Ngaio Marsh - Died in the Wool

“When you hear me,” he breathed, and a tiny voice replied, “O.K.”

He slipped off his too tight jacket and moving sideways glided across the shed and along the wall, until his back was against the port-holes. He peered across the shearing board towards the pens, now faintly lit by reflected light from the visitor’s torch. A curious sound came from them, a mixture of rattle and scuffle.

Alleyn drew his breath. He was about to discover whether the post-mortem on Florence Rubrick’s character, the deductions he had drawn from it, and the light it had seemed to cast on her associates, were true or false. The case had closed in upon a point of light still hidden from him. He felt an extraordinary reluctance to take the final step. For a moment time stood still. “Get it over,” he thought, and lightly crossed the shearing board. He rested his hand on the partition and switched on his torch.

It shone full in the eyes of Douglas Grace.

Part of a letter from Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to Detective-Inspector Fox.

… You asked for the works, Br’er Fox, and you’ll get them. I enclose a copy of my report but it may amuse you to have the pointers as I saw them. All right. First pointer. The leakage of information through the Portuguese journalist.

Not being a believer in fairies or in stories of access to sealed rooms you’ll have decided that Fabian Losse, Douglas Grace and, possibly, Florence Rubrick, were the only persons who had a hope of extracting blueprints and handing them on. Remembering they were copies, not originals, you’ll see that Florence Rubrick is ruled out. She hadn’t the ability to make copies or the apparatus to photograph originals.

So our enemy agent, murderer or not, looked like Douglas Grace or Fabian Losse. Both had free access to the stuff and means of passing it on. My job was to find the agent. As a working proposition I supposed he was also the murderer. If, then, the murderer was the agent and the two likeliest bets for the agent were Losse and Grace, which of them shaped up best as the murderer? Grace. Grace put the coat with the diamond clips over Mrs. Rubrick’s shoulders and leant over her chair on the tennis lawn. Grace, therefore, could most easily remove one of the clips. It was obvious that the thing would have been found if it had lain glittering on bare earth under a scraggy zinnia. I tried it and it showed up like a lighthouse.

Grace egged on his aunt to organize a search-party and take herself off to the wool-shed. I wondered if he’d pinched the clip in order to bring about this situation and dropped it among the zinnias for Arthur Rubrick to find when Grace himself had finished the job in the wool-shed. If so, he was a quick thinker and a bold customer altogether. He’d hatched the whole project between the time Mrs. Rubrick said she was going to the wool-shed and the moment when she actually left.

Grace had gone up to the house during the search and had answered the telephone and fetched two torches. This would give him a chance to bolt out by the dining-room windows and up the track to the wool-shed. On his return he could hang out the placard on Mrs. Rubrick’s bedroom door. This placard is important. You’ll have noticed that he was the only member of the party who had the opportunity to do this.

You’ll notice, too, that the disposal of the body must, unless our expert was Markins, Albert Black, or the quite impossible Mrs. Duck, have been interrupted by a period not shorter than the interval between the end of the search and the going to bed of the household and the cottage; and not longer than that between the assault and the onset of rigor mortis . Now, the abominable Black gouged out the candle stump which had been pressed down, almost certainly by the murderer, and chucked it into the pens. If he was guilty he would hardly have volunterred this information.

But suppose Grace was our man?

The pressing out of the light suggests a hurried movement. The men returning from the dance came quietly up the hill until they reached the shed, when they broke into a violent altercation. If you want to put out a candle quietly and quickly you don’t blow, you press. When I told these people I wanted to yank up the slatted floor, Grace hid behind his paper and said he’d give orders to the men to do the job and that he himself would help. I’d have prevented this, of course, but the offer was suggestive. All right.

You remember the presser told me that the floor round the press was smudged. With what? Florence Rubrick, poor thing, had lost no blood. Grace and Losse wore tennis shoes. If you tramp about on a glassy surface on rubber soles it gets smudged.

The bale hooks were hidden on a very high beam. It was just within my reach and certainly not within the reach of any suspect but Grace. There’s no easily movable object, in the shed, by which a shorter person could have gained access to this hiding place, but Douglas was as tall as I.

Next, Br’er Fox, we come to the wool that was found in number-two bin next morning. It hadn’t been there overnight. It was tangled and bitty and not in the least like the neatly rolled fleece in the sorter’s rack. But it was in the correct bin. Had it been put there by someone who knew about wool sorting? Fabian Losse, Douglas Grace or possibly Arthur Rubrick? It was, of course, the wool that the body had replaced. A piece of it dropped from the murderer when, late that night, he returned to Florence Rubrick’s room to hide away her suitcase. The notice was already on the door and remember, only Grace could have put it there.

Next, there was his character. There was his legend. He was accepted by the two girls on Fabian’s estimate. Fabian thought him an amiable goat with a knack for mechanics.

But Grace was no fool. He’d got a resourceful and a bold mind. He was determined and inventive. Look at his handling of poor old Markins. Without a doubt he guessed that Markins was watching him and, with a flourish, struck first. You’ve got to admire his cheek. Of course it was Grace himself who was abroad on the night when Markins heard something in the passage. Again, he coolly nipped in the complaint to his aunt that Markins was up to no good and she ought to get rid of him. But he reckoned without his Flossie. Flossie didn’t behave according to pattern. The woman who emerged from our post-mortem was nothing if not shrewd. Even Terence Lynne, whose opinion, poor girl, was distorted by jealousy, admitted her astuteness. I fancy Mrs. Rubrick was brisk enough to have her doubts about Douglas Grace. His popularity waned after their quarrel over Markins and again, since they were bound to tell me of this, Grace got in first with his version. It is in his underestimation of Florence Rubrick that we see, for the first time, that brittle, cast-iron habit of thinking that his earlier German training probably bred in him. He was one of the clutch of young foreign Herrenvolk , small, thank God, but infernal, who did their worst to raise Cain when they returned, bloated with fascism, to their own countries.

At this point, Br’er Fox, you’ll raise your eyebrows and begin to look puffy. You will say that so far I’ve presented a very scrubby case against this young man. I agree. If he had come to trial we’d have been on tenterhooks, but as you have seen by the report, Grace did not come to trial.

It was with the object of forcing an exposure that I lay for him. I let him know that I proposed to hunt for the candle which Albert Black threw into the pens. This evidently shook Master Douglas. We’ve found the candle and it has got his prints, but of course they wouldn’t have been conclusive evidence. However, he’d probably decided I was a nuisance on general grounds, and that my liquidation would be to the greater glory of the Fatherland.