Died in the Wool (32 page)

Terence was some time coming. Alleyn built up the fire and thawed himself out. He was caught on a wave of nostalgia; for Troy, his wife, for London, for Inspector Fox with whom he was accustomed to work, for his own country and his own people. If this had been a routine case from the Yard, he and Fox would, at its present stage, have gone into one of their huddles, staring at each other meditatively over their pipes. He could see old Fox now; his large unspeaking face, his grave attentiveness, his huge passive fists. And when it was over, there would be Troy, hugging her knees on the hearthrug and bringing him a sense of peace and communion. ‘She
is
nice,' he thought. ‘I do like my wife,' and he felt a kind of panic that he was so far away from her. With a sigh, he dismissed his mood and returned to the house on the slopes of Mount Moon, and felt again the silence of the plateau beyond the windows and the austerity of the night.

A door banged and someone crossed the hall. It was Terence Lynne.

She made a sedate entrance, holding herself very erect, looking straight before her. He noticed that she had powdered her face and done her lips. Evidently she had visited her room. He wondered if the book was still tucked down between the sheets.

‘All right now?' he asked, and pushed a chair up to the fire.

‘Quite, thank you.'

‘Sit down, won't you? We'll get it over quickly.'

She did as he suggested, at once, stiffly, as if she obeyed an order.

‘Miss Lynne,' Alleyn said, ‘I'm afraid I must ask you to let me read that diary.'

He felt her hatred, as if it was something physical that she secreted and used against him. ‘I wasn't mistaken after all,' she said. ‘I was right to think you would go back to my room. That's what you're like. That's the sort of thing you do.'

‘Yes, that's the sort of thing I do. I could have taken it away with me, you know.'

‘I can't imagine why you didn't.'

‘Will you please wait here, now, while I get it?'

‘I refuse to let you see it.'

‘In that case, I must lock your room and report to the police in the morning. They will come up with a search warrant and take the whole thing over themselves.'

Her hands trembled. She looked at them irritably and pressed them together in the fold of her gown. ‘Wait a minute,' she said. ‘There's something I must say to you. Wait.'

‘Of course,' he said and turned away.

After perhaps a minute she began to speak slowly and carefully. ‘What I am going to tell you is the exact truth. Until an hour ago I would have been afraid to let you see it. There is something written there that you would have misinterpreted. Now, you would not misinterpret it. There is nothing in it that could help you. It is because the thought of your reading it is distasteful to me that I want to keep it from you. I swear that is all. I solemnly swear it.'

‘You must know,' he said, ‘that I can't act on an assurance of that sort. Surely you must know.' She leant forward, resting her forehead on her hand and pushing her hair back from it. ‘If it is as you say,' Alleyn continued, ‘you must try to think of me as something quite impersonal, as indeed I am. I have read many scores of such documents, written for one reader only, and have laid them aside and put them from my mind. But I must see it or, if I don't, the police must do so. Which is it to be?'

‘Does it matter?' she said harshly. ‘You then. You know where it is. Go and get it, but don't let me see it in your hands.'

‘Before I go, there is one question. Why, when we discussed the search for the brooch, did you tell us you didn't meet Arthur Rubrick in the long walk below the tennis court?'

‘I still say so.'

‘No, no. You're an intelligent person. You heard what Losse and Grace said about the search. It was obvious you must have met him.' He paused, and the memory returned to him of Fabian muttering: ‘Terry! Oh Lord, I do wish I hadn't got up here. Silly old man!' He sat on the wooden fender, facing Terence Lynne. ‘Come,' he said, ‘there was an encounter, wasn't there? A significant encounter? Something happened that would speak for itself to an observer at some distance.'

‘Who was it? Was it Douglas? Ursula?'

‘Tell me what happened.'

‘If you know as much as this,' she said, ‘you know, unless you're trying to trap me, that he—he put his arms about me and kissed me. There's nothing left. Everything has been coarsened now, and made common.'

‘Isn't there something unsound in a happiness that fades in the light? I know this particular light is harsh and painful for you, but it is a passing thing. When it's gone you will have your remembrances—' He broke off for a moment and then added deliberately, ‘Whatever happens.'

She said impatiently: ‘Within the last hour, everything has altered. I told you. You don't understand.'

‘I've got an inkling,' he said. ‘Within the last hour there has been an attempt at a second murder. You think, don't you, that I'm saying to myself: “This attempt follows, in character, the attack on Mrs Rubrick. Therefore it has been made by Mrs Rubrick's assailant”.'

Terence looked attentively at him, a wary sidelong glance. She seemed to take alarm and rose quickly, facing him. ‘What do you mean…?'

‘You think,' said Alleyn, ‘that because Arthur Rubrick is dead, I cannot suspect him of the murder of his wife.'

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
further to be got from Terence Lynne. Alleyn went upstairs with her and stood in the open doorway while she fetched Arthur Rubrick's diary from its hiding-place. She gave it to him without a word, and the last glimpse he had of her was of an inimical face, pale, framed in its loosened wings of black hair. She shut the door on him. He went downstairs and called Cliff Johns and Markins into the study. It was now ten o'clock.

Cliff was nervous, truculent, and inclined to give battle.

‘I don't know why you want to pick on me again,' he said. ‘I don't know anything, I couldn't have done anything, and I've had just about enough of these sessions. If this is the Scotland Yard method, I don't wonder at what modern psychiatrists say about British justice.'

‘Don't you talk silly,' Markins admonished him and added hurriedly: ‘Beg pardon, sir, I'm sure.'

‘It's absolutely medieval,' Cliff mumbled.

‘Now, see here,' Alleyn said. ‘I heartily agree that you and I have had more than enough of these interviews. In the course of them, you have refused to give me certain information. I have now got that information from another source. I am going to repeat it to you and ask for your confirmation or denial. You're in a difficult position. Indeed, it is my duty to tell you that what you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.'

Cliff wetted his lips. ‘But that's what they say when—that means—'

‘It means that you'll be well advised either to tell the truth or to say nothing at all.'

‘I didn't kill her. I didn't touch her.'

‘Let us start with this business of the whisky. Is it true that you caught Albert Black in the act of stealing it, and were yourself in the act of replacing it when Markins found you?'

Markins had moved behind Cliff to the desk. He sat at it, opened his pocket book and produced a stump of pencil from his waistcoat.

‘Anything to say about that?' Alleyn asked Cliff. ‘True or untrue?'

‘Did he tell you?'

Alleyn raised an eyebrow. ‘I extracted it from his general manner. He admitted it. Why did you refuse to give this story to Mrs Rubrick?'

‘He wouldn't hand it over until I promised. He'd have got the sack and might have got gaoled. A year before, one of the chaps on the place pinched some liquor. They searched his room and found it. She got the police on to him and he did a week in gaol. Albie was a bit tight when he took it. I told him he was crazy.'

‘I see.'

‘I told you it hadn't anything to do with the case,' Cliff muttered.

‘But hasn't it? We'll go on to the following night, the night Mrs Rubrick was murdered, the night when you, dog-tired after your sixteen-mile tramp, were supposed to have played difficult music very well for an hour on a wreck of a piano.'

‘They all heard me,' Cliff cried out. ‘I can show you the music.'

‘What happened to that week's instalment of the published radio programmes?'

As Cliff's agitation mounted, he seemed to grow younger. His eyes widened and his lips trembled like a small boy's.

‘Did you burn it?' Alleyn asked.

Cliff did not answer.

‘You knew, of course, that the Art of Fugue was to be broadcast, followed by a Chopin Polonaise. You had started to work at the Bach and perhaps, while you waited for the programme to begin at 8.05 p.m., played the opening passages. You saw him playing, Markins, didn't you?'

‘Yes sir,' said Markins, still writing. Cliff started violently at the sound of his voice.

‘But at 8.05 you stopped and turned up the radio, which was probably already tuned to the station you wanted. From then, until just before your mother came, when you began to play again, the radio didn't stop. But at some time during that fifty minutes you went to the wool-shed. It was almost dark when you came out. Albert Black saw you. He was drunk, but he remembered and when three weeks later Mrs Rubrick's body was found and the police inquiry began, he used his knowledge for blackmail. He was afraid that when the whisky incident came to light, you would speak the truth. He drove a bargain with you. Now. Why did you go down to the wool-shed?'

‘I didn't touch her. I didn't plan anything. I didn't know she was going to the shed. It just happened.'

‘You sat in the annexe with the door open. If, after you stopped playing and the radio took up the theme, you sat on the piano chair, you would be able to see down the track. You would be able to see Mrs Rubrick come through the gate at the end of the lavender path and walk up the track towards you. You'd see her turn off to the wool-shed and then she would disappear. I don't for a moment suggest that you expected to see her. You couldn't possibly do so. I merely suggest that you did see her. The door was open, otherwise they would not have been able to hear the Bach from the tennis lawn. Why did you leave the Art of Fugue and follow her to the wool-shed?'

Watching Cliff, Alleyn thought: ‘When people are afraid, how little their faces express. They become wooden, dead almost. There's only a change of colour and a kind of stiffness in the mouth.'

‘Is there to be an answer?' he asked.

‘I am innocent,' said Cliff, and this gracious phrase came straight from his lips.

‘If that's true, wouldn't it be wise to tell me the facts? Do you want the murderer to be found?'

‘I haven't got the hunter's nose,' said Cliff harshly.

‘At least, if you're innocent, you want to clear yourself.'

‘How can I? How can I clear myself when there's only me to say what happened! She's dead, isn't she?' His voice rose shrilly. ‘And even if the dead could talk, she might still bear witness against me. If she had a moment to think, to realize she'd been hit, she may have thought it was me that did it. That may have been the last thought that flashed up in her mind before she died—that I was killing her.'

As if drawn by an intolerable restlessness, he moved aimlessly about the room, blundering short-sightedly against chairs. ‘That's a pretty ghastly idea to get into your head, isn't it? Isn't it?' he demanded, his back to Alleyn.

‘Then she was alive when you went into the shed? Did you speak to her?'

Cliff turned on him. ‘Alive? You must be crazy. Alive! Would I feel like this if I'd been able to speak to her?' His hands were closed on the back of a chair and he took in a shuddering breath. ‘Now,' Alleyn thought, ‘it's coming.'

‘Wouldn't it have been different,' Cliff said rapidly, ‘if I could have told her I was sorry, and tried to make her believe I wasn't a thief? That's what I wanted to do. I didn't know she was going to the shed. How could I? I just wanted to hear the Bach. I started off thinking I might try playing in unison with the radio, but it didn't work, so I stopped and listened. Then I saw her come up the track and turn off to the shed. I wanted suddenly to tell her I was sorry. I sat by the radio for a long time listening and thinking about what I could say to her. I couldn't make up my mind to go. Then, almost without properly willing it, I got up and walked out, leaving the music still going. I went down the hill, turning the phrases over in my mind. And then…to go in—into the dark—expecting to find her there and…I actually called out to her, you know. I wondered what she could be doing, standing so quiet somewhere in the dark. I could hear the music quite clearly. I called out: “Mrs Rubrick, are you there?” and my voice cracked. It hadn't broken properly then, and it cracked and sounded rotten. I walked on, deeper into the shadow.'

He rubbed his face with a shaking hand.

‘Yes?' Alleyn said. ‘You went on?'

‘There was a heap of empty bales beyond the press. I was quite close to it by then. It was so queer, her not being there. I don't know what I thought about. I don't know really if I'd any sort of idea about what was coming, but it seems to me now that I had got a kind of intuition. Like one of those nightmares, when something's waiting for you and you have to go on to meet it. But I don't know. That may not be true. It may not have happened till my foot touched hers.'

‘Under the empty bales?'

‘Yes, yes. Between the press and the wall. They were heaped up. I think I wondered what they were doing there. I suppose it was that. And then, in the dark, I stumbled into them. It's very queer, but I knew at once that it was Mrs Rubrick and that she was dead.'