“A modest little man, in fact”
She turned towards him and he detected again in her eyes that uncomfortable elliptical flicker of contempt.
“Oh no! Not modest! He gives a different performance, that’s all. Mr. Molravey is just as ”convinced as is Mr. Courtney-Briggs that he’s a very remarkable surgeon. They are both vain in a professional sense. Vanity, Mr. Dalgliesh, is a surgeon’s besetting sin as subservience is a nurse’s. I’ve never yet met a successful surgeon who wasn’t convinced that he ranked only one degree lower than Almighty God. They’re all infected with hubris.“ She paused:
“Isn’t that supposed to be true also of murderers?”
“Of one type of murderer. You must remember that murder is a highly individual crime.”
“Is it? I should have thought that the motives and the means would be monotonously familiar to you. But you, of course, are the expert.”
Dalgliesh said: “You have little respect for men apparently, Sister?”
“A great deal of respect. I just don’t happen to like them. But you have to respect a sex that has brought selfishness to such an art. That’s what gives you your strength, this ability to devote yourselves entirely to your own interest.”
Dalgliesh said, a little maliciously, that he was surprised that Miss Rolfe, since she obviously resented the subservience of her job, hadn’t chosen a more masculine occupation. Medicine perhaps? She laughed bitterly.
“I wanted to do medicine but I had a father who didn’t believe in educating women. I’m forty-six, remember. When I was at school we didn’t have universal free grammar school education. Father earned too much for me to get a free place, so he had to pay. He stopped paying as soon as he decently could, when I was sixteen.”
Dalgliesh found nothing appropriate to say. The confidence surprised him. She was hardly the woman, he would have thought, to expose a personal grievance to a stranger and he didn’t flatter himself that she found him sympathetic. She would find no man sympathetic. The outburst was probably a spontaneous release of pent up bitterness, but whether against her father, men in general or the limitations and subservience of her job it was hard to say.
They had left the hospital now and were passing along the narrow path which led to Nightingale House. Neither of them spoke another word until the house was reached. Sister Rolfe wrapped her long cloak tightly around her and pulled up her hood as if it could protect her from more than the bite of the wind. Dalgliesh was immersed in his private thoughts. And thus, with the width of the path between them, they paced together in silence under the trees.
IV
In the office Detective Sergeant Masterson was typing a report Dalgliesh said:
“Immediately before she came into the school, Nurse Pearce was working on the private ward under Sister Brumfett. I want to know if anything significant happened there. And I want a detailed account of her last week’s duty and an hour-by-hour account of what she did on her last day. Find out who the other nursing staff were, what her duties were, when she was off duty, how she appeared to the other staff. I want the names of the patients who were on the ward while she was nursing there and what happened to them. Your best plan is to talk to the other nurses and to work from the nursing reports. They’re bound to keep a book which is written up dairy.”
“Shall I get it from Matron?”
“No. Ask Sister Brumfett for it We deal directly with her, and for God’s sake be tactful. Have you those reports ready yet?”
“Yes, sir. They’ve been typed. Do you want to read them now?”
“No. Tell me if there’s anything I ought to know. I’ll look at them tonight I suppose if’s too much to expect that any of our suspects has a police record?”
“If they have, sir, it isn’t noted on the personal dossiers. There’s remarkable little information in most of them. Julia Paridoe was expelled from school, though. She seems to be the only delinquent among them.”
“Good God! What for?”
“Her dossier doesn’t say. Apparently it was something to do with a visiting math master. Her headmistress felt it right to mention it when she sent Matron a reference before the girl started here. It isn’t very specific. She writes that Julia was more sinned against than sinning and that she hoped the hospital would give her the chance of training for the only career she has ever shown any interest in, or signs of being suited for.”
“A nice double edged comment. So that’s why the London teaching hospitals wouldn’t take her. I thought Sister Rolfe was being a little disingenuous about the reasons. Anything about the others? Any previous connections between them?”
“Matron and Sister Brumfett trained together in the north at Nethercastle Royal Infirmary, did their midwifery training at the Municipal Maternity Hospital there and came here fifteen years ago, both as ward Sisters. Mr. Courtney-Briggs was in Cairo during 1946-7 and so was Sister Gearing. He was a major in the R.A.M.C. and she was a nursing sister in the Q.A.R.N.S. There’s no suggestion that they knew each other there.”
“If they did, you’d hardly expect to find the fact recorded on their personal records. But they probably did. Cairo in ‘46 was a chummy place, so my army friends tell me. I wonder if Miss Taylor served in the Q.A.R.N.S. That’s an army nursing service cap which she wears.”
“If she did, sir, it isn’t on her dossier. The earliest document is her reference from her training school when she came here as a Sister. They thought very highly of her at Nethercastle.”
“They think very highly of her here. Have you checked on Courtney-Briggs?”
“Yes, sir. The lodge porter makes a note of every car in and out after midnight Mr. Courtney-Briggs left at twelve thirty-two a.m.”
“Later than he led us to believe. I want a check on his schedule. The precise time he finished the operation will be in the operating theatre book. The junior doctor assisting him will probably know when he left-Mr. Courtney-Briggs is the kind of man who gets escorted to his car. Then drive over the route and time him. They will have moved the tree by now but it should be possible to see where it came down. He can’t have wasted more than a few minutes at the most tying on his scarf. Find out what happened to that He’d hardly lie about something so easily disproved, but he’s arrogant enough to think he can get away with anything, including murder.”
“Constable Greeson can do the checking, sir. He likes these reconstruction jobs.”
“Tell him to curb his urge for verisimilitude. There’s no need for him to don an operating gown and go into the theatre. Not that they’d let him. Is there any news yet from Sir Miles or the lab?”
“No, sir, but we’ve got the name and address of the man Nurse Fallon spent that week in the Isle of Wight with. He’s a G.P.O. night telephonist and lives in North Kensington. The local people got on to them almost at once. Fallon made it very easy for them. She booked in her own name and they had two single rooms.”
“She was a woman who valued her privacy. Still, she hardly got pregnant by staying in her own room. I’ll see the man tomorrow morning after I’ve visited Miss Fallon’s solicitor. Is Leonard Morris in the hospital yet, do you know?”
“Not yet, sir. I checked at the pharmacy that he telephoned this morning and said he wasn’t well. Apparently he suffers from a duodenal ulcer. They assume that it’s playing him up again.”
“It will play him up a great deal worse if he doesn’t come back soon and get the interview over. I don’t want to embarrass him by visiting his house, but we can’t wait indefinitely to get Sister Gearing’s story verified. Both these murders, if they were murders, hinge on the question of timing. We must know everyone’s movements, if possible, to the minute. Time is crucial.”