Died in the Wool ra-13

by Ngaio Marsh

  “When the bales were finally loaded on the lorry—” Alleyn began, but at once Merrywether took fright. “Now, don’t you start in on me about that,” he scolded. “I never noticed nothing. How would I? I never handled it.”

  “All right, my dear man,” said Alleyn pacifically, “you didn’t. That disposes of that. Don’t be so damned touchy; I never knew such a chap.”

  “I got to consider my stomach,” said Merrywether darkly.

  “Your stomach’ll have to lump it, I’m afraid. Who stencilled the Mount Moon mark on the bales?”

  “Young Cliff.”

  “And who sewed up the bales?”

  “I did. Now!”

  “All right. Now the bale with which I’m concerned was the first one you handled that morning. When you started work it was full of wool that apparently had been trampled down but not pressed. You pressed it. You told the police you noticed no change whatever, nothing remarkable or unusual in the condition of the bale. It was exactly as you’d left it the night before.”

  “So it was the same. Wouldn’t I of noticed if it hadn’t been?”

  “I should have thought so, certainly. The floor, for instance, round the press.”

  “What about it?” Merrywether began on a high note. Alleyn saw his hands contract. He blinked, his sandy lashes moving like shutters over his light eyes. “What about the floor?” he said less truculently.

  “I notice how smooth the surface is. Would that be the natural grease in the fleeces? It’s particularly noticeable on the shearing board and round the press where the bales may act as polishing agents when they are shoved across the floor.” He glanced at Merrywether’s feet. “You wear ordinary boots. The soles must get quite glassy in here, I should have thought.”

  “Not to notice,” he said uncomfortably.

  “The floor was in its normal condition that morning, was it? No odd pieces of wool lying about?”

  “I told you—” Merrywether began, but Alleyn interrupted him. “And as smooth as ever?” he said. Merrywether was silent. “Come now,” said Alleyn, “haven’t you remembered something that escaped your memory before, when Sub-Inspector Jackson talked to you?”

  “I couldn’t be expected — I was crook. The way he kept asking me how could I of shifted a pack with you-know-what inside it. It turned my stomach on me.”

  “I know. But the floor. Thinking back, now. Was there anything about the floor, round the press, when you arrived here that morning? Was it swept and polished as usual?”

  “It was swept.”

  “And polished?”

  “All right, all right, it wasn’t. How was I to remember, three weeks later? The way I’d got churned up over what, in all innocence, I done? It never crossed me mind till just now when you brought it up. I noticed it and yet I never noticed it if you can understand.”

  “I know,” said Alleyn.

  “But in pity’s name, Jack,” cried Fabian, who had been silent throughout the entire interview, “what did you notice?”

  “The floor was kind of smudged,” said Merrywether.

  In the men’s midday dinner hour, Fabian brought Cliff Johns to the study. Alleyn felt curious about this boy who had so unexpectedly refused the patronage of Florence Rubrick. He had asked Fabian to leave them alone together and now, as he watched the unco-ordinated movements of the youth’s hands, he wondered if Cliff knew that in defiance of his alibi he was Sub-Inspector Jackson’s pet among the suspects.

  He got the boy to sit down and asked him if he understood the reason for the interview. Cliff nodded and clenched and unclenched his wide mobile hands. Behind him, beyond open windows, glared a noonday garden, the plateau, blank with sunshine, and the mountains etherealized now by an intensity of light. Shadows on those ranges appeared translucent as though the sky beyond shone through. Their snows dazzled the eyes and seemed to be composed of light without substance. A nimbus of light rimmed Cliff’s hair. Alleyn thought that his wife would have liked to paint the boy, and would have found pleasure in reflected colour that swam in the hollow of his temples and beneath the sharp arches of his brows. He said: “Are you interested in painting as well as music?”

  Cliff blinked at him and shuffled his feet. “Yes,” he said. “A friend of mine is keen. Anything that — I mean — there aren’t so many people — I mean—”

  “I only asked you,” Alleyn said, “because I wondered if it would be as difficult to express this extraordinary landscape in terms of music as it would be to do so in terms of paint.” Cliff looked sharply at him. “I don’t understand music, you see,” Alleyn went on. “But paint does say something to me. When I heard that music was your particular thing I felt rather lost. The technique of approach through channels of interest wouldn’t work. So I thought I’d try a switch-over. Any good or rotten?”

  “I’d rather do without a channel of approach, I think,” Cliff said. “I’d rather get it over, if you don’t mind.” But instead of allowing Alleyn to follow his suggestion, he added, half-shamefaced: “That’s what I wanted to do. With music, I mean. Say something about this.” He jerked his head at the vastness beyond the window and added with an air of defiance: “And I don’t mean the introduction of native bird song and Maori hakas into an ersatz symphony.” Alleyn heard an echo of Fabian Losse in this speech.

  “It seems to me,” he said, “that the forcible injection of local colour is the catch in any aesthetic treatment of this country. There is no forcing the growth of an art, is there, and, happily, no denying it when the moment is ripe. Is your music good?”

  Cliff sank his head between his shoulders and with the profundity of the very young said: “It might have been. I’ve chucked it.”

  “Why?”

  Cliff muttered undistinguishably, caught Alleyn’s eye and blurted out: “The kind of things that have happened to me.”

  “I see. You mean, of course, the difference of opinion with Mrs. Rubrick, and her murder. Do you really believe that you’ll be worse off for these horrors? I’ve always had a notion that, if his craft has a sound core, an artist should ripen with experience, however beastly the experience may be at the time. But perhaps that’s a layman’s idea. Perhaps you had two remedies: your music and—” he looked out of the windows—“all this. You chose the landscape. Is that it?”

  “They wouldn’t have me for the army.”

  “You aren’t yet eighteen are you?”

  “They wouldn’t have me. Eyes and feet,” said Cliff as if the naming of these members were an offence against decency. “I can see as well as anybody and I can muster the high-country for three days without noticing my feet. That’s the army for you.”

  “So you mean to carry on mustering the high-country and seeing as far through a brick wall as the next fellow?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you ever lend a hand at wool sorting, or try to learn about it?”

  “I keep outside the shed. Always have.”

  “It’s a profitable job, isn’t it?”

  “Doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather go up the hill on a muster.”

  “And — no music?”

  Cliff shuffled his feet.

  “Why?” Alleyn persisted. Cliff rubbed his hands across his face and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I told you I can’t.”

  “Not since the evening in the annex? When you played for an hour or more on a very disreputable old instrument. That was the night following the incident over the bottle of whisky, wasn’t it?”

  More than at anything else, Alleyn thought, more than at the reminder of Florence Rubrick’s death, even, Cliff sickened at the memory of this incident. It had been a seriocomic episode. Markins indignant at the window, the crash of a bursting bottle and the reek of spirits. Alleyn remembered that the tragedies of adolescence were felt more often in the self-esteem, and he said: “I want you to explain this whisky story but, before you do, you might just remind yourself that there isn’t a creature living who doesn’t carry wi
thin him the memory of some particular shabbiness of which he’s much more ashamed than he would be of a major crime. Also that there’s probably not a boy in the world who hasn’t at some time or other committed petty larceny. I may add that I personally don’t give a damn whether you were silly enough to pinch Mr. Rubrick’s whisky or not. But I am concerned to find out whether you told the truth when you said you didn’t pinch it and why, if this is so, you wouldn’t explain what you were up to in the cellarage.”

  “I wasn’t taking it,” Cliff muttered. “I hadn’t taken it.”

  “Bible oath before a beak?”

  “Yes. Before anybody.” Cliff looked quickly at him. “1 don’t know how to make it sound true. I don’t expect you to believe me.”

  “I’m doing my best, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if you’d tell me what in the world you were up to.” ”

  Cliff was silent.

  “Not anything in the heroic line?” Alleyn asked mildly.

  Cliff opened his mouth and shut it again.

  “Because,” Alleyn went on, “there are moments when the heroic line is no more than a spanner in the works of justice. I mean, if you didn’t kill Mrs. Rubrick you’re deliberately, for some fetish of your own, muddling the trail. The whisky may be completely irrelevant but we can’t tell. It’s a question of tidying up. Of course if you did kill her you may be wise to hold your tongue. I don’t know.”

  “But you know I didn’t,” Cliff said and his voice faded on a note of bewilderment. “I’ve got an alibi. I played.”

  “What was it you played?”

  “Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue.’ ”

  “Difficult?” Alleyn asked and had to wait a long time for his answer. Cliff made two false starts, checking his voice before it was articulate. “I’d worked at it,” he said at last. “Now why,” Alleyn wondered, “does he jib at telling me it was difficult?”

  “It must be disheartening work, slogging away at a bad instrument,” he said. “It is bad, isn’t it?”

  Again Cliff was unaccountably reluctant. “Not as bad as all that,” he muttered and, with a sudden spurt: “A friend of mine in a music shop in town came out for a couple of days and tuned it for me. It wasn’t so bad.”

  “But nothing like the Bechstein in the drawing-room for instance?”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” he persisted. “It’s a good make. It used to be in the house here before — before she got the Bechstein.”

  “You must have missed playing the Bechstein.”

  “You can’t have everything,” Cliff said.

  “Honour,” Alleyn suggested lightly, “or concert grands? Is that it?”

  Cliff grinned unexpectedly. “Something of the sort,” he said.

  “See here,” said Alleyn. “Will you, without further ado and without me plodding round the by-ways of indirect attack — will you tell me the whole story of your falling-out with Mrs. Rubrick? You needn’t, of course. You can refuse to speak, as you did with my colleagues, and force me to behave as they did: listen to other people’s versions of the quarrel. Do you know that the police files devote two foolscap pages to hearsay accounts of the relationship between you and Mrs. Rubrick?”

  “I can imagine it,” said Cliff savagely. “Gestapo methods.”

  “Do you really think so?” Alleyn said with such gravity that Cliff looked fixedly at him and turned red. “If you can spare the time,” Alleyn went on, “I’d like to lend you a manual of police law. It would give you an immense feeling of security. You would learn from it that I am forbidden to quote in a court of law anything that you tell me about your relationship with Mrs. Rubrick unless it is to read aloud a statement that you’ve signed before witnesses. And I’m not asking you to do that. I’m asking you to give me the facts of the case so that I can make up my mind whether they have any bearing on her death.”

  “They haven’t.”

  “Very good. What are they?”

  Cliff bent forward, driving his fingers through his hair. Alleyn felt suddenly impatient. “But it is the impatience,” he thought, “of a middle-aged man,” and he reminded himself of the enclosed tragedies of youth. “Like green figs,” he said to himself, “closed in upon themselves. He is not yet eighteen,” he thought, growing more tolerant, “and I bring a code to bear upon him.” Then, as was habitual with him, he disciplined his thoughts and prepared himself for another assault upon Cliff’s over-tragic silence. Before he could speak Cliff raised his head and spoke with simplicity. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “In a way it’ll be a relief. But I’m afraid it’s a long story. You see it all hangs on her. The kind of woman she was.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  ACCORDING TO CLIFF JOHNS

  “You didn’t know her,” Cliff said. “That’s what makes everything so impossible. You don’t know what she was like.”

  “I’m learning,” Alleyn said.

  “But it doesn’t make sense. I’ve read about that sort of thing, of course, but somehow I never dropped to it when it was happening to me — I mean not until it was too late to avoid a row. I was only a kid of course. In the beginning.”

  “Yes,” said Alleyn and waited.

  Cliff turned his foot sideways and looked at the sole of his boot. Alleyn was surprised to see that he was blushing. “I suppose I’d better explain,” he said at last, “that I’m not absolutely positive what the Oedipus complex exactly is.”

  “And I’m not at all sure that I can help you. Let’s just have the whole story, clinical or otherwise, may we?”

  “Right-oh, then. You see, when I was a kid she started taking an interest in me. What they said when I used to go to the Lake School over there on the flat—” he jerked his head at the plateau—“about my liking music and so on. I was scared of her at first. You may have the idea that in this country there’s no class consciousness but it’s there, all right, don’t you worry. The station holder’s wife taking an interest in the working manager’s kid. Accent on working. I felt the condescension, all right. Her voice sounded funny to me at first too, but after a bit, when I got used to it, I liked the way she talked. A bit of an English accent. Crisp and clear and not afraid to say straight out what she thought without drawling ‘You know’ after every other word. The first time she had me over here I was only about ten and I’d never been inside the drawing-room. It seemed very big and white and smelt of flowers and the fire. She played for me. Chopin. Very badly, but I thought it was marvellous. Then she told me to play. I wouldn’t at first but she went out of the room and then I touched the keyboard. I felt guilty and silly but nobody came in and I went on striking one note after another, then chords, and then picking out a phrase of the Chopin melody. She left me alone for quite a long time and then she brought me in here for tea. I had ginger beer and cake. That was the beginning.”

  “You were good friends in those days?”

  “Yes, I thought so. You can imagine what it was like for me, coming here. She gave me books and bought new records for the gramophone and there was always the piano. She used to talk a lot about music; terrible stuff, of course, bogus and soulful, but I lapped it up. She began teaching me to ‘speak nicely,’ too. Dad and my mother used to sling off at me for it, but Mum half liked it all the same. Mum used to buck at Women’s Institute meetings about the interest Mrs. Rubrick took in me. Even Dad, for all his views, was a bit tickled at first. Parental vanity. They never saw how socially unsound the whole thing was; that I was just a sort of highbrow hobby and that every penny she spent on me was so much purchase money. Dad must have known of course, but I suppose Mum talked him out of it.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “What do you think? It seemed to me that everything I wanted was inside this house. I’d have lived here if I could. But she was very clever. Only one hour every other day, so that the gilt never wore off the gingerbread. She never forced me to do anything too long. I never tired of anything. I can see now what a lot of self-restraint she must have used because by nat
ure she was a slave driver.” He paused, tracing back his memories. “Gosh!” he said suddenly. “What a nasty little bit of work I must have been.”

  “Why?”

  “Sucking up to her. Wallowing in second-rate ideas about second-rate music. Telling her what Tchaikovsky made me feel like and slobbering out ‘Chanson Triste’ on the Bechstein with plenty of soul and wrong notes. Kidding myself as well as her that I didn’t like the ‘Donkey Serenade.’ ”

  “At the age of ten?” Alleyn murmured incredulously.

  “Up to thirteen. I used to write poems too, all about nature and high ideals. ‘We must be nothing weak, valleys and hills are ours, from the last lone rocky peak to where the rata flowers.’ I set that one to music: ‘Tiddely-tum-te-tum. Tiddely-tum-te-te’ and wrote it all out and gave it to her for Christmas with a lovely picture in water colour under the dedication. Gosh, I was awful.”

  “Well,” said Alleyn peaceably, “you certainly seem to have been a full-sized enfant prodigue. At thirteen you went to boarding-school, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. At her expense. I was hell-bent on it of course.”

  “Was it a success?” Alleyn asked and to his surprise Cliff said: “Not bad. I don’t approve of the system, of course. Education ought to be the business of the state; not of a lot of desiccated failures whose real object is to bolster up class consciousness. The teaching on the whole was merely comic but there were one or two exceptions.” He saw Alleyn raise an eyebrow and reddened. “I suppose you’re thinking I’m an insufferable young puppy, aren’t you?”

  “I’m merely reminding myself rather strenuously that you are probably giving me an honest answer and that you are not yet eighteen. But do go on. Why, after all, was it not so bad?”

  “There were things they couldn’t spoil. I was bullied at first, of course, and miserable. It’s so bracing for one, being made to feel suicidal at the age of thirteen. But I turned out to be a slow bowler and naturally that saved me. I got a bit of kudos at school concerts and I developed a turn for writing mildly indecent limericks. That helped. And I went to a good man for music. I am grateful to her for that. Honestly grateful. He made music clear for me. He taught me what music is about. And I did make some real friends. People I could talk to,” said Cliff with relish. The phrase carried Alleyn back thirty years to a dark study and the sound of bells. “In our way,” he told himself, “we were just such another clutch of little egoists.”