No one winked or nudged the person next to them, even if the temptation was there. The ‘someone’ was undoubtedly Paloma Kean, Diamond’s friend and occasional lover. Paloma owned a successful agency providing costume illustrations for television, film and the stage.
‘Has anyone taken photos?’ DC Paul Gilbert asked. He was the youngest on the team, eager to be involved, and sometimes forgotten.
Diamond eyed him. Photography was a sore point. But the remark seemed to have been innocent. ‘Done. A cameraman went up in the cherry picker and got good shots from several angles.’ He frowned. ‘Now that I think about it, five or six people went up in that damned contraption for a look yesterday. Why was I the unlucky one who got his picture in the papers?’
Not a question any member of the team was willing to answer. All eyes turned to the windows or the ceiling.
‘If you like,’ Gilbert said, ‘I could start a display board with the photos, like we have in an incident room.’
‘Waste of time,’ Leaman said.
Diamond agreed with him really. The days of whiteboards in incident rooms were over, if they had ever existed except on TV shows, but he didn’t like the way clever-clogs had said it. ‘For this inquiry, seeing as none of us knows much about the eighteenth century, that’s not a bad suggestion.’
‘In here?’ Gilbert asked.
‘Why not? We’ll stake our claim for this as our base. Is there anything I’ve overlooked?’
‘We’re getting a big response to your picture in the paper,’ Ingeborg said.
He bristled again. ‘Is this another dig at me?’
‘Let me rephrase it, guv. There’s a lot of interest in the skeleton. People like nothing better than a mystery. Most of what comes in will be no help, but I’m saying all suggestions ought to be examined, just in case.’
‘Have you looked at any of this stuff yourself?’
‘I did this morning. Two or three callers said the skeleton might be that of Beau Nash.’
‘Beau Nash?’ The name was familiar to anyone who had lived in Bath for any length of time, central to the history of the place. Familiar, but hardly a missing person.
Leaman rolled his eyes and said, ‘Because he’s the only eighteenth-century man they’ve heard of.’
‘It’s indisputable that he lived here.’
‘In a small terraced house in Twerton? Give me strength.’
Ingeborg shot Leaman a look that would have pierced armour plating. ‘Do you want to hear about this, or not?’
Diamond said, ‘Go on, Inge.’
‘The caller said the description of the clothes matched the things Nash usually wore. He had a black wig, which was unusual in those days. Most of them wore white ones. He dared to be different.’
‘I can’t say I know much about the man. He made Bath fashionable, didn’t he? The Beau bit turns me off.’
‘The skeleton was wearing a black wig,’ Ingeborg said in case the point had been missed.
‘It was, I grant you. See what you can bring up on your tablet about this guy, will you? And, yes, you’re right about the public response. We always take an interest in what people have to say.’
‘What exactly is the ACC expecting us to do?’ Halliwell asked.
‘What we’d do for any unexplained death,’ Diamond said. ‘Investigate and discover whatever we can for the coroner.’
‘And the media,’ Leaman murmured.
‘Screw the media. I’m not pandering to that lot.’
Brave words, but everyone knew that media interest was driving this enquiry.
Ingeborg had been busy on the internet. ‘Beau Nash was a Welshman, born in Swansea in 1674, and quite a ladies’ man, going by this. Sent down from Jesus College, Oxford, for neglecting his studies and getting engaged to one of the local girls.’
‘Was that against the rules?’ Halliwell said.
‘He was only sixteen at the time. He tried the army next, liking the idea of a red coat, and that didn’t last long either when he found there was more to soldiering than showing off, so he moved to London to study law at the Middle Temple.’
‘And show off in a wig and gown?’
‘I expect so.’ She was quick to digest the information and rehash it for the team. ‘Doesn’t seem to have spent much time with his law books. Lives beyond his means, buys expensive clothes and gets a reputation as a dandy. You’d think it was a recipe for disaster, but he’d found the thing he excelled at. And when the king — that’s William III — makes a visit to the Middle Temple, Nash is the only possible choice to stage a royal pageant. Naturally the show is a stunning success and the king offers him a knighthood, which he declines.’
‘Why?’
‘Hang on,’ she said, scrolling some more. ‘You’re getting ahead of me.’
She didn’t take long to catch up.
‘He was only twenty at the time and on his beam-ends and you needed funds — a small fortune, in fact — to live the life of a titled man. But his reputation was made and from that time he was a fashion leader and an arbiter of good taste. He seems to have been extremely popular with women and—’ she clicked her tongue as she read on — ‘a big spender of their money. At one time, someone questioned all this high living and said his money must have been acquired dishonestly, so Nash produced a wad of love letters from twenty girls who, basically, were keeping him.’
‘Unknown to each other?’
‘You bet,’ Halliwell said.
Ingeborg looked up from the tablet. ‘I don’t like saying this about my own sex, but when they’re daft they’re really daft. He must have broken a lot of hearts.’
‘I’ve never thought of him as a letch,’ Halliwell said. ‘Anyone with a name like Beau Nash sounds to me like some old queen.’
‘Please,’ Ingeborg said with a look she normally reserved for stale bread. ‘A beau was a good-looking guy who knew how to chat up girls. Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough?’
‘Can we fast forward to when he arrives in Bath?’
She took a moment more to check. ‘That’s 1705, it says here.’
‘Listen up, people,’ Diamond said. ‘We’ve come to the crunch.’ He hoped it was the crunch. He’d invited Ingeborg to brief the team, but the chance of any of this stuff being useful to the enquiry was remote.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘This is where his life really takes off. Bath was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Vegas. Entertainments of all kinds: music, dances, eating, the theatre, riding in sedan chairs, bathing and drinking the spa water, but the main attraction was the gambling. Gamesters came to the public rooms and huge sums were won and lost at dice games and cards. Nash had got a taste for it and in his first season he had an amazing run of luck at the tables, winning over a thousand pounds.’
‘How much is that in modern money?’ Halliwell asked.
‘At least a hundred and fifty grand,’ Leaman, the walking encyclopedia, informed them.
‘From then on he was made,’ Ingeborg went on. ‘Everyone wanted to know him. The master of ceremonies, a Captain Webster, invited him to be his ADC.’
‘What’s that?’ young Gilbert asked.
‘Aide-de-camp. Military term,’ Leaman said.
‘Personal assistant,’ Ingeborg said. ‘A massive honour. The MC presided over all the big occasions, so Nash got to see how things were done. And shortly after that there was another extraordinary piece of luck. Captain Webster got into an argument with a man who’d lost heavily to him in a game of cards. He was challenged to a duel that took place by torchlight in Orange Grove and was killed. That was the bad news. The good news was that Beau Nash was the only possible choice as his replacement.’
‘Convenient,’ Leaman said.
‘Too bloody convenient,’ Halliwell said. ‘If the police were any use they’d have wanted to know more about that duel.’