Authors: P. D. James
Dr. Steiner winced and shut his eyes. But his patient, happily engaged in his favourite hobby of talking about himself, seemed not to have heard. Mr. Burge’s high whine had not, in fact, faltered for the past twenty minutes.
“I don’t pretend I’m an easy person. I’m not, I’m a complicated devil. That’s something which Theda and Sylvia have never understood. The roots of it go deep of course. You remember that session we had in June? Some pretty basic stuff came out then, I thought.”
His therapist did not recall the session in question but was unconcerned. With Mr. Burge pretty basic stuff was invariably near the surface and could be trusted to emerge. An unaccountable peace fell. Dr. Steiner doodled on his notepad, regarded his doodle with interest and concern, looked at it again with the pad held upside down and became for a moment more preoccupied
with his own subconscious than with that of his patient. Suddenly he became aware of another sound from outside, faint at first and then becoming louder. Somewhere, a woman was screaming. It was a horrible noise, high, continuous and completely animal. Its effect on Dr. Steiner was peculiarly unpleasant. He was naturally timid and highly strung. Although his job involved him in the occasional emotional crises, he was more adept at circumventing than coping with an emergency.
Fear gave vent to irritation and he sprang from his chair exclaiming: “No! Really, this is too bad! What’s Miss Bolam doing? Isn’t anyone supposed to be in charge here?”
“What’s up?” inquired Mr. Burge, sitting up like a jack-in-the-box and dropping his voice half an octave to its more normal tone.
“Nothing. Nothing. Some woman having an attack of hysteria, that’s all. Stay where you are. I’ll be back,” commanded Dr. Steiner.
Mr. Burge collapsed again but with eye and ear cocked for the door. Dr. Steiner found himself in the hall.
Immediately a little group swung round to face him. Jennifer Priddy, the junior typist, was clinging to one of the porters, Peter Nagle, who was patting her shoulder in embarrassed pity and looking puzzled. Mrs. Shorthouse was with them. The girl’s screams were subsiding into whimpers but her whole body was shaking and she was deathly pale.
“What’s the matter?” asked Dr. Steiner sharply. “What’s wrong with her?”
Before anyone had a chance to reply, the door of the ECT room opened and Dr. Baguley came out followed by Sister Ambrose and his anaesthetist, Dr. Mary Ingram. The hall seemed suddenly full of people. “Calm down, that’s a good girl,” said Dr. Baguley mildly. “We’re trying to run a clinic.”
He turned to Peter Nagle and asked in a low voice: “What’s the matter anyway?”
Nagle seemed about to speak when, suddenly, Miss Priddy gained control. Breaking free she turned to Dr. Baguley and said with absolute clearness: “It’s Miss Bolam. She’s dead. Someone’s killed her. She’s in the basement record room and she’s murdered. I found her. Enid’s been murdered!”
She clung to Nagle and began to cry again but more quietly. The dreadful shaking had ceased. Dr. Baguley said to the porter: “Take her into the treatment room. Make her lie down. Better give her something to drink. Here’s the key. I’ll be back.”
He made for the basement stairs and the rest, abandoning the girl to Nagle’s ministrations, followed in a jostling bunch. The basement at the Steen was well lit; all its rooms were used by the clinic which, like most psychiatric units, was chronically short of space. Here, below stairs, in addition to the boiler room, the telephone equipment room and the porters’ quarters, was the art therapy department, a medical-records storeroom and, at the front of the building, a treatment room for the lysergic-acid patients.
As the little group reached the bottom of the stairs, the door of this room opened and Nurse Bolam, Miss Bolam’s cousin, looked out briefly—a shadowy wraith in her white uniform against the darkness of the room behind. Her gentle, puzzled voice floated to them down the corridor. “Is there anything wrong? I thought I heard a scream a few minutes ago.”
Sister Ambrose said with brusque authority: “There’s nothing wrong, Nurse. Get back to your patient.” The white figure disappeared and the door was shut. Turning to Mrs. Shorthouse, Sister Ambrose went on: “And there’s nothing for you to do here, Mrs. Shorthouse. Please stay upstairs. Miss Priddy might like a cup of tea.”
Mrs. Shorthouse was heard to mutter rebelliously but beat a reluctant retreat. The three doctors, with Sister in tow, pressed on.
The medical-record room was on their right, between the porters’ restroom and the art-therapy department. The door was ajar and the light was on.
Dr. Steiner, who had become unnaturally aware of every small detail, noticed the key was in the lock. No one was about. The steel racks, with their tight-packed rows of manilla folders, ran ceiling high and at right angles to the door forming a series of narrow aisles, each lit by a fluorescent light. The four high windows were barred and dissected by the racks; it was an airless little room rarely visited and seldom dusted. The little group pushed its way down the first passage and turned left to where there was a small, windowless space clear of shelving and furnished with a table and chair where records could be sorted for filing or information copied from the notes without the need to take the file away. Here was chaos. The chair was overturned. The floor was littered with records. Some had their covers wrenched apart and their pages torn; others lay dumped in shifting layers beneath gaps on the shelves which looked too narrow to have held such a weight of paper. And in the middle of this confusion, like a plump and incongruous Ophelia afloat on a tide of paper, was the body of Enid Bolam. On her chest rested a heavy and grotesque image carved in wood, her hands folded about its base so that she looked, horribly, like a parody of motherhood with her creature ritually laid to her breast.
There could be no doubt that she was dead. Even in the midst of his fear and repugnance, Dr. Steiner could not miss that final diagnosis. Staring at the wooden figure he cried:
“Tippett! That’s his fetish! That’s the carving he’s so proud of. Where is he? Baguley, he’s your patient! You’d better handle this!” He looked round nervously as if expecting Tippett to materialize, arm raised to strike, the very personification of violence.
Dr. Baguley was kneeling by the body. He said quietly: “Tippett isn’t here this evening.”
“But he’s always here on Fridays! That’s his fetish! That’s the weapon!” Dr. Steiner wailed against such obtuseness.
Dr. Baguley gently lifted Miss Bolam’s left eyelid with his thumb. Without looking up he said: “We had a phone call from St Luke’s this morning. Tippett’s been admitted with pneumonia. Last Monday, I think. Anyway, he wasn’t here this evening.” Suddenly he gave an exclamation. The two women bent closer to the body. Dr. Steiner, who could not bring himself to watch the examination, heard him say: “She’s been stabbed, too. Through the heart, by the look of it, and with a black-handled chisel. Isn’t this one of Nagle’s, Sister?”
There was a pause and Dr. Steiner heard Sister’s voice: “It looks very like it, Doctor. All his tools have black handles. He keeps them in the porters’ restroom.” She added defensively. “Anyone could get at them.”
“It looks as if someone has.” There was the sound of Dr. Baguley getting to his feet. Still keeping his eyes on the body he said: “Phone Cully on the door, will you, Sister. Don’t alarm him, but tell him that no one is to be admitted or to leave the building. That includes the patients. Then get Dr. Etherege and ask him to come down. He’ll be in his consulting room, I imagine.”
“Oughtn’t we to phone the police?” Dr. Ingram spoke nervously and her pink face, so ridiculously like that of an angora rabbit, flushed pinker. It was not only in moments of high drama that one was apt to overlook the presence of Dr. Ingram
and Dr. Baguley stared blankly at her as if he had momentarily forgotten her existence.
“We’ll wait for the medical director,” he said. Sister Ambrose disappeared with a rustle of starched linen. The nearest telephone was just outside the record-room door but, insulated by tiers of paper from every outside noise, Dr. Steiner strained his ears in vain to hear the lift of the receiver or the murmur of Sister’s voice. He forced himself to look once more at Miss Bolam’s body. In life he had thought of her as graceless and unattractive and death had lent her no dignity. She lay on her back, her knees raised and parted so that there was an expanse of pink woollen knicker clearly visible, looking far more indecent than naked flesh. Her round, heavy face was quite peaceful. The two thick plaits which she wore wound above her forehead were undisturbed. But then, nothing had ever been known to disturb Miss Bolam’s archaic hairstyle. Dr. Steiner was reminded of his private fantasy that the thick, lifeless plaits exuded their own mysterious secretion and were fixed for ever, immutably, about that placid brow. Looking at her in the defenceless indignity of death, Dr. Steiner tried to feel pity and knew that he felt fear. But he was fully conscious only of repugnance. It was impossible to feel tenderly towards something so ridiculous, so shocking, so obscene. The ugly word spun unbidden to the surface of thought. Obscene! He felt a ridiculous urge to pull down her skirt, to cover that puffy, pathetic face, to replace the spectacles which had slipped from her nose and hung, askew, from her left ear. Her eyes were half closed, her small mouth pursed as if in disapproval of so undignified and unmerited an end. Dr. Steiner was not unfamiliar with that look: he had seen it on her face in life. He thought, “She looks as if she’s just confronting me with my travelling expense form.”
Suddenly he was seized with an intolerable need to giggle. Laughter welled up uncontrollably. He recognized that this horrible urge was the result of nervousness and shock but understanding did not bring control. Helplessly, he turned his back on his colleagues and fought for composure, grasping the edge of a filing rack and pressing his forehead for support against the cold metal, his mouth and nostrils choked with the musty smell of old records.
He was not aware of Sister Ambrose’s return but, suddenly, he heard her speaking.
“Dr. Etherege is on his way down. Cully is on the door and I’ve told him that no one is to leave. Your patient is making rather a fuss, Dr. Steiner.”
“Perhaps I’d better go up to him.” Faced with the need for decision, Dr. Steiner regained control. He felt that it was somehow important that he should stay with the others and be there when the medical director arrived; that it would be wise to ensure that nothing important was said or done out of his hearing. On the other hand he was not anxious to stay with the body. The record room, brightly lit as an operating theatre, claustrophobic and overheated, made him feel like a trapped animal. The heavy, close-packed shelves seemed to press upon him, compelling his eyes again and again to that lumpen figure on its paper bier.
“I’ll stay here,” he decided. “Mr. Burge must wait like everyone else.”
They stood together without speaking. Dr. Steiner saw that Sister Ambrose, white-faced but otherwise apparently unmoved, stood stockily calm with her hands loosely clasped over her apron. So must she have stood, time without number in nearly forty years of nursing, waiting at the bedside of a patient, quietly deferential, for the doctor’s orders. Dr. Baguley
pulled out his cigarettes, looked at the packet for a moment as if surprised to find it in his hand and replaced it in his pocket. Dr. Ingram seemed to be silently crying. Once, Dr. Steiner thought he heard her murmur: “Poor woman. Poor woman!”
Soon they heard footsteps and the medical director was with them followed by the senior psychologist, Fredrica Saxon. Dr. Etherege knelt down beside the body. He did not touch it but put his face close to Miss Bolam’s as if he were about to kiss her. Dr. Steiner’s sharp little eyes did not miss the glance that Miss Saxon gave Dr. Baguley, that instinctive move towards each other and the quick withdrawal.
“What happened?” she whispered. “Is she dead?”
“Yes. Murdered apparently.” Baguley’s tone was flat. Miss Saxon made a sudden gesture. For one unbelievable moment Dr. Steiner thought that she was going to cross herself.
“Who did it? Not poor old Tippett? That’s his fetish, surely.”
“Yes, but he isn’t here. He’s in St Luke’s with pneumonia.”
“Oh, my God! Then who?” This time she moved close to Dr. Baguley and they did not draw apart.
Dr. Etherege scrambled to his feet. “You’re right, of course. She’s dead. Stunned first apparently and then stabbed through the heart. I’ll go upstairs to phone the police and let the rest of the staff know. We’d better keep people together. Then we three had better search the building. Nothing must be touched of course.”
Dr. Steiner dared not meet Dr. Baguley’s eyes. Dr. Etherege in his role of the calm, authoritative administrator had always struck him as slightly ridiculous. He suspected that Baguley felt the same.
Suddenly they heard footsteps and the senior psychiatric social worker Miss Ruth Kettle appeared from behind the filing racks, peering at them short-sightedly.
“Ah, there you are, Director,” said Miss Kettle, in her fluting, breathless voice. (She was the only staff member, thought Dr. Steiner, to give Dr. Etherege that ridiculous title and God only knew why. It made the place sound like a nature-cure clinic.) “Cully told me you were down here. Not busy, I hope? I’m so distressed, I don’t want to make trouble but it really is too bad! Miss Bolam has booked me a new patient for ten on Monday. I’ve just seen the appointment in my diary, No consultation with me, of course. She knows I always see the Worrikers then. It’s quite deliberate, I’m afraid. You know, Director, someone has really got to do something about Miss Bolam.”
Dr. Baguley stood aside and said grimly: “Someone has.”
At the other end of the square, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh of the Criminal Investigation Department was attending the ritual autumn sherry party given by his publishers which had coincided with the third reprint of his first book of verse. He didn’t overestimate his talent or the success of his book. The poems, which reflected his detached, ironic and fundamentally restless spirit, had happened to catch a public mood. He did not believe that more than half a dozen would live even in his own affections. Meanwhile he found himself awash on the shallows of an unfamiliar sea in which agents, royalties and reviews were agreeable hazards. And now there was this party. He had thought of it without enthusiasm as something to be endured, but it had proved unexpectedly enjoyable. Messrs. Hearne and Illingworth were as incapable of providing poor sherry as they were of publishing poor work; Dalgliesh estimated that his publishers’ share of his own book’s profits had been drunk in the first ten minutes. Old Sir Hubert Illingworth had made his brief appearance in the course of it, had shaken Dalgliesh sadly by the hand and had
shuffled off muttering under his breath as if deploring that yet another writer on the firm’s list was exposing himself and his publisher to the doubtful gratifications of success. To him all writers were precocious children; creatures to be tolerated and encouraged but not overexcited in case they cried before bedtime.