Dr. Mary Ingram was seen first by request of the medical director. She had three young children at home and it was important that she get back to them as soon as possible. She had been crying spasmodically while waiting, to the embarrassment of her colleagues who had difficulty in comforting a grief which seemed to them unreasonable and ill-timed. Nurse Bolam was bearing up well, after all, and she was a relative. Dr. Ingram’s tears added to the tension and provoked an irrational guilt in those whose emotions were less uncomplicated. There was a general feeling that she should be allowed to go home to her children without delay. There was little she could tell Dalgliesh. She attended the clinic only twice weekly to help with the ECT sessions and had hardly known Miss Bolam. She had been in the ECT room with Sister Ambrose for the whole of the crucial time from six-twenty until seven. In reply to Dalgliesh’s question she admitted that Dr. Baguley might have left them for a short time after six-fifteen but she couldn’t remember when exactly or for how long.
At the end of the interview she looked at Dalgliesh from reddened eyes and said: “You will find out who did it, won’t you? That poor, poor girl.”
“We shall find out,” replied Dalgliesh.
Dr. Etherege was interviewed next. He gave the necessary personal details without waiting to be asked and went on: “As regards my own movements this evening, I’m afraid I can’t be very helpful. I arrived at the clinic just before five and went into Miss Bolam’s office to speak to her before going upstairs. We had a little general conversation. She seemed perfectly all right to me and didn’t tell me that she had asked to see the group secretary. I rang the general office for Mrs. Bostock at about five-fifteen and she was with me taking dictation until about ten to six when she went downstairs with the post. She came back after ten minutes or so and we continued with the dictation, until some time before half past six, when she went next door to type material directly from a tape machine. Some of my treatment sessions are recorded and the material subsequently played back and a typescript made either for research purposes or for the medical record. I worked alone in my consulting room except for one brief visit to the medical library—I can’t remember when, but it was very shortly after Mrs. Bostock left me—until she returned to consult me on a point. That must have been just before seven because we were together when Sister rang to tell me about Miss Bolam. Miss Saxon came down from her room on the third floor to go home and caught us up on the stairs, so she and I went to the basement. You know what we found and the subsequent steps I took to ensure that no one left the clinic.”
“You seem to have acted with great presence of mind, Doctor,” said Dalgliesh. “As a result the field of inquiry can be considerably narrowed. It looks, doesn’t it, as if the murderer is still in this building?”
“Certainly Cully has assured me that no one got past him after five p.m. without being entered in his register. That is our system here. The implication of that locked back door is disturbing, but I’m sure you are too experienced an officer to jump to conclusions. No building is impregnable. The … the person responsible could have got in at any time, even early this morning, and lain hidden in the basement.”
“Can you suggest where such a person lay concealed or how he got out of the clinic?” The medical director did not reply. “Have you any idea who that person might be?”
Dr. Etherege slowly traced the line of his right eyebrow with his middle finger. Dalgliesh had seen him do this on television and reflected, now as then, that it served to draw attention to a fine hand and a well-shaped eyebrow, even if as an indication of serious thought the gesture seemed slightly spurious.
“I have no idea at all. The whole tragedy is incomprehensible. I’m not going to claim that Miss Bolam was an altogether easy person to get on with. She sometimes aroused resentment.” He smiled deprecatingly. “We’re not always very easy to get on with ourselves and the most successful administrator of a psychiatric unit is probably someone far more tolerant than Miss Bolam, less obsessional perhaps. But this is murder! I can’t think of anyone, patient or staff, who would want to kill her. It’s very horrible to me as medical director to think that there might be someone as disturbed as that working at the Steen and I never knew.”
“As disturbed or as wicked,” said Dalgliesh, unable to resist the temptation.
Dr. Etherege smiled again, patiently explaining a difficult point to an obtuse member of the television panel. “Wicked? I’m not competent to discuss this in theological terms.”
“Nor am I, Doctor,” replied Dalgliesh. “But this crime doesn’t look like the work of a madman. There’s an intelligence behind it.”
“Some psychopaths are highly intelligent, Superintendent. Not that I am knowledgeable about psychopathy. It’s a most interesting field but not mine. We have never claimed at the Steen to be able to treat the condition.”
Then the Steen was in good company, thought Dalgliesh. The Mental Health Act, 1959, may have defined psychopathy as a disorder requiring or susceptible to medical treatment but there appeared little enthusiasm on the part of doctors to treat it. The word seemed little more than a psychiatrist’s term of abuse and he said as much. Dr. Etherege smiled, indulgent, unprovoked.
“I have never accepted a clinical entity because it is defined in an Act of Parliament. However, psychopathy exists. I’m not convinced at present that it is susceptible to medical treatment. What I am sure is that it is not susceptible to a prison sentence. But we have no certainty that we’re looking for a psychopath.”
Dalgliesh asked Dr. Etherege whether he knew where Nagle kept his tools and which key opened the door of the record room.
“I knew about the key. If I’m working late and alone, I sometimes need one of the old files and I fetch it myself. I do a certain amount of research and, of course, lecturing and writing and it’s important to have access to the medical records. I last fetched a file about ten days ago. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the box of tools in the porters’ room but I knew that Nagle had his own set and was particular about them. I suppose if I’d wanted a chisel I should have looked in the porters’ room. The tools would hardly be kept anywhere else. Obviously, too, I should expect Tippett’s fetish to be in the art-therapy department. It was a most curious choice of weapons! What I find interesting is the apparent care taken by the murderer to fix suspicion on the clinic staff.”
“Suspicion can hardly rest elsewhere in the face of those locked doors.”
“That’s what I meant, Superintendent. If a member of the staff present this evening did kill Miss Bolam, surely he would want to divert suspicion from the relatively few people known to be in the building at the time. The easiest way to do that would be to unlock one of the doors. He’d need to wear gloves, of course, but then, I gather that he did wear them.”
“There are no prints on either of the weapons, certainly. They were wiped, but it is probable that he did wear gloves.”
“And yet, those doors were kept locked, the strongest evidence that the murderer was still in the building. Why? It would be risky to unlock the back door on the ground floor. That, as you know, is between the ECT room and the medical staff room and it leads into a well-lit road. It would be difficult to unlock it without the risk of being seen and a murderer would hardly make his exit that way. But there are the two fire-escape doors on the second and third floors and the door in the basement. Why not unlock one of those? It can only be, surely, because the murderer hadn’t the opportunity between the time of the crime and the finding of the body or that he deliberately wished to throw suspicion on the clinic staff even at the inevitable cost of increasing his own danger.”