‘Invites them to a what?’
‘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?