Shroud for a Nightingale

I

It was nearly two in the morning when the gate porter waved Masterson through the main entrance of the hospital. The wind was rising steadily as he drove along the twisting path to Nightingale House between an avenue of black rumbustious trees. The house was in darkness except for the one lit window where Dalgliesh was still working. Masterson scowled at it. It had been irritating and disconcerting to discover that Dalgliesh was still at Nightingale House. He expected to have to give his report on the day’s activities; the prospect wasn’t unpleasing since he was fortified by success. But it had been a long day. He hoped that they weren’t in for one of the Superintendent’s all-night sessions.

Masterson let himself in at the side door, double locking it behind him. The silence of the vast entrance hall received him, eerie and portentous. The house seemed to be holding its breath. He smelt again the alien but now familiar amalgam of disinfectant and floor polish, unwelcoming and faintly sinister. As if afraid to stir the sleeping house-half empty as it was- he did not switch on the light but made his way across the hall by the beam of his electric torch. The notices on the hall board gleamed white reminding him of mourning cards in the vestibule of some foreign cathedral. Of your charity pray for the soul of Josephine Fallon. He found himself tiptoeing up the stairs as if afraid to wake the dead.

In the first-floor office Dalgliesh was sitting at his desk with the file open before him. Masterson stood stock-still in the doorway, concealing his surprise. The Superintendent’s face was drawn and gray under an immense cocoon of white crepe bandage. He was sitting bolt upright, forearms resting on the desk, palms spread lightly each side of the page. The pose was familiar.“ Masterson reflected, not for the first time, that the Superintendent had remarkable hands and knew how to display them to advantage. He had long decided that Dalgliesh was one of the proudest men he knew. This essential conceit was too carefully guarded to be generally recognized, but it was gratifying to catch him out in the one of the lesser vanities. Dalgliesh looked up without smiling.

“I expected you back two hours ago, Sergeant. What were you doing?”

“Extracting information by unorthodox means, sir.”

“You look as if the unorthodox means have been used on you.”

Masterson bit back the obvious retort. If the old man chose to be mysterious about his injury he wasn’t going to give him the gratification of showing curiosity.

“I was dancing until nearly midnight, sir.”

“At your age that shouldn’t be too exhausting. Tell me about the lady. She seems to have made an impression on you. You had an agreeable evening?”

Masterson could have retorted with reason that he had had one hell of an evening. He contented himself with an account of what he had learned. The exhibition tango was prudently forgotten. Instinct warned him that Dalgliesh might think it neither funny nor clever. But he gave an otherwise accurate account of the evening. He tried to keep it factual and unemotional but became aware that he was enjoying some of the telling. His description of Mrs. Dettinger was concise but caustic. Towards the end he hardly troubled to conceal his contempt and disgust of her. He felt that he was making rather a good job of it.

Dalgliesh listened in silence. His cocooned head was still bent over the file and Masterson got no hint of what he was feeling. At the end of the recital Dalgliesh looked up:

“Do you enjoy your work, Sergeant?”

“Yes sir, for most of the time.”

“I thought you might say that.”

“Was the question intended as a rebuke, sir?”

Masterson was aware that he was entering on dangerous ground but was unable to resist this first tentative step.

Dalgliesh, didn’t answer the question. Instead he said:

“I don’t think it’s possible to be a detective and remain always kind. But if you ever find that cruelty is becoming pleasurable in itself, then it’s probably time to stop being a detective.”

Masterson flushed and was silent. This from Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh who was so uncaring about his subordinates’ private life as to seem unaware that they had any; whose caustic wit could be as devastating as another man’s bludgeon. Kindness! And how kind exactly was he himself? How many of his notable successes had been won with kindness? He would never be brutal, of course. He was too proud, too fastidious, too controlled, too bloody inhuman in fact for anything so understandable as a little down-to-earth brutality. His reaction to evil was a wrinkle of the nose not a stamp of the foot But kindness! Tell that to the boys, thought Masterson.

Dalgliesh went on talking as if he said nothing remarkable.

“We’ll have to see Mrs. Dettinger again, of course. And we’ll want a statement Did you think she was telling the truth?”

“It’s difficult to tell. I cant think why she should lie. But she’s a strange woman and she wasn’t feeling too pleased with me at the time. It might give her some kind of perverse satisfaction to mislead us. She might have substituted Grobel’s name for one of the other defendants, for example.”

“So that the person her son recognized on the ward could have been any one of the Felsenbeim defendants, those who are still alive and unaccounted for. What exactly did her son tell her?”

“That’s the problem, sir. Apparently he gave her to understand that this German woman, Irmgard Grobel, was employed at the John Carpendar but she can’t recall his exact words. She thinks he said something like:

“This is a funny kind of hospital, ma, they’ve got Grobel here, working as one of the Sisters.”

Dalgliesh said: “Suggesting that it wasn’t the Sister who was actually nursing him, otherwise he’d presumably have said so- Except of course, that he was unconscious most of the time and may not have seen Sister Brumfett previously or appreciated that she was in charge of the ward. He wasn’t in any state to recognize the niceties of the hospital hierarchy.

According to his medical record he was either delirious or unconscious most of the time, which would make his evidence suspect even if he hadn’t inconveniently died. Anyway, his mother at first didn’t apparently take the story too seriously. She didn’t mention it to anyone at the hospital? Nurse Pearce, for example?“

“She says not. I think at the time Mrs. Dettinger’s main concern was to collect her son’s belongings and the death certificate and claim on the insurance.”

“Bitter, Sergeant?”

“Well, she’s paying nearly £2,000 a year for dancing lessons and she’s come to the end of her capital. These Delaroux people like payment in advance. I heard all about her finances when I took her home. Mrs. Dettinger wasn’t out to make trouble. But then she received Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s bill, and it occurred to her that she might use her son’s story to get a reduction. And she got one too. Fifty quid.”

“Which suggests that Mr. Courtney-Briggs is either more charitable then he had supposed or thought that the information was worth the money. Did he pay it over at once?”

“She says not. She first visited him at his Wimpole Street consulting rooms on the evening of Wednesday, January twenty-first. She didn’t get much joy on that occasion so she rang him up last Saturday morning. The receptionist told her that Mr. Courtney-Briggs was out of the country. She intended to ring again on the Monday but the check for fifty pounds came by the first post. There was no letter and no explanation, merely his compliment slip. But she got the message all right.”

“So he was out of the country last Saturday. Where, I wonder? Germany? That’s something to check, anyway.”

Masterson said, “It all sounds so unlikely, sir. And it doesn’t really fit.”

“No. We’re pretty certain who killed both those girls. Logically all the facts point to one person. And as you say, this new evidence doesn’t really fit in. If’s disconcerting when you scramble around in the dirt for a missing piece of the jigsaw and then find it’s part of a different puzzle.”

“So you don’t think it’s relevant, sir? I should hate to think that my evening’s exertions with Mrs. Dettinger were in vain.”

“Oh, it’s relevant. It’s exceedingly relevant. And we’ve found some corroboration. We’ve traced the missing library book. Westminster City Library were very helpful. Miss Pearce went to the Marylebone Branch on the afternoon of Thursday, 8th January, when she was off duty and asked if they had a book dealing with German war trials. She said she was interested in a trial at Felsenheim in November 1945. They couldn’t find anything in stock but they said they would make inquiries of other London libraries and suggested that she should come back or telephone them in a day or two… She telephoned on the Saturday morning. They told her that they’d been able to trace a book which dealt with the Felsenheim trial among others, and she called in for it that afternoon. On each visit she have her name as Josephine Fallon and presented Fallon’s ticket and the blue token. Normally, of course, they wouldn’t have noticed the name and address. They did so because the book had to be specially obtained from another library.”

“Was the book returned, sir?”

“Yes, but anonymously, and they cant say exactly when. It was probably on the Wednesday after Pearce died. Someone left it -on the non-fiction trolley. When the assistant went to fill up the trolley with recently returned books she recognized it and took it back to the counter to be registered and put on one side ready for return to its parent library. No one saw who returned it The library is particularly busy and people come in and out at will. Not everyone has a book to return or calls at the counter. It would be easy enough to bring in a book in a basket or a pocket and slip it among the others on the trolley. The assistant who found it had been on counter duty for most of the morning and afternoon and one of the junior staff had been replenishing the trolley. The girl was getting behind with the work so her senior went to give a hand. She noticed the book at once. That was at four thirty approximately. But it could have been put there at any time.”

“Any prints, sir?”

“Nothing helpful. A few smudges. It had been handled by quite a number of the library staff and God knows how many of the public. And why not? They weren’t to know that it was part of the evidence in a murder inquiry. But there’s something interesting about it. Have a look.”

He opened one of the desk drawers and brought out a stout book bound with a dark blue cloth and embossed with a library catalogue number on the spine. Masterson took it and laid it on the table. He seated himself and opened it carefully, taking his time. It was an account of various war trials held in Germany from 1945 onwards, apparently carefully documented, unsensational in treatment and written by a Queen’s Counsel who had once been on the staff of the Judge Advocate General. There were only a few plates and of these only two related to the Felsenheim trial. One showed a general view of the Court with an indistinct glimpse of the doctor in the dock, and the other was a photograph of the camp commandant. Dalgliesh said:

“Martin Dettinger is mentioned, but only briefly. During the war he served in the King’s Wiltshire Light Infantry and in November 1945 he was appointed as a member of a military Court set up in West Germany to try four men and one woman accused of war crimes. These Courts were established under a Special Army Order of June 1945 and this one consisted of a President who was a Brigadier of the Grenadier Guards, four army officers of whom Dettinger was one, and the Judge Advocate appointed by the Judge Advocate General to the Forces. As I said, they had the job of trying five people who, it was alleged-you’ll find the indictment on page 127-‘acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent and acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich did on or about 3rd September 1944 willfully, deliberately and wrongfully aid, abet and participate in the killing of 31 human beings of Polish and Russian nationality’.”

Masterson was not surprised that Dalgliesh should be able to quote the indictment word for word. This was an administrator’s trick, this ability to memorize and present facts with accuracy and precision. Dalgliesh could do it better than most, and if he wanted to exercise his technique it was hardly for his Sergeant to interrupt. He said nothing. He noticed that the Superintendent had taken up a large gray stone, a perfect ovoid, and was rolling it slowly between his fingers. It was something that had caught his eye in the grounds, presumably, and which he had picked up to serve as a paper-weight. It certainly hadn’t been on the office desk that morning. The tired, strained voice went on.

“These 31 men, women and children were Jewish slave workers in Germany and were said to have been suffering from tuberculosis. They were sent to an institution in Western Germany which was originally designed to care for the mentally sick but which since the summer of 1944 had been dedicated, not to curing, but to the business of killing. There is no evidence to how many German mentally ill patients were done to death there. The staff had been sworn to secrecy about what went on, but there were plenty of rumors in the neighboring districts. On the 3rd September 1944, a transport of Polish and Russian nationals were sent to the institution. They were told they were to receive treatment for tuberculosis. That night they were given lethal injections- men, women and children-and by morning they were dead and buried. It was for this crime, not for the murder of the German nationals, that the five accused were on trial. One was the head doctor Max Klein, one a young pharmacist Ernst Gumbmann, one the chief male nurse Adolf Straub, and one a young, untrained female nurse aged 18, Irmgard Grobel. The head doctor and the chief male nurse were found guilty. The doctor was condemned to death and the male nurse to twenty-three years’ imprisonment The pharmacist and the woman were acquitted. You can find what her council said on page 140. You had better read it out.”

Surprised, Masterson took up the book in silence and turned to page 140. He began reading. His voice sounded unnaturally loud.

“This court is not trying the defendant Irmgard Grobel for participation in the death of German nationals. We know now what was happening at Steinhoff Institution. We know, too, that it was in accordance with German law as proclaimed by Adolf Hitler alone. In accordance with orders handed down from the highest authority, many thousands of insane German people were put to death with perfect legality from 1940 onward. On moral grounds one can judge this action as one pleases. The question is not whether the staff at Steinhoff thought it wrong or whether they thought it merciful. The question is whether they thought it was lawful. It has been proved by witnesses that there was such a law in existence. Irmgard Grobel, if she were concerned with the deaths of these people, acted in accordance with this law.

“But we are not concerned with the mentally ill. From July 1944 this same law was extended to cover incurably tubercular foreign workers. It might be contended that the accused would be in no doubt of the legality of such killings when she had seen German nationals put out of their misery in the interests of the State. But that is not my contention. We are not in a position to judge what the accused thought She was not implicated in the only killings which are the concern of this Court The transport of Russians and Poles arrived at Steinhoff on 3rd September 1944 at half past six in the evening. On that day Irmgard Grobel was returning from her leave. The Court has heard how she entered the nurses’ quarters at half past seven and changed into her uniform. She was on duty from nine o’clock. Between the time of entering the Institution and arriving in the nurses’ duty room in E Block she spoke only to two other nurses, witnesses Willig and Rohde. Both these women have testified that they did not tell Grobel of the arrival of the transport. So Grobel enters the duty room. She had had a difficult journey and is tired and sick. She is hesitating whether or not to seek permission to go off duty. It is then that the telephone rings and Doctor Klein speaks to her. The Court has heard the evidence of witnesses to this conversation. Klein asks Grobel to look in the drug store and tell him how much evipan and phenol there is in stock. You have heard how the evipan was delivered in cartons, each carton containing 25 injections and each injection consisting of one capsule of evipan in powder form and one container of sterile water. The evipan and phenol, together with other dangerous drugs, were kept in the nurses’ duty room. Grobel checks the amounts and reports to Klein that there are two cartons of evipan and about ISO cc of liquid phenol in stock. Klein then orders her to have all the available evipan and phenol ready to hand over to male nurse Straub who will fetch it He also orders her to hand over twelve 10 cc syringes and a quantity of strong needles. The accused claimed that at no time did he state for what purpose these drugs were required and you have heard from the accused Straub that he, also, did not enlighten her.

“Irmgard Grobel did not leave the duty room until she was carried back to her quarters at nine twenty that night The Court has heard how Nurse Rohde coming late on duty found her in a faint on the floor. For five days she was confined to her bed with acute vomiting and fever. She did not see the Russians and Poles enter E Block, she did not see their bodies carried out in the early hours of 4th September. When she returned to duty the corpses had been buried.

“Mr. President, this Court has heard witnesses who have testified to the kindness of Irmgard Grobel, to her gentleness with the child patients, to her skill as a nurse; I would remind the Court that she is young, hardly more than a child herself. But I do not ask for an acquittal on the grounds of her youth nor her sex but because she, alone of the accused, is manifestly innocent of this charge. She had no hand in the deaths of these 31 Russians and Poles. She did not even know that they existed. The Defense has nothing further to add.”

Dalgliesh’s bitter voice broke in on the silence.

The usual Teutonic plea of legality you note, Sergeant They didn’t waste much time with their killings did they? Admitted at seven thirty and injected soon after nine. And why evipan? They couldn’t be sure that death would be instantaneous unless they injected a heavy dose. I doubt whether less than 20 c.c. would kill immediately. Not that it would worry them. What saved Grobel was being on leave until late that evening. The Defense claimed that she was never told that the foreign prisoners had arrived, that no one knew until the morning of the fourth. That same plea gave the pharmacist his freedom. Technically they were born innocent, if yon can use that word of anyone who worked at Steinhoff.“

Masterson was silent It was all so long ago. Grobel had been a girt Ten years younger than he was now. The war was old history. It had no more relevance to his life than had the Wars of the Roses, less since it did not even evoke the faintly romantic and chivalrous overtones of the history learned in his boyhood. He had no particular feelings about the Germans, or indeed about any race other than the few he regarded as culturally and intellectually inferior. The Germans were not among these. Germany to him meant clean hotels and good roads, rippchen eaten with the local wine at the Apfel Wine Struben Inn, the Rhine curving below him like a silver ribbon, the excellence of the camping ground at Koblenz.

And if any of the accused from Felsenbeim were alive they would be well into middle age now. Irmgard Grobel herself would be forty-three. It was all such old history. It had relevance only because it touched this present case. He said:

“It happened so long ago. Is a secret like that worth killing to preserve? Who really cares now? Isn’t the official policy to forgive and forget?”

“We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends. Take a look at this book, Masterson. What do you notice?”

Masterson let the pages fall apart, shook them gently, lifted the book to eye level and examined the binding. Then he replaced it on the table and pressed back the middle pages. There, embedded deep in the folds were a few grains of sand.

Dalgliesh said: “We’ve sent a sample to the lab for analysis, but the result isn’t much in doubt. It’s almost certainly from one of the fire buckets in Nightingale House.”

“So that’s where it was hidden until he, or she, could return it to the library. The same person hid the book and the tin of rose spray. It all hangs together very neatly, sir.”

“A little too neatly, don’t you think?” said Dalgliesh.

But Sergeant Masterson had remembered something else.

That brochure, the one we found in Pearce’s room! Wasn’t it about the work of a Suffolk Refuge for Fascist War Victims? Suppose Pearce sent for it? Is this another example of making the punishment fit the crime?“

“I think so. We’ll get in touch with the place in the morning and find out what, if anything, she promised them. And we’ll talk again to Courtney-Briggs. He was in Nightingale House at about the time Fallon died. When we know who he came to see and why, we shall be close to solving this case. But all that must wait for tomorrow.”

Masterson stifled a yawn. He said: “It’s been tomorrow, sir, for nearly three hours.”