Питер Ловси - Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose [Stories]

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 couple 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.