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

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      ‘I didn’t expect you to come,’ said Fabian Losse.

      ‘No?’

      ‘No. Of course I wouldn’t have known anything about you if Flossie herself hadn’t told me. That’s rather a curious thought, isn’t it? Horrible in a way. It was not long before it happened that you met, was it? I remember her returning from her lawful parliamentary occasions (you knew, of course, that she was an MP) full of the meeting and of dark hints about your mission in this country. “Of course I tell you nothing that you shouldn’t know but if you imagine there are no fifth columnists in this country …” I think she expected to be put on some secret convention but as far as I know that never came off. Did she invite you to Mount Moon?’

      ‘Yes. It was extremely kind of her. Unfortunately, at the moment …’

      ‘I know, I know. More pressing business. We pictured you in a false beard, dodging round geysers.’

      Alleyn grinned. ‘You can eliminate the false beard, at least,’ he said.

      ‘But not the geysers? However, curiosity, as Flossie would have said, is the most potent weapon in the fifth-column armoury. Flossie was my aunt by marriage, you know,’ Fabian added unexpectedly. ‘Her husband, the ever-patient Arthur, was my blood uncle, if that’s the correct expression. He survived her by three months: Curious, isn’t it? In spite of his chronic endocarditis, Flossie, alive, did him no serious damage. Dead, she polished him off completely. I hope you don’t think me very heartless.’

      ‘I was wondering,’ Alleyn murmured, ‘if Mrs Rubrick’s death was a shock only to her husband.’

      ‘Well, hardly that,’ Fabian began and then glanced sharply at his guest. ‘You mean you think that because I’m suffering from shock, I adopt a gay ruthlessness to mask my lacerated nerves?’ He drove for a few moments in silence and then, speaking very rapidly and on a high note, he said: If your aunt by marriage turned up in a highly compressed state in the middle of a wool bale, would you be able to pass it off with the most accomplished sang-froid? Or would you? Perhaps, in your profession, you would.’ He waited and then said very quickly, as if he uttered an indecency, ‘I had to identify her.’

      ‘Don’t you think,’ Alleyn said, ‘that this is a good moment to tell me the whole story, from the beginning?’

      ‘That was my idea, of course. Do forgive me. I’m afraid my instinct is to regard you as omniscience itself. An oracle. To be consulted rather than informed. How much, by the way, do you know?’

      Alleyn, who had had his share of precious young moderns, wondered if this particular specimen was habitually so disjointed in speech and manner. He knew that Fabian Losse had seen war service. He wondered what had sent him to New Zealand and whether, as Fabian himself had suggested, he was, in truth, suffering from shock.

      ‘I mean,’ Fabian was saying, ‘it’s no use my filling you up with vain repetitions.’

      ‘When I decided to come,’ said Alleyn, ‘I naturally looked up the case. On my way here I had an exhaustive session with Sub-Inspector Jackson who, as of course you know, is the officer in charge of the investigation.’

      ‘All he was entitled to do,’ said Fabian with some heat, ‘was to burst into sobs and turn away his face. Did he, by any chance, show you his notes?’

      ‘I was given full access to the files.’

      ‘I couldn’t be more sorry for you. And I must say that in comparison with the files even my account may seem a model of lucidity.’

      ‘At any rate,’ said Alleyn placidly, ‘let’s have it. Pretend I’ve heard nothing.’

      He waited while Fabian, driving at fifty miles an hour, lit a cigarette, striking the match across the windscreen and shaking it out carefully before throwing it into the dry tussock.

      ‘On the evening of the last Thursday in January, 1942,’ he began, with the air of repeating something he had memorized, ‘my aunt by marriage, Florence Rubrick, together with Arthur Rubrick (her husband and my uncle), Douglas Grace (her own nephew), Miss Terence Lynne (her secretary), Miss Ursula Harme (her ward), and me, sat on the tennis lawn at Mount Moon and made arrangements for a patriotic gathering to be held, ten days later, in the wool-shed. In addition to being our member, Flossie was also president of a local rehabilitation committee, set up by herself to propagate the gospel of turning good soldiers into bewildered farmers. The meeting was to be given tea, beer, and a dance. Flossie, stationed on an improvised rostrum hard by the wool-press, was to address them for three-quarters of an hour. She was a remorseless orator, was Flossie. This she planned, sitting in a deck-chair on the tennis lawn. It may give you some idea of her character when I tell you she began with the announcement that in ten minutes she was going to the wool-shed to try her voice. We were exhausted. The evening was stiflingly hot. Flossie, who was fond of saying she thought best when walking, had marched us up and down the rose garden and had not spared us the glass houses and the raspberry canes. Wan with heat and already exhausted by an after-dinner set of tennis, we had trotted at her heels, unwilling acolytes. During this promenade she had worn a long diaphanous coat garnished with two diamond clips. When we were at last allowed to sit down, Flossie, heated with exercise and embryonic oratory, had peeled off this garment and thrown it over the back of the deck-chair. Some twenty minutes later, when she was about to resume the garment, one of the diamond clips was missing. Douglas, blast him, discovered the loss while he was helping Flossie into her coat and, like a damned officious booby, immediately came over all efficient and said we’d look for it. With fainting hearts we suffered ourselves to be organized into a search party; this one to the rose-beds, that to the cucumber frames. My lot fell among the vegetable marrows. Flossie, encouraged by Douglas, was most insistent that we separate and cover the ground exhaustively. She had the infernal cheek to announce that she was going off to the wool-shed to practise her speech and was not to be disturbed. She marched off down a long path, bordered with lavender, and that, as far as we know, was the last time she was seen alive.’

      Fabian paused, looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes, and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. ‘I had forgotten the classic exception,’ he said. ‘The last time she was seen alive, except by her murderer. She turned up some three weeks later at Messrs Riven Brothers’ wool store, baled up among the Mount Moon fleeces, poor thing. Did I forget to say we were shearing at the time of her disappearance? But of course you know all that.’

      ‘You followed her instructions about hunting for the clip?’

      Fabian did not answer immediately. ‘With waning enthusiasm, on my part, at least,’ he said. ‘But, yes. We hunted for about forty-five minutes. Just as it was getting too dark to continue, the clip was found by Arthur, her husband, in a clump of zinnias that he had already ransacked a dozen times. Faint with our search, we returned to the house and the others drank whiskies and sodas in the dining-room. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed alcohol. Ursula Harme hurried away to return the clip to Flossie. The wool-shed was in darkness. She was not in her drawing-room or her study. When Ursula went up to her bedroom she was confronted by a poisonously arch little notice that Flossie was in the habit of hanging on her door handle when she didn’t want to be disturbed.

      “Please don’t knock upon the door,

      The only answer is a snore.”

      ‘Disgusted but not altogether surprised, Ursula stole away, but not before she had scribbled the good news on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door. She returned and told us what she had done. We went to our beds believing Flossie to be in hers. Shall I go on, sir?’

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