by Ngaio Marsh
It was strange, Alleyn thought, that Terence Lynne, who from the beginning had resented the discussion and all that it implied, should suddenly yield, as the others had yielded, to this intolerable urge for self-revelation. As she developed her story, speaking steadily and with a kind of ruthlessness, he regretted more and more that he could form no clear picture in his mind of Florence Rubrick’s husband — of how he looked, of how wide a physical disparity there had been between Arthur Rubrick and this girl who must have been twenty years his junior.
Terence had been five years in New Zealand. Equipped with a knowledge of shorthand and typing and six letters of recommendation, including one from the High Commissioner in London to Flossie herself, she had sought her fortune in the Antipodes. Flossie immediately engaged her, and she settled down to life at Mount Moon interspersed with frequent visits to Flossie’s pied-à-terre near Parliament Buildings in Wellington. She must, Alleyn thought, have been lonely in her quiet, contained way; separated by half the world from her own country, her lot fallen among strangers. Fabian and Ursula, he supposed, had already formed an alliance in the ship, Douglas Grace had not yet returned from the Middle East, and she had obviously felt little respect or liking for her employer. Yes, she must have been lonely. And then Flossie began to send her on errands to her husband. “Those statistics on revaluation, Miss Lynne, I want something I can quote. Something comparative. You might just go over the notes with my husband. Nothing elaborate, tell him. Something that will score a point.” And Arthur Rubrick and Terence Lynne would work together in the study. She found she could lighten his task by fetching books from the shelves and by taking notes at his dictation. Alleyn formed a picture of this exquisitely neat girl moving quietly about the room or sitting at the desk while the figure in the armchair dictated, a little breathlessly, the verbal bullets that Flossie was to fire at her political opponents. As they grew to know each other well, she found that, with a pointer or two from Arthur Rubrick, she was able to build up most of the statistical ammunition required by her employer. She had a respect for the right phrase and for the just fall of good words, each in its true place, and so, she found, had he. They had a little sober fun together, concocting paragraphs for Flossie, but they never heard themselves quoted. “She used to peck over the notes like a magpie,” Terence said, “and then rehash them with lots of repetition so that she would be provided with opportunities to thump with her right fist on the palm of her left hand. ‘In 1938,’ she would shout, beating time with her fist, ‘in 1938, mark you, in 1938 the revenue from such properties amounted to three and a quarter million. To three and a quarter million. Three and a quarter million pounds, Mr. Speaker, was the sum realized…’ And she was quite right. It went down much better than our austerely balanced phrases would have done if ever she’d been fool enough to use them. They only appeared when she handed in notes of her speeches for publication. She kept them specially for that purpose. They looked well in print.” It had been through this turning of phrases that Flossie’s husband and her secretary came to understand each other more thoroughly. Flossie was asked by a weekly journal to contribute an article on the theme of women workers in the back-country. She was flattered, said Terence, but a bit uneasy. She came into the study and talked a good deal about the beauty of women’s work in the home. She said she thought the cocky-farmer’s wife led a supremely beautiful existence because it was devoted to the basic fundamentals (she occasionally coined such phrases) of life. “A noble life,” Flossie said, ringing for Markins, “they also serve—” But the quotation faltered before the picture of any cocky-farmer’s wife whose working-day is fourteen hours long and comparable only to that of a man under a sentence of hard labour. “Look up something appropriate, Miss Lynne. Arthur darling, you’ll help her. I want to stress the sanctity of women’s work in the high country. Unaided, alone. You might say matriarchal,” she threw at them as Markins came in with the cup of patent food she took at eleven o’clock. Flossie sipped it and walked up and down the room throwing out unrelated words: “True sphere… splendour… heritage… fitting mate.” She was called to the telephone but found time to pause in the door and say: “Away you go, both of you. Quotations, remember, but not too highbrow, Arthur darling. Something sweet and natural and telling.” She waved her hand and was gone.
The article they wrote was frankly heretical. They had stood side by side in the window and looked over the plateau to the ranges, now a clean thin blue in the mid-morning sunshine.
“When I look out there,” Arthur Rubrick had said, “it always strikes me as being faintly comic that we should talk of ‘settling’ on the plateau and of ‘bringing in new country.’ All we do is to move over the surface of a few hills. There is nothing new about them. Primal, yes, and almost unblotted by such new things as men and sheep. Essentially back among the earlier un-human ages.” He had added that perhaps this was the reason why no one had been able to write very well about this country. It had been possible, he said, to write of the human beings moving about parasitically over the skin of the country, but the edge of modern idiom was turned when it was tried against the implacable surface of the plateau. He said that some older and therefore fresher idiom was needed, “something that has the hard edge of a spring wind in it, something comparable to the Elizabethan mode.” From this conversation was born his idea of writing about the plateau in a prose that smacked of Hakluyt’s Voyages. “It sounds affected,” said Terence, “but he only did it as a kind of game. I thought it really did give one the sensation of this country. But it was only a game.”
“A fascinating game,” said Alleyn. “What else did he write?”
Five more essays, she said, that were redrafted many times and never really completed. Very often he wasn’t up to working on them, and Flossie’s odd jobs absorbed his energy when he was well. There were many occasions when he fagged over her speeches and reports, or dragged himself to meetings and parties when he should have been resting. He had a morbid dread of admitting to his wife that he was unwell. “It’s so tiresome for her,” he used to say. “She’s too good about it, too kind.”
“And she was kind,” Ursula declared. “She took endless trouble.”
“It was the wrong kind of trouble,” Fabian said. “She oozed long-suffering patronage.”
“I didn’t think so. Nor did he.”
“Did he, Terry?” asked Fabian.
“He was extraordinarily loyal. That’s all he ever said: ‘It’s too good of her, too kind.’ But, of course it wasn’t much fun being the object of that sort of compassion. And then—” Terence paused.
“Then what, Terry?” said Fabian.
“Nothing. That’s all.”
“But it isn’t quite all, is it? Something happened, didn’t it? There was some crisis, wasn’t there? What was he worrying about that last fortnight before she died? He was worried, you know. What was it?”
“He was feeling ill. He had an idea things were going wrong in the background. Mrs. Rubrick obviously was upset. I see now that it was the trouble with Cliff Johns and Markins that had put her in a difficult mood. She didn’t tell him about Cliff and Markins, I’m sure, but she dropped dark hints about ingratitude and disappointment. She was always doing it. She kept saying that she stood alone, that other women in her position had somebody to whom they could turn and that she had nobody. He sat over there in the window, listening, with his hand shading his eyes, just taking it. I could have murdered her.”
This statement was met by a scandalized hush.
“A commonplace exaggeration,” said Fabian at last. “I’ve used it repeatedly myself in speaking of Flossie. ‘I could have murdered her.’ I suppose she got home with her cracks at Uncle Arthur, didn’t she? Every time a coconut?”
“Yes,” said Terence. “She got home.”
A longer silence followed. Alleyn felt certain that Terence had reached a point in her story where something was to be withheld from her listeners. The suggestion of antagonism, never lo
ng absent from her manner, now deepened. She set her lips and, after a quick look into the shadow where he sat, took up her work again with an air of finality.
“Funny,” said Fabian suddenly. “I thought she seemed to be rather come-hither-ish with Uncle Arthur during that last week. There was a hint of skittishness which I found extremely awe-inspring. And, I may say, extremely unusual. You must have noticed it, all of you. What was she up to?”
“Honestly, Fabian darling,” said Ursula, “you are too difficult. At one moment you find fault with Aunt Floss for neglecting Uncle Arthur and at the next you complain because she was nice to him. What should she have done, poor darling, to please you and Terry?”
“How old was she?” Douglas blurted out. “Forty-seven, wasn’t it? Well, I mean to say she was jolly spry for her age, wasn’t she? I mean to say… well, I mean, there it was… I suppose…”
“Let it pass, Douglas,” Fabian said kindly. “We know what you mean. But I can’t think that Florence’s sudden access of playfulness was entirely due to natural or even pathological causes. There seemed to me to be a distinct suggestion of proprietary rights. What I have I hold. The bitch, if you will excuse the usage, Douglas, in the marital manger.”
“It’s entirely inexcusable,” said Ursula, “and so are you, Fab.”
“I don’t mean to show off and be tiresome, darling, I promise you I don’t. You can’t deny that she was different during that last week. As sour as a lemon with all of us and suddenly so, so keen on Uncle Arthur. She watched him too. Indeed she looked at him as if he was some objet d’art that she’d forgotten she possessed until someone else came along and saw that it was — well, rare, and in its way rather beautiful. Wasn’t it like that, Terry?”
“I don’t know. I thought she was horrible, baiting him about his illness. That’s what it amounted to and that’s what I saw.”
“But don’t you agree,” Fabian persisted, “that along with that there was a definite — what shall I call it? — why damn it, she made advances. She was kittenish. She shook her curls and did the little-devil number. Didn’t she, now?”
“I didn’t watch her antics,” said Terence coldly.
“But you did, Terry. You watched. Listen to me, Terry,” said Fabian very earnestly, “don’t get it into your head that I’m an enemy. I’m not. I’m sorry for you and I realize now that I’ve misjudged you. You see I thought you were merely doing your line of oomph with Uncle Arthur out of boredom. I thought you just sat round being a cryptic woman at him to keep your hand in. I know this sounds insufferable but he was so very much older and, well, as I thought, so definitely not your cup of tea. It was perfectly obvious that he was losing his heart to you and I resented what I imagined was merely a bit of practice technique on your part. I don’t suppose you give two tuppenny damns for what I thought, Terry, but I am sorry. All right. Now, when I suggested that we should ask Mr. Alleyn to come, we all agreed that rather than carry on as we were, with this unspeakable business festering in our minds, we would, each of us, risk becoming an object of suspicion. We agreed that none of us suspected any of the other three and, even with the terrifying example of the local detective force to daunt us, we said we didn’t believe that the truth, the whole truth, although it might be unpalatable, could do us any harm. Were we right in that, Mr. Alleyn?”
Alleyn stirred a little in his armchair and joined his long fingers. “It’s a truism to say that if the whole facts of a case are known there can be no miscarriage of justice. It’s very seldom indeed, in homicide investigations, that the police arrive at the whole truth. Sometimes they get enough of the truth to enable them to build up a case and make an arrest. Most often they get a smattering of essential facts, a plethora of inessential facts and a maddening accumulation of lies. If you really do stick to your original plan of thrashing out the whole story here to-night, in this room, you will, I think, bring off a remarkable, indeed a unique performance.”
He saw that they were young enough to be flattered and stimulated by this assurance. “There, now!” said Fabian triumphantly.
“But,” said Alleyn, “I don’t believe for a moment that you will succeed. How long does it take a psychoanalyst to complete his terrifying course of treatment? Months, isn’t it? His aim, as I understand it, is to get to the bottom, to spring-clean completely, to arrive, in fact, at the clinical truths. Aren’t you, Losse, attempting something of that sort? If so, I’m sure you cannot succeed, nor, as a policeman, would I want you to do so. As a policeman, I am not concerned with the whole clinical truth. Faced with it, I should probably find myself unable to make any arrest, ever. I am required only to produce facts. If your discussion of Mrs. Rubrick’s character and that of her husband can throw the smallest ray of light along the path that leads to an unknown murderer who struck her from behind, suffocated her, bound up her body, and concealed it in a wool press, then from the official point of view it will have been valuable. If, at the same time, somewhere along that path there is the trace of an enemy agent, then again from my point of view, as an investigator of espionage in this country, it will have been valuable. If, finally, it relieves the burden of secrecy under which you have all suffered, you, also, may profit by it, though, as you have already seen, the process is painful and may be dangerous.”
“We realize that,” Fabian said.
“Do you fully realize it? You told me at first that there was a complete absence of motive among you. Would you still say so? Look what has come out. Captain Grace was Mrs. Rubrick’s heir. That circumstance, which suggests the most common of all motives, has of course always been recognized by the police and must have occurred to all of you. You, Losse, advanced a theory that you yourself in a condition of amnesia attacked Mrs. Rubrick and killed her. What’s more, as you developed this theme you also revealed a motive, Mrs. Rubrick’s opposition to your engagement to Miss Harme. Now, under this same process of self-revelation, Miss Lynne must also be said to have a motive. Most courageously she has told us that she had formed a deep attachment for the murdered woman’s husband and you, Losse, say that this attachment obviously was returned. The second most common motive appears in both your case and hers. You have said, bravely, that none of you has anything to fear from this discussion. Are you sure you have the right to make this statement? You are using this room as a sort of confessional but I am bound by no priestly rule. What you tell me I shall consider from the practical point of view and may afterwards use in the report I send to your police. I should neglect my duty if, before she goes any further, I didn’t remind Miss Lynne of all the circumstances.” Alleyn paused and rubbed his nose. “That all sounds pompous,” he said. “But there it is. The whole thing’s a departure from the usual procedure. I doubt if any collection of possible suspects had ever before decided to have what Miss Harme has aptly described as a verbal strip-tease, before an investigating officer.” He looked at Terence. “Well, now, Miss Lynne,” he said, “if you don’t want to go on—”
“It’s not because I’m afraid,” she said. “I didn’t do it and any attempt to prove I did would fail. I suppose I ought to be afraid but I’m not. I don’t feel in the least anxious for myself.”
“Very well. Losse has suggested that there is some significance in the change, during the last week of Mrs. Rubrick’s life, in her manner towards her husband. He has suggested that you can explain this change. Is he right?”
She did not answer. Slowly and, as it seemed, reluctantly, she raised her eyes and looked at the portrait of Florence Rubrick.
“Terry!” said Ursula suddenly. “Did she know? Did she find out?”
Fabian gave a sharp ejaculation and Terence turned, not upon Ursula but upon him.
“You idiot, Fabian,” she said. “You unutterable fool.”
The fire had burnt low, and the room was colder and stale with tobacco smoke.
“I give it up,” said Douglas loudly. “I never was any good at riddles and I’m damned if I know half the time what you’re all get
ting at. For God’s sake let’s have some air in this room.”
He went to the far end of the study, jerked back the curtains, and pushed open a French window. The night air came in, not as a wind, but stilly, with a tang of extreme cleanliness. The moon was up and, across the plateau, fifty miles away, it shone on the Cloud Piercer and his attendant peaks. Alleyn joined Douglas at the window. “If I spoke,” he thought, “my voice would go out towards those mountains and between my moving lips and that distant snow there would be only clear darkness.” He had noticed, on the drive up to Mount Moon, that the flats in front of the homestead were swampy and studded with a few desultory willows. Now, in the moonlight, he caught a glint of water and he heard the cry of wild duck and the beat of wings. Behind him in the room, someone threw wood upon the fire and Alleyn’s shadow flickered across the terrace.
“Need we freeze?” Ursula asked fretfully. Douglas reached out his hand to the French window but before he shut it or drew the curtain a footfall sounded briskly and a man walked along the terrace towards the north side of the house. As he reached the part of the terrace that was lit from the room he was seen to be wearing a neat black suit and a felt hat. It was Markins, returning from his visit to the manager’s cottage. Douglas slammed the French window and pulled the curtain across it.
“And there goes the expert,” he said, “who runs about the place, scot-free, while we sit yammering a lot of highfalutin bilge about the character of the woman he may have killed. I’m going to bed.”