“So I see. Furnished with cinders from the boiler.”
“Pity he can’t talk, sir. He was in here for most of the evening waiting to be fed. He was probably here when the murderer came in for the record-room key.”
“And for the chisel. Oh, yes, Tigger saw it, all right. But what makes you think he’d tell you the truth?”
Sergeant Martin didn’t reply. People who went for cats in a big way were like that, of course. Childish you might call it. Unusually talkative, he said: “Miss B had him doctored at her own expense. Mrs. Shorthouse told PC Holliday that Dr. Steiner was very upset about it. He likes cats seemingly. They had words over it. Dr. Steiner told Mrs. Bostock that Miss Bolam would like everything male at the clinic doctored if she had her way. He put it rather crudely, I gather. Of course, it wasn’t meant to get back to Miss Bolam but Mrs. Bostock saw that it did.”
“Yes,” said Dalgliesh shortly. “She would.” They continued their inspection.
It was not an uncomfortable room. It smelled of food and leather and, just perceptibly, of gas. There were a number of pictures which looked as if they had found a home with the porters when their previous owners had seen enough of them. One was of the founder of the Steen surrounded, appropriately enough, by his five sons. It was a faded sepia photograph in a gilt frame more indicative, Dalgliesh thought, of old Hyman’s character than the more orthodox commemorative oil which hung upstairs in the hall.
On a smaller table against the rear wall lay Nagle’s box of tools. Dalgliesh lifted the lid. The tools, meticulously cared for, lay each in its correct place. There was only one missing and that one was unlikely ever again to find its place in Nagle’s toolbox.
“He could have come in through that rear door if he left it unlocked,” said Martin, voicing Dalgliesh’s thought.
“Of course. I admit to a perverse disposition to suspect the one person who was apparently not even in the building when the murder was committed. There’s little doubt, though, that Nagle was with Miss Priddy in the general office when Mrs. Shorthouse left Miss Bolam. Cully confirms that. And Miss Priddy states that she never left the general office except momentarily to fetch a file from the next room. What did you think of Shorthouse, by the way?”
“I thought she was telling the truth, sir. I wouldn’t put her above a bit of lying when it suited her. She’s the sort who likes things to happen and isn’t averse to giving them a bit of a shove in the right direction. But she had plenty to tell us without adding any frills.”
“She had, indeed,” agreed Dalgliesh. “There isn’t any reasonable doubt that Miss Bolam came down to the basement as a result of that call which fixes the approximate time of death for us very satisfactorily. It ties up with the police surgeon’s view, too, but we shall know more about that when we get the result of the PM. The call could have been genuine, of course. It’s possible that someone phoned from the basement, spoke to Miss Bolam somewhere down here, then left her to go back to his or her own room and is now too afraid to admit making the call. As I say, it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.”
“If the call was genuine, it could have been someone calling her down to look at the mess in the record room. Those files were certainly chucked about before the murder. Some of them were under the body. It looked to me as if she was struck as she crouched to pick them up.”
“That’s how it looked to me,” said Dalgliesh. “Well, let’s press on.”
They passed the service lift door without comment and went next into the basement treatment room at the front of the building. Here Nurse Bolam had sat with her patient through the early hours of the evening. Dalgliesh switched on the lights. The heavy curtains had been drawn back but the windows were hung with thin net, presumably to give privacy during the day. The room was simply furnished. There was a low stretcher bed in one corner with a hospital screen at its foot and a small armchair at its head. Against the front wall was a small table and chair, apparently for the use of the nurse in attendance. The table held a rack of nursing-report forms and blank medical-record sheets. The left-hand wall was lined with cupboards where the clinic’s clean linen was stored. Some attempt had been made to soundproof the fourth wall. It had been lined with acoustic panels and the door, strong and well built, was hung with a heavy curtain.
Dalgliesh said: “If her patient were noisy, I doubt whether Nurse Bolam would hear much that went on outside. Walk down the passage will you, Martin, and make a call on the telephone, the one just outside the medical-record room.”
Martin closed the door behind him and Dalgliesh was alone with the heavy silence. His hearing was acute and Martin’s heavy tread was just audible. He doubted whether he would have heard it against the noise of a distressed patient. He could not hear the faint ring as Martin took off the receiver nor the swing of the dial. In a few seconds he heard the footsteps again and Martin was back. He said: “There’s a card giving the internal numbers so I rang 004. That’s Miss Bolam’s room. Funny how eerie a telephone bell sounds when there’s no one to answer. Then someone did. It gave me quite a shock when the ringing stopped. It was Mr. Lauder, of course. He sounded a bit surprised, too. I told him we wouldn’t be long now.”
“Nor shall we. I couldn’t hear you, by the way. And yet Nurse Bolam did hear the Priddy child scream. Or so she says.”
“She took her time doing anything about it, didn’t she, sir? What’s more, she apparently heard the doctors and Sister when they came down.”
“That’s reasonable enough. There were four of them clattering about. She’s the obvious suspect, of course. She could have telephoned her cousin from this room, saying perhaps that someone had been creating chaos in the record room. Her patient would be far too disoriented to hear or understand. I saw her with Dr. Baguley and it was obvious that she wasn’t capable of giving anyone an alibi. Nurse Bolam could have left the treatment room and waited for her cousin in the record room with a fair degree of safety. She had the best opportunity to kill, she has the necessary medical knowledge, she has an obvious motive. If she is the murderer, the crime probably had nothing to do with the phone call to Lauder. We shall have to find out what Bolam did think was going on here, but it needn’t necessarily have anything to do with her death. If Nurse Bolam knew that the group secretary was coming, she might have decided to kill now with the idea of obscuring the real motive.”
“She doesn’t strike me as clever enough for that kind of planning, sir.”
“She doesn’t strike me as a murderer, Martin, but we’ve known less likely ones. If she is innocent, then her being down here alone was very convenient for the murderer. Then there are those rubber gloves. Of course, she had an explanation for them. There are plenty of pairs about and it’s perfectly reasonable for a member of the nursing staff to have a used pair in her apron pocket. But the fact remains that we haven’t found any dabs on either of the weapons nor on the door key, not even old prints. Someone wiped them first and handled them with gloves. And what more suitable than thin surgical gloves. Driving that chisel in was practically a surgical operation.”
“If she had the sense to use the gloves, then she’d have the sense to destroy them afterwards. The boiler was alight. What about that missing rubber apron from the art department? If the killer used that as possible protection and disposed of it in the boiler, it would be daft to hang on to the gloves.”
“So daft that we’re probably meant to think that no sane person would do it. I’m not sure about that apron, anyway. Apparently there’s one missing and it’s possible that the killer wore it. But this was a clean death and it was planned that way. Anyway, we’ll know tomorrow when the boiler’s cold and can be raked out. Those aprons have metal studs on the shoulder straps and, with luck, we might find them.”