Shroud for a Nightingale (28 page)

“You take these deaths very calmly, Sister.”

“I take every death very calmly. If I didn’t I couldn’t do my job. Death is happening all the time in a hospital. It’s probably happening now on my ward as it did this afternoon to one of my patients!”

She spoke with sudden and passionate protest, stiffening as if in outrage that the dread finger could touch anyone for whom she was responsible. Dalgliesh found the sudden change of mood disconcerting. It was as if this thickening, unattractive body housed the temperament of a
prima donna
, passionate and irrational. At one moment the eyes, small and unremarkable behind their thick lenses, met his in dull resentment, the obstinate little mouth snapped out its grievances. And then, suddenly, there was this metamorphosis. She blazed at him, her face flaming with indignation so that it came fiercely alive. He had a glimpse of that fervent and possessive love with which she encompassed those in her care. Here was a woman, outwardly unremarkable, who had dedicated her life to a single aim with formidable determination.
If something—or someone—got in the way of what she regarded as the greater good, how far would that determination carry her? She seemed to Dalgliesh a fundamentally intelligent woman. But murder was frequently the last resort of the unintelligent. And were these murders, for all their complexity, the work of a clever woman? A bottle of disinfectant quickly seized; a tin of nicotine readily available. Didn’t both these deaths speak of a sudden uncontrolled impulse, an unthinking reliance on the easiest means? Surely in a hospital there were more subtle methods of disposal?

The shrewd eyes were regarding him with watchful dislike.

The whole interrogation was an outrage to her. It was hopeless to try to propitiate such a witness and he had no stomach to try. He said: “I want to go through your movements on the morning Nurse Pearce died, and last night.”

“I’ve already told Inspector Bailey about the morning Pearce died. And I’ve sent you a note.”

“I know. Thank you for it. Now I want you to tell me yourself.”

She made no further protest but recited the sequence of her movements and actions as if they were a railway timetable.

Her account of her movements on the morning of Heather Pearce’s death agreed almost exactly with the written statement she had already given to Inspector Bailey. She described only her own actions, put forward no theories, gave no opinion. After that first revealing outburst she had apparently decided to stick to facts.

She had woken at six-thirty on Monday, 12th January, and had then joined the Matron for early morning tea which it was their habit to drink together in Miss Taylor’s flat. She had left Matron at seven-fifteen and had then bathed and dressed. She had stayed in her own room until about ten minutes to eight
when she had collected her paper from the rack in the hall and had gone in to breakfast. She had seen no one on the stairs or in the hall. Sister Gearing and Sister Rolfe had joined her in the dining-room and they had breakfasted together. She had finished her breakfast and had left the room first; she was unable to say precisely when but it was probably not later than twenty-past eight, had returned briefly to her sitting-room on the third floor, and had then walked over to the hospital where she had arrived on her ward shortly before nine o’clock. She had known about the General Nursing Council Inspection since, obviously, Matron had talked to her about it. She had known about the demonstration since details of the nurse training programme were on the hall noticeboard. She had known about Josephine Fallon’s illness since Sister Rolfe telephoned her during the night. She had not, however, known that Nurse Pearce was to take Fallon’s place. She agreed that she could have discovered this easily by a glance at the noticeboard, but she had not troubled to look. There was no reason why she should be concerned. Taking an interest in the general nurse training programme was one thing, bothering to check on who was to act as the patient was quite another.

She had not known that Nurse Fallon had returned to Nightingale House that morning. Had she done so, she would have reprimanded the girl severely. By the time she had reached the ward Nurse Fallon was in her room and in bed. No one in the ward had noticed her absence. Apparently the Staff Nurse had thought she was in the bathroom or the lavatory. It was reprehensible of the Staff Nurse not to have checked, but the ward was particularly busy and one did not expect patients, particularly student nurses, to behave like idiots. Nurse Fallon had probably only left the ward for about
twenty minutes. Her walk through the dark morning had apparently done her no harm. She had made a quick recovery from the influenza and there had been no complications. She had not seemed particularly depressed while she was in the ward, and if there was anything worrying her, she had not confided in Sister Brumfett. In Sister Brumfett’s opinion, the girl had been perfectly well enough on discharge from the ward to rejoin her set in Nightingale House.

Next she went through her movements on the previous night, in the same dull, unemphatic voice. Matron had been in Amsterdam at the Inter national Conference so she had spent the evening alone watching television in the Sisters’ sitting-room. She had gone to bed at ten p.m. and had been awakened at about quarter to twelve by Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s telephone call. She had made her way across to the hospital by a short cut through the trees and had helped the student nurse on duty to prepare the bed for the patient’s return. She had stayed with her patient until satisfied that the oxygen and drip were being satisfactorily administered and that his general condition was as good as could be expected. She had returned to Nightingale House shortly after two a.m. and on her way up to her room had seen Maureen Burt coming out of the lavatory. The other twin had appeared almost immediately and she had had a brief conversation with them. She had declined their offer to make her cocoa and had gone straight up to her room. Yes, there was a light shining through Fallon’s keyhole at that time. She had not gone into Fallon’s room and had no way of knowing whether the girl was alive or dead. She had slept well and had awoken just after seven o’clock when Sister Rolfe had come rushing in with the news that Fallon’s body had been discovered. She hadn’t seen Fallon since the girl was discharged from the ward after supper on the Tuesday.

At the end of the recital there was a silence, then Dalgliesh asked: “Did you like Nurse Pearce, Sister? Or Nurse Fallon?”

“No. I didn’t dislike them either. I don’t believe in having personal relationships with the student nurses. Like and dislike don’t come into it. They’re either good nurses or they aren’t.”

“And were they good nurses?”

“Fallon was better than Pearce. She had more intelligence and more imagination. She wasn’t an easy colleague but the patients liked her. Some people thought her callous but you wouldn’t find a patient who said so. Pearce tried too hard. She went about looking like a young Florence Nightingale, or so she thought. Always thinking of the impression she was making. A silly girl fundamentally. But you could rely on her. She always did what was correct. Fallon did what was right. That takes instinct as well as training. Wait until you’re dying, my good man. You’ll know the difference.”

So Josephine Fallon had been both intelligent and imaginative. He could believe it. But these were the last two qualities he would have expected Sister Brumfett to praise. He recalled the conversation at luncheon, her insistence on the need for unquestioning obedience. He said carefully: “I’m surprised that you should rank imagination among the virtues of a student nurse. I thought that you valued absolute obedience above all. It’s difficult to reconcile imagination, which is surely individual, even iconoclastic, with the submission to authority of the good subordinate. I’m sorry if I sound presumptuous. This conversation hasn’t much to do with my business here, I know. But I’m curious.”

It had a great deal to do with his business there; his curiosity wasn’t irrelevant. But she wasn’t to know that.

She said gruffly: “Obedience to rightful authority comes first. You’re in a disciplined service; you shouldn’t need
telling. It’s only when the obedience is automatic, when the discipline is accepted and even welcomed, that one learns the wisdom and courage that can safely step outside the rules when the moment comes. Imagination and intelligence are dangerous in nursing if they aren’t founded on discipline.”

So she wasn’t as simple or as obstinately conformist as she appeared, or chose to appear to her colleagues. And she, too, had imagination. Was this the Brumfett, he wondered, that Mary Taylor knew and valued? And yet, he was convinced that his first impressions hadn’t been wrong. Fundamentally, she wasn’t an intelligent woman. Was she, even now, voicing the theory, the very words perhaps, of another? “The wisdom and courage to step outside the rules.” Well, someone in Nightingale House had stepped outside them, someone hadn’t lacked the courage. They looked at each other. He was beginning to wonder if Nightingale House had put some kind of spell on him, if its threatening atmosphere had begun to affect his judgement. For behind the thick spectacles he thought he saw the eyes change, thought he detected an urgency to communicate, to be understood, even a plea for help. And then the illusion passed. He was facing again the most ordinary, the most uncompromising, the least complex of all his suspects. And the interview was at an end.

It was now after nine o’clock but Dalgliesh and Masterson were still together in the office. There were at least a couple of hours’ work ahead before they could break for the night, checking and comparing statements, searching for the telltale discrepancy, planning tomorrow’s activity. Dalgliesh decided to let Masterson get on with it and dialling the internal number of Matron’s flat, he asked if she could give him twenty minutes of her time. Courtesy and policy both dictated that he should keep her informed, but there was another reason for seeing her before he left Nightingale House.

She had left the door of the flat open for him and he passed straight down the corridor to the sitting-room, knocked and entered. He walked into peace, quietness, light. And coldness. The room was surprisingly chilly. A bright fire was burning in the grate but its warmth hardly reached the far corners of the room. As he went across to her he saw that she was appropriately dressed, her long legs encased in brown velvet slacks topped by a high-necked cashmere sweater in pale fawn, the sleeves pushed back
from brittle wrists. A silk scarf in bright green was knotted around her throat.

They sat down together on the sofa. Dalgliesh saw that she had been working. There was an open briefcase propped against the leg of the coffee table and a spread of papers across its surface. A coffee pot stood in the grate, and the comforting scent of warm wood and coffee pervaded the room.

She offered him coffee or whisky; nothing else. He accepted the coffee and she rose to fetch a second cup. When she had returned, the coffee poured, he said: “They’ve told you, I expect, that we’ve found the poison.”

“Yes. Gearing and Rolfe both came to see me after you’d finished questioning them. I suppose this means that it must be murder?”

“I think so, unless Nurse Fallon hid the tin herself. But somehow that seems unlikely. To make a deliberate mystery of suicide with the object of causing the maximum of trouble would be the action of an exhibitionist or a neurotic. This girl seems to me to have been neither, but I wanted your view.”

“I agree with you. Fallon, I would have said, was essentially a rational person. If she decided to kill herself it would be for reasons which seemed good to her at the time and I would expect her to leave a brief but lucid note explaining them. A great many suicides kill themselves to make trouble for other people. But not Fallon.”

“That would be my assessment, but I wanted to ask someone who had actually known her.”

She asked: “What does Madeleine Goodale say?”

“Madeleine Goodale thinks that her friend killed herself; but that was before we found the nicotine.”

He didn’t say where and she didn’t ask. He had no intention of telling anyone in Nightingale House where the tin had
been found. But one person would know where it had been hidden and with luck might inadvertently reveal their guilty knowledge.

He went on: “There is another matter. Miss Gearing tells me she entertained a friend in her room last night; she says that she let him out through your door. Does that surprise you?”

“No. I leave the flat open when I’m not here so that the Sisters can use the back staircase. It gives them at least the illusion of privacy.”

“At the cost, surely, of your own?”

“Oh, I think it’s understood that they don’t come into the flat. I trust my colleagues. Even if I didn’t, there’s nothing here to interest them. I keep all official papers in my office over at the hospital.”

She was right of course. There was nothing here to interest anyone except him. The sitting-room for all its individuality was almost as plain as his own flat high above the Thames at Queenhithe. Perhaps that was one reason why he felt so at home. Here were no photographs to invite speculation; no bureau bursting with its accumulated hoard of trivia; no pictures to betray a private taste; no invitations to advertise the diversity, the existence even, of a social life. He held his own flat inviolate; it would have been intolerable to him to think that people could walk in and out at will. But here was an even greater reticence; the self-sufficiency of a woman so private that even her personal surroundings were permitted to give nothing away.

He said: “Mr. Courtney-Briggs tells me that he was Josephine Fallon’s lover for a short period during her first year. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I knew it in the same way that I know Mavis Gearing’s visitor yesterday was almost certainly Leonard Morris. In a hospital, gossip spreads by a kind of osmosis. One can’t always
remember being told the latest scandal; one just gets to know.”

“And is there much to know?”

“More perhaps than in less sensational institutions. Is that so very surprising? Men and women who have to watch daily what the body can suffer in agony and degradation aren’t likely to be too scrupulous about availing themselves of its solace.”