“How come?” Diamond said.
Hen invited Bradley to explain.
“What happened was that the Smiths’ sprog-”
“Haley,” Diamond put in. He hated children being downgraded.
“Haley comes home on the school bus around three forty-five, can’t get in, gets no answer when she knocks, so goes next door, knowing Mrs Mead has a spare key. Mrs Mead goes round and finds Olga Smith lying here and calls an ambulance.”
“Was it also Mrs Mead who noticed Michael Smith’s Honda parked outside between two and three?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to meet this splendid woman.”
First, they looked into the other rooms. You learn a lot about the occupants of a house by seeing how they treat their surroundings. This seemed a lived-in home, with reassuring (or misleading) signs of family harmony. Holiday photos and postcards around the kitchen. A noticeboard with reminders pinned to it. Recipes cut from colour magazines. A sliced homemade cake under a perspex cover. Coffee mugs waiting to be washed. Haley’s school blouse hanging up to dry. A wooden chest for her toys, with her name painted on it.
Diamond sifted through a batch of photos of the Smiths. The father had the same expression in all of them, with half-closed, ungenerous eyes and only the vestige of a smile. Olga Smith, a short, pretty blonde, projected a warmer personality. He picked out a head and shoulders shot of the pair of them in their garden and pocketed it.
Upstairs, the duvets were turned back to air, and clean clothes waited to be put away. The Smiths’ bedroom didn’t have the look of a battleground. They shared a kingsize bed. Each had a pile of books. He was reading Jeffrey Archer (but you can’t condemn a man for that) and she Victoria Beckham’s autobiography. His bedside drawer contained a bottle of massage oil and a gross-size box of condoms, with only a handful left; hers, a pack of tissues, a Miss Dior spray, a half-eaten bar of chocolate and a mini Cointreau.
One glance into Haley’s room left them in no doubt that she was well treated. She had a vast collection of stuffed toys, a wigwam, a riding helmet, a computer, her own TV and three shelves of books.
The third bedroom had been converted into an office, with two filing cabinets and a computer. Diamond picked some letters off the desk. One was a bank statement.
“The argument wasn’t over money by the look of things.” He showed it to Hen. It was a fourteen-day notice account. Michael L. Smith had a hundred and twenty thousand on deposit. “Is that the kind of money a bookshop manager stacks away?”
“If it is, we’re in the wrong job,” Hen said. “Maybe he came into money.”
“Regularly, by the look of it. He makes two deposits in cash in August, one of fifteen hundred, the other of two grand. Cash, Hen.”
“A tax dodge?”
“Or some other scam.”
“Defrauding the shop?”
“On this scale? I doubt it. Anything so big would soon be picked up by the auditors.”
Agreeing to pursue the source of Mike Smith’s cash deposits at an early opportunity, they went next door to call on Mrs Mead, a short, bright-eyed woman in her sixties with permed silver hair that matched the colour of a yapping Yorkshire terrier held against her chest. “Let him sniff the back of your hand and he’ll quieten down,” she told Diamond, and it worked. She insisted each of them went through this ritual. Then she put the dog down, said, “Basket,” and it trotted off somewhere.
Pity you couldn’t do that with people, Diamond thought. He’d be saying “Basket” quite often.
Bradley introduced them and asked Mrs Mead to repeat her account of what had happened. She would make a useful witness, if needed in court. In precise, clear words, she described the day’s events as she had seen them: the arrival of Mike Smith’s car at two, or soon after, and the sight of him entering the house at a brisk step and leaving some fifty minutes later and driving off again. Haley had knocked about three forty-five saying her mummy hadn’t met her from school and wasn’t answering the door. “Olga is a good little mother,” Mrs Mead went on. “She collects the child at the school gate every day, so I was worried something was wrong. They gave me a front door key some time ago and I let myself in and to my amazement discovered her lying in the sitting room unconscious. I called an ambulance, and that was it, really. Haley stayed with me last night. An aunt came down from London this morning and collected her.”
“What sort of man is the husband?” Hen asked.
“A good neighbour. I’ve no complaints.”
“Good to his wife?”
“What are you implying, exactly?”
“You’re obviously friendly with Olga Smith. Does he treat her well?”
“She’s never complained to me about him.”
“And you’ve heard nothing?”
“Do you mean arguments?”
“Or anything else.”
“No violence, if that’s what you mean. He has his moods, as most men do. A bit inconsiderate at times, unlike my Lionel, who was wonderful to me for over forty years, but he was an exceptional man. I find it hard to believe Mike struck her.”
Bradley said without much grace, “You’re the one who found her. You saw the state of her.”
But Diamond was quick to say, “We don’t know what happened yet. When you say ‘a bit inconsiderate’, what do you mean?”
“Nothing so dreadful as hitting her. Small things I’ve noticed. For example, he doesn’t ever help her with the shopping. She does it all, struggles back from the supermarket where she works laden down with bags. It wouldn’t hurt him to pick it up in the car once in a while, would it? Those places are open well into the evening.”
“Doesn’t she have the use of the car?”
“She doesn’t drive, and that’s a handicap these days, as I’m well aware because I never learned and it’s too late now, but I’m not shopping for three.”
“Why doesn’t she drive?”
“She confided to me once that she was banned. I didn’t ask her for the details. We’re on neighbourly terms, but not so close as that. There’s a difference in our ages. I think she regards me as something of a mother figure, and you don’t tell your mother all the mistakes you make.”
Hen asked if Olga Smith had spoken of a recent trip to Wightview Sands beach. She had not. Perhaps that, also, fell into the category of things you wouldn’t tell Mother.
They left Mrs Mead. Diamond asked DI Bradley if he could recommend a pub for lunch, guessing, rightly, that the local man would be glad of a chance to say he was far too busy to idle away his time. So it was agreed that he would meet them again at four at the hospital, while they filled the unforgiving minute, or hour, or two, at the Boar’s Head, south of the town, on the Worthing Road.
In his car, Diamond used his mobile-a toy he rarely played with-to check on the driving career of Mrs Olga Smith. When was she banned, and what was the offence? He was given an answer of sorts before he drove into the car park of the Boar’s Head. The DVLC at Swansea had no record of Olga Smith.
He got out and ambled across to Hen. This time would not be wasted. They found a comfortable corner seat in a part of the main lounge no one else was using. Hen lit up a cigar while Diamond fetched beer for himself and dry white wine for the lady. Each felt able to relax in the other’s company now that Bradley was gone, and they knew crucial things had to be debated.
“You seemed to be back-pedalling this morning,” Hen commented.
“In what way?”
“With DI Bradley, over what may or may not have happened to Olga Smith.”
“Inserting a note of caution, that’s all. Just because Michael Smith is a dodgy character who doesn’t welcome the idea of a chat with the Old Bill, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he bashed his wife.”