Shroud for a Nightingale (36 page)

“What happened?”

It was Courtney-Briggs’s voice, harsh and masculine. So the surgeon had arrived. What had he been doing in the hospital? Another emergency operation? Courtney-Briggs’s patients seemed curiously prone to relapse. What alibi had he for the last half-hour?

Dalgliesh said: “Someone was lying in wait for me. I’ve got to check who’s in Nightingale House.”

A firm grip was on his arm. Courtney-Briggs was pressing him back into his chair. Two swinging blobs of grey hovered over him. Her voice again.

“Not now. You can hardly stand. One of us will go.”

“Go now.”

“In a minute. We’ve locked all the doors. We shall know if anyone returns. Rely on us. Just relax.”

So reasonable. Rely on us. Relax. He gripped the metal arms of the chair, taking hold on reality.

“I want to check for myself.”

Half blinded by blood, he sensed rather than saw their mutual glance of concern. He knew that he sounded like a petulant child, beating his insistence against the implacable calm of the grownups. Maddened with frustration, he tried to rise from the chair. But the floor tipped sickeningly, then rose up to meet him through whorls of screaming colour. It was no good. He couldn’t stand.

“My eyes,” he said.

Courtney-Briggs’s voice, annoyingly reasonable: “In one moment. I must look first at your head.”

“But I want to see!” His blindness infuriated him. Were they doing this to him deliberately? He put up a hand and began to pick at the caked eyelids. He could hear them talking together, low voiced, in the muttered idiom of their craft from which he, the patient, was excluded. He was conscious of new sounds, the hiss of a sterilizer, a jingle of instruments, the closing of a metal lid. Then the smell of disinfectant sharpened. Now she was cleaning his eyes. A pad, deliciously cool, was wiped across each lid, and he opened them blinking to see more clearly the sheen of her dressing-gown and the long plait of hair falling over her left shoulder. He spoke to her directly.

“I must know who’s in Nightingale House. Could you check now, please?”

Without another word or a further glance at Mr. Courtney-Briggs, she slipped out of the room. As soon as the door was
closed, Dalgliesh said: “You didn’t tell me that your brother was once engaged to Josephine Fallon.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

The surgeon’s voice was deliberate, uninterested, the response of a man with his mind on his job. There was a snip of scissors, a momentary chill of steel against the skull. The surgeon was clipping Dalgliesh’s hair around the wound.

“You must have known that I should be interested.”

“Oh, interested! You’re interested all right. Your kind have an infinite capacity for taking an interest in other people’s affairs. But I confined myself to satisfying your curiosity only so far as the deaths of these two girls were concerned. You can’t complain that I’ve held anything relevant back. Peter’s death isn’t relevant—merely a private tragedy.”

Not so much a private tragedy thought Dalgliesh as a public embarrassment. Peter Courtney had violated his brother’s first principle, the necessity of being successful.

Dalgliesh said: “He hanged himself.”

“As you said, he hanged himself. Not a very dignified or pleasant way to go, but the poor boy hadn’t my resources. The day when they make my final diagnosis I shall have more appropriate measures available than doing myself to death on the end of a rope.”

His egotism, thought Dalgliesh, was astounding. Even his brother’s death had to be seen in relationship to himself. He stood complacently secure at the hub of his private universe while other people—brother, mistress, patient—revolved round the central sun existing by virtue of its warmth and light, obedient to its centripetal force. But wasn’t that how most people saw themselves? Was Mary Taylor less self-absorbed? Was he himself? Wasn’t it merely that she and he pandered more subtly to their essential egotism?

The surgeon moved over to his black instrument case and took out a mirror mounted on a metal band which he clipped around his head. He came back to Dalgliesh, ophthalmoscope in hand and settling himself into a chair opposite his patient. They sat confronting each other, foreheads almost touching. Dalgliesh could sense the metal of the instrument against his right eye.

Courtney-Briggs commanded: “Look straight ahead.”

Dalgliesh stared obediently at the pinpoint of light. He said: “You left the main hospital building at about midnight. You spoke to the porter at the main gate at twelve thirty-eight a.m. Where were you between those times?”

“I told you. There was a fallen elm blocking the path back. I spent some minutes examining the scene and making sure that other people didn’t injure themselves on it.”

“One person did precisely that. That was at twelve seventeen a.m. There was no warning scarf tied on the branches at that time.”

The ophthalmoscope moved to the other eye. The surgeon’s breathing was perfectly regular.

“He was mistaken.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“So you deduce that I arrived at the fallen tree later than twelve seventeen a.m. It may have been so. As I wasn’t concocting an alibi, I didn’t check the time every two minutes.”

“But you’re not suggesting that it took you over seventeen minutes to drive from the main hospital to that particular place.”

“Oh, I think I could make out quite a case for the delay, don’t you know. I could claim that I needed, in your deplorable police jargon, to obey a call of nature and left my car to meditate among the trees.”

“And did you?”

“I may have done. When I’ve dealt with your head, which incidentally is going to need about a dozen stitches, I’ll give some thought to the matter. You’ll forgive me if I concentrate now on my own job.”

The Matron had quietly returned. She took up her stance next to Courtney-Briggs like an acolyte waiting for orders. Her face was very white. Without waiting for her to speak the surgeon handed her the ophthalmoscope.

She said: “Everyone who should be in Nightingale House is in her room.”

Courtney-Briggs was running his hands over Dalgliesh’s left shoulder causing pain with every thrust of the strong probing fingers. He said: “The collar-bone seems all right. Badly bruised but not fractured. Your attacker must have been a tall woman. You’re over six feet yourself.”

“If it were a woman. Or she may have had a long weapon, a golf club perhaps.”

“A golf club. Matron, what about your clubs? Where do you keep them?”

She answered dully: “In the hall at the bottom of my staircase. The bag is usually left just inside the door.”

“Then you’d better check them now.”

She was gone for less than two minutes and they awaited her return in silence. When she came back she spoke directly to Dalgliesh.

“One of the irons is missing.”

The news seemed to hearten Courtney-Briggs. He said almost jovially: “Well, there’s your weapon for you! But there’s not much point in searching for it tonight. It’ll be lying about somewhere in the grounds. Your men can find it and do everything necessary to it tomorrow; test it for fingerprints, look for blood and hair, all the usual tricks. You’re not in any fit state to bother yourself
tonight. We’ve got to get this wound sutured. I shall have to get you over to the out-patients’ theatre. You’ll need an anaesthetic.”

“I don’t want an anaesthetic.”

“Then I can give you a local. That just means a few injections around the wound. We could do this here, Matron.”

“I don’t want any anaesthetic. I just want it stitched.”

Courtney-Briggs explained patiently as if to a child. “It’s a very deep cut and it’s got to be sutured. It’s going to hurt badly if you won’t accept an anaesthetic.”

“I tell you I don’t want one. And I don’t want a prophylactic injection of penicillin or anti-tetanus. I just want it sutured.”

He felt them look at each other. He knew that he was being obstinately unreasonable but he didn’t care. Why couldn’t they get on with it?

Then Courtney-Briggs spoke, curiously formal: “If you’d prefer another surgeon …”

“No, I just want you to get on with it.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the surgeon spoke: “All right. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

He was aware that Mary Taylor had moved behind him. She drew his head back against her breast, supported it between cold, firm hands. He shut his eyes like a child. The needle felt immense, an iron rod simultaneously ice cold and red hot which pierced his skull time and time again. The pain was an abomination, made bearable only by anger and by his obstinate determination not to betray weakness. He set his features into a rigid mask. But it was infuriating to feel involuntary tears seeping under his eyelids.

After an eternity he realized that it was over. He heard himself say: “Thank you. And now I’d like to get back to my office. Sergeant Masterson has instructions to come on here if I’m not in the hotel. He can drive me home.”

Mary Taylor was winding a crêpe bandage around his head. She didn’t speak. Courtney-Briggs said: “I’d prefer you to go straight to bed. We can let you have a room in the Medical Officers’ quarters for tonight. I’ll arrange for an X-ray first thing in the morning. Then I’d like to see you again.”

“You can arrange what you like for tomorrow. Just now I’d like to be left alone.”

He got up from the chair. She put a hand on his arm, supporting him. But he must have made some kind of gesture for she dropped her arm. He felt surprisingly light on his feet. It was odd that such an insubstantial body could support the weight of so heavy a head. He put up an exploring hand and felt the scrape of the bandage; it seemed an immense distance from his skull. Then, focusing his eyes carefully, he walked unhindered across the room to the door. As he reached it, he heard Courtney-Briggs’s voice.

“You will want to know where I was at the time of the attack. I was in my room in the Medical Officers’ quarters. I’m staying there for tonight ready for an early operating session. I’m sorry I can’t oblige you with an alibi. I can only hope that you realize that, if I want to put anyone out of the way, I have subtler methods at my disposal than a golf iron.”

Dalgliesh didn’t reply. Without looking round and without a further word he left them and closed the door of the demonstration room quietly behind him. The stairs looked a formidable climb and, at first, he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to make it. But he grasped the banister resolutely and, step by careful step, made his way back to the office and settled down to wait for Masterson.

It was nearly two in the morning when the gate porter waved Masterson through the main entrance of the hospital. The wind was rising steadily as he drove along the twisting path to Nightingale House between an avenue of black rumbustious trees. The house was in darkness except for the one lit window where Dalgliesh was still working. Masterson scowled at it. It had been irritating and disconcerting to discover that Dalgliesh was still at Nightingale House. He expected to have to give his report on the day’s activities; the prospect wasn’t unpleasing since he was fortified by success. But it had been a long day. He hoped that they weren’t in for one of the Superintendent’s all-night sessions.

Masterson let himself in at the side door, double locking it behind him. The silence of the vast entrance hall received him, eerie and portentous. The house seemed to be holding its breath. He smelt again the alien but now familiar amalgam of disinfectant and floor polish, unwelcoming and faintly sinister. As if afraid to stir the sleeping house—half empty as it was—he did not switch on the light but made his way across
the hall by the beam of his electric torch. The notices on the hall board gleamed white reminding him of mourning cards in the vestibule of some foreign cathedral. Of your charity pray for the soul of Josephine Fallon. He found himself tiptoeing up the stairs as if afraid to wake the dead.

In the first-floor office Dalgliesh was sitting at his desk with the file open before him. Masterson stood stock-still in the doorway, concealing his surpise. The Superintendent’s face was drawn and grey under an immense cocoon of white crêpe bandage. He was sitting bolt upright, forearms resting on the desk, palms spread lightly on each side of the page. The pose was familiar. Masterson reflected, not for the first time, that the Superintendent had remarkable hands and knew how to display them to advantage. He had long decided that Dalgliesh was one of the proudest men he knew. This essential conceit was too carefully guarded to be generally recognized, but it was gratifying to catch him out in one of the lesser vanities. Dalgliesh looked up without smiling.

“I expected you back two hours ago, Sergeant. What were you doing?”

“Extracting information by unorthodox means, sir.”

“You look as if the unorthodox means have been used on you.”

Masterson bit back the obvious retort. If the old man chose to be mysterious about his injury he wasn’t going to give him the gratification of showing curiosity.

“I was dancing until nearly midnight, sir.”

“At your age that shouldn’t be too exhausting. Tell me about the lady. She seems to have made an impression on you. You had an agreeable evening?”

Masterson could have retorted with reason that he had had one hell of an evening. He contented himself with an account of what he had learned. The exhibition tango was prudently
forgotten. Instinct warned him that Dalgliesh might think it neither funny nor clever. But he gave an otherwise accurate account of the evening. He tried to keep it factual and unemotional but became aware that he was enjoying some of the telling. His description of Mrs. Dettinger was concise but caustic. Towards the end he hardly troubled to conceal his contempt and disgust of her. He felt that he was making rather a good job of it.

Dalgliesh listened in silence. His cocooned head was still bent over the file and Masterson got no hint of what he was feeling. At the end of the recital Dalgliesh looked up.

“Do you enjoy your work, Sergeant?”

“Yes sir, for most of the time.”