“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 Bollinger 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.
“This is what I think happened. At about ten past six he goes down to the porters’ restroom to put on his outdoor coat. It’s then that he unlocks the record-room door and throws the files on the floor. He leaves the light on and shuts the door but doesn’t bolt it. Then he unlocks the back door. Next he goes into the general office to collect the outgoing post. Miss Priddy is there but periodically visits the adjoining filing room. He only needs half a minute to telephone Miss Bolam and to ask her to come down to the record room as he has something serious to show her. We know how she reacted to that message. Before Nagle has a chance to replace the receiver, Jennifer Priddy is back. He keeps his head, depresses the receiver rest and pretends to be speaking to Nurse Bolam about the laundry. Then, without wasting any more time, he leaves with the post. He has only to take it to the box across the road. Then he darts down the mews, enters the basement by the unlocked back door, slips the chisel in his pocket, collects Tippett’s fetish and enters the record room. Miss Bolam is there as he expects, kneeling to pick up the torn and scattered files. She looks up at him, ready no doubt to ask where he’s been. But before she has time to speak, he strikes. Once she’s unconscious he can take his time over the stabbing. There mustn’t be any mistake and there isn’t. Nagle paints from the nude and his knowledge of anatomy is probably as good as that of most psychiatrists. And he was handy with that chisel. For this most important job he chose a tool he had confidence in and knew how to use.”
Martin said: “He couldn’t have got down to the basement in time if he’d walked to the corner of Beefsteak Street for his Standard. But the newsboy there couldn’t swear that he’d seen him. He was carrying a paper when he returned to the Steen but he could have got that in his lunch hour and kept it in his pocket.”
“I think he did,” said Dalgliesh. “That’s why he wouldn’t let Cully see it to check the racing results. Cully would have seen at once that it was the midday edition. Instead Nagle takes it downstairs and later uses it to wrap up the cat’s food before burning it in the boiler. He wasn’t in the basement alone for long, of course. Jenny Priddy was hard on his heels. But he had time to bolt the back door again and visit Nurse Bolam to ask if the clean laundry was ready to be carried upstairs. If Priddy hadn’t come down, Nagle would have joined her in the general office. He would take care not to be alone in the basement for more than a minute. The killing had to be fixed for the time when he was out with the post.”
Martin said: “I wondered why he didn’t unbolt the basement door after the killing but, like as not, he couldn’t bring himself to draw attention to it. After all, if an outsider could have gained access that way, it wouldn’t take long for people to start thinking ‘and so could Nagle.’ He took that fifteen quid no doubt after Colonel Fenton’s break-in. The local boys always did think it odd that the thief knew where to find it. Nagle thought he had a right to it, I suppose.”
“More likely he wanted to obscure the reason for the break-in, to make it look like a common burglary. It wouldn’t do for the police to start wondering why an unknown intruder should want to get his hands on the medical records. Pinching that fifteen pounds—which only Nagle had the chance to do—confused the issue. So did that business with the lift, of course. That was a nice touch. It would only take a minute to wind it up to the second floor before he slipped out of the basement door and there was a reasonable chance that someone would hear it and remember.”
Sergeant Martin thought that it all hung together very well but that it was going to be the devil to prove and said so.
“That’s why I showed my hand at the clinic yesterday. We’ve got to get him rattled. That’s why it’s worth looking in at the Steen tonight. If he’s there we’ll put on the pressure a bit. At least we know now where we’re going.”
Half an hour before Dalgliesh and Martin called at the Pimlico flat, Peter Nagle let himself into the Steen by the front door and locked it behind him. He did not put on the lights but made his way to the basement with the aid of his heavy torch. There wasn’t much to be done: just the kiln to be turned off, the boiler inspected. Then there was a little matter of his own to be attended to. It would mean entering the record room but that warm, echoing place of death had no terror for him. The dead were dead, finished, powerless, silenced for ever. In a world of increasing uncertainty, that much was certain. A man with the nerve to kill had much that he might reasonably fear. But he had nothing to fear from the dead.