by Ngaio Marsh
“While you were still at school,” he said, “Mrs. Rubrick went to England, didn’t she?”
“Yes. That was when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
The story developed slowly. Before Florence Rubrick left for England she visited young Cliff at his school, bearing down on him, Alleyn thought, as, a few years earlier, she had borne down on Ursula Harme. With less success, however. She seemed in the extraordinarily critical eyes of a schoolboy to make every possible gaffe. She spoke too loudly. She tipped too lavishly and in the wrong direction. She asked to be introduced to Cliff’s seniors and talked about him, in front of his contemporaries, to his housemaster. Worst of all she insisted on an interview with his music teacher, a fastidious and austere man, at whom she talked dreadfully about playing with soul and the works of Mendelssohn. Cliff became morbidly sensitive about her patronage, and imagined that those boys in his house who came from the plateau laughed about them both behind his back. He had committed, he felt, the appalling crime of being different. He had a private interview with Flossie, who spoke in an embarrassing manner about his forthcoming confirmation and even, with a formidable use of botanical parallels, of his approaching adolescence. In the course of this interview she told him that her great sorrow was the tragedy of having been denied (she almost suggested it was by Arthur Rubrick) a son. She took his face between her sharp large hands and looked at it until it turned purple. She then reminded him of all that she had done for him; kindly, breezily, but unmistakably, and said she knew that he would repay her just as much as if he really were her own son. “We’re real pals, aren’t we?” she said. “Real chums. Cobbers.” His blood ran cold.
She wrote him long letters from England and brought him back a marvellous gramophone and a great many records. He was now fifteen. The unpleasant memory of their last meeting had been thrust away at the back of his mind. He had found his feet at school and worked hard at his music. At first his encounters with his patron after her return from England were happy enough. Alleyn gathered that he talked about himself and that Flossie listened.
In the last term of 1941 Cliff formed a friendship with an English boy who had been evacuated to New Zealand by his parents; evidently communistic intellectuals. Their son, delicate, vehement and sardonic, seemed to Cliff extraordinarily mature, a man among children. He devoured everything his friend had to say, became an enthusiastic Leftist, argued with his masters and thought himself, Alleyn suspected, a good deal more of a bombshell than they did. He and his friend gathered round them an ardently iconoclastic group all of whom decided to fight “without prejudice” against fascism, reserving the right to revolt when the war was over. The friend, it seemed, had always been of this mind “but,” said Cliff ingenuously, “of course it made a big difference when Russia came in. I suppose,” he added, “you are horrified.”
“Do you?” said Alleyn. “Then I mustn’t disappoint you. The thing is, was Mrs. Rubrick horrified?”
“I’ll say she was! That was when the awful row happened. It started first of all with us trying to enlist. This chap and I suddenly felt we couldn’t stick it just hanging on at school and — well, anyway, that’s what we did. We were turned down, of course. The episode was very sourly received by all hands. That was at the end of 1941. I came home for the Christmas holidays. By that time I realized pretty thoroughly how hopelessly wrong it was for me to play at being a little gentleman at her expense. I realized that if I couldn’t get as my right, equally with other chaps, the things she’d given me, then I shouldn’t take them at all. I was admitting the right of one class to patronize another. They were short of men all over the high-country and I felt that if I couldn’t get into the army I’d better work on the place.”
He paused, and with a very shamefaced air muttered: “I’m not trying to make out a flattering case for myself. It wasn’t as if I was army-minded. I loathed the prospect. Muddle, boredom, idiotic routine and then carnage. It was just — well, I did honestly feel I ought to.”
“Right,” said Alleyn. “I take the point.”
“She didn’t. She’d got it all taped out. I was to go Home to the Royal College of Music. At her expense. She was delighted when they said I’d never pass fit. When I tried to explain she treated me like a silly kid. Then, when I stuck to it, she accused me of ingratitude. She had no right,” said Cliff passionately. “Nobody has the right to take a kid of ten and teach him to accept everything without knowing what it means and then use that generosity as a weapon against him. She’d always talked about the right of artists to be free. Free! She’d got vested interests in me and she meant to use them. It was horrible.”
“What was the upshot of the discussion?”
Cliff had turned in his chair. His face was dark against the glare of the plateau and it was by the posture of his body and the tilt of his head that Alleyn first realized he was staring at the portrait of Florence Rubrick.
“She sat just like that,” he said. “Her hands were like that and her mouth — not quite shut. She hadn’t got much expression, ever, and you couldn’t believe, looking at her, that she could say the things she said. What everything had cost and how she’d thought I was fond of her. I couldn’t stand it. I walked out.”
“When was this?”
“The night I got home for the summer holidays. I didn’t see her again until — until—”
“We’re back at the broken bottle of whiskey, aren’t we?”
Cliff was silent.
“Come,” said Alleyn, “you’ve been very frank up to now. Why do you jib at this one point?”
Cliff shuffled his feet and began mumbling. “All very well, but how do I know… not a free agent… Gestapo methods… Taken down and used against you…”
“Nonsense,” said Alleyn. “I’ve taken nothing down and I’ve no witness. Don’t let’s go over all that again. If you won’t tell me what you were doing with the whisky, you won’t, but really you can’t blame Sub-Inspector Jackson for taking a gloomy view of your reticence. Let’s get back to the bare bones of fact. You were in the dairy-cum-cellar with the bottle in your hand. Markins looked through the window, you dropped the bottle, he haled you into the kitchen. Mrs. Duck fetched Mrs. Rubrick. There was a scene in the middle of which she dismissed Mrs. Duck and Markins. We have their several accounts of the scene up to the point when they left. I should now like to have yours of the whole affair.”
Cliff stared at the portrait. Alleyn saw him wet his lips and a moment later, give the uncanny little half yawn of nervous expectancy. Alleyn was familiar with this grimace. He had seen it made by prisoners awaiting sentence and by men under suspicion when the investigating officer carried the interrogration towards danger point.
“Will it help,” he said, “if I tell you this? Anything that is not relevant to my inquiry will not appear in any subsequent report. I can give you my word, if you’ll take it, that I’ll never repeat or use such statements if, in fact, they are irrelevant.” He waited for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “what about this scene with Mrs. Rubrick in the kitchen? Was it so very bad?”
“You’ve been told what they heard. The other two. It was bad enough then. Before they went. Almost as if she was glad to be able to go for me. It’s as real now as if it had happened last night. Only it’s a queer kind of reality. Like the memory of a nightmare.”
“Have you ever spoken to anybody about it?”
“Never.”
“Then bring the monster out into the light of day and let’s have a look at it.”
He saw that Cliff half welcomed, half resisted this insistence.
“After all,” Alleyn said, “was it so terrible?”
“Not terrible exactly,” Cliff said. “Disgusting.”
“Well?”
“I suppose I had a kind of respect for her. Partly bogus, I know that. An acceptance of the feudal idea. But partly genuine too. Partly based on the honest gratitude I’d have felt for her if she hadn’t demanded gra
titude. I don’t know. I only know it made me feel sick to see her lips shake and to hear her voice tremble. There was a master at school who used to get like that before he caned us. He got the sack. She seemed to be acting, too. Acting the lady of the house who controlled herself before the servants. It’d have been better if she’d yelled at me. When they’d gone, she did — once. When I said I wasn’t stealing it. Then she sort of took hold of herself and dropped back into a whisper. All the same, even then, in a way, I thought she was putting it on. Acting. Really it was almost as if she enjoyed herself. That was what was so particularly beastly.”
“I know,” said Alleyn.
“Do you? And her being old. That made it worse. I started by being furious because she wouldn’t believe me. Then I began to be sorry for her. Then I simply wanted to get away and get clean. She began to — to cry. She looked ghastly. I felt as if I could never bear to look at her again. She held out her hand and I couldn’t touch it. I was furious with her for making me feel so ashamed, and I turned round and cleared out of it. I suppose you know about the next part.”
“I know you spent the rest of that night, and a good bit of the next day, walking towards the Pass.”
“That’s right. It sounds silly. A hysterical kid, you’ll think. I couldn’t help it. I made a pretty good fool of myself. I was out of training and my feet gave out. I’d have gone on, though, if Dad hadn’t come after me.”
“You didn’t make a second attempt.”
Cliff shook his head.
“Why?”
“They got on to me at home. Mum got me to promise. There was a pretty ghastly scene when I got home.”
“And in the evening you worked it off with Bach on the annex piano? That’s how it was, isn’t it?” Alleyn insisted, but Cliff was monosyllabic again. “That’s right,” he mumbled, rubbing the arm of his chair. Alleyn tried to get him to talk about the music he played that night in the darkling room while Florence Rubrick and her household sat in deck-chairs on the lawn. All through their conversation it had persisted, and through the search for the brooch. Florence Rubrick must have heard it as she climbed up her improvised rostrum. Her murderer must have heard it when he struck her down and stuffed her mouth and nostrils with wool. “Murder to Music,” thought Alleyn, and saw the words splashed across a news bill. Was it because of these associations that Cliff would not speak of his music? Was it because this, theatrically enough, had been the last time he played? Or was it merely that he was reluctant to speak of music with a Philistine? Alleyn found himself satisfied with none of these theories.
“Losse,” he said, “tells me you played extremely well that night.”
“What’s he mean?”Cliff stopped dead, as if horrified at his own vehemence. “I’d worked at it,” he said indistinctly. “I told you.”
“It’s strange to me,” Alleyn said, “that you don’t go on with your music. I should have thought that not to go on would be intolerable.”
“Would you?” he muttered.
“Are you sure you are not a little bit proud of your abstinence?”
This seemed to astonish Cliff. “Proud!” he repeated. “If you only realized…” He got up. “If you’ve finished with me,” he said.
“Almost, yes. You never saw her again?”
Cliff seemed to take this question as a statement of fact. He moved towards the French window. “Is that right?” Alleyn said, and he nodded. “And you won’t tell me what you were doing with the whisky?”
“I can’t.”
“All right. I think I’ll just take a look at this annex. I can find my way. Thank you for being so nearly frank.”
Cliff blinked at him and went out.
The annex proved to be grander than its name suggested. Fabian had told Alleyn that it had been added to the bunk-house by Arthur Rubrick as a sort of common-room for the men. Florence, in a spurt of solicitude and public-spiritedness, had urged this upon her husband, and, on acquiring the Bechstein, had given the men her old piano and a radio set, and had turned the house out for odd pieces of furniture. “It was when she stood for Parliament,” Fabian explained acidly. “She had a photograph taken with the station hands sitting about in exquisitely self-conscious attitudes and sent it to the papers. You’ll find a framed enlargement above the mantelpiece.”
The room had an unkempt look. There was a bloom of dust on the table, the radio and the piano. A heap of old radio magazines had been stacked untidily in a corner of the room and yellowing newspapers lay about the floor. The top of the piano was piled with music; ballads, student song-books and dance tunes. Underneath these he found a number of classical works with Cliff’s name written across the top. Here at the bottom was Bach’s “Art of Fugue.”
Alleyn opened the piano and picked out a phase from Cliff’s music. Two of the notes jammed. Had the Bach been full of hiatuses, then, or had the piano deteriorated so much in fifteen months? Alleyn replaced the “Art of Fugue” under a pile of song sheets, brushed his hands together absently, closed the door and squatted down by the heap of radio magazines in the corner.
He waded back through sixty-five weeks of wireless programs that had been pumped into the air from all the broadcasting stations in the country. The magazines were not stacked in order and it was a tedious business. Back to February, 1942: laying them down in their sequence. The second week in February, the first week in February. Alleyn’s hands were poised over the work. There were only half a dozen left. He sorted them quickly. The last week in January, 1942, was missing.
Mechanically he stacked the magazines up in their corner and, after a moment’s hesitation, disordered them again. He walked up and down the room whistling a phrase of Cliff’s music. “Oh, well!” he thought. “It’s a long shot and I may be off the mark.” But he stared dolefully at the piano and presently began again to pick out the same phrase, first in the treble and then, very dejectedly, in the bass, swearing when the keys jammed. He shut the lid at last, sat in a rakish old chair and began to fill his pipe. “I shall be obliged to send them all away on ludicrous errands,” he muttered, “and get a toll call through to Jackson. Is this high fantasy, or is it murder?”
The door opened. A woman stood on the threshold.
She looked dark against the brilliance of sunshine outside. He could see that the hand with which she had opened the door was now pressed against her lips. She was a middle-aged woman, plainly dressed. She was still for a moment and then stepped back. The strong sunshine fell across her face, which was heavy and pale for a countrywoman’s. She said breathlessly: “I heard the piano. I thought it was Cliff.”
“I’m afraid Cliff would not be flattered,” Alleyn said. “I lack technique!” He moved towards her.
She backed away. “It was the piano,” she said again. “Hearing it after so long.”
“Did the men never play it?”
“Not in the daytime,” she said hurriedly. “And I kind of remember the tune.” She tidied her hair nervously. “I’m sure I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said. “Excuse me.” She was moving away when Alleyn stopped her.
“Please don’t go,” he said. “You’re Cliff’s mother aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I’d be grateful if you would spare me a moment. It won’t be much more than a moment. Really. My name, by the way, is Alleyn.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said woodenly.
He stood aside, holding back the door. After a little hesitation she went into the room and stood there, staring straight before her, her fingers still moving against her lips. Alleyn left the door open. “Will you sit down?” he said.
“I won’t bother, thanks.”
He moved the chair forward and waited. She sat on the edge of it, unwillingly.
“I expect you’ve heard why I’m here,” Alleyn said gently. “Or have you?”
She nodded, still not looking at him.
“I want you to help me, if you will.”
“I can’t help you,”
she said. “I don’t know the first thing about it. None of us do. Not me, or Mr. Johns or my boy.” Her voice shook. She added rapidly with an air of desperation: “You leave my boy alone, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Well,” said Alleyn, “I’ve got to talk to people, you know. That’s my job.”
“It’s no use talking to Cliff. I tell you straight, it’s no use. It’s something cruel what those others done to Cliff. Pestering him, day after day, and him proved to be innocent. They proved it themselves with what they found out and even then they couldn’t let him alone. He’s not like other lads. Not tough. Different.”
“Yes,” Alleyn agreed, “He’s an exceptional chap, isn’t he?”
“They broke his spirit,” she said, frowning, refusing to look at him. “He’s a different boy. I’m his mother and I know what they done. It’s wicked. Getting on to a bit of a kid when it was proved he was innocent.”
“The piano?” Alleyn said.
“Mrs. Duck saw him. Mrs. Duck who cooks for them down there. She was out for a stroll, not having gone to the dance, and she saw him sit down and commence to play. They all heard him and they said they heard him, and me and his Dad heard him too. On and on, and him dead-beat, till I couldn’t stand it any longer and come over myself and fetched him home. What more do they want?”
“Mrs. Johns,” Alleyn began, “what sort—” He stopped short, feeling that he could not repeat once more the too-familiar phrase. “Did you like Mrs. Rubrick?” he said.
For the first time she looked sharply at him. “Like her?” she said unwillingly. “Yes, I suppose I did. She was kind. Always the same to everyone. She made mistakes as I well know. Things didn’t pan out the way she reckoned.”