Shroud for a Nightingale (20 page)

For the first time during the meal Sister Rolfe sounded amused.

She said: “Caustic little beast! Meaning, I suppose, that she’d come to consult a higher power than the clinical instructor.”

“Meaning mind your own business. So I did.”

Sister Brumfett said, as if feeling that her colleague’s presence at a place of worship needed some explanation:

“Sister Gearing is very good at arranging flowers. That’s why Matron asked her to look after the chapel. She sees to the flowers every Wednesday and Saturday. And she does very charming arrangements for the Annual Sisters’ Dinner.” Sister Gearing stared at her for a second and then laughed.

“Oh, little Mavis isn’t just a pretty face. But thanks for the compliment”

A silence fell. Dalgliesh addressed himself to his braised beef. He wasn’t disconcerted by the lack of conversation and had no intention of helping them out by introducing a fresh subject But Sister Gearing seemed to feel that silence was reprehensible in the presence of a stranger. She said brightly:

“I see from the minutes that the Hospital Management Committee have agreed to introduce the Salmon Committee proposals. Better late than never. I suppose that means that Matron will be head of the nursing services over all the hospitals in the group. Chief Nursing Officer! It’ll be a big thing for her, but I wonder how C.B. will take it If he had his way, Matron would be given less authority not more. She’s a big enough thorn in his flesh as it is.”

Sister Brumfett said: “It’s time something was done to wake up the psychiatric hospital and the geriatric units. But I don’t know why they want to change the title. If Matron was good enough for Florence Nightingale it’s good enough for Mary Taylor. I don’t suppose she particularly wants to be called Chief Nursing Officer. It sounds like an army rank. Ridiculous.”

Sister Rolfe shrugged her thin shoulders.

“Don’t expect me to get enthusiastic about the Salmon Report. I’m beginning to wonder what’s happening to nursing. Every report and recommendation seems to take us further away from the bedside. We have dieticians to see to the feeding, physiotherapists to exercise the patients, medical social workers to listen to their troubles, ward orderlies to make the beds, laboratory technicians to take blood, ward receptionists to arrange the flowers and interview the relatives^ operating theatre technicians to hand the surgeon the instruments. If we’re not careful nursing will become a residual skill, the job which is left when all the technicians have had their turn. And now we have the Salmon Report with all its talk of first second and third tiers of management. Management for what? There’s too much technical jargon. Ask yourself what is the function of the nurse today. What exactly are we trying to teach these girls?”

Sister Brumfett said: ‘To obey orders implicitly and be loyal to their superiors. Obedience and loyalty. Teach the students those and you’ve got a good nurse.“

She sliced a potato in two with such viciousness that the knife rasped the plate. Sister Gearing laughed.

“You’re twenty years out of date, Brumfett That was good enough for our generation, but these kids ask whether the orders are reasonable before they start obeying and what their superiors have done to deserve their respect A good thing too on the whole. How on earth do you expect to attract intelligent girls into nursing if you treat them like morons? We ought to encourage them to question established procedures, even to answer back occasionally.”

Sister Brumfett looked as if she, for one, would willingly dispense with intelligence if its manifestations were so disagreeable.

“Intelligence isn’t the only thing. That’s the trouble nowadays. People think it is.”

Sister Rolfe said: “Give me an intelligent girl and I’ll make a good nurse of her whether she thinks she has a vocation or not You can have the stupid ones. They may minister to your ego but they’ll never make good professional women.” She looked at Sister Brumfett as she spoke and the undertone of contempt was unmistakable. Dalgliesh dropped his eyes to his plate and pretended more interest than he could feel in the careful separation of meat from fat and gristle. Sister Brumfett reacted predictably:

“Professional women! We’re talking about nurses. A good nurse thinks of himself as a nurse first and last Of course she’s a professional woman! I thought we’d all accepted that by now. But there’s too much thinking and talking of status nowadays. The important thing is to get on with the job.”

“But what job exactly? Isn’t that precisely what we’re asking ourselves?”

“You may be. I’m perfectly clear what I’m doing. Which, at the moment is coping with a very sick ward.”

She pushed her plate to one side, flicked her cloak around her shoulders with brisk expertise, gave them a valedictory nod which was as much a warning as a good-bye, and strutted out of the dining-room with her brisk ploughman’s waddle, the tapestry bag swinging at her side. Sister Gearing laughed and watched her go.

“Poor old Brum! According to her, she’s always got a very sick ward.”

Sister Rolfe said drily: “She invariably has.”

III

They finished the meal almost in silence. Then Sister Gearing left, first murmuring something about a clinical teaching session on the E.N.T. ward. Dalgliesh found himself walking back to Nightingale House with Sister Rolfe. They left the dining-room together and he retrieved his coat from the rack. They men passed down a long corridor and through the outpatients’ department It had obviously only recently been opened and the furniture and decoration were still bright and new. The large waiting-hall with its groups of Formica-topped tables and easy chairs, its troughs of pot plants and unremarkable pictures was cheerful enough, but Dalgliesh had no wish to linger. He had the healthy man’s dislike and disgust of hospitals, founded partly on fear and partly on repugnance, and he found this atmosphere of determined cheerfulness and spurious normality unconvincing and frightening. The smell of disinfectant, which to Miss Beale was the elixir of life, infected him with the gloomier intimations of mortality. He did not think that he feared death. He had come close to it once or twice in his career and it had not unduly dismayed him. But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long. These things might have to be faced in time unless death took him quickly and easily. Well, be would face them. He was not arrogant enough to suppose himself secure from the lot of other men. But in the meantime, he preferred not to be reminded.

The out-patients’ department was next to the casualty department entrance and as they passed it a stretcher was wheeled in. The patient was an emaciated old man; his moist lips spewed feebly above the rim of a vomit bowl, his immense eyes rolled uncomprehendingly in the skull-like head. Dalgliesh became aware that Sister Rolfe was looking at him. He turned his head in time to catch her glance of speculation and, he thought, contempt.

“You don’t like this place, do you?” she asked.

“I’m not very happy in it, certainly.”

“Neither am I at present, but I suspect for very different reasons.”

They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Dalgliesh asked if Leonard Morris lunched in the staff dining-room when he was in the hospital.

“Not often. I believe he brings sandwiches and eats them in the pharmacy office. He prefers his own company.”

“Or that of Sister Gearing?”

She laughed contemptuously.

“Oh, you’ve got on to that have you? But of course! She was entertaining him last night, I hear. Either the food or the subsequent activity seems to have been rather more than the little man could take. What thorough little scavengers the police are! It must be a strange job, sniffing around for evil like a dog round trees.”

“Isn’t evil a strong word for Leonard Morris’s sexual preoccupations?”

“Of course. I was just being clever. But I shouldn’t let the Morris-Gearing affair worry you. It’s been hiccupping on for so long now that it’s become almost respectable. It isn’t even good for a gossip. She’s the kind of woman who must have someone in tow, and he likes someone to confide in about the awfulness of his family and the beastliness of the hospital medical staff. They don’t exactly take him at his own evaluation as an equal professional man. He’s got four children, by the way. I imagine that if his wife decided to divorce him and he and Gearing were free to marry nothing would disconcert them more. Gearing would like a husband no doubt, but I don’t think she’s cast poor little Morris for the role. It’s more likely…”

She broke off. Dalgliesh asked:

“You think she has a more eligible candidate in mind?”

“Why not try asking her? She doesn’t confide in me.”

“But you are responsible for her work? The clinical instructor comes under the senior nurse tutor?”

“I’m responsible for her work not her morals.”

They had reached the far door of the casualty department and as Sister Rolfe put out her hand to push it open Mr. Courtney-Briggs swept in. He was followed by a half-dozen chattering junior staff, white-coated and with stethoscopes slung round their necks. The two on each side of him were nodding in deferential attention as the great man spoke. Dalgliesh thought that he had the conceit, the patina of vulgarity and the slightly coarse
savoir-faire
which he associated with one type of successful professional man. As if reading his thoughts, Miss Rolfe said:

“They’re not all alike, you know. Take Mr. Molravey, our ophthalmic surgeon. He reminds me of a dormouse. Every Tuesday morning he patters in and stands for five hours in the theatre without speaking an unnecessary word, whiskers twitching and picking away with fastidious little paws at a succession of patients’ eyes. Then he thanks everyone formally down to the most junior theatre nurse, peels off his gloves and patters away again to play with his collection of butterflies.”

“A modest little man, in fact”

She turned towards him and he detected again in her eyes that uncomfortable elliptical flicker of contempt.

“Oh no! Not modest! He gives a different performance, that’s all. Mr. Molravey is just as ”convinced as is Mr. Courtney-Briggs that he’s a very remarkable surgeon. They are both vain in a professional sense. Vanity, Mr. Dalgliesh, is a surgeon’s besetting sin as subservience is a nurse’s. I’ve never yet met a successful surgeon who wasn’t convinced that he ranked only one degree lower than Almighty God. They’re all infected with hubris.“ She paused:

“Isn’t that supposed to be true also of murderers?”

“Of one type of murderer. You must remember that murder is a highly individual crime.”

“Is it? I should have thought that the motives and the means would be monotonously familiar to you. But you, of course, are the expert.”

Dalgliesh said: “You have little respect for men apparently, Sister?”

“A great deal of respect. I just don’t happen to like them. But you have to respect a sex that has brought selfishness to such an art. That’s what gives you your strength, this ability to devote yourselves entirely to your own interest.”

Dalgliesh said, a little maliciously, that he was surprised that Miss Rolfe, since she obviously resented the subservience of her job, hadn’t chosen a more masculine occupation. Medicine perhaps? She laughed bitterly.

“I wanted to do medicine but I had a father who didn’t believe in educating women. I’m forty-six, remember. When I was at school we didn’t have universal free grammar school education. Father earned too much for me to get a free place, so he had to pay. He stopped paying as soon as he decently could, when I was sixteen.”

Dalgliesh found nothing appropriate to say. The confidence surprised him. She was hardly the woman, he would have thought, to expose a personal grievance to a stranger and he didn’t flatter himself that she found him sympathetic. She would find no man sympathetic. The outburst was probably a spontaneous release of pent up bitterness, but whether against her father, men in general or the limitations and subservience of her job it was hard to say.

They had left the hospital now and were passing along the narrow path which led to Nightingale House. Neither of them spoke another word until the house was reached. Sister Rolfe wrapped her long cloak tightly around her and pulled up her hood as if it could protect her from more than the bite of the wind. Dalgliesh was immersed in his private thoughts. And thus, with the width of the path between them, they paced together in silence under the trees.

IV

In the office Detective Sergeant Masterson was typing a report Dalgliesh said:

“Immediately before she came into the school, Nurse Pearce was working on the private ward under Sister Brumfett. I want to know if anything significant happened there. And I want a detailed account of her last week’s duty and an hour-by-hour account of what she did on her last day. Find out who the other nursing staff were, what her duties were, when she was off duty, how she appeared to the other staff. I want the names of the patients who were on the ward while she was nursing there and what happened to them. Your best plan is to talk to the other nurses and to work from the nursing reports. They’re bound to keep a book which is written up dairy.”

“Shall I get it from Matron?”

“No. Ask Sister Brumfett for it We deal directly with her, and for God’s sake be tactful. Have you those reports ready yet?”

“Yes, sir. They’ve been typed. Do you want to read them now?”

“No. Tell me if there’s anything I ought to know. I’ll look at them tonight I suppose if’s too much to expect that any of our suspects has a police record?”

“If they have, sir, it isn’t noted on the personal dossiers. There’s remarkable little information in most of them. Julia Paridoe was expelled from school, though. She seems to be the only delinquent among them.”

“Good God! What for?”

“Her dossier doesn’t say. Apparently it was something to do with a visiting math master. Her headmistress felt it right to mention it when she sent Matron a reference before the girl started here. It isn’t very specific. She writes that Julia was more sinned against than sinning and that she hoped the hospital would give her the chance of training for the only career she has ever shown any interest in, or signs of being suited for.”