Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose

by Peter Lovesey

“Did he look for another position after the printing came to a stop?”

  “There wasn’t much point. All the local firms were laying people off.”

  “So how did he spend the days?”

  “Don’t ask me. Walks in the park. Television. Have you ever been out of work?”

  He nodded. “And my wife couldn’t find a job either.”

  “Then you ought to know.”

  “Unemployment hits people in different ways. I’m trying to understand how it affected your husband.”

  “You’re not,” she said bluntly. “You’re trying to find out if I murdered him. That’s your job.”

  Diamond didn’t deny it.

  “It wasn’t deliberate.” She raised her chin defiantly. “I wouldn’t dream of killing him. Glenn and I were married eleven years. We had fights. Of course we had fights, with my temper. That’s my personal demon—my temper. I threw things. Mostly I missed. He could duck when he was sober.” Her lips twitched into a sad smile.

  “We always made up. Some of the best times we had were making up after a fight.”

  Trish Noble’s candour was touching. Diamond sympathised with her. There was little more he could achieve. “We’ll need a statement, Mrs Noble, a written one, I mean. Then you can go. Do you have someone you can stay with? Family, a friend?”

  “Can’t I go home?”

  “Our people are going to be in the house for some time. You’d be better off somewhere else.”

  She told him she had a sister in Trowbridge. Diamond offered to make the call, but Trish Noble said she’d rather break the news herself.

  To most of the staff at Manvers Street Police Station this room on the top floor was known as the eagle’s nest. John Farr-Jones, the Chief Constable, greeted Diamond, who had arrived for a meeting of the high fliers. “You’re looking fit, Peter.”

  “I used the lift.”

  “What’s it like to be back in harness?”

  The big detective gave him a pained look and said, “I gave up wearing harness when I was two years old.” He took his place in a leather armchair and nodded to a chief inspector he scarcely knew.

  The wholesale changes of personnel in the couple of years he had been away had to be symptomatic of something.

  “Mr Diamond’s problem is that we haven’t had a juicy murder since he was reinstated,” Farr-Jones told the rest of the room. Since it was thanks to Farr-Jones’s recommendation that Diamond had got his job back, he may have felt entitled to rib the man a little. But really the recommendation had been little more than a rubber stamp. In October 1994, a dire emergency had poleaxed Avon and Somerset Constabulary. The daughter of the Assistant Chief Constable had been taken hostage and her captor had insisted on dealing only with Diamond. The old rogue elephant, boisterous as ever, was now back among the herd.

  “What about this teapot killing?” Farr-Jones persisted. “Can’t you get anything out of that?”

  There were smiles all round.

  John Wigfull unwisely joked, “A teabag?” There was a history of bad feeling between Wigfull and Diamond. Many a time Diamond had seriously contemplated grabbing the two ends of Wigfull’s ridiculously overgrown moustache and seeing if he could knot them under his chin. Now that Diamond was back, Wigfull had been ousted as head of the murder squad and handed a less glamorous portfolio as head of CID operations. He would use every chance to point to Diamond’s failings.

  Tom Ray, the Chief Constable’s staff officer, hadn’t heard about the teapot killing, so Diamond, wholly against his inclination, was obliged to give a summary of the incident.

  When he had finished, it was rather like being in a staff college seminar. Someone had to suggest how the law should deal with it.

  “Manslaughter?” Ray ventured, more in politeness than anything else.

  “No chance,” growled Diamond.

  Wigfull, who knew Butterworth’s Police Law like some people know the Bible, seized the moment to shine. “Hold on. As I remember, there are four elements necessary to secure a manslaughter conviction. First, there must be an unlawful act. That’s beyond doubt.”

  “Assault with a teapot,” contributed Ray.

  “Right. A half-full teapot. Second, the act has to be dangerous, in that any sober and reasonable person would recognize it could do harm.”

  “Clocking a fellow with a teapot is dangerous,” Ray agreed, filling a role as chorus to Wigfull.

  “Third, the act must be a cause of the death.”

  “Well, he didn’t die of old age.”

  “And finally, it must be intentional. There’s no question she meant to strike him.”

  “No question,” Ray echoed him.

  Diamond said flatly, “It was a sudden death.”

  “We can’t argue with that, Peter,” said Wigfull, and got a laugh.

  “I’m reporting it to the coroner. It’s going in as an occurrence report.”

  Wigfull said, “I think you should do a process report to the CPS.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “It would be up to them whether to prosecute,” Wigfull pointed out.

  Diamond’s patience was short at the best of times and it was even shorter when he was on shaky ground. He stabbed a finger at Wigfull. “Don’t you lecture me on the CPS. I refuse to dump on this woman. She’s a nurse, for pity’s sake. She walked all the way here from Twerton and reported what she’d done. If the coroner wants to refer it, so be it. He won’t have my support.”

  Ray asked, “Have you been out to Twerton yourself?”

  “I haven’t had a chance, have I?” said Diamond. “I’m attending a meeting, in case anyone hadn’t noticed. Julie is out there.”

  “Inspector Hargreaves?” said Farr-Jones. “Is that wise? She isn’t so experienced as some of your other people.”

  “She was my choice for this, sir.” He didn’t want to get into an argument over Julie’s capability, or his right to delegate duties, but if necessary he would.

  He was first out of the meeting, muttering sulphurous things about John Wigfull, Farr-Jones and the whole boiling lot of them. He stomped downstairs to his office to collect his raincoat and trilby. He’d had more than enough of the job for that day.

  Someone got up as he entered the room, a stocky, middle-aged man with black-framed bifocals. Dr Jack Merlin, the forensic pathologist. “What’s up?” Merlin said. “You’re looking even more stroppy than usual.”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Have you got a few minutes?”

  “I was about to leave,” said Diamond.

  “Before you do, old friend, I’d like a quiet word. Why don’t you shut that door?”

  The “old friend” alerted Diamond like nothing else. His dealings with Merlin—over upwards of a dozen corpses in various states of decomposition—were based on mutual respect. Jack was the best reader of human remains in Britain. But he rarely, if ever, expressed much in the way of sentiment. Diamond grabbed the door-handle and pulled it shut.

  “This one at Collinson Road, Twerton,” said Merlin.

  “The man hit with a teapot.”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t mind me asking, I hope. Did you visit the scene yourself?”

  Diamond shrugged. “I was tied up here. I sent one of my younger inspectors out.”

  “Good,” said Merlin. “I didn’t think you had.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “You interviewed the wife, I believe?”

  “Yes.”

  “She claimed to have topped him with a teapot?”

  He nodded. “She’s a ward sister at the RUH. Bit uptight, got religion rather badly, I think, which makes it harder for her.”

  Merlin fingered the lobe of his left ear. “The thing is, matey, I thought I should have a quiet word with you at this stage. Shan’t know the cause of death until I’ve done the PM, of course, but . . .”

  “Give it to me, Jack.”

  “. . . a first inspection suggests that the victim suffered a c
ouple of deep stab wounds.”

  “Stab wounds?”

  “In the back.”

  Diamond swore.

  “Not a lot of blood about,” the pathologist added, “and he was lying face up, so I wouldn’t be too critical of that young inspector, but it does have the signs of a suspicious death.”

  Collinson Road, Twerton, backs on to Brunel’s Great Western Railway a mile or so west of the centre of Bath. Diamond drove into a narrow street of Victorian terraced housing, the brickwork blackened by all those locomotives steaming by in years past. Several of the facades had since been cleaned up and gentrified with plastic guttering, picture windows and varnished oak front doors with brass fittings, but Number 32 was resolutely unaltered, sooty and unobtrusive behind an overgrown privet hedge and a small, neglected strip of garden. The door stood open. The Scenes of Crime Officers had received Diamond’s urgent instruction to step up the scale of their work and were still inside. Most of them knew him from years back and as he went in he had to put up with some good-natured chaffing over his intentions. It was well known that he’d been moodily waiting for a murder to fall in his lap.

  The team had finished its work downstairs, so he went through the hallway with the senior man, Derek Bignal, and looked inside the kitchen. Almost everything portable had been removed for inspection by the lab. Strips of adhesive tape marked the positions of the table and chairs and the outline of the body. Diamond asked if the murder weapon had been found.

  “Who knows?” said Bignal with a shrug, practically causing paranoia in Peter Diamond so soon after his conversation with Merlin, the laid-back pathologist. “We made a collection of kitchen knives. See the magnetic strip attached to the wall over the draining-board? They were all lined up there, ready to grab. Some of them had blades that could have done the business.”

  “No other knife in the sink, or lying on the floor?”

  “With blood and prints all over it? You want it easy, Mr Diamond.”

  He tried visualising the scene, which was no simple task with the furniture missing. According to her story, Trish Noble had returned from the hospital at four in the afternoon. If she was speaking the truth she must have let herself in at the front door, stepped through the hallway and found her husband seated facing her at the small table against the wall to her left as she entered the kitchen. In a fit of anger, believing him to be drunk, rather than mortally injured, she would have taken a couple of steps towards the table, where the teapot was, snatched it up and hit him with it. He had fallen off to the right of the chair—her right—and lay on his back on the floor, where she had tried resuscitation. That, anyway, was her version. The taped outline of the body didn’t conflict with what she had stated.

  To Diamond’s left was a fridge-freezer. The doors were decorated with postcards and photos. The shiny surfaces bore traces of powder, where they had been dusted for prints. Holiday snaps of Glenn Noble, deeply tanned, in shorts and sandals, his arms around the shoulders of his pretty, bikini-clad wife. More of Trish Noble in her nurse’s uniform, giggling with friends. A sneaky shot of her taken in a bathroom, eyes wide in surprise, holding a towel against her breasts, evidently unaware that her right nipple wasn’t covered. Surprising that a woman who claimed to be religious kept such a picture on her fridge door, Diamond mused, then decided that nurses must have a different perception of embarrassment. Another that took his attention was clearly taken on some seaside promenade. Glenn and an older, stocky man were giving piggyback rides to two women in swimsuits, one of them Trish—but it wasn’t Glenn’s back she was riding.

  Diamond sighed. To study people’s private snaps systematically like this was an invasion of privacy, an odious but necessary part of the job. He wasn’t in the house to look for evidence. Others had already been through for that. He was getting a sense of how the couple had lived and what their relationship had been. Having thought what a liberty it was, he stripped every photo off the fridge door.

  “What’s a wayzgoose when it’s at home?” he asked Bignal.

  “Come again.”

  “A wayzgoose. This picture of the two couples horsing about on the seafront has a note on the back. Wayzgoose, 1993, Minehead.”

  “Is it a place?”

  “Minehead is.”

  “Could it be the name of some game, do you think?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He looked into the other rooms downstairs. One was clearly the living room, with two armchairs, a TV and video, a music centre and a low table stacked with newspapers. The Nobles read the Daily Mirror and possessed just about every recording Freddie Mercury had made. On the wall were a bullfight poster and an antique map of

  Somerset. He picked an expensive-looking art book from a shelf

  otherwise stacked with nursing magazines. “Who’s Eugene Delacroix?”

  “A French romantic painter,” Bignal informed him.

  Diamond flicked the pages over. “Doesn’t seem to go with Freddie Mercury and the Mirror.”

  “There were also two coffee mugs on the table,” Bignal told him.

  “By the look of them, they were left over from last night. They’re going to the lab.”

  It was not vastly different from his own living room. He moved on. The front room was used as a workroom by the couple, for sewing, typing and storing household bills and bank statements. They had a joint account and seemed to be steadily in credit, which was better than the Diamonds managed.

  In another ten minutes the team finished upstairs. No signs of violence there, they informed Diamond. The aggro seemed to have been confined to the kitchen. He went to see for himself.

  The Nobles favoured a rather lurid pink for their bedroom, slept in a standard size double bed and had a portable TV on the chest of drawers Glenn used for most of his clothes. Trish Noble had a wardrobe and a dressing table to herself. She was reading Catherine Cookson and the Bible and Glenn had been into one of the Flashman books. If the quantity and variety of condoms in Glenn’s bedside cabinet was any guide, their sex life hadn’t been subdued by Trish’s religion.

  The second bedroom contained a folding bed, an ironing board and various items the couple must have acquired and been unwilling to throw away, ranging from an old record-player to a dartboard with the wire half detached.

  He glanced into the bathroom. Nothing caught his attention.

  “What’s in the back garden?” he asked Bignal.

  “Plants, mostly.”

  “Don’t push me, Derek. Have you been out there?”

  “Personally, no.”

  “Has anyone thought of looking for a murder weapon, footprints, a means of escape?”

  “Not systematically,” Bignal admitted. “It was already dark when we got here.”

  “Not systematically,” muttered Diamond with heavy sarcasm. “It backs onto the railway, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow, early, I want a proper search made. In particular, I want to know if there are signs that anyone got in or out by way of the railway embankment.”

  Bignal’s eyebrows peaked in surprise. “You think someone else is involved, as well as the wife?”

  “That’s the way they would have escaped.”

  “They?”

  “He, she, they or nobody at all. Let’s keep an open mind, shall we?”

  Julie Hargreaves may have expected a roasting for having failed to notice the stab wounds, but she need not have troubled. Diamond was more interested in roasting Trish Noble. “She had the kid-glove treatment from me yesterday,” he summed up as they drove out to Trowbridge. “Today she’s got to be given a workover.”

  “Do you see her as the killer?”

  “Do you?”

  She paused for thought. “It would be unusual, a woman using a knife as a weapon. The teapot, I can believe—but why would she hit him with the teapot if she’d already stuck a knife in his back?”

  “To finish him off.”

  “Ah.”

  “H
owever, there could be a second person involved.” Diamond casually tossed in some information he’d received that morning from the SOCOs combing the back garden at Twerton. “There’s evidence that someone climbed over the fence to the railway embankment.

  Two slats are freshly splintered at the top.”

  “An intruder? Nothing was stolen.”

  “Yes, but if she had an admirer, for instance . . .”

  Julie didn’t buy the idea. “That’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?”

  “You mean with her religious convictions? I said ‘admirer,’ not ‘lover’.”

  “No, I mean he wouldn’t need to climb over the fence. She’d let him in. And they would have to be real thickos to stab the husband and then go down to the nick and report it.”

  He responded huffily, “I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. Unrequited love, Julie. The admirer is obsessed with Trish. She’s unattainable while her husband is alive, so this nutter breaks into the house and knifes him. Trish comes home and finds Glenn dying, but mistakenly thinks he’s drunk.”

  “And bashes him with the teapot?”

  “Exactly. I think she told the truth yesterday. By now she may have something else to tell us.”

  “I wonder,” said Julie. “I find it difficult to believe in this crazy admirer.”

  Diamond said loftily, “You may understand better when you meet Trish Noble. She’s on the side of the angels and bloody attractive. Dangerous combination.”

  “That would explain everything,” murmured Julie in a bland tone. “Shall I organize house-to-house to find out if anyone was spotted on the railway embankment yesterday afternoon?”

  “It’s under way,” he told her. “Two teams.”

  Trish Noble’s sister lived in a semi-detached on a council estate north of Trowbridge. But it was the bloody attractive young widow herself who answered their knock. In jeans and a white tee-shirt, with the height and figure of a pre-teen schoolgirl, she looked too frail to use a knife on a chocolate cake, let alone a man. The hours since the killing had taken a toll. Her big eyes were red-lidded and they seemed to have sunk deeper into her skull. Julie must have wondered at Diamond’s ideas of attractiveness.

  He introduced her and said there were things he needed to ask. Trish calmly invited them in, explaining that she had the house to herself because her sister was at work. In a narrow sitting room, watched by two unwelcoming spaniels, Diamond took the best armchair and launched straight into the workover. “You didn’t kill your husband with the teapot, Mrs Noble. He was stabbed in the back.”