“I’ve known a few, but I’ve never been a villager. I know enough not to generalise…well, not to over-generalise.”
“You’re a Scot, aren’t you? I think you’ll have your fun. This is the surgery, though you might not think it.” She opened a door without ceremony and called: “Raymond. Here’s Scotland Yard. I’ll leave you to it.”
She withdrew and Macdonald crossed a small waiting-room to an open door as a voice called, “Come right in.”
Macdonald went in and saw a leanish, pleasant-faced fellow sitting at a desk covered in sheets of manuscript.
“Good day,” said Ferens. “Do you ever have hay fever?”
“No. Never,” said Macdonald firmly, “so if you want a guinea-pig you’ll have to buy one.”
“They’re no good for this. Still. Sit down. What’s your trouble?”
“Miss Monica Torrington, deceased.”
“Congratulations. Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever used the woman’s proper name to me? ‘Sister’s this and that’ they say. ‘Sister Monica’…A compound redolent of nunnery and hospital ward. It’s hypnotic. I was hoping that Peel would discover her real name was Maggie…or Maudie.”
“It wasn’t,” said Macdonald. “Her name was Monica Emily. Born 1888 in Kilburn, London, N.W.6. Daughter of a greengrocer, one Albert Torrington, a bandsman in the Salvation Army. A very good chap, I understand. We’ve found some of his one-time neighbours. He had five daughters: Monica, Ursula, Teresa, Dorcas, and Lois.”
“Well, well. You’ve been very diligent.”
“We’ve got the chaps to do the looking up,” said Macdonald. “That sort of thing’s easy. Now—”
“Yes. I know. But just tell me this. Did Albert, Ursula, Teresa, Dorcas, or Lois ever leave Monica a nice little packet?”
“No. Not by testamentary disposition. Besides, they’re not all dead: or at any rate Somerset House has no record of the deaths of Dorcas or Lois and it’s believed they all remained single.”
“Did they? Singleness evidently ran in the family. Before you start the Torquemada effect on me, give me some further gen on the woman’s background. I’m enormously interested.”
“Born in Kilburn in 1888—if that conveys anything to you,” said Macdonald. “Went to the National elementary school, called Board School in those days. Left at the age of eleven and became a nursemaid in ‘good service.’ Which meant wages of £10 a year. We’ve got all this from an octogenarian charlady who is still going strong and earning good money. In 1914 Monica Emily became a V.A.D. She must have been an educable girl, and she’d done well as a children’s ‘Nanny.’ In 1917 she was appointed as assistant at an orphanage in Watford. In 1921 she was appointed assistant Warden of Gramarye. She was then thirty-three—”
“And passing rich on £48 a year,” murmured Ferens. “Thanks very much for telling me. It’s very enlightening: did you hear anything about her mother?”
“The mother, according to our octogenarian, was very respectable, very thrifty, a holy terror to live with, and believed that sparing the rod spoilt the child. She belonged to one of those obscure religious sects, probably the Peculiar People.” He broke off and then added: “I know it’s a perfect text-book case: jam to any psychiatrist who dabbles in writing, but I’d like to say this. You’ve noticed for yourself that the ‘Sister Monica’ business almost hypnotised the people in this village. It’s been going on for a long time. You, as a newcomer, contrived to see it objectively, so perhaps you will understand me when I say that not only do I refuse to be hypnotised by the Sister Monica stuff, I also refuse to be obsessed by the psychiatrist’s approach. A woman named Monica Emily Torrington was drowned in the mill stream here, and I’m not going to get that woman muddled up with halos or lamps or complexes or inhibitions or defence mechanisms, or any of the other jargon which is two-a-penny to-day.”
“Duly noted,” said Ferens, “but I’d like to ask one question. If you don’t believe a person’s background affects their mentality in riper years, why have you bothered to collect all that information about her childhood and upbringing?”
“I didn’t say there was no effect. What I do want to keep clear in my mind is that her death occurred here and she’d been living here for thirty years. This is a local problem. I don’t go back to Kilburn to discover why the woman was found drowned at Milham in the Moor.”
“I got you,” said Ferens. “You’re doing what the bomber pilots did, weaving to avoid the flak till you get a pointer on the target.”
“Very neatly put. Now I know that you have only been here three months, but I should be very glad if you would give me your own opinion of Miss Torrington, as far as you formed an opinion.”
“Oh, I formed an opinion all right. I disliked her at sight. It was the religious pose which got my goat.” He hesitated, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and pushed it across to Macdonald. “Stop me if I get too verbose. Medical men see a lot of nurses. I respect nurses: they work damned hard and up till now haven’t had much of a deal. But unfortunately there has been in times past a tendency for a nurse’s training to develop, in some of them, the quality of tyrants: it made them dominate their patients, their probationers, their patients’ relatives—everybody they have power over. And when that realisation of power is reinforced by a belief they’re chosen vessels in the religious sense, I’m very allergic to it. My first impression of Miss Torrington was that she had the dominating power of the worst type of old-fashioned hospital matron, plus the religious fanaticism which makes the most hypocritical sort of egoist.”
“Were you satisfied for her to be Warden of that home?”
Raymond Ferens thumped the desk with his fists. “It wasn’t my business. Do get that clear. If I’d had any evidence at all that the children were ill-treated, I’d have raised Cain about it. I hadn’t any
