“I expected you back two hours ago, Sergeant. What were you doing?”
“Extracting information by unorthodox means, sir.”
“You look as if the unorthodox means have been used on you.”
Masterson bit back the obvious retort. If the old man chose to be mysterious about his injury he wasn’t going to give him the gratification of showing curiosity.
“I was dancing until nearly midnight, sir.”
“At your age that shouldn’t be too exhausting. Tell me about the lady. She seems to have made an impression on you. You had an agreeable evening?”
Masterson could have retorted with reason that he had had one hell of an evening. He contented himself with an account of what he had learned. The exhibition tango was prudently forgotten. Instinct warned him that Dalgliesh might think it neither funny nor clever. But he gave an otherwise accurate account of the evening. He tried to keep it factual and unemotional but became aware that he was enjoying some of the telling. His description of Mrs. Dettinger was concise but caustic. Towards the end he hardly troubled to conceal his contempt and disgust of her. He felt that he was making rather a good job of it.
Dalgliesh listened in silence. His cocooned head was still bent over the file and Masterson got no hint of what he was feeling. At the end of the recital Dalgliesh looked up:
“Do you enjoy your work, Sergeant?”
“Yes sir, for most of the time.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“Was the question intended as a rebuke, sir?”
Masterson was aware that he was entering on dangerous ground but was unable to resist this first tentative step.
Dalgliesh, didn’t answer the question. Instead he said:
“I don’t think it’s possible to be a detective and remain always kind. But if you ever find that cruelty is becoming pleasurable in itself, then it’s probably time to stop being a detective.”
Masterson flushed and was silent. This from Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh who was so uncaring about his subordinates’ private life as to seem unaware that they had any; whose caustic wit could be as devastating as another man’s bludgeon. Kindness! And how kind exactly was he himself? How many of his notable successes had been won with kindness? He would never be brutal, of course. He was too proud, too fastidious, too controlled, too bloody inhuman in fact for anything so understandable as a little down-to-earth brutality. His reaction to evil was a wrinkle of the nose not a stamp of the foot But kindness! Tell that to the boys, thought Masterson.
Dalgliesh went on talking as if he said nothing remarkable.
“We’ll have to see Mrs. Dettinger again, of course. And we’ll want a statement Did you think she was telling the truth?”
“It’s difficult to tell. I cant think why she should lie. But she’s a strange woman and she wasn’t feeling too pleased with me at the time. It might give her some kind of perverse satisfaction to mislead us. She might have substituted Grobel’s name for one of the other defendants, for example.”
“So that the person her son recognized on the ward could have been any one of the Felsenbeim defendants, those who are still alive and unaccounted for. What exactly did her son tell her?”
“That’s the problem, sir. Apparently he gave her to understand that this German woman, Irmgard Grobel, was employed at the John Carpendar but she can’t recall his exact words. She thinks he said something like:
“This is a funny kind of hospital, ma, they’ve got Grobel here, working as one of the Sisters.”
Dalgliesh said: “Suggesting that it wasn’t the Sister who was actually nursing him, otherwise he’d presumably have said so- Except of course, that he was unconscious most of the time and may not have seen Sister Brumfett previously or appreciated that she was in charge of the ward. He wasn’t in any state to recognize the niceties of the hospital hierarchy.
According to his medical record he was either delirious or unconscious most of the time, which would make his evidence suspect even if he hadn’t inconveniently died. Anyway, his mother at first didn’t apparently take the story too seriously. She didn’t mention it to anyone at the hospital? Nurse Pearce, for example?“
“She says not. I think at the time Mrs. Dettinger’s main concern was to collect her son’s belongings and the death certificate and claim on the insurance.”
“Bitter, Sergeant?”
“Well, she’s paying nearly £2,000 a year for dancing lessons and she’s come to the end of her capital. These Delaroux people like payment in advance. I heard all about her finances when I took her home. Mrs. Dettinger wasn’t out to make trouble. But then she received Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s bill, and it occurred to her that she might use her son’s story to get a reduction. And she got one too. Fifty quid.”
“Which suggests that Mr. Courtney-Briggs is either more charitable then he had supposed or thought that the information was worth the money. Did he pay it over at once?”
“She says not. She first visited him at his Wimpole Street consulting rooms on the evening of Wednesday, January twenty-first. She didn’t get much joy on that occasion so she rang him up last Saturday morning. The receptionist told her that Mr. Courtney-Briggs was out of the country. She intended to ring again on the Monday but the check for fifty pounds came by the first post. There was no letter and no explanation, merely his compliment slip. But she got the message all right.”
“So he was out of the country last Saturday. Where, I wonder? Germany? That’s something to check, anyway.”
Masterson said, “It all sounds so unlikely, sir. And it doesn’t really fit.”
“No. We’re pretty certain who killed both those girls. Logically all the facts point to one person. And as you say, this new evidence doesn’t really fit in. If’s disconcerting when you scramble around in the dirt for a missing piece of the jigsaw and then find it’s part of a different puzzle.”
“So you don’t think it’s relevant, sir? I should hate to think that my evening’s exertions with Mrs. Dettinger were in vain.”
“Oh, it’s relevant. It’s exceedingly relevant. And we’ve found some corroboration. We’ve traced the missing library book. Westminster City Library were very helpful. Miss Pearce went to the Marylebone Branch on the afternoon of Thursday, 8th January, when she was off duty and asked if they had a book dealing with German war trials. She said she was interested in a trial at Felsenheim in November 1945. They couldn’t find anything in stock but they said they would make inquiries of other London libraries and suggested that she should come back or telephone them in a day or two… She telephoned on the Saturday morning. They told her that they’d been able to trace a book which dealt with the Felsenheim trial among others, and she called in for it that afternoon. On each visit she have her name as Josephine Fallon and presented Fallon’s ticket and the blue token. Normally, of course, they wouldn’t have noticed the name and address. They did so because the book had to be specially obtained from another library.”
“Was the book returned, sir?”
“Yes, but anonymously, and they cant say exactly when. It was probably on the Wednesday after Pearce died. Someone left it -on the non-fiction trolley. When the assistant went to fill up the trolley with recently returned books she recognized it and took it back to the counter to be registered and put on one side ready for return to its parent library. No one saw who returned it The library is particularly busy and people come in and out at will. Not everyone has a book to return or calls at the counter. It would be easy enough to bring in a book in a basket or a pocket and slip it among the others on the trolley. The assistant who found it had been on counter duty for most of the morning and afternoon and one of the junior staff had been replenishing the trolley. The girl was getting behind with the work so her senior went to give a hand. She noticed the book at once. That was at four thirty approximately. But it could have been put there at any time.”