P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

“And did Pearce dislike Fallon?”

“Well, it’s difficult to say. Pearce never seemed to concern herself with what other people thought of her. She was an odd girl, pretty insensitive too. For example, she might disapprove of Fallon and her whisky-drinking but that didn’t prevent her from borrowing Fallon’s library ticket.”

“When did this happen?”

Dalgliesh leaned across and replaced his teacup on the tray. His voice was level, unconcerned. But he felt again that spring of excitement and anticipation, the intuitive sense that something important had been said. It was more than a hunch; it was, as always, a certainty. It might happen several times during a case if he were lucky, or not at all. He couldn’t will it to happen and he was afraid to examine its roots too closely since he suspected that it was a plant easily withered by logic.

“Just before she came into block, I think. It must have been the week before Pearce died. The Thursday, I think. Anyway, they hadn’t yet moved into Nightingale House. It was just after supper time in the main dining-room. Fallon and Pearce were walking out of the door together and I was just behind them with Goodale. Then‘ Fallon turned to Pearce and said: ’Here’s the library token I promised you. I’d better give it to you now as I don’t suppose well see each other in the morning. You’d better take the reader’s ticket too, or they may not let you have the book.” Pearce mumbled something and grabbed the token rather ungraciously I thought, and that was that Why? It isn’t important, is it?“ ”I can’t think why it should be,“ said Dalgliesh.

He sat through the next fifteen minutes in exemplary patience. Sister Gearing couldn’t have guessed from his courteous attention to her chattering and the leisurely way in which he drank his third and last cup of tea, that every moment was now grudged. When the meal was over, he carried the tray for her into the small Sisters’ kitchen at the end of the corridor while she fretted at his heels, bleating her protests. Then he said, “Thank you,” and left.

He went at once to the cell-like bedroom which still held nearly all the possessions Nurse Pearce had owned at the John Carpendar. It took him a moment to select the correct key from the heavy bunch in his pocket The room had been locked after her death and was still locked. He went in, switching on the light The bed was stripped and the whole room was very tidy and clean as if it too, had been laid out for burial. The curtains were drawn back so that from outside, the room would look no different from any other. The window was open but the air held a faint tang of disinfectant as if someone had tried to obliterate the memory of Pearce’s death by a ritual purification.

He had no need to refresh his memory. The detritus of this particular life was pathetically meager. But he went through her leavings again, turning them in careful hands as if the feel of cloth and leather could transmit their own dues. It didn’t take long. Nothing had altered since his first inspection. The hospital wardrobe, identical to that in Nurse Fallon’s room, was more than adequate for the few woolen dresses, unexciting in color and design, which, under his questing hands, swung from their padded hangers and gave out a faint smell of cleaning fluid and mothballs. The thick winter coat in fawn was of good quality but obviously old. He sought once more in the pockets. There was nothing except the handkerchief which had been there on his first examination, a crumpled ball of white cotton smelling of sour breath.

He moved to the chest of drawers. Here again the space provided had been more than sufficient. The two top drawers were filled with underclothes, strong sensible vests and knickers, comfortably warm no doubt for an English winter but with no concessions to glamour or fashion. The drawers were lined with newspaper. The sheets had been taken out once already, but he ran his hand under them and felt nothing but the gritty surface of bare unpolished wood. The remaining three drawers held skirts, jumpers and cardigans‘, a leather handbag, carefully wrapped in tissue paper; a pair of best shoes in a string bag; an embroidered handkerchief sachet with a dozen handkerchiefs carefully folded; an assortment of scarves; three pairs of identical nylon stockings still in their wrappers.

He turned again to the bedside locker, and the small shelf fixed above it The locker held a bedside lamp, a small alarm clock in a leather case which had long since run down, a packet of paper handkerchiefs with one crumpled tissue half-pulled through the slit, and an empty water carafe. There was also a leather-bound Bible and a writing-case. Dalgliesh opened the Bible at the flyleaf and read again the inscription in careful copper plate. “Awarded to Heather Pearce for attendance and diligence. St Mark’s Sunday School” Diligence. An unfashionable, intimidating word, but one, he felt of which Nurse Pearce would have approved.

He opened the writing-case, but with little hope of finding what he sought Nothing had changed since his first examination. Here still was the half-finished letter to her grandmother, a dull recital of the week’s doings written as impersonally as a ward report and a quarto-sized envelope, posted to her on the day of her death and obviously slipped into the writing-case by someone who, having opened it, couldn’t think of what else to do with it. It was an illustrated brochure on the work of a home in Suffolk for German war refugees apparently sent in the hope of a donation.

He turned his attention to the small collection of books on the wall shelf. He had seen them before. Then, as now, he was struck by the conventionality of her choice and by the meagerness of this personal library. A school prize for needlework. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Dalgliesh had never believed that any child read them and there was no evidence that Nurse Pearce had done so. There were two travel books, In the Steps of St. Paul and In the Steps of the Master. In both the girl had carefully inscribed her name. There was a well-known but out-of-date edition of a nursing textbook. The date on the flyleaf was nearly four years old. He wondered whether she had bought it in anticipation of her training, only to find that its advise on applying leeches and administering enemas had become out of date. There was a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, also a school prize, but this time inappropriately for deportment This, too, showed little sign of having been read. Lastly there were three paperbacks-novels by a popular woman writer, each advertised as “The Book of the Film”-and a fictional and highly sentimental account of the wanderings across Europe of a lost dog and cat which Dalgliesh remembered had been a best-seller some five years previously. This was inscribed, “To Heather, with love from Auntie Edie, Christmas 1964.” The whole collection told him little about the dead girl, except that her reading had apparently been as restricted as her life. And nowhere he found what he was seeking.

He didn’t go again to look in Nurse Fallon’s room. The scene-of-crime officer had searched every inch of it, and he himself could have described the room in minute detail and given an accurate inventory of all its contents. Wherever the library ticket and the token were, he could be sure that they weren’t there. Instead he ran lightly up the wide staircase to the floor above where he had noticed a wall-mounted telephone when carrying Sister Gearing’s tea tray to the utility room. A card listing the internal extensions hung beside it and, after a moment’s thought, he rang the nurses’ sitting-room. Maureen Burt answered. Yes, Nurse Goodale was still there. Almost immediately Dalgliesh heard her voice and he asked her to come up to see him in Nurse Pearce’s room.