P James - Shroud for a Nightingale

“It can all be checked, you know. We haven’t much of her body left but we don’t need it while we have your face. There will be records of the trial, photographs, the record of your marriage to a Sergeant Taylor.

She spoke so quietly that he had to bend his head to hear:

“He opened his eyes very wide and looked at me. He didn’t speak. There was a wildness, a desperation about that look. I thought that he was becoming delirious, or perhaps that he was afraid. I think he knew in that moment that he was going to die. I spoke to him a little and then his eyes closed. I didn’t recognize him. Why should I?

I’m not the same person as that child in Steinhoff. I don’t mean I think of Steinhoff as if it happened to someone else. It did happen to someone else. I can’t even remember now what exactly happened in that court at Felsenheim; I can’t recall a single face.“

But she bad had to tell someone. That must have been part of becoming another person, of putting Steinhoff out of her thoughts. So she had told Ethel Brumfett They had both been young student nurses at Nethercastle and Dalgliesh supposed that Brumfett represented something to her: kindness, reliability, devotion. Otherwise, why Brumfett? Why on earth choose her as a confidante? He must have been speaking his words aloud because she said eagerly as if it were important to make him understand:

“I told her because she was so ordinary. There was a security about her ordinariness. I felt that, if Brumfett could listen and believe me and still like me, then nothing that had happened was so very terrible after all. You wouldn’t understand that.”

But he did understand. There had been a boy in his prep, school like that, so ordinary, so safe, that he was a kind of talisman against death and disaster. Dalgliesh remembered the boy. Funny, but he hadn’t thought of him now for over thirty years. Sproat Minor with his round, pleasant, spectacled face, his ordinary conventional family, his unremarkable background, his blessed normality. Sproat Minor, protected my mediocrity and insensitivity from the terrors of the world. Life could not be wholly frightening while it held a Sproat Minor. Dalgliesh wondered briefly where he was now.

He said: “And Brumfett had stuck to you ever since. When you came here she followed. That impulse to confide, the need to have at least one friend who knew all about you, put you in her power. Brumfett, the protector, adviser, confidante. Theatres with Brumfett; morning golf with Brumfett; holidays with Brumfett; country drives with Brumfett; early morning tea and last night drinks with Brumfett Her devotion must have been real enough. After all, she was willing to kill for you. But it was blackmail all the same. A more orthodox blackmailer, merely demanding a regular tax-free income, would have been infinitely preferable to Brumfett’s intolerable devotion.”

She said sadly: “It’s true. It’s true. How can you possibly know?”

“Because she was essentially a stupid and dull woman and you are not.”

He could have added: “Because I know myself.”

She cried out in vehement protest:

“And who am I to despise stupidity and dullness? What right had I to be so particular? Oh, she wasn’t clever! She couldn’t even kill for me without making a mess of it She wasn’t clever enough to deceive Adam Dalgliesh, but when is that to be the criteria for intelligence? Have you ever seen her doing her job? Seen her with a dying patient or a sick child? Have you ever watched this stupid and dull woman, whose devotion and company it is apparently proper for me to despise, working all night to save a life?”

“I’ve seen the body of one of her victims and read the autopsy report on the other. I’ll take your word for her kindness to children.”

“Those weren’t her victims. They were mine.”

“Oh no,” he said. “There has only been one victim of yours in Nightingale House and she was Ethel Brumfett”

She rose to her feet in one swift movement and stood facing him, those astonishing green eyes, speculative and unwavering, gazed into his. Part of his mind knew that there were words he ought to speak. What were they, those over-familiar phrases of statutory warning, the professional spiel which came almost unbidden to the lips at the moment of confrontation? They had slipped away, a meaningless irrelevancy, into some limbo of his mind. He knew that he was a sick man, still weak from loss of blood, and that he ought to stop now, to hand over the investigation to Masterson, and get to his bed. He, the most punctilious of detectives, had already spoken as if none of the rules had been formulated, as if he were facing a private adversary. But he had to go on. Even if he could never prove it, he had to hear her admit what he knew to be the truth. As if it were the most natural question in the world he asked quietly:

“Was she dead when you put her into the fire?”

It was at that moment that someone rang the doorbell of the flat Without a word Mary Taylor swung her cape around her shoulders and went to open it There was a brief murmur of voices; then Stephen Courtney-Briggs followed her into the sitting-room. Glancing at the clock, Dalgliesh saw that the hands stood at 7:24 a.m. The working day had almost begun.

Courtney-Briggs was already dressed. He showed no surprise at Dalgliesh’s presence and no particular concern at his obvious weakness. He spoke to them both impartially:

“I’m told there was a fire in the night I didn’t hear the engines.”

Mary Taylor, her face so white that Dalgliesh thought she might faint said calmly:

“They came in at the Winchester Road entrance and kept the bells silent so as not to wake the patients.”

“And what’s this rumor that they found a burnt body in the ashes of the garden shed? Whose body?”

Dalgliesh said: “Sister Brumfett’s. She left a note confessing to the murders of Nurse Pearce and Nurse Fallon.”

“Brumfett killed them! Brumfett!”

Courtney-Briggs looked at Dalgliesh belligerently, his large handsome features seeming to disintegrate into irritated disbelief.

“Did she say why? Was the woman mad?”

Mary Taylor said: “Brumfett wasn’t mad and no doubt she believed that she had a motive.”

“But what’s going to happen to my ward today? I start operating at nine o’clock. You know that, Matron. And I’ve got a very long list. Both the staff nurses are off with flu. I can’t trust dangerously sick patients to first and second-year students.”

The Matron said calmly: “I’ll see to it at once. Most of the day nurses should be up by now. It isn’t going to be easy but, if necessary, we’ll have to withdraw someone from the school.”

She turned to Dalgliesh: “I prefer to do my telephoning from one of the Sisters’ sitting-rooms. But don’t worry. I realize the importance of our conversation. I shall be back to complete it”

Both men looked after her as she went out of the door and closed it quietly behind her. For the first time Courtney-Briggs seemed to notice Dalgliesh. He said brusquely:

“Don’t forget to go over to the radiography department and get that head X-rayed. You’ve no right to be out of bed. Ill examine you as soon as I’ve finished my list this morning.” He made it sound like a tedious chore which he might find time to attend to.

Dalgliesh asked: “Who did you come to visit in Nightingale House the night Josephine Fallon was murdered?”

“I told you. No one. I never entered Nightingale House.”

“There are at least ten minutes unaccounted for, ten minutes when the back door leading to the Matron’s flat was unlocked. Sister Gearing had let her friend out that way and was walking with him in the grounds. So you thought that the Matron must be in despite the absence of lights and made your way up the stairs to her flat. You must have spent some time there. Why, I wonder? Curiosity? Or were you searching for something?”‘