A Mind to Murder (13 page)

They went down to the ground floor where the group secretary and Nagle, chatting quietly to the police constables, turned to watch but made no move to join them. The four waiting figures were standing together in a sad group like mourners after a funeral, uncertain and disorganized in the hiatus that follows grief. When they talked together, their voices sounded muted in the silence of the hall.

The ground-floor plan was simple. Immediately inside the front door and to the left as one entered was the glasspanelled reception kiosk. Dalgliesh noted again that it commanded a good view of the whole hall, including the great curved staircase at the end. Yet Cully’s observations during the evening had been curiously selective. He was positive that everyone entering or leaving the clinic after five p.m. had been seen by him and entered in his book but many of the comings and goings in the hall had passed unnoticed. He had seen Mrs. Shorthouse come out of Miss Bolam’s office and into the front general office but had not seen the administrative officer passing down the hall to the basement stairs. He had seen Dr. Baguley coming out of the medical-staff cloakroom but not entering it. Most of the movements of patients and their relations had not escaped him and he was able to confirm the comings and goings of Mrs. Bostock. He was certain that Dr. Etherege, Miss Saxon and Miss Kettle had not passed through the hall after six p.m. If they had, he hadn’t noticed. Dalgliesh would have felt more confidence in Cully’s evidence if it were not apparent that the pathetic little man was terrified. When they arrived at the clinic, he had been merely depressed and a little surly. By the time he was allowed to go home, he was in a state of terror. At some stage of the investigation, thought Dalgliesh, he would have to find out why.

Behind the reception kiosk and with windows facing the square was the general office, part of which had been partitioned to form a small filing room for the current medical records. Next to the general office was Miss Bolam’s room and, beyond that, the ECT suite with its treatment room, nurses’ duty room and male and female recovery bays. This suite was separated by a hallway from the medical-staff cloakroom, clerical staff lavatories and the domestic assistant’s pantry. At the
end of the hallway was the locked side door, seldom used except by members of the staff who had been working late and who did not want to give Nagle the trouble of undoing the more complicated locks, bolts and chains on the front door.

At the opposite side of the main hall were two consulting rooms and the patients’ waiting room and lavatories. The front room had been divided to form two fairly large psychotherapy rooms which were separated from the waiting room by a passage. Dr. Steiner could, therefore, move from one to the other without coming within Cully’s view. But he could hardly move down the hall to the basement stairs without risk of being seen. Had he been seen? What was Cully keeping back and why?

Together, Dalgliesh and Martin examined the basement rooms for the last time that night. At the rear was the door which led to the area steps. Dr. Etherege had said that this door was bolted when he and Dr. Steiner had examined it after finding the body. It was still bolted. It had been tested for fingerprints but the only decipherable ones had been Peter Nagle’s. Nagle had said that he was probably the last person to touch the lock since it was his habit to check that the door was securely bolted before he locked up at night. It was rare for him or for any member of the staff to use the basement exit and the door was usually opened only when the coal or other heavy supplies were delivered. Dalgliesh shot back the bolt. There was a short flight of iron steps leading to the rear railings. Here, again, the wrought-iron door was bolted and fitted with a lock and chain. But an intruder would have no difficulty in getting into the basement area, particularly as the mews at the back was ill lit and unoccupied. The clinic itself would be less easy of access. All the basement windows, except the small lavatory window, were barred. It was through that window the clinic thief had cut his way.

Dalgliesh bolted the door again and they went into the porters’ restroom which occupied most of the back of the building. Nothing was changed since they had first examined it. Two clothes lockers stood against one wall. The centre of the floor was occupied by a heavy square table. There was a small, old-fashioned gas cooker in one corner and, beside it, a cupboard containing cups and saucers and tins of tea, sugar and biscuits. Two shabby leather chairs were drawn up one on either side of the gas fire. To the left of the door was a key board with the hooks numbered but not named. On this board had hung, among others, the key to the basement record room. That key was now in the possession of the police.

A large, striped cat was curled in a basket before the unlit gas fire. When the light was switched on, it stirred and, lifting its heavy, barred head, gave the intruders a stare, blank and expressionless, from immense yellow eyes. Dalgliesh knelt beside the basket and stroked the top of its head. The cat shivered then sat immobile under his touch. Suddenly it rolled on its back and stretched out its legs, rigid as poles, to display a ridge of soft belly hair for Dalgliesh’s ministrations.

The superintendent stroked and talked while Martin, whose preference was for dogs, looked on in tolerant patience. He said: “I’ve heard about him from Mrs. Shorthouse. It’s Tigger, Miss Bolam’s cat.”

“We deduce that Miss Bolam read A. A. Milne as a child. Cats are nocturnal. Why isn’t he let out at night?”

“I heard about that, too. Miss Bolam thought he’d keep the mice down if he were shut in. Nagle goes out at lunch time for a beer and a sandwich, but Cully eats his grub here and Miss B was always on to him about crumbs. The cat is shut in here every night and let out during the day. He’s got his food and his scratch tin.”

“So I see. Furnished with cinders from the boiler.”

“Pity he can’t talk, sir. He was in here for most of the evening waiting to be fed. He was probably here when the murderer came in for the record-room key.”

“And for the chisel. Oh, yes, Tigger saw it, all right. But what makes you think he’d tell you the truth?”

Sergeant Martin didn’t reply. People who went for cats in a big way were like that, of course. Childish you might call it. Unusually talkative, he said: “Miss B had him doctored at her own expense. Mrs. Shorthouse told PC Holliday that Dr. Steiner was very upset about it. He likes cats seemingly. They had words over it. Dr. Steiner told Mrs. Bostock that Miss Bolam would like everything male at the clinic doctored if she had her way. He put it rather crudely, I gather. Of course, it wasn’t meant to get back to Miss Bolam but Mrs. Bostock saw that it did.”

“Yes,” said Dalgliesh shortly. “She would.” They continued their inspection.

It was not an uncomfortable room. It smelled of food and leather and, just perceptibly, of gas. There were a number of pictures which looked as if they had found a home with the porters when their previous owners had seen enough of them. One was of the founder of the Steen surrounded, appropriately enough, by his five sons. It was a faded sepia photograph in a gilt frame more indicative, Dalgliesh thought, of old Hyman’s character than the more orthodox commemorative oil which hung upstairs in the hall.

On a smaller table against the rear wall lay Nagle’s box of tools. Dalgliesh lifted the lid. The tools, meticulously cared for, lay each in its correct place. There was only one missing and that one was unlikely ever again to find its place in Nagle’s toolbox.

“He could have come in through that rear door if he left it unlocked,” said Martin, voicing Dalgliesh’s thought.

“Of course. I admit to a perverse disposition to suspect the one person who was apparently not even in the building when the murder was committed. There’s little doubt, though, that Nagle was with Miss Priddy in the general office when Mrs. Shorthouse left Miss Bolam. Cully confirms that. And Miss Priddy states that she never left the general office except momentarily to fetch a file from the next room. What did you think of Shorthouse, by the way?”

“I thought she was telling the truth, sir. I wouldn’t put her above a bit of lying when it suited her. She’s the sort who likes things to happen and isn’t averse to giving them a bit of a shove in the right direction. But she had plenty to tell us without adding any frills.”

“She had, indeed,” agreed Dalgliesh. “There isn’t any reasonable doubt that Miss Bolam came down to the basement as a result of that call which fixes the approximate time of death for us very satisfactorily. It ties up with the police surgeon’s view, too, but we shall know more about that when we get the result of the PM. The call could have been genuine, of course. It’s possible that someone phoned from the basement, spoke to Miss Bolam somewhere down here, then left her to go back to his or her own room and is now too afraid to admit making the call. As I say, it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.”

“If the call was genuine, it could have been someone calling her down to look at the mess in the record room. Those files were certainly chucked about before the murder. Some of them were under the body. It looked to me as if she was struck as she crouched to pick them up.”

“That’s how it looked to me,” said Dalgliesh. “Well, let’s press on.”

They passed the service lift door without comment and went next into the basement treatment room at the front of the building. Here Nurse Bolam had sat with her patient through the early hours of the evening. Dalgliesh switched on the lights. The heavy curtains had been drawn back but the windows were hung with thin net, presumably to give privacy during the day. The room was simply furnished. There was a low stretcher bed in one corner with a hospital screen at its foot and a small armchair at its head. Against the front wall was a small table and chair, apparently for the use of the nurse in attendance. The table held a rack of nursing-report forms and blank medical-record sheets. The left-hand wall was lined with cupboards where the clinic’s clean linen was stored. Some attempt had been made to soundproof the fourth wall. It had been lined with acoustic panels and the door, strong and well built, was hung with a heavy curtain.

Dalgliesh said: “If her patient were noisy, I doubt whether Nurse Bolam would hear much that went on outside. Walk down the passage will you, Martin, and make a call on the telephone, the one just outside the medical-record room.”

Martin closed the door behind him and Dalgliesh was alone with the heavy silence. His hearing was acute and Martin’s heavy tread was just audible. He doubted whether he would have heard it against the noise of a distressed patient. He could not hear the faint ring as Martin took off the receiver nor the swing of the dial. In a few seconds he heard the footsteps again and Martin was back. He said: “There’s a card giving the internal numbers so I rang 004. That’s Miss Bolam’s room. Funny how eerie a telephone bell sounds when there’s no one to answer. Then someone did. It gave me quite a shock when the ringing stopped. It was Mr. Lauder, of
course. He sounded a bit surprised, too. I told him we wouldn’t be long now.”

“Nor shall we. I couldn’t hear you, by the way. And yet Nurse Bolam did hear the Priddy child scream. Or so she says.”

“She took her time doing anything about it, didn’t she, sir? What’s more, she apparently heard the doctors and Sister when they came down.”

“That’s reasonable enough. There were four of them clattering about. She’s the obvious suspect, of course. She could have telephoned her cousin from this room, saying perhaps that someone had been creating chaos in the record room. Her patient would be far too disoriented to hear or understand. I saw her with Dr. Baguley and it was obvious that she wasn’t capable of giving anyone an alibi. Nurse Bolam could have left the treatment room and waited for her cousin in the record room with a fair degree of safety. She had the best opportunity to kill, she has the necessary medical knowledge, she has an obvious motive. If she is the murderer, the crime probably had nothing to do with the phone call to Lauder. We shall have to find out what Bolam did think was going on here, but it needn’t necessarily have anything to do with her death. If Nurse Bolam knew that the group secretary was coming, she might have decided to kill now with the idea of obscuring the real motive.”

“She doesn’t strike me as clever enough for that kind of planning, sir.”

“She doesn’t strike me as a murderer, Martin, but we’ve known less likely ones. If she is innocent, then her being down here alone was very convenient for the murderer. Then there are those rubber gloves. Of course, she had an explanation for them. There are plenty of pairs about and it’s perfectly reasonable for a member of the nursing staff to have a used pair in
her apron pocket. But the fact remains that we haven’t found any dabs on either of the weapons nor on the door key, not even old prints. Someone wiped them first and handled them with gloves. And what more suitable than thin surgical gloves. Driving that chisel in was practically a surgical operation.”

“If she had the sense to use the gloves, then she’d have the sense to destroy them afterwards. The boiler was alight. What about that missing rubber apron from the art department? If the killer used that as possible protection and disposed of it in the boiler, it would be daft to hang on to the gloves.”

“So daft that we’re probably meant to think that no sane person would do it. I’m not sure about that apron, anyway. Apparently there’s one missing and it’s possible that the killer wore it. But this was a clean death and it was planned that way. Anyway, we’ll know tomorrow when the boiler’s cold and can be raked out. Those aprons have metal studs on the shoulder straps and, with luck, we might find them.”

They closed the treatment door behind them and went upstairs. Dalgliesh began to be conscious of his tiredness and the stabbing pain behind his eye was now almost continuous. It had not been an easy week and the sherry party, which promised an agreeable, relaxing finish to a busy day, had proved an unsettling preliminary to an even busier night. He wondered briefly where Deborah Riscoe had dined, and with whom. Their meeting now seemed part of a different world. Perhaps because he was tired, he felt none of the confidence with which he usually began a case. He did not seriously believe that the crime would defeat him. Professionally he had never yet known the taste of failure. It was all the more irritating, therefore, to be visited by this vague sensation of inadequacy and unrest. For the first time he felt unsure of his own mastery, as if he were opposed by an intelligence actively working against him
and equal to his own. And he did not think that Nurse Bolam had that intelligence.