P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

Sister Gearing broke into explanation:

“It’s the rose spray. That stuff containing nicotine. Fallon must have taken it. I feel absolutely ghastly about it, but how as I to know? The Superintendent has found the tin.”

She turned to Dalgliesh.

“You didn’t say where?”

“No,” Dalgliesh said. “I didn’t say where.” He spoke to Miss Rolfe.

“Did you know the stuff was kept in this cupboard?”

“Yes, I saw Gearing put it there. Some time last summer wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t mention this to me.”

“I didn’t think of it until now. It never occurred to me that Fallon might have taken nicotine. And, presumably, we don’t yet know that she did.”

Dalgliesh said: “Not until we get the toxicology report.”

“And even then, Superintendent can you be sure that the drag came from this tin? There are other sources of nicotine at the hospital surely? This could be a blind.”

“Of course, although it seems to me highly unlikely. But the forensic science laboratory should be able to tell us that This nicotine is mixed with a proportion of concentrated detergent. It will be identifiably by gas chromatography.”

She shrugged.

“Well, that should settle it then.”

Mavis Gearing cried out: “What do you mean, other sources of supply? Who are you getting at? Nicotine isn’t kept in the pharmacy, as far as I know. And anyway Len had left Nightingale House before Fallon died.”

“I wasn’t accusing Leonard Morris. But he was on the spot when both of them died, remember, and he was here in this room when you put the nicotine in the cupboard. He’s a suspect like the rest of us.”

“Was Mr. Morris with you when you bought the nicotine?”

“Well, he was as a matter of fact. I’ve forgotten it or I would have told you. We’d been out together that afternoon and he came back here to tea.”

She turned angrily to Sister Rolfe.

“It’s nothing to do with Len, I tell you! He hardly knew Pearce or Fallon. Pearce hadn’t anything on Len.”

Hilda Rolfe said calmly: “I wasn’t aware that she had anything on anyone. I don’t know whether you’re trying to put ideas into Mr. Dalgliesh’s head, but you’re certainly putting them into mine.”

Sister Gearing’s face disintegrated into misery. Moaning, she jerked her head from side to side as if desperately seeking help or asylum. Her face, sickly and surrealist, was suffused with the green light of the conservatory.

Sister Rolfe gave Dalgliesh one sharp look, then ignoring him, moved over to her colleague and said with unexpected gentleness:

Took Gearing, I’m sorry. Of course I’m not accusing Leonard Morris or you. But the fact that he was here would have come out anyway. Don’t let the police fluster you. It’s how they work. I don’t suppose the Superintendent cares a damn whether you or I or Brumfett killed Pearce and Fallon so long as he can prove someone did. Well, let him get on with it Just answer his questions and keep calm. Why not get on with your job and let the police get on with theirs?“

Mavis Gearing wailed like a child seeking reassurance:

“But it’s all so awful!”

“Of course it is! But it won’t last for ever. And in the meantime, if you must confide in a man, find yourself a solicitor, a psychiatrist or a priest. At least you can be reasonably sure they’ll be on your side.”

Mavis Gearing’s worried eyes moved from Dalgliesh to Rolfe. She looked like a child hesitating to decide where her allegiance lay. Then the two women moved imperceptibly together and gazed at Dalgliesh, Sister Gearing in puzzled reproach and Sister Rolfe with the tight satisfied smile of a woman who has just brought off a successful piece of mischief.

At that moment Dalgliesh caught the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone was moving across the dining-room. He turned to the door, expecting to find that Sister Brumfett had at last come to be interviewed. The conservatory door opened but, instead of her squat figure, he saw a tall bare-headed man wearing a belted raincoat and with a gauze patch taped across his left eye. A peevish voice spoke from the doorway:

“What’s happened to everyone? This place is like a morgue.”

Before anyone could reply, Miss Gearing had darted forward and seized his arm. Dalgliesh saw with interest his frown and twitch of involuntary recoil.

“Len, what is it? You’re hurt! You never told me! I thought it was your ulcer. You never said anything about hurting your head!”

“It was my ulcer. But this didn’t help it”

He spoke directly to Dalgliesh:

“You must be Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard. Miss Gearing told me that you wanted to see me. I’m on my way to my general practitioner’s surgery but I’m at your disposal for half an hour.”

But Sister Gearing was not to be diverted from her concern.

“But you never said anything about an accident! How did it happen? Why didn’t you tell me about it when I rang?”

“Because we had other things to discuss and because I didn’t want you to fuss.”

He shook off her detaining arm and sat himself down in a wicker chair. The two women and Dalgliesh moved in close to him. There was a silence. Dalgliesh revised his unreasonably preconceived notions of Miss Gearing’s lover. He should have looked ridiculous, sitting there in his cheap raincoat with his patched eye and bruised face and speaking in that grating sarcastic voice. But he was curiously impressive. Sister Rolfe had somehow conveyed the impression of a little man, nervous, ineffectual and easily intimidated. This man had force. It might be only the manifestation of pent-up nervous energy; it might be the obsessive resentment born of failure or unpopularity. But his was certainly not a comfortable or negligible personality.

Dalgliesh asked: “When did you learn that Josephine Fallon was dead?”

“When I rang my pharmacy office just after nine thirty this morning to say that I wouldn’t be in. My assistant told me. I suppose the news was all over the hospital by then.”

“How did you react to the news?”

“React? I didn’t react. I hardly knew the girl. I was surprised, I suppose. Two deaths in the same house and so close together in time; well, it’s unusual to say the least of it It’s shocking really. You could say I was shocked.”

He spoke like a successful politician condescending to express an attributable opinion to a cub reporter.

“But you didn’t connect the two deaths?”

“Not at the time. My assistant just said that another Nightingale-we call the students Nightingales when they are in block-that another Nightingale student, Jo Fallon, had been found dead. I asked how and he said something about a heart attack following influenza. I thought it was a natural death. I suppose that’s what everyone thought at first”

“When did you think otherwise?”

“I suppose when Miss Gearing rang me about an hour later to say that you were here.”

So Sister Gearing had telephoned Morris at his home. She must have wanted to reach him urgently to have risked that Was it perhaps to warn him, to agree their story? While Dalgliesh was wondering what excuse, if any, she had given to Mrs. Morris, the pharmacist answered the unspoken question.

“Miss Gearing doesn’t usually ring me at home. She knows that I like to keep my professional and my private life absolutely separate. But she was naturally anxious about my health when she rang the laboratory after breakfast and was told that I wasn’t in. I suffer from a duodenal ulcer.”

“Your wife, no doubt was able to reassure her.”

He replied calmly but with a sharp glance at Sister Rolf e, who had moved to the periphery of the group: