Under his gaze the girl moved restlessly about the studio, touching with happy possessiveness the frame of a painting, running her fingers along the window ledge, moving a jug of dahlias from one window to the next. It was as if she sought to impose the soft nuances of femininity on this disciplined masculine workshop, to demonstrate that this was her home, her natural place. She was entirely unembarrassed by the pictures of her naked body. It was possible that she gained satisfaction from this vicarious exhibitionism.
Suddenly Dalgliesh asked: “Do you remember, Miss Priddy, whether anyone telephoned Mr. Nagle while he was in the office with you?”
The girl looked surprised but said unconcernedly to Nagle: “Nurse Bolam phoned about the laundry, didn’t she? I came in from the record room—I’d only been gone a second—and heard you say that you were just on your way out and would go down when you came back.” She laughed. “After you put the receiver down, you said something much less polite about the way the nurses expect you to be at their beck and call. Remember?”
“Yes,” said Nagle shortly. He turned to Dalgliesh. “Any more questions, Superintendent? Jenny’ll have to be getting home soon and I usually go part of the way. Her parents don’t know she sees me.”
“Only one or two. Have either of you any idea why Miss Bolam should send for the group secretary?”
Miss Priddy shook her head. Nagle said: “It was nothing to do with us, anyway. She didn’t know that Jenny poses for me. Even if she found out, she wouldn’t send for Lauder. She wasn’t a fool. She knew he wouldn’t concern himself with anything the staff did in their own time. After all, she found out about Dr. Baguley’s affair with Miss Saxon but she wasn’t daft enough to tell Lauder.”
Dalgliesh did not ask whom Miss Bolam had told. He said: “It was obviously something concerned with the administration of the clinic. Had anything unusual happened lately?”
“Nothing but our famous burglary and the missing fifteen quid. But you know about that.”
“That’s nothing to do with Peter,” said the girl with quick defensiveness. “He wasn’t even at the clinic when the fifteen pounds arrived.” She turned to Nagle. “You remember, darling? That was the morning you got stuck in the Underground. You didn’t even know about the money!”
She had said something wrong. The flash of irritation in those large, mud-brown eyes was momentary, but Dalgliesh did not miss it. There was a pause before Nagle spoke, but his voice was perfectly controlled.
“I knew soon enough. We all did. What with the fuss over who sent it and the row over who was to spend it, the whole damn group must have known.” He looked at Dalgliesh. “Is that all?”
“No. Do you know who killed Miss Bolam?”
“I’m glad to say I don’t. I shouldn’t think it was one of the psychiatrists. Those boys are the strongest reason I know for staying sane. But I can’t see any of them actually killing. They haven’t the nerve.”
Someone very different had said much the same thing. As he reached the door, Dalgliesh paused and looked back at Nagle. He and the girl were sitting together on the bed as he had first seen them; neither of them made any move to see him out, but Jenny gave him her happy valedictory smile.
Dalgliesh asked his last question: “Why did you go for a drink with Cully on the night of the burglary?”
“Cully asked me.”
“Wasn’t that unusual?”
“So unusual that I went with him out of curiosity to see what was up.”
“And what was?”
“Nothing really. Cully asked me to lend him a quid which I refused and, while the clinic was left empty, someone broke in. I don’t see how Cully could have foreseen that. Or maybe he did. Anyway, I can’t see what it’s got to do with the murder.”
Nor, on the face of it, could Dalgliesh. As he passed down the stairs, he was vexed by the thought of time passing, time wasted, the drag of hours before Monday morning when the clinic would reopen and his suspects reassemble in the place where they were likely to be most vulnerable. But the last forty minutes had been well spent. He was beginning to trace the dominant thread in this tangled skein. As he passed by the third-floor flat, the pianist was playing Bach. Dalgliesh paused for a moment to listen. Contrapuntal music was the only kind he truly enjoyed. But the pianist stopped suddenly with a crash of discordant keys. And then nothing. Dalgliesh passed down the stairs in silence and left the quiet house unseen.
When Dr. Baguley arrived at the clinic for the Medical Committee meeting, the parking space reserved for doctors’ cars was already occupied. Dr. Etherege’s Bentley was there parked next to Steiner’s Rolls. On the other side of it was the battered Vauxhall which proclaimed that Dr. Albertine Maddox had decided to attend.
Upstairs in the first-floor boardroom the curtains were drawn against the blue-black October sky. In the middle of the heavy mahogany table was a bowl of roses. Baguley remembered that Miss Bolam had always supplied flowers for the meetings of the Medical Committee. Someone had decided to continue the practice. The roses were the slim, hothouse buds of autumn, rigid and scentless on their thornless stems. In a couple of days they would open for their brief and barren flowering. In less than a week they would be dead. Baguley thought that so extravagant and evocative a flower was inappropriate to the mood of the meeting. But the empty bowl would have been unbearably poignant and embarrassing.
“Who supplied the roses?” he asked.
“Mrs. Bostock, I think,” said Dr. Ingram. “She was up here getting the room ready when I arrived.”
“Remarkable,” said Dr. Etherege. He put out a finger and stroked one of the buds so gently that the stem did not even tremble. Baguley wondered whether the comment referred to the quality of the roses or to Mrs. Bostock’s perspicacity in supplying them.
“Miss Bolam was very fond of flowers, very fond,” said the medical director. He looked round as if challenging his colleagues to disagree.
“Well,” he said. “Shall we get started?” Dr. Baguley, as honorary secretary, seated himself on the right of Dr. Etherege. Dr. Steiner took the chair next to him. Dr. Maddox sat on Steiner’s right. No other consultant was there. Dr. McBain and Dr. Mason-Giles were in the States attending a conference. The rest of the medical staff, torn between curiosity and a disinclination to interrupt their weekend break, had apparently decided to wait in patience for Monday. Dr. Etherege had thought it proper to telephone them all and let them know of the meeting. He gave their apologies formally and they were as gravely received.
Albertine Maddox had been a surgeon and a highly successful one before she qualified as a psychiatrist. It was perhaps typical of her colleagues’ ambivalence towards their specialty that Dr. Maddox’s double qualification enhanced her standing in their eyes. She represented the clinic on the Group Medical Advisory Committee, where she defended the Steen against the occasional snipings of physicians and surgeons with a wit and vigour which made her respected and feared. At the clinic she took no part in the Freudian versus eclectic controversy being, as Baguley observed, equally beastly to both sides. Her patients loved her but this did not impress her colleagues. They were used to being loved by their patients and merely observed that Albertine was particularly skilful in handling a strong transference situation. Physically she was a plump, grey-haired, unremarkable woman who looked what she was, the comfortable mother of a family. She had five children, the sons intelligent and prosperous, the girls well-married. Her insignificant-looking husband and the children treated her with a tolerant, faintly amused solicitude which never failed to astonish her colleagues at the Steen to whom she was a formidable personality. She sat now, with Hector, her old Pekinese, squatting malevolently on her lap, looking as comfortably anticipatory as a suburban housewife at a matinée.