NGAIO MARSH

Died in the Wool

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Died in the Wool first published in Great Britain by Collins 1945

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1945

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Source ISBN: 9780006512394

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344581

Version: 2017-12-18

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Cast of Characters

Prologue – 1939–1942

1 Alleyn at Mount Moon

2 According to Ursula Harme

3 According to Douglas Grace

4 According to Fabian Losse

5 According to Terence Lynne

6 According to the Files

7 According to Ben Wilson

8 According to Cliff Johns

9 Attack

10 Night Piece

11 According to Arthur Rubrick

Epilogue – According to Alleyn

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

Florence Rubrick | Of Mount Moon
Arthur Rubrick | Her husband
Sammy Joseph | Wool buyer for Riven Brothers
Alf | Storeman at Riven Brothers
Roderick Alleyn | Chief Detective-Inspector, CID
Fabian Losse | Nephew to Arthur Rubrick
Douglas Grace | Nephew to Florence Rubrick
Ursula Harme | Her niece
Terence Lynne | Her secretary. Later gardener at Mount Moon
Mrs Aceworthy | Housekeeper at Mount Moon
Markins | Manservant at Mount Moon
Tommy Johns | Working manager at Mount Moon
Mrs Johns | His wife
Cliff Johns | Their son
Ben Wilson | Wool sorter
Jack Merrywether | Presser
Albert Black | Rouseabout
Percy Gould | Shearers’ cook

PROLOGUE

1939.

‘I am Mrs Rubrick of Mount Moon,’ said the golden-headed lady. ‘And I should like to come in.’

The man at the stage-door looked down into her face. Its nose and eyes thrust out at him, pale, all of them, and flecked with brown. Seen at close quarters these features appeared to be slightly out of perspective. The rest of the face receded from them, fell away to insignificance. Even the mouth with its slighty projecting, its never quite hidden teeth, was forgotten in favour of that acquisitive nose, those protuberant exacting eyes. ‘I should like to come in,’ Flossie Rubrick repeated.

The man glanced over his shoulder into the hall. ‘There are seats at the back,’ he said. ‘Behind the buyers’ benches.’

‘I know there are. But I don’t want to see the backs of the buyers. I want to watch their faces. I’m Mrs Rubrick of Mount Moon and my wool clip should be coming up in the next half-hour. I want to sit up here somewhere.’ She looked beyond the man at the door, through a pair of scenic book-wings to the stage where an auctioneer in shirt-sleeves sat at a high rostrum, gabbling. ‘Just there,’ said Flossie Rubrick, ‘on that chair by those painted things. That will do quite well.’ She moved past the man at the door. ‘How do you do?’ she said piercingly as she came face-to-face with a second figure. ‘You don’t mind if I come in, do you? I’m Mrs Arthur Rubrick. May I sit down?’

She settled herself on a chair she had chosen, pulling it forward until she could look through an open door in the proscenium and down into the front of the house. She was a tiny creature and it was a tall chair. Her feet scarcely reached the floor. The auctioneer’s clerks who sat below his rostrum, glanced up curiously from their papers.

‘Lot one seven six,’ gabbled the auctioneer. ‘Mount Silver.’

‘Eleven,’ a voice shouted.

In the auditorium two men, their arms stretched rigid, sprang to their feet and screamed. ‘Three!’ Flossie settled her furs and looked at them with interest. ‘Eleven-three,’ said the auctioneer.

The chairs proper to the front of the hall had been replaced by rows of desks, each of which was labelled with the name of its occupant’s firm. Van Huys. Riven Bros. Dubois. Yen. Steiner. James Ogden. Hartz. Ormerod. Rhodes. Markino. James Barnett. Dressed in business men’s suits woven from good wool, the buyers had come in from the four corners of the world for the summer wool sales. They might have been carefully selected types, so eloquently did they display their nationality. Van Huys’s buyer with his round wooden head and soft hat, Dubois’s, sleek, with a thin moustache and heavy grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, old Jimmy Ormerod who bought for himself, screamed like a stallion, and turned purple in the face, Hartz with horn-rimmed glasses who barked, and Mr Kurata Kan of Markino’s with his falsetto yelp. Each buyer held printed lists before him, and from time to time, like a well-trained chorus-ensemble, they would all turn a page. The auctioneer’s recital was uninflected, and monotonous; yet, as if the buyers were marionettes and he their puppet-master, they would twitch into violent action and as suddenly return to their nervously intent immobility. Some holding the papers before their eyes, stood waiting for a particular wool clip to come up. Others wrote at their desks. Each had trained himself to jerk in a flash from watchful relaxation into spreadeagled yelling urgency. Many of them smoked continuously and Flossie Rubrick saw them through drifts of blue tobacco clouds.

In the open doorways and under the gallery stood groups of men whose faces and hands were raddled and creased by the sun and whose clothes were those of the country man in town. They were the wool-growers, the run-holders, the sheep-cockies, the back-countrymen. Upon the behaviour of the buyers their manner of living for the next twelve months would depend. The wool sale was what it all amounted to; long musters over high country, nights spent by shepherds in tin huts on mountain sides, late snows that came down into lambing paddocks, noisy rituals of dipping, crutching, shearing; the final down-country journey of the wool bales – this was the brief and final comment on the sheep man’s working year.

Flossie saw her husband, Arthur Rubrick, standing in a doorway. She waved vigorously. The men who were with Arthur pointed her out. He gave her a dubious nod and began to make his way along a side aisle towards her. As soon as he reached the steps that led from the auditorium up to her doorway she called out in a sprightly manner. ‘Look where I’ve got to! Come up and join me!’ He did so but without enthusiasm.

‘What are you doing up here, Floss?’ he said. ‘You ought to have gone down below.’

‘Down below wouldn’t suit me at all.’

‘Everyone’s looking at you.’

‘That doesn’t embarrass me,’ she said loudly. ‘When will he get to us, darling? Show me.’

‘Ssh!’ said her husband unhappily and handed her his catalogue. Flossie made play with her lorgnette. She flicked it open modishly with white-gloved hand and looked through it at the lists. There was a simultaneous flutter of white paper throughout the hall. ‘Over we go, I see,’ said Flossie and turned a page. ‘Now, where are we?’

Her husband grunted urgently and jerked up his head.

‘Lot one eighty,’ gabbled the auctioneer.

‘Thirteen.’

‘Half!’ yelled old Ormerod.

‘Three!’

‘Fourteen!’

The spectacled Mr Kurata Kan was on his feet, yelping, a fraction of a second quicker than Ormerod.

‘Top price,’ cried Flossie shrilly. ‘Top price! Isn’t it, darling? We’ve got top price, haven’t we? That dear little Jap!’

A ripple of laughter ran through the hall. The auctioneer grinned. The two men near the stage-door moved away, their hands over their mouths. Arthur Rubrick’s face, habitually cyanosed, deepened to a richer purple. Flossie clapped her white gloves together and rose excitedly. ‘Isn’t he too sweet,’ she demanded. ‘Arthur, isn’t he a pet?’

‘Flossie, for God’s sake,’ Arthur Rubrick muttered.

But Flossie made a series of crisp little nods in the direction of Mr Kurata Kan and at last succeeded in attracting his attention. His eyelids creased, his upper lip lifted in a crescent over his long teeth and he bowed.

‘There!’ said Flossie in triumph as she swept out at the stage-door, followed by her discomforted husband. ‘Isn’t that splendid?’

He piloted her into a narrow yard. ‘I wish you wouldn’t make me quite so conspicuous, my dear,’ he said. ‘I mean, waving to that Jap. We don’t know him or anything.’

‘No,’ cried Flossie. ‘But we’re going to. You’re going to call on him, darling, and we shall ask him to Mount Moon for the weekend.’

‘Oh, no, Flossie. Why? Why on earth?’

‘I’m all for promoting friendly relations. Besides he’s paid top price for my wool. He’s a sensible man. I want to meet him.’

‘Grinning little pip-squeak. I don’t like ’em, Floss. Do you in the eye for tuppence, the Japs would. Any day. They’re our natural enemies.’

‘Darling, you’re absolutely antediluvian. Before we know where we are you’ll be talking about The Yellow Peril.’

She tossed her head and a lock of hair dyed a brilliant gold slipped down her forehead. ‘Do remember this is 1939,’ said Flossie.

1942.

On a summer’s day in February 1942, Mr Sammy Joseph, buyer for Riven Brothers Textile Manufactory, was going through their wool stores with the storeman. The windows had been blacked out with paint, and the storeman, as they entered, switched on a solitary lamp. This had the effect of throwing into strong relief the square hessian bales immediately under the lamp. Farther down the store they dissolved in shadow. The lamp was high and encrusted with dust: the faces of the two men looked cadaverous. Their voices sounded stifled: there is no echo in a building lined with wool. The air was stuffy and smelt of hessian.

‘When did we start buying dead wool, Mr Joseph?’ asked the storeman.

‘We never buy dead wool,’ Joseph said sharply. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘There’s a bale of it down at the far end.’

‘Not in this store.’

‘I’m good for a bet on it.’

‘What’s biting you? Why d’you say it’s dead?’

‘Gawd, Mr Joseph, I’ve been in the game long enough, haven’t I? Don’t I know dead wool when I smell it? It pongs.’

‘Here!’ said Sammy Joseph. ‘Where is this bale?’

‘Come and see.’

They walked down the aisle between ranks of baled wool. The storeman at intervals switched on more lights and the aisle was extended before them. At the far end he paused and jerked his thumb at the last bale. ‘Take a sniff, Mr Joseph,’ he said.

Sammy Joseph bent towards the bale. His shadow was thrown up on the surface, across stencilled letters, a number and a rough crescent.

‘That’s from the Mount Moon clip,’ he said.

‘I know it is.’ The storeman’s voice rose nervously. ‘Stinks, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Joseph. ‘It does.’

‘Dead wool.’

‘I’ve never bought dead wool in my life. Least of all from Mount Moon. And the smell of dead wool goes off after it’s plucked. You know that as well as I do. Dead rat, more likely. Have you looked?’

‘Yes, I have looked, Mr Joseph. I shifted her out the other day. It’s in the bale. You can tell.’

‘Split her up,’ Mr Joseph commanded.

The storeman pulled out a clasp knife, opened it, and dug the blade into the front of the bale. Sammy Joseph watched him in a silence that was broken only by the uneasy sighing of the rafters above their heads.

‘It’s hot in here,’ said Sammy Joseph. ‘There’s a nor’west gale blowing outside. I hate a hot wind.’

‘Oppressive,’ said the storeman. He drew the blade of his knife downwards, sawing at the bale. The strands of sacking parted in a series of tiny explosions. Through the fissure bulged a ridge of white wool.

‘Get a lung full of that,’ said the storeman, straightening himself. ‘It’s something chronic. Try.’

Mr Joseph said: ‘I get it from here, thanks. I can’t understand it. It’s not bellies in that pack, either. Bellies smell a bit but nothing to touch this.’ He opened his cigarette case. ‘Have one?’

‘Ta, Mr Joseph. I don’t mind if I do. It’s not so good, this pong, is it?’

‘It’s coming from inside, all right. They must have baled up something in the press. A rat.’

‘You will have your rat, sir, won’t you?’

‘Let’s have some of that wool out.’ Mr Joseph glanced at his neat worsted suit. ‘You’re in your working clothes,’ he added.

The storeman pulled at a tuft of wool. ‘Half a sec’, Mr Joseph. She’s packed too solid.’ He moved away to the end wall. Sammy Joseph looked at the rent in the bale, reached out his hand and drew it back again. The storeman returned wearing a gauntleted canvas glove on his right hand and carrying one of the iron hooks used for shifting wool bales. He worked it into the fissure and began to drag out lumps of fleece.

‘Phew!’ whispered Sammy Joseph.

‘I’ll have to hand it to you in one respect, sir. She’s not dead wool.’

Mr Joseph picked a lock from the floor, looked at it, and dropped it. He turned away and wiped his hand vigorously on a bale. ‘It’s frightful,’ he said. ‘It’s a godalmighty stench. What the hell’s wrong with you?’

The storeman had sworn with violence and extreme obscenity. Joseph turned to look at him. His gloved hand had disappeared inside the fissure. The edge of the gauntlet showed and no more. His face turned towards Joseph. The eyes and mouth were wide open.

‘I’m touching something.’

‘With the hook?’

The storeman nodded. ‘I won’t look any more,’ he said loudly.

‘Why not?’

‘I won’t look.’

‘Why the hell?’

‘It’s the Mount Moon clip.’

‘I know that. What of it?’

‘Don’t you read the papers?’

Sammy Joseph changed colour. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘God, you’re crazy.’

‘It’s three weeks, isn’t it, and they can’t find her? I was in the last war. I know what that stink reminds me of – Flanders.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Mr Joseph, incredulous but violent. ‘What do you think you are? A radio play or what?’

The storeman plucked his arm from the bale. Locks of fleece were sticking to the canvas glove. With a violent movement he jerked them free and they lay on the floor, rust coloured and wet.

‘You’ve left the hook in the bale.’

‘– the hook.’

‘Get it out, Alf.’

‘–!’

‘Come on. What’s wrong with you. Get it out.’

The storeman looked at Sammy Joseph as if he hated him. A loose sheet of galvanized iron on the roof rattled in the wind and the store was filled momentarily with a vague soughing.

‘Come on,’ Sammy Joseph said again. ‘It’s only a rat.’

The storeman plunged his hand into the fissure. His bare arm twisted and worked. He braced the palm of his left hand against the bale and wrenched out the hook. With an air of incredulity he held the hook out, displaying it.

‘Look!’ he said. With an imperative gesture he waved Mr Joseph aside. The iron hook fell at Sammy Joseph’s feet. A strand of metallic-gold hair was twisted about it.

CHAPTER ONE ALLEYN AT MOUNT MOON

I

May 1943.

A service car pulled out of the township below the Pass. It mounted a steep shingled road until its passengers looked down on the iron roof of the pub and upon a child’s farm-animal design of tiny horses tethered to veranda posts, upon specks that were sheep dogs and upon a toy sulky with motor car wheels that moved slowly along the road, down country. Beyond this a system of foothills, gorges, and clumps of pinus insignis stepped down into a plain fifty miles wide, a plain that rose slowly as its horizon mounted with the eyes of the mounting passengers.

Though their tops were shrouded by a heavy mask of cloud, the hills about the Pass grew more formidable. The intervals between cloud-roof and earth-floor lessened. The Pass climbed into the sky. A mountain rain now fell.

‘Going into bad weather?’ suggested the passenger on the front seat.

‘Going out of it, you mean,’ rejoined the driver.

‘Do I?’

‘Take a look at the sky, sir.’

The passenger wound down his window for a moment and craned out. ‘Jet black and lowering,’ he said, ‘but there’s a good smell in the air.’

‘Watch ahead.’

The passenger dutifully peered through the rain-blinded windscreen and saw nothing to justify the driver’s prediction but only a confusion of black cones whose peaks were cut off by the curtain of the sky. The head of the Pass was lost in a blur of rain. The road now hung above a gorge through whose bed hurried a stream, its turbulence seen but not heard at that height. The driver changed down and the engine whined and roared. Pieces of shingle banged violently on the underneath of the car.

‘Hallo!’ said the passenger. ‘Is this the top!’ And a moment later: ‘Good God, how remarkable!’

The mountain tops had marched away to left and right. The head of the Pass was an open square of piercing blue. As they reached it the black cloud drew back like a curtain. In a moment it was behind them and they looked down into another country.

It was a great plateau, high itself, but ringed about with mountains that were crowned in perpetual snow. It was laced with rivers of snow water. Three lakes of a strange milky green lay across its surface. It stretched bare and golden under a sky that was brilliant as a paladin’s mantle. Upon the plateau and the foothills, up to the level of perpetual snow, grew giant tussocks, but there were no forests. Many miles apart, patches of pinus radiata or lombardy poplars could be seen and these marked the solitary homesteads of the sheep farmers. The air was clear beyond belief, unbreathed, one would have said, newly poured out from the blue chalice of the sky.

The passenger again lowered the window, which was still wet but steaming now, in the sun. He looked back. The cloud curtain lolled a little way over the mountain barrier and that was all there was to be seen of it.

‘It’s a new world,’ he said.

The driver stretched out his hand to a pigeon-hole in the dashboard where his store of loose cigarettes joggled together. His leather coat smelt unpleasantly of fish oil. The passenger wished that his journey was over and that he could enter into this new world of which, remaining in the car, he was merely a spectator. He looked at the mountain ring that curved sickle-wise to right and left of the plateau. ‘Where is Mount Moon?’ he asked. The driver pointed sweepingly to the left. ‘They’ll pick you up at the forks.’

The road, a pale stripe in the landscape, pointed down the centre of the plateau and then, far ahead, forked towards the mountain ramparts. The passenger could see a car, tiny but perfectly clear, standing at the forks. ‘That’ll be Mr Losse’s car,’ said the driver. The passenger thought of the letter he carried in his wallet. Phrases returned to his memory. ‘… the situation has become positively Russian, or, if you prefer the allusion, a setting for a modern crime story … We continue here together in an atmosphere that twangs with stretched nerves. One expects them to relax with time, but no … it’s over a year ago … I should not have ventured to make the demand upon your time if there had not been this preposterous suggestion of espionage … refuse to be subjected any longer to this particular form of torment …’ And, in a pointed irritable calligraphy the signature: ‘Fabian Losse.’

The bus completed its descent and with a following cloud of dust began to travel across the plateau. Against some distant region of cloud a system of mountains revealed, glittering spear upon spear. One would have said that these must be the ultimate expression of loftiness but soon the clouds parted and there, remote from them, was the shining horn of the great peak, the cloud piercer, Aorangi. The passenger was so intent upon this unfolding picture that he had no eyes for the road and they were close upon the forks before he saw the sign post with its two arms at right-angles. The car pulled up beside them and he read their legends: ‘Main South Road’ and ‘Mount Moon’.

The air was lively with the sound of grasshoppers. Its touch was fresh and invigorating. A tall young man wearing a brown jacket and grey trousers, came round the car to meet him. ‘Mr Alleyn? I’m Fabian Losse.’ He took a mail bag from the driver who had already begun to unload Alleyn’s luggage and a large box of stores for Mount Moon. The service car drove away to the south in its attendant cloud of dust. Alleyn and Losse took the road to Mount Moon.

II

‘It’s a relief to me that you’ve come, sir,’ said Losse after they had driven in silence for some minutes. ‘I hope I haven’t misled you with my dark hints of espionage. They had to be dark, you know, because they are based entirely on conjecture. Personally I find the whole theory of espionage dubious, indeed I don’t believe in it for a moment. But I used it as bait.’

‘Does anyone believe in it?’

‘My deceased aunt’s nephew, Douglas Grace, urges it passionately. He wanted to come and meet you in order to press his case but I thought I’d get in first. After all it was I who wrote to you and not Douglas.’

The road they had taken was rough, little more than a pair of wheel tracks separated by a tussocky ridge. It ran up to the foothills of the eastern mountains and skirted them. Far to the west now, midway across the plateau, Alleyn could still see the service car, a clouded point of movement driving south.

‘I didn’t expect you to come,’ said Fabian Losse.

‘No?’

‘No. Of course I wouldn’t have known anything about you if Flossie herself hadn’t told me. That’s rather a curious thought, isn’t it? Horrible in a way. It was not long before it happened that you met, was it? I remember her returning from her lawful parliamentary occasions (you knew, of course, that she was an MP) full of the meeting and of dark hints about your mission in this country. “Of course I tell you nothing that you shouldn’t know but if you imagine there are no fifth columnists in this country …” I think she expected to be put on some secret convention but as far as I know that never came off. Did she invite you to Mount Moon?’

‘Yes. It was extremely kind of her. Unfortunately, at the moment …’

‘I know, I know. More pressing business. We pictured you in a false beard, dodging round geysers.’

Alleyn grinned. ‘You can eliminate the false beard, at least,’ he said.

‘But not the geysers? However, curiosity, as Flossie would have said, is the most potent weapon in the fifth-column armoury. Flossie was my aunt by marriage, you know,’ Fabian added unexpectedly. ‘Her husband, the ever-patient Arthur, was my blood uncle, if that’s the correct expression. He survived her by three months: Curious, isn’t it? In spite of his chronic endocarditis, Flossie, alive, did him no serious damage. Dead, she polished him off completely. I hope you don’t think me very heartless.’

‘I was wondering,’ Alleyn murmured, ‘if Mrs Rubrick’s death was a shock only to her husband.’

‘Well, hardly that,’ Fabian began and then glanced sharply at his guest. ‘You mean you think that because I’m suffering from shock, I adopt a gay ruthlessness to mask my lacerated nerves?’ He drove for a few moments in silence and then, speaking very rapidly and on a high note, he said: If your aunt by marriage turned up in a highly compressed state in the middle of a wool bale, would you be able to pass it off with the most accomplished sang-froid? Or would you? Perhaps, in your profession, you would.’ He waited and then said very quickly, as if he uttered an indecency, ‘I had to identify her.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Alleyn said, ‘that this is a good moment to tell me the whole story, from the beginning?’

‘That was my idea, of course. Do forgive me. I’m afraid my instinct is to regard you as omniscience itself. An oracle. To be consulted rather than informed. How much, by the way, do you know?’

Alleyn, who had had his share of precious young moderns, wondered if this particular specimen was habitually so disjointed in speech and manner. He knew that Fabian Losse had seen war service. He wondered what had sent him to New Zealand and whether, as Fabian himself had suggested, he was, in truth, suffering from shock.

‘I mean,’ Fabian was saying, ‘it’s no use my filling you up with vain repetitions.’

‘When I decided to come,’ said Alleyn, ‘I naturally looked up the case. On my way here I had an exhaustive session with Sub-Inspector Jackson who, as of course you know, is the officer in charge of the investigation.’

‘All he was entitled to do,’ said Fabian with some heat, ‘was to burst into sobs and turn away his face. Did he, by any chance, show you his notes?’

‘I was given full access to the files.’

‘I couldn’t be more sorry for you. And I must say that in comparison with the files even my account may seem a model of lucidity.’

‘At any rate,’ said Alleyn placidly, ‘let’s have it. Pretend I’ve heard nothing.’

He waited while Fabian, driving at fifty miles an hour, lit a cigarette, striking the match across the windscreen and shaking it out carefully before throwing it into the dry tussock.

‘On the evening of the last Thursday in January, 1942,’ he began, with the air of repeating something he had memorized, ‘my aunt by marriage, Florence Rubrick, together with Arthur Rubrick (her husband and my uncle), Douglas Grace (her own nephew), Miss Terence Lynne (her secretary), Miss Ursula Harme (her ward), and me, sat on the tennis lawn at Mount Moon and made arrangements for a patriotic gathering to be held, ten days later, in the wool-shed. In addition to being our member, Flossie was also president of a local rehabilitation committee, set up by herself to propagate the gospel of turning good soldiers into bewildered farmers. The meeting was to be given tea, beer, and a dance. Flossie, stationed on an improvised rostrum hard by the wool-press, was to address them for three-quarters of an hour. She was a remorseless orator, was Flossie. This she planned, sitting in a deck-chair on the tennis lawn. It may give you some idea of her character when I tell you she began with the announcement that in ten minutes she was going to the wool-shed to try her voice. We were exhausted. The evening was stiflingly hot. Flossie, who was fond of saying she thought best when walking, had marched us up and down the rose garden and had not spared us the glass houses and the raspberry canes. Wan with heat and already exhausted by an after-dinner set of tennis, we had trotted at her heels, unwilling acolytes. During this promenade she had worn a long diaphanous coat garnished with two diamond clips. When we were at last allowed to sit down, Flossie, heated with exercise and embryonic oratory, had peeled off this garment and thrown it over the back of the deck-chair. Some twenty minutes later, when she was about to resume the garment, one of the diamond clips was missing. Douglas, blast him, discovered the loss while he was helping Flossie into her coat and, like a damned officious booby, immediately came over all efficient and said we’d look for it. With fainting hearts we suffered ourselves to be organized into a search party; this one to the rose-beds, that to the cucumber frames. My lot fell among the vegetable marrows. Flossie, encouraged by Douglas, was most insistent that we separate and cover the ground exhaustively. She had the infernal cheek to announce that she was going off to the wool-shed to practise her speech and was not to be disturbed. She marched off down a long path, bordered with lavender, and that, as far as we know, was the last time she was seen alive.’

Fabian paused, looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes, and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. ‘I had forgotten the classic exception,’ he said. ‘The last time she was seen alive, except by her murderer. She turned up some three weeks later at Messrs Riven Brothers’ wool store, baled up among the Mount Moon fleeces, poor thing. Did I forget to say we were shearing at the time of her disappearance? But of course you know all that.’

‘You followed her instructions about hunting for the clip?’

Fabian did not answer immediately. ‘With waning enthusiasm, on my part, at least,’ he said. ‘But, yes. We hunted for about forty-five minutes. Just as it was getting too dark to continue, the clip was found by Arthur, her husband, in a clump of zinnias that he had already ransacked a dozen times. Faint with our search, we returned to the house and the others drank whiskies and sodas in the dining-room. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed alcohol. Ursula Harme hurried away to return the clip to Flossie. The wool-shed was in darkness. She was not in her drawing-room or her study. When Ursula went up to her bedroom she was confronted by a poisonously arch little notice that Flossie was in the habit of hanging on her door handle when she didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Please don’t knock upon the door,

The only answer is a snore.”

‘Disgusted but not altogether surprised, Ursula stole away, but not before she had scribbled the good news on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door. She returned and told us what she had done. We went to our beds believing Flossie to be in hers. Shall I go on, sir?’

‘Please do.’

‘Flossie was to leave at the crack of dawn for the mail car. Thence by train and ferry she was to travel to the seat of government where normally she would arrive, full of kick and drive, the following morning. On the eve of these departures she always retired early, and woe betide the wretch who disturbed her.’

The track descended into a shingle-bed and the car splashed through a clear race of water. They had drawn nearer to the foothills and now the mountains themselves were close above them. Between desultory boulders and giant tussocks, coloured like torches in sunlight, patches of bare earth lay ruddy in the late afternoon light. In the distance, spires of lombardy poplars appeared above the naked curve of a hill and, beyond them, a twist of blue smoke.

‘Nobody got up on the following morning to see Flossie off,’ said Fabian. ‘The mail car goes through at half-past five. It’s a kind of local arrangement. A farmer eight miles up the road from here runs it. He goes down to the forks three times a week and links up with the government mail car that you caught. Tommy Johns, the manager, usually drove her down to the front gate to catch it. She used to ring up his cottage when she was ready to start. When he didn’t hear from her, he says, he thought one of us had taken her. That’s what he says,’ Fabian repeated. ‘He thought one of us had taken her and didn’t bother. We, of course, never doubted that she had been driven down by him. It was all very neat when you come to think of it. Nobody worried about Flossie. We imagined her happily popping in and out of secret sessions and bobbing up and down at the Speaker. She’d told Arthur she had something to say in open debate. He tuned in to the House of Representatives and appeared to be disappointed when he didn’t hear his wife taking her usual energetic part in the interjections of “what about yourself?” and “sit down” which are so characteristic of the parry and riposte of our parliamentary debates. Flossie, we decided, must be holding her fire. On the day she was supposed to have left here, the communal wool-lorry arrived and collected our bales. I watched them load up.’

A shower of pebbles spattered on the windscreen as they lurched through the dry bed of a creek. Fabian dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. The knuckles of his hands showed white as he changed his grip on the wheel. He spoke more slowly and with less affectation.

‘I watched the lorry go down the drive. It’s a long stretch. Then I saw it turn into this road, and lurch through this race. There was more water in the race then. It fanned up and shone in the sunlight. Look. You can see the wool-shed now. A long building with an iron roof. The house is out of sight, behind the trees. Can you see the shearing-shed?’

‘Yes. How far away is it?’

‘About four miles. Everything looks uncannily close in this air. We’ll pull up if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to get this finished before we arrive.’

‘By all means.’

When they stopped, the smell and sounds of the plateau blew freshly in at the windows; the smell of sun-warmed tussock and earth and lichen, the sound of grasshoppers and, far away up the hillside, the multiple drone of a mob of sheep in transit, a dreamlike sound.

‘Not,’ said Fabian, ‘that there’s very much more to say. The first inkling we had that anything was wrong came on the fifth evening after she had walked down the lavender path. It took the form of a telegram from one of her brother MPs. He wanted to know why she hadn’t come up for the debate. It gave one the most extraordinarily empty and helpless feeling. We thought, at first, that for some reason she’d changed her mind and not left the South Island. Arthur rang up her club and some of her friends in town. Then he rang up her lawyers. She had an appointment with them and hadn’t kept it. They understood it was about her will. She was prolific of codicils and was always adding bits about what Douglas was to do with odds and ends of silver and jewellery. Then a little procession of discoveries came along. Terry Lynne found Flossie’s suitcase, ready-packed, stowed away at the back of a cupboard. Her purse with her travel pass and money was in a drawer of her dressing-table. Then Tommy Johns said he hadn’t taken her to the mail car. Then the search parties, beginning in a desultory sort of way and gradually getting more organized and systematic.

‘The Moon River runs through a gorge beyond the homestead. Flossie sometimes walked up there in the evening. She said it helped her, God save the mark, to think. When, finally, the police were brought in, they fastened like limpets upon this bit of information and, after hunting about the cliff for hours at a time, waited for poor Flossie to turn up ten miles downstream where there is a backwash or something. They were still waiting when the foreman at Riven’s wool store made his unspeakable discovery. By that time the trail was cold. The wool-shed had been cleaned out, the shearers had moved on, heavy rains had fallen, nobody could remember with any degree of accuracy the events of the fatal evening. Your colleagues of our inspired detective force are still giving an unconvincing impersonation of hounds with nose to ground. They return at intervals and ask us the same questions all over again. That’s all, really. Or is it?’

‘It’s a very neat resumé, at all events,’ said Alleyn. ‘But I’m afraid I shall have to imitate my detested colleagues and ask a great many questions.’

‘I am resigned.’

‘Good. First, then, is your household unchanged since Mrs Rubrick’s death?’

‘Arthur died of heart trouble three months after she disappeared. We’ve acquired a housekeeper, an elderly cousin of Arthur’s called Mrs Aceworthy, who quarrels with the outside men and preserves the proprieties between the two girls, Douglas and myself. Otherwise there’s been no change.’

‘Yourself,’ said Alleyn, counting, ‘Captain Grace, who is Mrs Rubrick’s nephew, Miss Ursula Harme, her ward, and Miss Terence Lynne, her secretary. What about servants?’

‘A cook, Mrs Duck, if you’ll believe me, who has been at Mount Moon for fifteen years, and a manservant, Markins, whom Flossie acquired in a fashion to be related hereafter. He’s a phenomenon. Menservants are practically non-existent in this country.’

‘And what about the outside staff at that time? As far as I can remember there was Mr Thomas Johns, the manager, his wife and his son, Cliff; an odd man – is rouseabout the right word? – called Albert Black, three shepherds, five visiting shearers, a wool-classer, three boys, two gardeners, a cowman, and a station cook. Right?’

‘Correct, even to the cowman. I need tell you nothing, I see.’

‘On the night of the disappearance, the shearers, the gardeners, the boys, the station cook, the sorter, the shepherds and the cowman were all at an entertainment held some fifteen miles away?’

‘Dance at the Social Hall, Lakeside. It’s across the flat on the main road,’ said Fabian, jerking his head at the vast emptiness of the plateau. ‘Arthur let them take the station lorry. We had more petrol in those days.’

‘That leaves the house-party, the Johns family, Mrs Duck, the rouseabout, and Markins?’

‘Exactly.’

Alleyn clasped his long hands round his knee and turned to his companion. ‘Now, Mr Losse,’ he said tranquilly, ‘will you tell me exactly why you asked me to come?’

Fabian beat his open palm against the driving-wheel. ‘I told you in my letter. I’m living in a nightmare. Look at the place. Our nearest neighbour’s ten miles up the road. What do you think it feels like? And when in January shearing came round again, there were the same men, the same routine, the same long evenings, the same smell of lavender and honeysuckle and oily wool. We’re crutching now and getting it all over again. The shearers talk about it. They stop when any of us come up, but every smoke-oh and every time they knock off it’s “the murder”. What a beastly soft noise the word makes. They’re using the wool-press, of course. The other evening I caught one of the boys that sweep up the crutchings squatting in the press while the other packed a fleece round him. Experimenting. God, I gave them a fright, the little bastards.’ He swung round and confronted Alleyn. ‘We don’t talk about it. We’ve clamped down on it now for six months. That’s bad for all of us. It’s interfering with my work. I’m doing nothing.’

‘Your work. Yes, I was coming to that.’

‘I suppose the police told you.’

‘I’d heard already at army headquarters. It overlaps my job out here.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Fabian. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You realize, don’t you, that I’m out here on a specific job. I’m here to investigate the possible leakage of information to the enemy. My peace-time job as a CID man has nothing to do with my present employment. But for the suggestion that Mrs Rubrick’s death may have some connection with our particular problem I should not have come. It’s with the knowledge and at the invitation of my colleagues that I’m here.’

‘I got a rise with my bait then,’ said Fabian. ‘What did you think of my brain-child?’

‘They showed me the blueprints. Beyond me, of course. I’m not a gunner. But I could at least appreciate its importance and also the extreme necessity of keeping your work secret. It is from that point of view, I believe, that the suggestion of espionage has cropped up?’

‘Yes. To my mind it’s an absurd suggestion. We work in a room that’s locked when we’re not in it, and the papers and gear – any of them that matter – are always shut up in a safe.’

‘We?’

‘Douglas Grace has worked with me. He’s done the practical stuff. My side is purely theoretical. I was at Home when war broke out and took an inglorious part in the now mercifully forgotten Norwegian campaign, I picked up rheumatic fever but, with an extraordinarily bad sense of timing, got back into active service just in time to get a crack on the head at Dunkirk.’ Fabian paused for a moment as if he had been about to say something further but now changed his mind. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘There it was. Later on still, when I was supposed to be fairly fit, they put me into a special show in England. That’s when I got the germ of the idea. I cracked up again rather thoroughly and they kicked me out for good. While I was still too groggy to defend myself, Flossie, who was Home on a visit, bore down upon me and conceived the idea of bringing her poor English nephew-in-law back with her to recuperate in this country. She said she was used to looking after invalids, meaning poor old Arthur’s endocarditis. I started messing about with my notion soon after I got here.’

‘And her own nephew? Captain Grace?’

‘He was actually taking an engineering course at Heidelberg in 1939 but he left on the advice of some of his German friends and returned to England. May I take this opportunity of assuring you that Douglas is not in the pay of Hitler or any of his myrmidons, a belief ardently nursed, I feel sure, by Sub-Inspector Jackson. He enlisted when he got to England, was transferred to a New Zealand unit, and was subsequently pinked in the bottom by the Luftwaffe in Greece. Flossie hauled him in as soon as he was demobilized. He used to work here as a cadet in his school holidays. He’s always been good with his hands. He’d got a small precision lathe and some useful instruments. I pulled him in. It’s Douglas who’s got this bee in his bonnet. He will insist that in some fantastic way his Auntie Flossie’s death is mixed up with our egg-beater, which is what we ambiguously call our magnetic fuse.’

‘Why does he think so?’

Fabian did not answer.

‘Has he any data –’ Alleyn began.

‘Look here, sir,’ said Fabian abruptly. ‘I’ve got a notion for your visit. It may not appeal to you. In fact, you may dismiss it as the purest tripe, but here it is. You’re full of official information about the whole miserable show, aren’t you? All those files! You know, for example, that any one of us could have left the garden and gone to the shearing-shed. You may even have gathered that apart from protracted irritation, which God knows may be sufficient motive, none of us had any reason for killing Flossie. We were a tolerably happy collection of people. Flossie bossed us about but, more or less, we went our own way.’ He paused and added unexpectedly, ‘Most of us. Very well. It seems to me that as Flossie was murdered there was something about Flossie that only one of us knew. Something monstrous. I mean something monstrously out of character that I, for one, have conceived of as being “Flossie Rubrick”; something murder-worthy. Now that something may not appear in any one of the Flossies that each of us has formed for his or herself but, to a newcomer, an expert, might it not appear in the collective Flossie that emerges from all these units put together? Or am I talking unadulterated bilge?’

Alleyn said carefully, ‘Women have been murdered for some chance intrusion upon other people’s affairs, some idiotic blunder that has nothing to do with character.’

‘Yes. But in the mind of the murderer of such a victim she is forever The Intruder. If he could be persuaded to talk of his victim, don’t you feel that something of that aspect of her character in his mind would come out? To a sensitive observer?’

‘I’m a policeman in a strange country,’ said Alleyn. ‘You mustn’t try me too high.’

‘At any rate,’ said Fabian, with an air of relief that was unexpectedly naïve, ‘you’re not laughing at me.’

‘Of course not, but I don’t fully understand you.’

‘The official stuff has been useless. It’s a year old. It’s just a string of uncorrelated details. For what it’s worth you’ve got it in these precious files. It doesn’t give you a picture of a Flossie Rubrick who was murder-worthy.’

‘You know,’ said Alleyn cheerfully, ‘that’s only another way of saying there was no apparent motive.’

‘All right. I’m being too elaborate. Put it this way. If factual evidence doesn’t produce a motive, isn’t it at least possible that something might come out of our collective idea of Flossie?’

‘If it could be discovered.’

‘Well, but couldn’t it?’ Fabian was now earnest and persuasive. Alleyn began to wonder if he had been very profoundly disturbed by his experience and was indeed a little unhinged. ‘If we could get them all together and start them talking, couldn’t you, an expert, coming fresh to the situation, get something? By the colour of our voices, by our very evasions? Aren’t those signs that a man with your training would be able to read? Aren’t they?’

‘They are signs,’ Alleyn replied, trying not to sound too patient, ‘that a man with my training learns to treat with extreme reserve. They are not evidence.’

‘No, but taken in conjunction with the evidence, such as it is?’

‘They can’t be disregarded, certainly.’

Fabian said fretfully, ‘But I want you to get a picture of Flossie in the round. I don’t want you to have only my idea of her which, truth to tell, is of a maddeningly arrogant piece of efficiency, but Ursula’s idea of a wonderwoman, Douglas’s idea of a manageable and not unprofitable aunt, Terence’s idea of an exacting employer – all these. But I didn’t mean to give you an inkling. I wanted you to hear for yourself, to start cold.’

‘You say you haven’t spoken of her for six months. How am I to break the spell?’

‘Isn’t it part of your job,’ Fabian asked impatiently, ‘to be a corkscrew?’

‘Lord help us,’ said Alleyn good-humouredly, ‘I suppose it is.’

‘Well, then!’ cried Fabian triumphantly. ‘Here’s a fair field with me to back you up. And, you know, I don’t believe it’s going to be so difficult. I believe they must be in much the same case as I am. It took a Herculean effort to write that letter. If I could have grabbed it back, I would have done so. I can’t tell you how much I funked the idea of starting this conversation but, you see, now I have started there’s no holding me.’

‘Have you warned them about this visitation?’

‘I talked grandly about “an expert from a special branch”. I said you were a high-up who’d been lent to this country. They know your visit is official and that the police and hush-hush birds have a hand in it. Honestly, I don’t think that alarms them much. At first, I suppose, each of us was afraid; personally afraid, I mean, afraid that we should be suspected. But I don’t think we four ever suspected each other. In that one thing we are agreed. And would you believe it, as the weeks went on and the police interrogation persisted, we got just plain bored. Bored to exhaustion. Bored to the last nerve. Then it stopped, and instead of Flossie’s death fading a bit, it grew into a bogey that none of us talked about. We could see each other thinking of it and a nightmarish sort of watching game set in. In a funny kind of way I think they were relieved when I told them what I’d done. They know, of course, that your visit has something to do with our X Adjustment, as Douglas pompously calls it.’

‘So they also know about your X Adjustment?’

‘Only very vaguely, except Douglas. Just that it’s rather special. That couldn’t be helped.’

Alleyn stared out at a clear and uncompromising landscape. ‘It’s a rum go,’ he said, and after a moment: ‘Have you thought carefully about this? Do you realize you’re starting something you may want to stop and – not be able to stop?’

‘I’ve thought about it ad nauseam.’

‘I think I ought to warn you. I’m a bit of state machinery. Any one can start me up but only the state can switch me off.’

‘OK.’

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘you have been warned.’

‘At least,’ said Fabian, ‘I’ll give you a good dinner.’

‘Then you’re my host?’

‘Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Arthur left Mount Moon to me and Flossie left her money to Douglas. You might say we were joint hosts,’ said Fabian.

III

Mount Moon homestead was eighty years old and that is a great age for a house in the antipodes. It had been built by Arthur Rubrick’s grandfather, from wood transported over the Pass in bullock wagons. Starting as a four-roomed cottage, room after room had been added, at a rate about twice as slow as that achieved by the intrepid Mrs Rubrick of those days in adding child after child to her husband’s quiver. The house bore a dim family resemblance to the Somersetshire seat which Arthur’s grandfather had thankfully relinquished to a less adventurous brother. Victorian gables and the inevitable conservatory, together with lesser family portraits and surplus pieces of furniture traced unmistakably the family’s English origin. The garden had been laid out in a nostalgic mood, at considerable expense, and with a bland disregard for the climate of the plateau. Of the trees old Rubrick had planted, only lombardy poplars, pinus insignis and a few natives had flourished. The tennis lawn, carved out of the tussocky hillside, turned yellow and dusty during summer. The pleached walks of Somerset had been in part realized with hardy ramblers and, where these failed, with clipped hedges of poplar. The dining-room windows looked down upon a queer transformation of what had been originally an essentially English conception of a well-planned garden. But beyond this unconvincing piece of pastiche – what uncompromising vastness! The plateau swam away into an illimitable haze of purple, its boundaries mingled with clouds. Above the cloud, suspended, it seemed, in a tincture of rose, floated the great mountains.

At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser Alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly-lit wood in the open fireplaces.

He considered once again the inmates of the house.

Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of landgirl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousey.

Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.

‘I am a New Zealander,’ said Miss Harme, ‘but all my relations – I haven’t any close relations except my uncle – live in England. Aunt Flossie – she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that – was better than any real relation could have been.’

She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.

The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse, his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair, was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn ‘sir’ each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.

Mrs Aceworthy, Arthur Rubrick’s elderly cousin who had come to Mount Moon on the death of his wife, was a large sandy woman with an air of uncertain authority and a tendency to bridle. Her manner towards Alleyn was cautious. He thought that she disapproved of his visit and he wondered how much Fabian Losse had told her. She spoke playfully and in inverted commas of ‘my family’, and seemed to show a preference for the two New Zealanders, Douglas Grace and Ursula Harme.

The vast landscape outside darkened and the candles on the dining-room table showed ghostly in the uncurtained window panes. When dinner was over they all moved into a comfortable, conglomerate sort of room hung with faded photographs of past cadets and lit cosily by a kerosene lamp. Mrs Aceworthy, with a vague murmur about ‘having to see to things’ left them with their coffee.

Above the fireplace hung the full-dress portrait of a woman.

It was a formal painting. The bare arms executed with machine-like precision, flowed wirily from shoulders to clasped hands. The dress was of mustard-coloured satin, very décolleté, and this hue was repeated in the brassy highlights of Mrs Rubrick’s incredibly golden coiffure. The painter had dealt remorselessly with a formidable display of jewellery. It was an Academy portrait by an experienced painter but his habit of flattery had met its Waterloo in Florence Rubrick’s face. No trick of understatement could soften that large mouth, closed with difficulty over protuberant teeth, or modify the acquisitive glare of the pale goitrous eyes which evidently had been fixed on the artist’s and therefore appeared, as laymen will say, to ‘follow one about the room’. Upon each of the five persons seated in Arthur Rubrick’s study did his wife Florence seem to fix her arrogant and merciless stare.

There was no other picture in the room. Alleyn looked round for a photograph of Arthur Rubrick but could find none that seemed likely.

The flow of talk, which had run continuously if not quite easily throughout dinner, was now checked. The pauses grew longer and their interruptions more forced. Fabian Losse began to stare expectantly at Alleyn. Douglas Grace sang discordantly under his breath. The two girls fidgeted, caught each other’s eyes, and looked away again.

Alleyn, sitting in shadow, a little removed from the fireside group, said, ‘That’s a portrait of Mrs Rubrick, isn’t it?’

It was as if he had gathered up the reins of a team of nervously expectant horses. He saw by their startled glances at the portrait that custom had made it invisible to them, a mere piece of furniture of which, for all its ghastly associations, they were normally unaware. They stared at it now rather stupidly, gaping a little.

Fabian said, ‘Yes. It was painted ten years ago. I don’t need to tell you it’s by a determined Academician. Rather a pity, really. John would have made something terrific out of Flossie. Or, better still, Agatha Troy.’

Alleyn, who was married to Agatha Troy, said, ‘I only saw Mrs Rubrick for a few minutes. Is it a good likeness?’

Fabian and Ursula Harme said, ‘No.’ Douglas Grace and Terence Lynne said, ‘Yes.’

‘Hallo!’ said Alleyn. ‘A divergence of opinion?’

‘It doesn’t give you any idea of how tiny she was,’ said Douglas Grace, ‘but I’d call it a speaking likeness.’

‘Oh, it’s a conscientious map of her face,’ said Fabian.

‘It’s a caricature,’ cried Ursula Harme. Her eyes were fixed indignantly on the portrait.

‘I should have called it an unblushing understatement,’ said Fabian. He was standing before the fire, his hands on the mantelpiece. Ursula Harme turned to look at him, knitting her brows. Alleyn heard her sigh as if Fabian had wakened some old controversy between them.

‘And there’s no vitality in it, Fabian,’ she said anxiously. ‘You must admit that. I mean she was a much more splendid person than that. So marvellously alive.’ She caught her breath at the unhappy phrase. ‘She made you feel like that about her,’ she added. ‘The portrait gives you nothing of it.’

‘I don’t pretend to know anything about painting,’ said Douglas Grace, ‘but I do know what I like.’

‘Would you believe it?’ Fabian murmured under his breath. He said aloud, ‘Is it so great a merit, Ursy, to be marvellously alive? I find unbounded vitality very unnerving.’

‘Not if it’s directed into suitable channels,’ pronounced Grace.

‘But hers was. Look what she did!’ said Ursula.

‘She was extraordinarily public-spirited, you know,’ Grace agreed. ‘I must say I took my hat off to her for that. She had a man’s grasp of things.’ He squared his shoulders and took a cigar case out of his pocket. ‘Not that I admire managing women,’ he said, sitting down by Miss Lynne. ‘But Auntie Floss was a bit of a marvel. You’ve got to hand it to her, you know.’

‘Apart from her work as an MP?’ Alleyn suggested.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Ursula, still watching Fabian Losse. ‘I don’t know why we’re talking about her, Fabian, unless it’s for Mr Alleyn’s information.’

‘You may say it is,’ said Fabian.

‘Then I think he ought to know what a splendid sort of person she was.’

Fabian did an unexpected thing. He reached out his long arm and touched her lightly on the cheek. ‘Go ahead, Ursy,’ he said gently. ‘I’m all for it.’

‘Yes,’ she cried out, ‘but you don’t believe.’

‘Never mind. Tell Mr Alleyn.’

‘I thought,’ said Douglas Grace, ‘that Mr Alleyn was here to make an expert investigation. I shouldn’t think our ideas of Aunt Florence are likely to be of much help. He wants facts.’

‘But you’ll all talk to him about her,’ said Ursula, ‘and you won’t be fair.’

Alleyn stirred a little in his chair in the shadows. ‘I should be very glad if you’d tell me about her, Miss Harme,’ he said. ‘Please do.’

‘Yes, Ursy,’ said Fabian. ‘We want you to. Please do.’

She looked brilliantly from one to another of her companions. ‘But – it seems so queer. It’s months since we spoke of her. I’m not at all good at expressing myself. Are you serious, Fabian? Is it important?’

‘I think so.’

‘Mr Alleyn?’

‘I think so, too, I want to start with the right idea of your guardian. Mrs Rubrick was your guardian, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you must have known her very well.’

‘I think I did. Though we didn’t meet until I was thirteen.’

‘I should like to hear how that came about.’

Ursula leant forward, resting her bare arms on her knees and clasping her hands. She moved into the region of firelight.

‘You see –’ she began.

CHAPTER TWO ACCORDING TO URSULA HARME

I

Ursula began haltingly with many pauses but with a certain air of championship. At first Fabian helped her, making a conversation rather than a solo performance of the business. Douglas Grace, sitting beside Terence Lynne, sometimes spoke to her in a low voice. She had taken up a piece of knitting and the click of the needles lent a domestic note to the scene, a note much at variance with her sleek and burnished appearance. She did not reply to Grace but once Alleyn saw her mouth flicker in a smile. She had small sharp teeth.

As Ursula grew into her narrative she became less uneasy, less in need of Fabian’s support, until presently she could speak strongly, eager to draw her portrait of Florence Rubrick.

A firm picture took shape. A schoolgirl, bewildered and desolated by news of her mother’s death, sat in the polished chilliness of a headmistress’s drawing-room. ‘I’d known ever since the morning. They’d arranged for me to go home by the evening train. They were very kind but they were too tactful, too careful not to say the obvious thing. I didn’t want tact and delicacy, I wanted warmth. Literally, I was shivering. I can hear the sound of the horn now. It was the sort that chimes like bells. She brought it out from England. I saw the car slide past the window and then I heard her voice in the hall asking for me. It’s years ago but I can see her as clearly as if it were yesterday. She wore a fur cape and smelt lovely and she hugged me and talked loudly and cheerfully and said she was my guardian and had come for me and that she was my mother’s greatest friend and had been with her when it happened. Of course I knew all about her. She was my godmother. But she had stayed in England when she married after the last war and when she returned we lived too far away to visit. So I’d never seen her. So I went away with her. My other guardian is an English uncle. He’s a soldier and follows the drum and he was very glad when Aunt Florence (that’s what I called her) took hold. I stayed with her until it was time to go back to school. She used to come during term and that was marvellous.’

The picture sharpened on a note of adolescent devotion. There had been the year when Auntie Florence returned to England but wrote occasionally and caused sumptuous presents to be sent from London stores. She reappeared when Ursula was sixteen and ready to leave school.

‘It was Heaven. She took me Home with her. We had a house in London and she brought me out and presented me and everything. It was wizard. She gave a dance for me.’ Ursula hesitated. ‘I met Fabian at that dance, didn’t I, Fabian?’

‘It was a great night,’ said Fabian. He had settled on the floor, his back was propped against the side of her chair and his thin knees were drawn up to his chin. He had lit a pipe.

‘And then,’ said Ursula, ‘it was September, 1939, and Uncle Arthur began to say we’d better come out to New Zealand. Auntie Florence wanted us to stay and get war jobs but he kept on cabling for her to come.’

Terence Lynne’s composed voice cut across the narrative. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘he was her husband.’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Douglas Grace and patted her knee.

‘Yes, but she’d have been wonderful in a war job,’ said Ursula impatiently. ‘I always took rather a gloomy view of his insisting like that. I mean, it was a thought selfish. Doing without her would really have been his drop of war work.’

‘He’d had three months in a nursing-home,’ said Miss Lynne without emphasis.

‘I know, Terry, but all the same … Well, anyway, soon after Dunkirk he cabled again and out we came. I had rather thought of joining something but she was so depressed about leaving. She said I was too young to be alone and she’d be lost without me, so I came. I loved coming, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Fabian murmured.

‘And there was you to be looked after on the voyage.’

‘Yes, I’d staged my collapse by that time. Ursula acted,’ Fabian said, turning his head towards Alleyn, ‘as a kind of buffer between my defencelessness and Flossie’s zeal. Flossie had been a VAD in the last war and the mysteries had lain fallow in her for twenty years. I owe my reason if not my life to Ursula.’

‘You’re not fair,’ she said but with a certain softening of her voice. ‘You’re ungrateful, Fab.’

‘Ungrateful to Flossie for plumping herself down in your affections like an amiable, no, not even an amiable cuttlefish? But go on, Ursy.’

‘I don’t know how much time Mr Alleyn has to spare for our reminiscences,’ began Douglas Grace, ‘but I must say I feel deeply sorry for him.’

‘I’ve any amount of time,’ said Alleyn, ‘and I’m extremely interested. So you all three arrived in New Zealand in 1940? Is that it, Miss Harme?’

‘Yes. We came straight here. After London,’ said Ursula gaily, ‘it did seem rather hearty and primitive but quite soon after we got here the member for the district died and they asked her to stand and everything got exciting. That’s when you came in, Terry, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Lynne, clicking her needles. ‘That’s where I came in.’

‘Auntie Floss was marvellous to me,’ Ursula continued. ‘You see, she had no children of her own so I suppose I was rather special. Anyway she used to say so. You should have seen her at the meetings, Mr Alleyn. She loved being heckled. She was as quick as lightning and absolutely fearless, wasn’t she, Douglas?’

‘She certainly could handle them,’ agreed Grace. ‘She was up to her neck in it when I got back. I remember at one meeting some woman shouted out: “Do you think it’s right for you to have cocktails and champagne when I can’t afford to give my kiddies eggs?” Aunt Floss came back at her in a flash: “I’ll give you a dozen eggs for every alcoholic drink I’ve consumed.”’

‘Because,’ Ursula explained, ‘she didn’t drink, ever, and most of the people knew and clapped, and Aunt Florence said at once: “That wasn’t fair, was it? You didn’t know about my humdrum habits.” And she said: “If things are as bad as that you should apply to my Relief Supply Service. We send plenty of eggs in from Mount Moon.”’ Ursula’s voice ran down on a note of uncertainty. Douglas Grace cut in with his loud laugh. ‘And the woman shouted “I’d rather be without eggs,” and Aunt Floss said: “Just as well perhaps while I’m on my soap-box,” and they roared with laughter.’

‘Parry and riposte,’ muttered Fabian. ‘Parry and riposte!’

‘It was damned quick of her, Fabian,’ said Douglas Grace.

‘And the kids continued eggless.’

‘That wasn’t Aunt Florence’s fault,’ said Ursula.

‘All right, darling. My sympathies are with the woman but let it pass. I must say,’ Fabian added, ‘that in a sort of way I rather enjoyed Floss’s electioneering campaign.’

‘You don’t understand the people in this country,’ said Grace. ‘We like it straight from the shoulder and Aunt Floss gave it to us that way. She had them eating out of her hand, hadn’t she, Terry?’

‘She was very popular,’ said Terence Lynne.

‘Did her husband take an active part in her public life?’ asked Alleyn.

‘It practically killed him,’ said Miss Lynne, clicking her needles.

II

There was a flabbergasted silence and she continued sedately. ‘He went for long drives and sat on platforms and fagged about from one meeting to another. This house was never quiet. What with Red Cross and Women’s Institute and EPS and political parties it was never quiet. Even this room, which was supposed to be his, was invaded.’

‘She was always looking after him,’ Ursula protested. ‘That’s unfair, Terry. She looked after him marvellously.’

‘It was like being minded by a hurricane.’

Fabian and Douglas laughed. ‘You’re disloyal and cruel,’ Ursula flashed out at them. ‘I’m ashamed of you. To make her into a figure of fun! How can you, when you, each of you, owed her so much.’

Douglas Grace at once began to protest that this was unfair, that nobody could have been fonder of his aunt than he was, that he used to pull her leg when she was alive and that she liked it. He was flustered and affronted and the others listened to him in an uncomfortable silence. ‘If we’ve got to talk about her,’ Douglas said hotly, ‘for God’s sake let’s be honest. We were all fond of her, weren’t we?’ Fabian hunched up his shoulders but said nothing. ‘We all took a pretty solid knock when she was murdered, didn’t we? We all agreed that Fabian should ask Mr Alleyn to come? All right. If we’ve got to hold a post-mortem on her character which, personally, seems to me to be a waste of time, I suppose we’re meant to say what we think.’

‘Certainly,’ said Fabian. ‘Unburden the bosom, work off the inhibitions. But it’s Ursy’s innings at the moment, isn’t it?’

‘You interrupted her, Fab.’

‘Did I? I’m sorry, Ursy,’ said Fabian gently. He slewed round – put his chin on the arm of her chair and looked up comically at her.

‘I’m ashamed of you,’ she said uncertainly.

‘Please go on. You’d got roughly to 1941 with Flossie in the full flush of her parliamentary career, you know. Here we were, Mr Alleyn. Douglas, recovered from his wound but passed unfit for further service, going the rounds of a kind of superior Shepherd’s Calendar. Terry, building up Flossie’s prestige with copious shorthand notes and cross-references. Ursula –’ He broke off for a moment. ‘Ursula provided enchantment,’ he said lightly, ‘and I, comedy. I fell off horses and collapsed at high altitudes, and fainted into sheep-dips. Perhaps these antics brought me en rapport with my unfortunate uncle who, at the same time, was fighting his own endocarditic battle. Carry on, Ursy.’

‘Carry on with what? What’s the good of my trying to give my picture of her when you all – when you all –’ Her voice wavered for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said more firmly. ‘The idea is that we each give our own account of the whole thing, isn’t it? The same account that I’ve bleated out at dictation speed to that monumental bore from the detective’s office. All right.’

‘One moment,’ said Alleyn’s voice out of the shadows.

He saw the four heads turn to him in the firelight.

‘There’s this difference,’ he said. ‘If I know anything of police routine you were continually stopped by questions. At the moment I don’t want to nail you down to an interrogation. I want you, if you can manage to do so, to talk about this tragedy as if you spoke of it for the first time. You realize, don’t you, that I’ve not come here, primarily, to arrest a murderer. I’ve been sent to try and discover if this particular crime has anything to do with unlawful behaviour in time of war.’

‘Exactly,’ said Douglas Grace. ‘Exactly, sir. And in my humble opinion,’ he added, stroking the back of his head, ‘it most undoubtedly has. However!’

‘All in good time,’ said Alleyn. ‘Now, Miss Harme, you’ve given us a clear picture of a rather isolated little community up to, let us say, something over a year ago. At the close of 1941 Mrs Rubrick is much occupied by her public duties, with Miss Lynne as her secretary. Captain Grace is a cadet on this sheep station. Mr Losse is recuperating and has begun, with Captain Grace’s help, to do some very specialized work. Mr Rubrick is a confirmed invalid. You are all fed by Mrs Duck, the cook, and attended by Markins, the houseman. What are you doing?’

‘Me?’ Ursula shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m nothing in particular. Auntie Florence called me her ADC. I helped wherever I could and did my VAD training in between. It was fun – something going to happen all the time. I adore that,’ cried Ursula. ‘To have events waiting for me like little presents in a treasure-hunt. She made everything exciting, all her events were tied up in gala wrappings with red ribbon. It was Heaven.’

‘Like the party that was to be held in the wool-shed?’ asked Fabian dryly.

‘Oh dear!’ said Ursula, catching her breath. ‘Yes. Like that one. I remember –’

III

The picture of that warm summer evening of fifteen months ago grew as she spoke of it. Alleyn, remembering his view through the dining-room window of a darkling garden, saw the shadowy company move along a lavender path and assemble on the lawn. The light dresses of the women glimmered in the dusk. Lancelike flames burned steadily as they lit cigarettes. They drew deck-chairs together. One of the women threw a coat of some thin texture over the back of her chair. A tall personable young man leant over the back in an attitude of somewhat studied gallantry. The smell of tobacco mingled with that of night-scented stocks and of earth and tussock that had not yet lost all warmth of the sun. It was the hour when sounds take on a significant clearness and the senses are sharpened to receive them. The voices of the party drifted vaguely yet profoundly across the dusk. Ursula could remember it very clearly.

‘You must be tired, Aunt Florence,’ she had said.

‘I don’t let myself be tired,’ answered that brave voice. ‘One mustn’t think about fatigue, Ursy, one must nurse a secret store of energy.’ And she spoke of Indian ascetics and their mastery of fatigue and of munition workers in England and of air-raid wardens. ‘If they can do so much surely I, with my humdrum old routine, can jog along at a decent trot.’ She stretched out her bare arms and strong hands to the girls on each side of her: ‘And with my Second Brain and my kind little ADC to back me up,’ she cried cheerfully, ‘what can I not do?’

Ursula slipped down to the warm dry grass and leant her cheek against her guardian’s knee. Her guardian’s vigorous fingers caressed rather thoroughly the hair which Ursula had been at some expense to have set on a three days’ visit down-country.

‘Let’s make a plan,’ said Aunt Florence.

It was a phrase Ursula loved. It was the prelude to adventure. It didn’t matter that the plan was concerned with nothing more exciting than a party in the wool-shed which would be attended by back-country men and their womenkind, dressed unhappily in co-operative store clothes, and by a sprinkling of such runholders as had enough enthusiasm and petrol to bring them many miles to Mount Moon. Aunt Florence invested it all in a pink cloud of anticipation. Even Douglas became enthusiastic and, leaning over the back of Flossie’s chair, began to make suggestions. Why not a dance? he asked, looking at Terence Lynne. Florence agreed. There would be a dance. Old Jimmy Wyke and his brothers who played accordions must practise together and take turn about with the radio-gramophone.

‘You ought to take that old piano over from the annexe,’ said Arthur Rubrick in his tired breathless voice, ‘and get young Cliff Johns to join forces with the others. He’s extraordinarily good. Play anything. Listen to him now.’

It was an unfortunate suggestion and Ursula felt the caressing fingers stiffen. As she recalled this moment, fifteen months later, for Alleyn, he heard her story recede backwards, into the past, and this quality, he realized, would be characteristic of all the stories he was to hear. They would dive backwards from the moment on the lawn into the events that foreshadowed it.

Ursula said she knew that Aunt Florence had been too thoughtful to worry Uncle Arthur with the downfall of young Cliff Johns. It was a story of the basest sort of ingratitude. Young Cliff, son of the manager, Tommy Johns, had been an unusual child. He had thrown his parents into a state of confusion and doubt by his early manifestations of aesthetic preferences, screaming and plugging his ears with his fists when his mother sang, yet listening with complacency for long periods to certain instrumental programmes on the wireless. He had taken a similar line over pictures and books. When he grew older and was collected in a lorry every morning and taken to a minute pink-painted State school out on the plateau, he developed a talent for writing florid compositions which changed their style with each new book he read, and much too fast for the comprehension of his teacher. His passion for music grew precociously and the schoolmistress wrote to his parents saying that his talent was exceptional. Her letter had an air of nervous enthusiasm. The boy, she said bravely, was phenomenal. He was, on the other hand, bad at arithmetic and games and made no attempt to conceal his indifference to both.

Aunt Florence hearing of this took an interest in young Cliff, explaining to his reluctant parents that they were face to face with the Artistic Temperament.

‘Now, Mrs Johns,’ she said cheerfully, ‘you mustn’t bully that boy of yours because he’s different. He wants special handling and lots of sympathy. I’ve got my eye on him.’

Soon after that she began to ask Cliff to the big house. She gave him books and a gramophone with carefully-chosen records and she won him completely. When he was thirteen years old, she told his bewildered parents that she wanted to send him to the nearest equivalent in this country of an English Public School. Tommy Johns raised passionate objections. He was an ardent trades unionist, a working manager and a bit of a communist. But his wife, persuaded by Flossie, overruled him and Cliff went off to boarding-school with sons of the six runholders scattered over the plateau.

His devotion to Florence, Ursula said, appeared to continue. In the holidays he spent a great deal of time with her and, having taken music lessons at her expense, played to her on the Bechstein in the drawing-room. At this point in Ursula’s narrative, Fabian gave a short laugh.

‘He plays very well,’ Ursula said. ‘Doesn’t he?’

‘Astonishingly well,’ Fabian agreed, and she said quickly: ‘She was very fond of music, Fab.’

‘Like Douglas,’ Fabian murmured, ‘she knew what she liked, but unlike Douglas she wouldn’t own up to it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that,’ said Ursula grandly and went on with her narrative.

Young Cliff continued at school when Florence went to England. He had full use of the Bechstein in the drawing-room during the holidays. She returned to find him a big boy but otherwise, it seemed, still docile under her patronage. But when he came home for his summer holidays at the end of 1941, he was changed, not, Ursula said emphatically, for the better. He had had trouble with his eyes and the school oculist had told him that he would never be accepted for active service. He had immediately broken bounds and attempted to enlist. On being turned down he wrote to Florence saying that he wanted to leave school and, if possible, do a job of war work on the sheeprun until he was old enough to get into the army, if only in a C3 capacity. He was now sixteen. This letter was a bombshell for Flossie. She planned a university career, followed, if the war ended soon enough, by a move to London and the Royal College of Music. She went to the manager’s cottage with the letter in her hand, only to find that Tommy Johns, also, had heard from his son and was delighted. ‘We’re going to need good men on the land as we’ve never needed them before, Mrs Rubrick. I’m very very pleased young Cliff looks at it that way. If you’ll excuse me for saying so, I thought this posh education he’s been getting would make a class-conscious snob of the boy but from what he tells me of his ideas I see it’s worked out different.’ For young Cliff, it appeared, was now a communist. Nothing could have been further removed from Flossie’s plans.

When he appeared, she could make no impression on him. He seemed to think that she alone would sympathize with his change of heart and plans and would support him. He couldn’t understand her disappointment nor, as he continued in his attitude, her mounting anger. He grew dogmatic and stubborn. The woman of forty-seven and the boy of sixteen quarrelled bitterly and strangely. It was a cruel thing for him to do, Ursula said, cruel and stupid. Aunt Florence was the most patriotic soul alive. Look at her war work. It wasn’t as though he was old enough or fit for the army. The least he could do was to complete the education she had so generously planned and in part given him.

After their quarrel they no longer met. Cliff went out with the high-country musterers and continued in their company when they came in from the mountains behind droning mobs of sheep. He became very friendly with Albie Black, the rouseabout. There was a rickety old piano in the bunkhouse annexe and in the evenings Cliff played it for the men. Their voices, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and strangely Victorian ballads, would drift across the yards and paddocks and reach the lawn where Flossie sat with her assembled forces, every night after dinner. But on the night she disappeared, his mates had gone to the dance and Cliff played alone in the annexe, strange music for that inarticulate old instrument.

‘Listen to him, now,’ said Arthur Rubrick. ‘Remarkable chap, that boy. You wouldn’t believe that old hurdy-gurdy over there had as much music in it. Extraordinary. Sounds like a professional.’

‘Yes,’ Fabian agreed after a pause. ‘It’s remarkable.’

Ursula wished they wouldn’t talk about Cliff. It would have been better to have told Uncle Arthur about the episode of the previous night, she thought, and let him deal with Cliff. Aunt Florence shouldn’t have to cope with everything and this had hurt her so deeply.

For the previous night, Markins, the manservant, hearing furtive noises in the old dairy that now served as a cellar, and imagining them to be made by a rat, had crept up and flashed his torch in at the window. Its beam darted mothlike about dusty surfaces of bottles. There was a brief sound of movement. Markins sought it out with his light. Cliff Johns’ face sprang out of the dark. His eyes were screwed up blindly and his mouth was open. Markins had described this very vividly. He had dipped the torch beam until it discovered Cliff’s hands. They were long and flexible hands and they grasped a bottle of Arthur’s twenty-year-old whisky. As the light found them they opened and the bottle crashed on the stone floor. Markins, a taciturn man, darted into the dairy, grasped Cliff by his wrist and, without a word, lugged him unresisting into the kitchen. Mrs Duck, outraged beyond measure, had instantly bustled off and fetched Mrs Rubrick. The interview took place in the kitchen. It nearly broke Florence’s heart, Ursula said. Cliff, who of course reeked of priceless whisky, said repeatedly that he had not been stealing, but would give no further explanation. In the meantime Markins had discovered four more bottles in a sugar bag, dumped round the corner of the dairy. Florence, naturally, did not believe Cliff and in a mounting scene called him a sneak-thief and accused him of depravity and ingratitude. He broke into a white rage and stammered out an extraordinary arraignment of Florence, saying that she had tried to buy him and that he would never rest until he had returned every penny she had spent on his schooling. At this stage Florence sent Markins and Mrs Duck out of the kitchen. The scene ended by Cliff rushing away while Florence, weeping and shaking, sought out Ursula and poured out the whole story. Arthur Rubrick had been very unwell and they decided to tell him nothing of this incident.

Next morning – the day of her disappearance – Florence went to the manager’s cottage only to be told that Cliff’s bed had not been slept in and his town clothes were missing. His father had gone off in their car down the road to the Pass. At midday he returned with Cliff whom he had overtaken at the crossroads, dead-beat, having covered sixteen miles on the first stage down-country to the nearest army depot. Florence would tell Ursula nothing of her subsequent interview with Tommy Johns.

‘So Uncle Arthur’s suggestion on that same evening that Cliff should play at the dance came at rather a grim moment,’ said Ursula.

‘The boy’s a damned conceited pup if he’s nothing worse,’ said Douglas Grace.

‘And he’s still here?’ said Alleyn. Fabian looked round at him.

‘Oh, yes. They won’t have him in the army. He’s got something wrong with his eyes, and anyway he’s ranked as doing an essential job on the place. The police got the whole story out of Markins, of course,’ said Fabian, ‘and for want of a better suspect, concentrated on the boy. I expect he looms large in the files, doesn’t he?’

‘He peters out about halfway through.’

‘That’s because he’s the only member of the household who’s got a sort of alibi. We all heard him playing the piano until just before the diamond clip was found, which was at five to nine. When he’d just started, at eight o’clock it was, Markins saw him in the annexe, playing, and he never stopped for longer than half a minute or less. Incidentally, to the best of my belief, that’s the last time young Cliff played on the piano in the annexe, or on any other piano, for a matter of that. His mother, who was worried about him, went over to the annexe and persuaded him to return with her to the cottage. There he heard the nine o’clock news bulletin and listened to a programme of classical music.

‘You may think that was a bit thick,’ said Fabian. ‘I mean a bit too much in character with the sensitive young plant, but it’s what he did. The previous night you must remember he’d had a snorting row with Flossie, and followed it up with a sixteen-mile hike and no sleep. He was physically and emotionally exhausted and dropped off to sleep in his chair. His mother got him to bed and she and his father sat up until after midnight, talking about him. Before she turned in, Mrs Johns looked at young Cliff and found him fathoms deep. Even the detective-sergeant saw that Flossie would have returned by midnight if she’d been alive. Sorry, Ursy dear, I interrupt continually. We are back on the lawn. Cliff is playing Bach on a piano that misses on six notes and Flossie’s talking about the party in the shearing-shed. Carry on.’

Ursula and Florence had steered Arthur Rubrick away from Cliff though the piano in the annexe continued to remind them of him. Flossie began to plan her speech on post-war land settlement for soldiers. ‘There’ll be no blunders this time,’ she declared. ‘The bill we’re planning will see to that. A committee of experts.’ The phrases drifted out over the darkling garden. ‘Good country, properly stocked … adequate equipment … Soldiers Rehabilitation Fund … I shall speak for twenty minutes before supper …’ But from what part of the wool-shed should she speak? Why not from the press itself? There would be a touch of symbolism in that, Flossie cried, taking fire. It would be from the press itself with an improvised platform across the top. She would be a dominant figure there. Perhaps some extra lighting? ‘We must go and look!’ she cried, jumping to her feet. That had always been her way with everything. No sooner said than done. She had tremendous driving power and enthusiasm. ‘I’m going to try my voice there – now. Give me my coat, Douglas darling.’ Douglas helped her into the diaphanous coat.

It was then that he discovered the loss of the diamond clip.

It had been a silver wedding present from Arthur, one of a pair. Its mate still twinkled on the left lapel of the coat. Flossie announced simply that it must be found, and Douglas organized the search party. ‘You’ll see it quite easily,’ she told them, ‘by the glitter. I shall walk slowly to the shearing-shed, looking as I go. I want to try my voice. Please don’t interrupt me, any of you. I shan’t get another chance and I must be in bed before ten. An early start in the morning. Look carefully and mind you don’t tread on it. Off you go.’

To Ursula’s lot had fallen a long path running down the right-hand side of the tennis lawn between hedges of clipped poplars, dense with summer foliage. This path divided the tennis lawn from a farther lawn which extended from the front along the south side of the house. This also was bordered by a hedged walk where Terence Lynne hunted, and, beyond her again, lay the kitchen gardens, allotted to Fabian. To the left of the tennis lawn Douglas Grace moved parallel with Ursula. Beyond him, Arthur Rubrick explored a lavender path that led off at right angles through a flower garden to a farther fence, beyond which lay a cart track leading to the manager’s hut, the bunkhouses and the shearing-shed.

‘No gossiping, now,’ said Flossie. ‘Be thorough.’

She turned down the lavender path, moving slowly. Ursula watched her go. The hills beyond her had now darkened to a purple that was almost black and, by the blotting out of nearer forms, Flossie seemed to walk directly into these hills until, reaching the end of the path, she turned to the left and suddenly vanished.

Ursula walked round the top of the tennis court, past the front of the house, to her allotted beat between the two lawns. The path was flanked by scrubby borders of parched annuals amongst which she hunted assiduously. Cliff Johns now played noisily but she was farther away and only heard disjointed passages, strident and angry. She thought it was a Polonaise. TUM, te-tum. Te-tum-te-tum-te TUM, te-tum. Tiddlytumtum. She didn’t know how he could proclaim himself like that after what had happened. Across the lawn, on her right, Fabian, making for the kitchen garden, whistled sweetly. Between them Terence Lynne hunted along the companion path to Ursula’s. The poplar fences completely hid them from each other but every now and then they would call out: ‘Any luck?’ ‘Not so far.’ It was now almost dark. Ursula had worked her way to the bottom of her beat and turned into the connecting path that ran right along the lower end of the garden. Here she found Terence Lynne. ‘It’s no good looking along here,’ Terence had said. ‘We didn’t come here with Mrs Rubrick. We crossed the lawn to the kitchen garden.’ But Ursula reminded her that earlier in the evening while Douglas and Fabian played an after-dinner singles, the girls had come this way with Florence. ‘But I’m sure she had the clip then,’ Terence objected. ‘We should have noticed if one was missing. And in any case, I’ve looked along here. We’d better not be together. You know what she said.’ They argued in a desultory way and then Ursula returned to her beat. She saw a light flash beyond the fence on the right side of the tennis lawn and heard Douglas call out, ‘Here’s a torch, Uncle Arthur.’ It was not long after this that Arthur Rubrick found the clip in a clump of zinnias along the lavender walk.

‘He said the beam from the torch caught it and it sent out sparks of blue light. They shouted, “Got it. We’ve found it!” and we all met on the tennis lawn. I ran out to a place on the drive where you can see the shearing-shed but there was no light there so we all went indoors.’ As they did this the music in the annexe stopped abruptly.

They had trailed rather wearily into the dining-room just as the nine o’clock bulletin was beginning on the radio. Fabian had turned it off. Arthur Rubrick had sat at the table, breathing short, his face more congested than usual. Terence Lynne, without consulting him, poured out a stiff nip of whisky. This instantly reminded Ursula of Cliff’s performance on the previous night. Arthur thanked Terence in his breathless voice and pushed the diamond clip across the table to Ursula.

‘I’ll just run up with it. Auntie Floss will like to know it’s found.’

It struck her that the house was extraordinarily quiet. This impression deepened as she climbed the stairs. She stood for a moment on the top landing, listening. As in all moments of quietude, undercurrents of sound, generally unheard, became disconcertingly audible. The day had been hot and the old wooden house relaxed with stealthy sighs or sudden cracks. Flossie’s room was opposite the stairhead. Ursula, stock-still on the landing, listened intently for any movement in the room. There was none. She moved nearer to the door and stooping down could just see the printed legend. Flossie was adamant about obedience to this notice, but Ursula paused while the inane couplet which she couldn’t read jigged through her memory:

Please don’t knock upon my door,

The only answer is a snore.

Auntie Flossie, she confessed, was a formidable snorer. Indeed it was mainly on this score that Uncle Arthur, an uneasy sleeper, had removed to an adjoining room. But on this night no energetic counterpoint of intake and expulsion sounded from behind the closed door. Ursula waited in vain and a small trickle of apprehension dropped down her spine. She stole away to her own room and wrote a little note. ‘It’s found. Happy trip, darling. We’ll listen to you.’ When she came back and slid it under Flossie’s door the room beyond was still quite silent.

Ursula returned to the dining-room. She said the light dazzled her eyes after the dark landing. She stood in the doorway and peered at the group round the table, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how, for no particular reason, something you see will stick in your memory? I mean there was no particular significance about my going back to the dining-room. I didn’t know then. Terry stood behind Uncle Arthur’s chair. Fabian was lighting a cigarette and I remember feeling worried about him –’ Ursula paused unaccountably. ‘I thought he’d been overdoing things a bit,’ she said. ‘Douglas was sitting on the table with his back towards me. They all turned their heads as I came in. Of course they were just wondering if I’d given her the diamond clip but it seems to me now that they asked me where she was. And, really, I answered as if they had done so. I said, “She’s in her room. She’s asleep!”’

‘Did it strike you as odd that she’d made no inquiries about the clip?’ Alleyn asked.

‘Not very odd. It was her way, to organize things and then leave them, knowing they’d be done. She was rather wonderful like that. She never nagged.’

‘There’s no need to nag if you’re an efficient dictator,’ Fabian pointed out. ‘I’ll admit her efficiency.’

‘Masculine jealousy,’ said Ursula, without malice, and he grinned and said, ‘Perhaps.’

Ursula waited for a moment and then continued her narrative.

‘We were all rather quiet. I suppose we were tired. We had a drink each and then we parted for the night. We keep early hours on the plateau, Mr Alleyn. Can you face breakfast at a quarter to six?’

‘With gusto.’

‘Good. We all went quietly upstairs and said goodnight in whispers on the landing. My room is at the end of the landing and overlooks the side lawn. Terry’s is opposite Auntie Florence’s and there’s a bathroom next door to her that is opposite Uncle Arthur’s dressing-room where he was sleeping. He’d once had a bad attack in the night and Auntie always left the communicating door open so that he could call to her. He remembered afterwards that this door was shut and that he’d opened it a crack and listened, thinking, as I had thought, how still she was. The boys’ rooms are down the corridor and the servants’ quarters at the back. When I came out in my dressing-gown to go to the bathroom, I met Terry. We could hear Uncle Arthur moving about quietly in his room. I glanced down the corridor and saw Douglas there and, farther along, Fabian in the door of his room. We all had candles, of course. We didn’t speak. It seemed to me that we were all listening. We’ve agreed, since, that we felt not exactly uneasy but not quite comfortable. Restless. I didn’t go to sleep for some time, and when I did it was to dream that I was searching in rather terrifying places for the diamond clip. It was somewhere in the wool-shed but I couldn’t find it because the party had started and Auntie Florence was making a speech on the edge of a precipice. I was late for an appointment and hunted in that horribly thwarted way one does in nightmares. I wouldn’t have bored you with my dream if it hadn’t turned into the dark staircase with me feeling on the treads for the brooch. The stairs creaked like they do at night, but I knew somebody was crossing the landing and I was terrified and woke up. The point is,’ said Ursula, leaning forward and looking directly at Alleyn, ‘somebody really was crossing the landing.’

The others stirred. Fabian reached over to the wood box and flung a log on the fire. Douglas muttered impatiently. Terence Lynne put down her knitting and folded her elegant hands together in her lap.

‘In what direction?’ Alleyn asked.

‘I’m not sure. You know how it is. Dream and waking overlap, and by the time you are really alert the sound that came into your dream and woke you has stopped. I simply know that it was real.’

‘Mrs Duck returning from the party,’ said Terence.

‘But it was three o’clock, Terry. I heard the grandfather strike about five minutes later and Duckie says they got back at a quarter to two.’

‘They’d hung about, cackling,’ said Douglas.

‘For an hour and a quarter? And, anyway, Duckie would come up the back stair. I don’t suppose it amounts to anything, Mr Alleyn, because we know now that – that it hadn’t – that it happened away from the house. It must have. But I don’t care what any one says,’ Ursula said, lifting her chin, ‘somebody was about on the landing at five minutes to three that morning.’

‘And we don’t know definitely and positively,’ said Fabian, ‘that it wasn’t Flossie herself.’

CHAPTER THREE ACCORDING TO DOUGLAS GRACE

I

Fabian’s suggestion raised a storm of protest. The two girls and Douglas Grace began at once to combat it. It seemed to Alleyn that they thrust it from them as an idea that shocked and horrified their emotions rather than offended their reason. In the blaze of firelight that sprang from the fresh log he saw Terence Lynne’s hands weave together.

She said sharply, ‘That’s a beastly thing to suggest, Fabian.’

Alleyn saw Douglas Grace slide his arm along the sofa behind Terence. ‘I agree,’ Douglas said. ‘Not only beastly but idiotic. Why in God’s name should Flossie stay out until three in the morning, return to her room, go out again and get murdered?’

‘I didn’t say it was likely. I said it wasn’t impossible. We can’t prove it wasn’t Flossie.’

‘But what possible reason –’

‘A rendezvous?’ Fabian suggested, and looked out of the corner of his eyes at Terence.

‘I consider that’s a remark in abominable taste, Fab,’ said Ursula.

‘Do you, Ursy? I’m sorry. Must we never laugh a little at people after they are dead? But I’m very sorry. Let’s go back to our story.’

‘I’ve finished,’ said Ursula shortly and there was an uncomfortable silence.

‘As far as we’re concerned,’ said Douglas at last, ‘that’s the end of the story. Ursula went into Aunt Floss’s room the next morning to do it out, and she noticed nothing wrong. The bed was made but that meant nothing because we all do our own beds and Ursy simply thought Flossie had tidied up before she left.’

‘But it was odd all the same,’ said Terence. ‘Mrs Rubrick’s sheets were always taken off when she went away and the bed made up again the day she returned. She always left it unmade, for that reason.’

‘It didn’t strike me at the time,’ said Ursula. ‘I ran the carpet sweeper over the floor and dusted and came away. It was all very tidy. She was a tremendously orderly person.’

‘There was another thing that didn’t strike you, Ursula,’ said Terence Lynne. ‘You may remember that you took the carpet sweeper from me and that I came for it when you’d finished. It wanted emptying and I took it down to the rubbish bin. I noticed there was something twisted round one of the axles, between the wheel and the box. I unwound it.’ Terence paused, looking at her hands. ‘It was a lock of wool,’ she said tranquilly. ‘Natural wool, I mean, from the fleece.’

‘You never told us that,’ said Fabian sharply.

‘I told the detective. He didn’t seem to think it important. He said that was the sort of thing you’d expect to find in the house at shearing-time. He was a town-bred man.’

‘It might have been there for ages, Terry,’ said Ursula.

‘Oh, no. It wasn’t there when you borrowed the sweeper from me. I’m very observant of details,’ said Terence, ‘and I know. And if Mrs Rubrick had seen it she’d have picked it up. She hated bits on the carpet. She had a “thing” about them and always picked them up. I’ll swear it wasn’t there when she was in the room.’

‘How big was it?’ Fabian demanded.

‘Quite small. Not a lock, really. Just a twist.’

‘A teeny-weeny twist,’ said Ursula in a ridiculous voice, suddenly gay again. She had a chancy way with her, one moment nervously intent on her memories, the next full of mockery.

‘I suppose,’ said Alleyn, ‘one might pick up a bit of wool in the shed and, being greasy, it might hang about on one’s clothes?’

‘It might,’ said Fabian lightly.

‘And being greasy,’ Douglas added, ‘it might also hang about in one’s room.’

‘Not in Auntie Floss’s room,’ Ursula said. ‘I always did her room, Douglas, you shan’t dare to say I left greasy wool lying squalidly about for days on the carpet. Pig!’ she mocked at him.

He turned his head lazily and looked at her. Alleyn saw his arm slip down the back of the sofa to Terence Lynne’s shoulders. Ursula laughed and pulled a face at him. ‘It’s all nonsense,’ she said, ‘this talk of locks of wool. Moonshine!’

‘Personally,’ said Terence Lynne, ‘I can’t think it very amusing. For me, and I’d have thought for all of us, the idea of sheep’s wool in her room that morning is perfectly horrible.’

‘You’re hateful, Terry,’ Ursula flashed at her. ‘It’s bad enough to have to talk about it. I mind more than any of you. You all know that. It’s because I mind so much that I can’t be too solemn. You know I’m the only one of us that loved her. You’re cold as ice, Terry, and I hate you.’

‘Now then, Ursy,’ Fabian protested. He knelt up and put his hands over hers. ‘Behave!’ he said. ‘Be your age, woman. You astonish me.’

‘She was a darling, and I loved her. If it hadn’t been for her –’

‘All right, all right.’

‘You would never even have seen me if it hadn’t been for her.’

‘Who was it,’ Fabian murmured, ‘who held the grapes above Tantalus’s lips? Could it have been Aunt Florence?’

‘All the same,’ said Ursula with that curious air, half-rueful, half-obstinate, that seemed to characterize her relationship with Fabian, ‘you’re beastly to me. I’m sorry, Terry.’

‘May we go on?’ asked Douglas.

Alleyn, in his chair beyond the firelight, stirred slightly and at once they were attentive and still.

‘Captain Grace,’ Alleyn said, ‘during the hunt for the diamond brooch, you went up to the house for a torch, didn’t you?’

‘For two torches, sir. I gave one to Uncle Arthur.’

‘Did you see any one in the house?’

‘No. There was only Markins. Markins says he was in his room. There’s no proof of that. The torches are kept on the hall table. The telephone rang while I was there and I answered it. But that only took a few seconds. Somebody wanting to know if Aunt Florence was going north in the morning.’

‘From the terrace in front of the house you look down on the fenced paths, don’t you? Could you see the other searchers from there?’

‘Not Uncle Arthur or Fabian, but I could just see the two girls. It was almost dark. I went straight to my uncle with the torch, he was there all right.’

‘Were you with him when he found the brooch?’

‘No. I simply gave him the torch and returned to my own beat with mine. I heard him call out a few moments later. He left the brooch where it was for me to see. It looked like a cluster of blue and red sparks in the torchlight. It was half-hidden by zinnia leaves. He said he’d looked there before. It wasn’t too good for him to stoop much and his sight wasn’t so marvellous. I supposed he’d just missed it.’

‘Did you go into the end path, the one that runs parallel with the others and links them?’

‘No. He did.’

‘Mr Rubrick?’

‘Yes. Earlier. Just as I was going to the house and before you went down there, Ursy, and talked to Terry.’

‘Then you and Mr Rubrick must have been there together, Miss Lynne,’ said Alleyn.

‘No,’ said Terence Lynne quickly.

‘I understood Miss Harme to say that when she met you in the bottom path you told her you had been searching there.’

‘I looked about there for a moment. I don’t remember seeing Mr Rubrick. I wasn’t with him.’

‘But –’ Douglas broke off. ‘I suppose I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I had it in my head that as I was going up to the house for the torches he came out of the lavender walk into my path and then moved on into the bottom path. And then I had the impression that as I returned with the torches he came back from the bottom path. It was just then that I heard you two arguing about whether you’d stop in the bottom path or not. You were there then.’

‘I may have seen him,’ said Terence. ‘I was only there a short time. I don’t remember positively, but we didn’t speak – I mean we were not together. It was getting dark.’

‘Well, but Terry,’ said Ursula, ‘when I went into the bottom path you came towards me from the far end, the end nearest the lavender walk. If he was there at all, it would have been at that end.’

‘I don’t remember, Ursula. If he was there we didn’t speak and I’ve simply forgotten.’

‘Perhaps I was mistaken,’ said Douglas uncertainly. ‘But it doesn’t matter much, does it? Arthur was somewhere down there and so were both of you. I don’t mind admitting that the gentleman whose movements that evening I’ve always been anxious to trace, is our friend Mr Markins.’

‘And away we go,’ said Fabian cheerfully. ‘We’re on your territory now, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Alleyn; ‘what about Markins, Captain Grace? Let’s have it.’

‘It goes back some way,’ said Douglas. ‘It goes back, to be exact, to the last wool sale held in this country, which was early in 1939.’

II

‘– So Aunt Floss jockeyed poor old Arthur into scraping acquaintance with this Jap. Kurata Kan his name was. They brought him up here for the weekend. I’ve heard that he took a great interest in everything, grinning like a monkey and asking questions. He’d got a wizard of a camera, a German one, and told them photography was his hobby. Landscape mostly, he said, but he liked doing groups of objects too. He took a photograph in the Pass. He was keen on flying. Uncle Arthur told me he must have spent a whole heap of money on private trips while he was here, taking his camera with him. He bought photographs too, particularly infra-red aerial affairs. He got the names of the photographers from the newspaper offices. We found that out afterwards, though apparently he didn’t make any secret of it at the time. It seems he was bloody quaint in his ways and talked like something out of the movies. Flossie fell for it like an avalanche. “My dear little Mr Kan.” She was frightfully bucked because he gave top price for her wool clip. The Japs always bought second-rate stuff and anyway it’s very unusual for merino wool to fetch top price. I consider the whole thing was damn fishy. When she went to England they kept up a correspondence. Flossie had always said the Japs would weigh in on our side when war came. “My Mr Kan tells me all sorts of things.” By God, there’s this to say for the totalitarian countries, they wouldn’t have had gentlemen like Mr Kurata Kan hanging about for long. I’ll hand that to them. They know how to keep the rats out of their houses.’ Douglas laughed shortly.

‘But not the bats out of their belfries,’ said Fabian. ‘Please don’t deviate into herrenvolk-lore, Douglas.’

‘This Kan lived for half the year in Australia,’ Douglas continued. ‘Remember that. Flossie got back here in ’40, bringing Ursy and Fabian with her. Before she went Home she used to run this place on a cook and two housemaids, but the maids had gone and this time she couldn’t raise the sight of a help. Mrs Duck was looking after Uncle Arthur singlehanded. She said she couldn’t carry on like that. Ursy did what she could but she wasn’t used to housework, and anyway it didn’t suit Flossie.’

‘Ursy seemed to me to wield a very pretty mop,’ said Fabian.

‘Of course she did, but it was damned hard work scrubbing and so on, and Auntie Floss knew it.’

‘I didn’t mind,’ said Ursula.

‘Anyway, when I got back after Greece, I found the marvellous Markins running the show. And where d’you think he’d blown in from? From Sydney, with a letter from Mr Kurata Kan. Can you beat that?’

‘A reference, do you mean?’

‘Yes. He hadn’t actually been with these precious Kans. He says he was valet to an English artillery officer who’d picked him up in America. He says he was friendly with the Kans’ servants. He says that when his employer left Australia he applied to Kan for a job. But the Kans were winging their way to Japan. Markins said he’d like to try his luck in New Zealand and Kan remembered Flossie moaning about the servant problem in this country. Hence, the letter. That’s Kan’s story. The whole thing looks damned fishy to me. Markins, an efficient, well-trained servant, could have taken a job anywhere. Beyond the fact that he was born British but has an American passport we know nothing about him. He gave the name of his American employers but doesn’t know their present address.’

‘I think I should tell you,’ said Alleyn, ‘that the American employers have been traced for us and verify the story.’

This produced an impression. Fabian said, ‘Not Understood, or The Modest Detective! I take back some of my remarks about him. Only some,’ he added. ‘I still maintain that, taking him by and large, our Mr Jackson is almost certifiable.’

‘It makes no difference,’ Douglas said. ‘It proves nothing. My case rests on pretty firm ground, as I think you’ll agree, sir, when you’ve heard it.’

‘Do remember, Douglas,’ Fabian murmured, ‘that Mr Alleyn has seen the files.’

‘I realize that, but God knows what sort of a hash they’ve made of it. Now, I don’t want to be unnecessarily hard on the dead,’ said Douglas loudly; Fabian grimaced and muttered to himself; ‘but I look at it this way. It’s my duty to give an honest opinion, and I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that Aunt Floss liked to know about things. Not to mince matters, she was a very inquisitive woman, and what’s more she enjoyed showing people that she was in on everything.’

‘I know what you’re going to say next,’ said Ursula brightly, ‘and I disagree with every word of it.’

‘My dear girl, you’re talking through your hat. Look here, sir. When I got back from Greece and was marched out of the army and came here, I found Fabian doing a certain type of work. I needn’t be more explicit than that,’ said Douglas portentously and raised his eyebrows.

‘You’re superb, Douglas,’ said Fabian. ‘Of course you needn’t. Do remember that Mr Alleyn is the man who knows all.’

‘Be quiet, Losse,’ said Alleyn unexpectedly. Fabian opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘You’re a mosquito,’ Alleyn added mildly.

‘I really am sorry,’ said Fabian. ‘I know.’

‘Shall I go on?’ asked Douglas huffily.

‘Please do.’

‘Fabian told me about his work. He called it, for security reasons, the egg-beater. Fabian’s idea. I prefer simply the X Adjustment.’

‘I see,’ said Alleyn. ‘The X Adjustment.’ Fabian grinned.

‘And he asked me if I’d like to have a look at his notes and drawings and so on. As a gunner I was, of course, interested. I satisfied myself there was something in it. I’d taken my electrical engineering degree before I joined up, and was rather keen on the magnetic fuse idea. I need go no further at the moment,’ said Douglas with another significant glance.

Alleyn thought, ‘He really is superb,’ and nodded solemnly.

‘Of course,’ Douglas continued, ‘Auntie Floss had to be told something. I mean, we wanted a room and certain facilities, and so on. She advanced us the cash for our gear. There’s no electrical supply this side of the plateau. We built a windmill and got a small dynamo. Later on she was going to have the house wired, but at the moment we’ve only got the juice in the workroom. She paid for all that. We began to spend more and more time on it. And later on, when we were ready to show something to somebody in the right quarter, she was damned useful. She’d talk anybody into anything, would Flossie, and she got hold of a certain authority at army headquarters and arranged for us to go up north and see him. He sent a report Home and things began to look up. We’ve now had a very encouraging answer from – however! I need not go into that.’

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