“The Ace-pot’s a bit scattered this morning,” Ursula said. “You’ll tell us, won’t you, Mr. Alleyn, if there’s anything we can do?”

Alleyn thanked her and said there was nothing. He and Fabian went out of doors.

The sun had not yet reached Mount Moon. The air was cold and the ground crisp under their feet. From the direction of the yards came the authentic voice of the high-country, a dreamlike and conglomerate drone, the voice of a mob of sheep. Fabian led the way along the left-hand walk between clipped poplar hedges, already flame-coloured. They turned down the lavender path and through a gate, making a long stride over an icy little water race, and then walked uphill in the direction of the wool-shed and cottages.

The sound increased in volume. Individual bleatings, persistent and almost human, separated out from the multiple drone. A long galvanized-iron shed appeared, flanked with drafting yards beyond which lay a paddock so full of sheep that at a distance it looked like a shifting greyish lake. The sheep were driven up to the yards by men and dogs: the men yelled and the dogs barked remorselessly and without rhythm. A continual flood of sheep poured through a series of yards, each smaller than the last, into a narrow runway or race and was forced and harried towards a two-way gate which a short, monkey-faced man shoved now this way, now that, drafting them into separate pens. This progress was assisted by a youth outside the rails who continually ran towards the sheep waving his hat and crying out in a falsetto voice. At each of these sallies the sheep, harried from the rear by dogs, would dart past the youth towards the drafting gate. The acrid smell of greasy wool was strong on the cold air.

“That’s Tommy Johns,” said Fabian, jerking his head at the man at the drafting gate. “The boy’s young Cliff.”

He was rather a nice-looking lad, Alleyn thought. He had a well-shaped head and a thatch of light brown hair that overhung his forehead. His face was thin. There was an agreeable sharpness and delicacy in the bony structures of the eyes and cheek-bones. The mouth was obstinate. He still had a lean, gangling air about him, the last characteristic of adolescence. His hands were broad and nervous. His grey sweater and dirty flannel trousers had a schoolboyish look that contrasted strongly with the clothes of the other men. When he saw Fabian he gave him a sidelong grin and then with a whoop and a flourish ran again at the oncoming sheep. They streamed past him to the drafting gate and huddled together, clambering on each other’s backs.

Now that he had drawn closer Alleyn could resolve the babel into its component parts: the complaint of the sheep, the patter of their feet on frozen earth and their human-like coughing and breathing; the yelp of dogs and men and, within the shed, the burr of an engine and intermittent bumping and thuds.

“There’ll be a smoke-oh in ten minutes,” said Fabian. “Would you like to see inside?”

“Right,” said Alleyn.

Tommy Johns didn’t raise his eyes as they passed him. The gate bumped to and fro against worn posts and the sheep darted through. “He’s counting,” Fabian said.

The wool-shed seemed dark when they first went in and the reek of sheep was almost tangible. The greatest area of light fell where the shearers were at work. It came through a doorless opening from which a sacking curtain had been pulled back and through the open port-holes that were exits for the sheep. From where Alleyn stood the shearers themselves were outlined with light and each sheep’s woolly coat had a bright nimbus. This strangely dramatic illumination focused attention on the shearing board. The rest of the interior seemed at first to be lost in a swimming dusk. But presently a wool sorter’s bench, ranked packs, and pens filled with waiting sheep, took shape in the shadows and Alleyn was able to form a comprehensive picture of the whole scene.

For a time he watched only the shearers. He saw them lug sheep out of the pens by their hind legs and handle them with dexterity so that they became quiescent, voluptuously quiescent almost, lolling back against the shearers’ legs, in a ridiculous sitting posture, or suffering their necks to be held between the shearers’ knees while the mechanically propelled blades, hanging from long arms with flexible joints, rolled away their wool.

“Is this crutching?” he asked.

“That’s it. De-bagging, you might call it.”

Alleyn saw the dirty wool turn back in a wave that was cream inside and watched the quarter-denuded sheep shoved away through the port-holes. He saw the broomies, two silent boys, sweep the dirty crutchings up to the sorter and fling them out on his rack. He saw the wool sorted and tossed into bins and finally he followed it to the press.

The press was in a central position, some distance from the shearing board. It faced the main portion of the shed and actually looked, Alleyn thought, a little like an improvised rostrum. Here Flossie Rubrick was to have stood on the night of her wool-shed party. From here she was to harangue a mob of friends, voters, and fellow high-countrymen, almost as quiescent as the shorn sheep. Alleyn sharpened his memory until it could encompass the figure of the woman with whom he had spoken for a few minutes. A tiny woman with a clear and insistent voice and an ugly face. A woman who wished to acquire him as a guest and from whom he had escaped with difficulty. He remembered her sharp stare and her rather too self-confident manner. These recollections remained unchanged by last night’s spate of conflicting impressions and it was the wraith of the persistent little woman he had met whom he now conjured up in the dark end of the wool-shed. Where had she stood? From what direction had her assailant come?

“She was going to try her voice, you know,” said Fabian at his elbow.

“Yes, but from where? The press? It was full of unpressed wool and open, when the men stopped work the previous night. Did she clamp down the pressing lid or whatever it’s called and climb up?”

“That’s what we’ve always supposed.”

“Is the new press in exactly the same place?”

“Yes. Under that red show ticket nailed up on the post.” Alleyn walked past the shearing board or floor. The wall opposite was a five-foot-high partition separating the indoor pens from the rest of the shed. Farther along, behind the press, this wall was extended up towards the roof. At some time a nail had been driven through it from the other side and the point, now rusty, projected close to the wool-press. He stooped to look at it. The machines still thrummed and the sheep plunged and skidded as they were hauled out of the pens. The work went on but Alleyn thought that the men knew exactly what he was doing. He straightened up. Above the rusty nail there ran a cross-beam in the wall on which anybody, intending to mount the press, might find foothold. Round the nail they had found a thread of Flossie’s dress material. The apex of the tear in her dress had been uppermost, so it had been caused by an upward pull. “As she climbed the press,” thought Alleyn, “not when her assailant disposed of the body. It was too securely bound and the press opens from the front. He would truss the body, then clear the tramped wool out of the pack, leaving only the bottom layer, then open the front of the press and get the body into the bale, then would begin the repacking. But where was she when he struck her? A downward blow from behind near the base of the skull and grazing the back of the neck. Was she bent forward, her hands on the press? Stooping to free her dress? Was she in the act of climbing down from the press to speak to him, her feet already on the floor, her back towards him?” That seemed most likely, he thought.

Near the wool-press, a hurricane lantern hung from a nail in the wall. Farther along, to the left, a rough candlestick hammered out of tin was nailed high up on a joist. It held a guttered stump of candle. A box of matches stood beside it. These appointments had been there at the time of the tragedy. Had Flossie lit the lantern or the candle? Surely. It was dusk outside and the wool-shed must have been in darkness. How strange, he thought, as the image of a tiny indomitable woman, lit fantastically, grew in his imagination. There she must have stood, in semi-darkness, shouting out the phrases of which Terence Lynne and Fabian Losse had grown weary, while her sharp voice echoed in the emptiness. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” How far had she got? What did her assailant hear as he approached? Was he — or she — actually an audience, stationed by Flossie at the far end of the shed, to mark the resonant phrases? Or did he creep in under cover of the darkness and wait until she descended? With the branding iron grasped in his right hand? Behind her and to her right, the inside pens had been crowded with sheep waiting for the next day’s shearing, too closely packed to do more than shift a little and tap with their small hooves on the slatted floor. Did they bleat at all, Alleyn wondered, when Flossie tried her voice? “Ladies and Gentlemen.”