Shroud for a Nightingale (28 page)

Next she went through her movements on the previous night, in the same dull, unemphatic voice. Matron had been in Amsterdam at the International Conference so she had spent the evening alone watching television in the Sisters’ sitting-room. She had gone to bed at ten p.m. and had been awakened at about quarter to twelve by Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s telephone call. She made her way across to the hospital by a short cut through the trees and had helped the student nurse on duty to prepare the bed for the patient’s return. She had stayed with her patient until satisfied that the oxygen and drip were being satisfactorily administered and that his general condition was as good as could be expected. She had returned to Nightingale House shortly after two a.m. and on her way up to her room had seen Maureen Burt coming out of the lavatory. The other twin had appeared almost immediately and she had had a brief conversation with them. She had declined their offer to make her cocoa and had gone straight up to her room. Yes, there was a light shining through Fallon’s keyhole at ‘that time. She had not gone into Fallon’s room and had no way of knowing whether the girl was alive or dead. She had slept well and had awoken just after seven o’clock when Sister Rolfe had come rushing in with the news that Fallon’s body had been discovered. She hadn’t seen Fallon since the girl was discharged from her ward after supper on the Tuesday.

At the end of the recital there was a silence, then Dalgliesh asked: “Did you like Nurse Pearce, Sister? Or Nurse Fallon?”

“No. I didn’t dislike them either. I don’t believe in having personal relationships with the student nurses. Like and dislike don’t come into it. They’re either good nurses or they aren’t.”

“And were they good nurses?”

“Fallon was better than Pearce. She had more intelligence and more imagination. She wasn’t an easy colleague but the patients liked her. Some people thought her callous but you wouldn’t find a patient who said so. Pearce tried too hard. She went about looking like a young Florence Nightingale, or so she thought Always thinking of the impression she was making. A silly girl fundamentally. But you could rely on her. She always did what was correct Fallon did what was right That takes instinct as well as training. Wait until you’re dying, my good man. You’ll know the difference.” So Josephine Fallon had been both intelligent and imaginative. He could believe it. But these were the last two qualities he would have expected Sister Brumfett to praise. He recalled the conversation at luncheon, her insistence on the need for unquestioning obedience. He said carefully:

“I’m surprised that you should rank imagination among the virtues of a student nurse. I thought that you valued absolute obedience above all. It’s difficult to reconcile imagination, which is surely individual, even iconoclastic, with the submission to authority of the good subordinate. I’m sorry if I sound presumptuous. This conversation hasn’t much to do with my business here, I know. But I’m curious.”

It had a great deal to do with his business there; his curiosity wasn’t irrelevant. But she wasn’t to know that. She said gruffly:

“Obedience to rightful authority comes first You’re in a disciplined service; you shouldn’t need telling. If’s only when the obedience is automatic, when the discipline is accepted and even welcomed, that one learns the wisdom and courage that can safety step outside the rules when the moment comes. Imagination and intelligence are dangerous in nursing if they aren’t founded on discipline.”

So she wasn’t as simple or as obstinately conformist as she appeared, or chose to appear to her colleagues. And she, too, had imagination. Was this the Brumfett, he wondered, that Mary Taylor knew and valued. And yet, he was convinced that his first impressions hadn’t been wrong. Fundamentally, she wasn’t an intelligent woman. Was she, even now, voicing the theory, the very words perhaps, of another? The wisdom and courage to step outside the rules.“ Well, someone in Nightingale House had stepped outside them, someone hadn’t lacked the courage. They looked at each other. He was beginning to wonder if Nightingale House had put some kind of spell on him, if its threatening atmosphere had begun to affect his judgment. For behind the thick spectacles he thought he saw the eyes change, thought he detected an urgency to communicate, to be understood, even a plea for help. And then the illusion passed. He was facing again the most ordinary, the most uncompromising, the least complex of all his suspects. And the interview was at an end.

V

It was now after nine o’clock but Dalgliesh and Masterson were still together in the office. There were at least a couple of hours’ work ahead before they could break for the night, checking and comparing statements, searching for the tell-tale discrepancy, planning tomorrow’s activity. Dalgliesh decided to let Masterson get on with it and dialing the internal number of Matron’s flat, he asked if she could give him twenty minutes of her time. Courtesy and policy both dictated that net should keep her informed, but there was another reason for seeing her before he left Nightingale House.

She had left the door of the flat open for him and be passed straight down the corridor to the sitting-room, knocked and entered. He walked into peace, quietness, light And coldness! The room was surprisingly chilly. A bright fire was burning in the grate but its warmth hardly reached the far corners oft the room. As he went across to her he saw that she was appropriately dressed, her long legs encased in brown velvet slacks topped by a high necked cashmere sweater in pale fawn, the sleeves pushed back from brittle wrists. A silk scarf in bright green was knotted around her throat.

They sat down together on the sofa. Dalgliesh saw that she had been working. There was an open briefcase propped against the leg of the coffee table and a spread of papers across its surface. A coffee pot stood in the grate, and the comforting scent of warm wood and coffee pervaded the room.

She offered him coffee or whisky; nothing else. He accepted the coffee and she rose to fetch a second cup. When she had returned, the coffee poured, he said:

“They’ve told you, I expect, that we’ve found the poison.”

“Yes. Gearing and Rolfe both came to see me after you’d finished questioning them. I suppose this means that it must be murder?”

“I think so, unless Nurse Fallon hid the tin herself. But somehow that seems unlikely. To make a deliberate mystery of suicide with the object of causing the maximum of trouble could be the action of an exhibitionist or a neurotic. This girl seems to me to have been neither, but I wanted your view.”

“I agree with you. Fallon, I would have said, was essentially , a rational person. If she decided to kill herself it would be for reasons which seemed good to her at the time and I would expect her to leave a brief but lucid note explaining them. A great many suicides kill themselves to make trouble for other people. But not Fallon.”

That would be my assessment, but I wanted to ask someone who had actually known her.“

She asked: “What does Madeleine Goodale say?”

“Nurse Goodale thinks that her friend killed herself; but that was before we found the nicotine.”

He didn’t say where and she didn’t ask. He had no intention of telling anyone in Nightingale House where the tin had been found. But one person would know where it had been hidden and with hick might inadvertently reveal their guilty knowledge.

He went on: “There is another matter. Miss Gearing tells me she entertained a friend in her room last night; she says that she let him out through your door. Does that surprise you?”

“No. I leave the flat open when I’m not here so that the Sisters can use the back staircase. It gives them at least the illusion of privacy.”

“At the cost, surely, of your own?”

“Oh, I think it’s understood that they don’t come into me flat I trust my colleagues. Even if I didn’t, there’s nothing here to interest them. I keep all official papers in my office over at the hospital”

She was right of course. There was nothing here to interest anyone except him. The sitting-room for all its individuality was almost as plain as his own flat high above the Thames at Queenhithe. Perhaps that was one reason why he felt so at home. Here were no photographs to invite speculation; no bureau bursting with its accumulated hoard of trivia; no pictures to betray a private taste; no invitations to advertise the diversity, the existence even, of a social life. He held his own flat inviolate; it would have been intolerable to him to think that people could walk in and out at will. But here was an even greater reticence; the self-sufficiency of a woman so private that even her personal surroundings were permitted to give nothing away.

He said: “Mr. Courtney-Briggs tells me that he was Josephine Fallon’s lover for a short period during her first year. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I knew it in the same way that I know Mavis Gearing’s visitor yesterday was almost certainly Leonard Morris. In a hospital, gossip spreads by a kind of osmosis. One can’t always remember being told the latest scandal; one just gets to know.” “And is there much to know?”

“More perhaps than in less sensational institutions. Is than so very surprising? Men and women who have to watch daily what the body can suffer in agony and degradation aren’t likely to be too scrupulous about availing themselves of its solace.”

When, and with whom, he wondered, did she find her consolation? In her job; in the power which that job undoubtedly! gave her? In astronomy, tracing through long nights the paths of the movable stars? With Brumfett? Surely to God not with Brumfett?“

She said: “If you’re thinking that Stephen Courtney-Briggs might have killed to protect his reputation, well, I don’t believe it I got to know about the affair. So did half the hospital, I’ve no doubt Courtney-Briggs isn’t particularly discreet Besides, such a motive would only apply to a man vulnerable to public opinion.”

“Every man is vulnerable in some way to public opinion.”

She gave him a sudden keen glance from those extraordinary exophthalmic eyes.

“Of course. No doubt Stephen Courtney-Briggs is as capable of killing to prevent personal disaster or public disgrace as any of us. But not I think, to prevent people knowing that a young and attractive woman was willing to go to bed with him; or that middle-aged as he may be, he is still able to take his sexual pleasure where he finds it.”

Was there a trace of contempt of resentment almost in her voice? For a moment he caught an echo of Sister Rolfe.

“And Hilda Rolfe’s friendship with Julia Pardoe? You knew about that?”

She smiled a little bitterly.

“Friendship? Yes, I know, and I think that I understand. But I’m not sure that you do. The orthodox reaction, if the affair became known, would be that Rolfe is corrupting Par-doe. But if that young woman has been corrupted, I suspect that it happened before she came to the John Carpendar. I don’t propose to interfere. The affair will settle itself. Julia Pardoe should qualify as a State Registered Nurse in a few months’ time. I happen to know that she has plans for her future and they certainly don’t include staying on here. I’m afraid were is a great deal of unhappiness ahead for Sister Rolfe. But we must meet that when it comes.”

Her voice told him that she knew, that she was watching, that she had the situation under control. And that it was not a matter for further discussion.

He finished his coffee in silence, then rose to go. There was nothing else he needed to ask at present and he found himself disagreeably sensitive to every nuance in her voice, every silence which might imply that his presence was irksome. It could hardly be welcome, he knew that. He was used to being the harbinger, at best of ill news, at worst of disaster. But at least he could avoid forcing his company on her a minute more than was necessary.

As she rose to accompany him to the door he made a casual reference to the architecture of the house and asked how long it had been in the possession of the hospital. She said:

“It’s a tragic and rather horrible story. The place was built in 1880 by a Thomas Nightingale, a local string and rope manufacturer who had come up in the world and wanted a house to dignify his new position. The name is fortuitously appropriate; it has nothing to do with Florence or with the bird. Nightingale lived here with his wife, they had no children, until 1886. In the January of that year the body of one of the maidservants, a nineteen-year-old girl called Nancy Gorring, who had been taken by Mrs. Nightingale from an orphanage, was found hanging from one of the trees in the grounds. When the body was cut down it was apparent that she had been systematically ill-treated, beaten, tortured even, over a period of months. It had been calculated sadism. One of the most horrible features of the case was that the other members of the staff must have had some idea what was going on, but did nothing. They were apparently well treated; they paid touching tribute at the trial to Nightingale as a just and considerate master. It must have been similar to some of these modern cases of child cruelty where only one member of the family is singled out for violence and neglect and the others acquiesce in the ill treatment A taste for vicarious sadism, I suppose, or just the desperate hope of preserving their own safety. And yet it’s odd. Not one of them turned against Nightingale, not even when local feeling was at its height in the weeks following the trial. He and his wife were both convicted and spent many years in prison. I have an idea that they died there. Anyway, they never returned to Nightingale House. It was sold to a retired boot manufacturer who lived here for only two years before deciding that he didn’t like it. He sold it to one of the governors of the hospital who spent the last twelve years of his life here and bequeathed it to the John Carpendar. It has always been something of an embarrassment to the hospital; no one has been quite sure what to do with it. It’s not really suitable as a nurse training school, but it’s difficult to see what exactly it would be suitable for. There’s a story that Nancy Gorring’s ghost can be heard weeping in the grounds after dark at this time of year. I’ve never heard her and it’s a tale we try to keep from the students. But it’s never been a happy house.”