P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

Dalgliesh asked her why.

“I didn’t take to Pearce. I didn’t kill her, but then I’m not given to murdering people merely because I dislike them. But she was a strange girl, a mischief maker and a hypocrite. If’s no use asking me how I know. I haven’t any real evidence and, if I had, I doubt whether I should give it to you.”

“So you didn’t find it surprising that she should have been murdered?”

“I found it astonishing. But I never for one moment thought her death was suicide or an accident.”

“And who do you suppose killed her?”

Sister Rolfe looked at him with a kind of grim satisfaction.

“You tell me, Superintendent You tell me!”

“So you went to the cinema last night and on your own?”

“Yes, I told you.”

“To see a revival of L’Avventura. Perhaps you felt that the subtleties of Antonioni could best be experienced without a companion? Or perhaps you couldn’t find anyone willing to go with you?”

She couldn’t, of course, resist that:

“There are plenty of people to take me to the movies if I want them to.”

The movies. It had been the flicks when Dalgliesh was her age. But the generation chasm was deeper than a matter of mere semantics, the alienation more complete. He simply didn’t understand her. He hadn’t the slightest clue to what was going on behind that smooth and childish forehead. The remarkable violet blue eyes, set wide apart under curved brows gazed at him, wary but unconcerned. The cat’s face with its small rounded chin and wide cheek bones expressed nothing but a vague distaste for the matter in hand. It was difficult Dalgliesh thought, to imagine finding a prettier or more agreeable figure than Julia Pardoe beside one’s sick bed; unless, of course, one happened to be in real pain or distress when the Burt twins’ sturdy common sense or Madeleine Goodale’s calm efficiency would be a great deal more acceptable. It might be a personal prejudice, but he couldn’t imagine any man willingly exposing his weakness or physical distress to this pert and self-absorbed young woman. And what precisely, he wondered, was she getting out of nursing? If the John Carpendar had been a teaching hospital he could have understood it. That trick of widening the eyes when she spoke so that the hearer was treated to a sudden blaze of blue, of slightly parting moist lips above the neat eburnean teeth would go down very well with a gaggle of medical students.

It was not, he noticed, without its effect on Sergeant Masterson.

But what was it that Sister Rolf e had said of her?

“An intelligent but untrained mind; a gentle and considerate nurse.”

Well, it could be. But Hilda Rolfe was prejudiced. And so, in his own way, was Dalgliesh.

He pressed on with his interrogation, resisting the impulse to sarcasm, to the cheap jibes of antipathy.

“Did you enjoy the film?”

“It was all right.”

“And you returned to Nightingale House from this all right film when?”

“I don’t know. Just before eleven, I suppose. I met Sister Rolfe outside the cinema and we walked back together. I expect she’s told you.”

So they must have talked since this morning. This was then-story and the girl was repeating it without even the pretence that she cared whether she were believed. It could be checked of course. The girl in the cinema box office might remember whether they had arrived together. But it was hardly worth the trouble of inquiry. Why indeed should it matter, unless they had spent the evening concocting murder as well as imbibing culture? And if they had, here was one partner in iniquity who wasn’t apparently worried.

Dalgliesh asked: “What happened when you got back?”

“Nothing. I went to the nurses’ sitting-room and they were all watching the telly. Well, actually they switched it off as I came in. The Burt twins came to make tea in the nurses’ kitchen and we took it into Maureen’s room to drink it Dakers came with us. Madeleine Goodale was left with Fallon. I don’t know what time they came up. I went to bed as soon as I’d had my tea. I was asleep before twelve.”

So she might have been. But this had been a very simple murder. There had been nothing to prevent her waiting, perhaps in one of the lavatory cubicles, until she heard Fallon running her bath. Once Fallon was in the bathroom, Nurse Pardoe would know what all the other students knew; that a beaker of whisky and lemon would be waiting on Fallon’s bedside table. How simple to slip into her room and add something to the drink. Add what? It was maddening, this working in the dark with its inevitable tendency to theorize in advance of the facts. Until the autopsy was completed and the toxicology result available he couldn’t even be sure that he was investigating a murder.

He suddenly changed tack, reverting to a previous course of questioning.

“Are you sorry about Nurse Pearce’s death?”

Again the wide opened eyes, the little moue of consideration, the suggestion that it was really rather a silly question.

“Of course.” A little pause. “She never did me any harm.”

“Did she do anyone any harm?”

“You’d better ask them.” Another pause. Perhaps she felt that she had been imprudently foolish and rude. “What harm could Pearce do to anyone?”

It was spoken with no tinge of contempt, almost with disinterest, a mere statement of fact.

“Someone killed her. That doesn’t suggest that she was innocuous. Someone must have hated her enough to want her out of the way.”

“She could have killed herself. When she swallowed that tube she knew what was coming to her all right. She was terrified. Anyone watching her could see that”

Julia Pardoe was the first student to have mentioned Nurse Pearce’s fear. The only other person present to have noticed it had been the General Nursing Council Inspector who, in her statement, had stressed the girl’s look of apprehension, almost of endurance. It was interesting and surprising that Nurse Pardoe should have been so perceptive. Dalgliesh said:

“But do you really believe that she put a corrosive poison into the feed herself?”

The blue eyes met his. She gave her little secret smile.

“No. Pearce was always terrified when she had to act as patient She hated it She never said anything, but anyone could see what she was feeling. Swallowing that tube must have been particularly bad for her. She told me once that she couldn’t bear the thought of a throat examination or operation. She’d had her tonsils out as a child and the surgeon-or it may have been a nurse-was rough with her and hurt her badly. Anyway, it had been a horrible experience and had left her with this phobia about her throat Of course, she could have explained to Sister Gearing and one of us would have taken her place. She didn’t have to act the patient. No one was forcing her. But I suppose Pearce thought it was her duty to go through with it She was a great one for duty.”

So anyone present could have seen what Pearce was feeling. But in fact, only two of them had seen. And one of them had been this apparently insensitive young woman.

Dalgliesh was intrigued, but not particularly surprised, that Nurse Pearce should have chosen to confide in Julia Pardoe. He had met it before, this perverse attraction which the pretty and popular often held for the plain and despised. Sometimes it was even reciprocated; an odd mutual fascination which, he suspected, formed the basis of many friendships and marriages that the world found inexplicable. But if Heather Pearce had been making a pathetic bid for friendship or sympathy by a recital of childhood woes she had been unlucky. Julia Pardoe respected strength, not weakness. She would be impervious to a plea for pity. And yet-who knew?-Pearce might have got something from her. Not friendship, or sympathy, or pity even; but a modicum of understanding.