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

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       CHAPTER FIVE ACCORDING TO TERENCE LYNNE

      I

      The aspect of Terence Lynne that struck Alleyn most forcibly was her composure. He felt quite sure that, more than any of them, she disliked and resented these interminable discussions. Yet she answered his questions composedly. Unlike her companions, she showed no sign of launching into a continuous narrative and the sense of release which had encouraged them to talk was, he felt certain, absent in Miss Lynne. He had the feeling that unless he was careful he would find himself engaged in something very like routine police interrogation. This, above all things, he was anxious to avoid. He wanted to retain his position as an onlooker before whom the spoil of an indiscriminate rummage was displayed, leaving him free to sort, reject and set aside. Terence Lynne waited for a specific demand, yet her one contribution up to date had been, in its way, sufficiently startling.

      ‘Here at least,’ Alleyn said, ‘are two completely opposed views. Losse, if I remember him, said Mrs Rubrick was as clever as a bagful of monkeys. You disagree, Miss Lynne?’

      ‘She had a few tricks,’ said Terence. ‘She could talk.’

      ‘To her electors?’

      ‘Yes, to them. She had the knack. Her speeches sounded rather effective. They didn’t read well.’

      ‘I always thought you wrote them for her, Terry,’ said Fabian with a grin.

      ‘If I’d done that they would have read well and sounded dull. I haven’t the knack.’

      ‘But wasn’t it pretty hot to know what they’d like?’ asked Douglas.

      ‘She used to listen to people on the wireless and then adapt the phrases.’

      ‘By golly, so she did!’ cried Fabian delightedly. ‘Do you remember, Ursy, the clarion call in the speech on rehabilitation? “We shall settle them on the good ground, in the fallow fields, in the workshops and in the hills. We shall never abandon them!” Good Lord, she had got a nerve.’

      ‘It was utterly unconscious!’ Ursy declaimed. ‘An instinctive echo.’

      ‘Was it!’ said Terence Lynne quietly.

      ‘You’re unfair, Terry.’

      ‘I don’t think so. She had a very good memory for other people’s ideas. But she couldn’t reason very well and she used to make the most painful floaters over finance: She hadn’t got the dimmest notion of how her rehabilitation scheme would work out financially.’

      ‘Uncle Arthur helped in that department,’ said Fabian.

      ‘Of course he did.’

      ‘He played an active part in her public life?’ asked Alleyn.

      ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I think it killed him. People talked about the shock of her death, but he was worn out before she died. I tried to stop it happening but it was no good. Night after night we would sit up working on the notes she handed over to him. She gave him no credit for that.’

      She spoke rapidly and with more colour in her voice. Hallo! Alleyn thought, she’s off.

      ‘His own work died of it, too,’ she said.

      ‘What on earth do you mean, Terry?’ asked Fabian. ‘What work?’

      ‘His essays. He’d started a group of six essays on the pastoral element in Elizabethan poetry. Before that, he wrote a descriptive poem treating the plateau in the Elizabethan mode. That was the best thing he did, we thought. He wrote very lucidly.’

      ‘Terry,’ said Fabian, ‘you bewilder me with these revelations. I knew his taste in reading, of course. It was surprisingly austere. But – essays? I wonder why he never told me.’

      ‘He was sensitive about them. He didn’t want to talk about them until they were complete. They were really very good.’

      ‘I should have liked to know,’ said Fabian gently. ‘I wish he had felt he could tell me.’

      ‘I suppose he had to have a hobby,’ said Douglas. ‘He couldn’t play games, of course. There’s nothing much in that, just doing a bit of writing, I mean.’

      ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon,”’ Alleyn muttered. Terence and Fabian looked quickly at him and Fabian grinned.

      ‘They were never finished,’ said Terence. ‘I tried to help by taking down at his dictation and then by typing, but he got so tired and there were always other things.’

      ‘Terry,’ said Fabian suddenly, ‘have I by any chance done you rather a bloody injustice?’