Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 5: Died in the Wool, Final Curtain, Swing Brother Swing. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ looked up at Fabian and saw his lips tremble into a sneer. He made a small breathy sound something like laughter. He wore the conceited, defiant air of the neurotic who bitterly despises his own weakness. ‘Difficult,’ Alleyn thought, ‘and damned tiresome. He’s going to treat me like an alienist. Blast!’ And he said: ‘So you had a row?’

      Ursula bent forward and put her hand in Fabian’s. For a moment his fingers closed tightly about hers and then, with an impatient movement, he jerked away from her.

      ‘Oh, yes,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m afraid, since I’ve started on my course of indecent exposure, I’ve got to tell you about that too. I’m sorry I can’t wait until we’re alone together. Very boring for the others. Especially Douglas. Douggy always pays. And I apologize to Ursula because she comes into it. Sorry, Ursy, very bad form.’

      ‘If you mean what I think you mean,’ said Douglas, ‘I most certainly agree. Surely Ursy can be left out of this.’

      ‘Don’t be an idiot, Douglas,’ Ursula said impatiently. ‘It’s what he’s doing to himself that matters.’

      ‘And to Douglas, of course,’ Fabian cut in loudly. ‘Don’t forget what I’m doing to poor old Douglas. He becomes the traditional figure of fun. Upon my word it’s like a fin de siècle farce. Flossie was the duenna of course and you, Douglas, her candidate for the mariage de convenance. Ursy is the wayward heroine who shakes her curls and looks elsewhere. I, at least, should have the sympathy of the audience if only because I didn’t get it from anybody else. There is no hero, I go sour in the part. You ought to be the confidante, Terry, but I’ve an idea you ran a little sub-plot of your own.’

      ‘I told you,’ said Terence Lynne, clearly, ‘that if we started to talk like this, one, if not all, of us, would regret it.’

      Fabian turned on her with extraordinary venom. ‘But that one won’t be you, will it, Terry? At least, not yet.’

      She put her work down in her lap. A thread of scarlet wool trickled over her black dress and fell in a little pool on the floor. ‘No,’ she said easily, ‘it won’t be me. Except that I find all this talk rather embarrassing. And I don’t know what you mean by your “not yet”, Fabian.’

      ‘You will please keep Terry’s name …’ Douglas began.

      ‘Poor Douglas!’ said Fabian. ‘Popping up all over the place as the little pattern of chivalry. But it’s no good, you know. I’m hell-bent on my Buchmanism. And, really, Ursy, you needn’t mind. I may have a crack in my skull and seem to be a bit crazy but I did pay you the dubious compliment of asking you to marry me.’

      III

      ‘It’s as a further sidelight on Flossie,’ Fabian said, ‘that the story is really significant,’ and as he listened to it Alleyn was inclined to agree with him. It was also a sidelight, he thought, on the character of Ursula Harme, who, when she found there was no stopping Fabian, took the surprising and admirable line of discussing their extraordinary courtship objectively and with an air of judicial impartiality.

      Fabian, it appeared, had fallen in love with her during the voyage out. He said, jeering at himself, that he had made up his mind to keep his feelings to himself. ‘Because, taking me by and large, I was not a suitable claimant for the hand of Mrs Rubrick’s ward.’ On his arrival in New Zealand he had consulted a specialist and had shown him the official report on his injury and subsequent condition. By that time Fabian was feeling very much better. His headaches were less frequent and there had been no recrudescence of the black-outs. The specialist took fresh X-ray photographs of his head, and comparing them with the English ones, found an improvement at the site of injury. He told Fabian to go slow and said there was no reason why he should not make a complete recovery. Fabian, greatly cheered, returned to Mount Moon. He attempted to take part in the normal activities of a sheep station but found that undue exertion still upset him, and he finally settled down to work seriously on his magnetic fuse.

      ‘All this time,’ he said, ‘I did not change either in my feeling for Ursy, or in my decision to say nothing about it. She was Heavenly-kind to me, which perhaps made things a little more difficult, but I had no idea, none at all, that she was in the least fond of me. I avoided anything like a declaration, not only because I thought it would be dishonest, but because I believed it would be useless and embarrassing.’

      Fabian made this statement with simplicity and firmness and Alleyn thought: he’s working his way out of this. Evidently, it was necessary for him to speak.

      One afternoon some months after his arrival at Mount Moon, Flossie plunged upstairs and beat excitedly on the workroom door. Fabian opened it and she shook a piece of paper in his face. ‘Read that,’ she shouted. ‘My Favourite Nephew! Isn’t it perfectly splendid!’

      It was a cable taken down by Markins over the telephone and it announced the imminent return of Douglas Grace. Flossie was delighted. He was, she repeated emphatically, her Favourite Nephew. ‘So sweet always to his old aunt. We had such high old times together in London before the war.’ Douglas was to come straight to Mount Moon. As a schoolboy he had spent all his holidays there. ‘It’s his home,’ said Flossie emphatically. His father had been killed in 1918 and his mother had died some three years ago when Douglas was taking a post-graduate engineering course at Heidelberg. ‘So he’s only got his old Auntie,’ said Flossie. ‘Your uncle says that if he’s demobilized he shall stay here as a salaried cadet. We don’t know how badly he’s been hurt, of course.’ Fabian asked where Douglas had been wounded. ‘A muscular wound,’ said Flossie evasively and then added, ‘the gluteus maximus,’ and was deeply offended when Fabian laughed. But she was too excited to remain long in a huff and Fabian saw that she hovered on the edge of a confidence. ‘Isn’t it fun,’ she exclaimed, letting her lips fly apart over her prominent teeth, ‘that Ursy and Douglas should meet! My little ADC and my Favourite Nephew. And you, of course, Fab. I’ve told Ursy so much about Douglas that she feels she knows him already.’ Here Flossie gave Fabian a very sharp gimlet-like glance. He came out, shut the workroom door and locked it. He felt a cold jolt of apprehension in the pit of his stomach, a dreadful turning over. Flossie took his arm and walked him along the passage. ‘You’ll call me a silly romantic old thing,’ she began and even in his distress he found time to reflect how irritating she was when she playfully assumed octogenarian whimsies. ‘It’s only a little dream, of course,’ she continued, ‘but it would make me so happy if they should come together. It’s always been a little plot of poor old Floosie’s. Now, if I was a French guardian and aunt …’ She gave Fabian’s arm a little squeeze. ‘Ah, well,’ she said, ‘we’ll see.’ He received another gimlet-like glance. ‘He’ll be very good for you, Fab,’ she said firmly. ‘He’s so sane and vigorous. Take you out of yourself. Ha!’

      So Douglas arrived at Mount Moon and presently the two young men began their partnership in the workroom. Fabian said, wryly, that from the beginning he had watched for an attraction to spring up between Ursula and Douglas. ‘Certainly Flossie made every possible effort to promote it. She left no stone unturned. The trips à deux to the Pass! The elaborate sorting-out. She displayed the virtuosity of Tommy Johns in the drafting yards. Ursy and Douglas to the right. Terry, Uncle Arthur and me to the left. It was masterly and quite shameless. One evening when, on the eve of one of her trips north, her machinations had been particularly blatant, Uncle Arthur called her Pandora, but she missed the allusion and thought he was making a joke about her luggage.’

      For a time Fabian thought her plot was going to work and tried to accustom himself to the notion. He watched, sick with uncertainty, for intimate glances, private jokes, the small change of courtship, to develop between Ursula and Douglas, and thought he saw them where they didn’t СКАЧАТЬ