A young nursing student is killed during a demonstration at Nightingale Training College; she acts as a patient and two partners demonstrate intragastric feeding. Food believed to contain milk turns out to be disinfectant, making Nurse Pearce’s death extremely painful. It occurs in the presence of Miss Beale, the Inspector of the General Nursing Council, which greatly damages the College’s reputation, but is otherwise believed to be a common murder, or even an accident, so Inspector Bailey of local police take over. the case. Only after another nursing student dies in her sleep about a week later does the case become serious enough to call in Scotland Yard, and Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh enters the scene.
He solves the crime fairly quickly, actually in a day, though it’s a long day for him, ending in an attempt on his own life. Shocked, he discovers that to understand the killer’s motive he has to go back in time, twenty-five years ago, actually, when World War II had just ended and one of the victims had not yet been born. Twenty-five years later, that war causes another outbreak of violence: at Nightingale House.
The third murder follows, and although Adam Dalgliesh knows the name of the murderer, he is unable to prove anything. This murderer is much more intelligent than the culprit of the first two crimes and knows how not to leave evidence. However, Dalgliesh is not one to give up easily…
I must say that I find PD James’s books a bit depressing, but interesting nonetheless. You may never want to read them again (I did, but just to refresh my memory for the review), but they are worth reading at least once. The mystery will keep him excited and unless he is as smart as Dalgliesh himself, he will never guess the name of the murderer until he reads the whole book. The characters are drawn with the precision of a true master, all different and all with just the right dose of Heaven and Hell in them, not even the victims portrayed as complete saints, or the killers as complete villains. They are just people, with all that that entails. And they are also interesting: I would like to meet some of them, and it is a pity that they are not real.
My absolute favorite is Adam Dalgliesh himself, a police officer and poet, apparently a genius in both fields. He sounds like a really decent person, really honorable. The people’s knowledge of him is amazing; his understanding of his duty even more. He’s a perfect role model for a police officer, assuming perfection exists off the books.
