course. I’m not a gunner. But I could at least appreciate its importance and also the extreme necessity of keeping your work secret. It is from that point of view, I believe, that the suggestion of espionage has cropped up?’
‘Yes. To my mind it’s an absurd suggestion. We work in a room that’s locked when we’re not in it, and the papers and gear – any of them that matter – are always shut up in a safe.’
‘We?’
‘Douglas Grace has worked with me. He’s done the practical stuff. My side is purely theoretical. I was at Home when war broke out and took an inglorious part in the now mercifully forgotten Norwegian campaign, I picked up rheumatic fever but, with an extraordinarily bad sense of timing, got back into active service just in time to get a crack on the head at Dunkirk.’ Fabian paused for a moment as if he had been about to say something further but now changed his mind. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘There it was. Later on still, when I was supposed to be fairly fit, they put me into a special show in England. That’s when I got the germ of the idea. I cracked up again rather thoroughly and they kicked me out for good. While I was still too groggy to defend myself, Flossie, who was Home on a visit, bore down upon me and conceived the idea of bringing her poor English nephew-in-law back with her to recuperate in this country. She said she was used to looking after invalids, meaning poor old Arthur’s endocarditis. I started messing about with my notion soon after I got here.’
‘And her own nephew? Captain Grace?’
‘He was actually taking an engineering course at Heidelberg in 1939 but he left on the advice of some of his German friends and returned to England. May I take this opportunity of assuring you that Douglas is not in the pay of Hitler or any of his myrmidons, a belief ardently nursed, I feel sure, by Sub-Inspector Jackson. He enlisted when he got to England, was transferred to a New Zealand unit, and was subsequently pinked in the bottom by the Luftwaffe in Greece. Flossie hauled him in as soon as he was demobilized. He used to work here as a cadet in his school holidays. He’s always been good with his hands. He’d got a small precision lathe and some useful instruments. I pulled him in. It’s Douglas who’s got this bee in his bonnet. He will insist that in some fantastic way his Auntie Flossie’s death is mixed up with our egg-beater, which is what we ambiguously call our magnetic fuse.’
‘Why does he think so?’
Fabian did not answer.
‘Has he any data –’ Alleyn began.
‘Look here, sir,’ said Fabian abruptly. ‘I’ve got a notion for your visit. It may not appeal to you. In fact, you may dismiss it as the purest tripe, but here it is. You’re full of official information about the whole miserable show, aren’t you? All those files! You know, for example, that any one of us could have left the garden and gone to the shearing-shed. You may even have gathered that apart from protracted irritation, which God knows may be sufficient motive, none of us had any reason for killing Flossie. We were a tolerably happy collection of people. Flossie bossed us about but, more or less, we went our own way.’ He paused and added unexpectedly, ‘Most of us. Very well. It seems to me that as Flossie was murdered there was something about Flossie that only one of us knew. Something monstrous. I mean something monstrously out of character that I, for one, have conceived of as being “Flossie Rubrick”; something murder-worthy. Now that something may not appear in any one of the Flossies that each of us has formed for his or herself but, to a newcomer, an expert, might it not appear in the collective Flossie that emerges from all these units put together? Or am I talking unadulterated bilge?’
Alleyn said carefully, ‘Women have been murdered for some chance intrusion upon other people’s affairs, some idiotic blunder that has nothing to do with character.’
‘Yes. But in the mind of the murderer of such a victim she is forever The Intruder. If he could be persuaded to talk of his victim, don’t you feel that something of that aspect of her character in his mind would come out? To a sensitive observer?’
‘I’m a policeman in a strange country,’ said Alleyn. ‘You mustn’t try me too high.’
‘At any rate,’ said Fabian, with an air of relief that was unexpectedly naïve, ‘you’re not laughing at me.’
‘Of course not, but I don’t fully understand you.’
‘The official stuff has been useless. It’s a year old. It’s just a string of uncorrelated details. For what it’s worth you’ve got it in these precious files. It doesn’t give you a picture of a Flossie Rubrick who was murder-worthy.’
‘You know,’ said Alleyn cheerfully, ‘that’s only another way of saying there was no apparent motive.’
‘All right. I’m being too elaborate. Put it this way. If factual evidence doesn’t produce a motive, isn’t it at least possible that something might come out of our collective idea of Flossie?’
‘If it could be discovered.’
‘Well, but couldn’t it?’ Fabian was now earnest and persuasive. Alleyn began to wonder if he had been very profoundly disturbed by his experience and was indeed a little unhinged. ‘If we could get them all together and start them talking, couldn’t you, an expert, coming fresh to the situation, get something? By the colour of our voices, by our very evasions? Aren’t those signs that a man with your training would be able to read? Aren’t they?’
‘They are signs,’ Alleyn replied, trying not to sound too patient, ‘that a man with my training learns to treat with extreme reserve. They are not evidence.’
‘No, but taken in conjunction with the evidence, such as it is?’
‘They can’t be disregarded, certainly.’
Fabian said fretfully, ‘But I want you to get a picture of Flossie in the round. I don’t want you to have only my idea of her which, truth to tell, is of a maddeningly arrogant piece of efficiency, but Ursula’s idea of a wonderwoman, Douglas’s idea of a manageable and not unprofitable aunt, Terence’s idea of an exacting employer – all these. But I didn’t mean to give you an inkling. I wanted you to hear for yourself, to start cold.’
‘You say you haven’t spoken of her for six months. How am I to break the spell?’
‘Isn’t it part of your job,’ Fabian asked impatiently, ‘to be a corkscrew?’
‘Lord help us,’ said Alleyn good-humouredly, ‘I suppose it is.’
‘Well, then!’ cried Fabian triumphantly. ‘Here’s a fair field with me to back you up. And, you know, I don’t believe it’s going to be so difficult. I believe they must be in much the same case as I am. It took a Herculean effort to write that letter. If I could have grabbed it back, I would have done so. I can’t tell you how much I funked the idea of starting this conversation but, you see, now I have started there’s no holding me.’
‘Have you warned them about this visitation?’
‘I talked grandly about “an expert from a special branch”. I said you were a high-up who’d been lent to this country. They know your visit is official and that the police and hush-hush birds have a hand in it. Honestly, I don’t think that alarms them much. At first, I suppose, each of us was afraid; personally afraid, I mean, afraid that we should be suspected. But I don’t think we four ever suspected each other. In that one thing we are agreed. And would you believe it, as the weeks went on and the police interrogation persisted, we got just plain bored. Bored to exhaustion.
