Just before half past four Dalgliesh, in defiance of convention and prudence, took tea alone with Sister Gearing in her bed-sitting-room. She had met him casually passing across the ground floor hall as the students were filing out of the lecture room after the last seminar of the day. She had given the invitation spontaneously and without coyness, although Dalgliesh noted that Sergeant Masterson was not included. He would have accepted the invitation even had it been delivered on highly scented and pink writing-paper and accompanied by the most blatant of sexual innuendoes. What he wanted after the formal interrogation of the morning was to sit in comfort and listen to a flow of artless, candid and slightly malicious gossip; to listen with the surface of his mind soothed, uninvolved, even a little cynically amused, but with the sharp claws of the intelligence sharpened for their pickings. He had learned more about the Nightingale House Sisters from their conversation at luncheon than he had in all his formal interviews, but he couldn’t spend all his time tagging along behind the nursing staff, picking up scraps of gossip like so many dropped- handkerchiefs. He wondered whether Sister Gearing had something to tell or something to ask Either way he didn’t expect an hour in her company to be wasted.
Dalgliesh hadn’t yet been in any of the rooms on the third floor except Matron’s flat and he was struck by the size and pleasant proportions of Sister Gearing’s room. From here, even in winter, the hospital couldn’t be seen, and the room had a calm of its own, remote from the frenetic life of wards and departments. Dalgliesh thought that in summer it must be very pleasant with nothing but a curdle of tree tops breaking the view of the far hills. Even now, with the curtains drawn against the fading light and the gas fire giving out a merry hiss, it was welcoming and warm. Presumably the divan bed in the corner with its cretonne cover and carefully arranged bank of cushions had been provided by the Hospital Management Committee, as had the two comfortable armchairs similarly covered and the rest of the uninteresting but functional furniture. But Sister Gearing had imposed her own personality on the room. There was a long shelf along the far wall on which she had arranged a collection of dolls in different national costumes. On another wall was a smaller shelf holding an assortment of china cats of different sizes and breeds. There was one particularly repulsive specimen in spotted blue, bulging of eye and adorned with a bow of blue ribbon; and propped beside it was a greetings card. It showed a female robin, the sex denoted by a frilly apron and flowered bonnet, perched on a twig. At her feet, a male robin was spelling out the words “Good luck” in worms. Dalgliesh hastily averted his eyes from this abomination and continued his tactful examination of the room.
The table in front of the window was presumably intended as a desk but about half a dozen photographs in silver frames effectively took up most of the working space. There was a record player in a corner with a cabinet of records beside it and a poster of a recent pop idol pinned on the wall above. There was a large number of cushions of all sizes and colors, three pouffes of unattractive design, an imitation tiger rug in brown-and-white nylon, and a coffee table on which Sister Gearing had set out the tea. But the most remarkable object in the room, in Dalgliesh’s eyes, was a tall vase of winter foliage and chrysanthemums, beautifully arranged, standing on a side table. Sister Gearing was reputably good with flowers, and this arrangement had a simplicity of color and line which was wholly pleasing. It was odd, he thought, that a woman with such an instinctive taste in flower arrangement should be content to live in this vulgarly over-furnished room. It suggested that Sister Gearing might be a more complex person than one would at first suppose. On the face of it, her character was easily read. She was a middle-aged, uncomfortably passionate spinster, not particularly well educated or intelligent, and concealing her frustrations with a slightly spurious gaiety. But twenty-five years as a policeman had taught him that no character was without its complications, its inconsistencies. Only the young or the very arrogant imagined that there was an identikit to the human mind.
Here in her own place Sister Gearing was less overtly flirtatious than she was in company. Admittedly she had chosen to pour the tea while curled on a large cushion at his feet, but he guessed from the number and variety of these cushions plumped around the room that this was her usual comfortable habit, rather than a kittenish invitation for him to join her. The tea was excellent. It was hot and freshly brewed, and accompanied by lavishly buttered crumpets with anchovy paste. There was an admirable absence of doilys and sticky cakes, and the cup handle could be comfortably held without dislocating one’s fingers. She looked after him with quiet efficiency. Dalgliesh thought that Sister Gearing was one of those women who, when alone with a man, consider it their duty to devote themselves entirely to his comfort and the flattering of his ego. This may arouse fury in other less dedicated women, but it is unreasonable to expect a man to object.
Relaxed by the warmth and comfort of her room and stimulated by tea, Sister Gearing was obviously in a mood for talk. Dalgliesh let her chatter on, only occasionally throwing in a question. Neither of them mentioned Leonard Morris. The artless confidences for which Dalgliesh hoped would hardly spring from embarrassment or restraint.
“Of course, what happened to that poor kid Pearce is absolutely appalling, however it was caused. And with the whole set looking on like that! I’m surprised that it hadn’t upset their work completely, but the young are pretty tough these days. And it isn’t as if they liked her. But I can’t believe any one of them put that corrosive into the feed. After all, these are third-year students. They know that carbolic acid taken straight into the stomach in that concentration is lethal. Damn it all, they had a lecture about poisons in their previous block. So it couldn’t have been a practical joke that misfired.”
“All the same, that seems to be the general view.”
“Well, it’s natural, isn’t it? No one wants to believe that Pearce’s death was murder. And if this were a first-year block I might believe it One of the students might have tampered with the feed on impulse, perhaps with the idea that Lysol is an emetic and that the demonstration might be enlivened by Pearce sucking up all over the G.N.C. Inspector. An odd idea of humor, but the young can be pretty crude. But these kids must have known what that stuff would do to the stomach.”
“And what about Nurse Fallon’s death?”
“Oh, suicide I should think. After all, the poor girl was pregnant She probably had a moment of intense depression and didn’t see the point of going on. Three years of training wasted and no family to turn to. Poor old Fallon! I don’t think she was really the suicidal type, but it probably happened on impulse. There has been a certain amount of criticism about Dr. Snelling-he looks after the students’ health -letting her come back to the block so soon after her influenza. But she hates being off and it isn’t as if she were on the wards. This is hardly the time of the year to send people away for convalescence. She was as well off in school as anywhere. Still, the flu couldn’t have helped. It probably left her feeling pretty low. This epidemic is having some pretty nasty after-effects. If only she’d confided in someone. It’s awful to think of her putting an end to herself like that with a houseful of people who would have been glad to help if only she’d asked. Here, let me give you another cup. And try one of those shortbreads. They’re home made. My married sister sends me them from time to time.”
Dalgliesh helped himself to a piece of shortbread from the proffered tin and observed that there were those who thought that Nurse Fallon might have had another reason for suicide, apart from her pregnancy. She could have put the corrosive in the feed. She had certainly been seen in Nightingale House at the crucial time.
He put forward the suggestion slyly, awaiting her reaction. It wouldn’t, of course, be new to her; it must have occurred to everyone in Nightingale House. But she was too simple to be surprised that a senior detective should be discussing his case so frankly with her, and too stupid to ask herself why. She dismissed this theory with a snort. “Not Fallon! It would have been a foolish trick and she was no fool. I told you, any third-year nurse would know:hat the stuff was lethal. And if you’re suggesting that Fallon intended to kill Pearce-and why on earth should she?-I’d say that she was the last person to suffer remorse. If Fallon decided to do murder she wouldn’t waste time repenting afterwards, let alone kill herself in remorse. No, Fallon’s death is understandable enough. She had post-flu depression and she felt she couldn’t cope with the baby.”
“So you think they both committed suicide?”
“Well, I’m not so sure about Pearce. You’d have to be pretty crazy to choose that agonizing way of dying, and Pearce seemed sane enough to me. But it’s a possible explanation, isn’t it? And I can’t see you proving anything else however long you stay.”
He thought he detected a note of smug complacency in her voice and glanced at her abruptly. But the thin face bowed nothing but its usual look of vague dissatisfaction.
She was eating shortbread, nibbling at it with sharp, very white teeth. He could hear them rasping against the biscuits. She said:
“When one explanation is impossible, the improbable must be true. Someone said something like that G. K. Chesterton wasn’t it? Nurses don’t murder each other. Or anyone else for that matter.”
“There was Nurse Waddingham,” said Dalgliesh.
“Who was she?”
“An unprepossessing and unpleasant woman who poisoned with morphine one of her patients, a Miss Baguley. Miss Baguley had been so ill advised as to leave Nurse Waddingham her money and property in turn for life-long treatment in the tatter’s nursing home. She struck a poor bargain. Nurse Waddingham was hanged.”
Sister Gearing gave a frisson of simulated distaste.
“What awful people you do get yourself mixed up with! Anyway, she was probably one of those unqualified nurses. You can’t tell me that Waddingham was on the General Nursing Council’s Register.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t believe she was. And I wasn’t mixed up with it. It happened in 1935.”
“Well, there you are then,” Sister Gearing said as if vindicated.
She stretched across to poor him a second cup of tea, then wriggled herself more comfortably into her cushion and leaned back against the arm of his chair, so that her hair brushed his knee. Dalgliesh found himself examining with mild interest the narrow band of darker hair each side of the parting where the dye had grown out Viewed from above, her foreshortened face looked older, the nose sharper. He could see the latent pouch of skin under the bottom eyelashes and a spatter of broken veins high on the cheekbones, the purple threads only half disguised by makeup. She was no longer a young woman; that he knew. And there was a great deal more about her that he had gleaned from her dossier. She had trained at a hospital in the East End of London after a variety of unsuccessful and unprofitable office jobs. Her nursing career had been checkered and her references were suspiciously non-committal. There had been a doubt about the wisdom of seconding her for training as a clinical instructor, a suggestion that she had been motivated less by a desire to teach than by the hope of an easier job than that of ward Sister. He knew that she was having difficulty with the menopause. He knew more about her than she realized, more than she would think he had any right to know. But he didn’t yet know whether she was a murderess. Intent for a moment on his private thoughts, he hardly caught her next words.
“It’s odd your being a poet Fallon had your last volume of verse in her room, didn’t she? Rolfe told me. Isn’t it difficult to reconcile poetry with being a policeman?”
“I’ve never thought of poetry and police work as needing to be reconciled in that ecumenical way.”
She laughed coyly.
“You know very well what I mean. After all it is a little unusual. One doesn’t think of policemen as poets.”
He did, of course, know what she meant but it wasn’t a subject he was prepared to discuss. He said:
“Policemen are individuals like people in any other job. After all, you three nursing Sisters haven’t much in common have you? You and Sister Brumfett could hardly be more different personalities. I can’t see Sister Brumfett feeding me on anchovy crumpets and home-made shortbread.”
She reacted at once, as he had known she would.
“Oh, Brumfett’s all right when you get to know her. Of course she’s twenty years out of date. As I said at lunch, the kids today aren’t prepared to listen to all that guff about obedience and duty and a sense of vocation. But she’s a marvelous nurse. I won’t hear a word against Brum. I had an appendectomy here about four years ago. It went a bit wrong and the wound burst Then I got an infection which was resistant to antibiotics. The whole thing was a mess. Not one of our Courtney-Briggs’s most successful efforts. Anyway I felt like death. One night I was in ghastly pain and couldn’t sleep and I felt absolutely sure I wouldn’t see the morning. I was terrified. It was sheer funk. Talk about the fear of death! I knew what it meant that night Then Brumfett came round. She was looking after me herself; she wouldn’t let the students do a thing for me when she was on duty. I said to her: ‘I’m not going to die, am I?” She looked down at me. She didn’t tell me not to be a fool or give me any of the usual comforting lies. She just said in that gruff voice of hers: ’Not if I can help it you aren’t‘ And immediately the panic stopped. I knew that if Brumfett was fighting on my side I’d win through. It sounds a bit daft and sentimental put like that, but that’s what I thought. She’s like that with all the really sick patients. Talk about confidence! Brumfett makes you feel that she’d drag you back from the edge of the grave by sheer will-power, even if all the devils in hell were tugging the other way; which in my case they probably were. They don’t make them like that any more.“
Dalgliesh made appropriately assenting noises and paused briefly before picking up the references to Mr. Courtney-Briggs. He asked rather naively whether many of the surgeon’s operations went so spectacularly wrong. Sister Gearing laughed:
“Lord, no! Courtney-Briggs’s operations usually go the way he wants. That’s not to say they go the way the patient would choose if he knew the whole of it C.B. is what they call a heroic surgeon. If you ask me, most of the heroism has to be shown by the patients. But he does an extraordinary good job of work. He’s one of the last remaining great general surgeons. You know, take anything on, the more hopeless the better. I suppose a surgeon is rather like a lawyer. There’s no glory to be had in getting someone off if he’s obviously innocent The greater the guilt the greater the glory.”
“What is Mrs. Courtney-Briggs like? I presume he’s married. Does she show herself at the hospital?”
“Not very often, although she’s supposed to be a member of the League of Friends. She gave the prizes away last year when the Princess couldn’t come at the last moment Blonde, very smart Younger than C.B. but beginning to wear a bit now. Why do you ask? You don’t suspect Muriel Courtney-Briggs surely? She wasn’t even in the hospital the night Fallon died. Probably tucked up in bed in their very nice little place near Selborne. And she certainly hadn’t any motive for killing poor Pearce.”
So she did have a motive for getting rid of Fallon. Mr. Courtney-Brigg’s liaison had probably been more noticed than he bad realized. Dalgliesh wasn’t surprised that Sister Gearing should know about it Her sharp nose would be adept at smelling out sexual scandal.
He said: “I wondered if she were jealous.” Sister Gearing, unaware of what she had told, rambled happily on.
“I don’t suppose she knew. Wives don’t usually. Anyway, C.B. wasn’t going to break up his marriage to wed Fallon. Not him! Mrs. C.B. has plenty of money of her own. She’s the only child of Price of Price and Maxwell, the building firm-and what with CB.”s earnings and Daddy’s ill-gotten gains, they’re very comfortable. I don’t think Muriel worries much what he does as long as he behaves himself properly to her and the money keeps rolling in. I know I wouldn’t Besides, if rumor’s correct, our Muriel doesn’t exactly qualify for the League of Purity.“ ”Anyone here?“ asked Dalgliesh.
“Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just that she goes around with quite a smart set. She usually gets her picture in every third issue of the social glossies. And they’re in with the theatrical crowd too. C.B. had a brother who was an actor, Peter Courtney. He hanged himself about three years ago. You must have read about it.”
Dalgliesh’s job gave him few opportunities to see a play and theatre going was one of the pleasures he missed most He had seen Peter Courtney act only once but it had been a performance not easily forgotten. He had been a very young Macbeth, as introspective and sensitive as Hamlet, in thrall sexually to a much older wife, and whose physical courage was compounded of violence and hysteria. It had been a perverse but interesting interpretation, and it had very nearly succeeded. Thinking of the performance now, Dalgliesh imagined that he could detect a likeness between the brothers, something to do with the set of the eyes perhaps. But Peter must have been the younger by nearly twenty years. He wished he knew what the two men, so widely separated in age and talent, had made of each other. Suddenly and irrelevantly Dalgliesh asked: “How did Pearce and Fallon get on together?”
“They didn’t. Fallon despised Pearce. I don’t mean she hated her or would have harmed her; she just despised her.”
“Was there any particular reason?”
“Pearce took it upon herself to tell Matron about Fallon’s little tipple of whisky at nights. Self-righteous little beast. Oh, I know she’s dead and I ought not to have said that But really, Pearce could be insufferably self-righteous. Apparently what happened was that Diane Harper-she’s left the training school now-had a bad cold about a fortnight before the set came into the block, and Fallon fixed her a hot whisky and lemon. Pearce could smell the stuff half-way along the corridor and concluded that Fallon was now attempting to seduce her juniors with the demon drink. So she appeared in the utility room-they were in the main nurses’ home then, of course-in her dressing-gown, sniffing the air like an avenging angel, and threatened to report Fallon to Matron unless she promised more or less on her knees never to touch the stuff again. Fallon told her where to go and what to do with herself when she got there. She had a picturesque turn of phrase when roused, had Fallon. Nurse Dakers burst into tears, Harper lost her temper and the general noise brought the House Sister on to the scene, Pearce reported it to Matron all right, but no one knows with what result, except that Fallon started keeping her whisky in her own room. But the whole thing caused a great deal of feeling in the third year. Fallon was never popular with the set, she was too reserved and sarcastic. But they liked Pearce a damn sight less.”
“And did Pearce dislike Fallon?”
“Well, it’s difficult to say. Pearce never seemed to concern herself with what other people thought of her. She was an odd girl, pretty insensitive too. For example, she might disapprove of Fallon and her whisky-drinking but that didn’t prevent her from borrowing Fallon’s library ticket.”
“When did this happen?”
Dalgliesh leaned across and replaced his teacup on the tray. His voice was level, unconcerned. But he felt again that spring of excitement and anticipation, the intuitive sense that something important had been said. It was more than a hunch; it was, as always, a certainty. It might happen several times during a case if he were lucky, or not at all. He couldn’t will it to happen and he was afraid to examine its roots too closely since he suspected that it was a plant easily withered by logic.
“Just before she came into block, I think. It must have been the week before Pearce died. The Thursday, I think. Anyway, they hadn’t yet moved into Nightingale House. It was just after supper time in the main dining-room. Fallon and Pearce were walking out of the door together and I was just behind them with Goodale. Then‘ Fallon turned to Pearce and said: ’Here’s the library token I promised you. I’d better give it to you now as I don’t suppose well see each other in the morning. You’d better take the reader’s ticket too, or they may not let you have the book.” Pearce mumbled something and grabbed the token rather ungraciously I thought, and that was that Why? It isn’t important, is it?“ ”I can’t think why it should be,“ said Dalgliesh.