Died in the Wool (9 page)

‘Be quiet, Losse,' said Alleyn unexpectedly. Fabian opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘You're a mosquito,' Alleyn added mildly.

‘I really am sorry,' said Fabian. ‘I know.'

‘Shall I go on?' asked Douglas huffily.

‘Please do.'

‘Fabian told me about his work. He called it, for security reasons, the egg-beater. Fabian's idea. I prefer simply the X Adjustment.'

‘I see,' said Alleyn. ‘The X Adjustment.' Fabian grinned.

‘And he asked me if I'd like to have a look at his notes and drawings and so on. As a gunner I was, of course, interested. I satisfied myself there was something in it. I'd taken my electrical engineering degree before I joined up, and was rather keen on the magnetic fuse idea. I need go no further at the moment,' said Douglas with another significant glance.

Alleyn thought, ‘He really is superb,' and nodded solemnly.

‘Of course,' Douglas continued, ‘Auntie Floss had to be told something. I mean, we wanted a room and certain facilities, and so on. She advanced us the cash for our gear. There's no electrical supply this side of the plateau. We built a windmill and got a small dynamo. Later on she was going to have the house wired, but at the moment we've only got the juice in the workroom. She paid for all that. We began to spend more and more time on it. And later on, when we were ready to show something to somebody in the right quarter, she was damned useful. She'd talk anybody into anything, would Flossie, and she got hold of a certain authority at army headquarters and arranged for us to go up north and see him. He sent a report Home and things began to look up. We've now had a very encouraging answer from—however! I need not go into that.'

‘Quite,' said Alleyn. Fabian suddenly offered him a cigar which he refused.

‘Well, as I say, she was very helpful in many, ways, but she did
gimlet
rather and she used to talk jolly indiscreetly at meal times.'

‘You should have heard her,' said Fabian. ‘“Now, what do my two inventors think?” And then, you know, she'd pull an arch face and for all the world like one of the weird sisters in
Macbeth
, she'd lay her rather choppy finger on her lips and say, “But we mustn't be indiscreet, must we?” '

Alleyn glanced up at the picture. The spare, wiry woman stared down at him with the blank inscrutability of all Academy portraits. He was visited by a strange notion. If the painted finger should be raised to those lips, that seemed to be strained with such difficulty over projecting teeth! If she could give him a secret signal: ‘Speak now. Ask this question. Be silent here, they are approaching a matter of importance.'

‘That's how she carried on,' Douglas agreed. ‘It was damned difficult, and of course everybody in the house knew we were doing something hush-hush. Fabian always said, “What of it? We keep our stuff locked up and even if we didn't, nobody could understand it.” But I didn't like the way Flossie talked. Later on, her attitude changed.'

‘That was after questions had been asked in the House about leakage of information to the enemy,' said Ursula. ‘She took that very much to heart, Douglas, you know she did. And then that ship was torpedoed off the North Island. She was terribly upset.'

‘Personally,' said Fabian, ‘I found her caution much more alarming than her curiosity. You'd have thought we had the Secret Death Ray of fiction on the stocks. She papered the walls with cautionary posters. Go on, Douglas.'

‘It was about three weeks before she was killed that it happened,' said Douglas. ‘And if you don't find a parallel between my experience and Ursy's, I shall be very much surprised. Fabian and I had worked late on a certain improvement to a crucial part of our gadget, a safety device, let us call it.'

‘Why not,' said Fabian, ‘since it is one?'

‘I absolutely fail to understand your attitude, Fabian, and I'm sure Mr Alleyn does. Your bloody English facetiousness—'

‘All right. You're perfectly right, old thing, only it's just that all these portentous hints seem to me to be so many fancy touches. You know as well as I do that the idea of a sort of aerial magnetic mine must have occurred to countless schoolboys. The only thing that could possibly be of use to the most sanguinary dirty dog would be either the drawings or the dummy model.'

‘Exactly!' Douglas shouted, and then immediately lowered his voice. ‘The drawings and the model.'

‘And it's all right about Markins. He's spending the evening with the Johns family.'

‘So he says,' Douglas retorted. ‘Well, now, sir, on this night, three weeks before Aunt Floss was killed, I was worrying about the alteration in the safety device—'

His story did bear a curious resemblance to Ursula's.

On this particular evening, at about nine o'clock, Douglas and Fabian stood outside their workroom door, having locked it up for the night. They were excited by the proposed alteration to the safety device which Fabian now thought could be improved still further. ‘We'd talked ourselves silly and decided to chuck it up for the night,' said Douglas. He usually kept the keys of the workroom door and safe but on this occasion each of them said that he might feel inclined to return to the calculations later on that night. It was agreed that Douglas should leave the keys in a box on his dressing-table where Fabian, if he so desired, could get them without disturbing him. It was at this point that they noticed Markins, who had come quietly along the passage from the back stairs. He asked them if they knew where Mrs Rubrick was as a long-distance call had come through for her. He almost certainly overheard the arrangement about the keys. ‘And, by God,' said Douglas, ‘he tried to make use of it.'

They parted company and Douglas went to bed. But he was overstimulated and slept restlessly. At last, finding himself broad awake and obsessed with their experiment, he had decided to get up and look through the calculations they had been working on that evening. He had stretched out his hand to his bedside-table when he heard a sound in the passage beyond his door. It was no more than the impression of stealthy pressure, as though someone advanced with exaggerated caution and in slow motion. Douglas listened spellbound, his hand still outstretched. The steps paused outside his door. At that moment he made some involuntary movement of his hand and knocked his candlestick to the floor. The noise seemed to him to be shocking. It was followed by a series of creaks fading in a rapid diminuendo down the passage. He leapt out of bed and pulled open his door.

The passage was almost pitch dark. At the far end it met a shorter passage that ran across it like the head of a T. Here, there was a faint glow that faded while Douglas watched it, as if, he said, somebody with a torch was moving away to the left. The only inhabited room to the left was Markins'. The back stairs were to the right.

At this point in his narrative, Douglas tipped himself back on the sofa and glanced complacently about him. Why, he demanded, was Markins abroad in the passage at a quarter to three in the morning (Douglas had noted the time) unless it was upon some exceedingly dubious errand? And why did he pause outside his, Douglas's door? There was one explanation which, in the light of subsequent events, could scarcely be refuted. Markins had intended to enter Douglas's room and attempt to steal the keys of the workshop.

‘Well, well,' said Fabian, ‘let's have the subsequent events.'

They were, Alleyn thought, at least suggestive.

After the incident of the night Douglas took his keys to bed with him and lay fuming until daylight when he woke Fabian and told him of his suspicions. Fabian was sceptical. ‘A purely gastronomic episode, I bet you anything you like.' But he agreed that they should be more careful with the keys and he himself contrived a heavy shutter which padlocked over the window when the room was not in use. ‘There was no satisfying Douglas,' Fabian said plaintively. ‘He jeered at my lovely shutter, and didn't believe I went to bed with the keys on a bootlace round my neck. I did, though.'

‘I wasn't satisfied to let it go like that,' said Douglas. ‘I was damned worried, and next day I kept the tag on Master Markins. Once or twice I caught him watching me with a very funny look in his eye. That was on the Thursday. Flossie had given him the Saturday off and he went down to the Pass with the mail car. He's friendly with the pubkeeper there. I thought things over and decided to do a little investigation and I think you'll agree I was justified, sir. I went to his room. It was locked, but I'd seen a bunch of old keys hanging up in the store-room and after filing one of them I got it to function all right.' Douglas paused, half-smiling. His arm still rested along the back of the sofa behind Terence Lynne. She turned and, clicking her knitting-needles, looked thoughtfully at him.

‘I don't know how you could, Douglas,' said Ursula. ‘Honestly!'

‘My dear child, I had every reason to believe I was up against a very nasty bit of work; a spy, an enemy. Don't you understand?'

‘Of course I understand, but I just don't believe Markins is a spy. I rather like him.'

Douglas raised his eyebrows and addressed himself pointedly to Alleyn.

‘At first I thought I'd drawn a blank. Every blinking box and case in his room, and there were five all told, was locked. I looked in the cupboard and there, on the floor, I did discover something.'

Douglas cleared his throat, took a wallet from his breast pocket and an envelope from the wallet. This he handed to Alleyn. ‘Take a look at it, sir. It's not the original. I handed that over to the police. But it's an exact replica.'

‘Yes,' said Alleyn, raising an eyebrow at it. ‘A fragment of the covering used on a film package for a Leica or similar camera.'

‘That's right, sir. I thought I wasn't mistaken. A bloke in our mess had used those films and I remembered the look of them. Now it seemed pretty funny to me that a man in Markins' position should be able to afford a Leica camera. They cost anything from twenty-five to a hundred pounds out here when you could get them. Of course, I said to myself, it mightn't be his. But there was a suit hanging up in the cupboard and in one of the pockets I found a sale docket from a photographic supply firm. Markins had spent five pounds there, and amongst the stuff he'd bought were twelve films for a Leica. I suppose he was afraid he'd run out. I shifted one of his locked cases and it rattled and clinked. I bet it had his developing plant in it. When I left his room I was satisfied I'd hit on something pretty startling. Markins was probably going to photograph everything he could lay his hands on in our workroom and send it on to his principals.'

‘I see,' said Alleyn. ‘So what did you do?'

‘Told Fabian,' said Douglas. ‘Right away.'

Alleyn looked at Fabian.

‘Oh, yes. He told me, and we disagreed completely over the whole thing. In fact,' said Fabian, ‘we had one hell of a flaming row over it, didn't we, Doug?'

‘There's no need to exaggerate,' said Douglas. ‘We merely took up different attitudes.'

‘Wildly different,' Fabian agreed. ‘You see, Mr Alleyn, my idea, for what it's worth, was this. Suppose Markins was a dirty dog. If questioned about his nightly prowl he had only to say:
(a)
That his tummy was upset and he didn't feel up to going to the downstairs Usual Offices so had visited ours, or
(b)
That it wasn't him at all. As for his photographic zeal, if it existed, he might have been given a Leica camera by a grateful employer or saved up his little dimes and dollars and bought one second-hand in America. Every photographic zealot is not a fifth columnist. If he kept his developing stuff locked up it might be because he was innately tidy or because he didn't trust us, and I must say that with Douglas on the premises he wasn't far wrong.'

‘So you were for doing nothing about it?'

‘No. I thought we should keep our stuff well stowed away and our eyes open. I suggested that if, on consideration, we thought Markins was a bit dubious, we should report the whole story to the people who are dealing with espionage in this country.'

‘And did you agree with this plan, Grace?'

Douglas had disagreed most vigorously. He had, he said with a short laugh, the poorest opinion of the official counterespionage system and would greatly prefer to tackle the matter himself. ‘That's what we're like, out here, sir,' he told Alleyn. ‘We like to go to it on our own and get things done.' He added that he felt, personally, so angry with Markins that he had to do something about it. Fabian's suggestion he dismissed as unrealistic. Why wait? Report the matter certainly, but satisfy themselves first and then go direct to the authority they had seen at army headquarters and get rid of the fellow. They argued for some time and separated without having come to any conclusion. Douglas, on parting from Fabian, encountered his aunt who, as luck would have it, launched out on an encomium upon her manservant. ‘What should I do without my Markins? Thank Heaven he comes back this evening. I touch wood,' Flossie had said, tapping a gnarled finger playfully on her forehead, ‘every time he says he's happy here. It'd be so unspeakably dreadful if he were lost to us.'