Shroud for a Nightingale

by P. D. James

“No. I’m not careless. Besides the affair was over. But if it hadn’t been I should hardly have killed her. That kind of solution causes more embarrassment than it prevents.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “What would you have done?”

  “That would have depended on the circumstances. I should have had to be sure it was my child. But this particular problem is hardly uncommon and not insoluble if the woman is reasonable.”

  “I’ve been told that Miss Fallon planned to get an abortion. Did she approach you?”

  “No.”

  “She might have done?”

  “Certainly she might have done. But she didn’t.”

  “Would you have helped her if she had?”

  The surgeon looked at him. “That question is hardly within your terms of reference, I should have thought.”

  Dalgliesh said: “That’s for me to judge. The girl was pregnant; she apparently intended to get an abortion; she told a friend that she knew someone who would help her. I’m naturally interested to know who she had in mind.”

  “You know the law. I’m a surgeon not a gynaecologist. I prefer to stick to my own speciality and to practise it legally.”

  “But there are other kinds of help. Referring her to an appropriate consultant, helping with the fees.”

  A girl with £16,000 to bequeath was hardly likely to want help with the fees for an abortion. But Miss Goodale’s legacy was not being made public and Dalgliesh was interested to learn whether Courtney-Briggs knew about Fallon’s capital. But the surgeon gave no sign.

  “Well, she didn’t come to me. She may have had me in mind but she didn’t come. And if she had, I wouldn’t have helped. I make it my business to assume my own responsibilities; but I don’t take on other people’s. If she chose to look elsewhere for her satisfaction she could look elsewhere for her help. I didn’t impregnate her. Someone did. Let him look after her.”

  “That would have been your response?”

  “Certainly it would. And rightly.” His voice held a note of grim satisfaction. Looking at him, Dalgliesh saw that his face was flushed. The man was controlling his emotion with difficulty. And Dalgliesh had little doubt of the nature of that emotion. It was hate. He went on with his interrogation.

  “Were you in the hospital last night?”

  “Yes. I was called to operate on an emergency. One of my patients relapsed. It wasn’t altogether unexpected, but very serious. I finished operating at eleven forty-five p.m. The time will be noted in the theatre register. Then I rang Sister Brumfett at Nightingale House to ask her to be good enough to return to her ward for an hour or so. My patient was a private patient. After that I rang my home to say that I would be returning that night instead of sleeping here in the medical officers’ quarters as I do occasionally after a late operation. I left the main building shortly after twelve. I intended driving out by the Winchester Road gate. I have my own key. However, it was a wild night, as you probably noticed, and I discovered that there was an elm down over the path. I was lucky not to drive into it. I got out of the car and knotted my white silk scarf round one of the branches to warn anyone who might be driving that way. It wasn’t likely that anyone would, but the tree was an obvious danger and there was no chance of getting it moved before daylight. I reversed the car and left by the main entrance, reporting the fallen tree to the gate porter on my way out.”

  “Did you notice the time then?”

  “I didn’t. He may have done. But, at a guess, it was probably about twelve fifteen, maybe later. I wasted a bit of time at the tree.”

  “You would have had to drive past Nightingale House to reach the back gate. You didn’t go in?”

  “I had no reason to go in and I didn’t go in, either to poison Nurse Fallon or for any other reason.”

  “And you saw no one in the grounds?”

  “After midnight and in the middle of a storm? No, I saw no one.”

  Dalgliesh switched his questioning. “You saw Nurse Pearce die, of course. I suppose there was never a real chance of saving her?”

  “Never, I should say. I took pretty vigorous measures, but it isn’t easy when you don’t know what you’re treating.”

  “But you knew it was poison?”

  “Pretty soon. Yes. But I didn’t know what. Not that it would have made any difference. You’ve seen the post-mortem report. You knew what the stuff did to her.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “You were in Nightingale House from eight o’clock onwards on the morning that she died?”

  “You know perfectly well that I was if, as I assume, you’ve taken the trouble to read my original statement. I arrived in Nightingale House shortly after eight. My contract here is for six notional half-days a week; I’m in the hospital all day on Monday, Thursday and Friday; but it’s not uncommon for me to be called in to operate on an emergency; particularly if it’s a private patient, and I occasionally do a Saturday morning session in the theatre if the lists are long. I’d been called out shortly after eleven o’clock on Sunday night for an emergency appendicectomy—one of my private patients—and it was convenient to spend the night in the medical officers’ quarters.”

  “Which are where?”

  “In that deplorably designed new building near the outpatients’ department. They serve breakfast at the ungodly hour of seven thirty.”

  “You were here rather early surely. The demonstration wasn’t due to begin until nine.”

  “I wasn’t here merely for the demonstration, Superintendent. You’re really rather ignorant of hospitals, aren’t you? The Senior Consultant Surgeon doesn’t normally attend nurse training sessions unless he’s actually lecturing the students. I only attended on January 12th because the G.N.C. Inspector was to be there and I’m Vice-Chairman of the Nurse Education Committee. It was a courtesy to Miss Beale to be here to meet her. I came in early because I wanted to work on some clinical notes which I had left in Sister Rolfe’s office after a previous lecture. I also wanted to have a chat with Matron before the inspection began and to be sure that I was there in time to receive Miss Beale. I went up to Matron’s flat at eight thirty-five and found her finishing breakfast. And, if you’re thinking that I could have put the corrosive in the milk bottle any time between eight and eight thirty-five, you’re perfectly right. As it happens, I didn’t.”

  He looked at his watch. “And now if there’s nothing else you need to ask I must get my lunch. I’ve another out-patients’ session this afternoon and time’s pressing. If it’s really necessary, I can probably give you a few more minutes before I leave but I hope it won’t be. I’ve already signed one statement about Pearce’s death and I’ve nothing to add or to alter. I didn’t see Fallon yesterday. I didn’t even know she was discharged from the sick bay. She wasn’t carrying my child, and even if she had been, I shouldn’t have been foolish enough to kill her. Incidentally, what I told you about our previous relationship was naturally in confidence.”

  He looked across meaningly at Sergeant Masterson. “Not that I care whether it’s made public. But, after all, the girl is dead. We may as well try to protect her reputation.”

  Dalgliesh found it difficult to believe that Mr. Courtney-Briggs was interested in anyone’s reputation but his own. But, gravely, he gave the necessary assurance. He saw the surgeon leave without regret. An egotistical bastard whom it was agreeable, if childish, to provoke. But a murderer? He had the hubris, the nerve and the egotism of a killer. More to the point, he had had the opportunity. And the motive? Hadn’t it been a little disingenuous of him to have confessed so readily to his relationship with Josephine Fallon? Admittedly he couldn’t have hoped to keep his secret for long; a hospital was hardly the most discreet of institutions. Had he been making a virtue of necessity, ensuring that Dalgliesh heard the version of the affair before the inevitable gossip reached his ears? Or had it been merely the candour of conceit, the sexual vanity of a man who wouldn’t trouble to conceal any exploit which proclaimed his attraction and virility?

  Putting
his papers together, Dalgliesh became aware that he was hungry. He had made an early start to the day and it had been a long morning. It was time to turn his mind from Stephen Courtney-Briggs and for him and Masterson to think about luncheon.

  BOOK FIVE

  TABLE TALK

  1

  The resident Sisters and students from Nightingale House took only their breakfast and afternoon tea in the dining-room at the school. For their main midday and evening meal they joined the rest of the staff in the hospital cafeteria where all but the consultants ate in institutionalized and noisy proximity. The food was invariably nourishing, adequately cooked, and as varied as was compatible with the need to satisfy the differing tastes of several hundred people, avoid outraging their religious or dietary susceptibilities, and keep within the catering officer’s budget. The principles governing the menu planning were invariable. Liver and kidneys were never served on the days when the urinary surgeon operated, and the nurses were not faced with the same menu as that which they had just served to the patients.

  The cafeteria system had been introduced at the John Carpendar Hospital against strong opposition from all grades of staff. Eight years ago there had been separate dining-rooms for the Sisters and nurses, one for the administrative and lay professional staff, and a canteen for the porters and artisans. The arrangements had suited everyone as making a proper distinction between grades and ensuring that people ate in reasonable quietness and in the company of those with whom they preferred to spend their lunch break. But now only the senior medical staff enjoyed the peace and privacy of their own dining-room. This privilege, jealously defended, was under perpetual attack from Ministry auditors, Government catering advisers and work study experts who, armed with costing statistics, had no difficulty in proving that the system was uneconomical. But so far the doctors had won. Their strongest argument was their need to discuss the patients in privacy. This suggestion that they never stopped working, even for meals, was greeted with some scepticism but was difficult to refute. The need to keep the patients’ affairs confidential touched on that area of patient-doctor relationship which the doctors were always quick to exploit. Before this mystique even the Treasury auditors were powerless to prevail. Furthermore, they had had the support of the Matron. Miss Taylor had made it known that she considered it eminently reasonable that the senior medical staff should continue to have their own dining-room. And Miss Taylor’s influence over the Chairman of the Hospital Management Committee was so obvious and of such long standing that it had almost ceased to excite comment. Sir Marcus Cohen was a wealthy and personable widower and the only surprise now was that he and the Matron hadn’t married. This, it was generally accepted, was either because Sir Marcus, an acknowledged leader of the country’s Jewish community, chose not to marry outside his faith or because Miss Taylor, wedded to her vocation, chose not to marry at all.

  But the extent of Miss Taylor’s influence over the Chairman and thus over the Hospital Management Committee was beyond speculation. It was known to be particularly irritating to Mr. Courtney-Briggs since it considerably diminished his own. But in the matter of the consultants’ dining-room it had been exercised in his favour and had proved decisive.

  But if the rest of the staff had been forced into proximity they had not been forced into intimacy. The hierarchy was still apparent. The immense dining-room had been divided into smaller dining areas separated from each other by screens of latticework and troughs of plants, and in each of these alcoves the atmosphere of a private dining-room was re-created.

  Sister Rolfe helped herself to plaice and chips, carried her tray to the table which, for the past eight years, she had shared with Sister Brumfett and Sister Gearing, and looked around at the denizens of this strange world. In the alcove nearest the door were the laboratory technicians in their stained overalls, noisily animated. Next to them was old Fleming, the outpatients’ pharmacist, rolling bread pellets like pills in his nicotine-stained fingers. At the next table were four of the medical stenographers in their blue working overalls. Miss Wright, the senior secretary, who had been at the John Carpendar for twenty years, was eating with furtive speed as she always did, avid to get back to her typewriter. Behind the adjacent screen was a little clutch of the lay professional staff—Miss Bunyon, the head radiographer, Mrs. Nethern, the head medical social worker, and two of the physiotherapists, carefully preserving their status by an air of calm unhurried efficiency, an apparent total disinterest in the food they were eating and the choice of a table as far removed as possible from that of the junior clerical staff.

  And what were they all thinking about? Fallon probably. There couldn’t be anyone in the hospital from the consultants to the ward maids who didn’t know by now that a second Nightingale student had died in mysterious circumstances and that Scotland Yard had been called in. Fallon’s death was probably the subject of gossip at most of the tables this morning. But it didn’t prevent people from eating their lunch or from getting on with their jobs. There was so much to do; there were so many other pressing concerns; there was even so much gossip. It wasn’t just that life had to go on; in hospital that cliché had particular relevance. Life did go on, carried forward by the imperative momentum of birth and death. New booked admissions came in; ambulances daily disgorged the emergencies; operation lists were posted; the dead were laid out and the healed discharged. Death, even sudden and unexpected death, was more familiar to these young fresh-faced students than it was to even the most experienced senior detective. And there was a limit to its power to shock. You either came to terms with death in your first year, or you gave up being a nurse. But murder? That was different. Even in this violent world, murder still held its macabre and primitive power to shock. But how many people in Nightingale House really believed that Pearce and Fallon had been murdered? It would take more than the presence of the Yard’s wonder boy and his retinue to give credence to such an extraordinary idea. There were too many other possible explanations, all of them simpler and more believable than murder. Dalgliesh might believe as he chose; proving it would be another matter.

  Sister Rolfe bent her head and began unenthusiastically to dissect her plaice. She felt no particular hunger. The strong smell of food was heavy on the air, stifling appetite. The noise of the cafeteria beat against her ears. It was ceaseless and inescapable, a confused continuum of discord in which individual sounds were scarcely distinguishable.

  Next to her, her cloak folded neatly at the back of her chair and the shapeless tapestry bag which accompanied her everywhere dumped at her feet, Sister Brumfett was eating steamed cod and parsley sauce with belligerent intensity as if she resented the need to eat and was venting her irritation on the food. Sister Brumfett invariably chose steamed fish and Sister Rolfe felt suddenly that she couldn’t face another lunch hour of watching Brumfett eat cod.

  She reminded herself that there was no reason why she should. There was nothing to prevent her sitting somewhere else, nothing except this petrification of the will which made the simple act of carrying her tray three feet to a different table seem impossibly cataclysmic and irrevocable. On her left, Sister Gearing toyed with her braised beef, and chopped her wedge of cabbage into neat squares. When she actually began to eat she would shove the food in avidly like a greedy schoolgirl. But always there were finicky and salivatory preliminaries. Sister Rolfe wondered how many times she had resisted the urge to say, “For God’s sake, Gearing, stop messing about and eat it!” One day, no doubt, she would say it. And another middle-aged and unlikeable Sister would be pronounced “getting very difficult. It’s probably her age.”

  She had considered living out of the hospital. It was permissible and she could afford it. The purchase of a flat or small house would be the best investment for her retirement. But Julia Pardoe had disposed of that idea in a few half-interested, destructive comments dropped like cold pebbles into the deep pool of her hopes and plans. Sister Rolfe could still hear that high, childish voice.

&nbs
p; “Live out. Why should you want to do that? We shouldn’t see so much of each other.”

  “But we should, Julia. And in much greater privacy and without all this risk and deceit. It would be a comfortable and agreeable little house. You’d like it.”

  “It wouldn’t be as easy as slipping upstairs to see you when I feel like it.”

  When she felt like it? Felt like what? Sister Rolfe had desperately fought off the question she never dared to let herself ask.

  She knew the nature of her dilemma. It wasn’t, after all, peculiar to herself. In any relationship there was one who loved and one who permitted himself or herself to be loved. This was merely to state the brutal economics of desire; from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. But was it selfish or presumptuous to hope that the one who took knew the value of the gift; that she wasn’t wasting love on a promiscuous and perfidious little cheat who took her pleasure wherever she chose to find it?

  She had said: “You could probably come twice or three times a week, perhaps more often. I wouldn’t move far.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how I could manage that. I don’t see why you want the work and bother of a house. You’re all right here.”

  Sister Rolfe thought: “But I’m not all right here. This place is souring me. It isn’t only the long-stay patients who become institutionalized. It’s happening to me. I dislike and despise most of the people I’m required to work with. Even the job is losing its hold. The students get more stupid and worse educated with every intake. I’m not even sure any more of the value of what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  There was a crash near the counter. One of the maids had dropped a tray of used crockery. Looking instinctively across, Sister Rolfe saw that the detective had just come in and taken up his tray at the end of the line. She watched the tall figure, disregarded by the chattering queue of nurses, as he began to move slowly down the line between a white-coated houseman and a pupil midwife, helping himself to a roll and butter, waiting for the girl to hand out his choice of main course. She was surprised to see him there. It had never occurred to her that he would eat in the hospital dining-hall or that he would be on his own. Her eyes followed him as he reached the end of the line, handed over his meal ticket and turned to look for a vacant seat. He seemed utterly at ease and almost oblivious of the alien world around him. She thought that he was probably a man who could never imagine himself at a disadvantage in any company since he was secure in his private world, possessed of that core of inner self-esteem which is the basis of happiness. She wondered what kind of a world his was, then bent her head to her plate at this unusual interest he aroused in her. Probably he would be thought handsome by most women, with that lean bony face, at once arrogant and sensitive. It was probably one of his professional assets, and being a man he would make the most of it. No doubt it was one of the reasons why he had been given this case. If dull Bill Bailey could make nothing of it, let the Yard’s wonder boy take over. With a house full of women and the three middle-aged spinsters as his chief suspects, no doubt he fancied his chances. Well, good luck to him!