Died in the Wool (3 page)

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:

‘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 résumé, 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?'