by Janet Roger
She cast a glance around four blank walls stenciled with bunches of violets and at a thin wedge of daylight at the bedroom door. “Well, obviously not through the window. You didn’t answer your doorbell. The lady cleaning in the bar downstairs said you hadn’t long come in. She gave me your door key.”
“Bridget? She wouldn’t give even the Holy Virgin my key.”
She reached for the clutch purse, opened it and tossed the key on the pillow. “You’re confusing me with someone else. And the world still turns while you sleep, Detective. I had two urgent calls this morning. The first was Guy Beaufort. The second was to perform a postmortem on the young nurse who so fascinated you last night in the Viaduct. I know you’ll remember her, because the minute she walked through the door was the minute I lost your attention.” She jerked the cup out of my hand and set it down on the night table. “Shall I tell you what I think? I think you knew perfectly well Nurse Greer would be in the Viaduct last night. I think you already knew she was in danger, and since I can recognize a hospital dressing when I see one, I also think you saw her after I left. So now I want you to listen to me very carefully. After you telephoned Guy this morning, he called to ask what I thought of you, which is no easy question for me to answer. In the end, I said all we could do was trust your judgment, because I had absolutely no idea what you meant to do or why. But be clear about this. I will not—will not—do that for you ever again. I will never again cover for you or give you the benefit of the doubt or be party to what you do, when you always and deliberately tell me nothing.” She was pounding her knuckles in my chest, leaning on every syllable until her hair tangled in my mouth. The effort made her hiss. “Do. You. Hear. Me?”
I heard. But the way she smelled of a walk in a cottage garden was beginning to make my teeth ache. She let up on the chest while she got her breath and I said, “Doctor, my judgment lately doesn’t recommend itself to anybody. Nurse Greer died this morning because I wasn’t there. Dillys Valentine died Christmas Day because I was. What do I do next time? Toss a coin? But what I know is, Blanche’s boy didn’t murder anybody; not the professor or the nurse or the nurse’s neighbor, and not Dillys Valentine either. Take it from me. I was there and it wasn’t Henry who sapped me. He doesn’t have the wrist. I called Guy Beaufort because my knowing it counts for nothing. Henry is short on alibi and Littomy will put him up for every murder he’s got available. There’s another story in there. There has to be. I have no idea where it begins or with who, only that somebody is burying it deeper with every passing day. Keeping Henry out of a police cell buys me some time, that’s all.”
She hooked her hair behind an ear and stayed where I could see the whites of her eyes, then snapped upright, smoothed out her skirt and stood up. “My preliminary report on Nurse Greer is in your sitting room. Littomy won’t receive his copy till later this morning. I can’t delay it any longer. We recovered the bullet and it indicates the same gun that killed Jarrett and Garfield. I imagine it’s what you expected.”
I swung my head off the pillow and my heels off the blanket and stood up, lifted the astrakhan off the foot of the bed and helped her in it as if we were leaving for the opera. While she pulled on her gloves I gave some thought to what I might have expected. Whoever murdered Nurse Greer had got as close to her as he got to Garfield and to Jarrett. Close enough to point a .38 between her eyes and squeeze. The sight and the sound and the smell of it might have sickened him, or merely raised his pulse. Or both at the same time. I said, “Jarrett almost got away. It taught his killer that a bullet in the head is the way to be sure. One more life just proved it.”
She stiffened at that. “Two more lives. Read my report.” The air went out of the room. I put a hand out to the wall, steadied against it and thought back to a candlelight nativity and a crib in the straw, and a nurse who spelled out what she was doing there in case I could be dumb enough to miss it: As a matter of fact, just lately I light two. Kathryn Swinford wheeled around, her head tilted to one side, the astrakhan collar bunched in both hands under her chin. She gave a small gasp of surprise. “You really had no idea, had you? Nurse Greer was going to have a little girl.” The tip of her tongue put a smudge in her lipstick, her forehead cleared and she started unbuttoning the coat. “I’ll boil some water. You need to shave.”
TWENTY-NINE
Smithfield market was already shuttered for the day. The City trembled beneath a sky of pounding blue. A police officer shifted foot to foot outside the garden in the square and had nobody to turn away. I went through the gatehouse to St. Bartholomew’s churchyard with a razor wind under my eyelids, squeezing out tears with a thumb. In a niche over the arch the flayed saint looked as if he ought to be freezing to death.
Both hospital switchboard operators said Nurse Greer hadn’t telephoned anybody overnight. One of them remembered putting through an incoming call before five a.m. but nothing about her caller. To walk home all she had to do was follow the high wall along the hospital side of the square, pass by the churchyard entrance and turn into Cloth Fair, then turn again into Cloth Court. Instead, with the air freezing hard and an ice rink underfoot, she’d crossed to the garden at the center of the square and walked in through the gates before dawn. The late morning editions said nobody had seen the nurse exit the building or heard the shot that killed her. The hospital gateman was still talking to City Police. As for the intern, he’d overrun his shift, left the hospital late and saw the body lying in a heap in the snow. It was all I had. Not much more than anybody else who read a newspaper.
The church porch was showing no signs of a murder, the walls and floor had been scrubbed clean. I hadn’t any idea of going back inside, then smelled incense on the air, pushed on the door and walked toward daylight angling through the shadows. I followed the same squat columns I’d followed three mornings before, passed by the Christmas crib and went along the line of the wall as far as two wrought-iron gates open on a lady chapel behind the main altar. It had rows of straight-back chairs set facing an altar of its own, and at the end of one of the rows, sitting pressed against a heating pipe running under a high window, a woman in a black velvet coat wrapped close around her calves. She sat with her head bowed and a glove stretched taut between her fingers, her wrists rested across a black patent bag in her lap. A kneeler lifted her toes and high-heels off the chill of a stone-flagged floor.
There was a glass cabinet against the north wall of the chapel, draped either side with an RAF standard and a Union flag. I moved over to it. It had a notice under the glass that said London City Squadron and a typed committee letter inviting donations to a memorial plaque for its airmen killed in action. Below the invitation ran the names of the dead. I read down the rollcall and found the one name I recognized. A voice behind me caught softly and said, “Charlie.” I turned around. “Estelle always seemed to hold a fascination for him and vice versa.” And when I didn’t answer added, “Estelle was my sister. Isn’t she the reason you’re here?”
The woman at the end of the seat row left it at that. She wore her dark red hair caught up in a hat of wide, black velvet, with a veil so fine it floated on her breath. We looked at each other for long seconds. Then she shivered extravagantly and I sidestepped along the row behind and put a hand under her elbow. “Mrs. Allynson, sitting in here is a ticket to pneumonia. Why don’t we go to the house?” She thought about that and nodded, put on her glove and got to her feet and moved along the row. And if she was taller in heels than I remembered, the walk hadn’t changed at all.
Inside five minutes we were standing in her sister’s kitchen on Cloth Court, thin curtains drawn aside on the backyard and daylight cutting stripes across the room. Mrs. Allynson brought an electric heater over to where we stood, dragged two chairs from under the kitchen table and lit a flame under a kettle on the stove. She lifted her veil with both hands and took out a pin, slid out from under the hat and touched her hair back in place. I was halfway to sitting, watching two short cr
eases knit across her forehead, when she said, “If we’re to talk about Estelle, please let’s not be maudlin about it. I’ve spent two hours with policemen already this morning.” And then, “Is something wrong?”
Not wrong. Only that Mrs. Allynson had her sister’s glossed brown eyes, so dark they were practically purple. So exactly the same that the last five hours peeled away with her veil and I was back in the garden on the square again, hardly able to breathe. The nurse still danced her reel there in the snow, teeth parted, cheeks hollowed, her bottom lip dropped in a look of mild surprise. No different. Except now she had eyes to gaze with, up through branches glittering with frost, in blank wonder at the throbbing constellations on a night as clear as glass. I shook the apparition off. “I was… wondering.”
“Wondering what?” She stared and waited.
I asked the first thing that came to mind. “You knew the flight lieutenant?”
“Charlie Ross?” Her lips squeezed and weighed what they ought to say, then said it anyway. “Both of the Greer girls had a crush on the flight lieutenant. What girl didn’t? We shared practically everything, but Charlie was smitten with Estelle. Did you know he flew with my husband?” She dropped her gloves and hat on the oilcloth on the kitchen table, then went to a corner cabinet by the window. “No, why would you? My husband was older of course. Always the lawyer, but he’d flown before the war. Quite early on his lungs were burned in a bad landing and he never flew again. Charlie, on the other hand, seemed indestructible, until one day he went chasing buzz-bombs over the Channel and didn’t come back. Or were you asking out of politeness?” She was up on her toes, reaching at the back of the cabinet. “I don’t intend making tea, by the way.”
You guessed she wouldn’t. Mrs. Allynson brought over two tumblers and a quarter of cheap rum, poured two slugs and made the kind of conversation anybody will make when they’re dressed for deep mourning and the highballs are under par. “My husband found this house for Estelle. I was never sure whether she liked it or simply hated it less than the nurses’ residence. Drake & Co. owns most of the court apparently.” She carried the kettle over to the glasses and filled the room with the scent of thin liquor.
“So Nurse Greer had to get over the flight lieutenant. What then?”
The question bought me a sigh. “Oh, do please stop this. Charlie Ross can’t possibly be interesting to either of us.” She took the seat opposite, her glass held against her lip, and watched me pull the nurse’s letter rack across the table. I riffled through for a torn-off flap of envelope with a message written on, and when I found it, flattened it on the oilcloth where she could read The Viaduct tomorrow.
“Mrs. Allynson, from the time she found her neighbor’s body your sister was running scared. Scared of what or who is something I have to guess at, but you would know. You just said how the Greer girls shared everything, and the two of you talked last night.”
Two hours of police interview is meant to show. According to Mrs. Allynson it had left her feeling ragged, but she was making it hard to tell. She wore a sketch of powder on her nose, a soft bow of red on her mouth, fitted black silk and blacker velvet from the toes on up, and a wave of dark-cherry hair that brushed her cheek every time she gave me the quizzical look. She unbuttoned her coat, cool and untroubled, and let it fall loose at her sides, blinked long lashes and waited for what came next. “You don’t want to seem disloyal, so I’ll make it easy. Your sister’s story about what happened Christmas morning didn’t make sense then or now. After she found her neighbor’s body and before she called the police, she came back here to the house. Leaving out that small detail gave her fifteen or twenty minutes unexplained, so she stretched her story to account for them. It was a cockeyed thing to do, a lie that put her in the frame for Jarrett’s murder, and even though she pretended not to notice, her timings still didn’t fit. I’m hired by your husband’s employer, Mrs. Allynson. What was scaring your sister is something you’re supposed to tell me.”
She slid one knee across the other, breathed the rum to clear her head and shifted in her seat. “I really don’t know what to tell you. She was upset when we met last night, hardly making sense.” She took another deep breath for both of us. “All she would say was that there was someone else there when she came out of the church. In the darkness Estelle didn’t see who, and anyway he was gone before she understood what had happened.” Mrs. Allynson looked up and made astonished eyes. “I admit I was angry with her! How could she be so idiotic not to tell that to the police? When I asked what she intended to do, all she said was that she wanted to talk to you. I told her if she thought you might help, then for goodness sake do it quickly.” Mrs. Allynson put her elbows on the table, crossed her fists under her chin and let sisterhood churn in her eyes.
“You told all this to McAlester?”
“Not that Estelle wanted to talk to you. It only seemed to complicate things. The rest…well, yes.”
“So, at around four-thirty Christmas morning your sister falls across her dead neighbor and sees his likely killer escape. She can’t identify the mystery man, but he doesn’t know that, and it makes her so nervous she leaves him out of her story, right up until last night in the Viaduct. By that time there are two more murders and finally she’s so scared she admits to you she’s been lying. Is that what you told McAlester?”
The question knit across her brow. “Something of the sort, yes. But I think you’re being very harsh.”
A dull glow from the heater itched at my shins. I got up and moved to the door, stopped there and put my back against it. “The flight lieutenant was killed three years ago. Who did your sister know since?”
She turned the question over and decided it was shop-soiled. “In the way I think you mean, no one I knew of. We had no secrets from each other.” As flat as that, as if the Greer sisters had shared secrets as easily as they might have shared Charlie Ross, or whatever else there wasn’t enough of to go around.
“Mrs. Allynson, later today McAlester will get a postmortem report telling him Nurse Greer was going to have a child. So best give some thought to the men in her life, because when he’s through with the report McAlester will be back, asking the same question I just did. Tell him your sister didn’t have any men friends—not in the way you think he means—and harsh will not begin to describe his manner.”
She touched the wave of cherry hair across her cheek with a look of frank amazement. Up until now she’d been good—better than good—in a repertory that had stretched from ice-cool untouchable to concerned big sister leveling with me across the kitchen table. But this was her best yet. The purple-brown eyes switched from shock to bewilderment to disbelief and back again. So seamless, it might have been for real.
THIRTY
The telephone began ringing before I shut my office door. I raised the window blind and reached across a shaft of daylight cutting the room in half. A voice asked, “Mr. Newman?”
There was a faint lisp in it, hesitant and unmistakable. I said, “Hospitals get touchy when you walk out on them, Irene. Where are you?” I sat across the corner of the desk and looked up past the rooftops at ice clouds five miles high.
She let the question go. “Terry says he’ll talk to you, Mr. Newman. I said he had to. Will you see him?” And to clinch it, “He paid me back the money he took.” She gave me an address in Soho and waited for an answer, but I was looking over at the figure that just walked in my office, fists deep in the pockets of a long outercoat, permanent homburg worn square. McAlester crossed the room behind me, parked in front of my window and blocked the daylight as if somebody moved a closet there. I said all right and to give me an hour and chopped a hand down on the connection. Irene would see to the rest. She knew the answer anyway before she dialed.
I found a cigarette, lit it and inhaled. At length a whisper said, “Littomy was right.” I waved smoke out of my eyes and listened for what Littomy had been right about. McAlester wo
und his shoulders up around his ears, went over to the connecting door to my neighbor’s office and opened it, satisfied himself I didn’t have him surrounded and went back to blocking the view. He relaxed there, pulled a licorice candy from his coat pocket, prized it out of a gaudy paper twist and slotted it in his cheek. Then shrugged and struck the conversational tone. “We put a watch on the Beaufort place when the boy went missing. For twenty-four hours nothing. But Littomy says be patient, junior will telephone home. Then early this morning house lights go on all over.” The candy wrapper rolled tight in a ball between his palms. “It’s a lot of lights.” I felt the same airlessness around McAlester I always did; the urge to put a chair through the window before the walls closed in. He stopped rolling the wrapper and sucked on the licorice. “Ten minutes later, Beaufort drives out as if he’s been called to a fire. The detective on duty follows. Twenty minutes and Beaufort’s in Guildhall talking to junior in his professor’s office. Then I get a call.”
The candy cracked in his teeth. I snorted absently at a picture of McAlester walking in on Henry before dawn with four unsolved murders in the air. Call it a late-arriving part of Henry’s education, useful for his future understanding of police method. But that depended on him having a future. The idea stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I swallowed and said, “It makes sense. A milk-fed City detective comes face-to-face with Henry Beaufort, thinks he could be too tough to handle alone and sends for you. What happened to his old man?”
McAlester left me his rueful look and made unhurried for the door, his teeth blackened by the licorice. “Left before I got there. Drove off to see his friend the commissioner.” His disappointment in a fellow citizen so touching you wanted to console him. Then a flat and final shake of the head. “Big mistake.” My cigarette began tasting of cold ashes. McAlester looked me over with infinite regret. “Your big mistake was calling him to the fire.”