Read A Mind to Murder for Free Online

Peter Nagle had taken the call from the hospital and had told Miss Bolam but he hadn’t told her. She hadn’t seen the chisel in Miss Bolam’s chest but Dr. Etherege had told the staff about the stabbing when they were gathered together in the front consulting-room waiting for the police. She thought that most of the staff knew where Peter Nagle kept his tools and also which key opened the door of the basement record room. It hung on hook number 12 and was shinier than the other keys, but it wasn’t labelled. Dalgliesh said:
    “I want you to think very hard and very carefully. When you went downstairs to help Mr. Nagle feed the cat was the record-room door ajar and the light on as it was when you went down later and found Miss Bolam?”
    The girl, pushed back her dank blonde hair and said with sudden weariness:
    “I… I can’t remember. I didn’t go past that door you see. I went straight into the porters’ room at the bottom of the stairs. Peter was there clearing up Tigger’s plate. He hadn’t eaten all of his last meal so we scraped it off his plate and washed it at the sink. We didn’t go near the record-room.”
    “But you could see the door as you came down the stairs. Would you be likely to notice if the door were ajar? The room isn’t often used, is it?”
    “No, but anyone might go there if they wanted a record. I mean, if the door were open I wouldn’t go to see who was there or anything like that. I think I would notice if the door was wide open so I suppose it wasn’t, but I can’t remember, honestly I can’t.”
    Dalgliesh ended by asking her about Miss Bolam. It appeared that Miss Priddy knew her outside the clinic, that the Priddy family attended the same church and that Miss Bolam had encouraged her to take the job at the clinic.
    “I shouldn’t have got this job if it hadn’t been for Enid. Of course, I never called her that inside the clinic. She wouldn’t have liked it.” Miss Priddy gave the impression that she had only reluctantly brought herself to use the Christian name outside the clinic. She went on: “I don’t mean she actually appointed me. I had to be interviewed by Mr. Lauder and by Dr. Etherege, but I know she spoke up for me. My shorthand and typing weren’t very good then—it was nearly two years ago when I came—and I was lucky to get here. I didn’t see very much of Enid at the clinic but she was always very kind and keen for me to get on. She wanted me to take the Institute of Hospital Administration Diploma so that I needn’t be a shorthand typist all my life.”
    This ambition for Miss Priddy’s future career struck Dalgliesh as a little odd. The child gave no impression of being ambitious and she would surely marry in time. It hardly needed the Institute’s diploma, whatever that might be, to save her from being a shorthand typist for life. He felt a little sorry for Miss Bolam who could scarcely have picked a less promising protégée. She was pretty, honest and naïve, but not, he thought, particularly intelligent. He had to remind himself that she had given her age as twenty-two not seventeen. She had a shapely and oddly mature body, but her thin face with its frame of long, straight hair, was the face of a child.
    There was little she could tell him about the administrative officer. She hadn’t noticed any change recently in Miss Bolam. She didn’t know that the A.O. had sent for Mr. Lauder and had no idea what could be worrying Miss Bolam at the clinic. Everything was going on very much as usual. Miss Bolam had no enemies as far as she knew, certainly no one who would wish to kill her.
    “She was happy here, then, as far as you know? I was wondering whether she had asked for a move. A psychiatric clinic can’t be the easiest unit to administer.”
    “Oh, it isn’t! I don’t know how Enid carried on sometimes. But I’m sure she would never ask for a move. Someone must have given you the wrong impression. She was never one to give up. If she