“She wanted to protect you. She always wanted that. It wasn’t easy with the first murder. You were in Nightingale House; you had as much opportunity as anyone to interfere with the drip feed. But at least she could ensure that you had an alibi for the time of Fallon’s death. You were safely in Amsterdam. You couldn’t possibly have killed the second victim. Why, therefore, should you have killed the first? From the beginning of this investigation I decided that the two murders were connected. It was too much of a coincidence to postulate two killers in the same house at the same time. And that automatically excluded you from the list of suspects.”
“But why should anyone suspect me of killing either girl?”
“Because the motive we’ve imputed to Ethel Brumfett doesn’t make sense. Think about it A dying man came momentarily out of unconsciousness and saw a face bending over him. He opened his eyes and through his pain and delirium be recognized a woman. Sister Brumfett? Would you recognize Ethel Brumfett’s face after twenty-five years? Plain, ordinary, inconspicuous Brumfett? There’s only one woman in a million who has a face so beautiful and so individual that it can be recognized even in a fleeting glance across twenty-five years of memory. Your face. It was you and not Sister Brumfett who was Irmgard Grobel.”
She said quietly: “Irmgard Grobel is dead.”
He went on as if she had not spoken.
“It’s not surprising that Nurse Pearce never suspected for one moment that Grobel could be you. You’re the Matron, protected by a quasi-religious awe from the taint of human weakness, let alone human sin. It must have been psychologically impossible for her to think of you as a killer. And then, there were the words used by Martin Dettinger. He said it was one of the Sisters. I think I know how he made that mistake. You visit every ward in the hospital once a day, speak to nearly all the patients. The face he saw bending over him was not only clearly the face of Irmgard Grobel. He saw a woman wearing what to him was a Sister’s uniform, the short cape and wide triangular cap of the army nursing service. To his drug-muddled mind that uniform meant a Sister. It still means a Sister to anyone who has been nursed in an army hospital, and he had spent months in them.” She said again quietly: “Irmgard Grobel is dead.” “So he told Nurse Pearce much the same as he told his own mother. Mrs. Derringer wasn’t particularly interested. Why should she be? And then she received a hospital account and thought that there might be a way of saving herself a few pounds. If Mr. Courtney-Briggs hadn’t been greedy I doubt whether she would have taken it any further. But she did, and Courtney-Briggs was given an intriguing piece of information which he thought it worth taking some time and trouble to verify. We can guess what Heather Pearce thought She must have experienced much the same triumph and sense of power as when she saw Nurse Dakers stooping to pick up those pound notes fluttering on the path in front of her. Only this time someone a great deal more important and interesting than a fellow student would be in her power. It never occurred to her that the patient could be referring to a woman other than the Sister nursing him. But she knew she had to get proof, or at least assure herself that Detringer, who after all was a dying man, wasn’t deluded or hallucinated. So she spent her half-day on Thursday visiting the Westminster library and asked them for a book about the Felsenheim trial. They had to borrow it for her from another branch and she returned for it on Saturday. I think she learned enough from that book to convince herself that Martin Detringer knew what he was talking about I think that she spoke to Sister Brumfett on the Saturday night and that the Sister didn’t deny the charge. I wonder what price Pearce was asking? Nothing as commonplace or understandable or as reprehensible as direct payment for her silence. Pearce liked to exercise power; but even more she enjoyed indulging in moral rectitude. It must have been on Sunday morning that she wrote to the Secretary of the League for the Assistance of Fascist Victims. Sister Brumfett would be made to pay, but the money would go in regular installments to the League. Pearce was a great one for making the punishment fit the crime.” This time she was silent sitting there with her hands folded gently in her lap and looking expressionless into some unfathomable past. He said gently:
“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?”