doubted that she had been driven down by him. It was all very neat when you come to think of it. Nobody worried about Flossie. We imagined her happily popping in and out of secret sessions and bobbing up and down at the Speaker. She’d told Arthur she had something to say in open debate. He tuned in to the House of Representatives and appeared to be disappointed when he didn’t hear his wife taking her usual energetic part in the interjections of “what about yourself?” and “sit down” which are so characteristic of the parry and riposte of our parliamentary debates. Flossie, we decided, must be holding her fire. On the day she was supposed to have left here, the communal wool-lorry arrived and collected our bales. I watched them load up.’
A shower of pebbles spattered on the windscreen as they lurched through the dry bed of a creek. Fabian dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. The knuckles of his hands showed white as he changed his grip on the wheel. He spoke more slowly and with less affectation.
‘I watched the lorry go down the drive. It’s a long stretch. Then I saw it turn into this road, and lurch through this race. There was more water in the race then. It fanned up and shone in the sunlight. Look. You can see the wool-shed now. A long building with an iron roof. The house is out of sight, behind the trees. Can you see the shearing-shed?’
‘Yes. How far away is it?’
‘About four miles. Everything looks uncannily close in this air. We’ll pull up if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to get this finished before we arrive.’
‘By all means.’
When they stopped, the smell and sounds of the plateau blew freshly in at the windows; the smell of sun-warmed tussock and earth and lichen, the sound of grasshoppers and, far away up the hillside, the multiple drone of a mob of sheep in transit, a dreamlike sound.
‘Not,’ said Fabian, ‘that there’s very much more to say. The first inkling we had that anything was wrong came on the fifth evening after she had walked down the lavender path. It took the form of a telegram from one of her brother MPs. He wanted to know why she hadn’t come up for the debate. It gave one the most extraordinarily empty and helpless feeling. We thought, at first, that for some reason she’d changed her mind and not left the South Island. Arthur rang up her club and some of her friends in town. Then he rang up her lawyers. She had an appointment with them and hadn’t kept it. They understood it was about her will. She was prolific of codicils and was always adding bits about what Douglas was to do with odds and ends of silver and jewellery. Then a little procession of discoveries came along. Terry Lynne found Flossie’s suitcase, ready-packed, stowed away at the back of a cupboard. Her purse with her travel pass and money was in a drawer of her dressing-table. Then Tommy Johns said he hadn’t taken her to the mail car. Then the search parties, beginning in a desultory sort of way and gradually getting more organized and systematic.
‘The Moon River runs through a gorge beyond the homestead. Flossie sometimes walked up there in the evening. She said it helped her, God save the mark, to think. When, finally, the police were brought in, they fastened like limpets upon this bit of information and, after hunting about the cliff for hours at a time, waited for poor Flossie to turn up ten miles downstream where there is a backwash or something. They were still waiting when the foreman at Riven’s wool store made his unspeakable discovery. By that time the trail was cold. The wool-shed had been cleaned out, the shearers had moved on, heavy rains had fallen, nobody could remember with any degree of accuracy the events of the fatal evening. Your colleagues of our inspired detective force are still giving an unconvincing impersonation of hounds with nose to ground. They return at intervals and ask us the same questions all over again. That’s all, really. Or is it?’
‘It’s a very neat resumé, at all events,’ said Alleyn. ‘But I’m afraid I shall have to imitate my detested colleagues and ask a great many questions.’
‘I am resigned.’
‘Good. First, then, is your household unchanged since Mrs Rubrick’s death?’
‘Arthur died of heart trouble three months after she disappeared. We’ve acquired a housekeeper, an elderly cousin of Arthur’s called Mrs Aceworthy, who quarrels with the outside men and preserves the proprieties between the two girls, Douglas and myself. Otherwise there’s been no change.’
‘Yourself,’ said Alleyn, counting, ‘Captain Grace, who is Mrs Rubrick’s nephew, Miss Ursula Harme, her ward, and Miss Terence Lynne, her secretary. What about servants?’
‘A cook, Mrs Duck, if you’ll believe me, who has been at Mount Moon for fifteen years, and a manservant, Markins, whom Flossie acquired in a fashion to be related hereafter. He’s a phenomenon. Menservants are practically non-existent in this country.’
‘And what about the outside staff at that time? As far as I can remember there was Mr Thomas Johns, the manager, his wife and his son, Cliff; an odd man – is rouseabout the right word? – called Albert Black, three shepherds, five visiting shearers, a wool-classer, three boys, two gardeners, a cowman, and a station cook. Right?’
‘Correct, even to the cowman. I need tell you nothing, I see.’
‘On the night of the disappearance, the shearers, the gardeners, the boys, the station cook, the sorter, the shepherds and the cowman were all at an entertainment held some fifteen miles away?’
‘Dance at the Social Hall, Lakeside. It’s across the flat on the main road,’ said Fabian, jerking his head at the vast emptiness of the plateau. ‘Arthur let them take the station lorry. We had more petrol in those days.’
‘That leaves the house-party, the Johns family, Mrs Duck, the rouseabout, and Markins?’
‘Exactly.’
Alleyn clasped his long hands round his knee and turned to his companion. ‘Now, Mr Losse,’ he said tranquilly, ‘will you tell me exactly why you asked me to come?’
Fabian beat his open palm against the driving-wheel. ‘I told you in my letter. I’m living in a nightmare. Look at the place. Our nearest neighbour’s ten miles up the road. What do you think it feels like? And when in January shearing came round again, there were the same men, the same routine, the same long evenings, the same smell of lavender and honeysuckle and oily wool. We’re crutching now and getting it all over again. The shearers talk about it. They stop when any of us come up, but every smoke-oh and every time they knock off it’s “the murder”. What a beastly soft noise the word makes. They’re using the wool-press, of course. The other evening I caught one of the boys that sweep up the crutchings squatting in the press while the other packed a fleece round him. Experimenting. God, I gave them a fright, the little bastards.’ He swung round and confronted Alleyn. ‘We don’t talk about it. We’ve clamped down on it now for six months. That’s bad for all of us. It’s interfering with my work. I’m doing nothing.’
‘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 CID 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.’
