by P. D. James
“But you could see the door as you came down the stairs. Would you be likely to notice if the door were ajar? The room isn’t often used, is it?”
“No, but anyone might go there if they wanted a record. I mean, if the door were open, I wouldn’t go to see who was there or anything like that. I think I would notice if the door was wide open, so I suppose it wasn’t, but I can’t remember, honestly I can’t.”
Dalgliesh ended by asking her about Miss Bolam. It appeared that Miss Priddy knew her outside the clinic, that the Priddy family attended the same church and that Miss Bolam had encouraged her to take the job at the clinic.
“I shouldn’t have got this job if it hadn’t been for Enid. Of course, I never called her that inside the clinic. She wouldn’t have liked it.” Miss Priddy gave the impression that she had only reluctantly brought herself to use the Christian name outside the clinic. She went on: “I don’t mean she actually appointed me. I had to be interviewed by Mr. Lauder and by Dr. Etherege, but I know she spoke up for me. My shorthand and typing weren’t very good then—it was nearly two years ago when I came—and I was lucky to get here. I didn’t see very much of Enid at the clinic but she was always very kind and keen for me to get on. She wanted me to take the Institute of Hospital Administration diploma so that I needn’t be a shorthand typist all my life.”
This ambition for Miss Priddy’s future career struck Dalgliesh as a little odd. The child gave no impression of being ambitious and she would surely marry in time. It hardly needed the Institute’s diploma, whatever that might be, to save her from being a shorthand typist for life. He felt a little sorry for Miss Bolam who could scarcely have picked a less promising protégée. She was pretty, honest and naïve, but not, he thought, particularly intelligent. He had to remind himself that she had given her age as twenty-two not seventeen. She had a shapely and oddly mature body, but her thin face with its frame of long, straight hair was the face of a child.
There was little she could tell him about the administrative officer. She hadn’t noticed any change recently in Miss Bolam. She didn’t know that the AO had sent for Mr. Lauder and had no idea what could be worrying Miss Bolam at the clinic. Everything was going on very much as usual. Miss Bolam had no enemies as far as she knew, certainly no one who would wish to kill her.
“She was happy here, then, as far as you know? I was wondering whether she had asked for a move. A psychiatric clinic can’t be the easiest unit to administer.”
“Oh, it isn’t! I don’t know how Enid carried on sometimes. But I’m sure she would never ask for a move. Someone must have given you the wrong impression. She was never one to give up. If she thought people wanted her to go, she’d dig her toes in. The clinic was a kind of challenge to her.”
It was probably the most illuminating thing she had said about Miss Bolam. As he thanked her and asked her to wait with the rest of the staff until his preliminary interviews were over, Dalgliesh pondered on the possible nuisance value of an administrator who regarded her job as a challenge, a battleground from which she would never willingly retreat. He asked next to see Peter Nagle.
If the junior porter was worried by the killer’s choice of his chisel as a weapon, he gave no sign. He answered Dalgliesh’s questions calmly and politely, but so dispassionately that they might have been discussing some minor point of clinic procedure which was only doubtfully his concern. He gave his age as twenty-seven and an address in Pimlico and confirmed that he had been employed at the clinic for just over two years and was previously at a provincial art school. His voice was level and educated, his mud-brown eyes were large, almost expressionless. Dalgliesh noticed that he had unusually long arms which, held loosely from his short and powerful body, gave an impression of simian strength. His hair was black, coiling tightly over the scalp. It was an interesting face, withdrawn but intelligent. There could scarcely have been a greater contrast with poor old Cully, long since dispatched home to nurse both his stomach ache and his grievance at being kept late.
Nagle confirmed Miss Priddy’s story. He again identified his chisel with no more emotion than a brief moue of distaste and said that he had last seen it at eight o’clock that morning when he had arrived on duty and—for no particular reason—had made a check of his toolbox. Everything was in order then. Dalgliesh asked whether it was generally known where the box was kept. Nagle replied: “I’d be a fool if I said no, wouldn’t I?”
“You’d be a fool to say anything but the truth now or later.”
“I suppose most of the staff knew. Those who didn’t could find out easily enough. We don’t keep the porters’ room locked.”
“Isn’t that rather unwise? What about the patients?”
“They don’t go down to the basement on their own. The lysergic-acid patients are always escorted and the art-therapy people usually have someone keeping an eye on them. The department hasn’t been down there for long. The light’s bad and it isn’t really suitable. It’s a temporary department.”
“Where used it to be, then?”
“On the third floor. Then the Clinic Medical Committee decided they wanted the large room there for the marital-problems discussion groups, so Mrs. Baumgarten—she’s the art therapist—lost it. She’s been agitating to get it back but the MPD patients say it would be psychologically disturbing for them to meet in the basement.”
“Who runs the MPD?”
“Dr. Steiner and one of the psychiatric social workers, Miss Kallinski. It’s a club where the divorced and the single tell the patients how to be happy though married. I don’t see how it can concern the murder.”
“Nor do I. I asked about it to satisfy my curiosity as to why the art therapy department was so unsuitably housed. When did you hear that Tippett wasn’t attending today, by the way?”
“At about nine o’clock this morning. The old boy had been worrying St Luke’s Hospital to telephone and let us know what had happened. So they did. I told Miss Bolam and Sister.”
“Anyone else?”
“I think I mentioned it to Cully when he came back on the board. He’s had a bellyache for most of the day.”
“So I’m told. What’s wrong with him?”
“Cully? Miss Bolam made him go to hospital for an examination but nothing was found. He gets these bellyaches if anyone upsets him. They say here it’s psychosomatic.”
“What upset him this morning?”
“I did. He got here before me this morning and started sorting the post. That’s my job. I told him to concentrate on his own work.”
Dalgliesh took him patiently over the events of the evening. His story agreed with Miss Priddy’s and, like her, he was unable to say whether the door of the basement record room had been ajar when he returned from posting the letters. He admitted that he had passed the door when he went to ask Nurse Bolam if the laundry was sorted. It was usual for the door to be closed as the room was seldom visited and he thought he would have noticed had it been open. It was frustrating and maddening that this crucial point could not be cleared up, but Nagle stood firm. He hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t say. He hadn’t noticed, either, whether the record-room key was on the board in the porters’ restroom. This was easier to understand. There were twenty-two hooks on the board and most of the keys were in use and missing.
Dalgliesh said: “You realize that Miss Bolam’s body was almost certainly lying in the record room when you and Miss Priddy were together feeding the cat? You realize how important it is to remember whether the door was open or shut?”
“It was ajar when Jenny Priddy went down later. That’s what she says and she’s no liar. If it was shut when I got back from the post, someone must have opened it between six-twenty-five and seven. I don’t see what’s so impossible about that. It would be better for me if I could remember about the door, but I can’t. I hung up my coat in my locker, went straight to ask Nurse Bolam about the clean laundry and then returned to the restroom. Jenny met me at the bottom of the stairs.”
He
spoke without heat, almost unemotionally. It was as if he said, “That’s what happened. Like it or not, it happened that way.” He was too intelligent not to see that he was in some danger. Perhaps he was also intelligent enough to know that the danger was minimal to an innocent man who kept his head and told the truth.
Dalgliesh told him to let the police know at once if he remembered anything fresh and let him go.
Sister Ambrose was seen next. She strutted into the room, armour-plated in white linen, belligerent as a battleship. The bib of her apron, starched rigid as a board, curved against a formidable bosom on which she wore her nursing badges like medals of war. Grey hair spurted from each side of her cap which she wore low on her forehead above a face of uncompromising plainness. Her colour was high; Dalgliesh thought that she was finding it difficult to control her resentment and distrust. He dealt with her gently, but his questions were answered in an atmosphere of rigid disapproval. She confirmed briefly that she had last seen Miss Bolam walking through the hall towards the basement stairs at about twenty past six. They had not spoken and the administrative officer had looked the same as usual. Sister Ambrose was back in the ECT room before Miss Bolam was out of sight and had been there with Dr. Ingram until the body was found. In reply to Dalgliesh’s question whether Dr. Baguley had also been with them for the whole of that time, Sister Ambrose suggested that he should ask the doctor direct. Dalgliesh replied mildly that this was his intention. He knew that the Sister could give him a great deal of useful information about the clinic if she chose but, apart from a few questions about Miss Bolam’s personal relationships from which he gained nothing, he did not press her. He thought that she was probably more shocked by the murder, by the calculated violence of Miss Bolam’s death, than anyone he had yet seen. As sometimes happens with unimaginative and inarticulate people, this shock gave vent to ill temper. She was very cross: with Dalgliesh because his job gave him the right to ask impertinent and embarrassing questions; with herself because she could not conceal her feelings; with the victim, even, who had involved the clinic in this bizarre predicament. It was a reaction Dalgliesh had met before and no good came of trying to force co-operation on such a witness. Later on Sister Ambrose might be induced to talk more freely; at present, it was a waste of time to do more than elicit the facts which she was prepared to give. One fact at least was crucial. Miss Bolam was alive and making her way towards the basement stairs at about twenty past six. At seven o’clock her body was discovered. Those forty minutes were vital and any member of the staff who could produce an alibi covering them could be eliminated from the inquiry. On the face of it the case presented little difficulty. Dalgliesh did not believe that an outsider had somehow gained access to the clinic and lain in wait for Miss Bolam. The killer was almost certainly still in the building. It was now a matter of careful questioning, of the methodical checking of alibis, of the seeking out of a motive. Dalgliesh decided to talk to the one man whose alibi appeared unassailable and who would have the detached outsider’s view of the clinic and its varied personalities. He thanked Sister Ambrose for her valuable cooperation—a flicker of the eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles suggested that the irony was not lost on her—and asked the constable at the door to send in Mr. Lauder.
2
It was the first chance Dalgliesh had had to observe the group secretary closely. He saw a thick-set, chubby-featured man, mild-eyed behind the heavy square spectacles, who looked, in his well-cut tweeds, more like a country doctor or small-town solicitor than a bureaucrat. He was completely at ease and bore himself like a man confident of his powers, unwilling to be hurried, keeping always something in reserve, including, Dalgliesh thought, a keener intelligence than his appearance might suggest.
He seated himself opposite Dalgliesh, drew his chair comfortably forward and, without either apology or excuse, took a pipe from one pocket and sought in the other for his tobacco pouch. Nodding towards Martin and his open notebook he said, in a slow voice with a trace of north-country accent: “Reginald Iven Lauder. Date of birth, 21st April 1905. Address, 42 Makepeace Avenue, Chigwell, Essex. Occupation, Group Secretary, East Central Hospital Management Committee. And now, Superintendent, what do you want to know?”
“A great deal, I’m afraid,” said Dalgliesh. “And firstly, have you any idea at all who could have killed Miss Bolam?” The group secretary established his pipe and, leaning his elbows on the desk, regarded its glowing head with satisfaction.
“I wish I had. I’d have been in here to tell you before now, never fear. But, no. I’ve no help of that kind for you.”
“Miss Bolam had no enemies as far as you were aware?”
“Enemies? Well now, Superintendent, that’s a strong word! She had people who didn’t much like her, the same as I have. You, too, no doubt. But we don’t go in fear of being murdered. No, I wouldn’t have said she had enemies. Mind you, I know nothing of her private life. That’s not my concern.”
“Could you tell me something about the Steen and the position she held? I know something of the clinic’s reputation, of course, but it would be helpful if I could have a clear picture of what goes on here.”
“A clear picture of what goes on?” It might have been imagination but Dalgliesh thought he saw the group secretary’s mouth twitch. “Well, the medical director could tell you more about that than I—on the medical side, that is. But I can give you a gist. The place was founded between the wars by the family of a Mr. Hyman Stein. The story goes that the old man suffered from impotence, got himself some psychotherapy and subsequently fathered five children. So far from impoverishing him they all did well and, when papa died, they put the clinic on a sound financial footing as a memorial to him. After all, they did owe the place something. The sons all changed their name to Steen—for the usual reason I suppose—and the clinic was given the anglicized name. I often wonder what old Hyman would have thought.”
“Is it well endowed?”
“It was. The state got the endowments of course on the Appointed Day following the 1946 Act. A bit has come in since, but not much. People aren’t so keen to will money to institutions run by the government. But the place was quite well off before 1948 as these places go. They did themselves well in the way of equipment and facilities. The Hospital Management Committee’s had quite a job providing for them in the way to which they’d become accustomed.”
“Is the clinic difficult to administer? I imagine there may be personality problems.”
“No more difficult than any other small unit. You get personality problems anywhere. I’d rather deal with a difficult psychiatrist than a difficult surgeon any day. They’re the real prima donnas.”
“Did you consider Miss Bolam a successful administrative officer?”
“Well … she was efficient. I hadn’t really any complaints. She was a bit rigid, I suppose. After all, Ministry circulars haven’t even the force of law, so there’s no sense in treating them as if they are personally dictated by God Almighty. I doubt whether Miss Bolam would have got much further. Mind you, she was a competent, methodical and highly conscientious officer. I don’t think she ever sent in an inaccurate return.”
Poor devil! thought Dalgliesh, stung by the bleak anonymity of that official epitaph. He asked: “Was she popular here? With the medical staff, for example?”
“Well, now, Superintendent, you’ll have to ask them. I can’t think of any reason why she shouldn’t be.”
“You were not then under any pressure from the Medical Committee to remove her from the clinic?”
The mild grey eyes grew suddenly blank. There was a momentary pause before the group secretary calmly replied: “I have had no official request of that kind made to me.”
“But unofficially?”
“There has been a feeling here from time to time, I believe, that a change of job might be helpful to Miss Bolam. Now that’s not such a bad idea, Superintendent! Any officer in a small unit, particularly a psychiatric clinic, can benefit from a
change of experience. But I don’t transfer my staff at the whim of medical committees. Bless me, no! And, as I said, no official request was made. If Miss Bolam herself had asked for a transfer, that would have been a different matter. Even so, it wouldn’t have been easy. She was a general administrative officer and we haven’t many posts in that grade.”
Dalgliesh then asked again about Miss Bolam’s telephone call and Lauder confirmed that he had spoken to her at about ten to one. He remembered the time because he was just about to go for lunch. Miss Bolam had asked to speak to him personally and had been put through by his secretary. She had asked whether she could see him urgently.
“Can you remember the exact conversation?”
“More or less. She said: ‘Can I have an appointment to see you as soon as possible? I think there may be something going on here that you ought to know about. I should like your advice. Something that started well before my time here.’ I said that I couldn’t see her this afternoon as I would be in the Finance and General Purposes Committee from two-thirty onwards and had a Joint Consultative Committee immediately afterwards. I asked whether she could give me any idea what it was all about and whether it couldn’t wait until Monday. She hesitated, so, before she could reply, I said I’d drop in on my way home this evening. I knew they had a late clinic on Fridays. She said that she would arrange to be alone in her office from six-thirty onwards, thanked me and rang off. The JCC lasted longer than I expected—that Committee always does—and I got here just before seven-thirty. But you know that. I was still in committee at the time they found the body, as no doubt you’ll be checking in due course.”
“Did you take Miss Bolam’s message seriously? Was she the sort of woman who ran to you with trifles or would a request to see you really mean that something serious was wrong?”
