Shroud for a Nightingale

by P. D. James

  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. Masterson 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-Stokes’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-Stokes. It means that you’re going to die.”

  “They should have done something about it. That girl 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 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.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll come again. Yes. Yes.”

  The flesh was dry and hot now. She might have been in a fever. The painted nails were ridged. On the back of the hands the veins stood out like purple cords. He traced with a caressing finger the brown stains of age.

  Shortly after midnight her voice burbled into incoherency, her head sank forward, and he saw that she was asleep. He waited for a moment, then disengaged his hand and tiptoed into the bedroom. It took him only a couple of minutes to change his clothes. Then he tiptoed into the bathroom and washed his face and the hand which had touched hers, washed them over and over again. Finally he left the flat, shutting the door quietly behind him as if afraid to wake her, and went out into the night.

  5

  Fifteen minutes later, Masterson’s car passed the flat where Miss Beale and Miss Burrows, cosily dressing-gowned, were sipping their late night cocoa before the dying fire. They heard it as one brief crescendo in the intermittent flow of traffic, and broke off their chatter to speculate with desultory interest on what brought people out in the small hours of the morning. It was certainly unusual for them to be still up at this hour, but tomorrow was Saturday and they could indulge their fondness for late night conversation in the comfortable knowledge that they could lie in next morning.

  They had been discussing the visit that afternoon of Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh. Really, they agreed, it had been a success, almost a pleasure. He had seemed to enjoy his tea. He had sat there, deep in their most comfortable armchair, and the three of them had talked together as if he were as harmless and familiar as the local vicar.

  He had said to Miss Beale: “I want to see Nurse Pearce’s death through your eyes. Tell me about it. Tell me everything you saw and felt from the moment you drove through the hospital gates.”

  And Miss Beale had told him, taking a shameful pleasure in her half-hour of importance, in his obvious appreciation that she had observed so carefully and could describe with such clarity. He was a good listener, they conceded. Well, that was part of his job. He was clever, too, at making people talk. Even Angela, who had sat in watchful silence for most of the time, couldn’t explain why she had felt drawn to mention her recent encounter with Sister Rolfe in the Westminster Library. And his eyes had flickered with interest, interest which had faded into disappointment when she told him the date. The friend agreed that they couldn’t have been mistaken. He had been disappointed. Sister Rolfe had been seen in the library on the wrong day.

  6

  It was after eleven o’clock when Dalgliesh turned the key in his desk drawer, locked the office behind him and let himself out of the side door of Nightingale House to walk back to the Falconer’s Arms. At the turn of the path where it narrowed before losing itself in the dark shadows of the trees, he looked back at the gaunt pile of the house, enormous and sinister, with its four turrets black against the night sky. The house was in almost total darkness. There was only one lighted window and it took him a minute to identify the room. So Mary Taylor was in her bedroom but not yet asleep. The light was merely a faint glow, perhaps from a bedside lamp, and as he watched it went out.

  He made his way towards the Winchester Gate. The trees here were very close to the path. Their black boughs arched over his head shutting out the faint light from the nearest lamp. For about fifty yards he walked in absolute darkness, treading swiftly and silently over the mush of dead leaves. He was in that state of physical tiredness when the mind and body seem detached, the body, conditioned to reality, moving half consciously in the familiar physical world, while the liberated mind swings into uncontrolled orbit in which fantasy and fact show an equally ambiguous face. Dalgliesh was surprised that he was so tired. This job was no more arduous than any other. He was working long hours, but then a sixteen-hour day was normal for him when he was on a case. And this extraordinary weariness wasn’t the exhaustion of frustration or failure. The case would break by tomorrow morning. Later tonight Masterson would be back with another piece of the jigsaw and the picture would be complete. In two days at the latest he would have left Nightingale House. In two days’ time he would have seen the last of that gold and white room in the south-west turret.

  Moving like an automaton he heard, too late, the sudden muted footfall at his back. Instinctively, he threw himself round to face his adversary and felt the blow glance from his left temple to his shoulder. There was no pain, only a crack as if his whole cranium had split, a numbness of his left arm, and after a second which seemed an eternity, the warm, almost comforting, gush of blood. He gave one gasp and crumpled forward. But he was still conscious. Blinded by blood and fighting against nausea, he tried to rise, feeling for the earth with both hands, willing himself to get up and fight. But his feet scrabbled ineffectively in the moist earth and there was no strength in his arms. His eyes were blinded by his o
wn blood. The suffocating smell of damp humus pressed against his nose and mouth, pungent as an anaesthetic. He lay there, helplessly retching, waking pain with every spasm, and waited in angry impotence for the final annihilating blow.

  But nothing happened. He sank, unresisting, into unconsciousness. A few seconds later he was recalled to reality by a hand gently shaking his shoulder. Someone was bending over him. He heard a woman’s voice.

  “It’s me. What’s ’appened? Somebody cosh yer?”

  It was Morag Smith. He struggled to answer, to warn her to get away quickly. The two of them would be no match for a determined killer. But his mouth seemed incapable of forming words. He was aware that somewhere very close a man was groaning, then realized with bitter humour that the voice was his. He seemed to have no control over it. He was aware of hands moving around his head. Then she shuddered like a child.

  “Ugh! Yer all over blood!”

  Again he tried to talk. She bent her head nearer. He could see the dark strands of hair and the white face hovering in front of him. He struggled to rise and this time managed to get to his knees.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Not really—’e ’eard me coming through. Made off towards Nightingale ’ouse. Blimey, you don’t ’alf look a bloody mess. ’Ere, lean on me.”

  “No. Leave me and get help. He may be back.”

  “Not ’im. Anyway, we’re better together. I don’t fancy going it alone. Ghosts is one thing, bloody murderers is another. Come on, I’ll give yer a ’and.”

  He could feel the sharp bones in her thin shoulders, but the fragile body was remarkably wiry and she stood his weight well. He forced himself to his feet and stood there swaying. He asked: “Man or woman?”

  “Didn’t see. Could’ve been either. Never mind about that now. Think yer can make it to Nightingale ’ouse? That’d be the nearest.”

  Dalgliesh felt remarkably better now that he was on his legs. He could scarcely see the path but he took a few tentative steps forward, his hand supported by her shoulder.

  “I think so. The back door would be the nearest. It can’t be more than fifty yards. Ring the bell of Matron’s flat. I know she’s there.”

  Together they shuffled slowly along the path, obliterating, as Dalgliesh realized bitterly, any footprints he might otherwise have hoped to find next morning. Not that these sodden leaves would yield many clues. He wondered what had happened to the weapon. But this was pointless speculation. He could do nothing until it was light. He felt a wave of gratitude and affection for the tough little person whose brittle arm lay weightless as a child’s around his hips. We must look an odd pair, he thought.

  He said: “You probably saved my life, Morag. He only ran off because he heard you coming.”

  He, or was it she? If only Morag had been in time to glimpse whether it were a man or a woman. He could scarcely catch her reply.

  “Don’t talk bloody daft.”

  He heard, without surprise, that she was crying. She made no attempt to suppress or check her sobbing and it didn’t impede their progress. Perhaps, to Morag, crying was almost as natural as walking. He made no effort to comfort her except to press on her shoulders. She took that as a plea for more support and tightened her arm around his hips, leaning against him, helping him on his way. And thus incongruously they passed under the shadows of the trees.

  7

  The light in the demonstration room was bright, too bright. It pierced even his gummed eyelids and he moved his head restlessly from side to side to escape the shaft of pain. Then his head was being steadied by cool hands. Mary Taylor’s hands. He heard her speaking to him, telling him that Courtney-Briggs was in the hospital. She had sent for Courtney-Briggs. Then the same hands were taking off his tie, undoing the buttons of his shirt, slipping his arms out of his jacket with practised skill.

  “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 se
ttling 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.