‘Everyone’s gone except me,’ he told her. ‘Peter Diamond, in the water behind you. Turn right round and check if you want.’
Too much to ask. She was facing death and she wouldn’t budge.
So be it, he told himself. This will be a monologue.
How to start? Say something reassuring. ‘Your husband Ed pleaded with me that he should stay here, but I persuaded him to go up to the house with the others. He doesn’t know what we discussed in the dressmaking room. Nobody knows, except you, me and Paloma, and I doubt if Paloma took much of it in.’
Her clenched hands tightened. She was listening, for sure.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought it through, what will happen next, so I want to explain some things you may not appreciate. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for you, Sally, and I’m certain any court of law will be sympathetic, too.’
The balance between empathy and harsh reality was so difficult to strike. In a sense, her footing was far more secure than his.
‘Only you know precisely what happened in the Twerton house in 1997, how Sidney Harrod met his death. I’m assuming he got physical, coming on to you sexually, and you didn’t intend to kill him. You acted in self-defence. If so, it wasn’t murder. There was no premeditation. You picked up the scissors to defend yourself. At worst, it would count as manslaughter if the force you used was not reasonable, but any lawyer worth his salt would convince a judge and jury that you were under attack and the worst thing you did was to conceal a death and fail to report it and I’m guessing Harry Morgan was the instigator there. You wouldn’t walk free without some sort of technical penalty, but judges have a lot of discretion and it’s well possible you’d receive a deferred sentence.’
He was trying to thought-read from watching her back. There was visible flexing in her shoulders while he was speaking. At least he was getting a hearing.
‘Of course the other death, the shooting of Perry, is more serious in the eyes of the law because there was an element of planning. You took the gun with you to the fireworks show intending to shoot him, to kill him, in fact, and that’s murder. A mandatory life sentence. But do you have any idea what that amounts to?’
He paused. He wasn’t expecting her to reply. His best hope was to engage her in what he was saying. He waited and she turned her head a fraction as if she wanted to hear more and he took that as involvement.
He started over. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve known cases where a life sentence meant less than six years in prison. These days a judge looks at all the circumstances and decides on the tariff, the term you actually serve. It can be as low as five years and once you’ve served that you can be considered for release on parole.’
This was so difficult without seeing the reactions playing over her face.
‘It’s all about mitigating factors. Perry was trying to blackmail you. He needed the money to fund his drugs and it was obvious that if you paid him, the demands would go on indefinitely. An addict isn’t reliable. You couldn’t have any confidence he would keep your secret even if you paid him. Those are the mitigating factors your legal team would make clear to the judge. I can’t predict what your minimum tariff would be, but it doesn’t mean spending the rest of your life in prison, that’s certain.’
There wasn’t any more he could usefully tell her. She’d need to plead guilty and that would be factored in by the judge, but he didn’t want to inundate her with detail. He’d made the point about life sentences and, frustratingly, all he’d achieved were minimal signs of interest. She remained one short step from killing herself.
There was a last card he could play.
‘Your husband’s going through hell, Sally.’
Unexpectedly, she turned her head again. And remarkably she had something to say.
‘That’s a prize porky if ever I heard one.’
The first words she’d spoken in ten minutes were a rebuke, defiant and typical of the spirited woman he knew her to be.
She hadn’t finished either. ‘Ed doesn’t have the faintest. We’ve been married twelve years and I’ve told him diddley-squat about my past.’
Her remark of much earlier, about the failing marriage, could be the clue to what was going on here.
But Diamond had got a different impression. Ed’s desperation was fresher in his memory. ‘You misunderstood me. He’s not going through hell because you killed two men. The poor guy’s at the end of his tether. He can’t understand why you’re doing this. He loves you to bits — that’s obvious. He’s immensely proud of you. I’ve seen the look on his face when you’re hosting an event like today, charming everybody, making sure it’s a big success.’
She’d gone silent again.
‘Believe me, Sally, he’ll be devastated if you jump. It won’t just be your life that comes to an end. His world will collapse as well.’
‘Oh, fiddlesticks.’
She exhaled, turned right about, stepped off the wall and plopped into the water. A massive anticlimax. As a demonstration of love, it was unusual, but that was what it was, her commitment to Ed confirmed in one life-affirming drenching.
She surfaced and said, ‘Come on, squire, I’d better face the music.’
After splashing towards him she linked her arm in his and together they waded the length of the pool. It was the strangest arrest Diamond would ever make. He didn’t have the heart to speak the formal words required by law.
They made their way up the sloping lawn, she in her bare feet and wet, clinging dress, he in nothing except his striped boxer shorts. As they approached the ugly steel and glass house, the guests streamed out to meet them and formed an impromptu guard of honour and applauded. They didn’t know Sally was a double-killer. She was their hostess who had come to her senses and chosen life over death.
The exhausted policemen who had spent most of the afternoon climbing the hill joined in the clapping. Even Georgina was celebrating the moment. The CID team were savouring it as well. Someone had collected Ingeborg and she was getting a photo.
Ed was waiting at the top of the steps with towels. He gave Sally a hug that seemed to last forever and then he turned to Diamond and hugged him as well. ‘Thanks, mate. I owe you a drink.’
They moved into the reception room.
That wretched hologram was still on its stand facing them. Diamond couldn’t be certain, but he thought he got a wink from Beau Nash.
A Note on Sources
Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq (1762), written a year after Nash’s death, with the advantage of access to Nash’s own fragments of autobiography, remains a fascinating work that can be read online. The other biographies consulted by the present author were Bath under Beau Nash, by Lewis Melville (Lewis S. Benjamin) (Eveleigh Nash, 1907); Beau Nash: Monarch of Bath and Tunbridge Wells, by Willard Connely (Werner Laurie, 1955); Splendour and Scandaclass="underline" the Reign of Beau Nash, by John Walters (Jarrolds, 1968); and The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath, by John Eglin (Profile Books, 2005). Nash’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was first written by Thomas Seccombe in 1894. The latest online version is by Philip Carter in 2009.
Of the sources mentioned in passing, the contemporary account of Nash’s funeral was in the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 21 February 1761. The notice of Juliana Papjoy’s death and strange living arrangements is in the Annual Register for March, 1777. George Scott’s correspondence of 1761 concerning the formidable Mrs. Hill is discussed in Eglin’s book and is held at the British Library in the Egerton collection. The details of Dr. Walsh’s participation in the 1909 Bath Pageant can be found in The Year of the Pageant, by Andrew Swift and Kirsten Elliott (Akeman Press, 2009).