P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

It was apparent where in Miss Collins’s eyes the full enormity of the crime had lain.

At twenty minutes to one, Mr. Courtney-Briggs appeared. He knocked briskly at the door, came in without waiting for an invitation, and said curtly:

“I can give you a quarter of an hour now, Dalgliesh, if it’s convenient”

His tone assumed that it would be. Dalgliesh assented and indicated the chair. The surgeon looked across at Sergeant Masterson sitting impassively with his notebook at the ready, hesitated, then turned the chair so that its back was to the sergeant Then he seated himself and slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket The cigarette case he drew out was of finely tooled gold and so slim that it looked hardly functional.

He offered a cigarette to Dalgliesh but not to Masterson and seemed neither surprised nor particularly interested at the Superintendent’s refusal. He lit his own. The hands cupped around the lighter were large, square-fingered; not the sensitive hands of a fictional surgeon, but strong carpenter’s hands, beautifully cared for.

Dalgliesh, overtly busy with his papers, observed the man. He was big but not yet fat The formal suit fitted him almost too well, containing a sleek well-fed body and enhancing the effect of latent power only imperfectly controlled. He could still be called handsome. His long hair brushed straight back from a high forehead was strong and dark, except for one single white strand. Dalgliesh wondered whether it were bleached. His eyes were too small for the large, rather florid face, but were well shaped and set wide apart. They gave nothing away.

Dalgliesh knew that it bad been Mr. Courtney-Briggs who had been mainly responsible for the Chief Constable calling in the Yard. From Inspector Bailey’s somewhat bitter account during their brief colloquy when Dalgliesh had taken over the case, it was easy to understand why. The surgeon had made himself a nuisance from the beginning and his motives, if they were capable of rational explanation, raised interesting speculations. At first he had asserted vigorously that Nurse Pearce had obviously been murdered, that it was unthinkable that anyone connected with the hospital could have been concerned with the crime, and that the local police had a duty to proceed on this assumption and to find and arrest the killer with a minimum of delay. When their investigations yielded no immediate results, he became restive. He was a man used to exercising power and he was certainly not without it There were eminent people in London who owed their lives to him and some of them had considerable nuisance value. Telephone calls, some tactful and half-apologetic, others frankly critical, were made both to the Chief Constable and to the Yard. As the Inspector in charge of the investigation became more convinced that Nurse Pearce’s death was the result of a practical joke which had tragically misfired, so Mr. Courtney-Briggs and his co-agitators proclaimed more loudly that she had been murdered, and pressed more strongly for the case to be handed over to the Yard.

And then Nurse Fallon had been found dead. It could be expected that the local C.I.D. would be galvanized into fresh activity, that the diffuse light which had played over the first crime would sharpen and focus on this second death. And it was at this moment that Mr. Courtney-Briggs had chosen to telephone the Chief Constable to announce that no further activity was necessary, that it was obvious to him that Nurse Fallon had committed suicide, that this could only have been in remorse at the tragic result of the practical joke which had killed her colleague, and that it was now in the hospital’s interest to close the case with the minimum of fuss before nurse recruitment and indeed the whole future of the hospital was jeopardized. The police are not unused to these sudden quirks of temperament, which is not to say that they welcome them. Dalgliesh thought that it must have been with considerable satisfaction that the Chief Constable decided that, in all the circumstances, it would be prudent to call in the Yard to investigate both the deaths.

During the week following Nurse Pearce’s death, Courtney-Briggs had even rung up Dalgliesh, who had been his patient three years earlier. It had been a case of uncomplicated appendicitis, and although Dalgliesh’s vanity was gratified by the smallness and neatness of the resultant scar, he felt that the surgeon’s expertise had been adequately rewarded at the time. He had certainly no wish to be used for Courtney-Briggs’s private ends. The telephone call had been embarrassing and he had resented it He was interested to see that the surgeon had apparently decided that this was an incident it would be advisable for both of them to forget.

Without lifting his eyes from his papers, Dalgliesh said:

“I understand that you take the view that Miss Fallon killed herself?”

“Of course. It’s the obvious explanation. You’re not suggesting that someone else put stuff into her whisky? Why should they?”

“There’s the problem, isn’t there, of the missing container? That is, if it were poison. We shan’t know until we get the autopsy report”

“What problem? There’s no problem. The beaker was opaque, heat insulated. She could have put the stuff into it earlier that evening. No one would have noticed. Or she could have carried a powder in a slip of paper and flushed it down the lavatory. The container’s no problem. Incidentally, it wasn’t a corrosive this time. That much was evident when I saw the body.”

“Were you the first doctor on the scene?”

“No. I wasn’t in the hospital when they found her. Dr. Snelling saw her. He’s the general physician who looks after the nurses here. He realized at once that there was nothing to be done. I went across to have a look at the body as soon as I heard the news. I arrived at the hospital just before nine. By then the police had arrived, of course. The local people, I mean. I cant think why they weren’t left to get on with it I rang the Chief Constable to make my views known. Incidentally, Miles Honeyman tells me that she died about midnight I saw him just as he was leaving. We were at medical school together.”

“So I understand.”

“You were wise to call him in. I gather that he’s generally considered to be the best.”

He spoke complacently, success condescending to recognize success. His criteria were hardly subtle, thought Dalgliesh. Money, prestige, public recognition, power. Yes, Courtney-Briggs would always demand the best for himself, confident of his ability to pay for it.

Dalgliesh said: “She was pregnant. Did you know?”

“So Honeyman told me. No, I didn’t know. These things happen, even today when birth control is reliable and easily obtained. But I should have expected a girl of her intelligence to be on the Pill.”

Dalgliesh remembered the scene that morning in the library when Mr. Courtney-Briggs had known the girl’s age to a day. He asked his next question without apology.

“Did you know her well?”

The implication was plain and the surgeon did not reply for a moment Dalgliesh had not expected him to bluster or threaten and he did neither. There was an increased respect in the sharp look which be gave his interrogator.

“For a time, yes.” He paused. “You could say I knew her intimately.”

“Was she your mistress?”

Courtney-Briggs looked at him, impassive, considering. Then he said:

That’s putting it rather formally. We slept together fairly regularly during her first six months here. Are you objecting?“

“It’s hardly for me to object if she didn’t. Presumably she was willing?”

“You could say that.”

“When did it end?”

“I thought I told you. It lasted until the end of her first year. That’s a year and a half ago.”