Dalgliesh helped himself to a piece of shortbread from the proffered tin and observed that there were those who thought that Nurse Fallon might have had another reason for suicide, apart from her pregnancy. She could have put the corrosive in the feed. She had certainly been seen in Nightingale House at the crucial time.
He put forward the suggestion slyly, awaiting her reaction. It wouldn’t, of course, be new to her; it must have occurred to everyone in Nightingale House. But she was too simple to be surprised that a senior detective should be discussing his case so frankly with her, and too stupid to ask herself why. She dismissed this theory with a snort. “Not Fallon! It would have been a foolish trick and she was no fool. I told you, any third-year nurse would know:hat the stuff was lethal. And if you’re suggesting that Fallon intended to kill Pearce-and why on earth should she?-I’d say that she was the last person to suffer remorse. If Fallon decided to do murder she wouldn’t waste time repenting afterwards, let alone kill herself in remorse. No, Fallon’s death is understandable enough. She had post-flu depression and she felt she couldn’t cope with the baby.”
“So you think they both committed suicide?”
“Well, I’m not so sure about Pearce. You’d have to be pretty crazy to choose that agonizing way of dying, and Pearce seemed sane enough to me. But it’s a possible explanation, isn’t it? And I can’t see you proving anything else however long you stay.”
He thought he detected a note of smug complacency in her voice and glanced at her abruptly. But the thin face bowed nothing but its usual look of vague dissatisfaction.
She was eating shortbread, nibbling at it with sharp, very white teeth. He could hear them rasping against the biscuits. She said:
“When one explanation is impossible, the improbable must be true. Someone said something like that G. K. Chesterton wasn’t it? Nurses don’t murder each other. Or anyone else for that matter.”
“There was Nurse Waddingham,” said Dalgliesh.
“Who was she?”
“An unprepossessing and unpleasant woman who poisoned with morphine one of her patients, a Miss Baguley. Miss Baguley had been so ill advised as to leave Nurse Waddingham her money and property in turn for life-long treatment in the tatter’s nursing home. She struck a poor bargain. Nurse Waddingham was hanged.”
Sister Gearing gave a frisson of simulated distaste.
“What awful people you do get yourself mixed up with! Anyway, she was probably one of those unqualified nurses. You can’t tell me that Waddingham was on the General Nursing Council’s Register.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t believe she was. And I wasn’t mixed up with it. It happened in 1935.”
“Well, there you are then,” Sister Gearing said as if vindicated.
She stretched across to poor him a second cup of tea, then wriggled herself more comfortably into her cushion and leaned back against the arm of his chair, so that her hair brushed his knee. Dalgliesh found himself examining with mild interest the narrow band of darker hair each side of the parting where the dye had grown out Viewed from above, her foreshortened face looked older, the nose sharper. He could see the latent pouch of skin under the bottom eyelashes and a spatter of broken veins high on the cheekbones, the purple threads only half disguised by makeup. She was no longer a young woman; that he knew. And there was a great deal more about her that he had gleaned from her dossier. She had trained at a hospital in the East End of London after a variety of unsuccessful and unprofitable office jobs. Her nursing career had been checkered and her references were suspiciously non-committal. There had been a doubt about the wisdom of seconding her for training as a clinical instructor, a suggestion that she had been motivated less by a desire to teach than by the hope of an easier job than that of ward Sister. He knew that she was having difficulty with the menopause. He knew more about her than she realized, more than she would think he had any right to know. But he didn’t yet know whether she was a murderess. Intent for a moment on his private thoughts, he hardly caught her next words.
“It’s odd your being a poet Fallon had your last volume of verse in her room, didn’t she? Rolfe told me. Isn’t it difficult to reconcile poetry with being a policeman?”
“I’ve never thought of poetry and police work as needing to be reconciled in that ecumenical way.”
She laughed coyly.
“You know very well what I mean. After all it is a little unusual. One doesn’t think of policemen as poets.”
He did, of course, know what she meant but it wasn’t a subject he was prepared to discuss. He said:
“Policemen are individuals like people in any other job. After all, you three nursing Sisters haven’t much in common have you? You and Sister Brumfett could hardly be more different personalities. I can’t see Sister Brumfett feeding me on anchovy crumpets and home-made shortbread.”
She reacted at once, as he had known she would.
“Oh, Brumfett’s all right when you get to know her. Of course she’s twenty years out of date. As I said at lunch, the kids today aren’t prepared to listen to all that guff about obedience and duty and a sense of vocation. But she’s a marvelous nurse. I won’t hear a word against Brum. I had an appendectomy here about four years ago. It went a bit wrong and the wound burst Then I got an infection which was resistant to antibiotics. The whole thing was a mess. Not one of our Courtney-Briggs’s most successful efforts. Anyway I felt like death. One night I was in ghastly pain and couldn’t sleep and I felt absolutely sure I wouldn’t see the morning. I was terrified. It was sheer funk. Talk about the fear of death! I knew what it meant that night Then Brumfett came round. She was looking after me herself; she wouldn’t let the students do a thing for me when she was on duty. I said to her: ‘I’m not going to die, am I?” She looked down at me. She didn’t tell me not to be a fool or give me any of the usual comforting lies. She just said in that gruff voice of hers: ’Not if I can help it you aren’t‘ And immediately the panic stopped. I knew that if Brumfett was fighting on my side I’d win through. It sounds a bit daft and sentimental put like that, but that’s what I thought. She’s like that with all the really sick patients. Talk about confidence! Brumfett makes you feel that she’d drag you back from the edge of the grave by sheer will-power, even if all the devils in hell were tugging the other way; which in my case they probably were. They don’t make them like that any more.“
Dalgliesh made appropriately assenting noises and paused briefly before picking up the references to Mr. Courtney-Briggs. He asked rather naively whether many of the surgeon’s operations went so spectacularly wrong. Sister Gearing laughed:
“Lord, no! Courtney-Briggs’s operations usually go the way he wants. That’s not to say they go the way the patient would choose if he knew the whole of it C.B. is what they call a heroic surgeon. If you ask me, most of the heroism has to be shown by the patients. But he does an extraordinary good job of work. He’s one of the last remaining great general surgeons. You know, take anything on, the more hopeless the better. I suppose a surgeon is rather like a lawyer. There’s no glory to be had in getting someone off if he’s obviously innocent The greater the guilt the greater the glory.”
“What is Mrs. Courtney-Briggs like? I presume he’s married. Does she show herself at the hospital?”
“Not very often, although she’s supposed to be a member of the League of Friends. She gave the prizes away last year when the Princess couldn’t come at the last moment Blonde, very smart Younger than C.B. but beginning to wear a bit now. Why do you ask? You don’t suspect Muriel Courtney-Briggs surely? She wasn’t even in the hospital the night Fallon died. Probably tucked up in bed in their very nice little place near Selborne. And she certainly hadn’t any motive for killing poor Pearce.”