A Mind to Murder (8 page)

“Poor little blighter! Mind you I only gave her another six months here what with one thing and another, but I never thought she’d leave feet first.”

Jennifer Priddy sat apart from the rest of the staff on the edge of the treatment couch. Her interview with the superintendent had been unexpectedly easy. She didn’t know quite what she had expected but certainly it wasn’t this quiet, gentle, deep-voiced man. He hadn’t bothered to commiserate with her on the shock of finding the body. He hadn’t smiled at her. He hadn’t been paternal or understanding. He gave the impression that he was interested only in finding out the truth as quickly as possible and that he expected everyone else to feel the same. She thought that it would be difficult to tell him a lie and she hadn’t tried. It had all been quite easy to remember, quite straightforward. The Superintendent had questioned her closely about the ten minutes or so she had spent in the basement with Peter. That was only to be expected. Naturally he was wondering whether Peter could have killed Miss Bolam after he returned from the post and before she joined him. Well, it wasn’t possible. She had followed him downstairs almost immediately and Mrs. Shorthouse could confirm it. Probably it hadn’t taken long to kill Enid—she tried not to think about that sudden, savage, calculated violence—but however quickly it was done, Peter hadn’t time.

She thought about Peter. Thinking about him occupied most of her few solitary hours. Tonight, however, the familiar warm imaginings were needled with anxiety. Was he going to be cross about the way she had behaved? She remembered with shame her delayed scream of terror after finding the body, the way she had thrown herself into his arms. He had been very kind and considerate, of course, but then he always was considerate when he wasn’t working and remembered she was there. She knew that he hated fuss and that any demonstration of affection irked him. She. had learned to accept that their love, and she dared no longer doubt that it was love, must be taken on his terms. Since their brief time together in the nurses’ duty-room after the finding of Miss Bolam she had scarcely spoken to him. She couldn’t guess what he felt. She was only sure of one thing. She couldn’t possibly pose for him tonight. It hadn’t anything to do with shame or guilt; he had long since cut her free of those twin encumbrances. He would expect her to arrive at the studio as planned. After all, her alibi was fixed and her parents would accept that she was at her evening class. He would see no reasonable grounds for altering their arrangements and Peter was a great one for reason. But she couldn’t do it! Not tonight. It wasn’t so much the posing as what would follow. She wouldn’t be able to refuse him. She wouldn’t want to refuse him. And tonight, with Enid dead, she felt that she couldn’t bear to be touched.

When she returned from her talk with the Superintendent, Dr. Steiner had come to sit beside her and had been very kind. But then Dr. Steiner was kind. It was easy enough to criticize his indolence or laugh at his odd patients. But he did care about people, whereas Dr. Baguley, who worked so hard and wore himself out with his heavy clinics, didn’t really like people at all, but only wished that he did. Jenny wasn’t sure how she knew this so clearly. She hadn’t really thought about it before. Tonight, however, now that the first shock of finding the body had passed, her mind was unnaturally clear. And not only her mind. All her perceptions were sharpened. The tangible objects about her, the chintz covering on the couch, the red blanket folded at its foot, the bright varied greens and golds of the chrysanthemums on the desk, were clearer, brighter, more real to her than ever before. She saw the line of Miss Saxon’s arm as it rested on the desk curved around the book she was reading and the way in which the small hairs on her forearm were tipped with light from the desk lamp. She wondered whether Peter always saw the life around him with this wonder and clarity as if one were born into an unfamiliar world with all the first bright hues of creation fresh upon it. Perhaps this was what it felt like to be a painter.

“I suppose it’s the brandy,” she thought, and giggled a little. She remembered hearing the muttered grumblings of Sister Ambrose half an hour earlier.

“What’s Nagle been feeding to Priddy? That child’s half drunk.” But she wasn’t drunk and she didn’t really believe it was the brandy.

Dr. Steiner had drawn his chair close to her and had laid his hand briefly on her shoulder. Without thinking, Miss Priddy had said:

“She was kind to me and I didn’t like her.”

She no longer felt sad or guilty about it. It was a statement of fact.

“You mustn’t worry about it,” he said gently, and patted her knee. She didn’t resent the pat. Peter would have said: “Lecherous old goat! Tell him to keep his paws to himself.” But Peter would have been wrong. Jenny knew that it was a gesture of kindliness. For a moment she was tempted to put her hand over his to show that she understood. He had small and very white hands for a man, so different from Peter’s long, bony, paint-stained fingers. She saw how the hairs curled beneath his shirt cuffs, the stubble of black along the knuckles. On his little finger he wore a gold signet ring, heavy as a weapon.

“It’s natural to feel as you do,” he said. “When people die we always wish that we had been kinder to them, had liked them better. There is nothing to be done about it. We shouldn’t pretend about our feelings. If we understand them we learn in time to accept them and to live with them.”

But Jenny was no longer listening. For the door had opened quietly and Peter Nagle had come in.

Bored with sitting in the reception desk and exchanging commonplace remarks with the uncommunicative policeman on duty there, Nagle sought diversion in the front consulting-room. Although his formal interview was over he wasn’t yet free to leave the clinic. The group secretary obviously expected him to stay until the building could be locked for the night and it would be his job to open it again on Monday morning. The way things were going it looked as if he would be stuck in the place for another couple of hours at least. That morning he had planned to get home early and work on the picture, but it was no use thinking of that now. It might well be after eleven o’clock before this business was settled and he was free to go home. But even if they could go to the Pimlico flat together Jenny wouldn’t pose for him tonight. One glance at her face told him that. She did not come across to him as he entered the room and he was grateful for that amount of restraint at least. But she gave him her shy, elliptical glance, half conspiratorial and half pleading. It was her way of asking him to understand, of saying sorry. Well, he was sorry, too. He had hoped to put in a good three hours tonight and time was getting short. But if she was only trying to convey that she wasn’t in the mood for making love, well, that suited him all right. It suited him most nights if she only knew. He wished that he could take her—since she was so tiresomely insistent on being taken—as simply and quickly as he took a meal, a means of satisfying an appetite that was nothing to be ashamed of but nothing to fuss about either. But that wasn’t Jenny. He hadn’t been as clever as he thought and Jenny was in love. She was hopelessly, passionately and insecurely in love, demanding a constant reassurance, facile tenderness and time-consuming technique which left him exhausted and barely satisfied. She was terrified of becoming pregnant so that the preliminaries to love-making were irritatingly clinical, the aftermath, more often than not, her wild sobbing in his arms. As a painter he was obsessed by her body. He couldn’t think of changing his model now and he couldn’t afford to change. But the price of Jenny was getting too high.

He was almost untouched by Miss Bolam’s death. He suspected that she had always known just how little work he did for his money. The rest of the staff, deluded by comparing him with that poor fool, Cully, thought they had a paragon of industry and intelligence. But Bolam had been no fool. It was not that he was lazy. One could have an easy life at the Steen—and most people, including some psychiatrists, did—without risking that imputation. Everything required of him was well within his capabilities and he gave no more than was required. Enid Bolam knew that all right, but it worried neither of them. If he went she could only hope to replace him by a porter who did less and did it less efficiently. And he was educated, personable and polite. That had meant a great deal to Miss Bolam. He smiled as he remembered how much it had meant. No, Bolam had never bothered him. But he was less confident about her successor.

He glanced across the room to where Mrs. Bostock sat alone gracefully relaxed in one of the more comfortable patients’ chairs that he had brought in from the waiting-room. Her head was studiously bent over a book, but Nagle had little doubt that her mind was otherwise occupied. Probably working out her incremental date as A.O., he thought. This murder was a break for her all right. You couldn’t miss compulsive ambition in a woman. They burnt with it. You could almost smell it sizzling their flesh. Underneath that air of calm unflappability she was as restless and nervous as a cat on heat. He sauntered across the room to her and lounged against the wall beside her chair, his arm just brushing her shoulder.

“Nicely timed for you, isn’t it?” he said.

She kept her eyes on the page but he knew that she would have to answer. She could never resist defending herself even when defence only made her more vulnerable. She’s like the rest of them, he thought. She can’t keep her bloody mouth shut.

“I don’t know what you mean, Nagle.”

“Come off it. I’ve been admiring your performance for the last six months. Yes, Doctor. No, Doctor. Just as you like, Doctor. Of course, I’d like to help, Doctor, but there are certain complications here… You bet there were! She wasn’t giving up without a struggle. And now she’s dead. Very nice for you. They won’t have to look far for their new A.O.”

“Don’t be impertinent and ridiculous. And why aren’t you helping Mrs. Shorthouse with the coffee?”

“Because I don’t choose to. You’re not the A.O. yet, remember.”

“I’ve no doubt the police will be interested in knowing where you were this evening. After all, it was your chisel.”

“I was out with the post and fetching my evening paper. Disappointing, isn’t it? And I wonder where you were at six-twenty-two.”

“How do you know she died at six-twenty-two?”

“I don’t. But Sister saw her going down to the basement at six-twenty and there wasn’t anything in the basement to keep her as far as I know. Not unless your dear Dr. Etherege was there, of course. But surely he wouldn’t demean himself cuddling Miss Bolam. Not quite his type I’d have said. But you know his tastes in that direction better than I do, of course.”

Suddenly she was out of her chair and, swinging her right arm, she slapped his cheek with a force that momentarily rocked him. The sharp crack of the blow echoed in the room. Everyone looked at them. Nagle heard Jennifer Priddy’s gasp, saw Dr. Steiner’s worried frown as he looked from one to the other in puzzled inquiry, saw Fredrica Saxon’s contemptuous glance at them before her eyes fell again to her book. Mrs. Shorthouse, who was piling plates on to a tray at a side table, looked round a second too late. Her sharp little eyes darted from one to the other, frustrated at having missed something worth seeing. Mrs. Bostock, her colour heightened, sank back in her chair and picked up her book. Nagle, holding his hand to his cheek, gave a shout of laughter.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Dr. Steiner. “What happened?”

It was then that the door opened and a uniformed policeman put his head in and said:

“The superintendent would like to see Mrs. Shorthouse now, please.”

Mrs. Amy Shorthouse had seen no reason why she should stay in her working clothes while waiting to be interviewed so that, when called in to Dalgliesh, she was dressed ready to go home. The metamorphosis was striking. Comfortable working slippers had been replaced by a modish pair of high-heeled court shoes, white overall by a fur coat, and head scarf by the latest idiocy in hats. The total effect was curiously old-fashioned. Mrs. Shorthouse looked like a relic of the gay twenties, an effect which was heightened by the shortness of her skirt and the careful curls of peroxided hair which lay cunningly arranged on forehead and cheeks. But there was nothing false about her voice and little, Dalgliesh suspected, about her personality. The little grey eyes were shrewd and amused. She was neither frightened nor distressed. He suspected that Amy Shorthouse craved more excitement than her life customarily afforded and was enjoying herself. She would not wish anyone violently dead but, since it had happened, one might as well make the most of it.

When the preliminaries were over and they got down to the events of the evening, Mrs. Shorthouse came out with her prize piece of information.

“No good saying I can tell you who did it because I can’t. Not that I haven’t got my own ideas. But there’s one thing I can tell you. I was the last person to talk to her, no doubt about that. No, scrub that out! I was the last person to talk to her, face to face. Excepting the murderer, of course.”

“You mean that she subsequently spoke on the telephone? Hadn’t you better tell me about it plainly? I’ve got enough mystery here for one evening.”

“Smart, aren’t you?” said Mrs. Shorthouse without rancour. “Well, it was in this room. I came in at about ten-past six to ask how much leave I’d got left on account of wanting a day off next week. Miss Bolam got out my dossier—leastwise it was already out come to think of it—and we fixed that up and had a bit of a chat about the work. I was on my way out really, just standing at the door for a few last words as you might say, when the phone rang.”

“I want you to think very carefully, Mrs. Shorthouse,” said Dalgliesh. “That call may be important. I wonder if you can remember what Miss Bolan said?”

“Think someone was enticing her down to her death, do you?” said Mrs. Shorthouse with alliterative relish. “Well, could be, come to think of it.”

Dalgliesh thought that his witness was far from being a fool. He watched while she screwed up her face in a simulated agony of effort. He had no doubt that she remembered very well what had been said.