Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  If anyone actually clapped it wasn’t heard because a volley of mortar blasts got the French programme under way. Finally all attention focused on the fireworks. Patriotic red, white and blue in cascades lit up the night, multiplied into millions of sparks curving outwards over the crescent. The crowd responded with the obligatory oooooghs and aaaaaghs. There was stirring synchronised music from Bizet as well, but the real treats were in the sky.

  “Worth coming for?” Diamond said.

  If Paloma answered it was lost in the next explosions.

  The French display took almost half an hour, but seemed longer, such was the intensity. Everyone seemed to agree the show was worthy of the finale and better than anything seen on previous nights.

  Smoke could be seen along the length of the lawn and teams were at work rigging the next display. The smell of sulphur spread across the park.

  The interval was welcome and the drinks vendors did a good trade.

  “The Chinese should give us something special considering they invented fireworks,” Diamond said. “Are you up for it?”

  “I am, but my ears aren’t,” Paloma said. “I think I’ll be deaf for the next twenty-four hours.”

  At the front, Perry was working the crowd, asking them how amazing the French display had been and whether China could top it.

  “He’s good at this,” Diamond said. “It’s a rare talent.”

  Paloma didn’t seem to have heard. He took out a tube of mints and handed it to her.

  Huge aerial shells announced the start of China’s effort. This time the sky turned red as lithium atoms showered over the crescent. What followed was exceptional. How the effect of a silver brocade waterfall was achieved was a mystery and that was just the start of a programme that had the crowd gasping between cries of appreciation. When it finished there was little doubt that China was the winner, but the announcement was delayed. Instead, Greensleeves suddenly boomed from the public address system. Could there be a dispute over the result? Perry the Pyro was nowhere to be seen. It transpired that in the hiatus the city of Bath was about to make its own contribution to the evening.

  “Can your eardrums stand any more?” Diamond asked Paloma.

  “If we start walking now, we might escape the worst of it,” she said.

  “Good idea.”

  But they hadn’t got far before a fusillade of mortars shook the ground. Diamond looked over his shoulder. “How do they follow that?”

  “With an anticlimax,” she said. “Just look at it.”

  Somewhere in front of the scaffolding, a set piece tableau outlined in fizzing light had appeared. The figure of a woman in Georgian costume appeared to be curtseying to a bowing man in frock coat and wig.

  “If I’m not mistaken that’s Jane Austen and bloody Beau Nash,” he said. “The bugger follows me everywhere.”

  17

  Diamond had uncorked a French wine in Paloma’s sitting room and was pouring it when his phone buzzed.

  “At this hour?”

  “Better answer it,” Paloma said.

  “Ten to one it’s a cold call.” But he recognised the number on the display.

  Ingeborg’s voice was charged with tension. “Guv, where are you exactly?”

  “Paloma’s house. Why?”

  “You’d better get back to the crescent. There was a shooting. A man is dead.”

  “What?” Stupid reaction. He’d heard what she said. Troubling images invaded his brain. The size of that crowd at the show. Some idiot loosing off a gun. Panic and mayhem. It was likely others had been injured as well. He needed to get there fast. “Are you there now, Inge?”

  “On the residents’ lawn where the fireworks were. The show finished a while ago. We’ve sealed it off. There’s no shortage of manpower.”

  That was a first. On reflection, most of Bath Central had been on duty.

  “Well, you know the drill. Witnesses. Detain anyone who saw anything. Call the police surgeon, scene of crime unit and pathologist. I’ll see if I can get to you before they do.”

  He told Paloma and apologised. “God knows what can be done at this time of night, but it must be dealt with.” He thought of the difficulty of a crime scene littered with firework debris and witnesses who spoke Chinese and French. Don’t meet trouble halfway, he told himself.

  His preference was always to drive well inside the speed limit, but this called for a change in behaviour. He put his foot down. Not much was moving into town, but unending headlights dazzled him, almost certainly people coming away from the fireworks.

  He parked behind a police minivan on the cobbles in front of the Royal Crescent. Some of the lights at the windows were now turned off. At ground level a few of the inevitable gawpers watched from behind the railings, but everyone else seemed to have left except the display teams and the strong contingent of police in their high-visibility jackets.

  He crossed the lawn to where he was confident he would find Ingeborg with Keith Halliwell. Fireworks require darkness, so the building’s floodlighting had been turned off. Shadowy figures were moving about with flashlights and hand torches, their voices raised as if to compensate for the difficulty of seeing.

  Compelled to take notice of things he’d not really taken in during the show, he made out from the languages being loudly used that the rival teams from France and China had worked from separate ends of the crescent lawn. The standing structures erected for Bath’s rather cheesy effort occupied the no-man’s land in the middle.

  Bits of both figures were still smouldering. The fumes of burnt chemicals made his nostrils tingle.

  A flashlight had been lashed to the railings with the beam showing the reason for all the extra activity—the victim of the shooting, face down behind the charred remains of the Beau Nash figure. It seemed only one person had been hit.

  “Are we certain he’s had it?” Diamond asked no one in particular.

  A voice in a French accent said, “’Ad it?”

  “Is that you, guv?” Ingeborg came from nowhere and shone a torch at him. “You got here fast. Yes, no question he’s dead.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “If there were, we haven’t found them yet.”

  “In all that crowd? Tens of thousands. Surely when the gun was fired . . .” He stopped. Common sense kicked in. “The sound was masked by the bloody fireworks.”

  “Seems so.”

  “Where was he hit? Head? Chest?”

  “Both. He took several shots.”

  “Anyone know who he is?”

  “Didn’t I say? It’s Perry the Pyro.”

  Spikes thrust through his veins.

  “Give me the torch.”

  Suddenly ice-cold, he confirmed what she’d said. Death is difficult to accept at any time. Here the shock was extreme. The go-getting young guy had been the personification of vitality. Only a short time earlier he had been the main man of the entire show, working the crowd like an evangelist preacher raising the expectations of everyone present. Now the long, dark hair was fanned across the turf, almost covering that white hat, except that there was more red than white. Some of the badges glinted moistly.

  Speculating why the killing had taken place was pointless when so little was known about the man and his contacts, but Diamond’s job was to go beyond speculation and find logical reasons. People like Perry, the movers and shakers of this world, can be ruthless in getting what they want. Witness that “D’you mind, dude?” moment. Who could say what enemies he’d made on the journey here?

  Another car bumped over the cobbles. The police surgeon. All he would do would be to declare life to be extinct. Most times it’s screamingly obvious, as now. Nice little earner for a local GP. But of course it can involve unsocial hours.

  He was the same Dr. Higgins who had used the cherry picker to declare the skeleton dead. “What
are you doing here?” the sarcastic little man asked Diamond. “Hoping to make the front page of the Sun again?”

  Too shocked to trade insults with this jobsworth, Diamond turned to Ingeborg and said loudly, “Did you call a real pathologist? We need an expert here.”

  She confirmed that Jim Middleton was expected, an assurance that did nothing for Diamond’s state of mind. Fifteen years before, his beloved wife Steph had been gunned down only a short distance from here, on the lowest stretch of the sloping lawn below the crescent, and Middleton had attended the murder scene and afterwards carried out the autopsy. No reason to blame Inge or the pathologist. His own raw emotion made the memory painful.

  The scene of crime team arrived in two vans. Their first task would be to fix some temporary lighting.

  Asked when anyone had first noticed Perry was missing, a short man in a tracksuit, one of the event organisers, said there had been some confusion after the Chinese display. Perry had been expected to step forward and inform the huge audience that while the judges were coming to a decision the city of Bath would present a show of its own, but he hadn’t appeared, so Bath’s set-piece figures had been activated without any announcement. And after the five-minute show was over and Beau Nash and Jane Austen had fizzled out, Perry still couldn’t be found, so one of the judges had been forced to take over and declare the result. The Chinese chef de mission had been handed the trophy and the crowd was unaware that anything unplanned had happened. It was only after people were starting to disperse that one of the riggers had stumbled on the body on the turf.

  “Did anyone touch him?”

  “Several of us—to see if he needed help. But it was obvious he’d been shot and was dead, poor guy. We told the nearest policeman.”

  He spoke to Ingeborg, “Take the names of that rigger and everyone who handled the body.” Then he asked the tracksuited man, “How could he have been shot without anyone noticing?” The question came out like an accusation of negligence. Diamond wasn’t in a mood to spare people’s feelings.

  “No one had any reason to go round the back of the figures.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t go near for safety reasons,” the man said. “The things are ignited remotely using infrared signals.”

  “There were plenty of people involved in setting off the fireworks. Someone must have seen what was going on.”

  “Don’t count on it. The guys up here all had their own jobs to do and there weren’t many of us.”

  “Yes, but someone fired a gun.”

  “If you’d been here—”

  “I was.”

  “Then you must have heard the mortars the Chinese were firing. Even with ear muffs on, they were deafening. Rapid, too. And of course everyone looks to the sky to see the effect.”

  He’d done the same. He wouldn’t have witnessed the shooting even if he’d been at the front.

  A sudden flash of light transformed the scene. A police photographer was taking shots of the corpse.

  Another thought occurred. “Some of the flashes from the fireworks lit up everything brighter than daylight.”

  “I can only speak for myself and I wasn’t looking for a gunman.”

  Diamond gazed up at the huge mass of the crescent. Now that midnight had come and gone, most of the lights were out. “People in there would have had the best view of the firing area. Some of them must have been watching from the windows.”

  “Yes, but, like I say, would they have noticed what was going on down here?”

  He had to concede that the man had a point. Most of Bath had watched the free show, but finding even one witness to the shooting would be a challenge.

  He stepped over to where the Chinese team were uprooting hundreds of racks and tubes used to fire the mortar shells that had made such an impression. “Anyone speak English?”

  Apparently not. This was the worst start to an investigation he could remember.

  More of them were loading a truck. By repeating the same question several times over he found someone who appeared to understand what he asked.

  “Good. Did any of your guys see the man get shot?”

  A shrug.

  “Would you ask them?”

  Another shrug, but the man did at least say something to his colleagues. No one appeared interested. The speaker of English shook his head and said, “See nothing.”

  The French, when Diamond tried them, were more animated. He got a “Zut alors!” and much gesticulating, but nobody admitted to witnessing the murder.

  “So who was the rigger who found the body?” he asked Ingeborg.

  “He’s local. His name is Dave Bateson. I’ll call him over.”

  Dave Bateson was one of the Bath team and he looked like a coal miner coming off shift. It seemed his responsibility had been to make sure the two figures stayed fully ignited and in motion for as long as possible.

  “I thought it was all remote,” Diamond said.

  “Yes, but once they were alight, things could go wrong. We were confident Beau Nash would keep bowing, but Jane Austen was more complicated and could easily have gone belly up.”

  Jane Austen belly up would not have enhanced her reputation or the city’s.

  “How do they work?” Diamond asked. “Like the moving signs in Piccadilly Circus?”

  “Not really. It’s all down to the lancework.”

  “What’s that when it’s at home?”

  “Set-piece pictures like you saw—they’re powered by multiple firework fountains known as lances mounted on a wood or metal frame and connected by a fuse. The manufacturers are perfecting new systems all the time. These things were automatons. It’s very high-tech.”

  “Oh yes? So high-tech that you had to be ready with a box of matches if they failed?”

  Bateson gave a nervous laugh. “It’s not like that.”

  “When did you actually find the body?” Diamond asked.

  “Only after the show was over. I must have been close to him when the figures were set off. I was keeping behind the frames so as not to be obvious. I wouldn’t have noticed anything on the ground while I was on duty. That’s pressure, that is. Imagine if I failed.”

  “Jane Austen fizzing out?”

  “Or the other one.”

  The whole concept of Jane Austen and Beau Nash appearing together was fatuous anyway. They were born a hundred years apart. The Beau had been dead nearly forty years when Jane arrived in Bath.

  “So can we be confident the body was lying there all the time?”

  “I suppose. Horrible shock I had, almost falling over it like that. Soon as I did, I called my mates over and we made sure it wasn’t some drunk. When we saw the blood we called your lot.”

  “My lot?”

  “The police.”

  “Right.” Diamond’s mind was on other things. “The layout for the show must have been planned some time ahead. Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No, each team planned its own.”

  “I’m talking about the areas the teams were given to set up their displays.”

  “Got you. That was fixed a few weeks ahead, but it was obvious, really. You had to give the finalists separate stations and it made sense to keep them apart with our bit standing between.”

  “It’s becoming clearer to me now,” Diamond said. “If the shooting was pre-planned, the killer must have known his best opportunity was to do it behind all the action while the show was in progress.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “He could be reasonably confident Perry the Pyro would be standing behind your figures. Where else would he go when he wasn’t out front giving his pitch to the audience? He wouldn’t want to spoil their view so he’d go round the back.”

  It had made sense for Perry to retire into the shadows between announcements.
Having watched the show from the front, Diamond had needed to understand how the event had been handled up here on the residents’ lawn. Little more could be learned from this witness so he let Bateson go.

  Detectives are taught at police college that the first twenty-four hours after a murder are the most productive of vital information. You shouldn’t expect much sleep. Diamond had never followed the rules. He called Keith Halliwell over. “One of us should be here when old motormouth arrives to look at the body. Is there any word from him?”

  “Jim Middleton? Last I heard, he was on the road.”

  “Which road?”

  “He’s coming in from Devizes. If you want to get away, guv, I’ll do the honours with Jim. At this time of night he might be less talkative than usual.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  This earned a grin, but both men knew the real reason Diamond didn’t want to meet Middleton. Halliwell had been with his boss on that dreadful morning in February 2001 when Steph Diamond’s body was found.

  “I’m going to take you up on it,” Diamond said. “If I’ve had some shut-eye, I’ll be firing on all cylinders in the morning. I’ll tell Inge to stand down as well. And most of the plods. There isn’t a lot they can do at this stage.”

  “It’s down to us as usual.”

  “But I wouldn’t call this usual, Keith. Everything I’ve seen and heard so far makes me think this death is unusual. Highly unusual.”

  18

  “First job: next of kin.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “You know my view on this,” Diamond said. “I don’t believe in asking uniform to knock on someone’s door and give them the bad news. It’s our duty.”

  It didn’t surprise him that no eyes locked with his when he looked around the room. The entire CID team apart from Keith Halliwell had assembled next morning for instructions.