Before questioning anyone, the policeman strung yellow tape across the stairwell door opening. Greta Lundberg was left alone on the second floor landing.

“A fall,” Dr Hauptman speculated.

Detective Klugman was inclined to call in the specialists just in case Greta’s demise was not an accident.

“Who found her,” Klugman asked.

“Bruce, I think,” Dr Hauptman said. “He’s the one that called me up here.”

Klugman eyed the giant orderly up and down.

“You found her?” Klugman asked Bruce.

“The door was open,” Bruce said. “Not supposed to be open. I looked in but it was Nurse Shirley that found her. She was already down there, tending to her. Told me to call the Doc up.”

Klugman took a small notepad from his pocket, flipped through the pages. He had only one blank page left. He patted his pockets for a pencil but had none.

“Never mind,” Klugman said. “I’ll remember. Where is this nurse Shirley now? I’ll need a statement from her.”

“Just left. Gone home most likely,” Bruce said. “Her shift was done long time ago. She works the nights.”

Klugman stared at Bruce suspiciously. He imagined himself telling the giant black man to put his hands behind his back so he could handcuff him, even though there was no reason to suspect the orderly of anything other than being a witness to the discovery. But he was big and he was black and that in itself made him suspicious and scary. Klugman imagined Bruce resisting, imagined the orderly picking him up with one hand and tossing him against the wall, like a rag doll. Imagined himself bouncing off the wall and sliding down the long shiny floor on his back. Tossing, like he could have easily tossed this poor little lady down a stairwell. The orderly bore a mute expressionless face, as if he cared little that there was a dead woman down on the landing.

Klugman knew he was ahead of himself, thinking that Bruce might have had something to do with the dead woman. He shook his head to rid himself of his suspicion, he had seen enough scenes of death to know that a cause of death could often be something other than what it first appeared to be. Sometimes though, it was obvious, like a suspect with a gun in hand standing over a dead body, that had a sizeable bullet hole in its head.

“There’s Nurse Clara,” Bruce said. “You can ask her about Nurse Shirley. She’s the boss.”

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