Shroud for a Nightingale (8 page)

He opened the right-hand drawer. It held nothing but a concertina file, each compartment indexed. He thumbed through the contents. A birth certificate. A certificate of baptism. A post office savings account book. The name and address of her solicitor. There were no personal letters. He tucked the file under his arm.

He moved on to the wardrobe and examined again the collection of clothes. Three pairs of slacks. Cashmere jumpers. A winter coat in bright red tweed. Four well-cut dresses in fine wool. They all spoke of quality. It was an expensive wardrobe for a student nurse.

He heard a final satisifed grunt from Sir Miles and turned round. The pathologist was straightening himself and peeling
off his rubber gloves. They were so thin that it looked as if he were shedding his epidermis. He said: “Dead, I should say, about ten hours. I’m judging mainly by rectal temperature and the degree of rigor in the lower limbs. But it’s no more than a guess, my dear fellow. These things are chancy, as you know. We’ll have a look at the stomach contents; that might give us a clue. At present, and on the clinical signs, I should say she died about midnight give or take an hour. Taking a common-sense view, of course, she died when she drank that nightcap.”

The fingerprint officer had left the whisky bottle and beaker on the table and was working now on the door handle. Sir Miles trotted round to them and without touching the beaker bent his head and placed his nose close to the rim.

“Whisky. But what else? That’s what we’re asking ourselves, my dear fellow. That’s what we’re asking ourselves. One thing, it wasn’t a corrosive. No carbolic acid this time. I didn’t do the P.M. on that other girl by the way. Rikki Blake did that little job. A bad business. I suppose you’re looking for a connection between the two deaths?”

Dalgliesh said: “It’s possible.”

“Could be. Could be. This isn’t likely to be a natural death. But we’ll have to wait for the toxicology. Then we may learn something. There’s no evidence of strangulation or suffocation. No external marks of violence come to that. By the way, she was pregnant. About three months gone, I’d say. I got a nice little
ballottement
there. Haven’t found that sign since I was a student. The P.M. will confirm it of course.”

His little bright eyes searched the room. “No container for the poison apparently. If it were poison, of course. And no suicide note?”

“That’s not conclusive evidence,” said Dalgliesh.

“I know. I know. But most of them leave a little
billet doux
. They like to tell the tale, my dear fellow. They like to tell the tale. The mortuary van’s here by the way. I’ll take her away if you’re finished with her.”

“I’ve finished,” said Dalgliesh.

He waited and watched while the porters manoeuvred their stretcher into the room and with brisk efficiency dumped the dead weight on to it. Sir Miles fretted around them with the nervous anxiety of an expert who has found a particularly good specimen and must carefully supervise its safe transport. It was odd that the removal of that inert mass of bone and tightening muscles, to which each in his different way had been ministering, should have left the room so empty, so desolate. Dalgliesh had noticed it before when the body was taken away; this sense of an empty stage, of props casually disposed and bereft of meaning, of a drained air. The recently dead had their own mysterious charisma; not without reason did men talk in whispers in their presence. But now she was gone, and there was nothing further for him to do in the room. He left his fingerprint man annotating and photographing his finds, and went out into the passage.

It was now after eleven o’clock but the corridor was still very dark, the one clear window at the far end discernible only as a square haze behind the drawn curtains. Dalgliesh could at first just make out the shape and colour of the three red fire buckets filled with sand and the cone of a fire extinguisher gleaming against the carved oak panelling of the walls. The iron staples, driven brutally into the woodwork, on which they were supported, were in incongruous contrast to the row of elegant light fittings in convoluted brass which sprang from the centres of the quatrefoil carvings. The fittings had obviously originally been designed for gas, but had been crudely adapted without imagination or skill to the use of electricity. The brass was unpolished and most of the delicate glass shades, curved in a semblance of flower petals, were missing or broken. In each of the deflowered clusters a single socket was now monstrously budded with one grubby and low-powered bulb whose faint and diffused light threw shadows across the floor and served only to accentuate the general gloom. Apart from the one small window at the end of the corridor there was little other natural
light. The huge window over the well of the staircase, a Pre-Raphaelite representation in lurid glass of the expulsion from Eden, was hardly functional.

He looked into the rooms adjacent to that of the dead girl. One was unoccupied, with the bed stripped, the wardrobe door ajar and the drawers, lined with fresh newspaper, all pulled out as if to demonstrate the room’s essential emptiness. The other was in use but looked as if it had been hurriedly left; the bedclothes were carelessly thrown back and the bedside rug was rumpled. There was a little pile of textbooks on the bedside table and he opened the flyleaf of the first to hand and read the inscription, “Christine Dakers”. So this was the room of the girl who had found the body. He inspected the wall between the two rooms. It was thin, a light partition of painted hardboard which trembled and let out a soft boom as he struck it. He wondered whether Nurse Dakers had heard anything in the night. Unless Josephine Fallon had died instantly and almost soundlessly, some indication of her distress must surely have penetrated this insubstantial partition. He was anxious to interview Nurse Christine Dakers. At present she was in the nurses’ sick bay suffering, so he was told, from shock. The shock was probably genuine enough, but even if it were not, there was nothing he could do about it. Nurse Dakers was for the moment effectively protected by her doctors from any questioning from the police.

He explored a little further. Opposite the rows of nurses’ bedrooms was a suite of bathroom cubicles and lavatories leading out of a large square cloakroom fitted with four washbasins, each surrounded by a shower curtain. Each of the bath cubicles had a small sash window fitted with opaque glass, inconveniently placed but not difficult to open. They gave a view of the back of the house and of the two short wings,
each built above a brick cloister, which were incongruously grafted on to the main building. It was as if the architect, having exhausted the possibilities of Gothic revival and baroque, had decided to introduce a more contemplative and ecclesiastical influence. The ground between the cloisters was an overgrown jungle of laurel bushes and untended trees which grew so close to the house that some of the branches seemed to scrape the downstairs windows. Dalgliesh could see dim figures searching among the bushes and could hear the faint mutter of voices. The discarded bottle of disinfectant which had killed Heather Pearce had been found among these bushes and it was possible that a second container, its contents equally lethal, might also have been hurled in the dark hours from the same window. There was a nail brush on the bath rack and, reaching for it, Dalgliesh hurled it in a wide arc through the window and into the bushes. He could neither see nor hear its fall but a cheerful face appeared among the parted leaves, a hand was waved in salute and the two searching constables moved back deeper into the undergrowth.

He next made his way along the passage to the nurses’ utility room at the far end. Detective Sergeant Masterson was there with Sister Rolfe. Together they were surveying a motley collection of objects laid out before them on the working surface rather as if they were engaged in a private Kim’s game. There were two squeezed lemons; a bowl of granulated sugar; an assortment of mugs containing cold tea, the surface of the liquid mottled and puckered; and a delicate Worcester teapot with matching cup and saucer and milk jug. There was also a crumpled square of thin white wrapping paper bearing the words “Scunthorpe’s Wine Stores, 149, High Street, Heatheringfield” and a scribbled receipt smoothed out and held flat by a couple of tea canisters.

“She bought the whisky yesterday morning, sir,” Masterson said. “Luckily for us, Mr. Scunthorpe is punctilious about receipts. That’s the bill and that’s the wrapping paper. So it looks as if she first opened the bottle when she went to bed yesterday.”

Dalgliesh asked: “Where was it kept?”

It was Sister Rolfe who replied. “Fallon always kept her whisky in her bedroom.”

Masterson laughed. “Not surprising with the stuff costing nearly three quid a bottle.”

Sister Rolfe looked at him with contempt. “I doubt whether that would worry Fallon. She wasn’t the type to mark the bottle.”

“She was generous?” asked Dalgliesh.

“No, merely unconcerned. She kept her whisky in her room because Matron asked her to.”

But brought it in here yesterday to prepare her late night drink, thought Dalgliesh. He stirred the sugar gently with his finger.

Sister Rolfe said: “That’s innocent. The students tell me that they all used it when they made their morning tea. And the Burt twins, at least, drank some of theirs.”

“But we’ll send it and the lemon to the lab just the same,” said Dalgliesh.

He lifted the lid from the little teapot and looked inside. Answering his unspoken question, Sister Rolfe said: “Apparently Nurse Dakers made early tea in it. The pot is Fallon’s of course. No one else has early tea in antique Worcester.”

“Nurse Dakers made tea for Nurse Fallon before she knew that the girl was dead?”

“No, afterwards. It was a purely automatic reaction, I imagine. She must have been in shock. After all, she had just seen Fallon’s body. She could hardly expect to cure rigor mortis with hot tea, even with the best China blend. I suppose you’ll want to see Dakers, but you’ll have to wait. She’s in the sick
bay at the moment. I think they told you. It’s part of the private wing and Sister Brumfett is looking after her. That’s why I’m here now. Like the police, we’re a hierarchical profession and when Matron isn’t in Nightingale House, Brumfett is next in the pecking order. Normally she would be dancing attendance on you, not I. You’ve been told, of course, that Miss Taylor is on her way back from a conference in Amsterdam. She had to deputize unexpectedly for the Chairman of the Area Nurse Training Committee, luckily for her. So at least there’s one senior member of the staff with an alibi.”

Dalgliesh had been told, and more than once. The absence of the Matron seemed to be a fact which everyone he had met, however briefly, had found it necessary to mention, explain or regret. But Sister Rolfe was the first to make a snide reference to the fact that it gave Miss Taylor an alibi, at least for the time of Fallon’s death.

“And the rest of the students?”

“They’re in the small lecture room on the floor below. Sister Gearing, our clinical instructor, is taking them for a private study period. I don’t suppose they’re doing much reading. It would have been better to set them something more active but it’s not easy at a moment’s notice. Will you see them there?”

“No, later. And in the demonstration room where Nurse Pearce died.”

She glanced at him and then turned her eyes away quickly, but not so quickly that he missed the look of surprise and, he thought, disapproval. She had expected him to show more sensitivity, more consideration. The demonstration room had not been used since Nurse Pearce’s death. To interview the students there so soon after this second tragedy would reinforce memory with fresh horror. If any of them were ready to be unnerved, this might do it and he had never considered using
any other room. Sister Rolfe, he thought, was like all the rest of them. They wanted their murderers caught but only by the most gentlemanly means. They wanted them punished, but only if the punishment did not outrage their own sensibility.

Dalgliesh asked: “How is this place locked at night?”

“Sister Brumfett, Sister Gearing and myself take responsibility for a week at a time. It’s Gearing’s turn this week. We’re the only three Sisters who are resident here. We lock and bolt the front door and the kitchen door at eleven o’clock promptly. There’s a small side door with a Yale lock and an inside bolt. If any student or member of the staff has a late pass she is issued with a key to that door and bolts it when she comes in. Sisters have a key in their possession permanently. There’s only one other door and that leads from Matron’s flat on the third floor. She has a private staircase and, of course, her own key. Apart from that, there are the fire escape doors, but they are all kept locked on the inside. The place wouldn’t be difficult to break into. I imagine that few institutions are. But we’ve never had a burglar so far as I know. Incidentally, there’s a pane of glass out in the conservatory. Alderman Kealey, the Vice-Chairman, seems to think that Fallon’s murderer got in that way. He’s a great man for finding comfortable explanations for all life’s embarrassing problems. It looks to me as if the pane blew in with the wind, but you’ll no doubt form your own opinion.”

She’s talking too much, he thought. Loquacity was one of the commonest reactions to shock or nervousness and one which any interrogating officer made the most of. Tomorrow she would despise herself for it, and become that much more difficult, that much less co-operative. In the meantime she was telling him more than she realized.

The broken pane would, of course, have to be looked at, the woodwork examined for marks of entry. But he thought it
unlikely that Nurse Fallon’s death had been the work of any intruder. He asked: “How many people slept here last night?”

“Brumfett, Gearing and myself. Brumfett was out for part of the night. I understand she was recalled to the ward by Mr. Courtney-Briggs. Miss Collins was here. She’s the housekeeper. And there were five student nurses: Nurse Dakers, the Burt twins, Nurse Goodale and Nurse Pardoe. And Fallon slept here of course. That is, if Fallon had time to sleep! Incidentally, her bedside light was on all night. The Burt twins were up brewing cocoa shortly after two and nearly took a cup in to Fallon. If they’d done so you might have got a clearer idea of the time of death. But it occurred to them that she might have fallen asleep with the light on and wouldn’t exactly welcome being woken, even to the sight and smell of cocoa. The twins’ invariable solace is food and drink, but at least they’ve lived long enough to realize that not everyone shares their preoccupation and that Fallon, in particular, might prefer sleep and privacy to cocoa and company.”