Died in the Wool (6 page)

‘One moment,' said Alleyn's voice out of the shadows. He saw the four heads turn to him in the firelight.

‘There's this difference,' he said. ‘If I know anything of police routine you were continually stopped by questions. At the moment I don't want to nail you down to an interrogation. I want you, if you can manage to do so, to talk about this tragedy as if you spoke of it for the first time. You realize, don't you, that I've not come here, primarily, to arrest a murderer. I've been sent to try and discover if this particular crime has anything to do with unlawful behaviour in time of war.'

‘Exactly,' said Douglas Grace. ‘Exactly, sir. And in my humble opinion,' he added, stroking the back of his head, ‘it most undoubtedly has. However!'

‘All in good time,' said Alleyn. ‘Now, Miss Harme, you've given us a clear picture of a rather isolated little community up to, let us say, something over a year ago. At the close of 1941 Mrs Rubrick is much occupied by her public duties, with Miss Lynne as her secretary. Captain Grace is a cadet on this sheep station. Mr Losse is recuperating and has begun, with Captain Grace's help, to do some very specialized work. Mr Rubrick is a confirmed invalid. You are all fed by Mrs Duck, the cook, and attended by Markins, the houseman. What are you doing?'

‘Me?' Ursula shook her head impatiently. ‘I'm nothing in particular. Auntie Florence called me her ADC. I helped wherever I could and did my VAD training in between. It was fun—something going to happen all the time. I adore that,' cried Ursula. ‘To have events waiting for me like little presents in a treasure-hunt. She made everything exciting, all her events were tied up in gala wrappings with red ribbon. It was Heaven.'

‘Like the party that was to be held in the wool-shed?' asked Fabian dryly.

‘Oh dear!' said Ursula, catching her breath. ‘Yes. Like that one. I remember—'

The picture of that warm summer evening of fifteen months ago grew as she spoke of it. Alleyn, remembering his view through the dining-room window of a darkling garden, saw the shadowy company move along a lavender path and assemble on the lawn. The light dresses of the women glimmered in the dusk. Lancelike flames burned steadily as they lit cigarettes. They drew deck-chairs together. One of the women threw a coat of some thin texture over the back of her chair. A tall personable young man leant over the back in an attitude of somewhat studied gallantry. The smell of tobacco mingled with that of night-scented stocks and of earth and tussock that had not yet lost all warmth of the sun. It was the hour when sounds take on a significant clearness and the senses are sharpened to receive them. The voices of the party drifted vaguely yet profoundly across the dusk. Ursula could remember it very clearly.

‘You must be tired, Aunt Florence,' she had said.

‘I don't let myself be tired,' answered that brave voice. ‘One mustn't think about fatigue, Ursy, one must nurse a secret store of energy.' And she spoke of Indian ascetics and their mastery of fatigue and of munition workers in England and of air-raid wardens. ‘If they can do so much surely I, with my humdrum old routine, can jog along at a decent trot.' She stretched out her bare arms and strong hands to the girls on each side of her: ‘And with my Second Brain and my kind little ADC to back me up,' she cried cheerfully, ‘what can I not do?'

Ursula slipped down to the warm dry grass and leant her cheek against her guardian's knee. Her guardian's vigorous fingers caressed rather thoroughly the hair which Ursula had been at some expense to have set on a three days' visit down-country.

‘Let's make a plan,' said Aunt Florence.

It was a phrase Ursula loved. It was the prelude to adventure. It didn't matter that the plan was concerned with nothing more exciting than a party in the wool-shed which would be attended by back-country men and their womenkind, dressed unhappily in cooperative store clothes, and by a sprinkling of such runholders as had enough enthusiasm and petrol to bring them many miles to Mount Moon. Aunt Florence invested it all in a pink cloud of anticipation. Even Douglas became enthusiastic and, leaning over the back of Flossie's chair, began to make suggestions. Why not a dance? he asked, looking at Terence Lynne. Florence agreed. There would be a dance. Old Jimmy Wyke and his brothers who played accordions must practise together and take turn about with the radio-gramophone.

‘You ought to take that old piano over from the annexe,' said Arthur Rubrick in his tired breathless voice, ‘and get young Cliff Johns to join forces with the others. He's extraordinarily good. Play anything. Listen to him now.'

It was an unfortunate suggestion and Ursula felt the caressing fingers stiffen. As she recalled this moment, fifteen months later, for Alleyn, he heard her story recede backwards, into the past, and this quality, he realized, would be characteristic of all the stories he was to hear. They would dive backwards from the moment on the lawn into the events that foreshadowed it.

Ursula said she knew that Aunt Florence had been too thoughtful to worry Uncle Arthur with the downfall of young Cliff Johns. It was a story of the basest sort of ingratitude. Young Cliff, son of the manager, Tommy Johns, had been an unusual child. He had thrown his parents into a state of confusion and doubt by his early manifestations of aesthetic preferences, screaming and plugging his ears with his fists when his mother sang, yet listening with complacency for long periods to certain instrumental programmes on the wireless. He had taken a similar line over pictures and books. When he grew older and was collected in a lorry every morning and taken to a minute pink-painted State school out on the plateau, he developed a talent for writing florid compositions which changed their style with each new book he read, and much too fast for the comprehension of his teacher. His passion for music grew precociously and the schoolmistress wrote to his parents saying that his talent was exceptional. Her letter had an air of nervous enthusiasm. The boy, she said bravely, was phenomenal. He was, on the other hand, bad at arithmetic and games and made no attempt to conceal his indifference to both.

Aunt Florence hearing of this took an interest in young Cliff, explaining to his reluctant parents that they were face to face with the Artistic Temperament.

‘Now, Mrs Johns,' she said cheerfully, ‘you mustn't bully that boy of yours because he's different. He wants special handling and lots of sympathy. I've got my eye on him.'

Soon after that she began to ask Cliff to the big house. She gave him books and a gramophone with carefully-chosen records and she won him completely. When he was thirteen years old, she told his bewildered parents that she wanted to send him to the nearest equivalent in this country of an English Public School. Tommy Johns raised passionate objections. He was an ardent trades unionist, a working manager and a bit of a communist. But his wife, persuaded by Flossie, overruled him and Cliff went off to boarding-school with sons of the six runholders scattered over the plateau.

His devotion to Florence, Ursula said, appeared to continue. In the holidays he spent a great deal of time with her and, having taken music lessons at her expense, played to her on the Bechstein in the drawing-room. At this point in Ursula's narrative, Fabian gave a short laugh.

‘He plays very well,' Ursula said. ‘Doesn't he?'

‘Astonishingly well,' Fabian agreed, and she said quickly: ‘She was very fond of music, Fab.'

‘Like Douglas,' Fabian murmured, ‘she knew what she liked, but unlike Douglas she wouldn't own up to it.'

‘I don't know what you mean by that,' said Ursula grandly and went on with her narrative.

Young Cliff continued at school when Florence went to England. He had full use of the Bechstein in the drawing-room during the holidays. She returned to find him a big boy but otherwise, it seemed, still docile under her patronage. But when he came home for his summer holidays at the end of 1941, he was changed, not, Ursula said emphatically, for the better. He had had trouble with his eyes and the school oculist had told him that he would never be accepted for active service. He had immediately broken bounds and attempted to enlist. On being turned down he wrote to Florence saying that he wanted to leave school and, if possible, do a job of war work on the sheeprun until he was old enough to get into the army, if only in a C3 capacity. He was now sixteen. This letter was a bombshell for Flossie. She planned a university career, followed, if the war ended soon enough, by a move to London and the Royal College of Music. She went to the manager's cottage with the letter in her hand, only to find that Tommy Johns, also, had heard from his son and was delighted. ‘We're going to need good men on the land as we've never needed them before, Mrs Rubrick. I'm very very pleased young Cliff looks at it that way. If you'll excuse me for saying so, I thought this posh education he's been getting would make a class-conscious snob of the boy but from what he tells me of his ideas I see it's worked out different.' For young Cliff, it appeared, was now a communist. Nothing could have been further removed from Flossie's plans.

When he appeared, she could make no impression on him. He seemed to think that she alone would sympathize with his change of heart and plans and would support him. He couldn't understand her disappointment nor, as he continued in his attitude, her mounting anger. He grew dogmatic and stubborn. The woman of forty-seven and the boy of sixteen quarrelled bitterly and strangely. It was a cruel thing for him to do, Ursula said, cruel and stupid. Aunt Florence was the most patriotic soul alive. Look at her war work. It wasn't as though he was old enough or fit for the army. The least he could do was to complete the education she had so generously planned and in part given him.

After their quarrel they no longer met. Cliff went out with the high-country musterers and continued in their company when they came in from the mountains behind droning mobs of sheep. He became very friendly with Albie Black, the rouseabout. There was a rickety old piano in the bunkhouse annexe and in the evenings Cliff played it for the men. Their voices, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda' and strangely Victorian ballads, would drift across the yards and paddocks and reach the lawn where Flossie sat with her assembled forces, every night after dinner. But on the night she disappeared, his mates had gone to the dance and Cliff played alone in the annexe, strange music for that inarticulate old instrument.

‘Listen to him, now,' said Arthur Rubrick. ‘Remarkable chap, that boy. You wouldn't believe that old hurdy-gurdy over there had as much music in it. Extraordinary. Sounds like a professional.'

‘Yes,' Fabian agreed after a pause. ‘It's remarkable.'

Ursula wished they wouldn't talk about Cliff. It would have been better to have told Uncle Arthur about the episode of the previous night, she thought, and let him deal with Cliff. Aunt Florence shouldn't have to cope with everything and this had hurt her so deeply.

For the previous night, Markins, the manservant, hearing furtive noises in the old dairy that now served as a cellar, and imagining them to be made by a rat, had crept up and flashed his torch in at the window. Its beam darted mothlike about dusty surfaces of bottles. There was a brief sound of movement. Markins sought it out with his light. Cliff Johns' face sprang out of the dark. His eyes were screwed up blindly and his mouth was open. Markins had described this very vividly. He had dipped the torch beam until it discovered Cliff's hands. They were long and flexible hands and they grasped a bottle of Arthur's twenty-year-old whisky. As the light found them they opened and the bottle crashed on the stone floor. Markins, a taciturn man, darted into the dairy, grasped Cliff by his wrist and, without a word, lugged him unresisting into the kitchen. Mrs Duck, outraged beyond measure, had instantly bustled off and fetched Mrs Rubrick. The interview took place in the kitchen. It nearly broke Florence's heart, Ursula said. Cliff, who of course reeked of priceless whisky, said repeatedly that he had not been stealing, but would give no further explanation. In the meantime Markins had discovered four more bottles in a sugar bag, dumped round the corner of the dairy. Florence, naturally, did not believe Cliff and in a mounting scene called him a sneak-thief and accused him of depravity and ingratitude. He broke into a white rage and stammered out an extraordinary arraignment of Florence, saying that she had tried to buy him and that he would never rest until he had returned every penny she had spent on his schooling. At this stage Florence sent Markins and Mrs Duck out of the kitchen. The scene ended by Cliff rushing away while Florence, weeping and shaking, sought out Ursula and poured out the whole story. Arthur Rubrick had been very unwell and they decided to tell him nothing of this incident.

Next morning—the day of her disappearance—Florence went to the manager's cottage only to be told that Cliff's bed had not been slept in and his town clothes were missing. His father had gone off in their car down the road to the Pass. At midday he returned with Cliff whom he had overtaken at the crossroads, dead-beat, having covered sixteen miles on the first stage down-country to the nearest army depot. Florence would tell Ursula nothing of her subsequent interview with Tommy Johns.