“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 within 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.”