A Mind to Murder (27 page)

“You went to the Priddys’ place, I suppose. Well, let’s have the dirt about that. The girl is married, I suppose?”

“There’s no doubt about that, sir. I was there earlier this evening and I had a chat with the parents. Luckily Miss Priddy was out, fetching fish and chips for supper. They’re in quite poor circumstances.”

“That’s a
non sequitur
. However, go on.”

“There isn’t much to report. They live in one of those terrace houses leading down to the southern railway line in Clapham. Everything’s very comfortable and neat but there’s no television or anything like that. I suppose their religion’s against it. Both the Priddys are over sixty I reckon. Jennifer’s the only child and her mother must have been more than forty when she was born. It’s the usual story about the marriage. I was surprised they told me but they did. The husband’s a warehouseman; used to work with the girl at her last job. Then there was a baby on the way so they had to get married.”

“It’s almost pitiably common. You’d think that her generation, who think they know all the answers about sex, would make themselves familiar with a few basic facts. However, we’re told these little mishaps don’t worry anyone these days.”

Dalgliesh was shocked by the bitterness in his own voice. Was it really necessary, he wondered, to protest quite so vehemently about so common a little tragedy. What was happening to him? Martin said stolidly:

“They worry people like the Priddys. These kids get themselves into trouble but it’s usually the despised older generation who have to cope. The Priddys did their best. They made the kids marry of course. There isn’t much room in the house but they gave up the first floor and made it into a small flat for the young couple. Very nicely done it was too. They showed me.”

Dalgliesh thought how much he disliked the expression “young couple” with its cosy undertones of dewy-eyed domesticity, its echo of disillusion.

“You seem to have made a hit in your brief visit,” he said.

“I liked them, sir. They’re good people. The marriage didn’t last of course, and I think that they wonder now whether they did the right thing in forcing it. The chap left Clapham over two years ago and they don’t know where he is now. They told me his name and I saw his photograph. He’s got nothing to do with the Steen Clinic, sir.”

“I didn’t think he had. We hardly expected to discover that Jennifer Priddy was Mrs. Henry Etherege. Neither her parents nor her husband have anything to do with this crime.”

Nor had they, except that their lives, like flying tangents, had made brief contact with the circle of death.

Every murder case produced such people. Dalgliesh had sat more times than he could remember in sitting-rooms, bedrooms, pubs and police stations talking to people who had come, however briefly, in touch with murder. Violent death was a great releaser of inhibitions, the convulsive kick which spun open the top of so many ant hills. His job, in which he could deceive himself that non-involvement was a duty, had given him glimpses into the secret lives of men and women whom he might never see again except as half-recognized faces in a London crowd. Sometimes he despised his private image, the patient, uninvolved, uncensorious inquisitor of other people’s misery and guilt. How long could you stay detached, he wondered, before you lost your own soul.

“What happened to the child?” he asked suddenly.

“She had a miscarriage, sir,” answered Martin.

“Of course,” thought Dalgliesh. “She would.” Nothing could go right for such as the Priddys. Tonight he felt that he, too, was tainted with their ill luck. He asked what Martin had learned about Miss Bolam.

“Not much that we didn’t know already. They went to the same church and Jennifer Priddy used to be a girl guide in Bolam’s company. The old people spoke of her with a great deal of respect. She was helpful to them when the baby was on the way—I got the impression that she paid to have the house converted—and when the marriage failed she suggested that the Priddy child should work at the Steen. I think the old people were glad to think that someone was keeping an eye on Jenny. They couldn’t tell me much about Miss Bolam’s private life, at least, nothing that we don’t know. There was one odd thing though. It happened when the girl got back with the supper. Mrs. Priddy asked me to stay and have a meal with them but I said I’d better be getting back. You know what it is with fish and chips. You just buy the right number of pieces and it isn’t easy to fit in an extra. Anyway, they called the girl in to say ‘good-bye’ and she came in from the kitchen looking like death. She only stayed a second or two and the old people didn’t seem to notice anything. But I did. Something had scared the kid properly.”

“Finding you there, perhaps. She may have thought that you’d mentioned her friendship with Nagle.”

“I don’t think it was that, sir. She looked into the sitting-room when she first got back from the shop and said ‘good evening’ without turning a hair. I explained that I was just having a chat with her parents because they were friends of Miss Bolam and might be able to tell us something useful about her private life. It didn’t seem to worry her. It was about five minutes later that she came back looking so odd.”

“No one arrived at the house or telephoned during that time?”

“No. I heard no one anyway. They aren’t on the phone. I suppose it was something that occurred to her while she was alone in the kitchen. I couldn’t very well ask her. I was on my way out and there wasn’t anything you could put tongue to. I just told them all that if they thought of anything that might help they should let us know at once.”

“We’ve got to see her again, of course, and the sooner the better. That alibi’s got to be broken and she’s the only one who can do it. I don’t think the girl was consciously lying, or even deliberately withholding evidence. The truth simply never occurred to her.”

“Nor to me, sir, until we got the motive. What do you want to do now? Let him sweat a bit?”

“I daren’t, Martin. It’s too dangerous. We’ve got to press on. I think we’ll go now and have a little chat with Nagle.”

But when they reached the Pimlico house twenty minutes later they found the flat locked and a folded scrap of paper wedged under the knocker. Dalgliesh smoothed it out and read aloud. “Darling. Sorry I missed you. I must speak to you. If I don’t see you tonight I’ll be at the clinic early. Love, Jenny.”

“Any point in waiting for him, sir?”

“I doubt it. I think I can guess where he is. Cully was on the board when we did our phoning this morning but I made sure that Nagle, and probably everyone else at the Steen, knew that I was interesting myself in the medical records. I asked Dr. Etherege to put them back after I left. Nagle goes into the Steen on one or two evenings in the week to see to the boiler and turn off the art therapy department kiln. I imagine that he’s there tonight, taking the opportunity of seeing which records have been moved. We’ll look in anyway.”

As the car moved northwards towards the river, Martin said:

“It’s easy to see that he needed the cash. You couldn’t rent a flat like that on a porter’s pay. And then there would be his painting gear.”

“Yes. The studio is pretty impressive. I should like you to have seen it. And there were the lessons from Sugg. Nagle may have got those on the cheap but Sugg doesn’t teach for nothing. I don’t think the blackmailing was particularly lucrative. That’s where he was clever. There was probably more than one victim and the amounts were nicely calculated. But even if he only made fifteen to thirty pounds a month, tax free, it would be enough to carry him over until he won the Bollinger or made his name.”

“Is he any good?” asked Sergeant Martin. There were subjects on which he never expressed an opinion but took it for granted that his Super was an expert.

“The trustees of the Bollinger Trust think so apparently.”

“There’s not much doubt is there, sir?” And Martin was not referring to Nagle’s talent for painting. Dalgliesh said irritably:

“Of course there’s doubt. There always is at this stage of an investigation. But consider what we know. The blackmailer instructed that the cash should be sent in a distinctively addressed envelope, presumably so that he could pick it out before the post was opened. Nagle gets to the clinic first and is responsible for sorting and distributing the post. Colonel Fenton was asked to send the money so that it arrived on the first of each month. Nagle came to the clinic on 1st May although he was ill and had to be taken home later. I don’t think it was anxiety about the Duke’s visit that brought him in. The only time he didn’t manage to get first to work was the day he got stuck in the tube and that was the day Miss Bolam received fifteen pounds from an unknown grateful patient.

“And now we come to the murder and theory replaces fact. Nagle was helping on the switchboard that morning because of Cully’s belly-ache. He listens to Mrs. Fenton’s call. He knows what Miss Bolam’s reaction will be and, sure enough, he is asked to put through a call to the group offices. He listens again and learns that Mr. Lauder will be at the Steen after the J.C.C. meeting. Sometime before then Miss Bolam has got to die. But how? He can’t hope to entice her away from the Steen. What excuse could he use and how could he provide himself with an alibi? No, it must be done in the clinic. And perhaps that isn’t such a bad plan after all. The A.O. isn’t popular. With luck there will be plenty of suspects to keep the police occupied, some of them with pretty good reasons for wishing Miss Bolam dead. So he makes his plans. It was obvious, of course, that the phone call to Miss Bolam wasn’t necessarily made from the basement. Nearly all the rooms have telephones. But if the murderer wasn’t in the record-room waiting for her how could he ensure that she would stay there until he could get down? That’s why Nagle chucked the records about. He knew Miss Bolam well enough to be fairly sure that she couldn’t bear not to pick them up. Dr. Baguley thought that her first reaction might be to phone for Nagle to help. She didn’t, of course, because she was expecting him to appear any minute. Instead she made a start on the job herself, giving him the two or three minutes that he needed.

“This is what I think happened. At about ten past six he goes down to the porters’ rest-room to put on his outdoor coat. It’s then that he unlocks the record-room door and throws the files on the floor. He leaves the light on and shuts the door but doesn’t bolt it. Then he unlocks the back door. Next he goes into the general office to collect the outgoing post. Miss Priddy is there but periodically visits the adjoining filing-room. He only needs half a minute to telephone Miss Bolam and to ask her to come down to the record-room as he has something serious to show her. We know how she reacted to that message. Before Nagle has a chance to replace the receiver Jennifer Priddy is back. He keeps his head, depresses the receiver rest, and pretends to be speaking to Nurse Bolam about the laundry. Then, without wasting any more time, he leaves with the post. He has only to take it to the box across the road. Then he darts down the mews, enters the basement by the unlocked back door, slips the chisel in his pocket, collects Tippett’s fetish and enters the record-room. Miss Bolam is there as he expects, kneeling to pick up the torn and scattered files. She looks up at him, ready no doubt to ask where he’s been. But, before she has time to speak he strikes. Once she’s unconscious he can take his time over the stabbing. There mustn’t be any mistake, and there isn’t. Nagle paints from the nude and his knowledge of anatomy is probably as good as that of most psychiatrists. And he was handy with that chisel. For this most important job he chose a tool he had confidence in and knew how to use.” Martin said:

“He couldn’t have got down to the basement in time if he’d walked to the corner of Beefsteak Street for his
Standard
. But the newsboy there couldn’t swear that he’d seen him. He was carrying a paper when he returned to the Steen but he could have got that in his lunch hour and kept it in his pocket.”

“I think he did,” said Dalgliesh. “That’s why he wouldn’t let Cully see it to check the racing results. Cully would have seen at once that it was the midday edition. Instead Nagle takes it downstairs and later uses it to wrap up the cat’s food before burning it in the boiler. He wasn’t in the basement alone for long, of course. Jenny Priddy was hard on his heels. But he had time to bolt the back door again and visit Nurse Bolam to ask if the clean laundry was ready to be carried upstairs. If Priddy hadn’t come down Nagle would have joined her in the general office. He would take care not to be alone in the basement for more than a minute. The killing had to be fixed for the time when he was out with the post.” Martin said:

“I wondered why he didn’t unbolt the basement door after the killing but like as not he couldn’t bring himself to draw attention to it. After all, if an outsider could have gained access that way it wouldn’t take long for people to start thinking ‘and so could Nagle’. He took that fifteen quid no doubt after Colonel Fenton’s break-in. The local boys always did think it odd that the thief knew where to find it. Nagle thought he had a right to it I suppose.”

“More likely he wanted to obscure the reason for the break-in, to make it look like a common burglary. It wouldn’t do for the police to start wondering why an unknown intruder should want to get his hands on the medical records. Pinching that fifteen pounds—which only Nagle had the chance to do—confused the issue. So did that business with the lift, of course. That was a nice touch. It would only take a minute to wind it up to the second floor before he slipped out of the basement door and there was a reasonable chance that someone would hear it and remember.”

Sergeant Martin thought that it all hung together very well but that it was going to be the devil to prove and said so.

“That’s why I showed my hand at the clinic yesterday. We’ve got to get him rattled. That’s why it’s worth looking in at the Steen tonight. If he’s there we’ll put on the pressure a bit. At least we know now where we’re going.”

Half an hour before Dalgliesh and Martin called at the Pimlico flat, Peter Nagle let himself into the Steen by the front door and locked it behind him. He did not put on the lights but made his way to the basement with the aid of his heavy torch. There wasn’t much to be done; just the kiln to be turned off, the boiler inspected. Then there was a little matter of his own to be attended to. It would mean entering the record-room but that warm, echoing place of death had no terror for him. The dead were dead, finished, powerless, silenced for ever. In a world of increasing uncertainty that much was certain. A man with the nerve to kill had much that he might reasonably fear. But he had nothing to fear from the dead.