Ngaio Marsh: Died in the Wool

“Hullo!” said the passenger. “Is this the top?” And a moment later—“Good God, how remarkable!”

The mountain tops had marched away to left and right. The head of the Pass was an open square of piercing blue. As they reached it the black cloud drew back like a curtain. In a moment it was behind them and they looked down into another country.

It was a great plateau, high itself, but ringed about with mountains that were crowned in a perpetual snow. It was laced with rivers of snow water. Three lakes of a strange milky green lay across its surface. It stretched bare and golden under a sky that was brilliant as a paladin’s mantle. Upon the plateau and the foot-hills, up to the level of perpetual snow, grew giant tussocks, but there were no forests. Many miles apart, patches of Pinus insignis or Lombardy poplars could be seen and these marked the solitary homesteads of the sheep farmers. The air was clear beyond belief, unbreathed, one would have said, newly poured out from the blue chalice of the sky.

The passenger again lowered the window, which was still wet but steaming now, in the sun. He looked back. The cloud curtain lolled a little way over the mountain barrier and that was all there was to be seen of it.

“It’s a new world,” he said.

The driver stretched out his hand to a pigeon-hole in the dashboard where his store of loose cigarettes joggled together. His leather coat smelt unpleasantly of fish oil. The passenger wished that his journey was over and that he could enter into this new world of which, remaining in the car, he was merely a spectator. He looked at the mountain ring that curved sickle-wide to right and left of the plateau. “Where is Mount Moon?” he asked. The driver pointed sweepingly to the left. “They’ll pick you up at the forks.”

The road, a pale stripe in the landscape, pointed down the centre of the plateau and then far ahead forked towards the mountain ramparts. The passenger could see a car, tiny but perfectly clear, standing at the forks. “That’ll be Mr. Losse’s car,” said the driver. The passenger thought of the letter he carried in his wallet. Phrases returned to his memory. “… the situation has become positively Russian, or, if you prefer the allusion, a setting for a modern crime story… We continue here together in an atmosphere that twangs with stretched nerves. One expects them to relax with time, but no… it’s over a year ago… I should not have ventured to make the demand upon your time if there had not been this preposterous suggestion of espionage… refuse to be subjected any longer to this particular form of torment…” And, in a pointed irritable calligraphy, the signature— “Fabian Losse.”

The car completed its descent and with a following cloud of dust began to travel across the plateau. Against some distant region of cloud a system of mountains was revealed, glittering spear upon spear. One would have said that these must be the ultimate expression of loftiness, but soon the clouds parted and there, remote from them, was the shining horn of the great peak, the Cloud Piercer, Aorangi. The passenger was so intent upon this unfolding picture that he had no eyes for the road and they were close upon the forks before he saw the signpost with its two arms at right angles. The car pulled up beside them and he read their legends: “Main South Road” and “Mount Moon.”

The air was lively with the sound of grasshoppers. Its touch was fresh and invigorating. A tall young man wearing a brown jacket and grey trousers came round the car to meet him. “Mr. Alleyn? I’m Fabian Losse.” He took a mail-bag from the driver, who had already begun to unload Alleyn’s luggage, and a large box of stores for Mount Moon. The service car drove away to the south in its attendant cloud of dust. Alleyn and Losse took the road to Mount Moon.

“It’s a relief to me that you’ve come, sir,” said Losse after they had driven in silence for some minutes. “I hope I haven’t misled you with my dark hints of espionage. They had to be dark, you know, because they are based entirely on conjecture. Personally I find the whole theory of espionage dubious, indeed I don’t believe in it for a moment. But I used it as bait.”

“Does anyone believe in it!”

“My deceased aunt’s nephew, Douglas Grace, urges it passionately. He wanted to come and meet you in order to press his case, but I thought I’d get in first. After all it was I who wrote to you and not Douglas.”

The road they had taken was rough, little more than a pair of wheel tracks separated by a tussocky ridge. It ran up to the foot-hills of the eastern mountains and skirted them. Far to the west now, midway across the plateau, Alleyn could still see the service car, a clouded point of movement driving south.

“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 M.P.) 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 six 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 wouldn’t 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.”