P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

“And Nurse Pearce’s death?”

“I think that was essentially an accident. Someone put the poison in the feed as a joke or out of vague malice without realizing that the result would be fatal.”

“Which would be odd in a third-year student nurse whose program of lectures presumably included basic information on corrosive poisons.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that it was a nurse. I don’t know who it was. I don’t think you’ll ever find out now. But I can’t believe that it was willful murder.”

That was all very well, thought Dalgliesh, but surely it was a little disingenuous in a girl as intelligent as Nurse Goodale. It was, of course, the popular, almost the official view. It exonerated everyone from the worst crime and indicted no one of anything more than malice and carelessness. It was a comforting theory, and unless he were lucky it might never be disproved. But he didn’t believe it himself, and he couldn’t accept that Nurse Goodale did. But it was even harder to accept that here was a girl to comfort herself with false theories or deliberately to shut her eyes to unpalatable facts.

Dalgliesh then asked her about her movements on the morning of Pearce’s death. He already knew them from Inspector Bailey’s notes and her previous statement and was not surprised when Nurse Goodale confirmed them without hesitation. She had got up at 6.45 and had drunk early morning tea with the rest of the set in the utility room. She had told them about Fallon’s influenza since it was to her room that Nurse Fallon had come when she was taken ill in the night None of the students had expressed particular concern but they had wondered how the demonstration would go now that the set was so decimated and had speculated, not without malice, how Sister Gearing would acquit herself in the face of a G.N.C. inspection. Nurse Pearce had drunk her tea with the rest of the set and Nurse Goodale thought that she remembered Pearce saying:

“With Fallon ill, I suppose I shall have to act the patient.” Nurse Goodale couldn’t recall any comment or discussion about this. It was well accepted that the next student on the list substituted for anyone who was ill.

After she had drunk her tea, Nurse Goodale had dressed and had then made her way to the library to revise the treatment of laryngectomy in preparation for the morning’s session. It was important that there should be a quick and lively response to questions if the seminar were to be a success. She had settled herself to work at about 7.15 and Nurse Dakers had joined her shortly afterwards, sharing a devotion to study which, thought Dalgliesh, had at least been rewarded by an alibi for most of the time before breakfast She and Dakers had said nothing of interest to each other while they had been working and had left the library at the same time and gone into breakfast together. That had been at about ten minutes to eight. She had sat with Dakers and the Burt twins, but had left the breakfast room before them. That was at 8.15. She had returned to her bedroom to make the bed, and then gone to the library to write a couple of letters. That done, she had paid a brief visit to the cloakroom and had made her way to the demonstration room just before a quarter to nine. Only Sister Gearing and the Burt twins were already there, but the rest of the set had joined them shortly afterwards; she couldn’t remember in what order. She thought that Pearce had been one of the last to arrive.

Dalgliesh asked: “How did Nurse Pearce seem?”

“I noticed nothing unusual about her, but then I wouldn’t expect to. Pearce was Pearce. She made a negligible impression.”

“Did she say anything before the demonstration began?”

“Yes, she did as a matter of fact. It’s odd that you should ask that. I haven’t mentioned it before, I suppose because Inspector Bailey didn’t ask. But she did speak. She looked round at us-the set had all assembled by then-and asked if anyone had taken anything from her bedroom.”

“Did she say what?”

“No.” She just stood there with that accusing rather belligerent look she occasionally had and said: “Has anyone been to my room this morning or taken anything from it?”

“No one replied. I think we just all shook our heads. It wasn’t a question we took particularly seriously. Pearce was apt to make a great fuss about trifles. Anyway, the Burt twins were busy with their preparations and the rest of us were chatting. Pearce didn’t get a great deal of attention paid to her question. I doubt whether half of us heard her even.”

“Did you notice how she reacted? Was she worried or angry or distressed?”

“None of those things. It was odd really. I remember now. She looked satisfied, almost triumphant, as if something she suspected had been confirmed. I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did. Sister Gearing then called us to order and the demonstration began.”

Dalgliesh did not immediately speak at the end of this recital and, after a little time, she took his silence for dismissal and rose to go. She got out of the chair with the same controlled grace as she had seated herself, smoothed her apron with a scarcely discernible gesture, gave him a last interrogatory glance and walked to the door. Then she turned as if yielding to an impulse.

“You asked me if anyone had a reason to kill Jo. I said I knew of no one. That is true. But I suppose a legal motive is something different I ought to tell you that some people might think I had a motive.”

Dalgliesh said: “Had you?”

T expect you’ll think so. I am Jo’s heir, at least I think I am. She told me about three months ago that she had made her will and that she was leaving me all she had. She gave me the name and address of her solicitor,“t can let you have the information. They haven’t yet written to me but I expect they will, that is if Jo really made her will. But I expect she did. She wasn’t a girl to make promises she didn’t fulfill. Perhaps you would prefer to get in touch with the solicitors now7 These things take time, don’t they?”

“Did she say why she was making you her legatee?”

“She said that she had to leave her money to someone and that I would probably do most good with it I didn’t take the matter very seriously and neither, I think, did she. After all she was only thirty-one. She wasn’t expecting to die. And she warned me that she’d probably change her mind long before she got old enough to make the legacy a serious prospect for me. After all she’d probably marry. But she felt she ought to make a will and I was the only person at the time who she cared to remember. I thought that it was only a formality. It never occurred to me that she might have much to leave. It was only when we had our talk about the cost of an abortion that she told me how much she was worth.”

“And was it-is it-much?”

The girl answered calmly: “About £16,000 I believe. It came from her parents’ insurances.”

She smiled a little wryly.

“Quite worth having you see, Superintendent. I should think it would rank as a perfectly respectable motive, wouldn’t you? We shall be able to put central heating in the vicarage now.

And if you saw my fiance’s vicarage-twelve rooms, nearly all of them facing north or east-you would think I had quite a motive for murder.“

Sister Rolfe and Sister Gearing were waiting with the students in the library; they had moved from the nurses’ sitting-room in order to occupy the waiting time with reading and revision. How much the girls were really taking in was problematic but the scene certainly looked peaceful and studious enough. The students had seated themselves at the desks in front of the window and sat, books open before them, in apparent absorption. Sister Rolfe and Sister Gearing, as if to emphasize their seniority and solidarity, had withdrawn to the sofa in front of the fire and were seated side by side. Sister Rolfe was marking with green biro a pile of first-year students’ exercises, picking up each notebook from a stack on the floor at her feet, and adding it, when dealt with, to the growing pile which rested against the back of the sofa. Sister Gearing was ostensibly making notes for her next lecture, but seemed unable to keep her eyes from her colleague’s decisive hieroglyphics.