Shroud for a Nightingale (34 page)

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment we have all been waiting for. The exhibition dances. Our medalists for the year will demonstrate for .our delight the dances which won them their awards. We begin with our silver medallist, Mrs. Dettinger, dancing”—he consulted the list—“dancing the tango.”

He swept a chubby hand around the floor. The band crashed into a discordant fanfare. Mrs. Dettinger rose, dragging Masterson with her. Her claw was like a vice round his wrist The spotlight swung round and settled on them. There was a little burst of applause. The sleek man continued:

“Mrs. Dettinger is dancing with—could we have the name of your new partner Mrs. Dettinger?” Masterson called out loudly:

“Mr. Edward Heath.”

The sleek man paused, then decided to take it at its face value. Forcing enthusiasm into his voice, he proclaimed:

“Mrs. Dettinger, silver medallist dancing the tango with Mr. Edward Health.”

The cymbals clashed, there was a further spatter of applause. Masterson led his partner on to the floor with exaggerated courtesy. He was aware that he was slightly drunk and was glad of it He was going to enjoy himself.

He clasped his hand to the small of her back and assumed an expression of lecherous expectancy. It won an immediate giggle from the nearest table. She frowned and he watched fascinated while an unbecoming crimson flowed over her face and neck. He realized with delight that she was intensely nervous, that this pathetic charade actually mattered to her. It was for this moment that she had dressed so carefully, painted her raddled face. The Delaroux Medal Ball. The demonstration tango. And then her partner had failed her. Lost courage probably, the poor sap. But fate had provided her with a personable and competent substitute. It must have seemed like a miracle. It was for this moment that he had been enticed to the Athenaeum Hall, kept dancing here hour after tedious hour. The knowledge was exhilarating. By God, he had her now. This was to be her big moment. He would see that she didn’t forget it in a hurry.

The slow rhythm began. He noted with irritation that it was the same old tune for this dance that they had played most of the evening. He hummed the words in her ear. She whispered:

“We’re supposed to be dancing the Dalaroux tango.”

“We’re dancing the Charles Masterson tango, sweetheart”

Clasping her tightly he marched her belligerently across the floor in a strutting parody of the dance, swung her viciously around so that her laquered hair nearly brushed the floor and he heard her bones cracking, and held her in the pose while he bestowed a smile of surprised gratification on the party at the nearest table. The giggle was louder now, more prolonged. As he jerked her upright and waited for the next beat she hissed:

“What do you want to know?”

“He recognized someone, didn’t he? Your son. When be was in the John Carpendar Hospital. He saw someone he knew?”

“Will you behave yourself and dance properly?”

“Perhaps.”

They were moving again in an orthodox tango. He could feel her relaxing a little in his arms, but he still kept a firm hold on her.

“It was one of the Sisters. He’d seen her before.”

“Which Sister?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t tell me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“After the dance.”

“Tell me now if you don’t want to end on the floor. Where had he seen her before?”

“In Germany. She was in the dock. It was a war trial. She got off but everybody knew she was guilty.”

“Where in Germany?”

He mouthed the words through lips stretched into the fatuous smile of a professional dancing partner.

“Felsenheim. It was a place called Felsenheim.”

“Say it again. Say that name again!”

“Felsenheim.”

The name meant nothing to him but he knew he would remember it. With luck he would get the details later but the salient facts must be torn from her now while he had her in his power. It might not be true, of course. None of it might be true. And if true it might not be relevant. But this was the information he had been sent to get He felt a surge of confidence and good humor. He was even in danger of enjoying the dance. He decided that it was time for something spectacular and led her into a complicated routine beginning with a progressive link and ending with a close promenade that took them diagonally across the hall. It was faultlessly executed and the applause was loud and sustained. He asked: “What was her name?”

“Irmgard Groble. She was only a young girl then, of course. Martin said that was why she got off. He never had any doubt she was guilty.” “Are you sure he didn’t tell you which Sister it was?” “No. He was very ill. He told me about the trial when he came home from Europe, so I already knew about it. But he was unconscious most of the time in hospital. And when he wasn’t he was mostly delirious.”

So he could have made a mistake, thought Masterson. It was an unlikely enough story. And surely it would be hard to recognize a face after over twenty-five years; except that he must have watched that particular face with fascinated intensity all through the trial. It must have made an impression on a young and probably sensitive man. Enough, perhaps, for him to relive it in his delirium and delude himself that one of the faces bending over him in those few moments of consciousness and lucidity was the face of Irmgard Grobel. But supposing, just supposing, he had been right. If he had told his mother he might well have told his special nurse or blurted it out in his delirium. And what use had Heather Pearce made of her knowledge? He whispered softly into her ear: “Who else have you told?”

“Nobody. I haven’t told anybody. Why should I?” Another rock swing. Then an over swing. Very nice.

More applause. He tightened his hold on her and made his voice husky with menace beneath the fixed grin.

“Who else? You must have told someone.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re a woman.”

It was a lucky reply. The mulish obstinacy on her face softened. She glanced up at him for a second, then fluttered her sparse ‘mascara-coated eyelashes in a travesty of flirtation. Oh God, he thought, she’s going to be coy.

“Oh well… perhaps I did tell just one person.”

“I know bloody well you did. I’m asking who?”

Again the deprecatory glance, the little moo of submission. She had decided to enjoy this masterful man. For some reason, perhaps the gin, perhaps the euphoria of the dance, her resistance had crumbled. It was going to be hunky-dory from now on.

“I told Mr. Courtney-Briggs, Martin’s surgeon. Well, it seemed only right”

“When?”

“Last Wednesday. The Wednesday of last week, I mean. At his consulting rooms in Wimpole Street. He had just left the hospital on the Friday when Martin died so I couldn’t see him earlier. He’s only at the John Carpendar on Monday, Thursday and Friday.”

“Did he ask to see you?”

“Oh no! The staff nurse who was taking Sister’s place said that he would be very glad to have a talk with me if I thought it would be helpful and that I could phone Wimpole Street to make an appointment I didn’t then. What was the use? Martin was dead. But then I got his bill. Not very nice, I thought so soon after Martin had passed away. Two hundred guineas 11 thought it was monstrous. After all, it’s not as if he did any good. So I thought I’d just pop into Wimpole Street and see him and mention what I knew. It wasn’t right for the hospital to employ a woman like that A murderess really. And then to charge all that money. There was a second bill from the hospital for his maintenance you know, but it wasn’t anything like Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s two hundred guineas.”

The sentences were disjointed. She spoke them close into his ear as opportunity offered. But she was neither breathless nor incoherent. She had plenty of energy for both the dance and the talk. And it was Masterson who was feeling the strain. Another progressive link leading into the
dori
and ending with a close promenade. She didn’t put a foot wrong. The old girl had been well taught even if they couldn’t give her grace or
elan.

“So you trotted along to tell him what you knew and suggested that he took a slice off his profits?”

“He didn’t believe me. He said that Martin was delirious and mistaken and that he could personally vouch for all the Sisters. But he took £50 off the bill.”

She spoke with grim satisfaction. Masterson was surprised. Even if Courtney-Briggs had believed the story there was no reason why he should deduct a not inconsiderable amount from his bill. He wasn’t responsible for recruiting or appointing the nursing staff. He had nothing to worry about. Masterson wondered whether he had believed the story. He had obviously said nothing, either to the Chairman of the Hospital Management Committee or to the Matron. Perhaps it was true that he could vouch personally for all the Sisters and the £50 deduction had merely been a gesture to keep a tiresome woman quiet. But Courtney-Briggs hadn’t struck Masterson as the kind of man to submit himself to blackmail or to relinquish a penny of what he thought was due to him.

It was at that moment that the music crashed to a finish. Masterson smiled benevolently on Mrs. Dettinger, and led her back to their table. The applause lasted until they reached it and then was cut off abruptly as the sleek man announced the next dance. Masterson looked around for the waiter and beckoned.

“Well, now,” he said to his partner, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? If you behave yourself nicely for the rest of the evening I might even take you home.”

He did take her home. They left early but it was well past midnight before he finally left the Baker Street flat. By then he knew that he had as much of the story as she could tell him. She had grown maudlin after their return, a reaction, he felt, to triumph and gin. He had kept her supplied with the latter through the rest of the evening, not enough to make her unmanageably drunk but sufficient to keep her talkative and pliable. But the journey home had been a nightmare, not made easier by the cab driver’s glances of mingled amusement and contempt as he drove them from the hall to the South Bank car park, and by the disapproving superciliousness of the hall porter when they arrived at Saville Mansions. Once in the fiat he had coaxed, comforted and bullied her into coherence, making black coffee for them both in the unbelievably squalid kitchen—a slut’s kitchen he thought, glad of one more reason to despise her—and giving it to her with promises that, of course, he wouldn’t leave her, that he would call for her again the following Saturday, that they would be permanent dancing partners. By midnight he had‘ got out of her all he wanted to know about Martin Dettinger’s career and his stay in the John Carpendar Hospital. There wasn’t a great deal to be learned about the hospital. She hadn’t visited often during the week he was there. Well, what was the point of it? There wasn’t anything she could do for him. He was unconscious most of the time and didn’t really know her even when he woke. Except that once, of course. She had hoped then for a little word of comfort and appreciation, but all she had got was that odd laugh and the talk about Irmgard Grobel. He had told her that story years before. She was tired of hearing it A boy ought to be thinking of his mother when he was dying. It had been a terrible effort to sit there watching. She was a sensitive person. Hospitals upset her. The late Mr. Dettinger hadn’t understood how sensitive she was.

There was apparently a great deal that the late Mr. Dettinger hadn’t understood, his wife’s sexual needs among them. Masterson listened to the story of her marriage without interest It was the usual story of an unsatisfied wife, a henpecked husband and an unhappy and sensitive child. Master-son heard it without pity. He wasn’t particularly interested in people. He divided them into two broad groups, the law-abiding and the villains and the ceaseless war which he waged against the latter fulfilled, as he knew, some inarticulated need of his own nature. But he was interested in facts. He knew that when anybody visited the scene of a crime, some evidence was left behind or some was taken away. It was the detective’s job to find that evidence. He knew that fingerprints hadn’t yet been known to lie and that human beings did frequently, irrationally, whether they were innocent or guilty. He knew that facts stood up in court and people let you down. He knew that motive was unpredictable although he had honesty enough sometimes to recognize his own. It had struck him at the very moment of entering Julia Pardoe that his act, in its anger and exaltation, was in some way directed against Dalgliesh. But it never occurred to him to ask why. That would have seemed profitless speculation. Nor did he wonder whether, for the girl also, it had been an act of malice and private retribution.

“You’d think a boy would want his mother when he was dying. It was terrible to sit there and hear that dreadful breathing, first soft and then dreadfully loud. Of course he had a private room. That’s why the hospital was able to charge. He wasn’t National Health. But the other patients must have heard the noise all over the ward.”

“Cheyne-Stoke’s breathing,” said Masterson. “It comes before the death rattle.”

They should have done something about it. It upset me dreadfully. That special nurse he had should have done something about it. The plain one. I suppose she was doing her duty, but she never gave a thought to me. After all, the living need some attention. There wasn’t anything else she could do for Martin.“

“That was Nurse Pearce. The one who died.”

“Yes, I remember you told me. So she’s dead too. I hear of nothing but death. It’s all around me. What did you call that breathing?”

“Cheyne-Stoke’s. It means that you’re going to die.”

They should have done something about it. Did she breathe like that before she died?“

“No, she screamed. Someone poured disinfectant into her stomach and burned it out.”

“I don’t want to hear about it! I don’t want to hear about it any more! Tell me about the dance. You will come back next Saturday, won’t you?”

And so it had gone on. It had been tedious and exhausting and, in the end, almost frightening. The triumphant glow of getting what he wanted had faded before midnight and he was aware only of hatred and disgust. While he listened to her babblings he toyed with imagined violence. It was easy to see how these things happened. A handy poker. The silly face smashed into pulp. Blow on blow on blow. The bones splintering. A gush of blood. An orgasm of hatred. Imagining it, he found it hard to keep his breathing even. He took her hand gently.