‘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.