Muriel Gilchrist

Muriel Gilchrist is 29 and for two years has worked as a nurse in Dr. Ackland's office in the beach district. Born in the countryside, the daughter of a railwayman and a seamstress, she went into nursing at eighteen because the town hospital paid a salary and gave a uniform. She served in Darwin during the war, and from the war she brought the habit of never saying aloud anything that could be repeated.

She rents a room in a gabled house, ten minutes' walk from the office, and always arrives before the first patient to sterilize the instruments and check the schedule. She eats lunch sitting on the back step, reads pocket novels and keeps her salary in a biscuit tin, in folded notes. In the neighborhood they say she greets everyone and has never invited anyone in.

She is thin, with an oval, freckled face, tired green eyes and auburn hair in a bun under the white cap. She wears the starched uniform, a navy cape on her shoulders and a lapel watch pinned to her chest, which she consults without taking her eyes off the patient. She speaks of bodies with the calm of someone who has seen everything and of herself almost nothing, in short, precise sentences.

She was the one who fainted in the morgue and gave the dead man's name to the police. She says she knew him from the war, from Darwin, where she was a nurse and he a corporal, and that she hadn't seen him in years. She explains the fainting by the heat and the formalinformalin Pungent solution of formaldehyde in water, used to preserve bodies and tissue samples.. What she observed with a professional eye is that the dead man's shoes were polished, without a grain of sand on the sole, without vomit and without sign of a struggle.

Muriel knows that fainting before a dead man she knew is the kind of thing the police write down. It could be the shock of a nurse who didn't expect to see that face. It could be someone who tells only what can be checked. The detective will have to decide which.