Shroud for a Nightingale (17 page)

“You and your Sergeant are staying with the Maycrofts at the Falconer’s Arms, aren’t you? I hope they’re making you comfortable. Sheila’s a bit of a drag but Bob’s good value when you get him on his own.”

Dalgliesh had taken very good care not to get Bob on his own. He had chosen the Falconer’s Arms because it was small, convenient, quiet, and half empty; it had not taken long to understand why. Group Captain Robert Maycroft and his wife were more concerned to impress visitors with their own gentility than to minister to the comfort of their guests, and Dalgliesh fervently hoped to be out of the place by the end of the week. In the meantime he had no intention of discussing the Maycrofts with Sister Gearing and he guided her politely but firmly towards more relevant subjects.

Unlike the other suspects she found it necessary to waste the first five minutes in expressing her horror at the deaths of the two girls. It had been all too horrible, tragic, awful, ghastly, beastly, unforgettable, inexplicable. The emotion, thought Dalgliesh, was real enough even if its expression wasn’t original. The woman was genuinely distressed. He suspected that she was also very frightened.

He took her through the events of Monday, 12th January. She had little new of interest to say and her account tallied with that already on the file. She had woken very late, dressed in a hurry, and had only just managed to get down to the dining-room by eight o’clock. There she had joined Sister Brumfett and Sister Rolfe for breakfast and had first heard from them that Nurse Fallon had been taken ill in the night. Dalgliesh asked her if she remembered which of the Sisters had given her the news.

“Well, I can’t say I do really. I think it was Rolfe but I can’t be sure. I was in a bit of a tizzy that morning what with one thing and another. It hadn’t helped oversleeping like that, and I was naturally a bit nervous about the General Nursing Council inspection. After all, I’m not a qualified Sister Tutor. I was only deputizing for Sister Manning. And it’s bad enough
taking the first demonstration of a set without Matron and the G.N.C. Inspector, Mr. Courtney-Briggs and Sister Rolfe all sitting there with their beady eyes on every move you make. It struck me that with Fallon absent, there would only be about seven students left in the set. Well, that suited me all right; the fewer the better as far as I was concerned. I only hoped the little beasts would answer up and show some intelligence.”

Dalgliesh asked her who had left the dining-room first.

“Brumfett did. Dead keen as usual to get back to her ward, I suppose. I left next. I took my papers through into the conservatory with a cup of coffee and sat down for ten minutes’ read. Christine Dakers, Diane Harper and Julia Pardoe were there. Harper and Pardoe were chatting together and Dakers was sitting on her own reading a magazine. I didn’t stay long and they were still there when I left. I went up to my room at about half past eight, collecting my post on the way, and then came down again and went straight into the demonstration room just before quarter to nine. The Burt twins were already there finishing their preparations and Goodale arrived almost immediately. The rest of the set came in together at about ten to nine, except Pearce, who didn’t arrive until last. There was the usual girlish chatter before we got down to work but I can’t remember any of it. The rest you know.”

Dalgliesh did know. But although he thought it unlikely that there was anything new to learn from Sister Gearing he took her again through the events of that traumatic demonstration. But she had nothing fresh to reveal. It had all been too awful, terrible, ghastly, frightful, unbelievable. She would never forget it as long as she lived.

Dalgliesh then turned to the death of Fallon. But here Sister Gearing had a surprise for him. She was the first suspect to produce an alibi, or what she obviously hoped was one,
and she put it forward with understandable satisfaction. From eight o’clock until after midnight she had been entertaining a friend in her room. She gave Dalgliesh his name with coy reluctance. He was Leonard Morris, the chief pharmacist of the hospital. She had invited him to dinner, had produced a simple meal of spaghetti bolognaise in the Sisters’ kitchen on the third floor and had served it in her sitting-room at eight o’clock, shortly after his arrival. They had been together for the whole of the four hours except for the few minutes when she had fetched the supper dish from the kitchen, and for a couple of minutes at about midnight when he had visited the lavatory, and a similar period earlier in the evening she had left him for the same purpose. Apart from that they had never been out of each other’s sight. She added eagerly that Len—Mr. Morris that was—would be only too happy to confirm her story. Len would remember the times perfectly well. Being a pharmacist he was precise and accurate about details. The only difficulty was that he wasn’t in the hospital this morning. He had telephoned the pharmacy just before nine to say that he was sick. But he would be back at work tomorrow, she was sure of it. Len hated taking time off.

Dalgliesh asked at what hour he had actually left Nightingale House.

“Well, it couldn’t have been long after midnight. I remember that when my clock struck twelve Len said that it was really time he was off. We went out about five minutes later, down the back staircase, the one leading from Matron’s flat. I left the door open: Len collected his bicycle from where he’d left it and I walked with him to the first turn in the path. It wasn’t exactly a night for a stroll but we’d still one or two matters about the hospital to discuss—Len lectures in pharmacology to the second-year students—and I thought I could do
with a breath of air. Len didn’t like to leave me to walk back alone so he came back as far as the door. I suppose it was about twelve-fifteen when we finally parted. I came in through Matron’s door and locked it behind me. I went straight to my room, took the supper things into the kitchen to wash them up, went to the bathroom, and was in bed by a quarter to one. I didn’t see Fallon all the evening. The next thing I knew was Sister Rolfe dashing in to wake me up with the news that Dakers had found Fallon dead in bed.”

“So you went out and returned through Miss Taylor’s flat. Was her door left unlocked then?”

“Oh, yes! Matron usually leaves it open when she’s away. She knows we find it convenient and more private to use her staircase. After all, we’re grown women. We’re not exactly forbidden to entertain friends in our rooms and it isn’t particularly nice to have to show them out through the main house with every little student watching with her eyes out on stalks. Matron’s awfully good like that. I think she even leaves her sitting-room unlocked when she’s not in Nightingale House. I suppose that’s so that Sister Brumfett can use it if she feels inclined. Brumfett, in case you hadn’t heard, is Matron’s spaniel. Most Matrons keep a little dog you know. Mary Taylor has Brumfett.”

The note of bitter cynicism was so unexpected that Masterson’s head came up from his note-taking with a jerk and he looked at Sister Gearing as if she were an unpromising candidate who had suddenly revealed unexpected potentialities. But Dalgliesh let it pass. He asked: “Was Sister Brumfett using Miss Taylor’s flat last night?”

“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.

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?