‘Bloody thing.’
Two of the crime scene people helped him up. Not Ingeborg. She was looking away with her hand over her mouth.
The SOCOs asked if he was all right.
‘All right except for my suit ruined. I only got it back from the cleaner’s the day before yesterday.’ He raised his voice for Ingeborg’s benefit. ‘I saw you smirking, Sergeant Smith. It’s your car I’m going to be sitting in.’
On the drive back, Ingeborg offered to make a detour to Diamond’s house in Weston so that he could change. A helpful suggestion, a peace offering he huffily accepted.
While he was upstairs, she gave Raffles an unexpected serving of beef in jelly.
‘You weren’t feeding that cat, I hope,’ he said when he came down in his second-best suit and saw Raffles licking his lips beside an empty dish. ‘He gets fed morning and night. Those are his times.’
They decided to get some lunch themselves since they were so convenient for Diamond’s local, the Old Crown. Over ham, egg and chips and with a pint of strong bitter in front of him, he was more forgiving, even confessing to feeling vulnerable.
‘How, exactly?’ Ingeborg asked.
He took a long sip of beer. ‘This is in confidence, right? Have you ever thought of me as superstitious?’
She shook her head.
‘Feet firmly on the ground, right?’
He could see her struggling to avoid more laughter. ‘All right. Unfortunate choice of words. You know what I mean.’
She managed a nod, not a solemn nod, but a definite attempt to be solemn.
He continued. ‘Ever since that ridiculous photo of me and the skeleton got in the papers, I’ve felt as if I’m being picked on.’
‘Who by?’
‘The fates, I suppose.’ He drank some beer. ‘Well, Beau Nash, if you want to know. You saw what happened this morning. I brushed against the thing and went arse over tip. It had to be bloody Beau Nash, didn’t it? If it had been Jane Austen messing me up I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Pure accident.’
‘That’s all it was, guv.’
‘I don’t know. It’s a series of embarrassing events, like revenge or something. I refused to believe he’s buried in the Abbey when he plainly was. Even after Leaman found the newspaper accounts I was thinking Mrs. Hill had fooled everyone and secretly moved the corpse to Twerton. I went to that autopsy in the belief they were Nash’s bones and got my comeuppance with a pair of pants.’
‘You shouldn’t take it personally.’
‘So who was it who had to hold a press conference and show a picture of the Y-fronts to the media? Muggins. How can I avoid taking it personally? Originally Georgina wanted me to go in front of them and hold up the pants myself. Imagine the captions they’d have thought up for that picture.’
Ingeborg was forced to cover her mouth again.
‘Next, Georgina gets friendly with the president of the Beau Nash Society and volunteers me for their meeting. Great — except it involves dressing up in white tights and breeches, frock coat and wig.’
She started shaking uncontrollably. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I haven’t told anyone. I walked into it. She was threatening to hand the case over to Charlie Crocker from Bristol. I wasn’t having that.’
The mention of Crocker came as a shock to Ingeborg. The Bristol police hadn’t got a good word to say for the man. Suddenly Diamond’s misfortunes weren’t so funny. ‘Why? What’s her reason?’
‘We’re overstretched.’
‘We can manage.’
‘I told her — and to show commitment talked myself into wearing the fancy dress. Is it any wonder Beau Nash is getting to me?’
‘But did she say any more about Charlie Crocker taking over?’
‘The threat was withdrawn.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘No, you can thank me.’
‘I do. I do. It’s an opportunity, guv. Look at it that way.’
‘Now you’re talking like Georgina.’
She continued to talk like Georgina. ‘We’ve spent a lot of man-hours trying to identify the skeleton. This is a real chance to crack it — a bunch of people who dress up regularly in eighteenth-century costume. One of them may have the answer. This is about attitude. If you go there feeling like a victim you’ll get nothing out of it. Tell yourself you look terrific in the outfit and you will.’
He frowned. On second thoughts, she was talking more like Paloma than Georgina and she was making sense.
She hadn’t finished. ‘You probably know more about Beau Nash by now than most of their members. After all, we spent days digging out the true facts of his life, exposing the myth about Juliana Papjoy. You’re a Beau Nash expert.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘You’d better start saying it and believing. By showing confidence you can make your visit a triumph. If you don’t, you’ll lay yourself open to more embarrassments. When is this meeting?’
He tried to sound enthusiastic. ‘Wednesday night.’
‘Have you got the costume?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Better get one fast, guv. You want it to fit.’
‘I was thinking of asking Paloma to hire one for me. She’s got contacts in the historical costume world.’
‘Call her now. Please, guv. For all our sakes.’
The autopsy on Perry Morgan was conducted the same afternoon in the mortuary at the Royal United Hospital after Miss Divine had viewed the body and confirmed the identity of her former tenant. Old motormouth, as Diamond called Jim Middleton, provided a running commentary throughout interspersed with fly-fishing anecdotes whenever he stepped back to allow his assistant to clean up. The sole police witness and captive audience was Keith Halliwell. When it was over, he called Diamond from the hospital.
‘All done, guv.’
‘What did you learn?’
‘A lot. You wouldn’t believe how many knots they have in fishing. I made the mistake of mentioning the perfection loop to show I’d paid attention last time and he was away. There’s the Albright, the grinner, also known as the uni, the clinch, the nail, the double surgeon—’
‘What’s that for?’
‘It connects the leader to the tippet.’
He didn’t want to know any more. There were more urgent things. ‘Tell me about the autopsy.’
‘The killer wasn’t too accurate. Only two shots entered the body, one in the chest and the other in the head.’
‘He was firing in difficult conditions.’
‘That’s true, I guess. Anyway, the one through the cranium is what killed Perry, in case you hadn’t worked it out.’
‘Sounds like the coup de grâce after the first one knocked him down.’
‘Wasn’t mentioned.’
‘Only me speculating. I suppose we have to wait for test results to find out if he was high on cocaine that night?’
‘I told Jim our suspicions and he sent blood, urine and vitreous fluid for analysis as well as hair samples. The lab will probably confirm he was a user, but the coke metabolises quickly, so I don’t know what we’re likely to find out about his state that evening. Is the drug use important when we know a bullet killed him?’
‘It’s early days, Keith. I want all the information we can get.’
‘He did remark on Perry’s skinny physique. Cocaine suppresses the appetite, and the latest research suggests it actually prevents fat from being stored by the body. Won’t be long before it’s marketed as a slimming aid in this crazy world. He also took swabs from each nostril and looked inside the nose for signs of cartilage erosion from the snorting, but that was inconclusive.’
‘Inconclusive sums it up.’
‘If there was more, I’d tell you.’
‘I know. I’m not ungrateful.’
‘I was wondering, guv.’