by Ngaio Marsh
“Your work. Yes, I was coming to that.”
“I suppose the police told you.”
“I’d heard already at Army Headquarters. It overlaps my job out here.”
“I suppose so,” said Fabian. “Yes, of course.”
“You realize, don’t you, that I’m out here on a specific job? I’m here to investigate the possible leakage of information to the enemy. My peace-time job as a C.I.D. man has nothing to do with my present employment. But for the suggestion that Mrs. Rubrick’s death may have some connection with our particular problem I should not have come. It’s with the knowledge and at the invitation of my colleagues that I’m here.”
“I got a rise with my bait then,” said Fabian. “What did you think of my brain child?”
‘They showed me the blueprints. Beyond me, of course. I’m not a gunner. But I could at least appreciate its importance and also the extreme necessity of keeping your work secret. It is from that point of view, I believe, that the suggestion of espionage has cropped up?”
“Yes. To my mind it’s an absurd suggestion. We work in a room that is locked when we’re not in it and the papers and gear — any of them that matter — are always shut up in a safe.”
“We?”
“Douglas Grace has worked with me. He’s done the practical stuff. My side is purely theoretical. I was at Home when war broke out and took an inglorious part in the now mercifully forgotten Norwegian campaign. I picked up rheumatic fever but, with an extraordinarily bad sense of timing, got back into active service just in time to get a crack on the head at Dunkirk.” Fabian paused for a moment as if he had been about to say something further but now changed his mind. “Ah well,” he said, “there it was. Later on still when I was supposed to be fairly fit they put me into a special show in England. That’s when I got the germ of the idea. I cracked up again rather thoroughly and they kicked me out for good. While I was still too groggy to defend myself, Flossie, who was Home on a visit, bore down upon me and conceived the idea of bringing her poor English nephew-in-law back with her to recuperate in this country. She said she was used to looking after invalids, meaning poor old Arthur’s endocarditis. I started messing about with my notion soon after I got here.”
“And her own nephew? Captain Grace?”
“He was actually taking an engineering course at Heidelberg in 1939 but he left on the advice of some of his German friends and returned to England. May I take this opportunity of assuring you that Douglas is not in the pay of Hitler or any of his myrmidons, a belief ardently nursed, I feel sure, by Sub-Inspector Jackson. He enlisted when he got to England, was transferred to a New Zealand unit, and was subsequently pinked in the bottom by the Luftwaffe in Greece. Flossie hauled him in as soon as he was demobilized. He used to work here as a cadet in his school holidays. He’s always been good with his hands. He’d got a small precision lathe and some useful instruments. I pulled him in. It’s Douglas who’s got this bee in his bonnet. He will insist that in some fantastic way his Auntie Flossie’s death is mixed up with our eggbeater, which is what we ambiguously call our magnetic fuse.”
“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.
At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly lit wood in the open fire-places.
He considered once again the inmates of the home.
Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent, neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of land girl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousy.
Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs. Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.
“I am a New Zealander,” said Miss Harme, “but all my relations — I haven’t any close relations except my uncle— live in England. Aunt Flossie — she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that — was better than any real relation could have been.”
She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that, though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked, her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.
The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse — his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair — was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean, but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn “sir” each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.
Mrs. Aceworthy, Arthur Rubrick’s elderly cousin who had come to Mount Moon on the death of his wife, was a large sandy woman with an air of uncertain authority and a tendency to bridle. Her manner towards Alleyn was cautious. He thought that she disapproved of his visit and he wondered how much Fabian Losse had told her. She spoke playfully and in quotation marks of “my family” and seemed to show a preference for the two New Zealanders, Douglas Grace and Ursula Harme.
The vast landscape outside darkened and the candles on the dining-room table showed ghostly in the uncurtained window-panes. When dinner was over they all moved into a comfortable, conglomerate sort of room hung with faded photographs of past cadets and lit cosily by a kerosene lamp. Mrs. Aceworthy, with a vague murmur about “having to see to things,” left them with their coffee.
Above the fire-place hung the full-dress portrait of a woman.
It was a formal painting. The bare arms, executed with machine-like precision, flowed wirily from shoulders to clasped hands. The dress was of mustard-coloured satin, very décolleté, and this line was repeated in the brassy high lights of Mrs. Rubrick’s incredibly golden coiffure. The painter had dealt remorselessly with a formidable display of jewelry. It was an Academy portrait by an experienced painter, but his habit of flattery had met its Waterloo in Florence Rubrick’s face. No trick of understatement could soften that large mouth, closed with difficulty over protuberant teeth, or modify the acquisitive glare of the pale goiterous eyes which evidently had been fixed on the artist’s and therefore appeared, as laymen will say, to “follow one about the room.” Upon each of the five persons seated in Arthur Rubrick’s study did his wife Florence seem to fix her arrogant and merciless stare.
There was no other picture in the room. Alleyn looked round for a photograph of Arthur Rubrick but could find none that seemed likely.
The flow of talk, which had run continuously if not quite easily throughout dinner, was now checked. The pauses grew longer and their interruptions more forced. Fabian Losse began to stare expectantly at Alleyn. Douglas Grace sang discordantly under his breath. The two girls fidgeted, caught each other’s eyes and looked away again.
Alleyn, sitting
in shadow a little removed from the fireside group, said: “That’s a portrait of Mrs. Rubrick, isn’t it?”
It was as if he had gathered up the reins of a team of nervously expectant horses. He saw by their startled glances at the portrait that custom had made it invisible to them, a mere piece of furniture of which, for all its ghastly associations, they were normally unaware. They stared at it now rather stupidly, gaping a little.
Fabian said: “Yes. It was painted ten years ago. I don’t need to tell you it’s by a determined Academician. Rather a pity, really. John would have made something terrific out of Flossie. Or, better still, Agatha Troy.”
Alleyn, who was married to Agatha Troy, said: “I only saw Mrs. Rubrick for a few minutes. Is it a good likeness?”
Fabian and Ursula Harme said: “No.” Douglas Grace and Terence Lynne said: “Yes.”
“Hullo!” said Alleyn. “A divergence of opinion?”
“It doesn’t give you any idea of how tiny she was,” said Douglas Grace, “but I’d call it a speaking likeness.”
“Oh, it’s a conscientious map of her face,” said Fabian.
“It’s a caricature,” cried Ursula Harme. Her eyes were fixed indignantly on the portrait.
“I should have called it an unblushing understatement,” said Fabian. He was standing before the fire, his hands on the mantelpiece. Ursula Harme turned to look at him, knitting her brows. Alleyn heard her sigh as if Fabian had wakened some old controversy between them.
“And there’s no vitality in it, Fabian,” she said anxiously. “You must admit that. I mean she was a much more splendid person than that. So marvellously alive.” She caught her breath at the unhappy phrase. “She made you feel like that about her,” she added. “The portrait gives you nothing of it.”
“I don’t pretend to know anything about painting,” said Douglas Grace, “but I do know what I like.”
“Would you believe it?” Fabian murmured under his breath. He said aloud: “Is it so great a merit, Ursy, to be marvellously alive? I find unbounded vitality very unnerving.”