Authors: P. D. James
She thought again about the money. Not about her own share. That was hardly likely to bring her happiness now. But even if they arrested her for murder, they couldn’t stop Mummy inheriting her share. No one could stop that. But somehow she must get hold of some cash urgently. Everyone knew that a will took months to prove. Would it look very suspicious or heartless if she went to Enid’s solicitor to explain how poor they were and to ask what could be arranged? Or would it be wiser to approach the bank? Perhaps the solicitor would send for her. Yes, of course he would. She and her mother were the next of kin. And as soon as the will was read, she could tactfully raise the question of an advance. Surely that would be natural enough? An advance of one hundred pounds wouldn’t be much to ask by someone who was going to inherit a share of thirty thousand.
Suddenly she could bear it no longer. The long tension broke. She wasn’t conscious of covering those last few stairs, of putting her key in the lock. At once she was in the flat and through to her mother’s room. Howling with fear and misery, crying as she had not cried since childhood, she hurled herself on her mother’s breast and felt around her the comfort and the unexpected strength of those brittle, shaking arms. The arms rocked her like a baby. The beloved voice cooed its reassurance. Under the cheap nightdress she smelt the soft familiar flesh.
“Hush, my darling. My baby. Hush. What is it? What’s happened. Tell me, darling.”
And Nurse Bolam told her.
Since his divorce two years earlier Dr. Steiner had shared a house in Hampstead with his widowed sister. He had his own
sitting room and kitchen, an arrangement which enabled Rosa and him to see little of each other, thus fostering the illusion that they got on well together. Rosa was a culture snob. Her house was the centre for a collection of resting actors, one-volume poets, aesthetes posing on the fringe of the ballet world and writers more anxious to talk about their craft in an atmosphere of sympathetic understanding than to practise it. Dr. Steiner did not resent them. He merely ensured that they ate and drank at Rosa’s expense, not his. He was aware that his profession had a certain cachet for his sister and that to introduce “my brother Paul—the famous psycho-analyst”—was in some measure a compensation for the low rent which he spasmodically paid and the minor irritations of propinquity. He would hardly have been housed so economically and comfortably had he been a bank manager.
Tonight Rosa was out. It was exasperating and inconsiderate of her to be missing on the one evening when he needed her company, but that was typical of Rosa. The German maid was out, too, presumably illicitly since Friday was not her half day. There was soup and salad put ready for him in his kitchen, but even the effort of heating the soup seemed beyond him. The sandwiches he had eaten without relish at the clinic had taken away his appetite but left him hungry for protein, preferably hot and properly cooked. But he did not want to eat alone. Pouring himself a glass of sherry he recognized his need to talk to someone—anyone—about the murder. The need was imperative. He thought of Valda.
His marriage to Valda had been doomed from the start, as any marriage must be when husband and wife have a basic ignorance of each other’s needs coupled with the illusion that they understand each other perfectly. Dr. Steiner had not been desolated by his divorce but he had been inconvenienced and
distressed and had been harried afterwards by an irrational sense of failure and guilt. Valda, on the other hand, apparently throve on freedom. When they met, he was always struck with her glow of physical well-being. They did not avoid each other, since meeting her ex-husband and discarded lovers with the greatest appearance of friendliness and good humour was what Valda meant when she talked about civilized behaviour. Dr. Steiner did not like or admire her. He liked the company of women who were well-informed, well-educated, intelligent and fundamentally serious. But these were not the kind of women he liked to go to bed with. He knew all about this inconvenient dichotomy. Its causes had occupied many expensive hours with his analyst. Unfortunately, knowing is one thing and changing is another, as some of his patients could have told him. And there had been times with Valda (christened Millicent) when he hadn’t really wanted to be different.
The telephone rang for about a minute before she answered and he told her about Miss Bolam against a background noise of music and clinking glasses. The flat was apparently full of people. He wasn’t even sure she had heard him.
“What is it?” he asked irritably. “Are you having a party?”
“Just a few chums. Wait while I turn down the gramophone. Now, what did you say?”
Dr. Steiner said it again. This time Valda’s reaction was entirely satisfactory.
“Murdered! No! Darling, how too frightful for you! Miss Bolam. Isn’t she that dreary old AO you hated so much? The one who kept trying to do you down over your travelling claims?”
“I didn’t hate her, Valda. In some ways I respected her. She had considerable integrity. Of course, she was rather obsessional, frightened of her own subconscious aggressions, possibly sexually frigid …”
“That’s what I said, darling. I knew you couldn’t bear her. Oh, Paulie, they won’t think you did it, will they?”
“Of course not,” said Dr. Steiner, beginning to regret his impulse to confide.
“But you always did say that someone should get rid of her.” The conversation was beginning to have a nightmare quality. The gramophone thudded its insistent bass to the treble cacophony of Valda’s party and the pulse in Dr. Steiner’s temple beat in unison. He was going to start one of his headaches.
“I meant that she should be transferred to another clinic, not bashed on the head with a blunt instrument.”
The hackneyed phrase sharpened her curiosity. Violence had always fascinated her. He knew that she saw in imagination a spatter of blood and brains.
“Darling, I must hear all about it. Why not come over?”
“Well, I was thinking of it,” said Dr. Steiner. He added cunningly: “There are one or two details I can’t give you over the phone. But if you’ve got a party, it’s rather difficult. Frankly, Valda, I’m not capable of being sociable just now. I’ve got one of my heads starting. This has all been a terrible shock. After all, I did more or less discover the body.”
“You poor sweet. Look, give me half an hour and I’ll get rid of the chums.”
The chums sounded to Dr. Steiner as if they were well entrenched and he said so.
“Not really. We were all going on to Toni’s. They can manage without me. I’ll give them a shove and you set off in about half an hour. All right?”
It was certainly all right. Replacing the receiver, Dr. Steiner decided that he would just have time to bathe and change in comfort. He pondered on a choice of tie. The headache
unaccountably seemed to have gone. Just before he left the house, the telephone rang. He felt a spasm of apprehension. Perhaps Valda had changed her mind about seeing off the chums and having some time alone together. That, after all, had been a recurring pattern in his marriage. He was irritated to find that the hand reaching for the receiver was not quite steady. But the caller was only Dr. Etherege to say that he was calling an emergency meeting of the Clinic Medical Committee for eight p.m. the following evening. In his relief Dr. Steiner, momentarily forgetting Miss Bolam, just saved himself in time from the folly of asking why.
If Ralfe and Sonia Bostock had lived in Clapham, their flat would have been called a basement. Since, however, it was in Hampstead, half a mile in fact from Dr. Steiner’s house, a small wooden notice, lettered with impeccable taste, directed one to the garden flat. Here they paid nearly twelve pounds a week for a socially acceptable address and the privilege of seeing a green sloping lawn from the sitting-room window. They had planted this lawn with crocuses and daffodils and in spring those plants which managed to bloom in the almost complete lack of sun at least fostered the illusion that the flat had access to a garden. In autumn, however, the view was less agreeable and dampness from the sloping soil seeped into the room. The flat was noisy. There was a nursery school two houses away and a young family in the ground-floor flat.
Ralfe Bostock, dispensing drinks to their carefully selected friends and raising his voice against the wail of bath-time tantrums, would say: “Sorry for the row. I’m afraid the intelligentsia have taken to breeding but not—alas—to controlling their brats.” He was given to malicious remarks, some of which were clever, but he overworked them. His wife lived in constant
apprehension that he would make the same witticism twice to the same people. There were few things more fatal to a man’s chances than the reputation for repeating his jokes.
Tonight he was out at a political meeting. She approved of the meeting which might be an important one for him and she did not mind being alone. She wanted time to think. She went into the bedroom and took off her suit, shaking it carefully and hanging it in the wardrobe, then put on a housecoat of brown velvet. Next she sat at her dressing table. Binding a crêpe bandage about her brow she began to cream the makeup from her face. She was more tired than she had realized and needed a drink, but nothing would deter her from her evening ritual. There was much to think about, much to plan. The grey-green eyes, ringed with cream, gazed calmly back at her from the glass. Leaning forward she inspected the delicate folds of skin beneath each eye, watching for the first lines of age. She was only twenty-eight, after all. There was no need to worry yet. But Ralfe was thirty this year. Time was passing. If they were to achieve anything, there was no time to lose.
She considered tactics. The situation would need careful handling and there was no room for mistakes. She had made one already. The temptation to slap Nagle’s face had proved irresistible, but it was still a mistake and possibly a bad one, too like vulgar exhibitionism to be safe. Aspiring administrative officers did not slap a porter’s face even when under strain, particularly if they wanted to create an impression of calm, authoritative competence. She remembered the look on Miss Saxon’s face. Well, Fredrica Saxon was in no position to be censorious. It was a pity that Dr. Steiner was there but it had all happened so quickly that she couldn’t be sure that he had really seen. The Priddy child was of no importance.
Nagle would have to go, of course, once she was appointed.
Here, too, she would have to be careful. He was an insolent devil, but the clinic could do much worse and the consultants knew it. An efficient porter made quite a difference to their comfort, especially when he was willing and able to carry out the many small repair jobs that were needed. It wouldn’t be a popular move if they had to wait for someone to come from the group engineer’s department every time a sash cord broke or a fuse needed replacing. Nagle would have to go, but she would put out feelers for a good replacement before taking any action.
The main concern at present must be to get the consultants’ support for her appointment. She could be sure of Dr. Etherege and his was the most powerful voice. But it wasn’t the only one. He would be retiring in six months’ time and his influence would be on the wane. If she were offered an acting appointment, and all went well, the Hospital Management Committee might not be in too much of a hurry to advertise the post. Almost certainly they would wait until the murder was either solved or the police shelved the case. It was up to her to consolidate her position in the intervening months. It wouldn’t do to take anything for granted. When there had been trouble at a unit, committees tended to make an outside appointment. There was safety in bringing in a stranger uncontaminated by the previous upset. The group secretary would be an influence there. It had been a wise move to see him last month and ask his advice about working for the diploma of the Institute of Hospital Administrators. He liked his staff to qualify and, being a man, he was flattered to be asked for advice. But he wasn’t a fool. He didn’t have to be. She was as suitable a candidate as the HMC were likely to find, and he knew it.
She lay back, relaxed, on her single bed, her feet raised on a pillow, her mind busy with the images of success. “My wife is administrative officer of the Steen Clinic.” So much more
satisfactory than, “Actually, my wife is working as a secretary at present. The Steen Clinic, as a matter of fact.”
And less than two miles away, in a mortuary in north London, Miss Bolam’s body, tight-packed as a herring in an ice box, stiffened slowly through the autumn night.
If there had to be a murder at the Steen, Friday was the most convenient day for it. The clinic did not open on Saturday so that the police were able to work in the building without the complications presented by the presence of patients and staff. The staff, presumably, were glad of two days’ grace in which to recover from the shock, determine at leisure what their official reaction should be and seek the comfort and reassurance of their friends.
Dalgliesh’s day began early. He had asked for a report from the local CID about the Steen burglary and this, together with typescripts of the previous day’s interviews, was waiting on his desk. The burglary had puzzled the local men. There could be no doubt that someone had broken into the clinic and that the fifteen pounds was missing. It was not so certain that these two facts were related. The local sergeant thought it odd that a casual thief had picked the one drawer which held cash while neglecting the safe and leaving untouched the silver inkstand in the medical director’s office. On the other hand, Cully had undoubtedly seen a man leaving the clinic and both he and
Nagle had alibis for the time of entry. The local CID were inclined to suspect Nagle of having helped himself to the cash while he was alone in the building but it had not been found on him and there was no real evidence. Besides, the porter had plenty of opportunities for dishonesty at the Steen if he were so inclined and nothing was known against him. The whole affair was puzzling. They were still working on it but weren’t very hopeful. Dalgliesh asked that any progress should be reported to him at once and set off with Sergeant Martin to examine Miss Bolam’s flat.