A Mind to Murder

5

If there had to be a murder at the Steen, Friday was the most convenient day for it. The clinic did not open on Saturday so that the police were able to work in the building without the complications presented by the presence of patients and staff. The staff, presumably, were glad of two days’ grace in which to recover from the shock, determine at leisure what their official reaction should be and seek the comfort and reassurance of their friends.

Dalgliesh’s day began early. He had asked for a report from the local CID about the Steen burglary and this, together with typescripts of the previous day’s interviews, was waiting on his desk. The burglary had puzzled the local men. There could be no doubt that someone had broken into the clinic and that the fifteen pounds was missing. It was not so certain that these two facts were related. The local sergeant thought it odd that a casual thief had picked the one drawer which held cash while neglecting the safe and leaving untouched the silver inkstand in the medical director’s office. On the other hand, Cully had undoubtedly seen a man leaving the clinic and both he and Nagle had alibis for the time of entry. The local CID were inclined to suspect Nagle of having helped himself to the cash while he was alone in the building but it had not been found on him and there was no real evidence. Besides, the porter had plenty of opportunities for dishonesty at the Steen if he were so inclined and nothing was known against him. The whole affair was puzzling. They were still working on it but weren’t very hopeful. Dalgliesh asked that any progress should be reported to him at once and set off with Sergeant Martin to examine Miss Bolam’s flat.

Miss Bolam had lived on the fifth floor of a solid, red-brick block near Kensington High Street. There was no difficulty over the key. The resident caretaker handed it over with formal and perfunctory expressions of regret at Miss Bolam’s death. She seemed to feel that some reference to the murder was necessary, but managed to give the impression that the company’s tenants usually had the good taste to quit this life in more orthodox fashion.

“There will be no undesirable publicity, I hope,” she murmured, as she escorted Dalgliesh and Sergeant Martin to the lift. “These flats are very select and the company are most particular about their tenants. We have never had trouble of this kind before.”

Dalgliesh resisted the temptation to say that Miss Bolam’s murderer had obviously not recognized one of the company’s tenants.

“The publicity is hardly likely to affect the flats,” he pointed out. “It’s not as if the murder took place here.” The caretaker was heard to murmur that she hoped not indeed!

They ascended to the fifth floor together in the slow, old-fashioned panelled lift. The atmosphere was heavy with disapproval.

“Did you know Miss Bolam at all?” Dalgliesh inquired. “I believe she had lived here for some years.”

“I knew her to say good morning to, nothing more. She was a very quiet tenant. But then all our tenants are. She has been in residence for fifteen years, I believe. Her mother was the tenant previously and they lived here together. When Mrs. Bolam died, her daughter took over the tenancy. That was before my time.”

“Did her mother die here?”

The caretaker closed her lips repressively. “Mrs. Bolam died in a nursing home in the country. There was some unpleasantness, I believe.”

“You mean that she killed herself?”

“I was told so. As I said, it happened before I took this job. Naturally I never alluded to the fact either to Miss Bolam or to any of the other tenants. It is not the kind of thing one would wish to talk about. They really do seem a most unfortunate family.”

“What rent did Miss Bolam pay?”

The caretaker paused before replying. This was obviously high on her list of questions that should not properly be asked. Then, as if reluctantly admitting the authority of the police, she replied: “Our fourth- and fifth-floor two-bedroom flats are from £490 excluding rates.”

That was about half Miss Bolam’s salary, thought Dalgliesh. It was too high a proportion for anyone without private means. He had yet to see the dead woman’s solicitor, but it looked as if Nurse Bolam’s assessment of her cousin’s income was not far wrong.

He dismissed the caretaker at the door of the flat and he and Martin went in together.

This prying among the personal residue of a finished life was a part of his job which Dalgliesh had always found a little distasteful. It was too much like putting the dead at a disadvantage. During his career he had examined with interest and with pity so many petty leavings. The soiled underclothes pushed hurriedly into drawers, personal letters which prudence would have destroyed, half-eaten meals, unpaid bills, old photographs, pictures and books which the dead would not have chosen to represent their taste to a curious or vulgar world, family secrets, stale makeup in greasy jars, the muddle of ill-disciplined or unhappy lives. It was no longer the fashion to dread an unshriven end but most people, if they thought at all, hoped for time to clear away their debris. He remembered from childhood the voice of an old aunt exhorting him to change his vest. “Suppose you got run over, Adam. What would people think?” The question was less absurd than it had seemed to a ten-year-old. Time had taught him that it expressed one of the major preoccupations of mankind, the dread of losing face.

But Enid Bolam might have lived each day as if expecting sudden death. He had never examined a flat so neat, so obsessively tidy. Even her few cosmetics, the brush and comb on her dressing table were arranged with patterned precision. The heavy double bed was made. Friday was obviously her day for changing the linen. The used sheets and pillowcases were folded into a laundry box which lay open on a chair. The bedside table held nothing but a small travelling clock, a carafe of water and a Bible with a booklet beside it appointing the passage to be read each day and expounding the moral. There was nothing in the table drawer but a bottle of aspirin and a folded handkerchief. A hotel room would have held as much individuality.

All the furniture was old and heavy. The ornate mahogany door of the wardrobe swung open soundlessly to reveal a row of tightly packed clothes. They were expensive but unexciting. Miss Bolam had bought from that store which still caters mainly for country-house dowagers. There were well-cut skirts of indeterminate colour, heavy coats tailored to last through a dozen English winters, woollen dresses which could offend no one. Once the wardrobe was closed, it was impossible accurately to recall a single garment. At the back of them all, closeted from the light, were bowls of fibre, planted no doubt with bulbs whose Christmas flowering Miss Bolam would never see.

Dalgliesh and Martin had worked together for too many years to find much talking necessary and they moved about the flat almost in silence. Everywhere was the same heavy, old-fashioned furniture, the same ordered neatness. It was hard to believe that these rooms had been recently lived in, that anyone had cooked a meal in this impersonal kitchen. It was very quiet. At this height and muffled by the solid Victorian walls the clamour of traffic in Kensington High Street was a faint, distant throbbing. Only the insistent ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall stabbed the still silence. The air was cold and almost odourless except for the smell of the flowers. They were everywhere. There was a bowl of chrysanthemums on the hall table and another in the sitting room. The bedroom mantelpiece held a small jug of anemones. On the kitchen dresser was a taller brass jug of autumn foliage, the gatherings perhaps of some recent country walk. Dalgliesh did not like autumn flowers, the chrysanthemums which obstinately refuse to die, flaunting their shaggy heads even on a rotting stem, scentless dahlias fit only to be planted in neat rows in municipal parks. His wife had died in October and he had long recognized the minor bereavements which follow the death of the heart. Autumn was no longer a good time of the year. For him the flowers in Miss Bolam’s flat emphasized the general air of gloom, like wreaths at a funeral.

The sitting room was the largest room in the flat and here was Miss Bolam’s desk. Martin fingered it appreciatively.

“It’s all good solid stuff, sir, isn’t it? We’ve got a piece rather like this. The wife’s mother left it to us. Mind you, they don’t make furniture like it today. You get nothing for it, of course. Too big for modern rooms, I suppose. But it’s got quality.”

“You can certainly lean against it without collapsing,” said Dalgliesh.

“That’s what I mean, sir. Good solid stuff. No wonder she hung on to it. A sensible young woman on the whole, I’d say, and one who knew how to make herself comfortable.” He drew a second chair up to the desk where Dalgliesh was already seated, planted his heavy thighs in it and did indeed look comfortable and at home.

The desk was unlocked. The top rolled back without difficulty. Inside was a portable typewriter and a metal box containing files of paper, each file neatly labelled. The drawers and compartments of the desk held writing paper, envelopes and correspondence. As they expected, everything was in perfect order. They went through the files together. Miss Bolam paid her bills as soon as they were due and kept a running account of all her household expenditure.

There was much to be gone through. Details of her investments were filed under the appropriate heading. At her mother’s death the trustee securities had been redeemed and the capital reinvested in equities. The portfolio was skilfully balanced and there could be little doubt that Miss Bolam had been well advised and had increased her assets considerably during the past five years. Dalgliesh noted the name of her stockbroker and solicitor. Both would have to be seen before the investigation was complete.

The dead woman kept few of her personal letters; perhaps there had been few worth keeping. But there was one, filed under P, which was interesting. It was written in a careful hand on cheap lined paper from a Balham address and read:

It was extraordinary, thought Dalgliesh, that people still lived who could write a letter like that, with its archaic mixture of subservience and self-respect, its unashamed yet curiously poignant emotionalism. The story it told was ordinary enough, but he felt detached from its reality. The letter could have been written fifty years ago; he almost expected to see the paper curling with age and smell the tentative scent of potpourri. It had no relevance, surely, to that pretty, ineffectual child at the Steen.

“It’s unlikely to have any importance,” he said to Martin. “But I’d like you to go over to Balham and have a word with these people. We’d better know who the husband is. But, somehow, I don’t think he’ll prove to be Dr. Etherege’s mysterious marauder. The man—or woman—who killed Miss Bolam was still in the building when we arrived. And we’ve talked to him.”

It was then that the telephone rang, sounding ominously strident in the silence of the flat as if it were calling for the dead. Dalgliesh said: “I’ll take it. It will be Dr. Keating with the PM report. I asked him to ring me here if he got through with it.”

He was back with Martin within two minutes. The report had been brief. Dalgliesh said: “Nothing surprising. She was a healthy woman. Killed by a stab through the heart after being stunned, which we could see for ourselves, and virgo intacta which we had no reason to doubt. What have you got there?”

“It’s her photograph album, sir. Pictures of Guide camps mostly. It looks as if she went away with the girls every year.”

Probably making that her annual holiday, thought Dalgliesh. He had a respect bordering on simple wonder for those who voluntarily gave up their leisure to other people’s children. He was not a man who liked children and he found the company of most of them insupportable after a very brief time. He took the album from Sergeant Martin. The photographs were small and technically unremarkable, taken apparently with a small box camera. But they were carefully disposed on the page, each labelled in neat white printing. There were Guides hiking, Guides cooking on primus stoves, erecting tents, blanket-swathed around the campfire, lining up for kit inspection. And in many of the photographs there was the figure of their captain, plump, motherly, smiling. It was difficult to connect this buxom, happy extrovert with that pathetic corpse on the record-room floor—or with the obsessional, authoritative administrator described by the staff of the Steen. The comments under some of the photographs were pathetic in their evocation of happiness remembered:

“The Swallows dish up. Shirley keeps an eye on the spotted dick.”

“Valerie ‘flies up’ from the Brownies.”

“The Kingfishers tackle the washing-up. Snap taken by Susan.”

“Captain helps the tide in! Taken by Jean.” This last showed Miss Bolam’s plump shoulders rising from the surf, surrounded by some half-dozen of her girls. Her hair was down and hanging in flat swaths, wet and dank as seaweed, on either side of her laughing face.

Together the two detectives looked at the photograph in silence. Then Dalgliesh said: “There haven’t been many tears shed for her yet, have there? Only her cousin’s and they were more shock than grief. I wonder whether the Swallows and the Kingfishers will weep for her.”

They closed the album and went back to their search. It disclosed only one further item of interest, but that was very interesting indeed. It was the carbon copy of a letter from Miss Bolam to her solicitor, dated the day before her death, and making an appointment to see him “in connection with the proposed changes to my will which we discussed briefly on the telephone yesterday night.”

After the visit to Ballantyne Mansions there followed a hiatus in the investigation, one of those inevitable delays which Dalgliesh had never found it easy to accept. He had always worked at speed. His reputation rested on the pace as well as the success of his cases. He did not ponder too deeply the implications of this compulsive need to get on with the job. It was enough to know that delay irritated him more than it did most men.

This hold up was, perhaps, to be expected. It was hardly likely that a London solicitor would be in his office after midday on Saturday. It was more dispiriting to learn by telephone that Mr. Babcock of Babcock and Honeywell had flown with his wife to Geneva on Friday afternoon to attend the funeral of a friend and would not be back in his city office until the following Tuesday. There was now no Mr. Honeywell in the firm but Mr. Babcock’s chief clerk would be in the office on Monday morning if he could help the superintendent. It was the caretaker speaking. Dalgliesh was not sure how far the chief clerk could help him. He much preferred to see Mr. Babcock. The solicitor was likely to be able to give a great deal of useful information about Miss Bolam’s family as well as her financial affairs, but much of it would probably be given with at least a token show of resistance and obtained only by the exercise of tact. It would be folly to jeopardize success by a prior approach to the clerk.

Until the details of the will were available, there was little point in seeing Nurse Bolam again. Frustrated in his immediate plans Dalgliesh drove without his sergeant to call on Peter Nagle. He had no clear aim in view but that didn’t worry him. The time would be well spent. Some of his most useful work was done in these unplanned, almost casual encounters when he talked, listened, watched, studied a suspect in his own home or gleaned the thin stalks of unwittingly dropped information about the one personality which is central to any murder investigation—that of the victim.

Nagle lived in Pimlico on the fourth floor of a large, white, stuccoed Victorian house near Eccleston Square. Dalgliesh had last visited this street three years previously when it had seemed irretrievably sunk into shabby decay. But the tide had changed. The wave of fashion and popularity which flows so inexplicably in London, sometimes missing one district while sweeping through its near neighbour, had washed the broad street bringing order and prosperity in its wake. Judging by the number of house agents’ boards, the property speculators, first as always to sniff the returning tide, were reaping the usual profits. The house on the corner looked newly painted. The heavy front door stood open. Inside, a board gave the names of the tenants, but there were no bells. Dalgliesh deduced that the flats were self-contained and that, somewhere, there was a resident caretaker who would answer the front-door bell when the house was locked for the night. He could see no lift so set himself to climb the four flights to Nagle’s flat.

It was a light, airy house and very quiet. There was no sign of life until the third floor where someone was playing the piano and playing well; perhaps a professional musician, practising. The treble cascade of sound fell over Dalgliesh and receded as he reached the fourth floor. Here, there was a plain wooden door with a heavy brass knocker and a card pinned above it on which was lettered the one word—Nagle. He rapped and heard Nagle shout an immediate “come in.”

The flat was surprising. He hardly knew what he had expected, but it was certainly not this immense, airy, impressive studio. It ran the whole length of the back of the house, the great north window, uncurtained, giving a panoramic view of twisted chimney pots and irregular sloping roofs. Nagle was not alone. He was sitting, knees apart, on a narrow bed which stood on a raised platform at the east side of the room. Curled against him, clad only in a dressing gown, was Jennifer Priddy. They were drinking tea from two blue mugs; a tray holding the teapot and a bottle of milk was on a small table beside them. The painting on which Nagle had recently been working stood on an easel in the middle of the room.

The girl showed no embarrassment at seeing Dalgliesh but swung her legs from the bed and gave him a smile which was frankly happy, almost welcoming, certainly without coquetry.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

Nagle said: “The police never drink on duty and that includes tea. Better get your clothes on, kid. We don’t want to shock the superintendent.”

The girl smiled again, gathered up her clothes with one arm and the tea tray with the other and disappeared through a door at the far end of the studio. It was difficult to recognize in this confident, sensual figure the tear-stained, diffident child Dalgliesh had first seen at the Steen. He watched her as she passed. She was obviously naked except for the dressing gown of Nagle’s; her hard nipples pointed the thin wool. It came to Dalgliesh that they had been making love. As she passed from view, he turned to Nagle and saw in his eyes the transitory gleam of amused speculation. But neither of them spoke.

Dalgliesh moved about the studio, watched by Nagle from the bed. The room was without clutter. In its almost obsessional neatness it reminded him of Enid Bolam’s flat with which it had otherwise nothing in common. The dais with its plain wooden bed, chair and small table obviously served as a bedroom. The rest of the studio was taken up with the paraphernalia of a painter, but there was none of that undisciplined muddle which the uninitiated associate with an artist’s life. About a dozen large oils were stacked against the south wall and Dalgliesh was surprised by their power. Here was no amateur indulging his little talent. Miss Priddy was apparently Nagle’s only model. Her heavy-busted, adolescent body gleamed at him from a diversity of poses, here foreshortened, there curiously elongated as if the painter gloried in his technical competence. The most recent picture was on the easel. It showed the girl sitting astride a stool with the childish hands hanging relaxed between her thighs, the breasts bunched forward. There was something in this flaunting of technical expertise, in the audacious use of greens and mauve and in the careful tonal relationships which caught at Dalgliesh’s memory.

“Who teaches you?” he asked. “Sugg?”

“That’s right.” Nagle did not seem surprised. “Know his work?”

“I have one of his early oils. A nude.”

“You made a good investment. Hang on to it.”

“I’ve every intention of doing so,” said Dalgliesh mildly. “I happen to like it. Have you been with him long?”

“Two years. Part time, of course. In another three years I’ll be teaching him. If he’s capable of learning, that is. He’s getting an old dog now and too fond of his own tricks.”

“You appear to have imitated some of them,” said Dalgliesh.

“You think so? That’s interesting.” Nagle did not seem affronted. “That’s why it will be good to get away. I’m off to Paris by the end of the month at the latest. I applied for the Bollinger scholarship. The old man put in a word for me and last week I had a letter to say that it’s mine.”

Try as he would, he could not entirely keep the note of triumph from his voice. Underneath the assumption of nonchalance, there was a spring of joy. And he had reason to be pleased with himself. The Bollinger was no ordinary prize. It meant, as Dalgliesh knew, two years in any European city with a generous allowance and freedom for the student to live and work as he chose. The Bollinger trust had been set up by a manufacturer of patent medicines who had died wealthy and successful but unsatisfied. His money had come from stomach powders but his heart was in painting. His own talent was small and, to judge by the collection of paintings which he bequeathed to the embarrassed trustees of his local gallery, his taste had been on a par with his performance. But the Bollinger scholarship had ensured that artists should remember him with gratitude. Bollinger did not believe that art flourished in poverty or that artists were stimulated to their best efforts by cold garrets and empty bellies. He had been poor in his youth and had not enjoyed it. He had travelled widely in his old age and been happy abroad. The Bollinger scholarship enabled young artists of promise to enjoy the second without enduring the first and it was well worth winning. If Nagle had been awarded the Bollinger, he was hardly likely to be much concerned now with the troubles of the Steen Clinic.

“When are you due to go?” Dalgliesh asked.

“When I like. By the end of the month, anyway. But I may go earlier and without notice. No sense in upsetting anyone.” He jerked his head towards the far door as he spoke and added: “That’s why this murder is such a nuisance. I was afraid it might hold things up. After all, it was my chisel. And that wasn’t the only attempt made to implicate me. While I was in the general office waiting for the post, someone phoned to ask me to go down for the laundry. It sounded like a woman. I’d got my coat on and was more or less on my way out, so I said I’d collect it when I got back.”

“So that’s why you went to see Nurse Bolam on your return from the post and asked her whether the laundry was ready?”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you tell her about the phone call at the time?”

“I don’t know. There didn’t seem any point. I wasn’t anxious to hang about the LSD room. Those patients give me the creeps with their moaning and muttering. When Bolam said the stuff wasn’t ready, I thought it was Miss Bolam who had phoned and it wouldn’t have done to have said so. She was a bit too apt to interfere with the nursing responsibilities, or so they thought. Anyway, I didn’t say anything about the call. I might have done but I didn’t.”

“And you didn’t tell me either when you were first interviewed.”

“Right again. The truth is that the whole thing struck me as a bit odd and I wanted time to think about it. Well, I’ve thought and you’re welcome to the story. You can believe it or not, as you like. It’s all the same to me.”

“You seem to be taking it pretty calmly if you really believe that someone was trying to involve you in the murder.”

“I’m not worrying. They didn’t succeed, for one thing, and, for another, I happen to believe that the chance of an innocent man getting convicted of murder in this country is practically nil. You ought to find that flattering. On the other hand—given the jury system—the chances of the guilty getting off are high. That’s why I don’t think you’re going to solve this murder. Too many suspects. Too many possibilities.”

“We shall see. Tell me more about this call. When exactly did you receive it?”

“I can’t remember. About five minutes before Shorthouse came into the general office, I think. It could have been earlier. Jenny may remember.”

“I’ll ask her when she gets back. What exactly did the voice say?”

“Just, ‘The laundry’s ready if you’d fetch it now, please.’ I took it that Nurse Bolam was phoning. I replied that I was just going out with the post and would see to it when I got back. Then I put down the receiver before she had a chance to argue.”

“You were sure it was Nurse Bolam speaking?”

“I’m not sure at all. I naturally thought it was at the time because Nurse Bolam usually does phone about the laundry. As a matter of fact the woman spoke softly and it could have been anyone.”

“But it was a woman’s voice?”

“Oh, yes. It was a woman all right.”

“At any rate it was a false message because we know that, in fact, the laundry wasn’t sorted.”

“Yes. But what was the point of it? It doesn’t add up. If the idea was to lure me down to the basement to frame me, the killer stood the risk that I’d arrive at the wrong moment. Nurse Bolam, for example, wouldn’t want me on the spot inquiring for the laundry if she were planning to be in the record room slugging her cousin. Even if Miss Bolam were dead before the call was made, it still doesn’t make sense. Suppose I’d nosed around and found the body? The killer couldn’t have wanted it discovered that soon! Anyway, I didn’t go down until I got back from the post. Lucky for me I was out with it. The box is only just across the road, but I usually go down to Beefsteak Street to buy a Standard. The man there probably remembers me.”

Jennifer Priddy had returned during the last few words. She had changed into a plain woollen dress. Clasping a belt round her waist, she said: “It was the row over your paper that finished poor old Cully. You might have let him have it, darling, when he asked. He only wanted to check on his horses.”

Nagle said without rancour: “Mean old devil. He’d do anything to save himself threepence. Why can’t he pay for it occasionally? I’m no sooner in the door before he puts out his hand for it.”

“Still, you were rather unkind to him, darling. It isn’t as if you wanted it yourself. We only glanced at it downstairs then used it to wrap up Tigger’s food. You know what Cully is. The least upset goes to his stomach.”

Nagle expressed his opinion of Cully’s stomach with force and originality. Miss Priddy glanced at Dalgliesh as if inviting his shocked admiration of the vagaries of genius and murmured: “Peter! Really, darling, you are awful!” She spoke with coy indulgence, the little woman administering a mild rebuke. Dalgliesh looked at Nagle to see how he bore it, but the painter seemed not to have heard. He still sat, immobile, on the bed and looked down at them. Clad now in brown linen trousers, thick blue jersey and sandals, he yet looked as formal and neat as he had in his porter’s uniform, his mild eyes unworried, his long, strong arms relaxed.

Under his gaze the girl moved restlessly about the studio, touching with happy possessiveness the frame of a painting, running her fingers along the window ledge, moving a jug of dahlias from one window to the next. It was as if she sought to impose the soft nuances of femininity on this disciplined masculine workshop, to demonstrate that this was her home, her natural place. She was entirely unembarrassed by the pictures of her naked body. It was possible that she gained satisfaction from this vicarious exhibitionism.

Suddenly Dalgliesh asked: “Do you remember, Miss Priddy, whether anyone telephoned Mr. Nagle while he was in the office with you?”

The girl looked surprised but said unconcernedly to Nagle: “Nurse Bolam phoned about the laundry, didn’t she? I came in from the record room—I’d only been gone a second—and heard you say that you were just on your way out and would go down when you came back.” She laughed. “After you put the receiver down, you said something much less polite about the way the nurses expect you to be at their beck and call. Remember?”

“Yes,” said Nagle shortly. He turned to Dalgliesh. “Any more questions, Superintendent? Jenny’ll have to be getting home soon and I usually go part of the way. Her parents don’t know she sees me.”

“Only one or two. Have either of you any idea why Miss Bolam should send for the group secretary?”

Miss Priddy shook her head. Nagle said: “It was nothing to do with us, anyway. She didn’t know that Jenny poses for me. Even if she found out, she wouldn’t send for Lauder. She wasn’t a fool. She knew he wouldn’t concern himself with anything the staff did in their own time. After all, she found out about Dr. Baguley’s affair with Miss Saxon but she wasn’t daft enough to tell Lauder.”

Dalgliesh did not ask whom Miss Bolam had told. He said: “It was obviously something concerned with the administration of the clinic. Had anything unusual happened lately?”

“Nothing but our famous burglary and the missing fifteen quid. But you know about that.”

“That’s nothing to do with Peter,” said the girl with quick defensiveness. “He wasn’t even at the clinic when the fifteen pounds arrived.” She turned to Nagle. “You remember, darling? That was the morning you got stuck in the Underground. You didn’t even know about the money!”

She had said something wrong. The flash of irritation in those large, mud-brown eyes was momentary, but Dalgliesh did not miss it. There was a pause before Nagle spoke, but his voice was perfectly controlled.

“I knew soon enough. We all did. What with the fuss over who sent it and the row over who was to spend it, the whole damn group must have known.” He looked at Dalgliesh. “Is that all?”

“No. Do you know who killed Miss Bolam?”

“I’m glad to say I don’t. I shouldn’t think it was one of the psychiatrists. Those boys are the strongest reason I know for staying sane. But I can’t see any of them actually killing. They haven’t the nerve.”

Someone very different had said much the same thing. As he reached the door, Dalgliesh paused and looked back at Nagle. He and the girl were sitting together on the bed as he had first seen them; neither of them made any move to see him out, but Jenny gave him her happy valedictory smile.

Dalgliesh asked his last question: “Why did you go for a drink with Cully on the night of the burglary?”

“Cully asked me.”

“Wasn’t that unusual?”

“So unusual that I went with him out of curiosity to see what was up.”

“And what was?”

“Nothing really. Cully asked me to lend him a quid which I refused and, while the clinic was left empty, someone broke in. I don’t see how Cully could have foreseen that. Or maybe he did. Anyway, I can’t see what it’s got to do with the murder.”

Nor, on the face of it, could Dalgliesh. As he passed down the stairs, he was vexed by the thought of time passing, time wasted, the drag of hours before Monday morning when the clinic would reopen and his suspects reassemble in the place where they were likely to be most vulnerable. But the last forty minutes had been well spent. He was beginning to trace the dominant thread in this tangled skein. As he passed by the third-floor flat, the pianist was playing Bach. Dalgliesh paused for a moment to listen. Contrapuntal music was the only kind he truly enjoyed. But the pianist stopped suddenly with a crash of discordant keys. And then nothing. Dalgliesh passed down the stairs in silence and left the quiet house unseen.

When Dr. Baguley arrived at the clinic for the Medical Committee meeting, the parking space reserved for doctors’ cars was already occupied. Dr. Etherege’s Bentley was there parked next to Steiner’s Rolls. On the other side of it was the battered Vauxhall which proclaimed that Dr. Albertine Maddox had decided to attend.

Upstairs in the first-floor boardroom the curtains were drawn against the blue-black October sky. In the middle of the heavy mahogany table was a bowl of roses. Baguley remembered that Miss Bolam had always supplied flowers for the meetings of the Medical Committee. Someone had decided to continue the practice. The roses were the slim, hothouse buds of autumn, rigid and scentless on their thornless stems. In a couple of days they would open for their brief and barren flowering. In less than a week they would be dead. Baguley thought that so extravagant and evocative a flower was inappropriate to the mood of the meeting. But the empty bowl would have been unbearably poignant and embarrassing.

“Who supplied the roses?” he asked.

“Mrs. Bostock, I think,” said Dr. Ingram. “She was up here getting the room ready when I arrived.”

“Remarkable,” said Dr. Etherege. He put out a finger and stroked one of the buds so gently that the stem did not even tremble. Baguley wondered whether the comment referred to the quality of the roses or to Mrs. Bostock’s perspicacity in supplying them.

“Miss Bolam was very fond of flowers, very fond,” said the medical director. He looked round as if challenging his colleagues to disagree.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we get started?” Dr. Baguley, as honorary secretary, seated himself on the right of Dr. Etherege. Dr. Steiner took the chair next to him. Dr. Maddox sat on Steiner’s right. No other consultant was there. Dr. McBain and Dr. Mason-Giles were in the States attending a conference. The rest of the medical staff, torn between curiosity and a disinclination to interrupt their weekend break, had apparently decided to wait in patience for Monday. Dr. Etherege had thought it proper to telephone them all and let them know of the meeting. He gave their apologies formally and they were as gravely received.

Albertine Maddox had been a surgeon and a highly successful one before she qualified as a psychiatrist. It was perhaps typical of her colleagues’ ambivalence towards their specialty that Dr. Maddox’s double qualification enhanced her standing in their eyes. She represented the clinic on the Group Medical Advisory Committee, where she defended the Steen against the occasional snipings of physicians and surgeons with a wit and vigour which made her respected and feared. At the clinic she took no part in the Freudian versus eclectic controversy being, as Baguley observed, equally beastly to both sides. Her patients loved her but this did not impress her colleagues. They were used to being loved by their patients and merely observed that Albertine was particularly skilful in handling a strong transference situation. Physically she was a plump, grey-haired, unremarkable woman who looked what she was, the comfortable mother of a family. She had five children, the sons intelligent and prosperous, the girls well-married. Her insignificant-looking husband and the children treated her with a tolerant, faintly amused solicitude which never failed to astonish her colleagues at the Steen to whom she was a formidable personality. She sat now, with Hector, her old Pekinese, squatting malevolently on her lap, looking as comfortably anticipatory as a suburban housewife at a matinée.

Dr. Steiner said testily: “Really, Albertine, need you have brought Hector? I don’t want to be unkind but that animal is beginning to smell. You should have him put down.”

“Thank you, Paul,” replied Dr. Maddox in her deep, beautifully modulated voice. “Hector will be put down, as you so euphemistically describe it, when he ceases to find life pleasant. I judge that he has not yet reached that state. It is not my habit to kill off living creatures simply because I find certain of their physical characteristics displeasing; nor, I may say, because they have become somewhat of a nuisance.”

Dr. Etherege said quickly: “It was good of you to find time to come tonight, Albertine. I’m sorry that the notice was so short.”

He spoke without irony, although he was as well aware as were his colleagues that Dr. Maddox only attended one committee meeting in four on the grounds, which she made no effort to conceal, that her contract with the Regional Board contained no clause compelling her to a monthly session of boredom laced with claptrap, and that the company of more than one psychiatrist at a time made Hector sick. The truth of this last assertion had been demonstrated too often to be safely challenged.

“I am a member of this committee, Henry,” replied Dr. Maddox graciously. “Is there any reason why I should not make the effort to attend?”

Her glance at Dr. Ingram implied that not everyone present had an equal right. Mary Ingram was the wife of a suburban general practitioner and attended the Steen twice a week to give the anaesthetic at ECT sessions. Not being either a psychiatrist or a consultant she was not normally present at meetings of the Medical Committee.

Dr. Etherege interpreted the glance correctly and said firmly: “Dr. Ingram has been good enough to come along tonight at my request. The main business of the meeting is naturally concerned with Miss Bolam’s murder and Dr. Ingram was in the clinic on Friday evening.”

“But is not a suspect, so I understand,” replied Dr. Maddox. “I congratulate her. It is gratifying that there is one member of the medical staff who has been able to produce a satisfactory alibi.”

She looked at Dr. Ingram severely, her tone implying that an alibi was, in itself, suspicious and hardly becoming to the most junior member of the staff since three senior consultants had been unable to produce one. No one asked how Dr. Maddox knew about the alibi. Presumably she had been speaking to Sister Ambrose.

Dr. Steiner said pettishly: “It’s ridiculous to talk about alibis as if the police could seriously suspect one of us! It’s perfectly obvious to me what happened. The murderer was lying in wait for her in the basement. We know that. He may have been hidden down there for hours, perhaps even since the previous day. He could have slipped past Cully with one of the patients or have pretended to be a relative or a hospital-car attendant. He could even have broken in during the night. That has been known, after all. Once in the basement there would be plenty of time to discover which key opened the record-room door and plenty of time to select a weapon. Neither the fetish nor the chisel were hidden.”

“And how do you suggest this unknown murderer left the building?” asked Dr. Baguley. “We searched the place pretty thoroughly before the police arrived and they went over it again. The basement and first-floor doors were both bolted on the inside, remember.”

“Climbed up the lift shaft by the pulley ropes and out through one of the doors leading to the fire escape,” replied Dr. Steiner, playing his trump card with a certain panache. “I’ve examined the lift and it’s just possible. A small man—or a woman, of course—could squeeze over the top of the box and get into the shaft. The ropes are quite thick enough to support a considerable weight and the climb wouldn’t be too difficult for anyone reasonably agile. They’d need to be slim, of course.” He glanced at his own rounding paunch with complacency.

“It’s a pleasant theory,” said Baguley. “Unfortunately all the doors opening on the fire escape were also bolted on the inside.”

“There is no building in existence which a desperate and experienced man cannot break into or get out of,” proclaimed Dr. Steiner, as if from a plenitude of experience. “He could have got out of a first-floor window and edged along the sill until he could get a foothold on the fire escape. All I’m saying is that the murderer isn’t necessarily one of the staff who happened to be on duty yesterday evening.”

“It could be I, for example,” said Dr. Maddox. Dr. Steiner was undaunted.

“That, of course, is nonsense, Albertine. I make no accusations. I merely point out that the circle of suspects is less restricted than the police seem to think. They should direct their inquiries to Miss Bolam’s private life. Obviously she had an enemy.”

But Dr. Maddox was not to be diverted. “Fortunately for me,” she proclaimed, “I was at the Bach recital at the Royal Festival Hall last night with my husband and dined there before the concert. And while Alasdair’s testimony on my behalf might be suspect, I was also with my brother-in-law who happens to be a bishop. A High Church bishop,” she added complacently, as if incense and chasuble set a seal on episcopal virtue and veracity.

Dr. Etherege smiled gently and said: “I should be relieved if I could produce even an evangelical curate to vouch for me between six-fifteen and seven o’clock yesterday evening. But isn’t all this theorizing a waste of time? The crime is in the hands of the police and there we must leave it. Our main concern is to discuss its implications for the work of the clinic and, in particular, the suggestion of the chairman and the group secretary that Mrs. Bostock should carry on for the present as acting administrative officer. But we’d better proceed in order. Is it your pleasure that I sign the minutes of the last meeting?”

There was the unenthusiastic but acquiescent mumble which this question usually provokes and the medical director drew the minute book towards him and signed. Dr. Maddox said suddenly: “What is he like? This superintendent, I mean.”

Dr. Ingram, who hadn’t so far spoken, surprisingly replied: “He’s about forty, I should think. Tall and dark. I liked his voice and he has nice hands.” Then she blushed furiously, remembering that, to a psychiatrist, the most innocent remark could be embarrassingly revealing. That comment about nice hands was, perhaps, a mistake.

Dr. Steiner, ignoring Dalgliesh’s physical characteristics, launched into a psychological assessment of the superintendent to which his fellow psychiatrists gave the polite attention of experts interested in a colleague’s theories. Dalgliesh, had he been present, would have been surprised and intrigued by the accuracy and percipience of Dr. Steiner’s diagnosis.

The medical director said: “I agree that he’s obsessional and also that he’s intelligent. That means that his mistakes will be the mistakes of an intelligent man—always the most dangerous. We must hope for all our sakes that he makes none. The murder, and the inevitable publicity, are bound to have an effect on the patients and on the work of the clinic. And that brings us to this suggestion about Mrs. Bostock.”

“I have always preferred Bolam to Bostock,” said Dr. Maddox. “It would be a pity if we lost one unsuitable AO—however regrettably and fortuitously—only to be saddled with another.”

“I agree,” said Dr. Baguley. “Of the two I personally always preferred Bolam. But this would only be a temporary arrangement presumably. The job will have to be advertised. In the meantime someone’s got to take over and Mrs. Bostock does at least know the work.”

Dr. Etherege said: “Lauder made it plain that the HMC wouldn’t favour putting in an outsider until the police have finished their investigation, even if they could find anyone willing to come. We don’t want any additional upheaval. There will be enough disturbance to cope with. And that brings me to the problem of the press. Lauder suggested, and I have agreed, that all inquiries are referred to Group Headquarters and that no one here makes any statements. It seems much the best plan. It’s important in the interests of the patients that we don’t have reporters running all over the clinic. Therapy is likely to suffer enough without that. Have I this committee’s formal confirmation of the decision?”

He had. No one evinced any enthusiasm for coping with the press.

Dr. Steiner did not contribute to the general murmur of consent. His thoughts were still with the problem of Miss Bolam’s successor. He said querulously: “I can’t understand why Dr. Maddox and Dr. Baguley have this animus against Mrs. Bostock. I’ve noticed it before. It’s ridiculous to compare her adversely with Miss Bolam. There’s no doubt which of them is—was—is—the more suitable administrator. Mrs. Bostock is a highly intelligent woman, psychologically stable, efficient and with a real appreciation of the importance of the work we do here. No one could have said as much of Miss Bolam. Her attitude to the patients was sometimes most unfortunate.”

“I didn’t know that she came into contact much with the patients,” said Dr. Baguley. “Anyway, none of mine complained.”

“She made appointments occasionally and paid out travelling expenses. I can quite believe that your patients didn’t remark on her attitude. But mine are a rather different class. They’re also more sensitive to these things. Mr. Burge, for example, mentioned the matter to me.”

Dr. Maddox laughed unkindly. “Oh, Burge! Is he still coming? I see that his new opus is promised for December. It will be interesting to see, Paul, whether your efforts have improved his prose. If so, it’s probably public money well spent.”

Dr. Steiner burst into pained expostulation. He treated a fair number of writers and artists, some of them protégés of Rosa in search of a little free psychotherapy. Although he was sensitive to the arts, his usually keen critical insight failed completely where his patients were concerned. He could not bear to hear them criticized, lived in perpetual hope that their great talents would at last be recognized and was roused to quick, defensive anger on their behalf. Dr. Baguley thought that it was one of Steiner’s more endearing qualities; in many ways he was touchingly naïve. He launched now into a muddled defence of both his patient’s character and his prose style, ending: “Mr. Burge is a most talented and sensitive man, very distressed by his inability to sustain a satisfactory sexual relationship, particularly with his wives.”

This unfortunate solecism seemed likely to provoke Dr. Maddox to further unkindness. It was certainly, thought Baguley, her night to be pro-eclectic.

Dr. Etherege said mildly: “Could we forget our professional differences for a moment and concentrate on the matter in hand? Dr. Steiner, have you any objection to accepting Mrs. Bostock as a temporary administrative officer?”

Dr. Steiner said grumpily: “The question is purely academic. If the group secretary wishes her to be appointed, she will be appointed. This farce of appearing to consult us is ridiculous. We have no authority either to approve or disapprove. That was made perfectly clear to me by Lauder when I approached him last month about getting Bolam transferred.”

“I didn’t know you had approached him,” said Dr. Etherege.

“I spoke to him after the September meeting of the House Committee. It was merely a tentative suggestion.”

“And was met with a pretty positive brush off, no doubt,” said Baguley. “You would have been wiser to keep your mouth shut.”

“Or to have brought the matter before this committee,” said Etherege.

“And with what result?” cried Steiner. “What happened last time I complained about Bolam? Nothing! You all admitted that she was an unsuitable person to hold the post of administrative officer. You all agreed—well, most of you agreed—that Bostock—or even an outsider—would be preferable. But when it came to action, not one of you was prepared to put your signature to a letter to the Hospital Management Committee. And you know very well why! You were all terrified of that woman. Yes, terrified!”

Amid the murmur of outraged denial, Dr. Maddox said: “There was something intimidating about her. It may have been that formidable and self-conscious rectitude. You were as affected by it as anyone, Paul.”

“Possibly. But I did try to do something about her. I spoke to Lauder.”

“I spoke to him, too,” said Etherege quietly, “and possibly with more effect. I made it clear that this committee realized that we had no control over the administrative staff but I said that Miss Bolam appeared to me, speaking as a psychiatrist and as chairman of the Medical Committee, to be temperamentally unsuitable for her job. I suggested that a transfer would be in her own interests. There could be no criticism of her efficiency and I made none. Lauder was noncommittal, of course, but he knew perfectly well that I was entitled to make the point. And I think he took it.”

Dr. Maddox said: “Allowing for his natural caution, his suspicion of psychiatrists and the usual speed of his administrative decisions, I suppose we should have been rid of Miss Bolam within the next two years. Someone has certainly speeded things up.”

Suddenly Dr. Ingram spoke. Her pink, rather stupid face flushed unbecomingly. She sat stiffly upright and her hands, clasped on the table in front of her, were shaking.

“I don’t think you ought to say things like that. It … it isn’t right. Miss Bolam is dead, brutally murdered. You sit here, all of you, and talk as if you didn’t care! I know she wasn’t very easy to get on with but she’s dead and I don’t think this is the time to be unkind about her.”

Dr. Maddox looked at Dr. Ingram with interest and a kind of wonder as if she were faced by an exceptionally dull child who had somehow succeeded in making an intelligent remark. She said: “I see that you subscribe to the superstition that one should never tell the truth about the dead. The origins of that atavistic belief have always interested me. We must have a talk about it sometime. I should like to hear your views.”

Dr. Ingram, scarlet with embarrassment and close to tears, looked as if the proposed talk were a privilege she would be happy to forgo.

Dr. Etherege said: “Unkind about her? I should be sorry to think that anyone here was being unkind. There are some things, surely, which don’t need saying. There can’t be a member of this committee who isn’t horrified at the senseless brutality of Miss Bolam’s death and who wouldn’t wish her back with us no matter what her defects as an administrator.”

The bathos was too blatant to be missed. As if conscious of their surprise and discomfiture, he looked up and said challengingly: “Well, is there? Is there?”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Steiner. He spoke soothingly, but the sharp little eyes slewed sideways to meet Baguley’s glance. There was embarrassment in that look, but Baguley recognized also the smirk of malicious amusement. The medical director wasn’t playing this too cleverly. He had allowed Albertine Maddox to get out of hand and his control over the committee was less sure than formerly. The pathetic thing about it, thought Baguley, was that Etherege was sincere. He meant every word. He had—and so had they all, come to that—a genuine horror of violence. He was a compassionate man shocked and saddened by the thought of a defenceless woman brutally done to death. But his words sounded false. He was taking refuge in formality, deliberately trying to lower the emotional tone of the meeting to one of platitudinous convention. And he only succeeded in sounding insincere.

After Dr. Ingram’s outburst the meeting seemed to lose heart. Dr. Etherege made only spasmodic attempts to control it and the conversation ranged in a tired, desultory way from one subject to another but, always and inevitably, returned to the murder. There was a feeling that the Medical Committee should express some common view. Groping from theory to theory the meeting eventually came to accept Dr. Steiner’s proposition. The killer had obviously entered the clinic earlier in the day when the system of booking people in and out was not in force. He had secreted himself in the basement, selected his weapons at leisure and called Miss Bolam down by noting the number of her extension from the card hung beside the telephone. He had made his way to the upper floors without being observed and left by one of the windows, managing to close it behind him before edging his way onto the fire escape. That this procedure argued considerable luck, coupled with unusual and remarkable agility, was not overemphasized. Under Dr. Steiner’s leadership the theory was elaborated. Miss Bolam’s telephone call to the group secretary was dismissed as irrelevant. She had undoubtedly wished to complain about some trifling misdemeanour, real or imagined, and which was quite unconnected with her subsequent death. The suggestion that the killer had swarmed up the pulley in the lift shaft was generally discounted as somewhat fanciful although, as Dr. Maddox pointed out, a man who could shut a heavy window while balancing on the outside sill, then swing himself some five feet through space to reach the fire escape, would hardly find the lift shaft an insuperable problem.

Dr. Baguley, wearying of his part in the fabrication of this mythical killer, half-closed his eyes and gazed from under lowered lids at the bowl of roses. Their petals had been opening gently and almost visibly in the warmth of the room. Now the red, green and pink swam together in an amorphous pattern of colour which, as his gaze shifted, was reflected in the shining table.

Suddenly he opened his eyes fully and saw Dr. Etherege looking fixedly at him. There was concern in that sharp, analytic regard; Dr. Baguley thought that there was also pity. The medical director said: “Some of our members have had enough. So, I think, have I. If no one has any urgent business to bring forward, I declare, the meeting closed.”

Dr. Baguley thought that it was not altogether by chance that he and the medical director found themselves alone in the room, the last to leave. As he tested the windows to check that they were locked, Dr. Etherege said: “Well, James, have you come to a decision yet about succeeding me as medical director?”

“It’s more a question of deciding whether or not to apply for the job when it’s advertised, surely?” said Baguley. He asked: “What about Mason-Giles or McBain?”

“M. G. isn’t interested. It’s maximum sessions, of course, and he doesn’t want to give up his teaching-hospital connection. McBain is tied up with the new regional unit for adolescents.”

It was typical of the medical director’s occasional insensitivity that he didn’t try to soften the fact that he had tried others first. He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, thought Baguley.

“And Steiner?” he asked. “He’ll be applying, I imagine?” The medical director smiled.

“Oh, I don’t think the Regional Board will appoint Dr. Steiner. This is a multidiscipline clinic. We must have someone who can hold the place together. And there may be very great changes. You know my views. If there is to be a closer integration of psychiatry with general medicine, a place like this may have to die for the greater good. We ought to have access to beds. The Steen may find its natural home in a general-hospital outpatient department. I don’t say it’s probable. But it’s possible.”

So that was the way the Board was thinking? Dr. Etherege had his ear well to the ground. A small outpatient unit with no registrars, no training function and no link with a general hospital might well become anachronistic in the eyes of the planners.

Dr. Baguley said: “I don’t mind where I see my patients as long as I get peace and quiet, a certain tolerance and not too much of the hierarchical claptrap and starched linen. These proposed psychiatric units in general hospitals are all very well so long as the hospital appreciates what we’re going to need in staff and space. I’m too tired to do battle.” He looked at the medical director. “Actually, I had more or less decided not to apply. I telephoned your room yesterday evening from the medical-staff room to ask if we could chat about it after the clinic.”

“Indeed? At what time?”

“At about six-twenty or six-twenty-five. There was no reply. Later, of course, we had other things to think about.”

The medical director said: “I must have been in the library. I’m very glad I was if it means that you’ve had time to reconsider your decision. And I hope that you will reconsider it, James.”

He turned out the lights and they went downstairs together. Pausing at the foot, the medical director turned to Baguley and said: “It was at about six-twenty that you telephoned? I find that very interesting, very interesting indeed.”

“Well, about then, I suppose.” Dr. Baguley realized with irritation and surprise that it was he, not the medical director, who sounded guilty and embarrassed. He was seized by an intense desire to get out of the clinic, to escape from the blue, speculative gaze which was so adept at putting him at a disadvantage. But there was something else which must be said. At the door he forced himself to pause and face Dr. Etherege. But despite his attempt at nonchalance his voice sounded forced, even belligerent: “I’m wondering whether we ought to do something about Nurse Bolam.”

“In what way?” asked the medical director gently. Receiving no reply, he went on: “All the staff know that they can ask to see me at any time. But I’m not inviting confidences. This is a murder investigation, James, and it’s out of my hands. Out of my hands completely. I think you would be wise to take the same attitude. Good night.”