Shroud for a Nightingale (26 page)

Mavis Gearing went straight over to a low, four-foot-long cupboard in white-painted wood, fitted underneath the wall shelf on the left of the door and hardly visible behind the curtain of waving ferns. It had one inadequate door fitted
with a small knob and no lock. Together they crouched to look in it. Although the overhead fluorescent lights were unpleasantly garish, the recesses of the cupboard were dim and their view obstructed by the shadow of their heads. Dalgliesh switched on his torch. Its beam revealed the usual paraphernalia of the indoor gardener. He made a mental inventory. There were balls of green twine, a couple of watering cans, a small spray, packets of seed, some opened and half-used with their tops pressed back, a small plastic bag of potting compost and one of fertilizer, about two dozen flower pots of various sizes, a small stack of seed trays, pruning shears, a trowel and small fork, a disorderly pile of seeds-men’s catalogues, three clothbound books on gardening, their covers stained and dirty, an assortment of flower vases and bundles of tangled wire.

Mavis Gearing pointed to a space in the far corner. “That’s where it was. I put it well back. It couldn’t have been a temptation to anyone. You wouldn’t even notice it, just opening the door. It was quite hidden really. Look, that’s the space—you can see where it was.”

She spoke with urgent self-justification, as if the empty space acquitted her of all responsibility. Then her voice changed. It dropped a tone and became huskily pleading like an amateur actress playing a seduction scene.

“I know it looks bad. First, I was in charge of the demonstration when Pearce died. And now this. But I haven’t touched the stuff since I used it last summer. I swear I haven’t! I know some of them won’t believe me. They’ll be glad—yes glad—and relieved if suspicion falls on me and Len. It’ll let them out. Besides they’re jealous. They’ve always been jealous. It’s because I’ve got a man and they haven’t. But you believe me don’t you? You’ve got to believe me!”

It was pathetic and humiliating. She pressed her shoulder against his, as they knelt huddled together in a ridiculous parody of prayer. He could feel her breath against his cheek. Her right hand, the fingers twitching nervously, crept across the floor towards his hand.

Then her mood broke. They heard Sister Rolfe’s voice from the door.

“The Sergeant told me to meet you here. Am I interrupting anything?”

Dalgliesh felt the pressure on his shoulder immediately released, and Sister Gearing scrambled gracelessly to her feet. He got up more slowly. He neither felt nor looked embarrassed, but he was not sorry that Miss Rolfe had chosen that moment to appear.

Sister Gearing broke into explanation: “It’s the rose spray. That stuff containing nicotine. Fallon must have taken it. I feel absolutely ghastly about it, but how was I to know? The Superintendent has found the tin.”

She turned to Dalgliesh. “You didn’t say where?”

“No,” Dalgliesh said. “I didn’t say where.” He spoke to Miss Rolfe.

“Did you know the stuff was kept in this cupboard?”

“Yes, I saw Gearing put it there. Sometime last summer wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t mention this to me.”

“I didn’t think of it until now. It never occurred to me that Fallon might have taken nicotine. And, presumably, we don’t yet know that she did.”

Dalgliesh said: “Not until we get the toxicology report.”

“And even then, Superintendent, can you be sure that the drug came from this tin? There are other sources of nicotine at the hospital surely? This could be a blind.”

“Of course, although it seems to me highly unlikely. But the forensic science laboratory should be able to tell us that. This nicotine is mixed with a proportion of concentrated detergent. It will be identifiable by gas chromatography.”

She shrugged.

“Well, that should settle it then.”

Mavis Gearing cried out: “What do you mean, other sources of supply? Who are you getting at? Nicotine isn’t kept in the pharmacy, as far as I know. And anyway Len had left Nightingale House before Fallon died.”

“I wasn’t accusing Leonard Morris. But he was on the spot when both of them died, remember, and he was here in this room when you put the nicotine in the cupboard. He’s a suspect like the rest of us.”

“Was Mr. Morris with you when you bought the nicotine?”

“Well, he was as a matter of fact. I’d forgotten it or I would have told you. We’d been out together that afternoon and he came back here to tea.”

She turned angrily to Sister Rolfe. “It’s nothing to do with Len, I tell you! He hardly knew Pearce or Fallon. Pearce hadn’t anything on Len.”

Hilda Rolfe said calmly: “I wasn’t aware that she had anything on anyone. I don’t know whether you’re trying to put ideas into Mr. Dalgliesh’s head, but you’re certainly putting them into mine.”

Sister Gearing’s face disintegrated into misery. Moaning, she jerked her head from side to side as if desperately seeking help or asylum. Her face, sickly and surreal, was suffused with the green light of the conservatory.

Sister Rolfe gave Dalgliesh one sharp look, then ignoring him, moved over to her colleague and said with unexpected gentleness: “Look, Gearing, I’m sorry. Of course I’m not
accusing Leonard Morris or you. But the fact that he was here would have come out anyway. Don’t let the police fluster you. It’s how they work. I don’t suppose the Superintendent cares a damn whether you or I or Brumfett killed Pearce and Fallon so long as he can prove someone did. Well, let him get on with it. Just answer his questions and keep calm. Why not get on with your job and let the police get on with theirs?”

Mavis Gearing wailed like a child seeking reassurance: “But it’s all so awful!”

“Of course it is! But it won’t last for ever. And in the meantime, if you must confide in a man, find yourself a solicitor, a psychiatrist or a priest. At least you can be reasonably sure that they’ll be on your side.”

Mavis Gearing’s worried eyes moved from Dalgliesh to Rolfe. She looked like a child hesitating to decide where her allegiance lay. Then the two women moved imperceptibly together and gazed at Dalgliesh, Sister Gearing in puzzled reproach and Sister Rolfe with the tight satisfied smile of a woman who has just brought off a successful piece of mischief.

At that moment Dalgliesh caught the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone was moving across the dining-room. He turned to the door, expecting to find that Sister Brumfett had at last come to be interviewed. The conservatory door opened but, instead of her squat figure, he saw a tall bare-headed man wearing a belted raincoat and with a gauze patch tied across his left eye. A peevish voice spoke from the doorway: “What’s happened to everyone? This place is like a morgue.”

Before anyone could reply, Miss Gearing had darted forward and seized his arm. Dalgliesh saw with interest his frown and twitch of involuntary recoil.

“Len, what is it? You’re hurt! You never told me! I thought it was your ulcer. You never said anything about hurting your head!”

“It was my ulcer. But this didn’t help it.”

He spoke directly to Dalgliesh: “You must be Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard. Miss Gearing told me that you wanted to see me. I’m on my way to my general practitioner’s surgery but I’m at your disposal for half an hour.”

But Sister Gearing was not to be diverted from her concern.

“But you never said anything about an accident! How did it happen? Why didn’t you tell me about it when I rang?”

“Because we had other things to discuss and because I didn’t want you to fuss.”

He shook off her detaining arm and sat himself down in a wicker chair. The two women and Dalgliesh moved in close to him. There was a silence. Dalgliesh revised his unreasonably preconceived notions of Miss Gearing’s lover. He should have looked ridiculous, sitting there in his cheap raincoat with his patched eye and bruised face and speaking in that grating sarcastic voice. But he was curiously impressive. Sister Rolfe had somehow conveyed the impression of a little man, nervous, ineffectual and easily intimidated. This man had force. It might be only the manifestation of pent-up nervous energy; it might be the obsessive resentment born of failure or unpopularity. But his was certainly not a comfortable or negligible personality.

Dalgliesh asked: “When did you learn that Josephine Fallon was dead?”

“When I rang my pharmacy office just after nine-thirty this morning to say that I wouldn’t be in. My assistant told me. I suppose the news was all over the hospital by then.”

“How did you react to the news?”

“React? I didn’t react. I hardly knew the girl. I was surprised, I suppose. Two deaths in the same house and so close together in time; well, it’s unusual to say the least of it. It’s shocking really. You could say I was shocked.”

He spoke like a successful politician condescending to express an attributable opinion to a cub reporter.

“But you didn’t connect the two deaths?”

“Not at the time. My assistant just said that another Nightingale—we call the students Nightingales when they are
in block—that another Nightingale, Jo Fallon, had been found dead. I asked him how and he said something about a heart attack following influenza. I thought it was a natural death. I suppose that’s what everyone thought at first.”

“When did you think otherwise?”

“I suppose when Miss Gearing rang me an hour later to say that you were here.”

So Sister Gearing had telephoned Morris at his home. She must have wanted to reach him urgently to have risked that. Was it perhaps to warn him, to agree their story? While Dalgliesh was wondering what excuse, if any, she had given to Mrs. Morris, the pharmacist answered the unspoken question.

“Miss Gearing doesn’t usually ring me at home. She knows that I like to keep my professional and my private life absolutely separate. But she was naturally anxious about my health when she rang the laboratory after breakfast and was told that I wasn’t in. I suffer from a duodenal ulcer.”

“Your wife, no doubt, was able to reassure her.”

He replied calmly but with a sharp glance at Sister Rolfe, who had moved to the periphery of the group: “My wife takes the children to her mother’s all day on Fridays.”

As Mavis Gearing would no doubt have known. So they had, after all, had a chance to consult each other, to decide on their story. But if they were concocting an alibi, why fix it for midnight? Because they knew for the best or worst of reasons that Fallon had died at that hour? Or because, knowing her habits, they judged that midnight was the most likely time? Only the killer, and perhaps not even he, could know precisely when Fallon had died. It could have been before midnight. It could have been as late as two-thirty. Even Miles Honeyman with his thirty years’ experience couldn’t time the death precisely from
clinical signs alone. The only certain thing was that Fallon was dead and that she had died almost immediately after drinking her whisky. But when exactly had that been? It was her usual habit to prepare her late night drink as soon as she went upstairs to bed. But no one admitted to having seen her after she left the nurses’ sitting-room. Fallon could, just possibly, have been alive when Sister Brumfett and the Burt twins saw her light shining through the keyhole just after two a.m. And if she had been alive then what had she been doing between midnight and two o’clock? Dalgliesh had been concentrating on those people who had access to the school. But suppose Fallon had left Nightingale House that night, perhaps to keep an assignation. Or suppose she had deferred making her nightly drink of whisky and lemon because she was expecting a visitor. The front and back doors of Nightingale House had been found bolted in the morning, but Fallon could have let her visitor out any time during the night and bolted the door behind him.

But Mavis Gearing was still preoccupied with her lover’s damaged head and bruised face.

“What happened to you, Len? You’ve got to tell me. Did you come off your bicycle?”

Sister Rolfe laughed unkindly. Leonard Morris bestowed on her a measured glance of intimidating contempt, then turned to Sister Gearing.

“If you must know, Mavis, yes I did. It happened after I left you last night. There was one of the big elms down across the path and I cycled right into it.”

Sister Rolfe spoke for the first time. “Surely you could see it in the light of your bicycle lamp?”

“My bicycle lamp, Sister, not unreasonably, is fixed to shine on the road. I saw the tree trunk. What I didn’t see in
time was one of the highly jutting boughs. I was lucky not to lose an eye.”

Sister Gearing, predictably, gave an anguished yelp.

Dalgliesh asked: “What time did this happen?”

“I’ve just told you. Last night after I had left Nightingale House. Oh, I see! You’re asking what time precisely? As it happens I can answer that. I came off my bicycle under the impact and was afraid that my watch had been broken. Fortunately it hadn’t. The hands stood at twelve-seventeen a.m. precisely.”

“Wasn’t there some warning—a white scarf—tied to the branch?”

“Of course not, Superintendent. If there had been I should hardly have ridden straight into it.”

“If it were tied high up on a bough you might not have noticed it.”

“It wasn’t there to notice. After I’d picked up my bicycle and recovered a little from the shock I inspected the tree carefully. My first thought was that I might be able to shift it at least slightly and leave part of the road clear. That was obviously impossible. The job was going to need a tractor and tackle. But there was no scarf on any part of that tree at twelve-seventeen a.m.”

“Mr. Morris,” said Dalgliesh, “I think it’s time you and I had a little talk.”

But Sister Brumfett was waiting for him outside the interview room. Before Dalgliesh could speak she said accusingly: “I was summoned to see you in this room. I came promptly at some inconvenience to my ward. When I arrive I’m told that you’re not in your room and will I please go down to the conservatory. I don’t propose to chase around Nightingale House for you. If you want to see me I can spare you half an hour now.”

“Sister Brumfett,” said Dalgliesh, “you seem determined by your behaviour to give me the impression that you killed these girls. It’s possible you did. I shall come to a conclusion about that as soon as I reasonably can. In the meantime, please curb your enthusiasm for antagonizing the police and wait until I can see you. That will be when I’m finished talking to Mr. Morris. You can wait here outside the office or go to your own room, whichever suits you. But I shall want you in about thirty minutes and I, too, have no intention of chasing over the house to find you.”