Authors: P. D. James
“Thank you,” said Dalgliesh gravely. “You haven’t any other confessions to pass on, I suppose? Or have you a conscientious objection to handing over an unfortunate psychopath to justice?”
She laughed, pulling on her coat and tying the scarf over her dark, springing hair.
“Oh, no! If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I don’t like murder and I’m quite law-abiding, really. But I didn’t know we were talking about justice. That’s your word. Like Portia, I feel that in the course of justice none of us would see salvation. Please, I would much rather pay for my own coffee.”
She doesn’t want to feel I bought information from her, thought Dalgliesh, not even a shilling’s worth. He resisted the temptation to say that the coffee could come from expenses,
wondering a little at this impulse to sarcasm which she aroused in him. He liked her but there was something about her certainty, her self-sufficiency, which he found irritating. Perhaps what he felt was envy.
As they left the café, he asked her whether she was on her way to the Steen.
“Not today. I don’t have a session on Monday mornings. But I shall be there tomorrow.”
She thanked him formally for the coffee and they parted. He turned eastwards towards the Steen and she disappeared in the direction of the Strand. As he watched her slim, dark figure swinging out of sight, he pictured Cully creeping through the night with his pathetic bundle, half petrified with fright. He was not surprised that the old porter had confided so fully in Fredrica Saxon; in Cully’s place, he would probably have done the same. She had, thought Dalgliesh, given him a great deal of interesting information. But what she hadn’t been able to give him was an alibi for Dr. Baguley or for herself.
Mrs. Bostock, shorthand notebook at the ready, sat beside Dr. Etherege’s chair, her elegant legs crossed at the knees and her flamingo head lifted to receive, with becoming gravity, the medical director’s instructions.
“Superintendent Dalgliesh has telephoned to say that he will be here shortly. He wants to see certain members of the staff again and has asked for an interview with me before lunch.”
“I don’t see how you can fit him in before lunch, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock repressively. “There’s the Professional Staff Committee at two-thirty and you haven’t had time to look at the agenda. Dr. Talmage from the States is booked for twelve-thirty and I was hoping for an hour’s dictation from eleven a.m.”
“That will have to wait. The superintendent will be taking up a great deal of your own time, I’m afraid. He has some questions about the working of the clinic.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Doctor. Do you mean he’s interested in the general administrative arrangements?” Mrs. Bostock’s tone was a nice blend of surprise and disapproval.
“Apparently so,” replied Dr. Etherege. “He mentioned the appointments diary, the diagnostic index, the arrangements for registering incoming and outgoing post and the medical-record system. You had better deal with him personally. If I want to dictate, I’ll send for Miss Priddy.”
“I’ll do what I can to help, naturally,” said Mrs. Bostock. “It’s unfortunate that he should have picked one of our busiest mornings. It would be simpler to arrange a programme for him if I knew what he had in mind.”
“We should all like to know that, I imagine,” replied the medical director. “I should just answer his questions as fully as you can. And please get Cully to ring me as soon as he wants to come up.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock, recognizing defeat. And took her leave.
Downstairs, in the ECT room, Dr. Baguley twitched himself into his white coat, helped by Nurse Bolam.
“Mrs. King will be here for her LSD treatment on Wednesday as usual. I think it will be best if we give it in one of the PSW rooms on the third floor. Miss Kettle isn’t in on Wednesday evenings, is she? Have a word with her. Alternatively we could use Miss Kallinski’s room or one of the small interviewing rooms at the back.”
Nurse Bolam said: “It won’t be so convenient for you, Doctor. It means coming up two flights when I phone.”
“That isn’t going to kill me. I may look in my dotage but I still have the use of my legs.”
“There’s the question of a bed, Doctor. I suppose we could put up one of the recovery stretchers from the ECT clinic.”
“Get Nagle to see to it. I don’t want you alone in that basement.”
“I’m not in the least frightened, really, Dr. Baguley.”
Dr. Baguley lost his temper.
“For God’s sake, use your brain, Nurse. Of course you’re frightened! There’s a murderer loose somewhere in this clinic and no one—except one person—is going to be happy about staying alone for any length of time in the basement. If you really aren’t frightened, then have the good sense to conceal the fact, especially from the police. Where’s Sister? In the general office?”
He picked up the receiver and dialled jerkily. “Sister? Baguley here. I’ve just told Nurse Bolam that I don’t feel happy about using the basement room for LSD this week.”
Sister Ambrose’s voice came back clearly: “Just as you like, Doctor, of course. But if the basement is more convenient and we could get a relief nurse from one of the general hospitals in the group for the ECT clinic, I should be quite happy to stay downstairs with Nurse Bolam. We could special Mrs. King together.”
Dr. Baguley said shortly: “I want you in the ECT clinic as usual, Sister, and the LSD patient will go upstairs. I hope that’s finally understood.”
In the medical director’s room two hours later, Dalgliesh placed three black metal boxes on Dr. Etherege’s desk. The boxes, which had small round holes punched in each of the shorter sides, were packed with buff-coloured cards. It was the clinic diagnostic index. Dalgliesh said: “Mrs. Bostock has explained this to me. If I’ve understood her correctly, each of these cards represents a patient. The information on the case
record is coded and the patient’s code punched on the card. The cards are punched with even rows of small holes and the space between each hole is numbered. By punching any number with the hand machine I cut out the card between the two adjacent holes to form an oblong slit. If this metal rod is then inserted through, say, hole number 20 on the outside of the box, and pushed right through the cards and the box is rotated, any card which has been punched through that number will stand out. It is, in fact, one of the simplest of the many punch-card systems on the market.”
“Yes. We use it principally as a diagnostic index and for research.” If the medical director was surprised at Dalgliesh’s interest, he made no sign.
The superintendent went on: “Mrs. Bostock tells me that you don’t code from the case record until the patient has completed treatment and that the system was started in 1952. That means that patients at present attending won’t yet have a card—unless, of course, they were treated here earlier—and that patients who completed treatments before 1952 aren’t included.”
“Yes. We should like to include the earlier cases, but it’s a question of staff time. The coding and punching are time-consuming and it’s the kind of job that gets put on one side. At present we’re coding the February 1962 discharges, so we’re quite a bit behind.”
“But once the patient’s card is punched, you can select any diagnosis or category of patient at will?”
“Yes, indeed.” The medical director gave his slow, sweet smile. “I won’t say that we can pick out immediately all the indigenous depressives with blue-eyed grandmothers who were born in wedlock because we haven’t coded information about grandparents. But anything coded can be extracted without trouble.”
Dalgliesh laid a slim manilla file on the desk. “Mrs. Bostock has lent me the coding instructions. I see that you code sex, age, marital status, address by local authority area, diagnosis, consultant who treated the patient, dates of first and subsequent attendances and a considerable amount of detail about symptoms, treatment and progress. You also code social class. I find that interesting.”
“It’s unusual, certainly,” replied Dr. Etherege. “Chiefly, I suppose, because it can be a purely subjective assessment. But we wanted it because it’s sometimes useful in research. As you see we use the Registrar-General’s classes. They’re accurate enough for our purposes.”
Dalgliesh ran the thin metal rod through his fingers.
“So I could select, for example, the cards of patients in class one who were treated eight to ten years ago, were married with a family and were suffering from, say, sexual aberration, kleptomania or any other socially unacceptable personality disorder.”
“You could,” admitted the medical director quietly. “But I can’t see why you should want to.”
“Blackmail, Doctor. It occurs to me that we have here a neatly contrived apparatus for the pre-selection of a victim. You push through the rod and out pops your card. The card bears a number on the top right-hand corner. And down in the basement record room the medical record is filed and waiting.”
The medical director said: “This is nothing but guesswork. There isn’t a shred of evidence.”
“There’s no proof, certainly, but it’s a reasonable possibility. Consider the facts. On Wednesday afternoon Miss Bolam saw the group secretary after the House Committee meeting and told him all was well at the clinic. At twelve-fifteen on Friday morning she telephoned to ask for an urgent visit because ‘something is going on here that he ought to know about.’ It was
something serious and continuing and something that started before her time here, that is, more than three years ago.”
“Whatever it was, we’ve no evidence that it was the reason for her death.”
“No.”
“In fact, if the murderer wanted to prevent Miss Bolam seeing Lauder, he left it rather late. There was nothing to stop the group secretary turning up here any time after one o’clock.”
Dalgliesh said: “She was told over the telephone that he couldn’t arrive until after the JCC meeting that evening. That leads us to ask who could have overheard the telephone call. Cully was officially on the board, but he was unwell most of the day and, from time to time, other members of the staff took over, sometimes only for a few minutes. Nagle, Mrs. Bostock, Miss Priddy and even Mrs. Shorthouse all say that they helped on the board. Nagle thinks he took over for a short time at midday before he went out for his lunchtime beer but says that he can’t be sure. Nor can Cully. No one admits to having put through this particular call.”
“They might not know if they had,” replied Dr. Etherege. “We’re insistent that the operator doesn’t listen in to calls. That, after all, is important in our work. Miss Bolam may have merely asked for group offices. She must put through calls fairly often to the finance and supplies departments as well as the group secretary. The operator couldn’t know there was anything special about this call. She might even have asked for an outside line and put through the call herself. That is possible, of course, with the PABX system.”
“But it could still be overheard by the person on the board.”
“If he plugged in, I suppose it could.”
Dalgliesh said: “Miss Bolam told Cully late in the afternoon that she was expecting Mr. Lauder and she may have
mentioned the visit to other people. We don’t know. No one will admit to having been told except Cully. In the circumstances, that isn’t perhaps surprising. We’re not going to get much further with it at present. What I must do now is to find out what Miss Bolam wanted to tell Mr. Lauder. One of the first possibilities to be considered in a place like this must be blackmail. God knows that’s continuing and it’s serious enough.”
The medical director did not speak for a moment. Dalgliesh wondered whether he was contemplating a further remonstrance, selecting appropriate words to express concern or disbelief. Then he said quietly: “Of course it’s serious. There’s no point in wasting time discussing just how serious. Obviously, having thought up this theory, you have to carry through your investigation. Any other course of action would be most unfair to the members of my staff. What do you want me to do?”
“To help me select a victim. Later, perhaps, to make some telephone calls.”
“You appreciate, Superintendent, that the case records are confidential?”
“I’m not asking to see a single case record. But if I did, I don’t think either you or the patient need worry. Shall we get started? We can take out our class one patients. Perhaps you would call out the codes for me.”
A considerable number of the Steen patients were in class one. Upper-class neuroses catered for only, thought Dalgliesh. He surveyed the field for a moment and then said: “If I were the blackmailer, would I choose a man or a woman? It would depend on my own sex, probably. A woman might pick on a woman. But, if it’s a question of a regular income, a man is probably a better bet. Let’s take out the males next. I imagine our victim will live out of London. It
would be risky to select an ex-patient who could too easily succumb to the temptation to pop into the clinic and let you know what was going on. I think I’d select my victim from a small town or village.”
The medical director said: “We only coded the country if it were an out-London address. London patients are coded by borough. Our best plan will be to take out all the London addresses and see what’s left.”
This was done. The number of cards still in the survey was now only a few dozen. Most of the Steen patients, as might be expected, came from the county of London. Dalgliesh said: “Married or single? It’s difficult to decide whether one or the other would be most vulnerable. Let’s leave it open and start on the diagnosis. This is where I need your help particularly, Doctor. I realize this is highly confidential information. I suggest that you call out the codes for the diagnoses or symptoms which might interest a blackmailer. I don’t want details.”
Again the medical director paused. Dalgliesh waited patiently, metal rod in hand, while the doctor sat in silence, the code book open before him. He seemed not to be seeing it. After a minute he roused himself and focused his eyes on the page. He said quietly: “Try codes 23, 68, 69 and 71.” There were now only eleven cards remaining. Each of them bore a case-record number on the top right-hand margin.