Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose

by Peter Lovesey

  She frowned and stared.

  Julie said, “Why don’t you sit down?” She stood behind the second armchair until Trish Noble acted on the advice.

  “Did you stab him?” Diamond asked.

  Trish seemed to have difficulty taking in what she had just been told—or she was making a convincing show of being stunned by the news. She shook her head.

  Diamond said, “If you’d like to explain how it happened, we’re ready to listen.”

  She said, “Stabbed?”

  “Twice, in the back.”

  “That’s impossible. He was sitting in the kitchen.”

  “Your story.”

  “It’s true! He was at the table when I got in. I’ve told you this.”

  “You didn’t stab him yourself?”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “We’d like a clear answer, Mrs Noble.”

  She said vehemently, “No, I did not stab my own husband.”

  “That’s clear, then.” Diamond glanced across at Julie, who had found an upright chair by the sideboard. “Got that? She denies it.”

  Julie opened her notebook.

  “If you didn’t stab him yourself,” Diamond plunged in again, “we’ve obviously got to look for someone who did. Was there anyone else in the house when you got home from the hospital?”

  The tired eyes widened. “No one.”

  “You’re sure? You can’t be sure, can you? Let’s take this in stages. Did you see anyone?”

  “No. This is unbelievable.”

  “Or hear them?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anyone else living in the house?”

  “What do you mean—a lodger? No.”

  “Does anyone have a key?”

  “What?”

  “Some friend, perhaps?”

  “We don’t give keys to our friends.”

  “I’ll tell you what I have in mind,” Diamond offered. “If someone let himself into the house unknown to your husband, he could have taken him by surprise and stabbed him shortly before you came in.”

  “Who would do that?” she said, and there was a note of scorn in the voice. She was getting over the shock.

  “Do you have a lover?”

  She reddened, but that wasn’t necessarily an admission. Almost anyone would have blushed at the question. She told him with a glare, “You should wash out your mouth.”

  “Would you like it rephrased?” Diamond said. “A boyfriend? A fancy man? A bit on the side? Come on, Mrs Noble, you work in a hospital. Life in the raw. I don’t have to pick my words with you, do I?”

  “I am a married woman—or was,” she answered primly. “I took vows before the Lord.”

  “No need for a boyfriend?”

  The look she gave him was her response and he was convinced by it. Moreover, he’d seen inside her husband’s bedside drawer.

  “In that case, we have to consider what used to be called unrequited love. To put it crudely, some nutter who fancies you. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? This man obsessed by you murders your husband to have you to himself.”

  She sighed like a scythe and said, “I can’t listen to these serpent-words.”

  “No secret admirer you’re aware of? Let’s look at another possibility. Did your husband have any enemies?”

  The change of tack brought a more measured response. “Glenn didn’t have enemies.”

  “Then did he have friends? Encouraging him in bad habits, perhaps?”

  She said, “I can do without your sarcasm.”

  “These are friends, presumably?” He took from his pocket the photo taken at Minehead, the piggyback picture. “Were these people in the printing trade?”

  She snatched it possessively. “You were the one who stole them, then. My photos are personal.”

  “Who are the people?”

  The resentment remained in her voice. “The Porterfields. Friends of ours. We had a day out with them.”

  “Is Mr Porterfield a printer?”

  “No. Basil is a businessman. He sells car-parts.”

  “And the lady?”

  “His wife Serena. She’s an art teacher.”

  “That’s Serena mounted on your husband’s back?”

  She gave him a cold stare. “That was for a silly photograph.”

  “At Minehead?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a wayzgoose?”

  She frowned. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Look on the back. My dictionary says that a wayzgoose is a works outing for those in a printing house. A silly photo at a wayzgoose makes sense to me.”

  She glanced at the words on the back of the photo and shrugged. “It doesn’t make any to me. Basil and Serena had nothing to do with Glenn’s job. Besides, he was already redundant when we went to Minehead. He’d been out of work for over a year.”

  “I noticed an art book in your living room. French painter.”

  “Delacroix?”

  “Yes. Was that a gift from Mrs Porterfield?”

  “No. Glenn bought it himself.”

  “So he was interested in art?”

  “Only in Delacroix.”

  “Are the Porterfields local?”

  “They live up by the golf course.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “I don’t want them troubled. They’ve got nothing to do with this. They’re decent people.”

  “In that case, they’ll want to help me find your husband’s killer.”

  She said openly, “I can’t believe this is happening. I thought I killed him. I was sure of it.”

  If she is playing the innocent, Diamond thought, she’s doing it with style. He tried to resist making up his mind. First impressions were so misleading. In his time he’d made more mistakes over women than King Henry the Eighth. And this one with her martyred eyes was taking the steam out of his workover.

  “After you hit him with the teapot and he fell off the chair, what did you do? Tell me precisely.”

  “I went to him at once. I could tell from the way he fell that he was out cold when he hit the floor. I found he’d stopped breathing, so I tried to revive him. Tilted back his head and drew the chin upwards. I don’t have to go through the drill, do I?”

  “Mouth to mouth?”

  “Of course.”

  “Think carefully. While you were doing it, did you hear any extraneous sounds?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If anyone else was in the house, in that kitchen, even, they may have picked this moment to run out.” It was a wily suggestion. He couldn’t have handed her a better opportunity of shifting the suspicion to some mythical intruder.

  She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t notice a thing.”

  Innocent, or refusing to be drawn? He couldn’t tell. “After the resuscitation had no result, what did you do?”

  She bit her lip. “It’s difficult to remember. It’s just a blur. I was deeply shocked.”

  “Did you stay in the kitchen?”

  “For a bit, I think.”

  “You didn’t go upstairs, or in the other rooms?”

  “I don’t think so. I was horrified by what I’d done. I got the shakes. I think I ran out of the front door and wandered up the street asking the Lord to forgive me. It took Him a long time to calm my troubled spirit. In the end I walked all the way to Bath to confess to you.”

  “Did you speak to anyone between leaving the house and coming to us?”

  “No.”

  “See anyone you knew?”

  “I wasn’t noticing other people.” She made it all sound plausible.

  “If there was anyone,” said Diamond, becoming reasonable in spite of his best efforts to be tough, “it would help us to account for your movements.”

  “I’ve told you my movements.”

  “And we only have your word for them.”

  “That was after he died. Why do you want to know what I was doing after he died?”

  He d
eclined to answer. “Is there anyone you can think of who ever threatened your husband?”

  “No.”

  Julie looked up from her notes and said unexpectedly, “Was he seeing a woman?”

  Trish Noble blinked twice and flicked nervously at her hair. “If he was . . .” she started to say, then stopped. “If he was, I’d be very surprised.”

  “The wife usually is,” Diamond added, privately wishing he’d remembered to ask. Smart thinking on Julie’s part. “Anyone you can think of who may have fancied him?”

  “How would I know? Look, you’re talking about the man I loved and married. He isn’t in his grave yet. Do you have to be so cruel?”

  Julie said, “You want us to find the person who stabbed him, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “There is someone, isn’t there?” said Julie.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you had your suspicions?”

  She looked down and fingered her wedding ring. Speaking in a low, scarcely audible voice, she said, “Sometimes he came home really late. I mean about two in the morning, or later. He was exhausted. Too tired for anything.”

  “Drunk?”

  “No. I would have noticed.”

  “How long was this going on?”

  “When it started, it was once every two months or so. Lately, it was about every ten days.”

  “Did you question him about it?”

  “He snapped my head off when I did. Really told me to mind my own business. It made me think there might be someone, but I had no way of finding out. He didn’t smell of scent, or anything.”

  Diamond told her to collect her coat.

  She looked seriously worried. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Home. Julie will take you home. I want you to look at the scene and tell Julie everything you remember.”

  “Aren’t you going to be there?” A question that might have conveyed disappointment was actually spoken on a rising note of relief.

  “I may come later.” He turned to Julie. “On the way, you can drop me off at the hospital.”

  Trish’s anxiety flooded in again. “The hospital? Do you mean the RUH? You don’t have to talk to them. They can’t tell you anything.”

  “It isn’t about you,” said Diamond. “It’s another matter.”

  And it wasn’t about his weight problem either.

  “Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to admire your sewing,” Diamond told Jack Merlin.

  There was no reaction from the pathologist.

  “May I see the other side?”

  “Not my sewing. My assistant Rodney does the stitchwork.” In the post mortem room at the Royal United Hospital, Merlin had the advantage of familiar territory. No visitor was entirely comfortable in the mortuary. Attendance at autopsies is routinely expected of

  detectives on murder cases. Diamond ducked out whenever he could think up a plausible excuse. On this visit he arrived late. The gory stuff had already been got over. With only a sewn-up corpse to view, he was putting on a good show of self-composure, but it didn’t run to treating these places like a second home.

  The assistant Rodney stepped forward and helped Merlin turn the body of Glenn Noble. Two eye-shaped stab wounds were revealed.

  Diamond’s hands tightened behind his back. “Not much doubt about those.”

  Merlin watched him and said nothing.

  “They don’t look superficial, either.”

  Still nothing.

  “I reckon they tell a story.”

  There was a long interval of silence before Diamond spoke again. “You’re a helpful bugger, aren’t you? You know I’m pig-ignorant, yet you’re not going to help me out.”

  Merlin shot an amused look across the corpse and then relented. “This one to the right of the spine did the main damage. Penetrated the lung two inches above its basal margin.”

  Diamond bent closer to the body to examine the wounds. “Obviously you’ve cleaned him up.”

  “You don’t get much external bleeding from stab wounds. There was a pint or so in the right pleural cavity.”

  “So was that what killed him?”

  “It was a potentially fatal injury.”

  “The cause of death, in other words.”

  “The potential cause of death.”

  Diamond straightened up, frowning. “Am I missing something here?”

  “I can’t be specific as to the cause.”

  “With a couple of stab-wounds like this and massive internal bleeding? Come on, Jack. Give me a break.”

  Merlin said, “As I understand it, the wife admitted to you that she cracked him on the head with a teapot.”

  “I believe her. Somebody certainly smashed a teapot. His shirt-front was stained with tea, as I’m sure forensic will tell us in their own good time. Probably tell us if it was Brooke Bond or Tetley’s and whether she warmed the pot.”

  “There’s bruising here on the head, just above the hairline,” Merlin confirmed.

  “Look, what is this about the teapot? The man has two deep stab wounds.”

  “And a bruised cranium.”

  Diamond screwed his face into an anguished expression. “Are you telling me it’s possible that the teapot actually finished him off?”

  “It’s an interesting question. I can’t exclude the possibility of a fatal brain injury. Of course I’ll examine the brain.”

  “Haven’t you done that?”

  “It has to be fixed and cut in sections for microscopic examination.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Three to four weeks.”

  “God help us.” He complained because of his own frustration.

  He knew Merlin would give him all the information he could as soon as it was available. He was the best. “And even after I examine the brain, I may not have the answer.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack!”

  “I mean it. I’ve examined people who died after blows to the head and I could find no perceptible damage to the brain. We don’t know why it happens. Maybe the shock wave passing through the brain stem was sufficient to kill them.”

  “So even after four weeks, you may not have the answer?”

  “I’m a pathologist, not an ace detective.”

  There was an interval of silence. “Let me get one thing clear in my mind,” said Diamond. “Is it possible that what Mrs Noble told me is true that he was still alive when she clobbered him?”

  “Certainly.”

  “With stab wounds like this?”

  “A victim of stabbing may survive for some time.”

  “How long?”

  “How long is a piece of string?”

  “Your middle name wouldn’t be Prudence by any chance?”

  Merlin smiled.

  “A few seconds? A few minutes?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “And how would he have appeared? Unsteady, like a drunk?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “A distressed drunk?”

  “Distressed is probably right.”

  “Unable to speak?”

  “That’s possible. The knife cut through some of the blood vessels and airways in the lung, so there was bleeding not only into the chest cavity but into the air passages. That would have affected his power of speech.”

  “You see what I’m getting at?” said Diamond.

  Merlin grinned. “You’re testing the woman’s story. I was at the scene before you, remember,” he rubbed it in. “I saw the brandy bottle on the table. But I’m not given to speculation, as you know.”

  “Jack, I could be making an arrest very soon. Someone entered that house and stabbed him. Not the wife. I’m convinced she’s telling the truth.”

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  “I’m getting close.”

  “I wouldn’t get too close. If you nab them for murder at this stage, you could be torn to shreds by a good defence counsel. Mrs Noble admits that she
clobbered her husband with the teapot. She may have killed him, stabbing or no stabbing.”

  It was a five-minute drive, no more, from the hospital to the murder house in Collinson Road. Frustrated by his session with Jack Merlin, Diamond looked to Julie Hargreaves for some progress in the investigation. He had left her there with Trish Noble, ostensibly checking the contents to see if anything had been stolen. More importantly, she would have been working on drawing Trish out, putting her at her ease and gaining her confidence in the way that she did with women suspects almost without seeming to try. If there were secrets in the lives of the Nobles, Julie was best placed to unlock them.

  When he looked in, the two women were waiting in that chintzy living room with the bullfight poster and the map of Somerset. The television was on and coffee and biscuits were on the table. There must be something wrong with my methods, Diamond thought. While I look at a dead body, my sidekick puts her feet up and watches the box.

  “Am I interrupting?” he asked.

  Julie looked up. “We were waiting for you.”

  “What are you watching—a kids’ programme?”

  “Actually we were looking out of the window at the SOCOs in the back garden.” She reached for the remote control and switched off.

  “They look as if they’re about to pack up. Would you like coffee?”

  “Had a hospital one, thanks.” In a paper cup from a machine and tasting of tomato soup, he might have added. He wouldn’t want another drink for some time. He reached for the packet of chocolate digestives and helped himself. “What’s the report, then? Anything missing?”

  “Most of the furniture from my kitchen,” Trish Noble said accusingly.

  “That’ll be the scenes of crime team,” Diamond told her. “They must have left you a check-list somewhere. You’ll get everything back eventually.”

  “They weren’t the ones who pinched the photos from my fridge door.”

  He said smoothly, “You’ll get them back.” He reached for the art book he’d remarked on before and leafed through the pages. “Is anything of value missing? Money? Jewellery?”