A Mind to Murder

by P. D. James

  “Then the inevitable happened. Helen began to crack. James had left her with the Surrey house and was living with me in the flat. He had to see her fairly often. He didn’t say very much at first, but I knew what was happening. She was ill, of course, and we both knew it. She had played out the role of the patient, uncomplaining wife and, according to the novels and the films, her husband should, by now, have been returning to her. And James wasn’t. He kept most of it from me, but I had some idea what it was doing to him, the scenes, the tears, the entreaties, the threats of suicide. One minute she was going through with the divorce, the next she would never give him his freedom. She couldn’t, of course. I see that now. It wasn’t hers to give. It’s degrading to talk about a husband as if he’s a dog chained up in the back yard. All the time that this was happening, I was realizing more and more that I couldn’t go on. Something that had been a slow process over the years came to a head. There’s no point in talking about it or trying to explain. It isn’t relevant to your inquiry, is it? Nine months ago I started to receive instruction with the hope of being received into the Catholic church. When that happened, Helen withdrew her petition and James went back to her. I think he no longer cared what happened to him or where he went. But you can see, can’t you, that he had no reason to hate Bolam. I was the enemy.”

  Dalgliesh thought that there could have been very little struggle. Her rosy, healthy face with the broad and slightly tip-tilted nose, the wide, cheerful mouth, was ill-suited to tragedy. He recalled how Dr. Baguley had looked, seen in the light of Miss Bolam’s desk lamp. It was stupid and presumptuous to try to assess suffering by the lines on a face or the look in the eyes. Miss Saxon’s mind was probably as tough and resilient as her body. It did not mean that she felt less because she could withstand more. But he felt profoundly sorry for Baguley, rejected by his mistress at the moment of the greatest trial in favour of a private happiness which he could neither share nor understand. Probably no one could fully know the magnitude of that betrayal. Dalgliesh did not pretend to understand Miss Saxon. It wasn’t hard to imagine what some people at the clinic would make of it. The facile explanations came easily to mind. But he could not believe that Fredrica Saxon had taken refuge in religion from her own sexuality or had ever refused to face reality.

  He thought of some of the things she had said about Enid Bolam. “Who would suppose that Bolam would want to see Anouilh? I suppose she was sent a free ticket … Even Bolam could recognize love when she saw it … She could make practically anything sound vulgar.” People did not automatically become kind because they had become religious. Yet there had been no real malice in her words. She spoke what she thought and would be equally detached about her own motives. She was probably the best judge of character in the clinic.

  Suddenly, and in defiance of orthodoxy, Dalgliesh asked: “Who do you think killed her, Miss Saxon?”

  “Judging by character and the nature of the crime and taking no account of mysterious telephone calls from the basement, creaking lifts and apparent alibis?”

  “Judging by character and the nature of the crime.”

  She said without hesitation and with no apparent reluctance: “I’d have said it was Peter Nagle.”

  Dalgliesh felt a stab of disappointment. It was irrational to have thought that she might actually know.

  “Why Nagle?” he asked.

  “Partly because I think this was a masculine crime. The stabbing is significant. I can’t see a woman killing in just that way. Faced with an unconscious victim I think a woman would strangle. Then there’s the chisel. To use it with such expertise suggests an identification of the weapon with the killer. Why use it otherwise? He could have struck her again and again with the fetish.”

  “Messy, noisy and less sure,” said Dalgliesh.

  “But the chisel was only sure in the hands of a man who had confidence in his ability to use it, someone who is literally ‘good with his hands.’ I can’t see Dr. Steiner killing in that way, for instance. He couldn’t even knock in a nail without breaking the hammer.”

  Dalgliesh was inclined to agree that Dr. Steiner was innocent. His clumsiness with tools had been mentioned by more than one member of the clinic staff. Admittedly he had lied in denying that he knew where the chisel was kept, but Dalgliesh judged that he had acted from fear rather than guilt. And his shamefaced confession of falling asleep while awaiting Mr. Burge had the ring of truth.

  Dalgliesh said: “The identification of the chisel with Nagle is so certain that I think we were meant to suspect him. And you do?”

  “Oh, no! I know he couldn’t have done it. I only answered the question as you posed it. I was judging by character and the nature of the crime.”

  They had finished their coffee now and Dalgliesh thought that she would want to go. But she seemed in no hurry. After a moment’s pause, she said: “I have one confession to make; on another person’s behalf actually. It’s Cully. Nothing important but something you ought to know and I promised I’d tell you about it. Poor old Cully is scared out of his wits and they aren’t plentiful at the best of times.”

  “I knew he was lying about something,” said Dalgliesh. “He saw someone passing down the hall, I suppose.”

  “Oh, no! Nothing as useful as that. It’s about the missing rubber apron from the art-therapy department. I gather you thought that the murderer might have worn it. Well, Cully borrowed it from the department last Monday to wear while he emulsion-painted his kitchen. You know what a mess paint makes. He didn’t ask Miss Bolam if he could take it because he knew what the answer would be and he couldn’t ask Mrs. Baumgarten because she’s away sick. He meant to bring it back on Friday but, when Sister was checking the inventory with your sergeant and they asked him if he’d seen it, he lost his head and said ‘no.’ He’s not very bright and he was terrified that you’d suspect him of the murder if he owned up.”

  Dalgliesh asked her when Cully had told her of this. “I knew he had the apron because it just happened that I saw him take it. I guessed that he’d be in a state about it so I went round to see him yesterday morning. His stomach gets upset when he worries and I thought someone had better keep an eye on him.”

  “Where is the apron now?” asked Dalgliesh. Miss Saxon laughed.

  “Disposed about London in half a dozen litter baskets if they haven’t been emptied. Poor old Cully daren’t put it in his own dustbin in case it was searched by the police and couldn’t burn it because he lives in a council flat with electric heating and no stove. So he waited until his wife was in bed then sat up until eleven cutting it into pieces with the kitchen scissors. He put the pieces into a number of paper bags, shoved the bags into a holdall and took a 36 bus up the Harrow Road until he was well away from his home ground. Then he slipped one of the bags into each litter bin he came across and dropped the metal buttons down the gutter grating. It was a formidable undertaking and the poor fellow could hardly creep home what with fear, tiredness—he’d lost the last bus—and the bellyache. He wasn’t in too good a shape when I called next morning but I did manage to convince him that it wasn’t a matter of life and death—particularly death. I told him I’d let you know about it.”

  “Thank you,” said Dalgliesh gravely. “You haven’t any other confessions to pass on, I suppose? Or have you a conscientious objection to handing over an unfortunate psychopath to justice?”

  She laughed, pulling on her coat and tying the scarf over her dark, springing hair.

  “Oh, no! If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I don’t like murder and I’m quite law-abiding, really. But I didn’t know we were talking about justice. That’s your word. Like Portia, I feel that in the course of justice none of us would see salvation. Please, I would much rather pay for my own coffee.”

  She doesn’t want to feel I bought information from her, thought Dalgliesh, not even a shilling’s worth. He resisted the temptation to say that the coffee could come from expenses, wondering a little at this impulse to sarcasm which she a
roused in him. He liked her but there was something about her certainty, her self-sufficiency, which he found irritating. Perhaps what he felt was envy.

  As they left the café, he asked her whether she was on her way to the Steen.

  “Not today. I don’t have a session on Monday mornings. But I shall be there tomorrow.”

  She thanked him formally for the coffee and they parted. He turned eastwards towards the Steen and she disappeared in the direction of the Strand. As he watched her slim, dark figure swinging out of sight, he pictured Cully creeping through the night with his pathetic bundle, half petrified with fright. He was not surprised that the old porter had confided so fully in Fredrica Saxon; in Cully’s place, he would probably have done the same. She had, thought Dalgliesh, given him a great deal of interesting information. But what she hadn’t been able to give him was an alibi for Dr. Baguley or for herself.

  Mrs. Bostock, shorthand notebook at the ready, sat beside Dr. Etherege’s chair, her elegant legs crossed at the knees and her flamingo head lifted to receive, with becoming gravity, the medical director’s instructions.

  “Superintendent Dalgliesh has telephoned to say that he will be here shortly. He wants to see certain members of the staff again and has asked for an interview with me before lunch.”

  “I don’t see how you can fit him in before lunch, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock repressively. “There’s the Professional Staff Committee at two-thirty and you haven’t had time to look at the agenda. Dr. Talmage from the States is booked for twelve-thirty and I was hoping for an hour’s dictation from eleven a.m.”

  “That will have to wait. The superintendent will be taking up a great deal of your own time, I’m afraid. He has some questions about the working of the clinic.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Doctor. Do you mean he’s interested in the general administrative arrangements?” Mrs. Bostock’s tone was a nice blend of surprise and disapproval.

  “Apparently so,” replied Dr. Etherege. “He mentioned the appointments diary, the diagnostic index, the arrangements for registering incoming and outgoing post and the medical-record system. You had better deal with him personally. If I want to dictate, I’ll send for Miss Priddy.”

  “I’ll do what I can to help, naturally,” said Mrs. Bostock. “It’s unfortunate that he should have picked one of our busiest mornings. It would be simpler to arrange a programme for him if I knew what he had in mind.”

  “We should all like to know that, I imagine,” replied the medical director. “I should just answer his questions as fully as you can. And please get Cully to ring me as soon as he wants to come up.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock, recognizing defeat. And took her leave.

  Downstairs, in the ECT room, Dr. Baguley twitched himself into his white coat, helped by Nurse Bolam.

  “Mrs. King will be here for her LSD treatment on Wednesday as usual. I think it will be best if we give it in one of the PSW rooms on the third floor. Miss Kettle isn’t in on Wednesday evenings, is she? Have a word with her. Alternatively we could use Miss Kallinski’s room or one of the small interviewing rooms at the back.”

  Nurse Bolam said: “It won’t be so convenient for you, Doctor. It means coming up two flights when I phone.”

  “That isn’t going to kill me. I may look in my dotage but I still have the use of my legs.”

  “There’s the question of a bed, Doctor. I suppose we could put up one of the recovery stretchers from the ECT clinic.”

  “Get Nagle to see to it. I don’t want you alone in that basement.”

  “I’m not in the least frightened, really, Dr. Baguley.”

  Dr. Baguley lost his temper.

  “For God’s sake, use your brain, Nurse. Of course you’re frightened! There’s a murderer loose somewhere in this clinic and no one—except one person—is going to be happy about staying alone for any length of time in the basement. If you really aren’t frightened, then have the good sense to conceal the fact, especially from the police. Where’s Sister? In the general office?”

  He picked up the receiver and dialled jerkily. “Sister? Baguley here. I’ve just told Nurse Bolam that I don’t feel happy about using the basement room for LSD this week.”

  Sister Ambrose’s voice came back clearly: “Just as you like, Doctor, of course. But if the basement is more convenient and we could get a relief nurse from one of the general hospitals in the group for the ECT clinic, I should be quite happy to stay downstairs with Nurse Bolam. We could special Mrs. King together.”

  Dr. Baguley said shortly: “I want you in the ECT clinic as usual, Sister, and the LSD patient will go upstairs. I hope that’s finally understood.”

  In the medical director’s room two hours later, Dalgliesh placed three black metal boxes on Dr. Etherege’s desk. The boxes, which had small round holes punched in each of the shorter sides, were packed with buff-coloured cards. It was the clinic diagnostic index. Dalgliesh said: “Mrs. Bostock has explained this to me. If I’ve understood her correctly, each of these cards represents a patient. The information on the case record is coded and the patient’s code punched on the card. The cards are punched with even rows of small holes and the space between each hole is numbered. By punching any number with the hand machine I cut out the card between the two adjacent holes to form an oblong slit. If this metal rod is then inserted through, say, hole number 20 on the outside of the box, and pushed right through the cards and the box is rotated, any card which has been punched through that number will stand out. It is, in fact, one of the simplest of the many punch-card systems on the market.”

  “Yes. We use it principally as a diagnostic index and for research.” If the medical director was surprised at Dalgliesh’s interest, he made no sign.

  The superintendent went on: “Mrs. Bostock tells me that you don’t code from the case record until the patient has completed treatment and that the system was started in 1952. That means that patients at present attending won’t yet have a card—unless, of course, they were treated here earlier—and that patients who completed treatments before 1952 aren’t included.”

  “Yes. We should like to include the earlier cases, but it’s a question of staff time. The coding and punching are time-consuming and it’s the kind of job that gets put on one side. At present we’re coding the February 1962 discharges, so we’re quite a bit behind.”

  “But once the patient’s card is punched, you can select any diagnosis or category of patient at will?”

  “Yes, indeed.” The medical director gave his slow, sweet smile. “I won’t say that we can pick out immediately all the indigenous depressives with blue-eyed grandmothers who were born in wedlock because we haven’t coded information about grandparents. But anything coded can be extracted without trouble.”

  Dalgliesh laid a slim manilla file on the desk. “Mrs. Bostock has lent me the coding instructions. I see that you code sex, age, marital status, address by local authority area, diagnosis, consultant who treated the patient, dates of first and subsequent attendances and a considerable amount of detail about symptoms, treatment and progress. You also code social class. I find that interesting.”

  “It’s unusual, certainly,” replied Dr. Etherege. “Chiefly, I suppose, because it can be a purely subjective assessment. But we wanted it because it’s sometimes useful in research. As you see we use the Registrar-General’s classes. They’re accurate enough for our purposes.”

  Dalgliesh ran the thin metal rod through his fingers.

  “So I could select, for example, the cards of patients in class one who were treated eight to ten years ago, were married with a family and were suffering from, say, sexual aberration, kleptomania or any other socially unacceptable personality disorder.”

  “You could,” admitted the medical director quietly. “But I can’t see why you should want to.”

  “Blackmail, Doctor. It occurs to me that we have here a neatly contrived apparatus for the pre-selection of a victim. You push
through the rod and out pops your card. The card bears a number on the top right-hand corner. And down in the basement record room the medical record is filed and waiting.”

  The medical director said: “This is nothing but guesswork. There isn’t a shred of evidence.”

  “There’s no proof, certainly, but it’s a reasonable possibility. Consider the facts. On Wednesday afternoon Miss Bolam saw the group secretary after the House Committee meeting and told him all was well at the clinic. At twelve-fifteen on Friday morning she telephoned to ask for an urgent visit because ‘something is going on here that he ought to know about.’ It was something serious and continuing and something that started before her time here, that is, more than three years ago.”

  “Whatever it was, we’ve no evidence that it was the reason for her death.”

  “No.”

  “In fact, if the murderer wanted to prevent Miss Bolam seeing Lauder, he left it rather late. There was nothing to stop the group secretary turning up here any time after one o’clock.”

  Dalgliesh said: “She was told over the telephone that he couldn’t arrive until after the JCC meeting that evening. That leads us to ask who could have overheard the telephone call. Cully was officially on the board, but he was unwell most of the day and, from time to time, other members of the staff took over, sometimes only for a few minutes. Nagle, Mrs. Bostock, Miss Priddy and even Mrs. Shorthouse all say that they helped on the board. Nagle thinks he took over for a short time at midday before he went out for his lunchtime beer but says that he can’t be sure. Nor can Cully. No one admits to having put through this particular call.”

  “They might not know if they had,” replied Dr. Etherege. “We’re insistent that the operator doesn’t listen in to calls. That, after all, is important in our work. Miss Bolam may have merely asked for group offices. She must put through calls fairly often to the finance and supplies departments as well as the group secretary. The operator couldn’t know there was anything special about this call. She might even have asked for an outside line and put through the call herself. That is possible, of course, with the PABX system.”