“Did you give her any details about how the blackmail was organized?”
“I told her that my husband had sent fifteen pounds a month in an envelope addressed in green ink. That’s when she became suddenly very anxious that I should visit the clinic or at least leave my name. It was rude of me to ring off without ending the conversation but I suddenly became frightened. I don’t know why. And I had said all that I meant to say. One of the chairs in the restroom was vacant by then, so I sat down for half an hour until I felt better. Then I went straight to Charing Cross and had some coffee and sandwiches in the buffet there and waited for my train home. I read about the murder in the paper on Saturday and I’m afraid I took it for granted that one of the other victims—for there must have been others, surely—had taken that way out. I didn’t connect the crime with my telephone call, at least, not at first. Then I began to wonder whether it might not be my duty to let the police know what had been going on at that dreadful place. Yesterday I talked to my husband about it and we decided to do nothing in a hurry. We thought it might be best to wait and see whether we received any further calls from the blackmailer. I wasn’t very happy about our silence. There haven’t been many details of the murder in the papers, so I don’t know what exactly happened. But I did realize that the blackmail might be in some way connected with the crime and that the police would wish to know about it. While I was still worrying about what to do, Dr. Etherege telephoned. You know the rest. I’m still wondering how you managed to trace me.”
“We found you in the same way as the blackmailer picked out Colonel Fenton, from the clinic diagnostic index and the medical record. You mustn’t think that they don’t look after their confidential papers at the Steen. They do. Dr. Etherege is very distressed indeed about the blackmail. But no system is completely proof against clever and deliberate wickedness.”
“You will find him, won’t you?” she asked. “You will find him?”
“Thanks to you, I think we shall,” Dalgliesh replied.
As he held out his hand to say good-bye, she suddenly asked: “What was she like, Superintendent? I mean the woman who was murdered. Tell me about Miss Bolam.”
Dalgliesh said: “She was forty-one years old. Not married. I never saw her alive but she had light-brown hair and blue-grey eyes. She was rather stout, wide browed, thin mouthed. She was an only child and both her parents were dead. She lived rather a lonely life but her church meant a great deal to her and she was a Guide captain. She liked children and flowers. She was conscientious and efficient but not very good at understanding people. She was kind when they were in trouble but they thought her rigid, humourless and censorious. I think they were probably right. She had a great sense of duty.”
“I am responsible for her death. I have to accept that.”
Dalgliesh said gently: “That’s nonsense, you know. Only one person is responsible and, thanks to you, we shall get him.”
She shook her head. “If I had come to you in the first place or even had the courage to turn up at the clinic instead of telephoning, she would be alive today.”
Dalgliesh thought that Louise Fenton deserved better than to be pacified with easy lies. And they would have brought no comfort. Instead he replied: “I suppose that could be true. There are so many ‘ifs.’ She would be alive today if her group secretary had cancelled a meeting and hurried to the clinic, if she herself had gone at once to see him, if an old porter hadn’t had stomach ache. You did what you thought right and no one can do more.”
“So did she, poor woman,” replied Mrs. Fenton. “And look where it led her.”
She patted Dalgliesh briefly on the shoulder, as if it were he who needed the comfort and reassurance.
“I didn’t mean to bore you. Please forgive me. You’ve been very patient and kind. Might I ask one more question? You said that, thanks to me, you would get this murderer. Do you know now who it is?”
“Yes,” said Dalgliesh. “I think I now know who it is.”
7
Back in his office at the Yard just over two hours later, Dalgliesh talked over the case with Sergeant Martin. The file lay open on the desk before him.
“You got corroboration of Mrs. Fenton’s story all right, sir?”
“Oh, yes. The colonel was quite forthcoming. Now that he’s recovered from the twin ordeals of his operation and the confession to his wife, he’s inclined to take both experiences rather lightly. He even suggested that the request for money could have been genuine and that it was reasonable to assume that it was. I had to point out that a woman has been murdered before he faced the realities of the situation. Then he gave me the full story. It agreed with what Mrs. Fenton had told me except for one interesting addition. I give you three guesses.”
“Would it be about the burglary? It was Fenton, I suppose?”
“Damn you, Martin, you might make an effort sometimes to look surprised. Yes, it was our colonel. But he didn’t take the fifteen pounds. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. The money was his, after all. He admits himself that he would have taken it back if he’d seen it, but, of course, he didn’t. He was there for quite another purpose, to get hold of that medical record. He was a bit out of his depth in most things but he did realize that the medical record was the only real evidence of what happened when he was a patient at the Steen. He mucked up his burglary attempt, of course, despite having practised glass-cutting in his greenhouse, and made an undignified exit when he heard Nagle and Cully arriving. He got nowhere near the record he wanted. He assumed it was in one of the files in the general office and managed to prise those open. When he saw that the records were filed numerically, he knew he couldn’t succeed. He had long forgotten his clinic number. I expect he put it firmly out of his mind when he felt he was cured.”
“Well, the clinic did that for him, anyway.”
“He doesn’t admit it, I can tell you. I believe that’s not uncommon with psychiatric patients. It must be rather disheartening for psychiatrists. After all, you don’t get surgical patients claiming that they could have performed their own operation given half a chance. No, the colonel isn’t feeling particularly grateful to the Steen nor inclined to give the clinic much credit for keeping him out of trouble. I suppose he could be right. I don’t imagine that Dr. Etherege would claim that you can do a great deal for a psychiatric patient in four months which was the length of time Fenton attended. His cure—if you can call it that—probably had something to do with leaving the army. It’s difficult to judge whether he welcomed that or dreaded it. Anyway, we’d better resist the temptation to be amateur psychologists.”
“What sort of man is the colonel, sir?”
“Small. Probably looks smaller because of his illness. Sandy hair; bushy eyebrows. Rather like a small, fierce animal glaring out from its hole. A much weaker personality than his wife, I’d say, despite Mrs. Fenton’s apparent frailty. Admittedly it’s difficult to be at one’s best lying in a hospital bed wearing a striped bed jacket and with a formidable Sister warning one to be a good boy and not talk too long. He wasn’t very helpful about the telephone voice. He says that it sounded like a woman and it never occurred to him that it mightn’t be. On the other hand he wasn’t surprised when I suggested that the voice could have been disguised. But he’s honest and, obviously, he can’t go further than that. He just doesn’t know. Still, we’ve got the motive. This is one of those rare cases in which knowing why is knowing who.”
“Are you applying for a warrant?”
“Not yet. We’re not ready. If we don’t go carefully now, the whole case could come apart in our hands.”
Again he was visited by the chilling presentiment of disaster. He found himself analysing the case as if he had already failed. Where had it gone wrong? He had shown his hand to the murderer when he had taken the clinic diagnostic index so openly into the medical director’s room. That fact would be round the clinic quickly enough. He had meant it to be. There came a time when it was useful to frighten your
man. But was this killer the kind who could be frightened into betraying himself? Had it been an error of judgement to move so openly?
Suddenly Martin’s plain, honest face looked irritatingly bovine as he stood there unhelpfully waiting for instructions. Dalgliesh said: “You went to the Priddys’ place, I suppose. Well, let’s have the dirt about that. The girl is married, I suppose?”
“There’s no doubt about that, sir. I was there earlier this evening and I had a chat with the parents. Luckily Miss Priddy was out, fetching fish and chips for supper. They’re in quite poor circumstances.”
“That’s a non sequitur. However, go on.”
“There isn’t much to report. They live in one of those terrace houses leading down to the southern railway line in Balham. Everything’s very comfortable and neat but there’s no television or anything like that. I suppose their religion’s against it. Both the Priddys are over sixty, I reckon. Jennifer’s the only child and her mother must have been more than forty when she was born. It’s the usual story about the marriage. I was surprised they told me but they did. The husband’s a warehouseman; used to work with the girl at her last job. Then there was a baby on the way so they had to get married.”
“It’s almost pitiably common. You’d think that her generation, who think they know all the answers about sex, would make themselves familiar with a few basic facts. However, we’re told these little mishaps don’t worry anyone these days.”
Dalgliesh was shocked by the bitterness in his own voice. Was it really necessary, he wondered, to protest quite so vehemently about so common a little tragedy? What was happening to him?
Martin said stolidly: “They worry people like the Priddys. These kids get themselves into trouble but it’s usually the despised older generation who have to cope. The Priddys did their best. They made the kids marry, of course. There isn’t much room in the house but they gave up the first floor and made it into a small flat for the young couple. Very nicely done it was too. They showed me.”
Dalgliesh thought how much he disliked the expression “young couple,” with its cosy undertones of dewy-eyed domesticity, its echo of disillusion.
“You seem to have made a hit in your brief visit,” he said.
“I liked them, sir. They’re good people. The marriage didn’t last, of course, and I think that they wonder now whether they did the right thing in forcing it. The chap left Balham over two years ago and they don’t know where he is now. They told me his name and I saw his photograph. He’s got nothing to do with the Steen Clinic, sir.”
“I didn’t think he had. We hardly expected to discover that Jennifer Priddy was Mrs. Henry Etherege. Neither her parents nor her husband have anything to do with this crime.”
Nor had they, except that their lives, like flying tangents, had made brief contact with the circle of death. Every murder case produced such people. Dalgliesh had sat more times than he could remember in sitting rooms, bedrooms, pubs and police stations talking to people who had come, however briefly, in touch with murder. Violent death was a great releaser of inhibitions, the convulsive kick which spun open the top of so many anthills. His job, in which he could deceive himself that non-involvement was a duty, had given him glimpses into the secret lives of men and women whom he might never see again except as half-recognized faces in a London crowd. Sometimes he despised his private image, the patient, uninvolved, uncensorious inquisitor of other people’s misery and guilt. How long could you stay detached, he wondered, before you lost your own soul?
“What happened to the child?” he asked suddenly.
“She had a miscarriage, sir,” answered Martin. Of course, thought Dalgliesh. She would. Nothing could go right for such as the Priddys. Tonight he felt that he, too, was tainted with their ill luck. He asked what Martin had learned about Miss Bolam.
“Not much that we didn’t know already. They went to the same church and Jennifer Priddy used to be a Girl Guide in Bolam’s company. The old people spoke of her with a great deal of respect. She was helpful to them when the baby was on the way—I got the impression that she paid to have the house converted—and, when the marriage failed, she suggested that the Priddy child should work at the Steen. I think the old people were glad to think that someone was keeping an eye on Jenny. They couldn’t tell me much about Miss Bolam’s private life, at least nothing that we don’t know. There was one odd thing though. It happened when the girl got back with the supper. Mrs. Priddy asked me to stay and have a meal with them but I said I’d better be getting back. You know what it is with fish and chips. You just buy the right number of pieces and it isn’t easy to fit in an extra. Anyway, they called the girl in to say ‘good-bye’ and she came in from the kitchen looking like death. She only stayed a second or two and the old people didn’t seem to notice anything. But I did. Something had scared the kid properly.”
“Finding you there, perhaps. She may have thought that you’d mentioned her friendship with Nagle.”
“I don’t think it was that, sir. She looked into the sitting room when she first got back from the shop and said ‘good evening’ without turning a hair. I explained that I was just having a chat with her parents because they were friends of Miss Bolam and might be able to tell us something useful about her private life. It didn’t seem to worry her. It was about five minutes later that she came back looking so odd.”
“No one arrived at the house or telephoned during that time?”
“No. I heard no one anyway. They aren’t on the phone. I suppose it was something that occurred to her while she was alone in the kitchen. I couldn’t very well ask her. I was on my way out and there wasn’t anything you could put tongue to. I just told them all that if they thought of anything that might help, they should let us know at once.”
“We’ve got to see her again, of course, and the sooner the better. That alibi’s got to be broken and she’s the only one who can do it. I don’t think the girl was consciously lying or even deliberately withholding evidence. The truth simply never occurred to her.”
“Nor to me, sir, until we got the motive. What do you want to do now? Let him sweat a bit?”
“I daren’t, Martin. It’s too dangerous. We’ve got to press on. I think we’ll go now and have a little chat with Nagle.”
But when they reached the Pimlico house twenty minutes later, they found the flat locked and a folded scrap of paper wedged under the knocker. Dalgliesh smoothed it out and read aloud. “Darling. Sorry I missed you. I must speak to you. If I don’t see you tonight, I’ll be at the clinic early. Love, Jenny.”
“Any point in waiting for him, sir?”
“I doubt it. I think I can guess where he is. Cully was on the board when we did our phoning this morning but I made sure that Nagle, and probably everyone else at the Steen, knew that I was interesting myself in the medical records. I asked Dr. Etherege to put them back after I left. Nagle goes into the Steen on one or two evenings in the week to see to the boiler and turn off the art-therapy-department kiln. I imagine that he’s there tonight, taking the opportunity of seeing which records have been moved. We’ll look in anyway.”
As the car moved northwards towards the river, Martin said: “It’s easy to see that he needed the cash. You couldn’t rent a flat like that on a porter’s pay. And then there would be his painting gear.”
“Yes. The studio is pretty impressive: I should like you to have seen it. And there were the lessons from Sugg. Nagle may have got those on the cheap but Sugg doesn’t teach for nothing. I don’t think the blackmailing was particularly lucrative. That’s where he was clever. There was probably more than one victim and the amounts were nicely calculated. But even if he only made fifteen to thirty pounds a month, tax free, it would be enough to carry him over until he won the Bollinger or made his name.”
“Is he any good?” asked Sergeant Martin. There were subjects on which he never expressed an opinion but took it for granted that his super was an expert.
“The trustees of the Boll
inger Trust think so, apparently.”
“There’s not much doubt is there, sir?” And Martin was not referring to Nagle’s talent for painting.
Dalgliesh said irritably: “Of course there’s doubt. There always is at this stage of an investigation. But consider what we know. The blackmailer instructed that the cash should be sent in a distinctively addressed envelope, presumably so that he could pick it out before the post was opened. Nagle gets to the clinic first and is responsible for sorting and distributing the post. Colonel Fenton was asked to send the money so that it arrived on the first of each month. Nagle came to the clinic on 1st May although he was ill and had to be taken home later. I don’t think it was anxiety about the Duke’s visit that brought him in. The only time he didn’t manage to get first to work was the day he got stuck in the tube and that was the day Miss Bolam received fifteen pounds from an unknown grateful patient.
“And now we come to the murder and theory replaces fact. Nagle was helping on the switchboard that morning because of Cully’s bellyache. He listens to Mrs. Fenton’s call. He knows what Miss Bolam’s reaction will be and, sure enough, he is asked to put through a call to the group offices. He listens again and learns that Mr. Lauder will be at the Steen after the JCC meeting. Sometime before then, Miss Bolam has got to die. But how? He can’t hope to entice her away from the Steen. What excuse could he use and how could he provide himself with an alibi? No, it must be done in the clinic. And perhaps that isn’t such a bad plan after all. The AO isn’t popular. With luck there will be plenty of suspects to keep the police occupied, some of them with pretty good reasons for wishing Miss Bolam dead.
“So he makes his plans. It was obvious, of course, that the phone call to Miss Bolam wasn’t necessarily made from the basement. Nearly all the rooms have telephones. But if the murderer wasn’t in the record room waiting for her, how could he ensure that she would stay there until he could get down? That’s why Nagle chucked the records about. He knew Miss Bolam well enough to be fairly sure that she couldn’t bear not to pick them up. Dr. Baguley thought that her first reaction might be to phone for Nagle to help. She didn’t, of course, because she was expecting him to appear any minute. Instead she made a start on the job herself, giving him the two or three minutes that he needed.