Shroud for a Nightingale

by P. D. James

  “At midnight! Not Brumfett! She goes to bed early unless she’s in town gallivanting with Matron. She’s usually brewing her last cuppa by ten-fifteen. Anyway, she was called out last night. Mr. Courtney-Briggs rang her to go over to the private ward and receive one of his patients back from the theatre. I thought everyone knew. That was just before twelve.”

  Dalgliesh asked if Sister Gearing had seen her.

  “No, but my friend did. Len, I mean. He popped his head out of the door to see if the coast was clear to go to the loo before we left and saw Brumfett wrapped in her cloak, carrying that old bag of hers, disappearing down the staircase. It was obvious that she was going out, and I guessed that she had been called back to the ward. That’s always happening to Brumfett. Mind you, it’s partly her own fault. There’s such a thing as being too conscientious.”

  It was not, thought Dalgliesh, a fault to which Sister Gearing was likely to be prone. It was difficult to imagine her tramping through the grounds at midnight in the depth of winter at the casual summons of any surgeon, however eminent. But he felt rather sorry for her. She had given him a depressing glimpse into the stultifying lack of privacy, and of the small pettiness and subterfuges with which people living in unwelcome proximity try to preserve their own privacy or invade that of others. The thought of a grown man peeping surreptitiously around the door before coming out, of two adult lovers creeping furtively down a back staircase to avoid detection, was grotesque and humiliating. He remembered the Matron’s words. “We do get to know things here; there’s no real privacy.” Even poor Brumfett’s choice of nightcap and her usual hour for bed were common knowledge. Small wonder that Nightingale House bred its own brand of neurosis, that Sister Gearing found it necessary to justify a walk with her lover in the grounds, their obvious and natural wish to prolong the final good-night, with unconvincing twaddle about the need to discuss hospital business. He found it all profoundly depressing and he wasn’t sorry when it was time to let her go.

  8

  Dalgliesh rather enjoyed his half-hour with the housekeeper, Miss Martha Collins. She was a thin, brown-skinned woman, brittle and nobbly as a dead branch who looked as if the sap had long since dried in her bones. She gave the appearance of having gradually shrunk in her clothes without having noticed it. Her working overall of thick fawn cotton hung in long creases from her narrow shoulders to mid-calf and was bunched around her waist by a schoolboy’s belt of red and blue stripes clasped with a snake buckle. Her stockings were a concertina around her ankles, and either she preferred to wear shoes at least two sizes too large, or her feet were curiously disproportionate to the rest of her body. She had appeared as soon as summoned, had plonked herself down opposite Dalgliesh, her immense feet planted firmly astride, and had eyed him with anticipatory malevolence as if about to interview a particularly recalcitrant housemaid. Throughout the interview she didn’t once smile. Admittedly there was nothing in the situation to provoke amusement but she seemed incapable of raising even the briefest smile of formal recognition. But despite these inauspicious beginnings the interview hadn’t gone badly. Dalgliesh wondered whether her acidulated tone and perversely unattractive appearance were part of a calculated persona. Perhaps some forty years earlier she had decided to become a hospital character, the beloved tyrant of fiction, treating everyone from the Matron to the junior maid with equal irreverence, and had found the characterization so successful and satisfying that she had never managed to drop it. She grumbled incessantly but it was without malice, a matter of form. He suspected that, in fact, she enjoyed her work and was neither as unhappy nor discontented as she chose to appear. She would hardly have stayed in the job for forty years if it were as intolerable as she made it sound.

  “Milk! Don’t talk to me about milk. There’s more trouble about milk in this house than the rest of the catering put together and that’s saying something. Fifteen pints a day we’re getting through even with half the house down with flu. Don’t ask me where it’s all going. I’ve stopped being responsible for it and so I told Matron. There’s a couple of bottles go up first thing each morning to the Sisters’ floor so they can make their own early tea. Two bottles between three I send up. You’d think that’d be enough for everyone. Matron is separate, of course. She gets a pint and not a drop grudged. But the trouble that milk causes! The first Sister to get at it takes all the cream, I suppose. Not very considerate, and so I told Matron. They’re lucky to get a bottle or two of Channel Island milk; no one else in the house does. There’s nothing but complaints. Sister Gearing going on because it’s too watery for her and Sister Brumfett because it’s not all Channel Island and Sister Rolfe wanting it sent up in half-pint bottles which she knows as well as I do you can’t get any more. Then there’s the milk for the students’ early tea and that cocoa and stuff they brew themselves at night. They’re supposed to sign for the bottles which they take from the fridge. The stuff isn’t grudged, but that’s the rule. Well, you take a look at the record book yourself! Nine times out of ten they can’t be troubled. And then there are the empties. They’re supposed to rinse them out and return them to the kitchen. You wouldn’t think that would be too much bother. Instead they leave the bottles about the house, in their rooms, in the cupboards, and in the utility room—half rinsed too—until the place stinks. My girls have got enough to do without running around after the students and their empties, and so I told Matron.

  “What do you mean, was I in the kitchen when the Burt twins took their pint? You know I was. I said so to the other policeman. Where else would I be at that hour of the day? I’m always in my kitchen by quarter to seven and it was nearly three minutes past when the Burt twins came in. No, I didn’t hand the bottle to them. They helped themselves from the fridge. It’s not my job to wait hand and foot on the students and so I told Matron. But there was nothing wrong with that milk when it left my kitchen. It wasn’t delivered until six-thirty and I’ve got enough to do before breakfast without messing about putting disinfectant into the milk. Besides, I’ve got an alibi. I was with Mrs. Muncie from six forty-five onwards. She’s the daily woman who comes in from the town to lend a hand when I’m short. You can see her any time you like but I don’t suppose you’ll get much out of her. The poor soul hasn’t got much between the ears. Come to think of it, I doubt whether she’d notice if I spent the whole morning poisoning the milk. But she was with me for what it’s worth. And I was with her all the time. No popping out every other minute to the lavatory for me, thank you. I do all that sort of thing at the proper time.

  “The lavatory disinfectant? I thought you’d be asking about that. I fill up the bottles myself from the big tin they send over once a week from the main hospital store. It’s not really my job but I don’t like to leave it to the housemaids. They’re so careless. They’d only get the stuff slopped all over the lavatory floors. I refilled that bottle in the downstairs W.C. the day before Nurse Pearce died so it must have been nearly full. Some of the students bother to put a little down the bowl when they’re finished with the lavatory but most of them don’t. You’d think student nurses would be particular about little things like that, but they’re no better than other young people. The stuff is mostly used by the maids when they’ve cleaned the W.C. bowl. All the lavatories get cleaned once a day. I’m very particular about having clean lavatories. The downstairs one was due to be cleaned by Morag Smith after lunch, but Nurse Goodale and Nurse Pardoe noticed that the bottle was missing before then. I’m told that the other policeman found it empty among the bushes at the back of the house. And who put it there, I’d like to know?

  “No, you can’t see Morag Smith. Didn’t they tell you? She’s on a day’s leave. She went off after tea yesterday, lucky for her. They can’t pin this latest spot of bother on Morag. No, I don’t know whether she went home. I didn’t inquire. The maids are enough responsibility when they’re under my nose in Nightingale House. I don’t concern myself with what they do on their days off. Just as well from some of the th
ings I hear. She’ll be back late tonight more than likely and Matron has left instructions that she’s to move to the Resident Staff Hostel. This place is too dangerous for us now apparently. Well, no one’s shifting me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to manage in the morning if Morag doesn’t show her face until just before breakfast. I can’t control my staff if they’re not under my eyes and so I told Matron. Not that Morag’s much bother. She’s as obstinate as they come but she’s not a bad worker once you get her started. And if they try to tell you that Morag Smith interfered with the drip-feed, don’t you believe them. The girl may be a bit dense but she’s not a raving lunatic. I’ll not have my staff slandered without cause.

  “And now I’ll tell you something, Mr. Detective.” She raised her thin rump from her chair, leaned forward across the desk and fixed Dalgliesh with her beady eyes. He willed himself to meet them without blinking and they stared at each other like a couple of wrestlers before a bout.

  “Yes, Miss Collins?”

  She stuck a lean nodular finger and prodded him sharply in the chest. Dalgliesh winced.

  “No one had any right to take that bottle out of the lavatory without my permission or to use it for any other purpose except for cleaning the lavatory bowl. Nobody!”

  It was apparent where in Miss Collins’s eyes the full enormity of the crime had lain.

  9

  At twenty minutes to one, Mr. Courtney-Briggs appeared. He knocked briskly at the door, came in without waiting for an invitation, and said curtly: “I can give you a quarter of an hour now, Dalgliesh, if it’s convenient.”

  His tone assumed that it would be. Dalgliesh assented and indicated the chair. The surgeon looked across at Sergeant Masterson sitting impassively with his notebook at the ready, hesitated, then turned the chair so that its back was to the Sergeant. Then he seated himself and slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket. The cigarette case he drew out was of finely tooled gold and so slim that it hardly looked functional. He offered a cigarette to Dalgliesh but not to Masterson and seemed neither surprised nor particularly interested at the Superintendent’s refusal. He lit his own. The hands cupped around the lighter were large, square-fingered; not the sensitive hands of a functional surgeon, but strong carpenter’s hands, beautifully cared for.

  Dalgliesh, overtly busy with his papers, observed the man. He was big but not yet fat. The formal suit fitted him almost too well, containing a sleek well-fed body and enhancing the effect of latent power only imperfectly controlled. He could still be called handsome. His long hair brushed straight back from a high forehead was strong and dark, except for one single white strand. Dalgliesh wondered whether it were bleached. His eyes were too small for the large, rather florid face, but were well shaped and set wide apart. They gave nothing away.

  Dalgliesh knew that it had been Mr. Courtney-Briggs who had been mainly responsible for the Chief Constable calling in the Yard. From Inspector Bailey’s somewhat bitter account during their brief colloquy when Dalgliesh had taken over the case, it was easy to understand why. The surgeon had made himself a nuisance from the beginning and his motives, if they were capable of rational explanation, raised interesting speculations. At first he had asserted vigorously that Nurse Pearce had obviously been murdered, that it was unthinkable that anyone connected with the hospital could have been concerned with the crime, and that the local police had a duty to proceed on this assumption and to find and arrest the killer with a minimum of delay. When their investigations yielded no immediate results, he became restive. He was a man used to exercising power and he was certainly not without it. There were eminent people in London who owed their lives to him and some of them had considerable nuisance value. Telephone calls, some tactful and half-apologetic, others frankly critical, were made both to the Chief Constable and to the Yard. As the Inspector in charge of the investigation became more convinced that Nurse Pearce’s death was the result of a practical joke which had tragically misfired, so Mr. Courtney-Briggs and his coagitators proclaimed more loudly that she had been murdered, and pressed more strongly for the case to be handed over to the Yard. And then Nurse Fallon had been found dead. It could be expected that the local C.I.D. would be galvanized into fresh activity, that the diffuse light which had played over the first crime would sharpen and focus on this second death. And it was at this moment that Mr. Courtney-Briggs had chosen to telephone the Chief Constable to announce that no further activity was necessary, that it was obvious to him that Nurse Fallon had committed suicide, that this could only have been in remorse at the tragic result of the practical joke which had killed her colleague, and that it was now in the hospital’s interest to close the case with the minimum of fuss before nurse recruitment and indeed the whole future of the hospital was jeopardized. The police are not unused to these sudden quirks of temperament, which is not to say that they welcome them. Dalgliesh thought that it must have been with considerable satisfaction that the Chief Constable decided that, in all the circumstances, it would be prudent to call in the Yard to investigate both the deaths.

  During the week following Nurse Pearce’s death, Courtney-Briggs had even rung up Dalgliesh, who had been his patient three years earlier. It had been a case of uncomplicated appendicitis, and although Dalgliesh’s vanity was gratified by the smallness and neatness of the resultant scar, he felt that the surgeon’s expertise had been adequately rewarded at the time. He had certainly no wish to be used for Courtney-Briggs’s private ends. The telephone call had been embarrassing and he had resented it. He was interested to see that the surgeon had apparently decided that this was an incident it would be advisable for both of them to forget.

  Without lifting his eyes from his papers, Dalgliesh said: “I understand that you take the view that Miss Fallon killed herself?”

  “Of course. It’s the obvious explanation. You’re not suggesting that someone else put stuff into her whisky? Why should they?”

  “There’s the problem, isn’t there, of the missing container? That is, if it were poison. We shan’t know until we get the autopsy report.”

  “What problem? There’s no problem. The beaker was opaque, heat insulated. She could have put the stuff into it earlier that evening. No one would have noticed. Or she could have carried a powder in a slip of paper and flushed it down the lavatory. The container’s no problem. Incidentally, it wasn’t a corrosive this time. That much was evident when I saw the body.”

  “Were you the first doctor on the scene?”

  “No. I wasn’t in the hospital when they found her. Dr. Snelling saw her. He’s the general physician who looks after the nurses here. He realized at once that there was nothing to be done. I went across to have a look at the body as soon as I heard the news. I arrived at the hospital just before nine. By then the police had arrived, of course. The local people, I mean. I can’t think why they weren’t left to get on with it. I rang the Chief Constable to make my views known. Incidentally, Miles Honeyman tells me that she died about midnight. I saw him just as he was leaving. We were at medical school together.”

  “So I understand.”

  “You were wise to call him in. I gather he’s generally considered to be the best.”

  He spoke complacently, success condescending to recognize success. His criteria were hardly subtle, thought Dalgliesh. Money, prestige, public recognition, power. Yes, Courtney-Briggs would always demand the best for himself, confident of his ability to pay for it.

  Dalgliesh said: “She was pregnant. Did you know?”

  “So Honeyman told me. No, I didn’t know. These things happen, even today when birth control is reliable and easily obtained. But I should have expected a girl of her intelligence to be on the Pill.”

  Dalgliesh remembered the scene that morning in the library when Mr. Courtney-Briggs had known the girl’s age to a day. He asked his next question without apology.

  “Did you know her well?” The implication was plain and the surgeon did not reply for a moment. Dalgliesh had not expected hi
m to bluster or threaten and he did neither. There was an increased respect in the sharp look which he gave his interrogator.

  “For a time, yes.” He paused. “You could say I knew her intimately.”

  “Was she your mistress?”

  Courtney-Briggs looked at him, impassive, considering. Then he said: “That’s putting it rather formally. We slept together fairly regularly during her first six months here. Are you objecting?”

  “It’s hardly for me to object if she didn’t. Presumably she was willing?”

  “You could say that.”

  “When did it end?”

  “I thought I told you. It lasted until the end of her first year. That’s a year and a half ago.”

  “Did you quarrel?”

  “No. She decided she’d, shall we say, exhausted the possibilities. Some women like variety. I do myself. I wouldn’t have taken her on if I’d thought she was the type to make trouble. And don’t get me wrong. I don’t make it a practice to sleep with student nurses. I’m reasonably fastidious.”

  “Wasn’t it difficult to keep the affair secret? There’s very little privacy in a hospital.”

  “You have romantic ideas, Superintendent. We didn’t kiss and cuddle in the sluice room. When I said I slept with her I meant just that. I don’t use euphemisms for sex. She came to my Wimpole Street flat when she had a night off and we slept there. I haven’t a resident man there and my house is near Selborne. The porter at Wimpole Street must have known, but he can keep his mouth shut. There wouldn’t be many tenants left in the building if he couldn’t. There wasn’t any risk, provided that she didn’t talk, and she wasn’t a talker. Not that I would have minded particularly. There are certain areas of private behaviour in which I do as I like. You too no doubt.”

  “So it wasn’t your child?”