly had put her hand on his thigh only to be told the cramping was lower down, in the calf, and in the other leg. She couldn’t bear seeing anyone suffer, so she’d leaned over, reached down and got to work with both hands. For a first date, this Cedric was asking a lot, because Jelly was now face down in his lap. The position wasn’t dignified or comfortable. When the muscle seemed to be responding, she’d asked if he was okay and he’d said there was a definite improvement and asked her to keep going. The groaning had given way to a kind of moan that sounded—even to the tender-hearted Jelly—suspiciously like sounds of pleasure.
This was the moment she’d been shocked to hear another voice join in. Someone had said, “So it’s you, Cedric. I thought I recognised the car. What’s going on here, then?”
Cedric, calm as a horse whisperer, had answered, “No problem, officer. A touch of cramp. The lady is massaging my leg.”
Officer? Jelly had caught her breath.
The second voice had said, “Same old game, then? The cramp attack? Does the lady know you’re famous for it?”
Jelly, mortified, angry and embarrassed, had stayed face down, not wanting to be recognised, hoping the policeman would go away. He must have driven silently into the layby and turned off his lights and parked and crept up on the car.
Then she’d heard Cedric say, “It’s not illegal between consenting adults.”
This was too much. Jelly had sat up and said, “I haven’t consented to anything. This man got me here under false pretences.” After a short, bad-tempered exchange, she’d insisted on being driven home in the police car demanding to know why Cedric hadn’t been charged with deception and a whole lot of other things.
Georgina had heard all this with a mixture of outrage and alarm. She could see it mushrooming into a ruinous situation, and not just for Jelly. She could imagine what the media would make of the assistant chief constable’s own sister being led astray by this sex pest. Cedric had to be stopped from preying on gullible women. It was a dilemma. You don’t want one of your own family put through the ordeal of a court case, yet the man couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
She’d told Jelly firmly to put the whole incident down to experience and take it as a warning about dating men online.
“Isn’t there something in the law about outraging public decency?” Jelly had asked her.
“Leave it,” Georgina had warned in the strongest terms. “You could find yourself being charged.”
“Me? I’m the victim. I was innocent. He’s obviously a predator.”
“Yes, and equally obviously known to the police. Leave it to us to deal with him.”
It had taken ten minutes and another G&T to make her sister understand what going to court would entail and what damage a clever counsel would do to her reputation. She had finally seen sense.
Georgina had promised—and half meant what she said, because she had to think of a way of keeping Jelly’s name out of it—to report the incident to Operation Bluestone, the dedicated rape and sexual offences unit. And now she was trying to put all that out of her mind and concentrate on her driving.
She shouldn’t really have been at the wheel. The two drinks were definitely over the limit. At the time, they’d been necessary, as much to control her own emotions as Jelly’s. But she’d been unwise to have them. Although she didn’t feel the slightest bit drunk, the law allowed no excuses. If she were stopped and breathalysed, her career would be over.
So she kept checking her speed and making sure her steering was faultless. Even on a quiet, safe road like this you could be stopped by some patrol keen to make an arrest. Give nothing away, she told herself. Keep the wheel steady and drive as if you have the lord chief justice in the passenger seat. Twenty minutes and you’ll be home.
Two minutes later something new appeared on the display.
A malfunction.
The bulb in her right taillight wasn’t working.
Damnation.
Her mouth went dry and her stomach clenched. However carefully she drove, she would now be pulled over by the first police car that came up behind her. She looked in the mirror and saw headlights not far behind.
What next? She could put her foot down and make sure they didn’t get close. The temptation was strong. No, no, no. Likely as not, they’d get her for speeding as well.
She saw a space in front o
f a farm gate and pulled off the road. You had to be careful in the dark. In some places along here there was almost no verge and a sheer drop.
She switched everything off and waited.
The car flashed by. Not a police vehicle.
Could she take the risk of driving down into Bath through built-up streets? It was the only route home. She should have stayed the night at Jelly’s. She could easily make a turn and go back, but by now she wasn’t far from Batheaston, a lot closer to home than South Wraxall.
For some minutes she agonised over what to do next. She wasn’t usually indecisive. Perhaps she’d taken in more alcohol than she thought. Jelly sometimes tipped in as much gin as tonic.
Needing to calm herself, she started going through earlier events, the humdrum routine of work. But of course it hadn’t been humdrum today. Anything but, with the Twerton skeleton and the suggestion that it was Beau Nash. When the media caught up with the latest theory there would be mayhem.
Beau Nash.
Ridiculous.
She blamed Peter Diamond, the cuckoo in her nest. Something about that bumptious, exasperating man acted as an attractant to bizarre and sensational cases. He’d deny it, of course. He’d argue that any detective working in a city with Bath’s colourful history would find himself investigating extraordinary events, but Beau Nash in a loft was the most extreme example yet.
No doubt there was an explanation. Sanity would prevail.
All Georgina had ever wanted was a low-key existence, free of sensation. Other people achieved it. She knew of assistant chief constables who complained of boredom. Ten minutes in Bath police would cure them of that.
Nothing more had come past. It was after midnight and Bath should be reasonably quiet. She made the decision to drive on.
In the last few minutes a mist had come down—or so she thought until she realised her own hot breath had steamed up the windows.
For God’s sake, woman, she told herself, get a grip.
She wiped a space in the windscreen, turned up the air conditioning and got the car back on the road to start the long descent into Batheaston.
Take it slowly. At a sedate speed in low gear she flicked the headlights to full beam. Maybe more power in the electrics would cure the taillight problem.
Beau Death Page 8
