“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.”
3
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.