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Post date: 24-Aug-2015 13:40:20
The next day DI Paige called us all together and briefed his team on the incident.
‘On the face of it,’ he said, ‘we have just five suspects: the other nurses who shared the flat in the nurses’ home with Nurse Parry. They – and the housekeeper – are the only people with access to the flat.’
‘But someone else could have got hold of a key,’ Detective Sergeant Egerton pointed out; always keen to make his presence felt. ‘They could have “borrowed” the housekeeper’s key – or maybe one of the nurses got a spare key cut for a friend – or, well there are all sorts of ways of getting through a locked door, aren’t there sir?’
‘Yes,’ Paige conceded, ‘that’s true; and so we’re going to be asking everyone with a legitimate copy of the key to check that it hasn’t gone missing and to tell us all about where they keep them and whether anyone else could have got hold of it for long enough to make a copy.’
Egerton smiled complacently, obviously thinking that he had impressed Paige with his perspicacity, but I thought that the Inspector looked rather irritated by the interruption.
‘However,’ he continued, ‘any outsider would be taking a big risk of being noticed by one of the nurses on their way to Nurse Parry’s room after they’d got into the flat. I think it’s much more likely that our murderer is one of the resident nurses. And there’s also the question of the locked room to consider. The murderer must have also had a key to Nurse Parry’s room, since the door and window were both locked – and in any case, the room is on the second floor so an exit through the window is out of the question. It’s much more likely that our killer was an insider: one of the nurses who live in that flat. But, since you’re so interested in the matter of keys, Egerton, you can take care of that side of the investigation. You need to find out what records are kept of keys to the nurses’ quarters. Ask to see the names of everyone who’s been given a key to that flat, going back for the last ten years – especially anyone who had a key to Nurse Parry’s room as well. She’d only been living there for a few months, so it’s possible that the previous occupant still has a copy of the key. Oh! And while you’re about it, you might as well do the rounds of all the local key-cutting places to see if any of them remember cutting a key of the design of the flat and/or room keys.’
‘Yes sir,’ Egerton answered, sounding rather deflated. I guessed that he must have realised that Paige hadn’t been impressed by his comment after all.
Paige despatched a team of officers to interview staff at the hospital, beginning with those who worked on the same ward as Susan Parry.
‘Find out everything you can about her,’ he instructed, ‘particularly who her friends were and whether she’d fallen out with any of them recently. And find out if there have been any incidents reported on the ward or any complaints made about any of the nurses – especially about Parry or the others from her flat.’
Once everyone else had left to go about their assigned tasks, Paige turned to me.
‘I want you to stay with me,’ he said. ‘We need to interview the other nurse from the flat and compare what she says with what the others told us yesterday.’
‘Yes sir,’ I hesitated, unsure whether to voice what was on my mind in case is was presumptuous of me to make suggestions about the conduct of the case; but Paige detected the uncertainty in my voice and urged me to speak up.
‘I was just thinking, sir, that it might be better to wait until the afternoon. She was on the night shift last night and will most likely be in bed now.’
‘That’s a very good point,’ Paige said, encouragingly. ‘So let’s put off going back to the nurses’ home until this afternoon. Meanwhile let’s have a look at what we’ve got so far and then there’s some work for you to do going through the files to see if any of our suspects has a police record – or if any of them reported any crime.'
We sat down together at Paige’s desk. I felt very privileged to have been singled out to work with him and tried my best to create a good impression. I drew up a table showing where each of our suspects had been during the period when Nurse Parry could have been killed.
It looked as if Angela Wheeler was in the clear, because she had been on duty on the ward for the whole time, but we would have to check with the staff there whether she had left at any point and been absent for long enough to return to the nurses’ home. Catherine Spencer had a daytime shift in the operating theatres, so she could have slipped in and stabbed Parry before leaving for work that morning. Jane Bentham and Elaine Gregg were both on the late shift that day, so either of them would have had plenty of time to kill their flatmate before going over to the hospital. Bentham worked on the same ward as Parry; so if there was any truth in Mrs Parry’s assertion that her daughter was worried about something not right there, that might provide a motive. The fifth nurse – Jill Saunders – was supposedly asleep when Parry was killed, but she could have got up, done the deed and then gone back to bed.
My careful searching of the police records drew a blank. None of the nurses had any sort of criminal past and none seemed to have been the victim of crime either. The only hint of anything dubious was a caution for possession of cannabis issued five years previously to one Graham Lawson, who was now (according to the talkative Jane Bentham) sister Spencer’s boyfriend.