Shroud for a Nightingale

the rim.

“Whisky. But what else? That’s what we’re asking ourselves, my dear fellow. That’s what we’re asking ourselves. One thing, it wasn’t a corrosive. No carbolic acid this time. I didn’t do the P.M. on that other girl by the way. Rikki Blake did that little job. A bad business. I suppose you’re looking for a connection between the two deaths?”

Dalgliesh said: “It’s possible.”

“Could be. Could be. This isn’t likely to be a natural death. But well have to wait for the toxicology. Then we may learn something. There’s no evidence of strangulation or suffocation. No external marks of violence come to that By the way, she was pregnant About three months gone, I’d say. I got a nice little ballottement there. Haven’t found that sign since I was a student The P.M. will confirm it of course.”

His little bright eyes searched the room. “No container for the poison apparently. If it were poison, of course. And no suicide note?”

That’s not conclusive evidence,“ said Dalgliesh.

“I know. I know. But most of them leave a little billet doux. They like to tell the tale, my dear fellow. They like to tell the tale. The mortuary van’s here by the way. I’ll take her away if you’re finished with her.”

“I’ve finished,” said Dalgliesh.

He waited and watched while the porters maneuvered their stretcher into the room and with brisk efficiency dumped the dead weight onto it Sir Miles fretted around them with the nervous anxiety of an expert who has found a particularly good specimen and must carefully supervise its safe transport It was odd that the removal of that inert mass of bone and tightening muscle, to which each in his different way had been ministering, should have left the room so empty, so desolate. Dalgliesh had noticed it before when the body was taken away; this sense of an empty stage, of props casually disposed and bereft of meaning, of a drained air. The recently dead had their own mysterious charisma; not without reason did men talk in whispers in their presence. But now she was gone, and there was nothing further for him to do in the room. He left the finger-print man annotating and photographing his finds, and went out into the passage.

II

It was now after eleven o’clock but the corridor was still very dark, the one clear window at the far end discernible only as a square haze behind the drawn curtains. Dalgliesh could at first just make out the shape and color of the three red fire buckets filled with sand and the cone of a fire extinguisher gleaming against the carved oak paneling of the walls. The iron staples, driven brutally into the woodwork, on which they were supported, were in incongruous contrast to the row of elegant light fittings in convoluted brass which sprang from the centers of the quatrefoil carvings. The fittings had obviously originally been designed for gas, but had been crudely adapted without imagination or skill to the use of electricity. The brass was unpolished and most of the delicate glass shades, curved in a semblance of flower petals, were missing or broken. In each of the deflowered clusters a single socket was now monstrously budded with one grubby and low-powered bulb whose faint and diffused light threw shadows across the floor and served only to accentuate the general gloom. Apart from the one small window at the end of the corridor there was little other natural light The huge window over the well of the staircase, a pre- Raphaelite representation in lurid glass of the expulsion from Eden, was hardly functional.

He looked into the rooms adjacent to that of the dead girl. One was unoccupied, with the bed stripped, the wardrobe door ajar and the drawers, lined with fresh newspaper, all pulled out as if to demonstrate the room’s essential emptiness. The other was in use but looked as if it had been hurriedly left; the bedclothes were carelessly thrown back and the bedside rug was rumpled. There was a little pile of textbooks on the bedside table and he opened the flyleaf of the first to hand and read the inscription, “Christine Dakers”. So this was the room of the girl who had found the body. He inspected the wall between the two rooms. It was thin, a light partition of painted hardboard which trembled and let out a soft boom as he struck it. He wondered whether Nurse Dakers had heard anything in the night. Unless Josephine Fallon had died instantly and almost soundlessly some indication of her distress must surely have penetrated this insubstantial partition. He was anxious to interview Nurse Christine Dakers. At present she was in the nurses’ sick bay suffering, so he was told, from shock. The shock was probably genuine enough, but even if it were not, there was nothing he could do about it. Nurse Dakers was for the moment effectively protected by her doctors from any questioning by the police.

He explored a little further. Opposite the row of nurses’ bedrooms was a suite of bathroom cubicles and lavatories leading out of a large square cloakroom fitted with four wash-basins, each surrounded by a shower curtain. Each of the bath cubicles had a small sash window fitted with opaque glass, inconveniently placed but not difficult to open. They gave a view of the back of the house and of the two short wings, each built above a brick cloister, which were incongruously grafted on to the main building. It was as if the architect, having exhausted the possibilities of Gothic revival and baroque, had decided to introduce a more contemplative and ecclesiastical influence. The ground between the cloisters was an overgrown jungle of laurel bushes and untended trees which grew so close to the house that some of the branches seemed to scrape the downstairs windows. Dalgliesh could see dim figures searching among the bushes and could hear the faint mutter of voices. The discarded bottle of disinfectant which had killed Heather Pearce had been found among these bushes and it was possible that a second container, its contents equally lethal, might also have been hurled in the dark hours from the same window. There was a nail brush on the bath rack and, reaching for it, Dalgliesh hurled it in a wide arc through the window and into the bushes. He could neither see nor hear its fall but a cheerful face appeared among the parted leaves, a hand was waved in salute and the two searching constables moved back deeper into the undergrowth.

He next made his way along the passage to the nurses’ utility room at the far end. Detective Sergeant Masterson was there with Sister Rolfe. Together they were surveying a motley collection of objects laid out before them on the working surface rather as if they were engaging in a private Kim’s game. There were two squeezed lemons; a bowl of granulated sugar; an assortment of mugs containing cold tea, the surface of the liquid mottled and puckered; and a delicate Worcester teapot with matching cup and saucer and milk jug. There was also a crumpled square of thin white wrapping paper bearing the words “Scunthorpe’s Wine Stores, 149, High Street, Heatheringfield” and a scribbled receipt smoothed out and held flat by a couple of tea canisters.

“She bought the whisky yesterday morning, sir,” Masterson said. “Luckily for us, Mr. Scunthrope is punctilious about receipts. That’s the bill and that’s the wrapping paper. So it looks as if she first opened the bottle when she went to bed yesterday.”

Dalgliesh asked: “Where was it kept?”

It was Sister Rolfe who replied. “Fallon always kept her whisky in her bedroom.”

Masterson laughed.

“Not surprising with the stuff costing nearly three quid a bottle.”

Sister Rolfe looked at him with contempt.

“I doubt whether that would worry Fallon. She wasn’t the type to mark the bottle.”

“She was generous?” asked Dalgliesh.

“No, merely unconcerned. She kept her whisky in her room because Matron asked her to.”

But brought it in here yesterday to prepare her late night drink, thought Dalgliesh. He stirred the sugar gently with his finger.

Sister Rolfe said: “That’s innocent The students tell me that they all used it when they made their morning tea. And the Burt twins, at least drank some of theirs.”

“But we’ll send it and the lemon to the lab just the same,” said Dalgliesh.

He lifted the lid from the little teapot and looked inside. Answering his unspoken question, Sister Rolfe said:

“Apparently Nurse Dakers made early tea in it The pot is Fallon’s of course. No one else has early tea in antique Worcester.”

“Nurse Dakers made tea for Nurse Fallon before she knew that the girl was dead?”

“No, afterwards. It was a purely automatic reaction, I imagine. She must have been in shock. After all, she had