Shroud for a Nightingale

by P. D. James

  “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.

  BOOK EIGHT

  A CIRCLE OF BURNT EARTH

  1

  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.”

  “I thought you might say that.”

  “Was the question intended as a rebuke, sir?”

  Masterson was aware that he was entering on dangerous ground but was unable to resist his first tentative step.

  Dalgliesh didn’t answer the question. Instead he said: “I don’t think it’s possible to be a detective and remain always kind. But if you ever find that cruelty is becoming pleasurable in itself, then it’s probably time to stop being a detective.”

  Masterson flushed and was silent. This from Dalgliesh! Dalgliesh who was so uncaring about his subordinates’ private life as to seem unaware that they had any; whose caustic wit could be as devastating as another man’s bludgeon. Kindness! And how kind exactly was he himself? How many of his notable successes had been won with kindness? He would never be brutal, of course. He was too proud, too fastidious, too controlled, too bloody inhuman in fact for anything so understandable as a little down-to-earth brutality. His reaction to evil was a wrinkle of the nose not a stamp of the foot. But kindness! Tell that to the boys, thought Masterson.

  Dalgliesh went on talking as if he had said nothing remarkable.

  “We’ll have to see Mrs. Dettinger again, of course. And we’ll want a statement. Did you think she was telling the truth?”

  “It’s difficult to tell. I can’t think why she should lie. But she’s a strange woman and she wasn’t feeling too pleased with me at the time. It might give her some kind of perverse satisfaction to mislead us. She might have substituted Grobel’s name for one of the other defendants, for example.”

  “So that the person her son recognized on the ward could have been any one of the Felsenheim defendants, those who are still alive and unaccounted for. What exactly did her son tell her?”

  “That’s the problem, sir. Apparently he gave her to understand that this German woman, Irmgard Grobel, was employed at the John Carpendar but she can’t recall his exact words. She thinks he said something like: ‘This is a funny kind of hospital, Ma, they’ve got Grobel here, working as one of the Sisters.’”

  Dalgliesh said: “Suggesting that it wasn’t the Sister who was actually nursing him, otherwise he’d presumably have said so. Except, of course, that he was unconscious most of the time and may not have seen Sister Brumfett previously or appreciated that she was in charge of the ward. He wasn’t in any state to recognize the niceties of the hospital hierarchy. According to his medical record he was either delirious or unconscious most of the time, which would make his evidence suspect even if he hadn’t inconveniently died. Anyway, his mother at first didn’t apparently take the story too seriously. She didn’t mention it to anyone at the hospital? Nurse Pearce, for example?”

  “She says not. I think at the time Mrs. Dettinger’s main concern was to collect her son’s belongings and the death certificate and claim on the insurance.”

  “Bitter, Sergeant?”

  “Well, she’s paying nearly £2,000 a year for dancing lessons and she’s come to the end of her capital. These Delaroux people like payments in advance. I heard all about her finances when I took her home. Mrs. Dettinger wasn’t out to make trouble. But then she received Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s bill, and it occurred to her that she might use her son’s story to get a reduction. And she got one too. Fifty quid.”

  “Which suggests that Mr. Courtney-Briggs is either more charitable than we had supposed or thought that the information was worth the money. Did he pay it over at once?”

  “She says not. She first visited him at his Wimpole Street consulting rooms on the evening of Wednesday, 21st January. She didn’t get much joy on that occasion so she rang him up last Saturday morning. The receptionist told her that Mr. Courtney-Briggs was out of the country. She intended to ring again on the Monday but the cheque for fifty pounds came by the first post. There was no letter and no explanation, merely his compliment slip. But she got the message all right.”

  “So he was out of the country last Saturday. Where, I wonder? Germany? That’s something to check, anyway.”

  Masterson said, “It all sounds so unlikely, sir. And it doesn’t really fit.”

  “No. We’re pretty certain who killed both those girls. Logically all the facts point to one person. And as you say, this new evidence doesn’t really fit in. It’s disconcerting when you scramble around in the dirt for a missing piece of the jigsaw and then find it’s part of a different puzzle.”

  “So you don’t think it’s relevant, sir? I should hate to think that my evening’s exertions with Mrs. Dettinger were in vain.”

  “Oh, it’s relevant. It’s exceedingly relevant. And we’ve found some corroboration. We’ve traced the missing library book. Westminster City Library were very helpful. Miss Pearce went to the Marylebone branch on the afternoon of Thursday, 8th January, when she was off duty and asked if they had a book dealing with German war trials. She said she was interested in a trial at Felsenheim in November 1945. They couldn’t find anything in stock but they said they would make inquiries of other London libraries and suggested that she should come back or telephone them in a day or two. She telephoned on the Saturday morning. They told her that they’d been able to trace a book which dealt with the Felsenheim trial among others, and she called in for it that afternoon. On each visit she gave her name as Josephine Fallon and presented Fallon’s ticket and the blue token. Normally, of course, they wouldn’t have noticed the name and address. They did so because the book had to be specially obtained from another library.”

  “Was the book returned, sir?”

  “Yes, but anonymously, and they can’t say exactly when. It was probably on the Wednesday after Pearce died. Someone left it on the non-fiction trolley. When the assistant went to fill up the trolley with recently returned books she recognized it and took it back to the counter to be registered and put on one side ready for return to its parent library. No one saw who returned it. The library is particularly busy and people come in and out at will. Not everyone has a book to return or calls at the counter. It would be easy enough to bring in a book in a basket or a pocket and slip it among the others on the trolley. The assistant who found it had been on counter duty for most of the morning and afternoon and one of the junior staff had been replenishing the trolley. The girl was getting behind with the work so her senior went to give a hand. She noticed the book at once. That was at four-thirty approximately. But it could have been put there at any time.”

  “Any prints, sir?”

  “Nothing helpful. A few smudges. It had been handled by quite a number of the library staff and God knows how many of the public. And why not? They weren’t to know that it was part of the evidence in a murder inquiry. But there’s something interesting about it. Have a look.”

  He opened one of the desk drawers and brought out a sto
ut book bound with a dark blue cloth and embossed with a library catalogue number on the spine. Masterson took it and laid it on the table. He seated himself and opened it carefully, taking his time. It was an account of various war trials in Germany from 1945 onwards, apparently carefully documented, unsensational in treatment and written by a Queen’s Counsel who had once been on the staff of the Judge Advocate General. There were only a few plates and of these only two related to the Felsenheim trial. One showed a general view of the Court with an indistinct glimpse of the doctor in the dock, and the other was a photograph of the camp commandant.

  Dalgliesh said: “Martin Dettinger is mentioned, but only briefly. During the war he served in the King’s Wiltshire Light Infantry and in November 1945 he was appointed as a member of a military Court set up in West Germany to try four men and one woman accused of war crimes. These Courts were established under a Special Army Order of June 1945 and this one consisted of a President who was a Brigadier of the Grenadier Guards, four army officers of whom Dettinger was one, and the Judge Advocate appointed by the Judge Advocate General to the Forces. As I said, they had the job of trying five people who, it was alleged—you’ll find the indictment on page 127—‘acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent and acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich did on or about 3rd September 1944 wilfully, deliberately and wrongfully aid, abet and participate in the killing of thirty-one human beings of Polish and Russian nationality’.”

  Masterson was not surprised that Dalgliesh should be able to quote the indictment word for word. This was an administrator’s trick, this ability to memorize and present facts with accuracy and precision. Dalgliesh could do it better than most, and if he wanted to exercise his technique it was hardly for his Sergeant to interrupt. He said nothing. He noticed that the Superintendent had taken up a large grey stone, a perfect ovoid, and was rolling it slowly between his fingers. It was something that had caught his eye in the grounds, presumably, and which he had picked up to serve as a paper-weight. It certainly hadn’t been on the office desk that morning. The tired, strained voice went on.