Died in the Wool (4 page)

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 naive, ‘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 uncorrected 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.

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.