‘So we’ve been checking the history.’
She couldn’t contain her amusement. ‘What’s the thinking behind this? The wig?’
‘That’s a factor, yes. I gather Mr. Nash saw himself as a fashion icon who wanted to be seen in his black wig.’
‘He did. It’s no secret. There are plenty of pictures of him. He liked to stand out from the crowd, obviously. He’s often pictured in a white tricorne, which I’m sure he chose for dramatic contrast. But none of this means he ended up in a loft space in Twerton.’
‘Agreed. We made some searches. Well, Ingeborg did, and we found he didn’t die there.’
‘He died in the house next to the theatre, now an Italian restaurant. Didn’t you lot know that?’
‘We do now.’
‘Your man is obviously someone else.’
‘Was he buried in the Abbey?’
She shrugged. ‘Nobody seems to know. There’s a large marble tablet in the south aisle, but it’s only a memorial, not a gravestone, and it wasn’t put up until about thirty years after his death.’
Paloma’s grasp of Bath lore always impressed him. She’d know about Nash as the supreme arbiter of fashion in his lifetime.
‘So if he wasn’t buried in the Abbey, where did they put him?’
‘It’s rather sad.’
He turned to look into Paloma’s face and see if she was kidding. She was good at hiding a smile, but her eyes always gave her away. Not this time. ‘You mean that?’
‘There’s a strong belief that he was buried in a pauper’s grave.’
‘Get away.’
But she was as serious as if she had just come back from the interment.
‘After a funeral on the scale he was given?’ he said. ‘A procession to the Abbey? The town band? Muffled bells? The full monty? He was the king. He made the city what it is. Would the people of Bath allow such a star to end up in an unmarked grave?’
‘Well, I can’t see them removing the corpse from the coffin and parking it in a chair in the loft of some small terraced house in Twerton, if that’s what you’re suggesting. That’s even harder to believe.’
Diamond didn’t comment. He was weighing all kinds of bizarre possibilities. ‘Was he officially a pauper?’
‘I suppose he was. He must have run up debts. Easy to check. I’ve got books I can lend you.’
‘Thanks. I’ll look at them. It’s all balls, I reckon, but I must make the effort.’
‘You need to talk to an expert, if only to discover for sure what happened to the body,’ Paloma said. ‘Let me think about that. Meanwhile, be an angel and pour me another glass of wine while I track down those books.’
The recovery of the remains was fixed for first light when the tricky operation could be done without attracting much attention. A strong police presence controlled who entered the site. If the press came, as they probably would, they’d need to get their pictures from behind the fence. Diamond was there with Keith Halliwell, both in regulation hard hats, and so was Dr. Claude Waghorn, the forensic anthropologist brought in from the university to carry out the postmortem, a small man with a big personality who had already clashed with the manager of the recovery team. He’d insisted on directing the operation himself from the cherry picker at top-floor level and being in radio contact with the crane operator.
‘A nit-picker in a cherry picker,’ Diamond commented to Halliwell.
‘No bad thing, guv. We need an expert eye on the job.’
Halliwell was right. Only the clothes and the chair were keeping the skeleton together. Waghorn had decided the best strategy was to lift it seated in the chair, a precision assignment. A telescopic truck-mounted crane had been brought in by the contractors and the chair and its fragile occupant would be hoisted from the loft using a sling. But before that, the canopy had to be removed and all the bits of rubble round the base of the chair picked up or there was a serious risk of trapping the feet and legs and parting them from the rest of the skeleton. All this had to be done mechanically.
The task was painstaking and Dr. Waghorn made it more so by personally selecting each chunk of debris to be lifted. From his basket high above everyone else he couldn’t have been more animated if he were conducting the last night of the Proms. He was saying plenty, too, but he had a barely audible voice and Diamond and Halliwell were spared the commentary. The crane driver bore the brunt.
Diamond looked at his watch. ‘Best part of two hours. I thought we’d be out of here by now. By the time we finally move him, half of Bath will be watching.’
‘Ah, but only through the observation windows. They won’t get on the site.’
‘Who are those two, then — the guys in suits on the other side? They’re not police or workmen.’
One of the two he was looking at was squat, overweight and bald. The head definitely wasn’t shaved. His pinstripe suit looked expensive and his whole demeanour oozed self-importance. In fact he wasn’t doing anything other than watching Waghorn’s performance and making occasional comments. His brown-suited companion didn’t give out the same aura at all and seemed to be there in a supportive role, nodding agreement and saying little himself.
‘Check ’em out, Keith.’
Halliwell went over and approached the sidekick.
When asked, the man in the brown suit said, ‘What’s it to you?’ Seeing the police ID, he quickly added, ‘I’m with my boss.’
‘And who’s he?’
‘Don’t you know him? Sir Edward Paris, Edpari Properties.’
Halliwell had heard of the company, even if he didn’t know the man. Edpari was emblazoned in large letters over developments across the city. ‘Does he own this?’
A shrug. ‘If he wants to, he will before long.’
‘Do you work for him?’
‘Chauffeur mainly.’
‘Name?’
‘Spearman. Jim Spearman.’
‘The car’s nearby, is it?’
‘The Range Rover with the others. The clean one. The Bentley is being serviced.’
‘And how did you get in?’
‘Through the gate like you. Nothing gets in Sir Ed’s way.’
Halliwell returned to Diamond and reported back.
‘I’ve seen the name around. How did he say the last part?’
‘Like the French say Paris.’
‘Makes sense, I suppose, if that’s his name: Ed Paris. Is he French?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘Funny. I would have said it like Campari. That’s Italian.’
‘I know,’ Halliwell said, and added after a pause, ‘I do know that much.’
‘Shouldn’t be long now,’ Diamond said, returning his attention to the work going on in the loft.
How wrong he was. Fitting the huge sling was like herding cats. Each time the straps were swung towards the chair, Dr. Waghorn aborted the attempt. He had his own idea how the job should be done and he wanted perfection. After numerous attempts, he came down from the cherry picker for a consultation with the manager who was nominally in charge.
The two detectives were close enough to hear everything.
‘It’s not working,’ Waghorn said in his small, clipped voice.
‘You’re telling me, mate. It’s never going to work with you,’ he was told.
‘It’s a disarticulated skeleton. I don’t want to end up with bones flying everywhere.’
‘That floor is going to collapse sometime soon and the whole bloody lot will disarticulate and fall through the hole. Don’t hold me responsible if you won’t let us do our job. We’re not without experience. I’ve moved a Bechstein grand from the top of a tower block and it didn’t take a single scratch.’
‘This is not a piano.’
‘It’s child’s play compared to that.’
‘Speaking of experience, I have thirty-seven years of recovering bones from difficult locations,’ Dr. Waghorn said through gritted teeth.