Died in the Wool (18 page)

‘Sydney Barnes, lorry driver, deposed that on January 29th 1942 he collected the Mount Moon clip and trucked it downcountry…Alfred Clark, storeman…received the Mount Moon clip on February 3rd and stacked it to await assessment…James MacBride, government wool-assessor…February 9th…noticed smell but attributed it to dead rat…Slit all packs and pulled out tuft of wool near top…noticed nothing unusual…assessed with rest of clip…Samuel Joseph, buyer…'

‘And back we come, full circle,' Alleyn sighed and refilled his pipe.

‘Subsequent investigations,' said the files ominously. In their own language they boiled down, de-humanized and tidied up the long accounts he had listened to that evening. ‘It seems certain,' said the files, twenty minutes later, ‘that the disposal of the body could not have been effected in under forty-five minutes. Tests have been made. The wool must have been removed from the press; the body bound up in the smallest possible compass, placed in the bottom half of the press, and packed round with wool. The fleeces must then have been replaced and tramped down both in the bottom and the top, and the top half replaced on the bottom half …Thomas Johns, working manager, deposed that on the next morning he found that his overalls had been split and were stained. He accused the “fleecies” of having interfered with his overalls. They denied having done so.'

It was getting very cold. Alleyn hunted out a sweater and pulled it on. The house was utterly silent now. So must it have been when Ursula Harme awoke to find her dream continued in the sound of a footfall on the landing, and when Douglas Grace heard retreating steps in the passage outside his room. It would be nice, Alleyn thought wearily, to know if the nocturnal prowler was the same in each instance.

He rose stiffly and moved to the large wardrobe whose doors were flush with the end wall of the room. He opened them and was confronted with his own clothes neatly arranged on hangers. The invaluable Markins again. It was here, at the back of the wardrobe, hidden under three folded rugs, that Flossie Rubrick's suitcase had been found, ready packed for the journey north that she never took. Terence Lynne had discovered it, three days after the night in the garden. The purse with her travelling money and official passes had been in the drawer of the dressing-table. Had this been the errand of Ursula's nocturnal prowler? To conceal the suitcase and the purse? And had the fragment of wool been dropped then? From a shoe that had tramped down the wool over Flossie Rubrick's head?

This, thought Alleyn, had been a neat and expeditious job. Not too fancy. A blow on the head, solid enough to stun, not savage enough to make a great mess. Suffocation, and then the answer to the one great problem, the disposal of the body. Very cool and bold. Risky, but well-conceived and justified by results. The most difficult part had been done by other people.

And the inevitable speculation arose in his mind. What had been the thoughts of this murderer when the shearers went to work the next morning, when the moment came for the wool-presser to throw his weight on the ratchet-arm and force down the trampled wool from the top half of the press into the pack in the lower half? Could the murderer have been sure that, when the pack was sewn up and the press opened, there would be no bulges, no stains? And when the time came for a bale hook to be jabbed into the top corner of the pack and for it to be hauled and heaved into the waiting lorry? Its weight? She had been a tiny woman and very thin, but how much more did she weigh than her bulk in pressed wool?

He turned back to the files.

‘The medical experts are of the opinion that the binding of the body was probably effected within six hours of death, as the onset of rigor mortis after that period would probably have rendered such a process impossible. They add, however, that in the circumstances, i.e., warm temperature, lack of violent exercise before death, the onset would be unlikely to be early.'

‘Cautious, as always,' Alleyn thought. ‘Now then. Supposing he was a man. Did the murderer of Florence Rubrick, believing that he would be undisturbed, finish his appalling job while the members of the household were still up? The men were away, certainly, but what about the Johns family, and Markins and Albert Black? Might their curiosity not have been aroused by a light in the wool-shed windows? Or were they blacked out in 1942? Probably they were not, as Ursula Harme remarked that the shed was in darkness at five to nine, when she went in search of her guardian. This suggests that she expected to see lights.' The files, he reflected, made no mention of this point. If the step that Ursula had heard was the murderer's, had he returned, having finished his work, to hide away the suitcase and purse and thus preserve the illusion that Florence had gone north? Were the killing and the trussing up and the hiding away of the body done as a continuous operation, or was there an interval? She was killed some time after eight o'clock—nobody can give the exact time when she walked down the lavender path and turned left. It had been her intention to try her voice in the shearing-shed and return. She would have been anxious, surely, to know if the brooch were found. Would she have stayed longer than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour giving an imitation of an MP talking to herself in a deserted shed? Surely not. Surely, then, she was killed before, or quite soon after, the search party went indoors. It was five to nine when the brooch was found, and five to nine when, on his mother's entrance in the outhouse, Cliff Johns stopped playing and went home with her. During the period after the people in the house went to bed and before the party returned from the dance at a quarter to two, the wool-shed would be completely deserted. The lorry itself had broken down at the gate, but the revellers would be heard long before they reached the shed. He would still have time to put out the lights, and, if necessary, hide. By that time, almost certainly, the body would have been in the bottom half of the press and probably the top half would be partially packed.

‘It boils down to this then,' Alleyn thought. ‘If any of the five members of the search party committed this crime, he or she probably did so during the actual hunt for the brooch, since, if she'd been alive after then, Mrs Rubrick would almost certainly have returned to the house.' But as, in the case of the searchers, this allowed only a margin of four minutes or so, the murderer, if one of that party, must have returned later to complete the arduous task of encasing the body with firmly packed wool and re-filling the press exactly as it was before the job was begun. The business of packing round the body would be particularly exacting. The wool must have been forced down into a layer solid enough, for all its thinness, to form a kind of wall and prevent the development of bulges on the surface of the pack.

But suppose it was the murderer whom Ursula heard on the landing at five minutes to three. If his errand was to hide the suitcase and purse, whether he was an inmate of the house or not, he would almost certainly wait until he could be reasonably certain that the household was asleep.

Alleyn himself was sleepy now, and tired. The stale chilliness of extreme exhaustion was creeping about his limbs. ‘It's been a long day,' he thought, ‘and I'm out of practice.' He changed into pyjamas and washed vigorously in cold water. Then, for warmth's sake, he got into bed, wearing his dressing-gown. His, candle, now a stump, guttered, spattered in its own wax, and went out. There was another on the desk, but Alleyn had a torch at his bedside and he did not stir. It was half-past two on a cold morning.

‘Can I allow myself a cat-nap'?' he muttered, ‘or shall I write to Troy?' Troy was his wife, thirteen thousand miles away, doing camouflage and pictorial surveys instead of portraits, at Bossicote in England. He said wistfully: ‘She's very easy to think about.' He considered the chilly journey from his bed to the writing-desk and had flung back the bed-clothes when, in a moment, he was completely still.

No night wind sighed about the windows of Mount Moon, no mouse scuttled in the wainscotting. From somewhere far outside the house, by the men's quarters, he supposed, a dog barked, once, very desolately. But the sound that had arrested Alleyn came from within the house. It was the measured creak made by the weight of someone moving up the old stairs. Then, very slow but vivid because of their slowness, sensed rather than heard, footfalls sounded on the landing. Alleyn counted eight of them, reached for his torch and waited for the brush of fingertips against his own door, and the decisive unmuffled click of the latch. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and he could make out a faint greyness which was the surface of his white-painted door. It shifted towards him, slowly at first, and remained ajar for some seconds. Then, incisively, candidly as it seemed, the door was pushed wide, and against the swimming blue of the landing he saw the shape of a man. His back was towards Alleyn. He shut the door delicately and turned. Alleyn switched on his torch. As if by trickery, a face appeared, its eyes screwed up in the unexpected light.

It was Markins.

‘You've been the hell of a time,' said Alleyn.

As seen when the remaining candle had been lighted, he was a spare, bird-like man. His black hair was brushed strongly back, like a coarse wig with no parting. He had small black eyes, a thin nose and a mobile mouth. Above his black trousers he wore a servant's alpaca working jacket. His habit of speech was basic Cockney with an overlay of Americanisms, but neither of these characteristics was very marked and he would have been a difficult man to place. He had an air of naivety and frankness, almost of innocence, but his dark eyes never widened, and he seemed, behind his manner, which was pleasing, to be always extremely alert. He carried the candle he had lit to Alleyn's bedside table and then stood waiting, his arms at his sides, his hands turned outwards at the wrists.

‘Sorry I couldn't make it before, sir,' he murmured. ‘They're light sleepers, all of them, more's the pity. All four.'

‘No more?' Alleyn whispered.

‘Five.'

‘Five's out.'

‘It used to be six.'

‘And two from six is four with the odd one out.'

They grinned at each other.

‘Right,' said Alleyn. ‘I walk in deadly fear of forgetting these rigmaroles. What would you have done if I'd got it wrong?'

‘Not much chance of that, sir, and I'd have known you anywhere, Mr Alleyn.'

‘I should keep a false beard by me,' said Alleyn gloomily. ‘Sit down, for Heaven's sake, and shoot the works. Have a cigarette? How long is it since we met?'

‘Back in '37, wasn't it, sir? I joined the Special Branch in '36. I saw you before I went over to the States on that pre-war job.'

‘So you did. We fixed you up as a steward in a German liner, didn't we?'

‘That's right, sir.'

‘By the way, is it safe to speak and not whisper?'

‘I think so, sir. There's nobody in the dressing-room or on this side of the landing. The two young ladies are over the way. Their doors are shut.'

‘At least we can risk a mutter. You did very well on that first job, Markins.'

‘Not so good this time, I'm afraid, sir. I'm properly up against it.'

‘Oh, well,' said Alleyn resignedly, ‘let's have the whole story.'

‘From the beginning?'

‘I'm afraid so.'

‘Well, sir,' said Markins, and pulled his chair closer to the bed. They leant towards each other. They resembled some illustration by Cruikshank from Dickens; Alleyn in his dark gown, his long hands folded on the counterpane; Markins, small, cautious, bent forward attentively. The candle glowed like a nimbus behind his head, and Alleyn's shadow, stooping with theatrical exaggeration on the wall beside him, seemed to menace both of them. They spoke in a barely vocal but pedantically articulate mutter.

‘I was kept on in the States,' said Markins, ‘as of course you know. In May, '38, I got instructions from your people, Mr Alleyn, to get alongside a Japanese wool buyer called Kurata Kan, who was in Chicago. It took a bit of time but I made the grade, finally, through his servant. A half-caste Jap this servant was, and used to go to a sort of night school. I joined up, too, and found that this half-caste was sucking up to another pupil, a janitor at a place where they made hush-hush parts for aeroplane engines. He was on the job, all right, that half-caste. They pay on the nail for information, never mind how small, and he and Kan were in the game together. It took me weeks of geography and American history lessons before I got a lead, and then I sold them a little tale about how I'd been in service at our Embassy in Washington and had been sacked for showing too much interest. After that it was money for jam. I sold Mr Kurata Kan quite a nice little line of bogus information. Then he moved on to Australia. I got instructions from the Special Branch to follow him up. They fixed me up as a gent's valet in Sydney. I was supposed to have been in service with an artillery expert from Home who visited the Governor of New South Wales. He gave me the references himself on Government House notepaper. He was in touch with your people, sir. Well, after a bit I looked up Mr Kan and made the usual offer. He was quite glad to see me and I handed him a little line of stuff the gentleman was supposed to have let out when under the influence. Your office supplied it.'