Shroud for a Nightingale (22 page)

She had hardly expected to win this particular battle but it was only when Mr. Courtney-Briggs lifted his hand to turn off the blood drip that she accepted failure. The patient had certainly fought well; a difficult patient, a demanding patient, but a good fighter. He had been a wealthy businessman whose meticulous plans for his future certainly didn’t include dying at forty-two. She recalled the look of wild surprise, almost of outrage, with which he had greeted the realization
that death was something neither he nor his accountant could fix. Sister Brumfett had seen too much of his young widow on that lady’s daily visits to suppose that she would suffer much grief or inconvenience. The patient was the only one who would have been furious at the failure of Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s heroic and expensive efforts to save him, and happily for the surgeon, the patient was the one person in no position to demand either explanation or excuse.

Mr. Courtney-Briggs would see the widow and offer her his customary carefully phrased condolences, his assurance that everything humanly possible had been done. In this case, the size of the bill would be a guarantee of that and a powerful antidote, no doubt, to the inevitable guilt of bereavement. Courtney-Briggs was really very good with the widows; and to do him justice, the poor as well as the rich received the consolation of his hand on their shoulder, of the stereotyped phrases of comfort and regret.

She drew the fold of the sheet up over the suddenly vacant face. Closing the dead eyes with practised fingers, she felt the eyeballs still warm under the wrinkled lids. She was conscious neither of grief nor anger. There was only, as always, this dragging weight of failure tugging like a physical load at the tired muscles of her stomach and back.

They turned away from the bed together. Glancing at the surgeon’s face, Sister Brumfett was struck by his look of weariness. For the first time he, too, appeared threatened with failure and with age. It was, of course, unusual for a patient to die when he was there to see it happen. Still less frequently did they die on the operating table, even if the scramble from the theatre to the ward was sometimes a little undignified. But, unlike Sister Brumfett, Mr. Courtney-Briggs did not have to watch over his patients to the last gasp. All the same,
she did not believe that this particular death had depressed him. It was, after all, not unexpected. He had nothing with which to reproach himself even if he had been given to self-criticism. She felt that he was stressed by some subtler worry, and she wondered whether it was something to do with Fallon’s death. He’s lost some of his bounce, thought Sister Brumfett. He looks suddenly ten years older.

He preceded her down the passage to her office. As they neared the ward kitchen there was the sound of voices. The door was open. A student nurse was setting a trolley with the afternoon tea trays. Sergeant Masterson was leaning against the sink and watching her with the air of a man completely at home. As the Sister and Mr. Courtney-Briggs appeared in the doorway the girl flushed, muttered a low “good afternoon, sir” and pushed the trolley past them into the corridor with clumsy haste. Sergeant Masterson gazed after her with tolerant condescension, then transferred his level gaze to the Sister. He appeared not to notice Mr. Courtney-Briggs.

“Good afternoon, Sister, could I have a word with you?”

Baulked of the initiative, Sister Brumfett said repressively: “In my office if you please, Sergeant. That is where you should have waited in the first place. People do not wander in and out of my ward just as they please, and that includes the police.”

Sergeant Masterson, unchastened, looked slightly gratified at this speech as if it confirmed something to his satisfaction. Sister Brumfett bustled into her office, tight-lipped and ready for battle. Rather to her surprise Mr. Courtney-Briggs followed.

Sergeant Masterson said: “I wonder, Sister, if I could see the ward report book covering the period when Nurse Pearce was on this ward? I’m particularly interested in her last week here.”

Mr. Courtney-Briggs broke in roughly: “Aren’t they confidential records, Sister? Surely the police will have to apply for a subpoena before they can make you produce them?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, sir.” Sergeant Masterson’s voice, quiet, almost too respectful, yet held a tinge of amusement which wasn’t lost on his hearer. “Ward nursing records surely aren’t medical in the proper sense. I merely want to see who was being nursed here during that period and whether anything happened which might be of interest to the Superintendent. It’s been suggested that something occurred to upset Nurse Pearce while she was nursing on your ward. She went from here straight to the school, remember.”

Sister Brumfett, mottled and shaking with an anger which left small room for fear, found her voice.

“Nothing happened on my ward. Nothing! It’s all stupid, malicious gossip. If a nurse does her job properly and obeys orders there’s no need for her to be upset. The Superintendent is here to investigate a murder, not to interfere with my ward.”

Mr. Courtney-Briggs broke in blandly: “And even if she were—upset is the word I think you used, Sergeant—I don’t see what relevance that has to her death.”

Sergeant Masterson smiled at him as if humouring a wilfully obstinate child.

“Anything that happened to Nurse Pearce in the week immediately before she was killed may have relevance, sir. That’s why I’m asking to see the ward report book.”

As neither Sister Brumfett nor the surgeon made any move to comply, he added: “It’s only a matter of confirming information we already have. I know what she was doing on the ward during that week. I’m told she was devoting all her time to nursing one particular patient. A Mr. Martin Dettinger.
‘Specializing’ him, I think you call it. My information is that she seldom left his room while she was on duty here during the last week of her life.”

So, thought Sister Brumfett, he had been gossiping with the student nurses. But of course! That was how the police worked. It was pointless to try to keep anything private from them. Everything, even the medical secrets of her ward, the nursing care of her own patients, would be nosed out by this impertinent young man and reported to his superior officer. There was nothing in the ward book which he couldn’t find out by more devious means; discover, magnify, misinterpret and use to make mischief. Inarticulate with anger and something close to panic she heard Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s bland and reassuring voice: “Then you’d better hand the book over, Sister. If the police insist on wasting their own time there’s no need for us to encourage them to waste ours.”

Without another word, Sister Brumfett went to her desk and, bending down, opened the deep right-hand drawer and took out a large, hard-backed book. Silently and without looking at him, she handed it to Sergeant Masterson. The Sergeant thanked her profusely and turned to Mr. Courtney-Briggs: “And now, sir, if the patient’s still with you, I’d like to have a word with Mr. Dettinger.”

Mr. Courtney-Briggs made no attempt to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

“I think that is likely to challenge even your ingenuity, Sergeant. Mr. Martin Dettinger died on the day Nurse Pearce left this ward. If I remember rightly, she was with him when he died. So both of them are safely out of reach of your inquisition. And now, if you’d be good enough to excuse us, Sister and I have work to do.”

He held open the door and Sister Brumfett strutted out before him. Sergeant Masterson was left alone, holding the ward record book in his hand.

“Bloody bastard,” he said aloud.

He stood for a moment, thinking. Then he went in search of the medical records department.

Ten minutes later he was back in the office. Under his arm was the ward report book and a buff-coloured file, stamped with a warning in black capital letters that it was not to be handed to the patient, and bearing the name of the hospital and Martin Dettinger’s medical record number. He placed the book on the table and handed the file to Dalgliesh.

“Thank you. You got it without trouble?”

“Yes, sir,” said Masterson. He saw no reason to explain that the Medical Records Officer had been out of his department and that he had half persuaded, half bullied the junior clerk on duty into handing over the file on the grounds, which he didn’t for a moment believe, that the rules about the confidentiality of medical records no longer applied when the patient was dead and that when a Superintendent of the Yard asked for a thing he was entitled to get it without fuss and without delay.

They studied the file together. Dalgliesh said: “Martin Dettinger. Aged forty-six. Gave his address as his London club. C. of E. Divorced. Next-of-kin, Mrs. Louise Dettinger, 23 Saville Mansions, Marylebone. Mother. You had better see the lady,
Masterson. Make an appointment for tomorrow evening. I shall need you here during the day while I’m in town. And take trouble with her. She must have visited her son pretty frequently when he was in hospital. Nurse Pearce was specializing him. The two women probably saw quite a lot of each other. Something happened to upset Pearce while she was working on the private ward during the last week of her life and I want to know what it was.”

He turned back to the medical record.

“There’s a lot of paper here. The poor chap seems to have had a stormy medical history. He suffered from colitis for the past ten years, and before that there’s a record of long spells of un diagnosed ill-health, perhaps a forerunner of the condition which killed him. He was in hospital for three periods during his army service, including a spell of two months in an army hospital in Cairo in 1947. He was invalided out of the army in 1952 and emigrated to South Africa. That doesn’t seem to have done him much good. There are notes here from a hospital in Johannesburg. Courtney-Briggs wrote for them; he certainly takes trouble. His own notes are pretty copious. He took over the case a couple of years ago and seems to have been acting as a kind of general practitioner to Dettinger as well as his surgeon. The colitis became acute about a month ago, and Courtney-Briggs operated to remove a large part of the bowel on Friday, 2nd January. Dettinger survived the operation, although he was in a pretty bad state by then, and made some progress until the early afternoon of Monday, 5th January, when he relapsed. After that he was seldom conscious for long, and he died at five-thirty p.m. on Friday, 9th January.”

Masterson said: “Nurse Pearce was with him when he died.”

“And apparently she nursed him almost single-handed for the last week of his life. I wonder what the nursing record tells us.”

But the nursing record was far less informative than the medical file. Nurse Pearce had entered in her careful schoolgirl’s hand the details of her patient’s temperature, respiration and pulse, his restlessness and brief hours of sleep, his medication and food. It could not be faulted as a meticulous record of nursing care. Beyond that it told them nothing.

Dalgliesh closed the book.

“You’d better return this to the ward and the medical folder to the proper department. We’ve learned all we can from them. But I feel in my bones that Martin Dettinger’s death has something to do with this case.”

Masterson did not reply. Like all detectives who had worked with Dalgliesh, he had a healthy respect for the old man’s hunches. Inconvenient, perverse and far-fetched they might seem, but they had been proved right too often to be safely ignored. And he had no objection to an evening trip to London. Tomorrow was Friday. The timetable on the hall notice-board showed that the students’ sessions ended early on Friday. They would be free soon after five. He wondered whether Julia Pardoe would fancy a drive to town. After all, why not? Dalgliesh wouldn’t be back by the time he was due to set out. It could be arranged with care. And there were some suspects it would be a positive pleasure to interview on their own.

Just before half past four Dalgliesh, in defiance of convention and prudence, took tea alone with Sister Gearing in her bed-sitting-room. She had met him casually passing across the ground-floor hall as the students were filing out of the lecture room after the last seminar of the day. She had given the invitation spontaneously and without coyness, although Dalgliesh noted that Sergeant Masterson was not included. He would have accepted the invitation even had it been delivered on highly scented and pink writing-paper and accompanied by the most blatant of sexual innuendoes. What he wanted after the formal interrogation of the morning was to sit in comfort and listen to a flow of artless, candid and slightly malicious gossip; to listen with the surface of his mind soothed, uninvolved, even a little cynically amused, but with the sharp claws of the intelligence sharpened for their pickings. He had learned more about the Nightingale House Sisters from their conversation at luncheon than he had in all his formal interviews, but he couldn’t spend all his time tagging along behind the nursing staff, picking up scraps of gossip like so many dropped
handkerchiefs. He wondered whether Sister Gearing had something to tell or something to ask. Either way he didn’t expect an hour in her company to be wasted.

Dalgliesh hadn’t yet been in any of the rooms on the third floor except Matron’s flat and he was struck by the size and pleasant proportions of Sister Gearing’s room. From here, even in winter, the hospital couldn’t be seen, and the room had a calm of its own, remote from the frenetic life of wards and departments. Dalgliesh thought that in summer it must be very pleasant with nothing but a curdle of tree tops breaking the view of the far hills. Even now, with the curtains drawn against the fading light and the gas fire giving out a merry hiss, it was welcoming and warm. Presumably the divan bed in the corner with its cretonne cover and carefully arranged bank of cushions had been provided by the Hospital Management Committee, as had the two comfortable armchairs similarly covered and the rest of the uninteresting but functional furniture. But Sister Gearing had imposed her own personality on the room. There was a long shelf along the far wall on which she had arranged a collection of dolls in different national costumes. On another wall was a smaller shelf holding an assortment of china cats of different sizes and breeds. There was one particularly repulsive specimen in spotted blue, bulging of eye and adorned with a bow of blue ribbon; and propped beside it was a greetings card. It showed a female robin, the sex denoted by a frilly apron and flowered bonnet, perched on a twig. At her feet, a male robin was spelling out the words “Good luck” in worms. Dalgliesh hastily averted his eyes from this abomination and continued his tactful examination of the room.