“Well, yes,” said the waiter, looking dubious. “Sir,” he added.
“He’s going to order another Scotch. Can you cook up a poor single to look like a double? Here — this’ll settle the lot and forget the change. Right?”
“Well, thank you very much, sir,” said the waiter, suddenly avid with curiosity and gratification. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Waiter!” shouted Dr. Schramm. “Same ’gain.”
“There’s your cue,” said Alleyn.
“What’ll I say to him?”
“ ‘Anon, anon, sir’ would do.”
“Would that be Shakespeare?” hazarded the waiter.
“It would, indeed.”
“Waiter!”
“Anon, anon, sir,” said the waiter self-consciously. He collected the empty glasses and hurried away.
“ ’Strordinary waiter,” said Dr. Schramm. “As I was saying. I insist on being informed for reasons that I shall make ’bundantly clear. What’s she said? ’Bout me?”
“You didn’t feature in our conversation,” said Alleyn.
“That’s what you say.”
Sister Jackson, with a groggy and terrified return to something like her habitual manner, said, “I wouldn’t demean myself.” She turned on Alleyn. “You’re mad,” she said, exactly as if there had been no break in their exchange. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. She was asleep.”
“Why didn’t you report your visit, then?” Alleyn said.
“It didn’t matter.”
“Oh, nonsense. It would have established, if true, that she was alive at that time.”
With one of those baffling returns to apparent sobriety by which drunken persons sometimes bewilder us, Dr. Scbxamm said: “Do I understand, Sister, that you visited her in her room?”
Sister Jackson ignored him. Alleyn said: “At about nine o’clock.”
“And didn’t report it? Why? Why?” He appealed to Alleyn.
“I don’t know. Perhaps because she was afraid. Perhaps because—”
Sister Jackson gave a strangulated cry. “No! No, for God’s sake! He’ll get it all wrong. He’ll jump to conclusions. It wasn’t like that. She was asleep. Natural sleep. There was nothing the matter with her.”
The waiter came back with a single glass, half full.
“Take that away,” Schram ordered. “I’ve got to have a clear head. Bring some ice. Bring me a lot of ice.”
The waiter looked at Alleyn, who nodded. He went out
“I’m going,” said Sister Jackson.—
“You’ll stay where you are unless you want a clip over the ear.”
“And you,” said Alleyn, “will stay where you are unless you want to be run in. Behave yourself.”
Schramm stared at him for a moment. He said something that sounded like: “Look who’s talking” and took an immaculate handkerchief from his breast coat-pocket, laid it on the table and began to fold it diagonally. The waiter reappeared with a jug full of ice.
“I really ought to mention this to the manager, sir,” he murmured. “If he gets noisy again, I’ll have to.”
“I’ll answer for you. Tell the manager it’s an urgent police matter. Give him my card. Here you are.”
“It — it wouldn’t be about that business over at Greengages, Would it?”
“Yes, it would. Give me the ice and vanish, there’s a good chap.”
Alleyn put the jug on the table. Schramm with shaking hands began to lay ice on his folded handkerchief.
“Sister,” he said impatiently. “Make a pack, if you please.”
To Alleyn’s utter astonishment she did so in a very professional manner. Schramm loosened his tie and opened his shirt. It was as if they both responded like Pavlovian dogs to some behaviouristic prompting. He rested his forehead on the table and she placed the pack of ice on the back of his neck. He gasped. A trickle of water ran down his jawline. “Keep it up,” he ordered and shivered.
Alleyn, watching this performance, thought how unpredictable the behaviour of drunken persons could be. Sister Jackson had been in the condition so inaccurately known as “nicely, thank you.” Basil Schramm had been in an advanced stage of intoxication but able to assess his own condition and after a fashion deal with it. And there they were, both of them, behaving like automata and, he felt sure, frightened out of what wits they still, however precariously, commanded.
She continued to operate the ice packs. A pool of water enlarged itself on the table and began to drip to the carpet.
“That’s enough,” Schramm said presently. Sister Jackson squeezed his handkerchief into the jug. Alleyn offered his own and Schramm mopped himself up with it. He fastened his shirt and reknotted his tie. As if by common consent he and Sister Jackon sat down simultaneously, facing each other across the table with Alleyn between them on the banquette: like a referee, he thought. This effect was enhanced when he took out his notebook. They paid not the smallest attention to him. They glared at each other, he with distaste and she with hatred. He produced a comb and used it.
“Now, then,” he said. “What’s the story? You went to her room at nine. You say she was asleep. And you,” he jabbed a finger at Alleyn, “say she was dead. Right?”
“I don’t say so, positively. I suggested it.”
“Why?”
“For several reasons. If Mrs. Foster was sleeping, peacefully and naturally, it’s difficult to see why Sister Jackson did not report her visit.”
“If there’d been anything wrong, I would have,” she said.
Schramm said: “Did you think it was suicide?”
“She was asleep.”
“Did you see the tablets — spilled on the table?”
“No. No.”
“Did you think she’d been drugged?”
“She was asleep. Peacefully and naturally. Asleep.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Come on!”
She began to gabble at Alleyn: “It was the shock, you know. When he rang through and told me, I came and we did everything — such a shock — I couldn’t remember anything about how the room had looked before. Naturally not.”
“It was no shock to you,” Dr. Schramm said profoundly. “You’re an old hand. An experienced nurse. And you didn’t regret her death, my dear. You gloated. You could hardly keep a straight face.”
“Don’t listen to this,” Sister Jackson gabbled at Alleyn, “it’s all lies. Monstrous lies. Don’t listen.”
“You’d better,” said Schramm. “This is the hell-knows-no-fury bit, Superintendent, and you may as well recognize it. Oh, yes. She actually said when she heard about Sybil and me that she bloody well wished Syb was dead and she meant it. Fact, I assure you. And I don’t mind telling you she felt the same about me. Still does. Look at her.”
Sister Jackson was hardly a classical figure of panic but she certainly presented a strange picture. The velvet beret had flopped forward over her left eye so that she was obliged to tilt her head back at an extravagant angle in order to see from under it. Oddly enough and deeply unpleasant as the situation undoubtedly was, she reminded Alleyn momentarily of a grotesque lady on a comic postcard.
They began to exchange charge and countercharge, often speaking simultaneously. It was the kind of row that is welcome as manna from Heaven to an investigating officer. Alleyn noted it all down, almost under their noses, and was conscious, as often before, of a strong feeling of distaste for the job.
They repeated themselves ad nauseam. She used the stock phrases of the discarded mistress. He, as he became articulate, also grew reckless and made more specific his accusations as to her having threatened to do harm to Sybil Foster and even hinted that on her visit to Room 20 she might well have abetted Sybil in taking an overdose.