Shroud for a Nightingale (10 page)

The quickest way to the private wing was through the outpatients hall. The department was already buzzing with activity. The circles of comfortable chairs, carefully disposed to give an illusion of informality and relaxed comfort, were filling quickly. Volunteers from the ladies’ committee of the League of Friends were already presiding at the steaming urn, serving tea to those regular patients who preferred to attend an hour before their appointments for the pleasure of sitting in the warmth, reading the magazines and chatting to their fellow habitues. As Matron passed she was aware of heads turning to watch her. There was a brief silence, followed by the customary murmur of deferential greeting. She was conscious of the white-coated junior medical staff standing briefly to one side as she passed, of the student nurses pressing themselves back against the wall.

The private ward was on the second floor of what still was called the new building, although it had been completed in 1945. Miss Taylor went up by the lift, sharing it with two radiographers and a young houseman. They murmured their formal, “Good morning, Matron,” and stood in unnatural silence until the lift stopped, then stood back while she went out before them.

The private ward consisted of a suite of twenty single rooms, opening each side of a wide central corridor. The Sister’s office, the kitchen, and the utility room were just inside the door. As Miss Taylor entered, a young first-year student nurse appeared from the kitchen. She flushed when she saw Matron and muttered something about fetching Sister.

“Where is Sister, Nurse?”

“In room 7 with Mr. Courtney-Briggs, Matron. His patient isn’t too well.”

“Don’t disturb them: just tell Sister when she appears that I’ve come to see Nurse Dakers. Where is she?”

“In room 3, Matron.” She hesitated.

“It’s all right, Nurse, I’ll find my own way. Get on with what you are doing.”

Room 3 was at the far end of the corridor, one of six single rooms, usually reserved for sick nurses. Only when these rooms were all occupied were the staff nursed in the side rooms of the wards. It was not, Miss Taylor noted, the room in which Josephine Fallon had been nursed. Room 3 was the sunniest and most pleasant of the six rooms reserved for nurses. A week ago it had been occupied by a nurse with pneumonia, a complication of influenza. Miss Taylor, who visited every ward in the hospital once a day and who received daily reports on every sick nurse, thought it unlikely that Nurse Wilkins was fit enough yet to be discharged Sister Brumfett must have moved her to make room 3 available for Nurse Dakers. Miss Taylor could guess why. The one window gave a view of the lawns and smoothly forked flower beds at the front of the hospital; from this side of the ward it was impossible to glimpse Nightingale House even through the bare tracery of the winter trees. Dear old Brumfett! So unprepossessingly rigid in her views, but so imaginative when it came to the welfare and comfort of her patients. Brumfett, who talked embarrassingly of duty, obedience, loyalty, but who knew exactly what she meant by those unpopular terms and lived by what she knew. She was one of the best ward sisters that the John Carpendar had, or ever would have. But Miss Taylor was glad that devotion to duty had kept Sister Brumfett from meeting the plane at Heathrow. It was bad enough to come home to this further tragedy without the added burden of Brumfett’s doglike devotion and concern.

She drew the stool from under the bed and seated herself beside the girl. Despite Dr. Snelling’s sedative. Nurse Dakers was not asleep. She was lying very still on her back gazing at the ceiling. Now her eyes turned to look at Matron. They were blank with misery. On the bedside locker there was a copy of a textbook,
Materia Medica for Nurses.
The Matron picked it up.

“This is very conscientious of you, Nurse, but just for the short time you are in here, why not have a novel from the Red Cross trolley or a frivolous magazine? Shall I bring one in for you?”

She was answered by a flood of tears. The slim figure twisted convulsively in the bed, buried her head in the pillow and clasped it with shaking hands. The bed shook with the paroxysm of grief. The Matron got up, moved over to the door and clicked across the board which covered the nurses’ peephole. She returned quickly to her seat and waited without speaking, making no move except to place her hand on the girl’s head. After a few minutes the dreadful shaking ceased and Nurse Dakers grew calmer. She began to mutter, her voice hiccupping with sobs, half muffled by the pillow:

“I’m so miserable, so ashamed.”

The Matron bent her head to catch the words. A chill of horror swept over her. Surely she couldn’t be listening to a confession of murder? She found herself praying under her breath.

“Dear God, please not. Not this child! Surely not this child?”

She waited, not daring to question. Nurse Dakers twisted herself round and gazed up at her, her eyes reddened and swollen like two amorphous moons in a face blotched and formless with misery.

“I’m wicked, Matron, wicked. I was glad when she died.”

“Nurse Fallon?”

“Oh no, not Fallon! I was sorry about Fallon. Nurse Pearce.”

The Matron placed her hands on each of the girl’s shoulders, pressing her back against the bed. She held the trembling body firmly and looked down into the drowned eyes.

“I want you to tell me the truth, Nurse. Did you kill Nurse Pearce?”

“No, Matron.”

“Or Nurse Fallon?”

“No, Matron.”

“Or have anything at all to do with their deaths?”

“No, Matron.”

Miss Taylor let out her breath. She relaxed her hold on the girl and .sat back.

“I think you’d better tell me all about it”

So, calmly now, the pathetic story came out. It hadn’t seemed like stealing at the time. It had seemed like a miracle. Mummy had so needed a warm winter coat and Nurse Dakers had been saving thirty shillings from her monthly salary check. Only the money had taken so long to save and the weather was getting colder; and Mummy, who never complained, and never asked her for anything, had to wait nearly fifteen minutes for the bus some mornings, and caught cold so easily. And if she did catch cold she couldn’t stay away from work because Miss Arkwright, the buyer in the department store, was only waiting for an opportunity to get her sacked. Serving in a store wasn’t really the right job for Mummy, but it wasn’t easy to find a job when you were over fifty and unqualified, and the young assistants in the department weren’t very kind. They kept hinting that Mummy wasn’t pulling her weight, which wasn’t true. Mummy might not be as quick as they were but she really took trouble with the customers.

Then Nurse Harper had dropped the two crisp new
£.
5 notes almost at her feet Nurse Harper who had so much pocket money from her father that she could lose £ 10 without really worrying about it. It had happened about four weeks ago.

Nurse Harper had been walking with Nurse Pearce from the Nurses’ Home to the hospital dining-room for breakfast, and Nurse Dakers had been following a few feet behind. The two notes had fallen out of Nurse Harper’s cape pocket and had lain there fluttering gently. Her first instinct had been to call after the other two students, but something about the sight of the money had stopped her. The notes had been so unexpected, so unbelievable, so beautiful in their pristine crispness. She had just stood looking at them for a second, and then she had realized that she was really looking at Mummy’s new coat And, by then, the other two students had passed almost out of sight, the notes were folded in her hand, and it was too late.

The Matron asked: “How did Nurse Pearce know that you had the notes?”

“She said that she’d seen me. She just happened to glance round when I was bending to pick up the notes. It meant nothing to her at the time, but when Nurse Harper told everyone that she’d lost the money and that the notes must have fallen out of her cape pocket on the way over to breakfast, Nurse Pearce guessed what had happened. She and the twins went with Nurse Harper to search the path to see if they could find the money. I expect that was when she remembered about my stooping down.”

“When did she first talk to you about it?”

“A week later, Matron, a fortnight before our set came into block. I expect she couldn’t bring herself to believe it before then. She must have been trying to make up her mind to speak to me.”

So Nurse Pearce had waited. The Matron wondered why. It couldn’t have taken her a whole week to clarify her suspicions. She must have recalled seeing Dakers stoop to pick up the notes as soon as she heard that they were missing. So why hadn’t she tackled the girl at once? Had it perhaps been more satisfying to her twisted ego to wait until the money was spent and the culprit safely in her power?“

“Was she blackmailing you?” she demanded.

“Oh no, Matron!” The girl was shocked.

“She only took back five shillings a week, and that wasn’t blackmail. She sent the money every week to a society for discharged prisoners. She showed me the receipts.”

“And did she, incidentally, explain why she wasn’t re-paying it to Nurse Harper?”

“She thought it would be difficult to explain without involving me and I begged her not to do that It would have been the end of everything, Matron. I want to take a district nurse training after I’m qualified so that I can look after Mummy. If I could get a country district we could have a cottage together and perhaps even a car. Mummy will be able to give up the store. I told Nurse Pearce about that Besides, she said that Harper was so careless about money that it wouldn’t hurt her to learn a lesson. She sent the payments to the society for discharged prisoners because it seemed appropriate. After all, I might have gone to prison if she hadn’t shielded me.”

The Matron said drily: “That of course, is nonsense and you should have known it was nonsense. Nurse Pearce seems to have been a very stupid and arrogant young woman. Are you sure that she wasn’t making any other demands on you? There is more than one kind of blackmail.”

“But she wouldn’t do that Matron!” Nurse Dakers struggled to lift her head from the pillow. “Pearce was… well, she was good.” She seemed to find the word inadequate and puckered her brow as if desperately anxious to explain.

“She used to talk to me quite a lot and she gave me a card with a passage out of the Bible which I had to read every day. Once a week she used to ask me about it”

The Matron was swept by a sense of moral outrage so acute that she had to find relief in action. She got up from the stool and walked over to the window, cooling her flaring face against the pane. She could feel her heart bumping and noticed with almost clinical interest that her hands were shaking. After a moment she came back again to the bedside.

“Don’t talk about her being good. Dutiful, conscientious, and well-meaning if you like, but not good. If ever you meet real goodness you will know the difference. And I shouldn’t worry about being glad that she is dead. In the circumstances you wouldn’t be normal if you felt differently. In time you may be able to pity her and forgive her.”

“But Matron, it’s me who ought to be forgiven. I’m a thief.” Was there a suggestion of masochism in the whine of the voice, the perverse self-denigration of the born victim? Miss Taylor said briskly.

“You’re not a thief. You stole once; that’s a very different thing. Every one of us has some incident in our lives that we’re ashamed and sorry about. You’ve recently learned something about yourself, about what you’re capable of doing, which has shaken your confidence. Now you have to live wife that knowledge. We can only begin to understand and forgive other people when we have learned to understand and forgive ourselves. You won’t steal again. I know that, and so do you. But you did once. You are capable of stealing. That knowledge will save you from being too pleased with yourself, from being too self-satisfied. It can make you a much more tolerant and understanding person and a better nurse. But not if you go on indulging in guilt and remorse and bitterness. Those insidious emotions may be very enjoyable but they aren’t going to help you or anyone else.”

The girl looked up at her.

“Will the police have to know?”

That, of course, was the question. And there could be only one answer.

“Yes. And you will have to tell them, just as you’ve told me. But I shall have a word first with the Superintendent He’s a new detective, from Scotland Yard this time, and I think he’s an intelligent and understanding man.”

Was he? How could she possibly tell? That first meeting had been so brief, merely a glance and a touching of hands. Was she merely comforting herself with a fleeting impression that here was a man with authority and imagination who might be able to solve the mystery of both deaths with a minimum of harm to the innocent and guilty alike. She had felt this instinctively. But was the feeling rational? She believed Nurse Dakers’s story; but then she was disposed to believe it How would it strike a police officer faced with a multiplicity of suspects but no other discernible motive? And the motive was there all right It was Nurse Dakers’s whole future, and that of her mother. And Dakers had behaved rather oddly. True she had been most distressed of all the students when Pearce had died, but she had pulled herself together remarkably quickly. Even under intense police questioning she had kept her secret safe. What then had precipitated this disintegration into confession and remorse? Was it only the shock of finding Fallon’s body? And why should Fallon’s death be so cataclysmic if she had had no hand in it?

Miss Taylor thought again about Pearce. How little one really knew about any of the students. Pearce, if one thought about her at all, had typified the dull, conscientious, unattractive student who was probably using nursing to compensate for the lack of more orthodox satisfactions. There was usually one such in every nurse training school. It was difficult to reject them when they applied for training since they offered more than adequate educational qualifications and impeccable references. And they didn’t on the whole make bad nurses. It was just that they seldom made the best But now she began to wonder. If Pearce had possessed such a secret craving for power that she could use this child’s guilt and distress as fodder for her own ego, then she had been far from ordinary or ineffective. She had been a dangerous young woman.