Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

‘Crutches wouldn’t look good.’

‘You know what I mean. The show goes on.’

‘Then we have to get you mobile. Ice and heat.’

He winced at the prospect.

Paloma said, ‘If that doesn’t grab you, sunshine, I have some wicked- smelling liniment.’

‘Ice and heat.’

‘Take off your things, then, and I’ll get organised.’

She spread cushions from her sofa on the floor and he removed his shirt and trousers and lay face down in his blue striped jockey shorts. He was alone for about ten minutes and the ache eased enough for him to think how ridiculous he must look. His relationship with Paloma hadn’t reached the stage when anything goes.

She returned and the ice was applied. His intake of breath was like a rocket launch.

Paloma said, ‘This is what they do for injured footballers. It must be effective because they’re soon on their feet again.’

‘They use some kind of spray.’

‘I know, and these are packs of frozen peas, but you have to settle for what you can get. Same principle. If you were a millionaire footballer you’d have a medic and the spray, but you’re not, so you’ve got me and Captain Birdseye. Is it helping?’ ‘It’s going numb.’

‘Good.’

‘I don’t like to think what the hot part will be.’

‘Wet flannels heated in the microwave. Take it from me, you wouldn’t get better treatment if you flew first class to America.’

‘If I was flying first class to America, I wouldn’t be half naked on the floor.’

‘You’d get a massage if you wanted. Really. It’s part of the service.’

‘I’ll take your word for that.’

Paloma frequently made business trips to Los Angeles to advise on period costume designs for films. She was known to all the production companies out there. It was a mystery to Diamond why a high-earning professional was interested in an overweight Bath policeman who travelled in the tourist section if he ever had a holiday abroad.

She went to collect the flannels.

He wriggled a little on the cushions. The ice had definitely helped and he told Paloma when she came back. Then the first hot flannel was applied and he gave a fair imitation of a peacock screeching.

She said, ‘I hope there was a payoff for this. Did you get something out of the session on the treadmill as well as a stiff back?’

‘Less than I hoped for. I’m looking for witnesses. The Lansdown Society members spend a lot of time there keeping an eye on things, but they seem to miss all the violence.’

‘What’s the object of this society?’

‘To keep the place peaceful and unspoilt.’

‘They don’t seem much good at it if a man was attacked twice and murdered.’

‘I’m beginning to think it’s more about giving the members a sense of importance than making a difference. Let’s face it, Lansdown has never been all that peaceful. I wouldn’t mind betting the Iron Age saw plenty of brutality.’

‘Human sacrifice, according to something I saw on TV.’

‘There you go. Then we know about the Civil War battle, upwards of ten thousand men fighting it out with muskets and artillery. They reckon several hundred were killed, mainly on the royalist side. And in World War Two, the fighter planes were taking off from Charmy Down airfield. Bath had its share of the bombing.’ He was breathing more easily. ‘That feels better after the first shock.’

‘Good. I’d better apply the ice again.’

‘Are you sure you’re not enjoying yourself?’

‘This is the treatment, Peter. By alternating the heat and cold, we stimulate the blood and accelerate the healing. I can tell you something else about violence on Lansdown.’

‘You lie in wait up there and attack middle-aged men with frozen peas and hot flannels?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t tempt me. If you want to know, for centuries there was a fair up there every August. I happen to know about this because of a scene I dressed for a movie. I researched country fairs and found out that Lansdown was one of the biggest. It must have been a marvellous annual treat for the local people.’

‘Better than a car boot sale, I reckon.’

‘I suppose they were the historical equivalent. Trading was done, mainly of cattle, sheep and horses, but the showmen came too, with what we think of as fairground rides, and also fire-eaters, dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, fortune-tellers, bare-knuckle fighters. Imagine what it was like for country people used to the dull routine of caring for crops and livestock.’

‘I liked fairs as a kid,’ Diamond said. ‘They brightened up our lives.’

‘But as children we were treated to any number of amusements like carnivals and fetes, holidays, cinema, television and pop music. In the times I’m talking about this was the one event of the year.’

‘And it came to Lansdown?’

‘I’ve got a book upstairs by Lord George Sanger called Seventy Years a Showman. He wasn’t really a lord. He took it on as a showbiz title. He tells of travelling in the eighteen-thirties with his father James, who owned a peepshow.’

‘ What the Butler Saw ?’

‘Easy, you’re in no state to get excited. Not in your condition. No, the original peepshow wasn’t a slot machine. It was a kind of cabinet lit by candles with pictures that were moved up and down on strings while the owner gave a commentary. One set was the battle of Trafalgar because James Sanger had been a sailor on the Victory. I have some peepshow illustrations upstairs and they’re four feet wide and nearly three feet high, really lurid and painted by an Irishman called Kelley who lived in Leather Lane, Holborn. Why do I remember that?’

‘Because you’re good at your job, that’s why.’

‘This should interest you as a policeman. Sanger’s peepshow also featured famous murders such as – what was it? – the red barn murder.’

‘William Corder.’

‘You’ve heard of it?’ Paloma’s turn to be impressed.

‘Corder was a callous bastard,’ he said. ‘A rich farmer. The victim was his mistress, a young woman called Maria Marten. He wanted to get rid of Maria, so he told her a secret wedding was all set up in Ipswich and they’d meet in the red barn and he’d arrange transport. She wasn’t seen again, but her mother dreamed the girl been murdered and buried in the barn and insisted it was dug up. After a year they found Maria’s body. The case passed into folklore. I can well understand it being peepshow material. The story was huge at the time. Ten thousand turned up to watch Corder being hanged. The red barn mystery was turned into melodrama, verse, hellfire sermons, waxworks, even one of those Staffordshire pottery figures.’ He didn’t add that he had his own small library of famous crimes.

‘Anyway,’ Paloma said, ‘the fair came to Lansdown as usual in 1839, and there was nervousness about coming here according to Sanger because the Bath slums housed the most horrendous bunch of criminals in England.’

This was news to Diamond. ‘ Bath? The genteel city?’

‘I know it’s hard to credit, but that’s the way it was at the time, apparently, and they were led by a woman known as Carroty Kate.’

‘Go on. I’m enjoying this.’

‘She lived in Bull Paunch Alley, which was a no go area for the police.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘A backstreet long since demolished and built over. She was huge, this Carroty Kate, built like a navvy, Sanger says, and late in the evening she decided to lead her gang of roughs up Lansdown Hill to the fair. She was half-stripped, as he described it, her red hair hanging loose. They started at the drinking booths, beat up some of the owners and drank themselves into a frenzy, whereupon Kate ordered them to wreck the fair, which they did – or much of it – overturning wagons, smashing up the caravans and the show platforms. They made bonfires with the wood.’