Ngaio Marsh: Died in the Wool

“Why does he think so?”

Fabian did not answer.

“Has he any data—” Alleyn began.

“Look here, sir,” said Fabian abruptly. “I’ve got a notion for your visit. It may not appeal to you. In fact you may dismiss it as the purest tripe, but here it is. You’re full of official information about the whole miserable show, aren’t you? All those files! You know, for example, that any one of us could have left the garden and gone to the shearing shed. You may even have gathered that apart from protracted irritation, which God knows may be sufficient motive, none of us had any reason for killing Flossie. We were a tolerably happy collection of people. Flossie bossed us about but more or less we went our own way.” He paused and added unexpectedly: “Most of us. Very well. It seems to me that, as Flossie was murdered, there was something about Flossie that only one of us knew. Something monstrous. I mean something monstrously out of the character that I, for one, have conceived of as being ‘Flossie Rubrick’ —something murder-worthy. Now that something may not appear in any one of the Flossies that each of us has formed for his or her self, but to a newcomer, an expert, might it not appear in the collective Flossie that emerges from all these units put together? Or am I talking unadulterated bilge?”

Alleyn said carefully: “Women have been murdered for some chance intrusion upon other people’s affairs, some idiotic blunder that has nothing to do with character.”

“Yes. But in the mind of the murderer of such a victim she is forever The Intruder. If he could be persuaded to talk of his victim, don’t you feel that something of that aspect of her character in his mind would come out? To a sensitive observer?”

“I’m a policeman in a strange country,” said Alleyn. “You mustn’t try me too high.”

“At any rate,” said Fabian with an air of relief that was unexpectedly naïve, “you’re not laughing at me.”

“Of course not, but I don’t fully understand you.”

“The official stuff has been useless. It’s a year old. It’s just a string of uncorrelated details. For what it’s worth you’ve got it in these precious files. It doesn’t give you a picture of a Flossie Rubrick who was murder-worthy.”

“You know,” said Alleyn cheerfully, “that’s only another way of saying there was no apparent motive.”

“All right. I’m being too elaborate. Put it this way. If factual evidence doesn’t produce a motive, isn’t it at least possible that something might come out of our collective idea of Flossie?”

“If it could be discovered.”

“Well, but couldn’t it?” Fabian was now earnest and persuasive. Alleyn began to wonder if he had been very profoundly disturbed by his experience and was indeed a little unhinged. “If we could get them all together and start them talking, couldn’t you, an expert, coming fresh to the situation, get something? By the colour of our voices, by our very evasions? Aren’t those signs that a man with your training would be able to read? Aren’t they?”

“They are signs,” Alleyn replied, trying not to sound too patient, “that a man with my training learns to treat with extreme reserve. They are not evidence.”

“No, but taken in conjunction with the evidence, such as it is?”

“They can’t be disregarded, certainly.”

Fabian said fretfully: “But I want you to get a picture of Flossie in the round. I don’t want you to have only my idea of her, which, truth to tell, is of a maddeningly arrogant piece of efficiency, but Ursula’s idea of a wonder-woman, Douglas’ idea of a manageable and not unprofitable aunt, Terence’s idea of an exacting employer — all these. But I didn’t mean to give you an inkling. I wanted you to hear for yourself, to start cold.”

“You say you haven’t spoken of her for six months. How am I to break the spell?”

“Isn’t it part of your job,” Fabian asked impatiently, “to be a corkscrew?”

“Lord help us,” said Alleyn good-humouredly, “I suppose it is.”

“Well then!” cried Fabian triumphantly. “Here’s a fair field with me to back you up. And, you know, I don’t believe it’s going to be so difficult. I believe they must be in much the same case as I am. It took a Herculean effort to write that letter. If I could have grabbed it back, I would have done so. I can’t tell you how much I funked the idea of starting this conversation, but, you see, now I have started there’s no holding me.”

“Have you warned them about this visitation?”

“I talked grandly about ‘an expert from a special branch.’ I said you were a high-up who’d been lent to this country. They know your visit is official and that the police and hush-hush birds have a hand in it. Honestly, I don’t think that alarms them much. At first, I suppose, each of us was afraid — personally afraid, I mean, afraid that we should be suspected. But I don’t think we four ever suspected each other. In that one thing we are agreed. And, would you believe it, as the weeks went on and the police interrogation persisted, we got just plain bored. Bored to exhaustion. Bored to the last nerve. Then it stopped, and instead of Flossie’s death fading a bit, it grew into a bogey that none of us talked about. We could see each other thinking of it and a nightmarish sort of watching game set in. In a funny kind of way I think they were relieved when I told them what I’d done. They know of course that your visit has something to do with our X Adjustment.”

“So they also know about your X Adjustment?”

“Only very vaguely, except Douglas. Just that it’s rather special. That couldn’t be helped.”

Alleyn stared out at the clear and uncompromising landscape. “It’s a rum go,” he said, and after a moment: “Have you thought carefully about this? Do you realize you’re starting something you may want to stop and — not be able to stop?”

“I’ve thought about it ad nauseam .”

“I think I ought to warn you. I’m a bit of state machinery. Anyone can start me up but only the state can switch me off.”

“O.K.”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “you have been warned.”

“At least,” said Fabian, “I’ll give you a good dinner.”

“Then you’re my host?”

“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Arthur left Mount Moon to me and Flossie left her money to Douglas. You might say we were joint hosts,” said Fabian.

Mount Moon homestead was eighty years old and that is a great age for a house in the Antipodes. It had been built by Arthur Rubrick’s grandfather, from wood transported over the Pass in bullock wagons. It was originally a four-roomed cottage, but room after room had been added, at a rate about twice as slow as that achieved by the intrepid Mrs. Rubrick of those days in adding child after child to her husband’s quiver. The house bore a dim family resemblance to the Somersetshire seat which Arthur’s grandfather had thankfully relinquished to a less adventurous brother. Victorian gables and the inevitable conservatory, together with lesser family portraits and surplus pieces of furniture, traced unmistakably the family’s English origin. The garden had been laid out in a nostalgic mood, at considerable expense and with a bland disregard for the climate of the plateau. Of the trees old Rubrick had planted, only Lombardy poplars, Pinus insignis and a few natives had flourished. The tennis lawn, carved out of the tussocky hill-side, turned yellow and dusty during summer. The pleached walks of Somerset had been in part realized with hardy ramblers and, where these failed, with clipped fences of poplar. The dining-room windows looked down upon a queer transformation of what had been originally an essentially English conception of a well-planned garden. But beyond this unconvincing piece of pastiche — what uncompromising vastness! The plateau swam away into an illimitable haze of purple, its boundaries mingled with clouds. Above the cloud, suspended it seemed in a tincture of rose, floated the great mountains.