“But you could see the door as you came down the stairs. Would you be likely to notice if the door were ajar? The room isn’t often used, is it?”
“No, but anyone might go there if they wanted a record. I mean, if the door were open, I wouldn’t go to see who was there or anything like that. I think I would notice if the door was wide open, so I suppose it wasn’t, but I can’t remember, honestly I can’t.”
Dalgliesh ended by asking her about Miss Bolam. It appeared that Miss Priddy knew her outside the clinic, that the Priddy family attended the same church and that Miss Bolam had encouraged her to take the job at the clinic.
“I shouldn’t have got this job if it hadn’t been for Enid. Of course, I never called her that inside the clinic. She wouldn’t have liked it.” Miss Priddy gave the impression that she had only reluctantly brought herself to use the Christian name outside the clinic. She went on: “I don’t mean she actually appointed me. I had to be interviewed by Mr. Lauder and by Dr. Etherege, but I know she spoke up for me. My shorthand and typing weren’t very good then—it was nearly two years ago when I came—and I was lucky to get here. I didn’t see very much of Enid at the clinic but she was always very kind and keen for me to get on. She wanted me to take the Institute of Hospital Administration diploma so that I needn’t be a shorthand typist all my life.”
This ambition for Miss Priddy’s future career struck Dalgliesh as a little odd. The child gave no impression of being ambitious and she would surely marry in time. It hardly needed the Institute’s diploma, whatever that might be, to save her from being a shorthand typist for life. He felt a little sorry for Miss Bolam who could scarcely have picked a less promising protégée. She was pretty, honest and naïve, but not, he thought, particularly intelligent. He had to remind himself that she had given her age as twenty-two not seventeen. She had a shapely and oddly mature body, but her thin face with its frame of long, straight hair was the face of a child.
There was little she could tell him about the administrative officer. She hadn’t noticed any change recently in Miss Bolam. She didn’t know that the AO had sent for Mr. Lauder and had no idea what could be worrying Miss Bolam at the clinic. Everything was going on very much as usual. Miss Bolam had no enemies as far as she knew, certainly no one who would wish to kill her.
“She was happy here, then, as far as you know? I was wondering whether she had asked for a move. A psychiatric clinic can’t be the easiest unit to administer.”
“Oh, it isn’t! I don’t know how Enid carried on sometimes. But I’m sure she would never ask for a move. Someone must have given you the wrong impression. She was never one to give up. If she thought people wanted her to go, she’d dig her toes in. The clinic was a kind of challenge to her.”
It was probably the most illuminating thing she had said about Miss Bolam. As he thanked her and asked her to wait with the rest of the staff until his preliminary interviews were over, Dalgliesh pondered on the possible nuisance value of an administrator who regarded her job as a challenge, a battleground from which she would never willingly retreat. He asked next to see Peter Nagle.
If the junior porter was worried by the killer’s choice of his chisel as a weapon, he gave no sign. He answered Dalgliesh’s questions calmly and politely, but so dispassionately that they might have been discussing some minor point of clinic procedure which was only doubtfully his concern. He gave his age as twenty-seven and an address in Pimlico and confirmed that he had been employed at the clinic for just over two years and was previously at a provincial art school. His voice was level and educated, his mud-brown eyes were large, almost expressionless. Dalgliesh noticed that he had unusually long arms which, held loosely from his short and powerful body, gave an impression of simian strength. His hair was black, coiling tightly over the scalp. It was an interesting face, withdrawn but intelligent. There could scarcely have been a greater contrast with poor old Cully, long since dispatched home to nurse both his stomach ache and his grievance at being kept late.
Nagle confirmed Miss Priddy’s story. He again identified his chisel with no more emotion than a brief moue of distaste and said that he had last seen it at eight o’clock that morning when he had arrived on duty and—for no particular reason—had made a check of his toolbox. Everything was in order then. Dalgliesh asked whether it was generally known where the box was kept. Nagle replied: “I’d be a fool if I said no, wouldn’t I?”
“You’d be a fool to say anything but the truth now or later.”
“I suppose most of the staff knew. Those who didn’t could find out easily enough. We don’t keep the porters’ room locked.”
“Isn’t that rather unwise? What about the patients?”
“They don’t go down to the basement on their own. The lysergic-acid patients are always escorted and the art-therapy people usually have someone keeping an eye on them. The department hasn’t been down there for long. The light’s bad and it isn’t really suitable. It’s a temporary department.”
“Where used it to be, then?”
“On the third floor. Then the Clinic Medical Committee decided they wanted the large room there for the marital-problems discussion groups, so Mrs. Baumgarten—she’s the art therapist—lost it. She’s been agitating to get it back but the MPD patients say it would be psychologically disturbing for them to meet in the basement.”
“Who runs the MPD?”
“Dr. Steiner and one of the psychiatric social workers, Miss Kallinski. It’s a club where the divorced and the single tell the patients how to be happy though married. I don’t see how it can concern the murder.”
“Nor do I. I asked about it to satisfy my curiosity as to why the art therapy department was so unsuitably housed. When did you hear that Tippett wasn’t attending today, by the way?”
“At about nine o’clock this morning. The old boy had been worrying St Luke’s Hospital to telephone and let us know what had happened. So they did. I told Miss Bolam and Sister.”
“Anyone else?”
“I think I mentioned it to Cully when he came back on the board. He’s had a bellyache for most of the day.”
“So I’m told. What’s wrong with him?”
“Cully? Miss Bolam made him go to hospital for an examination but nothing was found. He gets these bellyaches if anyone upsets him. They say here it’s psychosomatic.”
“What upset him this morning?”
“I did. He got here before me this morning and started sorting the post. That’s my job. I told him to concentrate on his own work.”
Dalgliesh took him patiently over the events of the evening. His story agreed with Miss Priddy’s and, like her, he was unable to say whether the door of the basement record room had been ajar when he returned from posting the letters. He admitted that he had passed the door when he went to ask Nurse Bolam if the laundry was sorted. It was usual for the door to be closed as the room was seldom visited and he thought he would have noticed had it been open. It was frustrating and maddening that this crucial point could not be cleared up, but Nagle stood firm. He hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t say. He hadn’t noticed, either, whether the record-room key was on the board in the porters’ restroom. This was easier to understand. There were twenty-two hooks on the board and most of the keys were in use and missing.
Dalgliesh said: “You realize that Miss Bolam’s body was almost certainly lying in the record room when you and Miss Priddy were together feeding the cat? You realize how important it is to remember whether the door was open or shut?”
“It was ajar when Jenny Priddy went down later. That’s what she says and she’s no liar. If it was shut when I got back from the post, someone must have opened it between six-twenty-five and seven. I don’t see what’s so impossible about that. It would be better for me if I could remember about the door, but I can’t. I hung up my coat in my locker, went straight to ask Nurse Bolam about the clean laundry and then returned to the restroom. Jenny met me at the bottom of the stairs.”