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Post date: 24-Aug-2015 13:34:29
Looking back, 1975 was probably the most significant year of my life, with the most important events kicking off in the autumn, just after the annual ‘Sunny smiles’ collection for the National Children’s Home had finished. I’d been in CID for just on two years by then, but I hadn’t been involved in anything as dramatic as a murder enquiry yet; so when DI Paige told me that we were going over to the nurses’ home at the Radcliffe Infirmary to investigate a suspicious death I was pretty excited. It was pure luck that I was in at the beginning: his favoured sergeant was on leave and I was the only DC on duty that night.
When we got there we found a group of nurses sitting in their little kitchen with mugs of cocoa. There were four of them: Sister Catherine Spencer, Nurse Jane Bentham, Nurse Elaine Gregg and Nurse Angela Wheeler. They were all in their early twenties and all looking rather shell-shocked.
Sister Spencer was very much in charge. She was the one who had made the call to the police after another of the nurses in their part of the home had been found dead in her bed that evening. She was a tall, dark-haired woman with deep brown eyes which watched intently as DI Paige and DC Johns entered the room. She rose to her feet and signalled to her colleagues to do the same, but Paige waved to them to stay seated. Although in some ways he could be old-fashioned in his outlook, Richard Paige had no sense of his own importance and did not stand on ceremony.
Nurse Bentham was shorter and fairer than Sister Spencer was and less well turned-out. Both nurses had long hair secured in a bun at the nape of the neck but, while Sister Spencer’s was neat and tidy, Nurse Bentham’s had strands of mousey brown hair dangling from it and several hair grips protruding as if ready to fall out at any minute. I noticed that nurse Bentham’s mug of cocoa had left a brown ring on the kitchen table where it had spilled over while she was drinking it. She looked at us anxiously as if unsure what to expect.
Nurse Gregg was small, lively and garrulous – but perhaps that was just nerves in the presence of the police. She spoke rapidly in a strong Black Country accent, offering to make tea for us and repeating, over and over again, her opinion that it was incomprehensible that anyone should want to kill Susan Parry. As she talked, she took off her nurses’ cap and I could see that her brown hair was cut so that the upper layers were shorter than those beneath, in a way that was fashionable at that time. She and Nurse Bentham were both wearing their nurses’ uniforms, while the others were in civvies.
Lastly, we come to Nurse Wheeler, who stood out from the group because she was what we used to call at that time ‘coloured’, which is to say that she was of Afro-Caribbean origin. I later learned that she had come to Oxford from Jamaica only a few months earlier. Her hair was braided in an intricate pattern across her head, in a way that I had never seen before. Her eyes were bright and intelligent. She was of medium height with a curvaceous and beautifully proportioned figure.
Paige started by speaking to the group as a whole. We learned that Nurse Susan Parry had been found dead that evening when some of her colleagues had gone into her room to investigate why she had not appeared on the ward for her night shift. Sister Spencer had called for help and a doctor had come over from the hospital and examined the body. He had concluded that she had been killed by a stab wound to her chest and had ordered the nurses to call the police.
At this point Paige stopped the conversation and, after giving the nurses strict instructions to stay where they were, took me to inspect the body. A uniformed constable was guarding the entrance to the bedroom where the remains of Nurse Parry lay. He opened it for us and we went in and looked down at the figure lying beneath the sheet. Paige reached out and pulled down the covers to reveal a slim, blond figure wearing brushed cotton pyjamas, which lay open at the front, presumably unbuttoned by the doctor who had examined the body. Paige pointed silently at a narrow incision in her chest. A tiny trickle of blood had dried on her skin just below it and there was a small round stain on the sheet beneath. Then he covered up the body again with the sheet and looked round the room.
I followed his gaze, trying to work out what he might be looking for and what he was able to deduce from what he saw. Everything looked very ordinary to me; there was nothing obviously out of place. Paige prowled round, looking at the shelves and peering under the bed.
Suddenly he pounced on a key, which was lying on a small table next to the bed. He picked it up, using a handkerchief so as not to put his own fingerprints on it, and tried it in the door. It turned easily.
‘Hmm!’ he murmured. ‘We seem to have a classic locked-room murder, with our victim inside, the key beside her and the murderer apparently vanished into thin air!’
He replaced the key on the bedside table and went over to the window, craning his neck to see down to the paved area outside, two floors below. Finally, he checked that the window was closed and the catch was fastened.
‘Nothing obvious in here,’ he said at last, ‘but we’ll get forensics to go over it in case our killer left any traces behind. Now we’d better get back to those nurses and put them out of their misery. If we take two each we can get their preliminary statements and then let them get off to bed. We’ll have a better idea what we really need to know after we get the PM report.’
I started my interviews with Angela Wheeler. She sat at the kitchen table, very calm and business-like, brushing aside my apology for questioning her at such a difficult time. She told me that she occupied the room next to Nurse Parry’s. This gave me an opening to ask when she had last seen the dead nurse.
‘Very briefly at the handover on the ward this morning. We’re both on male surgical. I’m on “earlies” this week, while she’s on nights.’
‘I see, and before that?’
‘That would be yesterday afternoon. She always goes straight to bed after a night shift and generally gets up sometime in the middle of the afternoon. I met her as I was coming in after my shift. She was on her way out to do some shopping.’
‘And over the last few days, did Nurse Parry seem just as normal? She wasn’t anxious about anything, as far as you know?’
‘Now you ask,’ Angela answered, screwing up her face in a very endearing way, like a child with a hard sum to work out, ‘she did seem a bit worried these last couple of weeks; but I thought it was just that she was anxious in case she made any mistakes with a patient. She’s newly qualified and it is rather daunting for a new nurse to think that we’re responsible for people’s lives, especially at night, when there’s often only one qualified nurse on duty; it’s difficult to know sometimes whether a situation warrants getting the on-call doctor out of bed. Susan takes her responsibilities very seriously and I thought she was just nervous about having to make decisions on her own.’
‘I see. Now, just for the record, can you describe your own movements from eleven last night to when Sister Spencer called us?’
‘Let me see. Well, I was in bed before eleven last night. I got up at six, got dressed, had breakfast and went over to the ward in time for the start of my shift at seven. I was on the ward until half past three, when I came back over here and changed out of my uniform. I nipped out to the shops, then came back and had a cup of tea in the kitchen with Jill Saunders: she’s the other nurse who shares this part of the home; you haven’t met her because she’s on nights. That would be about half past four.’
‘Ah yes. Can I check that I’ve got it straight? There are six of you sharing this part of the home? And it has a door separating it from the other parts, with a lock that only the six of you have keys for?’
‘Well, Mrs Fish, the housekeeper, has a master key and so do Security, but apart from that, yes, only the six of us can open the door.’
‘And you each have keys to your own rooms? Do you all keep them locked?’
‘When we’re out and when we’re in bed at night, but I don’t think any of us bothers during the daytime if we’re in.’
‘But Nurse Parry’s room was locked when you when to look for her just now: Sister Spencer said that she had to get the master key from the housekeeper’s room.’
‘Yes. I suppose Susan must have locked it so that no-one would disturb her while she was asleep.’
‘The key wasn’t in the lock. Do you know where she kept it?’
‘She used to put it in her purse when she went out, but I don’t know what she did if she locked the door when she was in her room.’
‘OK. Now, you were, where, when Nurse Bentham came in looking for Nurse Parry?’
‘I was in the passage on my way to the kitchen to make myself some cocoa before bed.’
‘And when you met Nurse Bentham you went with her to look for Nurse Parry?’
‘Yes. I knocked on the door but there was no reply. Then Elaine and Catherine came up the stairs and Catherine went to telephone to see if Susan might have gone over to the ward after all.’
‘And when she came back with the master key, who went in first?’
‘Catherine. She opened the door and went in and we all followed her. We all saw that Susan was dead. Catherine checked her pulse and told us to go back and wait in the kitchen. She went down to telephone for help from the hall.’
‘And did she lock the door, after you all left?’
‘Yes. She said we’d better make sure that no-one wandered in and disturbed anything.’
‘I see, so none of you were in the room alone at all?’
‘No. we all went in together and came out again together.’
‘And Sister Spencer was the first in and the last out?’
‘Yes.’
And that was that for the time being. Angela went off to her room and I turned my attention to Nurse Bentham. She was only too eager to tell me everything that had happened that evening in the greatest of detail, interspersing her narrative with her own ideas on what steps the police ought to take in order to discover who had managed to get into her colleague’s room and stab her to death as she slept. As I struggled to keep up with her narrative I wished that I had made more effort to improve my shorthand speed and I was conscious of having to ask my witness to repeat things so that I could be sure that I had got her statements right in my notes. Eventually she ran out of steam and I sent her to her room, telling her to expect to be questioned again at some later date.
And that was more or less the end of the first day of my first murder enquiry; but it turned out that was really just the start of everything ...