“We still have the local C.I.D. here, but they don’t come in so often now. They have been very kind to us students and I don’t think they suspect anyone. Poor Pearce wasn’t very popular, but if’s ridiculous to think that anyone here would want to harm her.”
Had the police really been kind, she wondered? They had certainly been very correct, very polite. They had produced all the usual reassuring platitudes about the importance of co-operating with them in solving this terrible tragedy, telling the truth at all times, keeping nothing back however trivial and unimportant it might seem. Not one of them had raised his voice: not one had been aggressive or intimidating. And all of them had been frightening. Their very presence in Nightingale House, masculine and confident, had been, like the locked door of the demonstration room, a constant reminder of tragedy and fear. Nurse Dakers had found Inspector Bailey the most frightening of them all. He was a huge, ruddy, moonfaced man whose encouraging and avuncular voice and manner were in unnerving contrast to his cold pig-like eyes. The questioning had gone on and on. She could still recall the interminable sessions, the effort of will necessary to meet that probing gaze.
“Now I’m told that you were the most upset of them all when Nurse Pearce died. She was a particular friend of yours perhaps?”
“No. Not really. Not a particular friend. I hardly knew her.”
“Well, there’s a surprise! After nearly three years of training with her? Living and working so closely together, I should have thought that you all got to know each other pretty well.”
She had struggled to explain.
“In some ways we do. We know each other’s habits. But I didn’t really know what she was like; as a person, I mean.” A silly reply. How else could you know anyone except as a person? And it wasn’t true. She had known Pearce. She had known her very well.
“But yon got on well together? There hadn’t been a quarrel or anything like that? No unpleasantness?”
An odd word. Unpleasantness. She had seen again that grotesque figure, teetering forward in agony, fingers scrabbling at the ineffectual air, the thin tubing stretching the mouth like a wound. No, there had been no unpleasantness.
“And the other students? They got on well with Nurse Pearce, too? There had been no bad blood as far as you know?”
Bad blood. A stupid expression. What was the opposite she wondered? Good blood? There was only good blood between us. Pearce’s good blood. She had answered:
“She hadn’t any enemies as far as I know. And if anyone did dislike her, they wouldn’t kill her.”
“So you all tell me. But someone did kill her, didn’t they? Unless the poison wasn’t intended for Nurse Pearce. She only played the part of the patient by chance. Did you know that Nurse Fallon had been taken ill that night?”
And so it had gone on. Questions about every minute of that last terrible demonstration. Questions about the lavatory disinfectant The empty bottle, wiped clean of finger-prints, had been quickly found by the police lying among the bushes at the back of the house. Anyone could have thrown it from a bedroom window or bathroom window in the concealing darkness of that January morning. Questions about her movements from the moment of first awakening. The constant reiteration in that minatory voice that nothing should be held back, nothing concealed.
She wondered whether the other students had been as frightened. The Burt twins had seemed merely bored and resigned, obeying the Inspector’s sporadic summons with a shrug of the shoulders and a weary, “Oh, God, not again!” Nurse Goodale had said nothing when she was called for questioning and nothing afterwards. Nurse Fallon had been equally reticent It was known that Inspector Bailey had interviewed her in the sick bay as soon as she was well enough to be seen. No one knew what had happened at that interview.
It was rumored that Fallon had admitted returning to Nightingale House early in the morning of the crime but had refused to say why. That would be very like Fallon. And now she had returned to Nightingale House to rejoin her set So far she hadn’t even mentioned Pearce’s death. Nurse Dakers wondered if and when she would; and, morbidly sensitive to the hidden meaning in every word, struggled on with her letter:
“We haven’t used the demonstration room since Nurse Pearce’s death but otherwise the set is continuing to work according to plan. Only one of the students, Diane Harper, has left school. Her father came to fetch her two days after Nurse Pearce died and the police didn’t seem to mind her leaving. We all thought it was silly of her to give up so near to her finals but her father has never been keen on her training as a nurse and she is engaged to be married anyway, so I suppose she thought it didn’t matter. No one else is thinking of leaving and there really isn’t the slightest danger. So please, darling, do stop worrying about me. Now I must tell you about tomorrow’s program.”
There was no need to go on drafting now. The rest of the letter would be easy. She read over what she had written and decided that it would do. Taking a fresh sheet of paper from the pad she began to write the final letter. With any luck she would just get it finished before the film ended and the twins put away their knitting and went to bed.
She scribbled quickly on and, half an hour later, her letter finished, saw with relief that the film had come to the last holocaust and the final embrace. At the same moment Nurse Goodale removed her reading spectacles, looked up from her work, and closed her book. The door opened and Julia Pardoe appeared.
“I’m back,” she announced, and yawned. “It was a lousy film. Anyone making tea?” No one answered but the twins stubbed their knitting-needles into the balls of wool and joined her at the door, switching off the television on their way. Pardoe would never bother to make tea if she could find someone else to do it and the twins usually obliged. As she followed them out of the sitting-room Nurse Dakers looked back at the silent, immobile figure of Fallon alone now with Madeleine Goodale. She had a sudden impulse to speak to Fallon, to welcome her back to the school, to ask after her health, or simply to say good night But the words seemed to stick in her throat, the moment passed, and the last thing she saw as she closed the door behind her was Fallon’s pale and individual face, blank eyes still fixed on the television set as if unaware that the screen was dead.
II
In a hospital, time itself is documented, seconds measured in a pulse beat, the drip of blood or plasma; minutes in the stopping of a heart; hours in the rise and fall of a temperature chart, the length of an operation. When the events of the night of 28th-29th January came to be documented there were few of the protagonists at the John Carpendar Hospital who were unaware what they had been doing or where they were at any particular moment of their waking hours. They might not choose to tell the truth, but at least they knew where the truth lay.
It was a night of violent but erratic storm, the wind varying in intensity and even in direction from hour to hour. At ten o’clock it was little more than a sobbing obbligato among the elms. An hour later it suddenly reached a crescendo of fury. The great elms around Nightingale House cracked and groaned under the onslaught, while the wind screamed among them like the cachinnation of devils. Along the deserted paths, the banks of dead leaves, still heavy with rain, shifted sluggishly then broke apart into drifts and rose in wild swirls like demented insects, to glue themselves against the black barks of the trees. In the operating theatre at the top of the hospital Mr. Courtney-Briggs demonstrated his imperturbability in the face of crisis by muttering to his attendant registrar that it was a wild night before bending his head again to the satisfying contemplation of the intriguing surgical problem which throbbed between the retracted lips of the wound. Below him in the silent and dimly lit wards the patients muttered and turned in their sleep as if conscious of the tumult outside. The radiographer, who had been called from home to take urgent X-rays of Mr. Courtney-Briggs’s patient, replaced the covers on the apparatus, switched out the lights and wondered whether her small car would hold the road. The night nurses moved silently among their patients testing the windows, drawing the curtains more closely as if to keep out some threatening and alien force. The porter on duty in the main gate lodge shifted uneasily in his chair then rose cramped to his feet and put a couple more chunks of coal on the fire. He felt in need of warmth and comfort in his isolation. The little house seemed to shake with every gust of the wind.