Shroud for a Nightingale (12 page)

“He said he would come in before lunch, Matron.”

“Perhaps you would ask him to be good enough to have a word with me. I shall be in the hospital all day.”

Sister Brumfett said: “I suppose that Scotland Yard detective will want to see me too. I hope he isn’t going to take too long about it. I’ve got a very sick ward.”

The Matron hoped that Brum wasn’t going to be too difficult. It would be unfortunate if she thought she could treat a Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police as if he were a recalcitrant House Surgeon. Mr. Courtney-Briggs, no doubt, would be his usual arrogant self, but she had a
feeling that Superintendent Dalgliesh would be able to cope with Mr. Courtney-Briggs.

They walked to the door of the ward together. Miss Taylor’s mind was already busy with fresh problems. Something would have to be done about Nurse Dakers’s mother. It would be some years before the child was fully qualified as a district nurse. In the meantime she must be relieved of the constant anxiety about her mother. It might be helpful to have a word with Raymond Grout. There might be a clerical job somewhere in the hospital which would suit her. But would that be fair? One couldn’t indulge one’s own urge to help at someone else’s expense. Whatever problems of staff recruitment the hospital service might have in London, Grout had no difficulty in filling his clerical jobs. He had a right to expect efficiency; and the Mrs. Dakers of this world, dogged by their own inadequacy as much as by ill-luck, could seldom offer that. She supposed she would have to telephone the woman; the parents of the other students too. The important thing was to get the girls out of Nightingale House. The training schedule couldn’t be disrupted; it was tight enough as it was. She had better arrange with the House Warden for them to sleep in the Nurses’ Home—there would be room enough with so many nurses in the sick bay—and they could come over each day to use the library and lecture room. And then there would be the Vice-Chairman of the Hospital Management Committee to consult and the Press to cope with, the inquest to attend and the funeral arrangements to be discussed. People would be wanting to get in touch with her continually. But first, and most important, she must see Superintendent Dalgliesh.

The Matron and Sisters had their living-quarters on the third floor of Nightingale House. When he reached the top of the staircase Dalgliesh saw that the south-west wing had been cut off from the rest of the landing by a specially constructed partition in white-painted wood in which a door, meanly proportioned and insubstantial in contrast to the high ceiling and oak-lined walls, bore the legend “Matron’s Flat”. There was a bell push, but before pressing it he briefly explored the corridor. It was similar to the one below but fitted with a red carpet which, although faded and scuffed, gave an illusion of comfort to the emptiness of this upper floor.

Dalgliesh moved silently from door to door. Each bore a hand-written name card slotted into the brass holder. He saw that Sister Brumfett occupied the room immediately adjacent to the Matron’s flat. Next was a bathroom, functionally divided into three mean cubicles, each with its bath and lavatory. The slot on the next door bore Sister Gearing’s name; the next two rooms were empty. Sister Rolfe was at the north end of the corridor immediately next to the kitchen and utility room.

Dalgliesh had no authority to enter any of the bedrooms but he tentatively turned the handles on each of the doors. As he expected, they were locked.

The Matron herself opened the door of her flat to him within seconds of his ring, and he followed her into the sitting-room. Its size and magnificence caught the breath. It occupied the whole of the south-west turret, an immense white-painted octagonal room, the ceiling starred in patterns of gold and pale blue, and with two huge windows facing out towards the hospital. One of the walls was lined from ceiling to floor with white bookcases. Dalgliesh resisted the impertinence of walking casually towards them in the hope of assessing Miss Taylor’s character by her taste in literature. But he could see from where he stood that there were no textbooks, no bound official reports or sloping banks of files. This was a living-room, not an office.

An open fire burnt in the grate, the wood still crackling with its recent kindling. It had as yet made no impression on the air of the room which was cold and very still. The Matron was wearing a short scarlet cape over her grey dress. She had taken off her head-dress and the huge coil of yellow hair lay like a burden on the frail, etiolated neck.

She was fortunate, he thought, to have been born in an age which could appreciate individuality of feature and form, owing everything to bone structure and nothing to the gentle nuances of femininity. A century ago she would have been called ugly, even grotesque. But today most men would think her interesting, and some might even describe her as beautiful. For Dalgliesh she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.

Placed precisely in the middle of the three windows was a sturdy oak table bearing a large black-and-white telescope.
Dalgliesh saw that this was no amateur’s toy but an expensive and sophisticated instrument. It dominated the room. The Matron saw his eyes upon it and said: “Are you interested in astronomy?”

“Not particularly.”

She smiled. “‘
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie
’?”

“Discomforts rather than terrifies. It’s probably my vanity. I can’t interest myself in anything which I not only don’t understand but know that I have no prospect of ever understanding.”

“That for me is the attraction. It’s a form of escapism, even of voyeurism, I suppose—this absorption in an impersonal universe which I can’t do anything to influence or control and, better still, which no one expects me to. It’s an abdication of responsibility. It restores personal problems to their proper proportion.”

She motioned Dalgliesh towards the black leather sofa in front of the fire. Before it, a low table held a tray with a coffee percolator, hot milk, crystal sugar and two cups.

As he seated himself, he smiled and said: “If I want to indulge in humility or speculate on the incomprehensible, I prefer to look at a primrose. The expense is nugatory, the pleasure is more immediate, and the moral just as valid.”

The mobile mouth mocked him.

“And at least you restrict your indulgence in these dangerous philosophical speculations to a few short weeks in the spring.”

The conversation is, he thought, a verbal pavane. If I’m not careful I shall begin to enjoy it. I wonder when she will get down to business. Or is she expecting me to make the first move? And why not? It is I who am the suppliant, the intruder.

As if reading his thoughts, she said suddenly: “It’s odd that they should both have been such friendless girls, both orphans. It makes my task less onerous. There aren’t any desolated parents to be comforted, thank God. Nurse Pearce only had the
grandparents who brought her up. He’s a retired miner and they live in some poverty in a cottage outside Nottingham. They belong to a very puritanical religious sect and their only reaction to the child’s death was to say, ‘God’s Will be Done’. It seemed an odd response to a tragedy which was so obviously the will of man.”

“So you think Nurse Pearce’s death was murder then?”

“Not necessarily. But I don’t accuse God of tampering with the intra-gastric drip.”

“And Nurse Fallon’s relatives?”

“None, as far as I know. She was asked for her next of kin when she first became a student and told us she was an orphan with no blood relations living. There was no reason to question it. It was probably true. But her death will be in the papers tomorrow and if there are any relatives or friends no doubt we shall be hearing from them. You’ve spoken to the students, I expect?”

“I’ve just had a preliminary talk with them as a group. I saw them in the demonstration room. It’s been useful in giving me a background to the case. They’ve all agreed to be fingerprinted and that’s being done now. I shall need the prints of everyone who was in Nightingale House last night and this morning, if only for elimination purposes. And I shall, of course, need to interview everyone separately. But I’m glad of this chance to see you first. After all, you were in Amsterdam when Nurse Fallon died. That means there’s one less suspect for me to worry about.”

He saw with surprise her knuckles whiten around the handle of the coffee pot. Her face flushed. She closed her eyes and he thought he heard her sigh. He watched her a little dis concerted. What he had said must surely be obvious to a woman of her intelligence. He hardly knew why he had bothered to say it. If this
second death were murder, then anyone with an alibi covering the whole of yesterday evening and night must be free of suspicion.

As if sensing his surprise, she said: “I’m sorry. I must seem obtuse. I know it’s foolish to feel such relief at not being under suspicion when one knows anyway that one is innocent. Perhaps it’s because none of us is innocent in any real sense. A psychologist could explain it, I’m sure. But ought you to be so confident? Couldn’t the poison—if it were poison—have been put into Fallon’s whisky bottle any time after she bought it, or another and poisoned bottle substituted for the one she purchased? That could have been done before I left for Amsterdam on Tuesday evening.”

“I’m afraid you must resign yourself to innocence. Miss Fallon bought this particular bottle of whisky from Scunthorpe’s wine shop in the High Street yesterday afternoon, and took her first and only drink from it on the night she died. The bottle is still almost full, the whisky remaining is perfectly good whisky as far as we know, and the only prints on the bottle are Miss Fallon’s own.”

“You’ve worked very fast. So the poison was put either into the glass after she’d poured her hot drink or into the sugar?”

“If she were poisoned. We can’t be sure of anything till we get the P.M. report and perhaps not even then. The sugar is being tested but that is really only a formality. Most of the students helped themselves from that bowl when they had their early morning tea and at least two of the girls drank theirs. So that leaves us with the beaker of whisky and hot lemon. Miss Fallon made it very easy for a murderer. Apparently the whole of Nightingale House knew that, if she didn’t go out in the evening, she watched the television until the programme closed down. She was a poor sleeper and never went to bed early. When the television ended she would go to her room and undress. Then in
her bedroom slippers and dressing-gown she would go to the little pantry on the second floor and make her nightcap. She kept the whisky in her room but she couldn’t make the drink there because there’s no water laid on and no means of heating it. So it was her habit to take the insulated tumbler with the whisky poured out ready and add the hot lemon in the pantry. A supply of lemons was kept there in the cupboard with the cocoa, coffee, chocolate and other items with which the nurses tend to make their late night drinks. Then she would take the tumbler back to her room and leave it on the bedside locker while she had her bath. She always bathed quickly and she liked to get into bed immediately afterwards while she was still warm. I expect that’s why she made her drink before she went into the bathroom. By the time she got back to her room and into bed, the drink was at precisely the right temperature. And apparently the routine never varied.”

The Matron said: “It’s rather frightening how much people get to know about each other’s habits in a small closed community like this. But, of course, it’s inevitable. There’s no real privacy. How can there be? I knew about the whisky, of course, but it hardly seemed my business. The girl certainly wasn’t an incipient alcoholic and she wasn’t handing it out to the younger students. At her age she was entitled to her own choice of nightcap.”

Dalgliesh asked how the Matron had learned about the whisky.

“Nurse Pearce told me. She asked to see me and gave me the information in a spirit of ‘I don’t want to tell tales but I think you ought to know’. Drink and the devil were one and the same to Nurse Pearce. But I don’t think Fallon made any secret of the whisky drinking. How could she? As I said, we know about each other’s little habits. But there are some things,
of course, that we don’t know. Josephine Fallon was a very private person. I can’t give you any information about her life outside the hospital and I doubt whether anyone here can.”

“Who was her friend here? She must have had someone she confided in, surely? Isn’t that necessary for any woman in this kind of closed community?”

She looked at him a little strangely. “Yes. We all need someone. But I think Fallon needed a friend less than most. She was remarkably self-sufficient. If she confided in anyone it would be Madeleine Goodale.”

“The plain one with the round face and large spectacles?” Dalgliesh recalled her. It was not an unattractive face, mainly because of the good skin and the intelligence of those large grey eyes behind the thick horn rims. But Nurse Goodale could never be other than plain. He thought he could picture her future: the years of training willingly endured, the success in examinations; the gradually increasing responsibility until, at last, she too was a Matron. It was not unusual for such a girl to be friendly with a more attractive woman. It was one way of gaining at least a vicarious share in a more romantic, less dedicated life.

As if reading his thoughts, Miss Taylor said: “Nurse Goodale is one of our most efficient nurses. I was hoping that she would stay on after her training and take a post as staff nurse. But that is hardly likely. She’s engaged to our local vicar and they want to marry next Easter.”

She glanced across at Dalgliesh a little maliciously. “He is considered a most eligible young man. You seem surprised, Superintendent.”

Dalgliesh laughed: “After over twenty years as a policeman I should have learned not to make superficial judgements. I think I had better see Nurse Goodale first. I understand the room you’re making available isn’t ready yet. I suppose we
could go on using the demonstration room. Or are you likely to be needing it?”