Chapter 5

My thought was to relieve Constable Rutherford at Lucy’s bedside. When I got off the car at Bathurst, I squinted towards the lake into the blazing midday sun and could see no northbound to transfer onto. So I dropped the greasy newspaper that had contained my chips in a trash bin, slung my suit jacket over my shoulder, and walked the five blocks up to the Western Hospital.

Behind a broad strip of parched lawn on the east side of Bathurst, the long, red-brick building went up three storeys on top of a high basement. The pile wasn’t old, but dated from before the war, so money had been spent on turrets and pillars and decorated corners. It wasn’t my money so I didn’t mind. That was outside. Inside, by contrast, it was all business in the fight against germs. I was immediately sobered by the starkness of unending white — white paint on the walls, white tiles on the floors, white enamel desks, white sheets and blankets, high white collars on the nurses’ white dresses. The eye’s only relief was the occasional gleam of aluminum on a food wagon or the black rubber of the tires on which stretchers rolled noiselessly down snowy corridors. I’ve nothing against white, and I guess the look of cleanliness reassures surgery patients, but I hoped Miss Clarkson didn’t require surroundings quite so monochrome.

The sterile tranquility of the Western made me think back to the military hospitals where the stench of putrefaction filled your nose and horrors met your eye at every turn. Volunteer nurses had had to make up with human warmth for their lack of spotless uniforms and years of training. They hadn’t had time to learn not to flirt, whereas these impassive vestals ... Just then one passing me returned my smile with twinkling eyes, and I felt better about the human race.

The feeling didn’t last. I was looking for an information desk when I saw with dismay Constable Rutherford push his way in through the street doors.

“Where’s the patient?” I asked.

The constable didn’t answer at once. He seemed to be trying to work loose with his tongue some morsel of food stuck between his teeth.

“Having a nap when I left her, sir,” he said at last.

“Show me.”

The constable led the way up a grand stairway into a rectangular, high-ceilinged room on the second floor. Tall windows lined the long walls, and beneath each row of windows ran a row of white-enamelled beds, most of them occupied. The women were either sitting up reading or knitting, or else lying down sleeping or moaning. The moaning was soft as nurses moved about the ward soothing and shushing. I saw no visitors, this apparently being a quiet time. Around each bed ran a curtain track, but most of the white cotton curtains were pushed back against the wall, so the beds and their occupants could be seen. Rutherford was leading me towards one of the exceptional screened-off beds.

I hadn’t liked it that Rutherford had let Lucy out of his sight, and I didn’t like it that I still couldn’t see her. But I was just prepared to entertain the possibility that a doctor was giving her some privacy while he examined her. Prepared, that is, until I noticed that the snap was open on the leather pouch on the right side of Rutherford’s belt. I tugged his sleeve.

“Constable, where’re your nippers?”

His hand went into the pouch and came out empty. When he looked at me, I thought I’d never seen such a foolish face on a grown man.

Inside the curtain, we found the handcuffs around the slender wrists of a frightened-looking fair-haired girl. She lay flat on her back with the bedclothes pulled up to her chin, her bare arms above her head. The sides of her nose bore the indentations of spectacles, which she was not wearing. The chain between her wrists had been passed around a vertical bar in the bed frame. Beside her, one hand on the girl’s shoulder, stood a nurse with early grey in her hair, a squarish face, and large, brown eyes.

“There, Benny,” said the latter. “The constable’s back with his key.”

You’d think from the woman’s calm that people in her ward got chained to beds every day.

“Quietly now, sirs,” she went on. “We don’t want to alarm the patients.”

“How long since she got away?” was my first, urgent question.

“Hours,” said the fettered girl with feeling — to be corrected promptly by her cool-headed companion.

“I didn’t see her leave, but it can’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Or less than ten.”

More than enough time for a vanishing act.

“I’m sure it felt longer,” I said, mild as milk.

After some fumbling in his uniform trouser pockets, Rutherford found the key and got the cuffs off the girl. He was about to put them back into their pouch.

“I’ll take those, constable,” I said. Our eyes met. “The key too.” I lifted cuffs and key out of his hand and stowed them in an inside pocket of my suit jacket.

The brown-eyed nurse was examining each of the girl’s wrists.

“Just a little redness, Ben. No break in the skin. Now I know you policemen will want to ask Nurse Bennett all about what happened.” She turned to me. “I assume you’re police as well. You can both wait in the nurses’ day room while we get some clothes on her. That’s the room with the bay window when you turn left at the far end of the ward.”

“You’d better come as well,” I said.

I got her name, which was Jane Sparrow. The other was D. Bennett — D. for Daisy. She hated the name, so no one called her that.

However swell the day room might be for an interview, I wasn’t about to lose track of any more witnesses, so Rutherford and I hung about the ward until the curtain around Lucy’s bed was pulled back and the two women emerged. Meanwhile, to each patient’s inquiry as to what was going on, I smiled sweetly and — dropping my voice to the most confidential level — replied, “It’s an investigation. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

Inside ten minutes, Nurses Sparrow and Bennett were sitting with Rutherford and myself in a room that daringly departed from the hospital’s universal whiteness. The walls were painted a mother-of-pearl grey and the armchairs were upholstered in a utilitarian buff. Miss Bennett was wearing a nurse’s dress pinned up at the hem, and three sizes too ample for her slender figure. Her own uniform — dress, cap, apron, and shoes, but not her stockings — had been taken by the “patient” whose fretful noises had summoned her into the curtained cubicle. Once there, she explained — with an understandable sense of grievance in her voice, but also with a woman-of-science matter-of-factness — she had been grabbed by the neck and had pressure applied to her carotid arteries until an interrupted flow of blood to the brain had caused her to faint. When she came to, she had found herself covered only with a bedsheet and chained to the head of the bed, while her sturdy white stockings had been used to tie her ankles to the bed frame at the other end. A hospital nightie had been tied around her mouth to keep her from calling out.

This was how she had been found. Jane Sparrow had gone to investigate why the curtains were closed around this particular bed. Save for exceptional circumstances, it was hospital policy to keep them open to facilitate patient supervision.

“Did you close the curtains, Miss Bennett?” I asked.

Rutherford stiffened.

“I closed them, sir,” he hastened to say, feeling perhaps that my question implied a criticism of the girl and anxious to demonstrate — better late than never — a sense of responsibility. “The foreign lady pointed at the curtains and made me understand that she wanted them drawn so she could have a better nap.”

“What became of her clothes?” I asked the nurses.

“There are drawers in the table by each bed,” said Jane Sparrow. “A patient’s effects are kept there unless she’s one of the ones that might wander off without a proper discharge. The constable warned us that Miss Clarkson might be disoriented on account of a blow to her head, so I put her things in this room. Did you want to see them?”

I nodded. “Please.”

While the older nurse was retrieving them from a locked metal cabinet, Miss Bennett turned with a reproving look to Rutherford. “Your warning didn’t include the fact that this woman was a dangerous criminal.”

“We didn’t know,” I interjected.

“The police force closes ranks,” murmured Miss Bennett, rubbing her wrists.

“Our interest in Lucy Clarkson was as a witness to a crime,” I explained, “not a suspect. She’d been hit on the head. We needed the hospital to tell us when she’d be fit to question.”

Jane Sparrow rejoined us, with Lucy’s rust-coloured rayon dress and a few undergarments folded over one arm and the shoes mended with sticking plaster in the other hand.

“We weren’t even able to figure out which languages she speaks,” I went on. “Were you?”

“We’re nurses,” sniffed Miss Bennett, “not linguists.”

I was ready to start calling her Daisy just for spite.

“Another patient thought she heard Polish,” offered Miss Sparrow. “I wouldn’t know.”

I looked over the girdle-bra combination Lucy had been wearing when admitted to the hospital. “Do you wear one of these, Miss Bennett?”

Rutherford blushed. “Sergeant, I don’t think ...”

“It’s a reasonable question,” Miss Bennett allowed, all scientific again. “You want to know when you go looking for your runaway witness if she still has the same figure you last saw her with.” She fingered the stiff, white undergarment. “I’ve never found the need of anything this confining. But I suspect Miss Clarkson would have changed her clothes again as soon as she got out of the hospital. On her, mine would have been conspicuously tight. Uncomfortably so too, I’d guess.”

“She take any money from you?” I asked. “Enough for a new outfit?”

“Not nearly. There may have been fifty cents in my apron pocket. Snack money is as much as I carry when I’m on duty.” She was still fingering Lucy’s girdle, I thought absent-mindedly, but then her fingers disappeared into an unexpected opening. “Aha, it seems I made a good trade after all.”

From a pocket sewn inside the bottom of the girdle Miss Bennett drew three banknotes; engraved on each was a picture of Benjamin Franklin and the amount $100.

Constable Rutherford whistled his astonishment, a whistle cut short by the sight of Jane Sparrow’s finger on her lips.

“That’s an awful lot to leave behind,” said Miss Bennett. “What was she running away from?”

“We’re working to find out.” I ran my finger inside the pocket to see if anything else was lurking there. I found nothing except a small key.

Jane Sparrow’s thought was as quick as mine. “It looks as if it might fit the suitcase you have there,” she said, brown eyes alive with curiosity.

I changed the subject. “Miss Bennett, Lucy Clarkson took your eyeglasses. Could you describe them for us?”

The young nurse laughed. “Look around the hospital, Mr. Policeman. You’ll only see one style, regulation style — big round goggles with black metal frames. Utilitarian and uglifying. You can bet the Strangler threw them away as soon as she got to the street. The prescription’s not strong, but looking through them would be irritating for anyone with twenty-twenty vision.”

I left my name and the HQ phone number before wrapping up the interview. My last question was whether any diagnosis had been made of Lucy Clarkson before her escape. The nurses said no, she’d have been examined when the doctors made their afternoon rounds. I said I was sorry I’d have to take the $300 and carried off Lucy’s clothes as well in a brown paper bag supplied by one of the nurses.

I phoned Grace Hospital again from the hospital lobby, only to find that Ned Cruickshank had been and gone. The pathologist told me the man accompanying the acting detective had failed to identify the deceased. When Constable Rutherford asked if we were now going to go looking for Lucy Clarkson, I suggested it was a little late for that, that it had already been too late for hot pursuit by the time he got back from his lunch. Oh, said Rutherford, where then were we going next? I suggested we walk south as far as Bathurst and Queen. From there, he could carry on west back to Parkdale while I boarded a streetcar east to City Hall. The projected parting of the ways spurred the constable to justify himself. He wasn’t in the habit of having his equipment stolen, he said. In his years on the force, he’d nabbed more pickpockets than a dog has fleas. It was just, as I myself had said, that the foreign woman wasn’t suspected of criminal behaviour. And then her not speaking English meant she had to communicate with him in dumb show, waving her arms about. It had put him off his guard. But he wouldn’t be caught twice. He’d learned his lesson. Maybe so, I said, but I had no work for him at present and he might as well report back to his home station. As for his handcuffs, they were now evidence of a crime and for the time being could not be returned to him.

Once I’d seen Rutherford off on his streetcar, I changed my mind about where to go and took the next car in the same westerly direction. I’d lugged Lucy’s suitcase around enough to feel a sense of ownership, and now that I thought I had the means for a discreet look inside I didn’t fancy taking that look at my desk with other detectives and possibly the inspector peering over my shoulder. So I retreated to my own bed-sitter apartment and sat with it on the bed.

The key fitted all right. Inside I found a plastic toilet case, a nightie, a negligee, two pair of flesh-coloured stockings, and two pair of loose step-in drawers. Also, a second inexpensive dropped-waist summer dress, this one apple green with red roses printed on it. All cheap but fashionable. Then there was an incongruously dowdy tweed skirt and a white schoolmarmish blouse. Puzzled, I kept digging and came at last to a Commonwealth of Australia passport in the name of Miss Edna Salisbury.

Before opening it, I hung up my jacket, peeled off my sweat-soaked shirt, drew a deep breath, and dared to hope that inside this grey-brown little book I’d find a photograph of the mystery woman.

No such luck. The photo on page three was of someone quite different — a jowly woman with a thick, bumpy nose, and straight, pale hair pulled back behind prominent ears. She was wearing a mannish shirt and tie. That jibed at least with the frumpy blouse in the suitcase, but I wasn’t about to start calling its recent possessor Edna just yet.

Particulars were handwritten in black ink. The place and date of birth were given as Melbourne, Victoria, 24th May 1890 — which made Miss Salisbury thirty-six. Her profession appeared as schoolteacher, her domicile Perth. The passport had been issued on 10th August 1925 and was to expire 9th August 1927. The latter pages had been decorated with the rubber stamps of authorities in Western Australia, Ceylon, the United Kingdom, the United States, and — just one day ago — Canada at Niagara Falls.

I took myself for a walk, all of three strides across the room to the bookcase where I kept my Seagram’s rye. Prohibition was still in effect in Ontario, and while I didn’t expect a raid, I enjoyed pulling out a volume of my second-hand encyclopedia whenever I wanted a drink. The mickey behind Demijohn to Edward was just under half full when I took it down, and still had one good plug in it when I tucked it away.

Back on the bed, I went through the suitcase once more, looking for more of those tricky hidden pockets and feeling around for anything sewn inside the lining. I didn’t find a thing of either kind, but this time I opened the toilet case.

I was expecting a toothbrush, a hair brush, a tube of lipstick, and maybe some face powder. All present and accounted for, but there was stage makeup as well — putty and greasepaint — and hair dye.