A Mind to Murder

  Praise for P. D. James

  “Her style is literate, her plots are complicated, her clues are abundant and fair and her solutions are intended to come as a surprise without straining credulity beyond that subtle point which is instinctively recognized and respected by addicts and practitioners alike.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  “The finest English crime novelist of her generation.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “P. D. James is one of the national treasures of British fiction. As James takes us from one life to another, her near-Dickensian scale becomes apparent.”

  Sunday Mail

  “P. D. James is unbeatable.”

  Ottawa Citizen

  “She is an addictive writer. P. D. James takes her place in the long line of those moralists who can tell a story as satisfying as it is complete.”

  Anita Brookner

  “P. D. James … writes the most lethal, erudite, people-complex novels of murder and detection since Michael Innes first began and Dorothy Sayers left us.”

  Vogue

  “P. D. James is a remarkable writer. Others have tried to rescue the detective story from its discredited position by freeing it from the bonds of the genre. But she has said that the discipline suits her, the restraints are a support and she can be a serious novelist within them. In this aim she has succeeded in a quite extraordinary way.”

  Ruth Rendell

  Also by P. D. James

  Fiction

  Cover Her Face

  Unnatural Causes

  Shroud for a Nightingale

  An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

  The Black Tower

  Death of an Expert Witness

  Innocent Blood

  The Skull Beneath the Skin

  A Taste for Death

  Devices and Desires

  The Children of Men

  Original Sin

  A Certain Justice

  Death in Holy Orders

  The Murder Room

  The Lighthouse

  The Private Patient

  Non-fiction

  The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (with T. A. Critchley)

  Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography

  Talking About Detective Fiction

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2011

  Copyright © 1963 P. D. James

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2011. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd., London, in 1963. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  James, P. D., 1920–

  A mind to murder / P. D. James.

  “An Adam Dalgliesh mystery.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40049-9

  I. Title.

  PR6060.A56M55 2011 823′.914 C2010-906055-5

  v3.1

  For Edward Gordon James

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is only a small number of autonomous psychiatric outpatient clinics in London and it is obvious that these units, dealing as they do with the same medical specialty and organized within a unified National Health Service, must inevitably have some methods of treatment and administrative proceedures in common. A number of these they share with the Steen Clinic. It is the more important to state clearly that the Steen is an imaginary clinic situated in an imaginary London square, that none of its patients or staff, medical or lay, represent living people and that the deplorable events which took place in its basement have their origin only in that curious psychological phenomenon—the imagination of the crime novelist.

  —P. D. James

  1

  Dr. Paul Steiner, consultant psychiatrist at the Steen Clinic, sat in the front ground-floor consulting room and listened to his patient’s highly rationalized explanation of the failure of his third marriage. Mr. Burge lay in comfort on a couch, the better to expound the complications of his psyche. Dr. Steiner sat at his head in a chair of the carefully documented type which the Hospital Management Committee had decreed for the use of consultants. It was functional and not unattractive but it gave no support to the back of the head. From time to time a sharp jerk of his neck muscles recalled Dr. Steiner from momentary oblivion to the realities of his Friday evening psychotherapy clinic. The October day had been very warm. After a fortnight of sharp frosts, during which the staff of the clinic had shivered and pleaded, the official date for starting the central heating had coincided with one of those perfect autumn days when the city square outside had brimmed with yellow light and the late dahlias in the railed garden, bright as a paintbox, had shone like the gauds of high summer. It was now nearly seven o’clock. Outside, the warmth of the day had long given way first to mist and then to chilly darkness. But here, inside the clinic, the heat of noon was trapped, the air, heavy and still, seemed spent with the breath of too much talking.

  Mr. Burge enlarged on the immaturity, coldness and insensitivity of his wives in a querulous falsetto. Dr. Steiner’s clinical judgement, not uninfluenced by the late effects of a large lunch and the unwise choice of a cream doughnut with his afternoon tea, told him that the time was not yet ripe to point out that the one defect shared by the three mesdames Burge had been a singular lack of judgement in their choice of husband. Mr. Burge was not yet ready to face the truth of his own inadequacy.

  Dr. Steiner felt no moral indignation about his patient’s behaviour. It would indeed have been most unethical had any such improper emotion clouded his judgement. There were few things in life which aroused Dr. Steiner’s moral indignation and most of them affected his own comfort. Many of them were indeed concerned with the Steen Clinic and its administration. He disapproved strongly of the administrative officer, Miss Bolam, whose preoccupation with the number of patients he saw in a session and the accuracy of his travelling expense form he saw as part of a systematic policy of persecution. He resented the fact that his Friday evening clinic coincided with Dr. James Baguley’s electroconvulsive therapy session so that his psychotherapy patients, all of them of high intelligence and sensible of the privilege of being treated by him, had to sit in the waiting room with the motley crowd of depressed suburban housewives and ill-educated psychotics that Baguley seemed to delight in collecting. Dr. Steiner had refused the use of one of the third-floor consulting rooms. These had been formed by partitioning the large and elegant Georgian rooms and he despised them as badly proportioned and unpleasing cells, ill-suited either to his grade or to the importance of his work. Nor had he found it convenient to change the time of his session. Baguley, therefore, should change his. But Dr. Baguley had stood firm and in this, too, Dr. Steiner had seen the influence of Miss Bolam. His plea that the ground-floor consulting rooms should be soundproofed had been turned down by the Hospital Management Committee on the grounds of expense. There had, however, been no de
mur over providing Baguley with a new and highly expensive contraption for shocking his patients out of the few wits they still possessed. The matter had, of course, been considered by the Clinic Medical Committee but Miss Bolam had made no secret of where her sympathies lay. In his diatribes against the administrative officer, Dr. Steiner found it convenient to forget that her influence over the Medical Committee was non-existent.

  It was difficult to forget the irritations of the ECT session. The clinic building had been put up when men built to last, but even the sturdy oak door of the consulting room could not muffle the comings and goings of a Friday night. The front door was closed at six p.m. and patients at the evening clinics were booked in and out since the time, over five years ago, when a patient had entered unobserved, secreted herself in the basement lavatory and chosen that insalubrious place in which to kill herself. Dr. Steiner’s psychotherapy sessions were punctuated by the ringing of the front-door bell, the passing of feet as patients came and went, the hearty voices of relatives and escorts exhorting the patient or calling goodbyes to Sister Ambrose. Dr. Steiner wondered why relatives found it necessary to shout at the patients as if they were deaf as well as psychotic. But possibly after a session with Baguley and his diabolic machine, they were. Worst of all was the clinic domestic assistant, Mrs. Shorthouse. One might imagine that Amy Shorthouse could do the cleaning early in the mornings as was surely the normal arrangement. That way there would be the minimum of disturbance to the clinic staff. But Mrs. Shorthouse maintained that she couldn’t get through the work without an extra two hours in the evenings and Miss Bolam had agreed. Naturally, she would. It appeared to Dr. Steiner that very little domestic work was done on Friday evenings. Mrs. Shorthouse had a predilection for the ECT patients—indeed, her own husband had once been treated by Dr. Baguley—and she was usually to be seen hanging around the hall and the ground-floor general office while the session was being held. Dr. Steiner had mentioned it at the Medical Committee more than once and had been irritated by his colleagues’ general uninterest in the problem. Mrs. Shorthouse should be kept out of sight and encouraged to get on with her work, not permitted to stand around gossiping with the patients. Miss Bolam, so unnecessarily strict with other members of the staff, showed no inclination to discipline Mrs. Shorthouse. Everyone knew that good domestic workers were hard to get but an administrative officer who knew her job would recruit them somehow. Weakness solved nothing. But Baguley could not be persuaded to complain about Mrs. Shorthouse and Bolam would never criticize Baguley. The poor woman was probably in love with him. It was up to Baguley to take a firm line instead of sloping around the clinic in that ridiculously long white coat which made him look like a second-rate dentist. Really, the man had no idea of the dignity with which a consultant clinic should be conducted.

  Clump, clump went someone’s boots along the passage. It was probably old Tippett, a chronic schizophrenic patient of Baguley’s who for the past nine years had regularly spent Friday evenings carving wood in the art therapy department. The thought of Tippett increased Dr. Steiner’s petulance. The man was totally unsuitable for the Steen. If he were well enough to be out of hospital, which Dr. Steiner doubted, he ought to attend a day hospital or one of the County Council’s sheltered workshops. It was patients like Tippett who gave the clinic a dubious reputation and obscured its real function as an analytically orientated centre of psychotherapy. Dr. Steiner felt positively embarrassed when one of his own carefully selected patients encountered Tippett creeping about the clinic on a Friday evening. Tippett wasn’t even safe to be out. One day there would be an incident and Baguley would find himself in trouble.

  Dr. Steiner’s happy contemplation of his own colleague in trouble was punctured by the ring of the front-door bell. Really, it was impossible! This time it was apparently a hospital-car-service driver calling for a patient. Mrs. Shorthouse went to the door to speed them away. Her eldritch screech echoed through the hall. “Cheerio, ducks. See you next week. If you can’t be good, be careful.”

  Dr. Steiner winced and shut his eyes. But his patient, happily engaged in his favourite hobby of talking about himself, seemed not to have heard. Mr. Burge’s high whine had not, in fact, faltered for the past twenty minutes.

  “I don’t pretend I’m an easy person. I’m not, I’m a complicated devil. That’s something which Theda and Sylvia have never understood. The roots of it go deep of course. You remember that session we had in June? Some pretty basic stuff came out then, I thought.”

  His therapist did not recall the session in question but was unconcerned. With Mr. Burge pretty basic stuff was invariably near the surface and could be trusted to emerge. An unaccountable peace fell. Dr. Steiner doodled on his notepad, regarded his doodle with interest and concern, looked at it again with the pad held upside down and became for a moment more preoccupied with his own subconscious than with that of his patient. Suddenly he became aware of another sound from outside, faint at first and then becoming louder. Somewhere, a woman was screaming. It was a horrible noise, high, continuous and completely animal. Its effect on Dr. Steiner was peculiarly unpleasant. He was naturally timid and highly strung. Although his job involved him in the occasional emotional crises, he was more adept at circumventing than coping with an emergency.

  Fear gave vent to irritation and he sprang from his chair exclaiming: “No! Really, this is too bad! What’s Miss Bolam doing? Isn’t anyone supposed to be in charge here?”

  “What’s up?” inquired Mr. Burge, sitting up like a jack-in-the-box and dropping his voice half an octave to its more normal tone.

  “Nothing. Nothing. Some woman having an attack of hysteria, that’s all. Stay where you are. I’ll be back,” commanded Dr. Steiner.

  Mr. Burge collapsed again but with eye and ear cocked for the door. Dr. Steiner found himself in the hall.

  Immediately a little group swung round to face him. Jennifer Priddy, the junior typist, was clinging to one of the porters, Peter Nagle, who was patting her shoulder in embarrassed pity and looking puzzled. Mrs. Shorthouse was with them. The girl’s screams were subsiding into whimpers but her whole body was shaking and she was deathly pale.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Dr. Steiner sharply. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Before anyone had a chance to reply, the door of the ECT room opened and Dr. Baguley came out followed by Sister Ambrose and his anaesthetist, Dr. Mary Ingram. The hall seemed suddenly full of people. “Calm down, that’s a good girl,” said Dr. Baguley mildly. “We’re trying to run a clinic.” He turned to Peter Nagle and asked in a low voice: “What’s the matter anyway?”

  Nagle seemed about to speak when, suddenly, Miss Priddy gained control. Breaking free she turned to Dr. Baguley and said with absolute clearness: “It’s Miss Bolam. She’s dead. Someone’s killed her. She’s in the basement record room and she’s murdered. I found her. Enid’s been murdered!”

  She clung to Nagle and began to cry again but more quietly. The dreadful shaking had ceased. Dr. Baguley said to the porter: “Take her into the treatment room. Make her lie down. Better give her something to drink. Here’s the key. I’ll be back.”

  He made for the basement stairs and the rest, abandoning the girl to Nagle’s ministrations, followed in a jostling bunch. The basement at the Steen was well lit; all its rooms were used by the clinic which, like most psychiatric units, was chronically short of space. Here, below stairs, in addition to the boiler room, the telephone equipment room and the porters’ quarters, was the art therapy department, a medical-records storeroom and, at the front of the building, a treatment room for the lysergic-acid patients.

  As the little group reached the bottom of the stairs, the door of this room opened and Nurse Bolam, Miss Bolam’s cousin, looked out briefly—a shadowy wraith in her white uniform against the darkness of the room behind. Her gentle, puzzled voice floated to them down the corridor. “Is there anything wrong? I thought I heard a scream a few minutes ago.”

  Sister Ambrose
said with brusque authority: “There’s nothing wrong, Nurse. Get back to your patient.” The white figure disappeared and the door was shut. Turning to Mrs. Shorthouse, Sister Ambrose went on: “And there’s nothing for you to do here, Mrs. Shorthouse. Please stay upstairs. Miss Priddy might like a cup of tea.”

  Mrs. Shorthouse was heard to mutter rebelliously but beat a reluctant retreat. The three doctors, with Sister in tow, pressed on.

  The medical-record room was on their right, between the porters’ restroom and the art-therapy department. The door was ajar and the light was on.

  Dr. Steiner, who had become unnaturally aware of every small detail, noticed the key was in the lock. No one was about. The steel racks, with their tight-packed rows of manilla folders, ran ceiling high and at right angles to the door forming a series of narrow aisles, each lit by a fluorescent light. The four high windows were barred and dissected by the racks; it was an airless little room rarely visited and seldom dusted. The little group pushed its way down the first passage and turned left to where there was a small, windowless space clear of shelving and furnished with a table and chair where records could be sorted for filing or information copied from the notes without the need to take the file away. Here was chaos. The chair was overturned. The floor was littered with records. Some had their covers wrenched apart and their pages torn; others lay dumped in shifting layers beneath gaps on the shelves which looked too narrow to have held such a weight of paper. And in the middle of this confusion, like a plump and incongruous Ophelia afloat on a tide of paper, was the body of Enid Bolam. On her chest rested a heavy and grotesque image carved in wood, her hands folded about its base so that she looked, horribly, like a parody of motherhood with her creature ritually laid to her breast.

  There could be no doubt that she was dead. Even in the midst of his fear and repugnance, Dr. Steiner could not miss that final diagnosis. Staring at the wooden figure he cried: “Tippett! That’s his fetish! That’s the carving he’s so proud of. Where is he? Baguley, he’s your patient! You’d better handle this!” He looked round nervously as if expecting Tippett to materialize, arm raised to strike, the very personification of violence.