Beau Death

by Peter Lovesey

  “His phone may have some names.”

  “The phone and the computer. But I’m not confident, Inge. You don’t store your supplier’s contact details unless you’re daft, and Perry wasn’t that.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “He was a user, right?”

  “Fair assumption.”

  “Why would he get shot when he’s a paying customer? The drugs barons wouldn’t want him dead. They’d want him to go on depending on the stuff.”

  “Maybe he changed his supplier.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Or he complained about the quality or threatened to name names. The main thing that came across to me in my short encounter with him was that he didn’t kowtow to anyone.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “The barons may have thought so. Obviously it wasn’t a casual killing. There was planning behind this. They would have known where he would be and what a fine opportunity it was to gun him down when the fireworks were blasting out.”

  “When you say ‘they,’ are you thinking there were other people involved?”

  “Not in the shooting. A job will be given to a single gunman, but others will have made the call. We’re likely to be dealing with hard professionals.”

  “Can we handle that?”

  “Of course. Let’s go.”

  In this assertive mode, Diamond turned abruptly and felt a contact of something against his arm. A sudden movement above his head caused him to duck and sheer away. He lost his balance on the slippery turf and fell.

  Only after he was dumped on his backside in the mud and felt the damp seeping through his trousers did he see what had happened. He’d bumped against the lancework figure of Beau Nash. Even as he lay shocked and humbled, there was a whirring noise and the mechanism gave one more twirl. The Beau performed an elegant bow.

  “Bloody thing.”

  Two of the crime scene people helped him up. Not Ingeborg. She was looking away with her hand over her mouth.

  The SOCOs asked if he was all right.

  “All right except for my suit ruined. I only got it back from the cleaner’s the day before yesterday.” He raised his voice for Ingeborg’s benefit. “I saw you smirking, Sergeant Smith. It’s your car I’m going to be sitting in.”

  On the drive back, Ingeborg offered to make a detour to Diamond’s house in Weston so that he could change. A helpful suggestion, a peace offering he huffily accepted.

  While he was upstairs, she gave Raffles an unexpected serving of beef in jelly.

  “You weren’t feeding that cat, I hope,” he said when he came down in his second-best suit and saw Raffles licking his lips beside an empty dish. “He gets fed morning and night. Those are his times.”

  They decided to get some lunch themselves since they were so convenient for Diamond’s local, the Old Crown. Over ham, egg and chips and with a pint of strong bitter in front of him, he was more forgiving, even confessing to feeling vulnerable.

  “How, exactly?” Ingeborg asked.

  He took a long sip of beer. “This is in confidence, right? Have you ever thought of me as superstitious?”

  She shook her head.

  “Feet firmly on the ground, right?”

  He could see her struggling to avoid more laughter. “All right. Unfortunate choice of words. You know what I mean.”

  She managed a nod, not a solemn nod, but a definite attempt to be solemn.

  He continued. “Ever since that ridiculous photo of me and the skeleton got in the papers, I’ve felt as if I’m being picked on.”

  “Who by?”

  “The fates, I suppose.” He drank some beer. “Well, Beau Nash, if you want to know. You saw what happened this morning. I brushed against the thing and went arse over tip. It had to be bloody Beau Nash, didn’t it? If it had been Jane Austen messing me up I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Pure accident.”

  “That’s all it was, guv.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a series of embarrassing events, like revenge or something. I refused to believe he’s buried in the Abbey when he plainly was. Even after Leaman found the newspaper accounts I was thinking Mrs. Hill had fooled everyone and secretly moved the corpse to Twerton. I went to that autopsy in the belief they were Nash’s bones and got my comeuppance with a pair of pants.”

  “You shouldn’t take it personally.”

  “So who was it who had to hold a press conference and show a picture of the Y-fronts to the media? Muggins. How can I avoid taking it personally? Originally Georgina wanted me to go in front of them and hold up the pants myself. Imagine the captions they’d have thought up for that picture.”

  Ingeborg was forced to cover her mouth again.

  “Next, Georgina gets friendly with the president of the Beau Nash Society and volunteers me for their meeting. Great—except it involves dressing up in white tights and breeches, frock coat and wig.”

  She started shaking uncontrollably. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I haven’t told anyone. I walked into it. She was threatening to hand the case over to Charlie Crocker from Bristol. I wasn’t having that.”

  The mention of Crocker came as a shock to Ingeborg. The Bristol police hadn’t got a good word to say for the man. Suddenly Diamond’s misfortunes weren’t so funny. “Why? What’s her reason?”

  “We’re overstretched.”

  “We can manage.”

  “I told her—and to show commitment talked myself into wearing the fancy dress. Is it any wonder Beau Nash is getting to me?”

  “But did she say any more about Charlie Crocker taking over?”

  “The threat was withdrawn.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “No, you can thank me.”

  “I do. I do. It’s an opportunity, guv. Look at it that way.”

  “Now you’re talking like Georgina.”

  She continued to talk like Georgina. “We’ve spent a lot of man-hours trying to identify the skeleton. This is a real chance to crack it—a bunch of people who dress up regularly in eighteenth-century costume. One of them may have the answer. This is about attitude. If you go there feeling like a victim you’ll get nothing out of it. Tell yourself you look terrific in the outfit and you will.”

  He frowned. On second thoughts, she was talking more like Paloma than Georgina and she was making sense.

  She hadn’t finished. “You probably know more about Beau Nash by now than most of their members. After all, we spent days digging out the true facts of his life, exposing the myth about Juliana Papjoy. You’re a Beau Nash expert.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You’d better start saying it and believing. By showing confidence you can make your visit a triumph. If you don’t, you’ll lay yourself open to more embarrassments. When is this meeting?”

  He tried to sound enthusiastic. “Wednesday night.”

  “Have you got the costume?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Better get one fast, guv. You want it to fit.”

  “I was thinking of asking Paloma to hire one for me. She’s got contacts in the historical costume world.”

  “Call her now. Please, guv. For all our sakes.”

  The autopsy on Perry Morgan was conducted the same afternoon in the mortuary at the Royal United Hospital after Miss Divine had viewed the body and confirmed the identity of her former tenant. Old motormouth, as Diamond called Jim Middleton, provided a running commentary throughout interspersed with fly-fishing anecdotes whenever he stepped back to allow his assistant to clean up. The sole police witness and captive audience was Keith Halliwell. When it was over, he called Diamond from the hospital.

  “All done, guv.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “A lot. You wouldn’t believe how many knots they have in fishi
ng. I made the mistake of mentioning the perfection loop to show I’d paid attention last time and he was away. There’s the Albright, the grinner, also known as the uni, the clinch, the nail, the double surgeon—”

  “What’s that for?”

  “It connects the leader to the tippet.”

  He didn’t want to know any more. There were more urgent things. “Tell me about the autopsy.”

  “The killer wasn’t too accurate. Only two shots entered the body, one in the chest and the other in the head.”

  “He was firing in difficult conditions.”

  “That’s true, I guess. Anyway, the one through the cranium is what killed Perry, in case you hadn’t worked it out.”

  “Sounds like the coup de grâce after the first one knocked him down.”

  “Wasn’t mentioned.”

  “Only me speculating. I suppose we have to wait for test results to find out if he was high on cocaine that night?”

  “I told Jim our suspicions and he sent blood, urine and vitreous fluid for analysis as well as hair samples. The lab will probably confirm he was a user, but the coke metabolises quickly, so I don’t know what we’re likely to find out about his state that evening. Is the drug use important when we know a bullet killed him?”

  “It’s early days, Keith. I want all the information we can get.”

  “He did remark on Perry’s skinny physique. Cocaine suppresses the appetite, and the latest research suggests it actually prevents fat from being stored by the body. Won’t be long before it’s marketed as a slimming aid in this crazy world. He also took swabs from each nostril and looked inside the nose for signs of cartilage erosion from the snorting, but that was inconclusive.”

  “Inconclusive sums it up.”

  “If there was more, I’d tell you.”

  “I know. I’m not ungrateful.”

  “I was wondering, guv.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “If I might knock off duty for the rest of the day. I’m still weary from last night.”

  “Okay, we’ll see you tomorrow. Going fishing, are you?”

  Late in the afternoon came a call from John Leaman—a man who hadn’t been much on Diamond’s mind. A rapid recap was needed: Twerton, the demolished terrace and the six diggers.

  “John? How’s it going there?”

  “It wasn’t the best day I ever spent,” Leaman said in an accusing tone.

  “I didn’t send you there to have a ball. Are you through yet?”

  “Just about. The weather slightly improved this afternoon.”

  “Yes, that rain early on was the worst I remember. I was out in it.”

  The last remark wasn’t appreciated. “I don’t suppose you were ankle-deep in mud at the time.”

  “I told you to dress for the conditions. Didn’t you run for cover when it came down hard?”

  “Yes.”

  From the clipped way the word was spoken it was obvious there was more to come, but Leaman felt entitled to a prompt, so Diamond provided it. “And?”

  “I ordered a halt when it got really impossible, but there was nowhere nearby to shelter except my car. The minibus that dropped them was on another job. They piled in somehow, all six of them, mud all over them and all over the inside of my car, the seats, the floor, even the windows.”

  “It’s known as a bonding experience.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t push it any more. He knew how the messed-up car would play on the mind of an obsessive-compulsive.

  “Never mind, John. Take your motor to a garage that offers a valet service and charge it up to CID expenses. Did you find anything when you finally got back to the dig?”

  “We did. That’s the reason I called.”

  “So the day wasn’t a complete write-off?”

  As a consolation for all the misery Leaman was about to have the last word. “I think you may be interested.”

  “Go on, then. I’m all ears.”

  “We found some bones.”

  20

  It occurred to Diamond as he was driving down to Twerton to see the bones that the timing wasn’t the best. Right now, a third corpse might shock Georgina into changing her mind. There was still a real danger of Charlie Crocker muscling in. There had to be a smart way to handle this.

  What was that bit of twisted wisdom he had once heard?

  When in charge, direct; when in trouble, delegate.

  John Leaman had turned up a crucial bit of evidence, so why shouldn’t he be given the chance to follow it up? If Ingeborg’s hunch was right and it emerged that the remains were those of the wife or partner who had gone missing in the 1990s, then inevitably it wouldn’t be long before the male tenant known loosely as Harry came under suspicion of killing both the woman buried in the garden and the man found in the loft. The two enquiries would fuse as one.

  Made sense.

  Meanwhile, he would be in no hurry to tell Georgina about the find. The remains would need to be examined before anyone took them seriously.

  At the site, Diamond drove over the rutted remains of the road and parked behind the Honda Civic hatchback owned by Leaman. How six men and a woman had squeezed into that small car to get out of the rain wasn’t nice to imagine.

  Leaman was standing alone, arms folded, barely recognisable in mud-coated overalls and wellies. The king of spades, as Diamond now privately dubbed him, didn’t summon up as much as a nod. If he was jubilant at making the find, any joy was internalised.

  “You sent the others home, then?”

  “The minivan came for them. They had a hard day. We all did.” He looked and sounded terribly down. Browned off in every sense.

  “Your car doesn’t look too mucky standing beside mine.”

  “You think so? It’s a disgrace. Want to see inside?” Leaman’s striving for perfection was often helpful to the team, but made life difficult for himself.

  “I’ll take your word for it. Where are these bones?”

  “At the far end. You’re going to ruin your shoes.”

  “It’s why I’m here.”

  Every part of the small garden seemed to have been turned over. Leaman led a snaking route around heaps of soil and deep trenches to the farthest end where yet another excavation had been started.

  “Not far down, then?” Diamond said, looking in. “The typical shallow grave.”

  Leaman took that as criticism. “It’s only shallow because I ordered a halt to the dig once we’d decided the first piece was definitely bone.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “What do you expect? It’s not the full skeleton.” He crouched and pointed. “They’re quite small pieces, broken up by some of the heavy machinery that was here, no doubt.” You would think from Leaman’s tone that the bulldozers had been sent in specially to spite him.

  With difficulty, Diamond made out some greyish-brown scraps that could just as easily have been stones. “Is one of these the piece you examined?”

  “No.”

  Leaman stood again, dipped a grimy hand into the pocket of his overalls and brought out a chunk of bulbous material almost the size of a golf ball, but emphatically bone, irregular on one side as if it had snapped off. “It’s the top of a femur where it joins the hip.”

  “May I?”

  Diamond took the object in his hand, felt the weight, looked closely at the surface and turned it over.

  He whistled.

  “Good find, John. And there’s obviously more.”

  “You can see pieces of the shaft. There ought to be other bones lower down. We only had spades and trowels to work with, which is why we stopped digging. We need finer tools and an expert now.”

  “I know exactly who to ask.”

  “Jim Middleton?”

  “No. Our bones man.”<
br />
  “Dr. Waghorn? I thought you didn’t get on with him.”

  “He’s a sarcastic old git and if this turns out to be animal bone he’ll give us hell, but I’m willing to risk it. You’ve opened a whole new line of enquiry.”

  The ridges of resentment on Leaman’s mud-spattered face vanished like ripples in a puddle. He didn’t raise a smile, but he appeared less likely to offer his resignation. “What made you so sure there was someone buried here?”

  “I can’t take credit for that,” Diamond said. “The possibility crossed my mind when I heard about a missing woman, but it was Ingeborg who convinced me we must dig. She won’t like me saying it was feminine intuition.”

  “Personally I don’t believe in that.”

  “Neither does she, but she has an uncanny way of pointing me in the right direction. Right now I’m interested in your abilities. How would you feel about taking on this side of the investigation?”

  At first, Leaman was wary. He wasn’t going to be caught twice over. “I don’t want to spend any more time in this quagmire.”

  “John, I’m offering you the chance to head the enquiry.”

  The voice changed. His entire manner underwent a transformation like a long-term convict at the moment he was told he’d been reprieved. “You want me in charge?”

  “You’ve got the experience.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No false modesty, John. You can handle this, right?” He pressed the piece of bone back into Leaman’s palm like a badge of office.

  The hours of misery were as nothing now. “Right. Where do I start?”

  “First, you go and see Claude Waghorn at the university and ask him to confirm that this bone is human. Then you bring in the scenes of crime team to search for more clues. They’re professionals. You don’t have to stand over them. You can safely leave them to dig for days on end while you get on with the detective work.”

  “What should I be doing?”

  Typical Leaman. “Where do I start?” “What should I be doing?” He’d do the job as well as anyone on the team and he probably knew the answers to his questions, but he was programmed to work to instructions.

  “Redouble your efforts to find who these tenants were. You know I met a Polish guy called Jerzy, don’t you, known to his mates as Yurek? Electrician working on the Manvers Street site. He and his partner were the last official tenants here before the squatters took over. They had the place eleven years. He didn’t meet the previous tenant, but he was told there had been a woman living in the house for a time. She left one day and wasn’t seen again.”