Died in the Wool (2 page)

‘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.

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.

‘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.'