A Mind to Murder Read Online Free PDF

psychotherapy patient of my colleague Dr. Steiner, and a woman who has been receiving lysergic acid treatment down here in the basement front treatment-room. Dr. Baguley will be able to explain the treatment to you—she is his patient—but you can be assured that she wasn’t capable of leaving her bed until twenty minutes ago and certainly wouldn’t know anything about the murder. These patients become quite disorientated during treatment. Nurse Bolam was with her all the evening.”
    “Nurse Bolam? She is a relation of the dead woman?”
    “Her cousin,” said Dr. Baguley briefly.
    “And your disorientated patient, Doctor. Would she know if Nurse Bolam left her alone during treatment?”
    Dr. Baguley said curtly:
    “Nurse Bolam would not have left her.”
    They mounted the stairs together to meet the murmur of voices in the hall.
    That ring at the door brought into the Steen Clinic the paraphernalia and skills of an alien world. Quietly and without fuss the experts in violent death got busy. Dalgliesh disappeared into the record-room with the police surgeon and photographer. The print man, small and plump-cheeked as a hamster, with tiny delicate hands, gave his attention to door handles, locks, the tool case and Tippett’s fetish. Plain-clothes men, looking disconcertingly like television actors playing plain-clothes men, made their methodical search of every room and cupboard in the clinic verifying that there was indeed no unauthorized person on the premises and that the back doors both of the ground floor and the basement were securely locked from the inside. The clinic staff, excluded from these activities and congregated in the front ground-floor consulting-room, which had been hastily furnished with additional easy chairs from the patients’ waiting-room, felt that their familiar ground had been taken over by strangers and that they were caught up in the inexorable machinery of justice and being ground forward to God knew what embarrassments and disasters. Only the group secretary appeared unperturbed. He had stationed himself in the hall like a watchdog and sat there patient and alone until his turn came to be interviewed.
    Dalgliesh took Miss Bolan’s office for his use. It was a small room on the ground floor situated between the large general office at the front of the building and the E.C.T. treatment-room and recovery-room at the rear. Opposite it was a suite of two consulting-rooms and the patients’ waiting-room. The office had been formed by partitioning the end of a larger room so that it was oddly proportioned and unattractively narrow for its height. It was sparsely furnished and lacked all evidence of personal taste except for a large bowl of chrysanthemums set on one of the filing cabinets. There was an old-fashioned safe against one wall and the other was lined with green metal filing cabinets. The desk was unostentatious and held nothing but a stationery office desk calendar, a jotting pad, and a small stack of manilla folders. Dalgliesh looked through them and said. “This is odd. These are staff dossiers apparently, but only of the female staff. Her own isn’t here incidentally. I wonder why she got these out?”
    “Checking on people’s annual leave entitlement, or something like that perhaps,” suggested Sergeant Martin.
    “Could be, I suppose. But why only the women? Oh well, it’s hardly of immediate importance. Let’s have a look at that jotter.”
    Miss Bolam was apparently one of those administrators who prefer not to trust to memory. The top leaf of the jotter, headed with the date, was well filled with notes in a sloping, rather childish handwriting.
    Medical Committee—speak M.D. re proposed Adolescent Dept.
    Speak Nagle—broken sash cord Miss KallinsH’s room.
    Mrs. Shorthouse—? leave.
    These notes were at least self-explanatory but the jottings below them—written it appeared in some hurry— were less explicit.
    Woman. Here eight years. To arrive 1st