‘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.’