P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

“No, but I think one of them was a ‘doctor. Perhaps more than one. That wouldn’t be surprising in the circumstances. We were talking once about sex and she said that a man’s nature and character were always completely revealed when he made love. That if he were selfish or insensitive or brutal he couldn’t conceal it in bed whatever he might do with his clothes on. Then she said that she had once slept with a surgeon and it was only too apparent that most of the bodies he came into contact with had been anaesthetized first; that he was so busy admiring his own technique that it never occurred to him that he was in bed with a conscious woman. She laughed about a great many things.”

“But you don’t think she was happy?”

He appeared to be considering. Dalgliesh thought: And for God’s sake don’t answer, “who is?”

“No, not really happy. Not for most of the time. But she did know how to be happy. That was the important thing.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I’m learning to be a writer. That’s what I want to be and I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I have to earn some money to live while I get my first novel finished and published, so I work at night as a continental telephone operator. I know enough French to make it possible. The pay isn’t bad. I don’t have many friends because there isn’t time and I never went to bed with any woman until I met Jo. Women don’t seem to like me. I met her last summer in St James’s Park. She was there on one of her off-duty days and I was there to watch the ducks and see what the park looked like. I wanted to set one of the scenes in my book in St James’s Park in July, and I went there to make some notes. She was lying on her back on the grass staring at the sky. She was quite alone. One of the pages of my notebook got detached and blew across the grass into her face. I went after it and apologized, and we chased it together.”

He was holding the mug of tea looking at it as if staring again into the summer surface of the lake.

“It was an odd day-very hot sunless and blustery. The wind blew in warm gusts. The lake looked heavy like oil.”

He paused for a moment and when Dalgliesh didn’t speak, went on:

“So we met and talked, and I asked her to come back for tea. I don’t know what I expected. After tea we talked more and she made love to me. She told me weeks later that she didn’t have that in mind when she came here but I don’t know. I don’t even know why she came back. Perhaps she was bored.”

“Did you have h in mind?”

“I don’t know that either. Perhaps. I know that I wanted to make love to a woman. I wanted to know what it was like. That’s one experience you can’t write about until you know.”

“And sometimes not even then. And how long did she continue to provide you with copy?”

The boy seemed unaware of the irony. He said:

“She used to come here about once a fortnight on her day off. We never went out together except to a pub occasionally. She would bring in some food and cook a meal and afterwards we would talk and go to bed.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I suppose I did most of the talking. She didn’t tell me much about herself, only that both her parents had been killed while she was a child and that she had been brought up in Cumberland by an elderly aunt. The aunt is dead now. I don’t think Jo had a very happy childhood. She always wanted to be a nurse but she got TB when she was seventeen. It wasn’t very bad and she spent eighteen months in a sanatorium in Switzerland and was cured. But the doctors advised her not to train as a nurse. So she did a number of other jobs. She was an actress for about three years; but that wasn’t much of a success. Then she was a waitress and a shop assistant for a time. Then she became engaged but nothing came of it. She broke it off.”

“Did she say why?”

“No, except that she found something out about the man which made it impossible to marry him.”

“Did she say what it was or who the man was?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. But I think he may have been some kind of sexual pervert.”

Seeing Dalgliesh’s face he added quickly:

“I don’t really know. She never told me. Most of the things I know about Jo just came up casually in conversation. She never really talked about herself for long. It’s just an idea I have. There was a kind of bitter hopelessness about the way she spoke of her engagement.”

“And after that?”

“Well, apparently she decided that she might as well go back to her original idea of being a nurse. She thought she could get through the medical examination with luck. She chose the John Carpendar Hospital because she wanted to be near London but not actually in it, and thought that a small hospital would be less arduous. She didn’t want her health to break down, I suppose.”

“Did she talk about the hospital?”

“Not much. She seemed happy enough there. But she spared me the intimate details of the bedpan rounds.”

“Do you know whether she had an enemy?”

“She must have had, mustn’t she, if somebody killed her? But she never told me about it. Perhaps she didn’t know.”

“Do these names mean anything to you?”

He went through the names of all the people, students, sisters, surgeon, pharmacist, who had been in Nightingale House the night Josephine Fallon had died.

“I think she mentioned Madeleine Goodale to me. I’ve a feeling they were friendly. And the Courtney-Briggs name seems familiar. But I can’t remember any details.”

“When did you last see her?”

“About three weeks ago. She came on her night off and cooked supper.”

“How did she seem then?”

“She was restless and she wanted to make love rather badly. Then just before she left she said that she wouldn’t see me again. A few days later I got a letter. It merely said, ”I meant what I said. Please don’t try to get in touch. It’s nothing you’ve done so don’t worry. Good-bye and thank you. Jo.“”

Dalgliesh asked if he had kept the letter.

“No. I only keep important papers. I mean, there isn’t room here to hoard letters.”

“And did you try to get in touch with her again?”

“No. She’d asked me not to and there didn’t seem much point in it. I suppose if I’d known about the child I might have done. But I’m not sure. There’s nothing I could have done. I couldn’t have had a child here. Well, you can see that How could I? She wouldn’t want to marry me and I never considered marrying her. I don’t want to marry anyone. But I don’t think she killed herself because of the baby. Not Jo.”

“All right You don’t think she killed herself. Tell me why.”

“She wasn’t the type.”

“Oh, come now! You can do better than that.”

The boy said belligerently: “It’s true enough. I’ve known two people in my life who killed themselves. One was a boy in my last year at school when we were sitting for our G.C.E. The other was a manager of a dry cleaning firm I worked for. I drove the delivery van. Well, in both cases, everyone said all the usual things about how dreadful and how surprising it was. But I wasn’t really surprised. I don’t mean that I was expecting it or anything like that. I just wasn’t really surprised. When I thought about both deaths I could believe that they had actually done it”

“Your sample is too small.”

“Jo wouldn’t kill herself. Why should she?”

“I can think of reasons. She hadn’t made much success of her life so far. She hadn’t any relatives to care about her, and very few friends. She didn’t sleep easily at night, wasn’t really happy. She had at last succeeded in training to be a nurse and was within a few months of her final examination. And then she finds herself pregnant. She knows that her lover won’t want the child, that it’s no use looking to him for comfort or support.”