Died in the Wool (35 page)

‘January 13th: I cannot yet believe in my good fortune. My emotion is rather one of humility and wonder than of exaltation. I cannot but think I have made too much of her singular kindness, yet when I recollect, as I do continually, her sweetness and her agitation, I must believe she loves me. It is very strange, for what a poor thing I am, creeping about with my heart my enemy: her equal in nothing but my devotion, and even in that confused and uncertain. I mistrust Florence. She interpreted very shrewdly the scene she interrupted, and I fear she may conclude it to be the latest of many; she cannot believe it to be, as in fact it is, the first of its kind…Her strange and most unwelcome attentiveness, the watch she keeps upon me, her removal of Terence; these are signs that cannot be misread.'

Alleyn read on quickly, reaching the sentence he had lighted upon when he first opened the book. Behind the formal phrases he saw Arthur Rubrick, confused and desperately ill, moved and agitated by the discovery of Terence Lynne's attachment to him, irked and repelled by his wife's determined attentions. Less stylized phrases began to appear at the end of the day's record. ‘A bad night.' ‘Two bad turns today.' A few days before his wife was killed, he had written: ‘I have been reading a book called “Famous Trials”. I used to think such creatures as Crippen must be monsters, unbalanced and quite without the habit of endurance by which custom inoculates the normal man against intolerance, but am now of a different opinion. I sometimes think that if I could be alone with her and at peace I might recover my health…' On the night of Florence's death, he had written: ‘It cannot go on like this. I must not see her alone. Tonight, when we met by chance, I was unable to obey the rule I had set myself. It is too much for me.'

There were no other entries.

Alleyn closed the book, shifted his position a little and switched off his torch. Cautiously he adjusted the covering over his head to leave a peephole for his right eye and, like a trained actor, dismissed all senses but one from his mind. He listened. Markins, a few inches away, whispered, ‘Now then, sir.'

The person who moved across the frozen ground towards the wool-shed did so very slowly. Alleyn was aware, not so much of footsteps as of interruptions in the silence, interruptions that might have been mistaken for some faint disturbance of his own eardrums. They grew more definite and were presently accompanied by a crisp undertone when occasionally the advancing feet brushed against stivered grass. Alleyn directed his gaze through his peephole towards that part of the darkness where the sacking should be.

The steps halted and were followed, after a pause, by a brushing sound. A patch of luminous blue appeared and widened until a star burned in it. It opened still wider and there hung a patch of glittering night sky and the shape of a hill. Into this, sidelong, edged a human form, a dark silhouette that bent forward, seeming to listen. The visitor's feet were still on the ground below, but, after perhaps a minute, the form rose quickly, mounting the high step, and showed complete for a moment before the sacking door fell back and blotted out the picture. Now there were three inhabitants of the wool-shed.

How still and how patient was this visitor to wait so long! No movement, no sound but quiet breathing. Alleyn became aware of muscles in his own body that asked for release, of a loose thread in the packing that crept down and tickled his ear.

At last a movement. Something had been laid down on the floor. Then two soft thuds. A disc of light appeared, travelled to and fro across the shearing-board and halted. The reflection from its beam showed stockinged feet and the dim outline of a coat. The visitor squatted and the light fanned out as the torch was laid on the floor. A soft rhythmic noise began. Gloved hands moved in and out of the regions of light. The visitor was polishing the shearing-board.

It was thoroughly done, backwards and forwards with occasional shiftings of the torch, always in the direction of the press. There was a long pause. Torch light found and played steadily upon the heap of packs where Fabian had rested. It moved on.

It found a single empty pack that Alleyn had dropped over the branding iron. This was pulled aside by a gloved hand, the iron was lifted and a cloth was rubbed vigorously over the head and shaft. It was replaced and its covering restored. For a blinding second the light shone full in Alleyn's right eye. He wondered how quickly he could collect himself and dive. It moved on and the press hid it.

Holding his breath, Alleyn writhed forward an inch. He could make out the visitor's shape, motionless in the shadow beyond the press. The light now shone on a tin candlestick nailed to a joist, high up on the wall.

Alleyn had many times used the method of reconstruction, but this was the first time it had been staged for him by an actor who was unaware of an audience. The visitor reached up to the candle. The torch moved and for a brief space Alleyn saw a clear silhouette. Gloved fingers worked, a hand was drawn back. The figure moved over to the pens. Presently there was the sound of a sharp impact, a rattle and a soft plop. Then silence.

‘This is going to be our cue,' thought Alleyn.

The visitor had returned to the shearing-board. Suddenly and quite clearly a long thin object was revealed, lying near the doorway. It was taken up and Alleyn saw that it was a green branch. The visitor padded back to the sheep pens. The light jogged and wavered over the barrier and was finally directed inside. Alleyn began to slough his covering. Now he squatted on his heels with the press between himself and the light. Now he rose until he crouched behind it and could look with his left eye round the corner. The visitor fumbled and thumped softly. The light darted eccentrically about the walls and, for a brief flash, revealed its owner astride the barrier. A movement and the figure disappeared. Alleyn looked over the edge of the press into blackness. He could hear Markins breathing. He reached down and his fingers touched short coarse hair.

‘When you hear me,' he breathed, and a tiny voice replied, ‘OK.'

He slipped off his too tight jacket and moving sideways glided across the shed and along the wall, until his back was against the portholes. 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 in his breath. He was about to discover whether the post-mortem on Florence Rubrick's character, the deduction 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.

P
ART 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 the 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, 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 were guilty he would hardly have volunteered 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 postmortem 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 under-estimation 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.