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

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.”

“However, 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.”