by Tony Medawar
‘Sure you didn’t make a date tonight?’
‘Why should I?’
‘To make it up. Sure you didn’t meet her and quarrel again?’
Guy’s sleepy confusion parted, and a cold sinister light shone through at these words. There was no mistaking the Superintendent’s meaning.
‘I was in the theatre,’ he said.
‘But the operation was over and the theatre cleared quite five minutes before Nurse Farrer left Brodie Ward.’
When Coleridge rejoined Sergeant Jones he found that considerable progress had been made. Though the office had shown no signs of disturbance, a large sum of money was, in fact, missing from the safe. The latter had not been forced, however—merely opened. An inside job, obviously. The laborious work of identifying fingerprints began.
In the late afternoon of the same day, the Superintendent went to Brodie Ward. It seemed to him now that his first suspicions of Dr Stevens had very little foundation. Nurse Farrer must have been attracted to the office by a noise or a light. Perhaps she had seen and recognised the thief; this inside thief who could well be known to her. And who more likely than the staff, particularly the cleaners, whom she knew? On the other hand, she had been struck from behind, perhaps while all her attention was focused on the thief. That suggested an accomplice, and the fact that the blow had not been hard enough to kill, might mean a female accomplice. He entered the ward with an open mind.
The Day Sister and her staff were prepared to help, but they knew nothing. Coleridge tackled the patients instead. Some swore they had slept through the night; one or two road accident cases were suspicious and tongue-tied. He gained most from an elderly man whose broken leg was fixed to an elaborate pulley system.
‘Poor kid!’ he said, referring to Nurse Farrer. ‘It was her own fault. She’d no business to go chasing up young Barry.’
Coleridge had heard the story twice. He looked round the ward.
‘You won’t find him,’ the old man went on. ‘He was discharged this morning. Been due to go out for a day or two.’
‘Fit?’
‘Good as new.’
‘Which was his bed?’
The old man pointed to the drawn curtains round the bed next to his own.
‘He liked joking with the nurses. He wouldn’t move while she was badgering him, but he was back from the toilet in his bed inside three minutes after she left.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Practical jokes. That was his line. I’ve not said this to Sister, but it’s my belief that snooper, as they call him, was Barry himself.’ The old man caught at Coleridge’s sleeve. ‘Suppose he pretended he’d seen a face at the window. We were all asleep but him. When nurse had gone back behind the curtains of that bad case they had that night he could nip out to the toilet and climb out and frighten the women in Treves, just before she went across to see what they were doing there. Then he’d be back when she got back, see?’
Coleridge looked at the old man with surprise, which he managed to suppress.
‘You have a new patient in his bed?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘Yes. Barry’d not been gone an hour when they brought this chap in. Fell off some scaffolding, they say.’
The Superintendent nodded, and went away down the ward to the bathrooms. As the old man had said, anyone normally agile could climb through a lavatory window, only a few feet from the ground, and return the same way. He hurried back to find Sister.
‘That young Barry Williams? Did be discharge himself?’
‘Oh, no. He’s been fit to leave for days now. But his people hadn’t brought his clothes.’
‘Why not?’
‘Londoners. No sense of time or dates. I sent them the usual notice of his discharge. We sent again yesterday and a friend turned up this morning.’
‘Only a friend?’
‘In a car.’
Coleridge nodded and got to work, rather against Sister’s will, on the cubicle so recently vacated by Barry Williams. As he pointed out, the new patient, being unconscious, would never know about it, and valuable evidence must not be lost.
The results of this, taken with the investigation in the office, were revealing. In the office all the fingerprints taken matched with members of the hospital staff. Those from the cubicle, besides the staff, were identified as belonging to a certain Bernard Grant, who had already two convictions for robbery with violence.
Grant, alias Barry Williams, was soon picked up by the London police and questioned. Most of the money from the safe at St Stephen’s Hospital was still with him. He agreed that he had used an alias on admission there after his road accident. Since this had been due to a skid and involved no one else, there had been no police inquiry when it happened.
‘What were you doing at the time?’ Coleridge asked.
‘Just having a run in the country.’
‘Planning a job?’
‘Certainly not.’
They got nothing from him but the money, less a deposit he had made on a new car. The old man’s suggestion that he had been the snooper he dismissed with a light laugh, though they thought they detected an uneasy note in it. He refused to say how he had opened the safe, and he swore he’d had nothing to do with Nurse Farrer’s death. His mother, when approached, was more revealing.
Superintendent Coleridge, again accompanied by Sergeant Jones, went up to St Stephen’s Hospital and asked for Holford.
‘Up at the theatre,’ Bates told them, and went outside the lodge to point the nearest way to the Annexe.
They were just passing the Hospital Office building when they met Holford, coming down the path towards them. He stopped at once, and stayed quite still as they went up to him.
‘James Holford?’ asked the Superintendent.
‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘Have you a sister called Amelia Grant?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a nephew called Bernard Grant, alias Barry Williams?’
Holford’s face had gone very white. His eyes wavered from side to side before fixing again on the two police officers.
‘I’m warning you,’ went on Coleridge. ‘Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you left the operating theatre on the night of Nurse Farrer’s death, did you use this path, passing the office?’
‘Always do.’ The voice was hoarse, reluctant.
‘It would be dark. Did you have your torch with you?’
Holford made a convulsive move off the path on to the grass, but Sergeant Jones side-stepped also, and he stopped, breathing heavily.
‘Well, did you?’
‘Always do,’ he repeated, in the same tone.
‘And you saw Nurse Farrer looking into the office?’
‘The nurses had gone down on their own. I was too late to go with them.’
‘Not Nurse Farrer. You expected her to be gone but you saw her. You knew she had discovered Grant in the act of burgling the safe, so you went up behind and struck her with that big rubber-covered torch of yours, and you killed her.’
Holford gave a cry, covering his face with his hands.
‘I never meant it,’ he groaned. ‘Only to give her a mild concussion, so she’d forget seeing Bernie. I could’ve passed it off, she’d tripped and hit her head on the step or something. Then I found she was dead. I’ve been out of my mind since.’
He took his hands away, staring at the Superintendent.
‘I’d nothing to do with the job,’ he pleaded. ‘The boy thought that up. Must have. He’s been getting about all over the hospital the last fortnight. He’s bad all through. I did it for Mellie’s sake. My sister. I only wanted Nurse to forget. I didn’t strike her hard.’
Coleridge looked at him with contempt.
‘Family likeness,’ he said. ‘The boy swears he only stole. You say you only killed by accident. You’re both as guilty as hell. Robbery and murder. A capital offence. How did Grant get into that office and into that safe if you didn�
��t manage to get keys for him? He wouldn’t have had the time or the means. He was back in the ward, going through the toilet window, as he’d been practising, inside three minutes after Nurse Farrer left. I’ve got a solid witness for that. You’ll have to come with us, Holford, and I warn you again, anything you say …’
JOSEPHINE BELL
‘Josephine Bell’ was the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier. She was born on 8 December 1897 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, the daughter of Maud Tessimond Windsor and Joseph Collier, a surgeon. From 1910 she studied at Godolphin School, Salisbury, and in 1916, at the age of eighteen, she went up to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences at Newnham College, taking time out to work on the land towards the end of the First World War.
Collier graduated in 1919, the same year that her elder brother Jack was killed in a flying accident in Spain, devastating her mother and her other brother Donald. In 1922, following in the footsteps of her father and great-grandfather, she decided to become a doctor and enrolled as a student at University College Hospital, London. She was diligent, even working in the emergency department of Hampstead General Hospital as a casualty officer. But she also had time for extramural matters and, on 6 January 1923 married Norman Dyer Ball, a pathologist at UCH who had lost an eye in the Great War. The following year, which included a spell as house physician, she gained the customary double degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.
The couple moved to Croom’s Hill in Greenwich where Dyer Ball set up in general practice, working alongside his wife until 1935 when ill health forced him to sell up. They moved to Walden in Headley, Hampshire, to stay with Collier’s mother, whose second husband Jean Éstradie had died three years earlier. Dyer Ball’s health began slowly to improve and the couple decided that the following summer they would make a long sea voyage. However, on the day after their thirteenth wedding anniversary and not long after he had been involved in a minor car accident, Dyer Ball drove up to London to do some shopping. He bumped into the wife of one of his neighbours at Croom’s Hill and offered to give her a lift home. However, their journey ended in tragedy when the car mounted the kerb, rolled over twice and collided with a lorry. His passenger died almost immediately while Dyer Ball died in hospital a little time later.
Not even forty years old and widowed with four young children, Collier moved to Bordon in East Hampshire. She secured a position as a Clinical Assistant at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford and to supplement her income turned to writing. Her first novel, Murder in Hospital (1937), dedicated to her late husband, was written under a pseudonym that some have suggested was an homage to the original of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Joseph Bell. However, the truth is much simpler: in coining the name ‘Josephine Bell’, Collier simply combined her own middle name with the first name of her father, who had died in 1905 before she was ten. Any connection to Joseph Bell was at most a happy coincidence.
Murder in Hospital was praised for its clever plot and even more so as a study of hospital mores. However, there are moments that jar for modern readers not least the portrayal of some characters that, while they might simply reflect the attitudes prevailing in the 1930s, are variously antisemitic and racist. For the novel, Bell introduced Dr David Wintringham, who would appear in eleven more novels including From Natural Causes (1941), which features an unusual method of murder, Death by Clairvoyance (1949), in which one of six identically dressed clowns is murdered at a buffet, and the horrific Bones in the Barrow (1953). Wintringham also appears in numerous short stories, many of which were published in the London Evening Standard.
As well as the Wintringham series, Collier wrote many other crime novels, often with a medical background and some with novel settings such as The House by the River (1959), set in Brittany, New People at the Hollies (1961), set in an old peoples’ home, and A Hole in the Ground (1971) in which a doctor returns to Cornwall to investigate an accident that he had witnessed twenty years earlier.
Collier also wrote historical romances and serial thrillers for magazines, such as The Dark Tide (1951). Her numerous straight novels include the possibly autobiographical Compassionate Adventure (1946) and The Bottom of the Well (1940) about a mismatched couple, but the best of her non-crime output are Total War at Haverington (1947), set during the air raids and chaos of war-torn London, and Wonderful Mrs Marriott (1948), about a domineering woman and the damage she wreaks on her family. There was also a non-criminous radio drama about a typhoid outbreak entitled Hidden Death (1949).
All the time Collier was writing, she continued to work, not least because she had four children to raise on her own. In 1941, she moved to the Royal Surrey’s gynaecology department until in 1944, a year after her mother’s death, she set up in general practice at ‘Willoughby’, 13 Albury Road, Guildford, still also pursuing her hobbies—gardening and sailing her five-ton sloop.
After retiring in 1954, Collier joined the management committee of St Luke’s Hospital in Guildford, a position she held until 1962. Perhaps more significantly, 1954 was also the year that she was elected a member of the Detection Club, the dining society for crime writers. A year later, Collier was among the founder members of the Crime Writers’ Association, later serving as the chair for 1959–1960. In this role, she spoke widely on crime fiction, including in 1959 a talk on the history and future of the crime novel to the literary society in Cranleigh, East Sussex. In 1960 she contributed to a series of radio plays by CWA members and in 1961 a series of short stories written by CWA members for newspaper syndication. After her term as chair ended, Collier remained on its main committee taking part in one of its most unusual meetings, held in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s and broadcast by the BBC in July 1967.
Writing almost up until the end of her life, Doris Bell Collier died in 1987. ‘A Torch at the Window’ was originally published in She, January 1960.
GRAND GUIGNOL
John Dickson Carr
A Mystery in Ten Parts. The performance staged under the direction of M. Henri Bencolin, prefect of police of Paris.
The Cast of Characters:
M. HENRI BENCOLIN.
M. ALEXANDRE LAURENT, scholar, former husband of—
LOUISE DE SALIGNY, the wife of—
RAOUL, fourth Duc de Saligny, eminent sportsman.
M. EDOUARD VAUTRELLE.
SIGNOR LUIGI FENELLI, maestro of several enterprises.
JACQUES GIRARD, jockey.
MR SID GOLTON, late of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.
FRANÇOIS DILLSART, operative of the prefecture.
M. LE COMTE DE VILLON, juge d’instruction,
and others.
The Place: Paris.
The Time: 1927.
The action covers a period of twenty-four hours.
I
THE OVERTURE: Danse Macabre
‘Le jeu est fait, ’sieurs et dames; rien ne va plus.’
The voices stopped. It was so quiet that from anywhere in the room you could hear the ball ticking about in the wheel. Then the shrill, bored voice chanted:
‘Vingt-deux noir, ’sieurs et dames …’
One man got up from the table stiffly, with an impassive face. He made a defiant gesture at lighting a cigarette, but the flame of the briquet wobbled in his hand; he smiled in a sickly way, and his face glistened when he looked from side to side. A woman laughed. There was the booming of an English voice, swearing triumphantly.
Paris has many such miniature casinos, which attract the most mixed throng of any places in that mixed city. This was a long red room, in a walled house of a discreet neighborhood at Passy. A harsh colour scheme of red and crystal; a harsh sound of voices, and bad ventilation; a harsh jazz orchestra downstairs mangling tunes already execrable; poor cocktails supplied by the house, and a clientèle at once fashionable and dowdy—above everything, a gloomy tensity of thousands being played across the table. The hard light showed worn places on faces and furniture. The women used too much perfume; men took an enormous
delight in shaking out two-thousand-franc notes like tablecloths.
At a lounge near one of the windows, from which you could see the Citroën advertisement spraying coloured lights up the side of the Eiffel Tower, I sat with my friend Bencolin. He idly twirled the stem of a cocktail glass; with the points of his hair whisked up, and his black beard clipped to a sharp point, he looked even more Mephistophelian than usual. The wrinkles round his eyelids contracted in amusement, and he smiled sideways when he pointed out each newcomer round the clicking wheel.
They were interesting. There was Madame That and the Marquise This, octogenarian crones whose faces were masks of enamel and rouge, dyed hair piled like a scaffolding; they smirked and ogled at their gigolos, smooth-haired pomandered young men whose gestures were like a woman’s, but with manners and evening dress flawless. A crone’s hand would shoot out like a claw after a new pile of banknotes; then the gigolo applauded politely, and smiled in a glittering way at the leering woman. There was a Russian lady with a Japanese face and a pearl collar—not beautiful, flourishing skinny arms like wings—but several men were eager to back all her bets. There were loud Argentines, the deepest plungers, and an American too drunk to follow the play, but falling over everybody’s chair and demanding to know who wanted to start a poker game. An attendant led him suavely away to the bar … Gestures were shriller, bolder; the hard light drew lines and wrinkles, and showed up splotches of powder on bare backs; no fog of smoke could eliminate the wet odour of the bar, or any amount of music blat down that insistent song of the wheel.
‘They are fools,’ said Bencolin idly, ‘to play against a double zero.’ He glanced over as another burst of laughter came from the tables. ‘And the foreigners will play nothing else. Baccarat, chemin-de-fer—never. It must be quick, like a drink of whisky, voilà!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Their only system is the martingale, doubles or quits, and they do not last long.’
‘Is the game straight?’ I asked.