Shroud for a Nightingale

VIII

Dalgliesh rather enjoyed his half hour with the housekeeper, Miss Martha Collins. She was a thin, brown-skinned woman, brittle and nobbly as a dead branch who looked as if the sap had long since dried in her bones. She gave the appearance of having gradually shrunk in her clothes without having noticed it Her working overall of thick fawn cotton hung in long creases from her narrow shoulders to mid-calf and was bunched around her waist by a schoolboy’s belt of red and blue stripes clasped with a snake buckle. Her stockings were a concertina around her ankles, and either she preferred to wear shoes at least two sizes too large, or her feet were curiously disproportionate to the rest of her body. She had appeared as soon as summoned, had plonked herself down opposite Dalgliesh, her immense feet planted firmly astride, and had eyed him with anticipatory malevolence as if about to interview a particularly recalcitrant housemaid. Throughout the interview she didn’t once smile. Admittedly there was nothing in the situation to provoke amusement but she seemed incapable of raising even the briefest smile of formal recognition. But despite these inauspicious beginnings the interview hadn’t gone badly. Dalgliesh wondered whether her acidulated tone and perversely unattractive appearance were part of a calculated persona. Perhaps some forty years earlier she had decided to become a hospital character, the beloved tyrant of fiction, treating everyone from the matron to the junior maid with equal irreverence, and had found the characterization so successful and satisfying that she had never managed to drop it She grumbled incessantly but it was without malice, a matter of form. He suspected that in fact she enjoyed her work and was neither as unhappy nor discontented as she chose to appear. She would hardly have stayed in the job for forty years if it were as intolerable as she made it sound.

“Milk! Don’t talk to me about milk. There’s more trouble about milk in this house than about the rest of the catering put together and that’s saying something. Fifteen pints a day we’re getting through even with half the house down with the flu. Don’t ask me where it’s all going. I’ve stopped being responsible for it and so I told Matron. There’s a couple of bottles go up first thing each morning to the Sisters’ floor so that they can make their own early tea. Two bottles between three I send up. You’d think that’d be enough for everyone. Matron’s is separate, of course. She gets a pint and not a drop grudged. But the trouble that milk causes! The first Sister to get at it takes all the cream, I suppose. Not very considerate, and so I told Matron. They’re lucky to get a bottle or two of Channel Island milk; no one else in the house does. There’s nothing but complaints. Sister Gearing going on because it’s too watery for her and Sister Brumfett because it’s not all Channel Island and Sister Rolfe wanting it sent up in half-pint bottles which she knows as well as I do you can’t get any more. Then there’s the milk for the students’ early tea and that cocoa and stuff they brew themselves at night. They’re supposed to sign for the bottles which they take from the fridge. The stuff isn’t grudged, but that’s the rule. Well, you take a look at the record book yourself! Nine times out of ten they can’t be troubled. And then there are the empties. They’re supposed to rinse them out and return them to the kitchen. You wouldn’t think that would be too much bother. Instead they leave the bottles about the house, in their rooms, in the cupboards, and in the utility room- half-rinsed too-until the place stinks. My girls have got enough to do without running around after the students and their empties, and so I told Matron.

“What do you mean, was I in the kitchen when the Burt twins took their pint? You know I was. I said so to the other policeman. Where else would I be at that hour of the day? I’m always in my kitchen by quarter to seven and it was nearly three minutes past when the Burt twins came in. No, I didn’t hand the bottle to them. They helped themselves from the fridge. It’s not my job to wait hand and foot on the students and so I told Matron. But there was nothing wrong with that milk when it left my kitchen. It wasn’t delivered until six thirty and I’ve got enough to do before breakfast without messing about putting disinfectant into the milk. Besides, I’ve got an alibi. I was with Mrs. Muncie from six forty-five onwards. She’s the daily woman who comes in from the town to lend a hand when I’m short. You can see her any time you like but I don’t suppose you’ll get much out of her. The poor soul hasn’t got much between the ears. Come to think of it, I doubt whether she’d notice if I spent the whole morning poisoning the milk. But she was with me for what it’s worth. And I was with her all the time. No popping out every other minute to the lavatory for me, thank you. I do all that sort of thing at the proper time.

“The lavatory disinfectant? I thought you’d be asking about that. I fill up the bottles myself from the big tin they send over once a week from the main hospital store. It’s not really my job but I don’t like to leave it to the housemaids. They’re so careless. They’d only get the stuff slopped all over the lavatory floors. I refilled that bottle in the downstairs W.C the day before Nurse Pearce died so it must have been nearly full. Some of the students bother to put a little down the bowl when they’ve finished with the lavatory but most of them don’t You’d think student nurses would be particular about little things like that, but they’re no better than other young people. The stuff is mostly used by the maids when they’ve cleaned the W.C. bowl. All the lavatories get cleaned once a day. I’m very particular about having clean lavatories. The downstairs one was due to be cleaned by Morag Smith after lunch, but Nurse Goodale and Nurse Pardoe noticed that the bottle was missing before then. I’m told that the other policeman found it empty among the bushes at the back of the house. And who put it there, I’d like to know?

“No, you can’t see Morag Smith. Didn’t they tell you? She’s on a day’s leave. She went off after tea yesterday, lucky for her. They can’t pin this latest spot of bother on Morag. No. I don’t know whether she went home. I didn’t inquire. The maids are enough responsibility when they’re under my nose in Nightingale House. I don’t concern myself with what they do on their days off. Just as well from some of the things I hear. She’ll be back late tonight more than likely and Matron has left instructions that she’s to move to the Resident Staff Hostel. This place is too dangerous for us now apparently. Well, no one’s shifting me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to manage in the mornings if Morag doesn’t show her face until just before breakfast. I can’t control my staff if they’re not under my eyes and so I told Matron. Not that Morag’s much bother. She’s as obstinate as they come but she’s not a bad worker once you get her started. And if they try to tell you that Morag Smith interfered with the dripfeed, don’t you believe them. The girl may be a bit dense but she’s not a raving lunatic. Ill not have my staff slandered without cause.

“And now I’ll tell you something, Mr. Detective.” She raised her thin rump from her chair, leaned forward across the desk and fixed Dalgliesh with her beady eyes. He willed himself to meet them without blinking and they stared at each other like a couple of wrestlers before a bout.

“Yes, Miss Collins?”

She stuck out a lean nodular finger and prodded him sharply in the chest. Dalgliesh winced.

“No one had any right to take that bottle out of the lavatory without my permission or to use it for any other purpose except for cleaning the lavatory bowl. Nobody!”

It was apparent where in Miss Collins’s eyes the full enormity of the crime had lain.