“Fabian!” Ursula murmured and put her arm about him, pressing him against her knees. “Darling Fabian, don’t.”

Douglas stared at Fabian and then looked away in embarrassment. “You don’t want to think of it like that,” he said. “It was a tribute. She was enormously popular. We had to let them do it. Personally—”

“Go on with the story, Douglas,” said Terence.

“Wait,” said Fabian. “I’ve got to explain. It’s my turn. I want to explain.”

“No,” cried Ursula. “Please not.”

“We agreed to tell him everything. I’ve got to explain why I can’t join in this nil nisi stuff. It crops up at every turn. Let’s clear it up and then get on with the job.”

“No!”

“I’ve got to, Ursy. Please don’t interrupt, it’s so deadly important. And after all one can’t make a fool of oneself without some sort of apology.”

“Mr. Alleyn will understand.” Ursula appealed urgently to Alleyn, her hands still pressed down on Fabian’s shoulders. “It’s the war,” she said. “He was dreadfully ill after Dunkirk. You mustn’t mind.”

“For pity’s sake shut up, darling, and let me tell him,” said Fabian violently.

“But it’s crazy. I won’t let you, Fabian. I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me,” he said.

“What the hell is this about?” Douglas asked angrily.

“It’s about me,” said Fabian. “It’s about whether or not I killed your Aunt Florence. Now for God’s sake hold your tongue and listen.”

CHAPTER IV

ACCORDING TO FABIAN

Sitting on the floor and hugging his knees, Fabian began his narrative. At first he stammered. The phrases tumbled over each other and his lips trembled. As often as this happened he paused, frowning, and, in a level voice, repeated the sentence he had bungled, so that presently he was master of himself and spoke composedly.

“I think I told you,” he said, “that I got a crack on the head at Dunkirk. I also told you, didn’t I, that for some weeks after I was supposed to be more or less patched up they put me on a specialized job in England? It was then I got the notion of a magnetic fuse for anti-aircraft shells, which is, to make no bones about it, the general idea behind our precious X Adjustment. I suppose, if things had gone normally, I’d have muddled away at it there in England, but they didn’t.

“I went to my job one morning with a splitting headache. What an admirably chosen expression that is—‘a splitting headache.’ My head really felt like that. I’d had bad bouts of it before and tried not to pay any attention. I was sitting at my desk looking at a memorandum from my senior officer and thinking I must collect myself and do something about it. I remember pulling a sheet of paper towards me. An age of nothingness followed this and then I came up in horrible waves out of dark into light. I was hanging over a gate in a road a few minutes away from my own billet. It was a very high gate, an eight-barred affair with wire on top and padlocked. The place beyond was army property. I must have climbed up. I was very sick. After a bit I looked at my watch. It’d missed an hour. It was as if it had been cut out of my mind. I looked at my right hand and saw there was ink on my fingers. Then I went home, feeling filthily ill. I rang up the office and I suppose I sounded peculiar because the army quack came in the next morning and had a look at me. He said it was the crack on my skull. I’ve got the report he gave me to bring out here. You can see it if you like.

“While he was with me the letter came.

“It was addressed to me by me. That gives one an unpleasant feeling at any time. When I opened it six sheets of office paper fell out. They were covered in my writing and figures. Nonsense they were, disjointed bits and pieces from my notes and calculations hopelessly jumbled together. I showed them to the doctor. He found it all enthralling and had me marched out of the army. That was when Flossie turned up.”

Fabian paused for a moment, his chin on his knees.

“I only had two other goes of it,” he said at last, rousing himself. “One was in the ship. I was supposed to be resting in my deck-chair. Ursy says she found me climbing. This time it was up the companion-way to the boat deck. I don’t know if I told you that when I caught my packet at Dunkirk I was climbing up a rope ladder into a rescue ship. I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s a connection. Ursy couldn’t get me to come down so she stayed with me. I wandered about, it seems, and generally made a nuisance of myself. I got very angry about something and said I was going to knock hell out of Flossie. A point to remember, Mr. Alleyn. I think I’ve mentioned before that Flossie’s ministrations in the ship were very agitating and tiresome. Ursy seems to have kept me quiet. When I came up to the surface she was there, and she helped me get back to my cabin. I made her promise not to tell Flossie. The ship’s doctor was generally tight so we didn’t trouble him either.

“Then the last go. The last go. I suppose you’ve guessed. It was on what your friend in the force calls the Night in Question. It was, in point of fact, while I was among the vegetable marrows hunting for Flossie’s brooch. Unhappily, this time Ursy was not there.”

“I suppose,” Fabian said, shifting his position and looking at his hands, “that I’d walked about, with my nose to the ground, for so long that I’d upset my equilibrium or something. I don’t know. All I do know is that I heard the two girls having their argument in the bottom path and then, without the slightest warning, there was the blackout, and, after the usual age of nothingness, that abominable, that disgusting sense of coming up to the surface. There I was at the opposite end of the vegetable garden, under a poplar tree, feeling like death and bruised all over. I heard Uncle Arthur call out: ‘Here it is. I’ve found it.’ I heard the others exclaim and shout to each other and then to me. So I pulled myself together and trotted round to meet them. It was almost dark by then. They couldn’t see my face which I daresay was bright green. Anyway they were all congratulating themselves over the blasted brooch. I trailed indoors after them and genteelly sipped soda-water while they drank hock and Uncle Arthur’s whisky. He was pretty well knocked up himself, poor old thing. So I escaped notice, except—”

He moved away a little from Ursula and looked up at her with a singularly sweet smile. “Except by Ursula,” he said. “She appeared to have noted the resemblance to a dead groper and she tackled me about it the next morning. So I told her that I’d had another of my ‘turns,’ as poor Flossie called them.”

“It’s so silly,” Ursula whispered. “The whole thing’s so silly. Mr. Alleyn is going to laugh at you.”

“Is he? I hope he is. I must say it’d be a great relief to me if Mr. Alleyn began to rock with professional laughter, but at the moment I see no signs of it. Of course you know where all this is leading, sir, don’t you?”

“I think so,” said Alleyn. “You wonder, don’t you, if in a condition of amnesia or automatism or unconscious behaviour or whatever it should be called, you could have gone to the wool-shed and committed this crime?”

“That’s it.”

“You say you heard Miss Harme and Miss Lynne talking in the bottom path?”

“Yes. I heard Terry say, ‘Why not just do what we’re asked? It would be so much simpler.’ ”

“Did you say that, Miss Lynne?”

“Something like it, I believe.”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “She said that! I remember.”

“And then I blacked-out,” said Fabian.

“Soon after you came to yourself again you heard Mr. Rubrick call out that he had found the diamond clip?”

“Yes. It’s the first thing I was fully aware of. His voice.”

“And how long,” Alleyn asked Terence Lynne, “was the interval between your remark and the discovery of the brooch?”