by Ngaio Marsh
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, to-day.” 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. To-night, 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 peep-hole 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 ear-drums. 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 peep-hole toward 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 disk 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 region of light. The visitor was polishing the shearing board.
It was thoroughly done, backwards and forwards with occasional shifting 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, “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.
EPILOGUE
ACCORDING TO ALLEYN
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 ou
t 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.
When I said I’d go to the annex for my cigarette case he made one of his snap decisions. He would follow me, get the branding iron from the wool-shed, apply the proved method, and send me down-country with the crutchings. Losse, wearing my overcoat, came in for the cosh.
I was now pretty sure of Grace. By dint of a rigmarole so involved that I myself nearly got bogged in it, I induced him to tell the others that I’d be working in the shed all night, and, at the same time, to believe himself that I was going to do no such thing. He had been interrupted by the stretcher party in his first attempt to return and tidy up any prints he’d left. And he must have left some when he fetched and replaced the branding iron. Persuaded that the shed would be deserted, and alarmed by my elephantine hints of clues to be discovered at daybreak, he made his fatal slip. He waited until he thought I was asleep, and then up he came to go over the ground for himself. He took off his slippers (he’d dried them at the drawing-room fire after the assault on Losse) and polished the wool-shed floor. He had another go at the branding iron which he’d already wiped on my overcoat. Then, harking back to his earlier intention, he gouged out the existing candle stump, leaving no prints on it, and dropped it into the pens. He then climbed into the pens and scuffled a branch between the slats until he’d covered the new candle end. It was odds on we’d find it before the one that Albert Black had chucked into the pens nearly a year and a half ago.
I’d counted on a show-down and got more than I bargained for.
It all happened quickly and, until the last moment, very quietly. It was a rum scene. I flashed the torch on him and he blinked and peered at me over the partition while Markins scudded across the shed looking for a fight. There wasn’t one. Boxed up in there, he hadn’t a hope. The whole affair suddenly became very formal. Grace drew himself up to attention and waited for me to make the first move. He didn’t speak. I was never to hear him speak again. I gave him the official warning, told him the police would arrive in two hours and said that if he liked to give his parole under temporary arrest we’d all move to warmer quarters.
He bowed. He bent stiffly from the waist. This made an extraordinary impression on me because in that moment, when he was queerly lit by two torches, Markins and I having turned both ours upon him, I saw him as a Nazi. He would now, I thought, play the role to which he was naturally suited. He would be formal and courageous, a figure from a recognizable pattern. He would exhibit correct manners because these are the coachwork of the Nazi machine. He would betray nothing.
Then I saw his hand move to his side pocket.
His eyes widened and his lips were compressed. I yelled out: “Stop that!”
If he’d been slower I’d have gone with him. As it was I’d got my foot on a beam in the partition, but it was still between us. It seemed to belly out and hit me amidships in a flare of white light. The last sensation I had was of an intolerable noise and of my body hurtling through space and striking itself crazily against a wall. I was, in effect, blown into the middle of next week. He went considerably further and is now among the eternal Herrenvolk.
There wasn’t much left. However we did find enough to show how he’d provided for the last emergency. His work on shells may have given him the idea but I fancy he was under orders, in event of a final exit, to take me with him. We found the wreck of a cigarette case showing traces of an explosive and a detonator that had been wired to a torch cell. The cigarette case, we think, was in his breast pocket and the cell in his side pocket.
We shall never hear the story
of his engineering days in Germany, of his association with other correct and terrible youths. We shall never know what oaths he took or to what intensive training he submitted himself before he was sent back to await the end of 1939 and the moment when he would enlist with our forces and begin to be useful.
Fabian Losse talks of building a new wool-shed.
Part of a letter from Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to his wife:
… almost midnight and I am in the study with only poor Flossie Rubrick’s portrait for company. I’m afraid, my love, that you would be very much put out by this painting and, indeed, it is a dreadfully slick and glossy piece of work. Yet, with its baleful assistance and the post-mortem on her character I feel as if I had known her very well. In a sense, Fabian Losse was right when he said the secret of her end lay in her own character. Who but Florence Rubrick would have practised a speech in the dark to a handful of sheep during a search for her own diamonds? Who but she, having made up her mind that her nephew was an enemy agent, would have informed her husband, bound him over to secrecy, and decided to tackle the job herself? That it was Douglas Grace she suspected, and not Markins, is clear enough when one remembers that Rubrick clung to Markins after her death, and that after her interview with Grace, her manner towards him altered and she subsequently climbed down over Fabian Losse’s engagement to Ursula Harme. She said nothing of her precise suspicions to anyone else. She played a lone hand and she hadn’t a chance. Down she went, that ugly little woman, with all her obstinacy, arrogance, generosity, shrewdness and energy, down she went before an idea that was too strong for her.