No one laughed. The announcement had shocked everyone.
‘But I’m not kidding about jacking it in.’
Shock was turning to annoyance. It wasn’t done for the Beau to quit.
‘I know the last one died on the job, but there’s nothing in the rules to say I have to go on till I drop dead.’
‘But there’s a precedent.’ Someone spoke up in elegant vowel sounds obviously honed by generations of good breeding.
‘A what?’
‘A noteworthy precedent.’
‘I’m your noteworthy president in case you’ve forgotten.’
A few polite laughs were heard. It was impossible to tell whether the pun had been intentional. Probably not, Diamond thought.
The well-bred man insisted on saying his piece. ‘The Beau, the original Beau, our revered Richard Nash, was still Master of Ceremonies when he departed this life. He collapsed over a card game in the Assembly Rooms. Four days later he was gone.’
‘So what’s your point, Crispin?’
‘Only, my dear Sir Edward, that nobody could possibly object if you chose to emulate the Beau and remain in office.’
‘My wife would. She wants her old man back.’
This did earn some laughter.
Somebody else spoke from the back of the room. ‘Isn’t there some question that Beau Nash was murdered? It was in all the papers the week before last.’
‘Rubbish,’ someone else shouted. ‘What do they know?’
‘A skeleton wearing the Beau’s clothes was found in a loft somewhere.’
‘Twerton,’ another voice said and caused more amusement.
‘He’d been stabbed.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Regardless of how he met his death, my point stands,’ the well-bred man said. ‘He remained the Beau until the end of his life.’
Ed was quick to say, ‘He would, wouldn’t he? Nobody told me it was forever. I’ve got a life of my own and a business to run. I’ve done my bit and I want out, so I’m telling you now you’d better find someone to take over. Do I have a volunteer?’
Silence dropped like a capture net on the entire company.
Ed waited and asked, ‘Anyone up for it?’
Diamond was amused to see so many of the high-ups of Bath staring at the floor and plainly wishing they weren’t high up at all and could fall straight through it.
The deadlock was ended only by one bold soul asking, ‘Does anyone know the latest on the skeleton?’
Ed said, ‘Hang on a bit. Are you lot deaf? You need a new Beau.’
Then one of the clergy pointed out that it was customary in clubs and societies to invite nominations and have them proposed and seconded and then proceed to an election.
‘It never happened when I got the job,’ Ed said. ‘Professor Plum went belly up and I was asked to take over next day, simple as that.’
‘Professor Plum?’ someone queried.
Sally Paris spoke up. ‘He means Orville Duff, don’t you, Ed?’
Ed wasn’t there to talk about Duff. ‘How about you, vicar? You know how things are done. Do you want to be Beau?’
If the cleric had been asked to run naked up Milsom Street on a Saturday afternoon he couldn’t have looked more horrified. ‘My ecclesiastical duties have to come first.’
‘Don’t we have a constitution?’ the well-bred man called Crispin asked. ‘We have our rules about dress and so forth. In fact, Beau Nash was famous for his rules.’
‘It’s never arisen before,’ an older man said. ‘I suppose we’re more feudal than democratic. We’ve always appointed a successor by invitation up to now.’
‘Because mugs like me stepped up to the plate,’ Ed said.
To which Lady Sally added, ‘Besides writing a large cheque to fund the building work when we took over this place.’
‘I don’t want to give the wrong impression,’ Crispin said. ‘We’re all immensely grateful for Sir Edward’s generosity. Indeed the sheer scale of his largesse may account for our reluctance to volunteer.’
Ed had misunderstood again, ‘My size has bog all to do with it.’ He looked round the room at all the uneasy faces. ‘Fair play, you weren’t expecting me to give up. I sprang this on you. I’ll do the honours one last time and you can decide among yourselves who stands on this soapbox next meeting, because it ain’t going to be Ed Paris.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Next business, welcoming guests. Any takers?’
Some hands were raised and people were introduced. The tension in the room had eased emphatically now that the prickly matter of the presidency was deferred.
Sally said something to her husband and he said, ‘Strewth. Almost forgot my own guest, Detective Dallymore from the Old Bill.’
Sally was quick to correct him.
With some bluster, Ed resumed. ‘All right, all right. Now you see why you need a new Beau. I’m going soft in the head. My good lady tells me I should have said Detective Superintendent Diamond. Where are you, mate?’
Forced against all his instincts to break cover, Diamond raised his hand and said, ‘Peter will do.’
‘Peter it is. Welcome to the Beau Nash Society, Pete. And if some of you are asking yourselves how I come to be cosying up to the law all of a sudden, it’s because he’s the cop investigating the skeleton you was talking about just now. Ain’t that the truth, Pete?’
The truth was that Diamond was in sudden danger of filling his breeches. He said, ‘Well, yes,’ and hoped the spotlight would shift.
It didn’t. Some busybody said, ‘It sounds as if the Beau’s guest is the ideal person to clear up the uncertainty about what actually happened at Twerton.’
Oh no he wasn’t.
Paloma’s ‘Keep your head down’ was a sick joke now.
To gain thinking time Diamond drained the champagne glass.
But Ed made a bad situation worse. ‘I’ll hand you the mike, Pete. We’d all like to hear from you.’
‘There’s nothing I can say,’ Diamond called across the room. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation.’
‘Can’t hear you,’ the busybody called out.
Ed had already stepped down from the stool and crossed the floor to where Diamond was. ‘Say something or they’ll get stroppy.’
Even the notoriously stubborn Peter Diamond wasn’t proof against an audience of Bath’s top people demanding a statement. He held the microphone to his mouth, ‘All I can tell you at this time is that the remains found in Twerton aren’t those of Beau Nash. He’s buried in the Abbey.’
‘The Abbey?’ the man called Crispin said in disbelief. ‘I think you’ll find the weight of opinion is against you. It’s all over the internet that he ended up in a pauper’s grave and no one seems to know exactly where.’
Somebody who’d drunk too much shouted, ‘Twerton.’
‘You don’t want to believe everything you read on the internet,’ Diamond said. ‘Go back to the original reports of the funeral as we did. They all say he was buried in the Abbey.’
‘Where does the story that he was a pauper come from, then?’
‘I’ve no idea and I don’t have the time or inclination to find out.’
‘It’s not just the internet. I’ve seen it in books.’
‘I’m sorry, but the books are wrong. This is one of a number of myths about Nash that don’t stand up to examination.’
Ed was still at Diamond’s side. He was rubbing his hands with anticipation. ‘What else is there? Now you’ve started, you’d better tell us.’
Everything Diamond said was being amplified, seeming to lend authority to his statements. Ed was right. He couldn’t really back down. So against all his best intentions he found himself giving the Beau Nash Society the truth about another bit of moonshine: the story that the Beau’s former mistress Juliana Papjoy resurfaced when the Beau was old and infirm and came back to Bath to nurse him. ‘For the romantics among you, I’m sorry to spoil a happy ending,’ he said, ‘but in spite of what most of the biographies say, there’s no evidence whatever that she came back. We looked at original sources. For the last twenty years of his life he was under the thumb of a woman called Mrs. Hill, who by all accounts gave him a hard time. As for Juliana, she turned eccentric and lived out the rest of her life in the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree.’