“Auntie Floss, please listen to me!”

“I thought I told you—”

Appalled at his own handiwork, he left her.

At this point in his narrative Douglas rose and straddled the hearth-rug.

“I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “that we weren’t the same after it. She got the huff and treated me like a kid.”

“We noticed,” Fabian said, “that your popularity had waned a little. Poor Flossie! You’d hoist her with the petard of her own conscience. A maddening and unforgivable thing to do, of course. Obviously she would hate your guts for it.”

“There’s no need to put it like that,” said Douglas grandly.

“With a little enlargement,” Fabian grinned, “it might work up into quite a pretty motive against you.”

“That’s a damned silly thing to say, Fabian,” Douglas shouted.

“Shut up, Fab,” said Ursula. “You’re impossible.”

“Sorry, darling.”

“I still don’t see,” Douglas abjectly fumed, “that I could have taken any other line. After all, as she pointed out, it was her house and he was her servant.”

“You didn’t think of that when you picked his door lock,” Fabian pointed out.

“I didn’t pick the lock, Fabian, and anyhow that was entirely different.”

“Did Mrs. Rubrick tackle him?” Alleyn asked.

“I presume so. She said nothing to me, and I wasn’t going to ask and be ticked off again.”

Douglas lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Obviously,” Alleyn thought, “he still has something up his sleeve.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Douglas lightly, “I’m quite positive she did tackle him, and I believe it’s because of what she said that Markins killed her.”

“And there,” said Fabian cheerfully, “you have it. Flossie says to Markins: ‘I understand from my nephew that you’re an enemy agent. Take a week’s wages in lieu of notice and expect to be arrested and shot when you get to the railway station!’ ‘No you don’t,’ says Markins to himself. He serves up the soup with murder in his heart, takes a stroll past the wool-shed, hears Flossie in the full spate of her experimental oratory, nips in and — does it. To me it just doesn’t make sense.”

“You deliberately make it sound silly,” said Douglas hotly.

“It is silly. Moreover it’s not in her character, as I read it, to accuse Markins. It would have been the action of a fool and, bless my soul, Flossie was no fool.”

“It was her deliberately expressed intention.”

“To ‘tackle Markins.’ That was her phrase, wasn’t it? That is, to tackle l’affaire Markins. She wanted to get rid of you and think. And, upon my soul, I don’t blame her.”

“But how would she tackle Markins,” Terence objected, “except by questioning him?” She spoke so seldom that the sound of her voice, cool and incisive, came as a little shock.

“She was a bit of a Polonius, was Flossie. I think she went round to work. She may even,” said Fabian, giving a curious inflection to the phrase, “she may even have consulted Uncle Arthur.”

“No,” said Douglas.

“How on earth can you tell?” asked Ursula.

There was a moment’s silence.

“It would not have been in her character,” said Douglas.

“Her character, you see,” Fabian said to Alleyn. “Always her character.”

“Ever since fifth-column trouble started in this country,” said Douglas, “Flossie had been asking questions about it in the house. Markins knew that as well as we did. If she gave him so much as an inkling that she suspected him, how d’you suppose he’d feel?”

“And even if she decided not to accuse him straight out,” Ursula said, “don’t you think he’d notice some change in her manner?”

“Of course he would, Ursy,” Douglas agreed. “How could she help herself?”

“Quite easily,” said Fabian. “She was as clever as a bagful of monkeys.”

“I agree,” said Terence.

“Well, now,” said Alleyn, “did any of you, in fact, notice any change in her manner towards Markins?”

“To be quite honest,” said Fabian slowly, “we did. But I think we all put it down to her row with Cliff Johns. She was extremely cantankerous with all hands and the cook during that last week, was poor Flossie.”

“She was unhappy,” Ursula declared. “She was wretchedly unhappy about Cliff. She used to tell me everything. I’m sure if she’d had a row with Markins she’d have told me about it. She used to call me her Safety Valve.”

“Mrs. Arthur Rubrick,” said Fabian, “accompanied by Miss U. Harme, S.V., A.D.C., etc., etc.!”

“She may have waited to talk to him until that night,” said Douglas. “The night she disappeared, I mean. She may have written for advice to a certain Higher Authority, and waited for the reply before she tackled Markins. Good Lord, that might have been the very letter she started writing while I was there!”

“I think,” said Alleyn, “that I should have heard if she’d done that.”

“Yes,” agreed Fabian. “Yes. After all you are the Higher Authority, aren’t you?”

Again there was a silence, an awkward one. Alleyn thought: Damn that boy, he’s said precisely the wrong thing. He’s made them self-conscious again.

“Well, there’s my case against Markins,” said Douglas grandly. “I don’t pretend it’s complete or anything like that, but I’ll swear there’s something in it, and you can’t deny that after she disappeared his behaviour was suspicious.”

“I can deny it,” said Fabian, “and what’s more I jolly well do. Categorically, whatever that may mean. He was worried and so were all of us.”

“He was jumpy.”

“We were all as jumpy as cats. Why shouldn’t he jump with us? It’d have been much more suspicious if he’d remained all suave and imperturbable. You’re reasoning backwards, Douglas.”

“I couldn’t stand the sight of the chap about the house,” said Douglas. “I can’t now. It’s monstrous that he should still be here.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Why is he still here?”

“You might well ask,” Douglas rejoined. “You’ll scarcely credit it, sir, but he’s here because the police asked Uncle Arthur to keep him on. It was like this…”

The story moved forward. Out of the narrative grew a theme of mounting dissonance, anxiety and fear. Five days after Florence had walked down the lavender path and turned to the left, the overture opened on the sharp note of a telephone bell. The Post Office at the Pass had a wire for Mrs. Rubrick. Should they read it? Terence took it down. trust you are not indisposed your presence urgently reguested at thursday’s meeting. It was signed by a brother M.P. There followed a confused and hurried passage. Florence had not gone north! Where was she? Inquiries, tentative at first but growing hourly less guarded and more frantic; long-distance calls, calls to her lawyers with whom she was known to have made an appointment, to hospitals and police stations; the abandonment of privacy following a dominion-wide SOS on the air; search-parties radiating from Mount Moon and culminating in the sudden collapse of Arthur Rubrick; his refusal to have a trained nurse or indeed anyone but Terence and Markins to look after him — all these abnormalities followed each other in an ominous crescendo that reached its peak in the dreadful finality of discovery.

As this phase unfolded, Alleyn thought he could trace a change of mood in the little company assembled in the study. At first Douglas alone stated the theme. Then one by one, at first reluctantly, then with increasing freedom, the other voices joined in, and it seemed to Alleyn that after their long avoidance of their subject they now found ease in speaking of it. After the impact of the discovery, there followed the slow assembly of official themes: the inquest adjourned, the constant appearance of the police, and the tremendous complications of the public funeral. These events mingled like phrases of a movement till interrupted emphatically by Fabian. When Douglas, who had evidently been impressed by it, described Flossie’s cortège—“there were three bands”—Fabian shocked them all by breaking into laughter. Laughter bubbled out of him. He stammered: “It was so horrible… disgusting… I’m terribly sorry, but when you think of what had happened to her… and then to have three brass bands… Oh God, it’s so electrically comic!” He drew in his breath in a shuddering gasp.