It didn’t. The malfunction notice hadn’t gone away.
Again she checked the rearview mirror for headlights. She was alone, thank God.
Not quite.
Ahead, on a stretch with tall trees on either side, her headlights on full beam picked out a figure at the side of the road with one hand raised, maybe to shield his eyes from the glare.
Some optical illusion? A tree stripped of its bark can stand out from the rest and look amazingly lifelike. But she thought she’d seen it move and there wasn’t much breeze tonight. It was possible someone was trying to wave her down.
She couldn’t stop for anyone.
Anyone.
She dipped her lights.
You never offer a lift at night, she thought. I must drive by.
The few seconds this troubling image had been caught in the glare of the lights had given the impression of a sizeable male with dark, shoulder-length hair. His clothes were strange. The word that popped into Georgina’s head was eccentric. Some kind of white jacket or coat and a large white hat. He was either bare-legged or wearing tights.
Come on, be sensible, she told herself. It was only some large item of rubbish caught on a bush and looking lifelike. Paper or plastic sheeting that had fallen off a passing vehicle.
She was tempted to flick to full beam again for a longer look, but she didn’t. She drove on until the dipped lights briefly caught the figure again.
Definitely a man. He was standing at the end of a driveway to some private house. And definitely waving.
She raced past.
The real shock was the clothes. He’d been dressed in a tricorne hat and frock coat, breeches and buckled shoes. The long hair must have been a wig. It was as if he’d stepped out of the eighteenth century. Or Georgina had travelled back there.
A ghost?
I know who he was, she thought.
The gin has gone to my head and I’m hallucinating. Beau Nash was in my thoughts and my intoxicated brain created this image. He can’t have been real.
Whatever the explanation, in this state of panic she wasn’t fit to be at the wheel of a car. Half a mile further on she flicked the main beam on again and looked for somewhere to stop. No laybys on this narrow road. But a short way on was a verge wide enough to take most of the car. She slowed, edged the front wheels on to the grass, braked and switched off. A pulse was thumping in her head.
“Please, God,” she said. “Please, God, help me.”
She’d got the shakes.
DTs?
Surely not.
For some minutes she did nothing. Couldn’t even think straight.
Finally she got a measure of control and succeeded in putting some sensible thoughts together. She would drive no more tonight. She’d phone for a taxi, leave the car here at the side of the road and collect it tomorrow when she was sober.
The decision came as a massive relief.
She took out her phone and got through straight away. And what a comfort it was to hear a human voice. It was difficult explaining the section of road where she was, but the woman at the taxi office said they’d find her if she waited by her car with the hazard lights on. “Have you broken down, dear?”
Comprehensively.
“Yes,” Georgina said.
“Don’t worry. Your driver will be on his way directly.”
Profoundly thankful, she sat in the car and for the next few minutes waited for her jangled nerves to calm. Hearing those few words of reassurance had been a comfort and now she needed to restore her equilibrium. She didn’t want the driver to see her in the state she was in. She closed her eyes and took some deep breaths. The shaking had almost stopped.
It would take the taxi ten to fifteen minutes.
The pulsing of her hazard lights was making the nearest bushes flash pink. Thinking more like the high-ranking police officer she was, she picked her bag off the passenger seat, stepped out and checked that nothing of value was in the back. Abandoned cars were an easy target for thieves. Then she locked up and stood in a safe position on the verge a short distance away from the car.
The cool night air was helping. She checked her watch a couple of times, but stayed calm. A couple of cars went past. It was too soon for the taxi.
When the arc of light high above the road told her another car was approaching, she didn’t get excited. The vehicle was coming from the wrong direction, the way she herself had travelled. She was expecting her taxi to come up from Bath.
The twin beams were too dazzling to stare at, but as they approached, she had the thought that this could, after all, be the taxi. The nearest cab might have been north of the city on another call and got a radio message to pick up a stranded passenger on Bannerdown. It seemed to be slowing. The lights dipped. But it wasn’t a taxi.
Or it didn’t look like a taxi. You can’t always be certain.
It was a four-by-four and it pulled up beside the winking Mercedes.
The nearest window slid down and a woman’s voice called out, “Need a lift?”
“Thank you, but I’ve called a taxi,” Georgina said.
“Where are you going?”
“Only into Bath.”
“Jump in. I’ll take you. You can phone and cancel the taxi.”
“I’d better not.”
But this was a persuasive lady. “Listen, my darling. They’re really busy at this time, after the pubs and clubs close. They tell you they’ll take ten minutes and they could be an hour. You never know who’s going to drive up and mug you while you’re standing here in the open with your handbag.”
Put like that, it was a winning argument. Georgina didn’t want to be kept waiting and mugged. “Well, thank you.”
“Not a problem. I’d never forgive myself if I drove past and read about you in the paper tomorrow.”
Georgina opened the door and got into the passenger seat.
“Makes sense.” In the darkness of the car the woman was difficult to see apart from a severe blonde fringe, but the voice was friendly and hearty in the way well-heeled Bathonians often are. “I’m Sally Paris.”
“Georgina Dallymore.”
“Call the taxi people, Georgie, and we’ll have you home in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
No one ever called her Georgie, but she was in no position to complain. She made the call and they were okay about it.
“Puncture, was it?” Sally Paris asked as she started up and got the Range Rover in motion.
Georgina didn’t want to tell a lie, but neither did she want to admit she was over the limit. “Actually my vision started playing tricks. I knew I shouldn’t be driving.”
“Responsible of you. I hope I’d do the same.” Sally then added in the same amiable tone, “Had a few drinks, have you? I thought I smelt gin on your breath. Where exactly do you live?”
“Bennett Street, if it isn’t too far out of your way.”
“Top of the town. I know it. Lovely area.”
Sociable conversations among people like this well-bred lady tend to follow a script. Any moment it would be “Tell me about yourself. Are you in business?” unless the lines were rewritten, so Georgina asked, “Have you driven far tonight?”
“No distance at all. I was collecting my husband. The chauffeur’s night off.”
“Oh yes?” Georgina tried to sound as if she, too, had given her chauffeur the evening off.
Sally raised her voice. “Are you awake, Ed?”
There was a grunt from the back, no more.
Georgina hadn’t realised there was another passenger.
“Out to the world,” Sally said. “One of his cronies invites them to an ‘at home’ and they all get plastered and the wives and significant others pick up the pieces at the end of the evening.”
“Invites them to a what?”
&nbs
p; “It’s an old-fashioned term for a booze-up. He’s the top banana, known as the Beau, so he has to be there. No excuses.”
“The Beau?”
“Heard of the Beau Nash Society?”
“I believe I have, but—”
“Fruitcakes, every one. Mostly men, of course. Isn’t that right, Ed?”
There was no reply from the fruitcake on the back seat, but Georgina turned her head and caught sight of a pair of chunky knees in white tights and, perched on even chunkier thighs, a three-cornered hat.
A light bulb turned on in her head. The roadside apparition must have been Ed dressed as Beau Nash waiting for his lift home.
“Is he awake?” Sally asked.
“Difficult to see,” Georgina said after turning her head as well as she could. The top banana seemed to have got overripe, gone soft and sunk in the seat.
“Try giving him a prod.”
Georgina had no desire to prod a strange man. “They dress up for this?”
“It’s the committee. Serious stuff,” Sally said. “They have rules and rituals and God knows what else. If Ed were awake he’d tell you. He’s been the Beau for the best part of twenty years. We get invited to all manner of functions that I try to avoid mostly. I’m forced to put in an appearance at the annual ball as the Belle. Silly, isn’t it? I’m sure it all sounds a hoot to anyone who isn’t caught up in it.”
“Can anyone join?”
“You need to be nominated and vetted. And you have to be well up on the Beau’s life story. Some of them write books about him. Between ourselves, I get bored to the back teeth with it all. Like tonight, waiting until after midnight for the phone call. Would I meet him at the roadside at the end of Crispin’s driveway? Just when I’m ready for sleep. Have you got one, Georgie?”
“One what?”
“A man.”
“Em, no. I live alone.”
“Good for you. What do you do—devote yourself to work?”
The topic she was desperate to avoid. “Not entirely. Tonight I was with my sister in South Wraxall.”
“Family matters to sort out?”
“Sort of.”
“And you both had a few. I don’t blame you.”
Georgina didn’t deny it. As long as Sally didn’t learn that her tipsy passenger was the assistant chief constable, the evening wouldn’t end in total humiliation. Not far to go now. They were through Walcot and level with the long sweep of the Paragon. “If you’d like to put me down at the Hay Hill turn I can walk the last bit.”
“Nonsense. I’ll take you all the way. Bennett Street. You must be a high-flyer to be living there.”
Georgina fired a fast question. “Where do you and Ed live?”
“Out Charlcombe way, a modern house we had built, a frightful let-down when we entertain because everyone expects the Beau to be housed in Georgian splendour.”
“I expect it’s more comfortable than an old building.”
“It has a few redeeming features. You must come and visit and we’ll get to know each other better. Do you have a business card?”
“Not with me,” Georgina lied.
“Look in the side pocket. We always have a few of ours in the car.”
“Thanks.”
“Found one? Give me a call next week. I’d like you to meet Ed when his eyes are open. Hey-ho. This looks like Bennett Street. Which end, Georgie?”
“This end will do.”
The Range Rover came to a halt. “He’s not even capable of saying goodnight,” Sally said. “He could be dead for all I know.”
8
The postmortem examination of the Twerton skeleton, as it was known, was to be conducted in the university anthropology department. Peter Diamond wasn’t expecting anything that would turn his stomach, but he still took the precaution of starting the day with a lighter breakfast than usual. He told himself he was apprehensive, and that was a reasonable human reaction. It was nowhere near cowardice. Driving up Widcombe Hill to the main campus, he raised morale by whistling the old song “Dem Bones.”
He knew where to park and where to find the department. Human remains might intimidate him, but academia didn’t. University lecturers and students are as likely as anyone else to feature as suspects in serious crime and he’d interviewed several over the years. When he’d left grammar school at sixteen to join the Met, his form master—a sarcastic old tosser—had told the class, “Today, Diamond is leaving us. Most of you will soon be entering the sixth form and preparing for Oxford, Cambridge or some other place of higher learning. Diamond is enrolling in the university of law and order, where his familiarity with detention and punishment will no doubt stand him in good stead. As you bid him farewell, be warned. It may not be the last time you see him. If any of you in your ivory towers fail to live up to the high moral standards this school has endeavoured to teach you, it’s quite possible you’ll wake up early one morning to the sound of your front door being kicked in by your old chum Diamond.”
The cheap laughs no longer hurt, but the idea of the university of law and order had stuck in Diamond’s memory. Policing as higher education was not so far-fetched. The campus left a lot to be desired and the tutorials could get rough and bloody and the only qualification on offer was the third degree, but they were learning experiences and he reckoned he’d graduated with honours.
So he strode the cloisters of Bath University—walkways, to be realistic—with no sense of inferiority. He found the right room with ten minutes to spare. Rather to his surprise it was a lecture theatre with tiered seating and about a dozen students already in there using their phones, doing their hair and chatting about anything except anthropology. A huge plasma screen was mounted high on the wall to the left. A still image of the skeleton was displayed slumped in the chair in situ in the Twerton roof space.
He hadn’t expected the autopsy to take the form of a lecture. He’d pictured three or four people at most gathered around a table to observe Dr. Waghorn holding forth as he picked at the bones. But there was no question this was the right room. The skeleton had been removed from the chair, stripped of clothes and was in pieces arranged tidily but ignominiously on a table at the front. None of the students seemed to be taking any interest.
The Beau isn’t happy about this, Diamond thought, clinging to his belief that the bones were those of Richard Nash. John Leaman’s discovery that the burial had taken place in the Abbey had shaken him, but not enough to change his opinion. He would not be budged from his suspicion that some trickery had taken place enabling the body to end up in the loft in Twerton.
So he was troubled to see the remains already stripped and laid out as if for an anatomy lecture. Usually an autopsy starts with the corpse in the clothes it was found in. The pathologist removes them in the presence of the witnesses.
He stepped closer and took stock in his own inexpert way. Bones are said to reveal all sorts of clues about the life of an individual, but there was little to go on except some arthritic distortions of the joints that you would expect to see in an elderly person. The skull looked to Diamond like any other except for the absence of teeth. No vestiges of hair, which was a shame because if there had been any question of poisoning by arsenic, as Keith Halliwell had suggested, it would have been detectable in hair like layers of sedimentary rock. However, as arsenic had often been taken medicinally in the eighteenth century, notably by people infected by syphilis, the presence of the poison may not have been a sure sign of murder. A man as sexually experienced as Nash would have been at risk of venereal disease.
Little goes undiscovered on the autopsy table, but would a dissolute life be evident from these old bones?
More students arrived, so Diamond made sure he had a seat in the front row, and presently a young woman in a white lab coat came in pushing a steel clothes rack on wheels that looked as if it had been borrowed from some dr
ess shop. The remnants of the clothes, presumably. Under the plastic cover the shapes of several hangers could be made out. Then a photographer came in and arranged two cameras on stands. A third assistant had a video camera and close-ups of the skeleton soon started appearing on the large screen. Maybe after all the Beau would get the attention he deserved.
Claude Waghorn made his entrance wearing surgeon’s scrubs, cap and mask as if he was about to conduct a full postmortem on a fresh corpse. All he lacked was the rubber boots. Much to Diamond’s disgust, he was wearing sandals.
The room had filled and the students still hadn’t all got seated. Although Waghorn must have noted Diamond’s presence, there was no meeting of eyes. The anthropologist stood in front of the bones, gazed up to the top tier and addressed his audience in the mincing voice familiar from the demolition site. “Today you are privileged to be present at a medico-legal investigation of human remains and I must ask you to treat the occasion with respect. Kindly find a place and have the good manners to remain seated until the autopsy is complete.”
He waited with folded arms.
When everyone was settled, he said, “I must also insist on total silence.”
Only then did he take a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and make a performance of putting them on, magnified on the screen like a TV commercial. At last he said with a lack of volume that almost dared anyone to breathe, “The skeleton was discovered just under a week ago during the demolition of an eighteenth-century house in Twerton.”
Shots of the building site now appeared on screen in a short PowerPoint presentation. If that picture appeared, Diamond would feel like pulling his jacket over his head. But he need not have worried. This was all about Waghorn.
The star of the show was saying, “I was called to the scene at an early stage and took command. Fortunately the demolition had been halted before irreparable damage was done to our subject. You will know that when decomposition has taken place the bones become disarticulated because the tendons and ligaments that bind them together are lost. Unless the subject is horizontal at death, you end up with a heap of two hundred and six bones. Unusually, this skeleton was more or less intact in a seated position, supported by a combination of its clothes and a wooden armchair. As you saw on screen it was clothed in the vestiges of an eighteenth-century male costume typical of the upper class including jacket, waistcoat, shirt, breeches, stockings, buckled shoes and a long black wig. Under my close supervision the seated figure and the chair were eventually lifted from the loft space and transported to a laboratory here.
Beau Death Page 9