“We’re solvent,” she answered without looking up.
He hadn’t Julie’s talent for easing out the information. “Your husband must have been given a lump sum when he was made redundant.”
She only nodded, so he talked on.
“It seems generous at the time, but it soon goes, I dare say. Where do you keep the statements?”
“They should still be in the front room if your people haven’t taken them away.”
“Would you mind?” he asked her.
In the short interval when Trish was out of the room, Diamond asked Julie what she had learned of importance.
“Glenn was up to something that she didn’t care for,” said Julie. “I think we touched a raw nerve asking if he had been two-timing her with some other woman.”
“You touched the nerve,” he said. “That was your contribution.”
Julie flushed slightly. She wasn’t used to credit from Peter Diamond. “Anyway, she’s suspicious, but she isn’t sure.”
“She wouldn’t have stuck a knife in his back unless she was damned sure.”
Trish returned and handed across the statements. He studied them. “High standard of living. Shopping at the best boutiques. Meals out at Clos du Roy and the Priory. A holiday in the south of France.”
“That’s the way we chose to spend our money.”
“But it doesn’t seem to have hit your bank balance.”
“Glenn had his redundancy cheque.”
“What’s this restaurant in Exeter that you visited twice in August?”
“The Lemon Tree? We often eat there after visiting his brother. Alec’s home is a working paper mill, a lovely old place in the country near Torquay, but he forgets that people need to eat.”
“I can take a hint. We’ll get you back to your sister’s,” said Diamond.
Seated in the front, whilst Julie drove, he tried drawing out Trish by talking about the pressures that nurses had to work under. “My own health is pretty good, thank God, but in this line of work you get to see the insides of hospitals all too often. The RUH is one of the better ones. I still wouldn’t care to be a nurse.”
She didn’t comment. Perhaps she found it hard to imagine the big policeman nursing anyone.
“How long have you worked there, Mrs Noble?”
“Three years.”
“And before that?”
“Frenchay.”
Another local hospital, in Bristol.
“It’s a vocation, isn’t it?” Diamond rambled on. “Nursing isn’t a job, it’s a vocation. So is doctoring. Better paid, but still a vocation. I’m less sure about some of the others who work in hospitals. The administrators. It’s out of proportion. All those managers.”
She didn’t take his pause as an invitation to join in.
“They tell me the Health Service managers are the only lot who are on the increase,” he said. “Oh, and counsellors. Counselling is the biggest growth industry of all. We need it for everything these days. Child care, education, careers, marriage, divorce, unemployment, alcoholism, bereavement. I don’t know how we managed before. If there’s a major disaster — a train crash or a flood — the first thing they announce after the number of deaths is that counsellors are with the families. We even have counsellors for the police. Some-thing ugly comes our way, like a serial murder case, or child abuse, and half the murder squad are reckoned to need counselling. Watch out for the counsellors, Mrs Noble. If they haven’t found you yet, you may be sure they’re about to make a case study of you.”
She didn’t respond. She was looking out of the window.
“Me, too, probably,” said Diamond.
7
“Give me the dope on the Porterfields,” Diamond asked as Julie steered the car out of the police station yard and headed for Widcombe Hill. On his instruction, she’d spent the last hour checking.
“They’ve lived in Bath for the last five years. Moved out of a terraced house in Bear Flat at the end of 1993 and into this mansion by the golf course. There must be good profits in car parts.”
He grunted his assent. “You’re talking to a man who just had to buy a set of new tyres.”
“She drives a Porsche and he has a Mercedes.”
“And people like me paid for them.”
“Oh, and her name isn’t really Serena. It’s plain Ann.”
“What’s wrong with Ann?” he demanded. “I once had a girl-friend called Ann. The last word in sophistication. Stilettos and hot pants. Don’t suppose you know what hot pants are.”
“Were,” murmured Julie.
“Well, we can’t arrest her for changing her name.” Diamond wrenched his thoughts back from his steamy past.
“Who’s your money on, Julie? Do you still think Glenn Noble had a mistress?”
“Yes — and Trish believes it, too.”
“So who’s the killer — an angry husband?”
“Or boyfriend.”
He didn’t mention Jack Merlin’s bombshell — that Trish might, after all, have struck the fatal blow. “Any idea who? Basil Porterfield?”
She said, “I’ll have a better idea when I meet him.”
“You can spot a skirt-chaser at fifty paces, can you?”
“If you don’t mind me saying,” Julie commented, “that’s a rather outdated expression.”
“Un-hip?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he went on, unabashed, “I have to agree with you that it was some visitor to the house.”
“But who?”
He spread his hands. “Could be anyone. Could be the Bishop of Bath and Wells for all we know.”
“The Porterfields were friends, close friends,” Julie pointed out. “How many of your women friends would you hoist on your back for a photo?”
“All at once?”
She said on a note of exasperation, “Mr Diamond, sir, I’m trying to make a serious point. We know that Glenn was often out until the small hours. If we could confirm that he was sleeping with Serena...”
“Hold on, Julie. That’s a large assumption, isn’t it? Trish Noble doesn’t seem to think he needed to go elsewhere for sex.”
“She had her suspicions, believe me. You have to understand a woman’s thinking. She may have said the opposite, but he was getting home so late that something was obviously going on. She’s too proud or too puritanical to admit it to you and me.”
“He could have been up to something entirely different.”
“Such as?”
“A poker school. He wouldn’t tell her if he was playing cards into the small hours. God and gambling don’t mix.”
Julie wasn’t impressed by that suggestion. “She said he was tired when he got in.”
“Well, it was late.”
“Too tired for anything.”
After a pause, he said, “Was that what she meant? This God-fearing woman who keeps a Bible by her bed?”
“That doesn’t mean she’s under-sexed.”
“Fair point,” said Diamond after a moment’s reflection. “There’s more bonking in the Bible than there is in Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins together. So she interprets his reduced libido as evidence of infidelity? It’s speculation, Julie, whether it’s her speculation or yours.”
She was resolute. “Maybe it is, but if she’s right, Serena Porterfield is in real danger — if she isn’t already murdered. We can’t ignore the possibility, speculation or not.”
The Porterfields’ mock-Tudor mansion was on the slopes of Bathampton Down, with all of the city as a gleaming backdrop of pale cream stone and blue slate roofs. The house stood among lawns as well trimmed as the greens of the Bath Golf Club nearby. A gardener was on a ladder pruning the Albertine rose that covered much of one side of the house. A white Mercedes was on the drive. The chances of anyone from here being involved in a stabbing in a small terraced house in Twerton seemed remote.