P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

He walked over to the bookcase beside the bed and again examined the books. They, too, seemed chosen to minister to predictable moods. A collection of modern poetry, his own last volume included; a complete set of Jane Austen, well worn but in a leather binding and printed on India paper; a few books on philosophy nicely balanced between scholarship and popular appeal; about two dozen paper-backs of modern novels, Greene, Waugh, Compton Burnett, Hartley, Powell, Cary. But most of the books were poetry. Looking at them, he thought, we shared the same tastes. If we had met we should at least have had something to say to each other. “Everyman’s death diminishes me.” But, of course, Doctor Donne. The over-exploited dictum had become a fashionable catch phrase in a crowded world where non-involvement was practically a social necessity. But some deaths still held their power to diminish more than others. For the first time in years he was conscious of a sense of waste, of a personal irrational loss.

He moved on. At the foot of the bed was a wardrobe with a chest of drawers attached, a bastard contraption in pale wood, designed, if anyone had consciously designed an object so ugly, to provide the maximum of space in the minimum of room. The top of the chest was meant to serve as a dressing-table and held a small looking-glass. In front of it were her brush and comb. Nothing else.

He opened the small left-hand drawer. It held her make-up, the jars and tubes neatly arranged on a small papier mache tray. There was a great deal more than he had expected to find: cleansing cream, a box of tissues, foundation cream, pressed powder, eye shadow, mascara. She had obviously made up with care. But there was only one of each item. No experiments, no impulse buying, no half used and discarded tubes with the make-up congealed round the stopper. The collection said: This is what suits me. This is what I need. No more and no less.“

He opened the right-hand drawer. It held nothing but a concertina file, each compartment indexed. He thumbed through the contents. A birth certificate. A certificate of baptism. A post office savings account book. The name and address of her solicitor. There were no personal letters. He tucked the file under his arm.

He moved on to the wardrobe and examined again the collection of clothes. Three pairs of slacks. Cashmere jumpers. A winter coat in bright red tweed. Four well-cut dresses in fine wool. They all spoke of quality. It was an expensive wardrobe for a student nurse.

He heard a final satisfied grunt from Sir Miles and turned round. The pathologist was straightening himself and peeling off his rubber gloves. They were so thin that it looked as if he were shedding his epidermis. He said:

“Dead, I should say, about ten hours. I’m judging mainly by rectal temperature and the degree of rigor in the lower limbs. But it’s no more than a guess, my dear fellow. These things are chancy, as you know. We’ll have a look at the stomach contents; that may give us a clue. At present, and on the clinical signs, I should say she died about midnight give or take an hour. Taking a common sense view, of course, she died when she drank that nightcap.”

The finger-print officer had left the whisky bottle and beaker on the table and was working now on the door handle. Sir Miles trotted round to them and without touching the beaker bent his head and placed his nose close to the rim.

“Whisky. But what else? That’s what we’re asking ourselves, my dear fellow. That’s what we’re asking ourselves. One thing, it wasn’t a corrosive. No carbolic acid this time. I didn’t do the P.M. on that other girl by the way. Rikki Blake did that little job. A bad business. I suppose you’re looking for a connection between the two deaths?”

Dalgliesh said: “It’s possible.”

“Could be. Could be. This isn’t likely to be a natural death. But well have to wait for the toxicology. Then we may learn something. There’s no evidence of strangulation or suffocation. No external marks of violence come to that By the way, she was pregnant About three months gone, I’d say. I got a nice little ballottement there. Haven’t found that sign since I was a student The P.M. will confirm it of course.”

His little bright eyes searched the room. “No container for the poison apparently. If it were poison, of course. And no suicide note?”

That’s not conclusive evidence,“ said Dalgliesh.

“I know. I know. But most of them leave a little billet doux. They like to tell the tale, my dear fellow. They like to tell the tale. The mortuary van’s here by the way. I’ll take her away if you’re finished with her.”

“I’ve finished,” said Dalgliesh.

He waited and watched while the porters maneuvered their stretcher into the room and with brisk efficiency dumped the dead weight onto it Sir Miles fretted around them with the nervous anxiety of an expert who has found a particularly good specimen and must carefully supervise its safe transport It was odd that the removal of that inert mass of bone and tightening muscle, to which each in his different way had been ministering, should have left the room so empty, so desolate. Dalgliesh had noticed it before when the body was taken away; this sense of an empty stage, of props casually disposed and bereft of meaning, of a drained air. The recently dead had their own mysterious charisma; not without reason did men talk in whispers in their presence. But now she was gone, and there was nothing further for him to do in the room. He left the finger-print man annotating and photographing his finds, and went out into the passage.

It was now after eleven o’clock but the corridor was still very dark, the one clear window at the far end discernible only as a square haze behind the drawn curtains. Dalgliesh could at first just make out the shape and color of the three red fire buckets filled with sand and the cone of a fire extinguisher gleaming against the carved oak paneling of the walls. The iron staples, driven brutally into the woodwork, on which they were supported, were in incongruous contrast to the row of elegant light fittings in convoluted brass which sprang from the centers of the quatrefoil carvings. The fittings had obviously originally been designed for gas, but had been crudely adapted without imagination or skill to the use of electricity. The brass was unpolished and most of the delicate glass shades, curved in a semblance of flower petals, were missing or broken. In each of the deflowered clusters a single socket was now monstrously budded with one grubby and low-powered bulb whose faint and diffused light threw shadows across the floor and served only to accentuate the general gloom. Apart from the one small window at the end of the corridor there was little other natural light The huge window over the well of the staircase, a pre-Raphaelite representation in lurid glass of the expulsion from Eden, was hardly functional.

He looked into the rooms adjacent to that of the dead girl. One was unoccupied, with the bed stripped, the wardrobe door ajar and the drawers, lined with fresh newspaper, all pulled out as if to demonstrate the room’s essential emptiness. The other was in use but looked as if it had been hurriedly left; the bedclothes were carelessly thrown back and the bedside rug was rumpled. There was a little pile of textbooks on the bedside table and he opened the flyleaf of the first to hand and read the inscription, “Christine Dakers”. So this was the room of the girl who had found the body. He inspected the wall between the two rooms. It was thin, a light partition of painted hardboard which trembled and let out a soft boom as he struck it. He wondered whether Nurse Dakers had heard anything in the night. Unless Josephine Fallon had died instantly and almost soundlessly some indication of her distress must surely have penetrated this insubstantial partition. He was anxious to interview Nurse Christine Dakers. At present she was in the nurses’ sick bay suffering, so he was told, from shock. The shock was probably genuine enough, but even if it were not, there was nothing he could do about it. Nurse Dakers was for the moment effectively protected by her doctors from any questioning by the police.