Fabian paused, looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes, and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. “I had forgotten the classic exception,” he said. “The last time she was seen alive, except by her murderer. She turned up some three weeks later at Messrs. Riven Brothers’ wool store, baled up among the Mount Moon fleeces, poor thing. Did I forget to say we were shearing at the time of her disappearance? But of course you know all that.”

“You followed her instructions about hunting for the clip?”

Fabian did not answer immediately. “With waning enthusiasm, on my part, at least,” he said. “But, yes. We hunted for about forty-five minutes. Just as it was getting too dark to continue, the clip was found by Arthur, her husband, in a clump of zinnias that he had already ransacked a dozen times. Faint with our search, we returned to the house and the others drank whisky-and-sodas in the dining room. Unfortunately I’m not allowed alcohol. Ursula Harme hurried away to return the clip to Flossie. The wool-shed was in darkness. She was not in her drawing-room or her study. When Ursula went up to her bedroom she was confronted by a poisonously arch little notice that Flossie was in the habit of hanging on her door handle when she didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Disgusted but not altogether surprised, Ursula stole away but not before she had scribbled the good news on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door. She returned and told us what she had done. We went to our beds believing Flossie to be in hers. Shall I go on, sir?”

“Please do.”

“Flossie was to leave at the crack of dawn for the mail car, thence by train and ferry she was to travel to the seat of government where normally she would arrive, full of kick and drive, the following morning. On the eve of these departures she always retired early and woe betide the wretch who disturbed her.”

The track descended into a shingle bed, and the car splashed through a clear race of water. They had drawn nearer to the foot-hills and now the mountains themselves were close above them. Between desultory boulders and giant tussocks, coloured like torches in sunlight, patches of bare earth lay ruddy in the late afternoon light. In the distance, spires of Lombardy poplars appeared above the naked curve of a hill and, beyond them, a twist of blue smoke.

“Nobody got up on the following morning to see Flossie off,” said Fabian. “The mail car goes through at half-past five. It’s a kind of local arrangement. A farmer eight miles up the road from here runs it. He goes down to the Forks three times a week and links up with the government mail car that you caught. Tommy Johns, the manager, usually drove her down to the front gate to catch it. She used to ring up his cottage when she was ready to start. When he didn’t hear from her, he says, he thought one of us had taken her. That’s what he says,” Fabian repeated. “He thought one of us had taken her and didn’t bother. We, of course, never doubted that she had been driven down by him. It was all very neat when you come to think of it. Nobody worried about Flossie. We imagined her happily popping in and out of secret sessions and bobbing up and down at the Speaker. She’d told Arthur she had something to say in open debate. He tuned in to the House of Representatives and appeared to be disappointed when he didn’t hear his wife taking her usual energetic part in the interjections of ‘What about yourself?’ and ‘Sit down’ which are so characteristic of the parry and riposte of our parliamentary debates. Flossie, we decided, must be holding her fire. On the day she was supposed to have left here the communal wool lorry arrived and collected our bales. I watched them load up.”

A shower of pebbles spattered on the windscreen as they lurched through the dry bed of a creek. Fabian dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. The knuckles of his hands showed white as he changed his grip on the wheel. He spoke more slowly and with less affectation.

“I watched the lorry go down the drive. It’s a long stretch. Then I saw it turn into this road and lurch through this race. There was more water in the race then. It fanned up and shone in the sunlight. Look. You can see the wool-shed now. A long building with an iron roof. The house is out of sight, behind the trees. Can you see the shearing shed?”

“Yes. How far away is it?”

“About four miles. Everything looks uncannily close in this air. We’ll pull up if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to get this finished before we arrive.”

“By all means.”

When they stopped the smell and sounds of the plateau blew freshly in at the windows; the smell of sun-warmed tussock and earth and lichen, the sound of grasshoppers and, far away up the hill-side, the multiple drone of a mob of sheep in transit, a dream-like sound.

“Not,” said Fabian, “that there’s very much more to say. The first inkling we had that anything was wrong came on the fifth evening after she had walked down the lavender path. It took the form of a telegram from one of her brother M.P.’s. He wanted to know why she hadn’t come up for the debate. It gave one the most extraordinarily empty and helpless feeling. We thought, at first, that for some reason she’d changed her mind and not left the South Island. Arthur rang up her club and some of her friends in town. Then he rang up her lawyers. She had an appointment with them and hadn’t kept it. They understood it was about her will. She was prolific of codicils and was always adding bits about what Douglas was to do with odds and ends of silver and jewelry. Then a little procession of discoveries came along. Terry Lynne found Flossie’s suitcase, ready packed, stowed away at the back of a cupboard. Her purse with her travel pass and money was in a drawer of her dressing table. Then Tommy Johns said he hadn’t taken her to the mail car. Then the search-parties, beginning in a desultory sort of way and gradually getting more organized and systematic.

“The Moon River runs through a gorge beyond the homestead. Flossie sometimes walked up there in the evening. She said it helped her, God save the mark, to think. When, finally, the police were brought in, they fastened like limpets upon this bit of information and, after hunting about the cliff for hours at a time, waited for poor Flossie to turn up ten miles down-stream where there is a backwash or something. They were still waiting when the foreman at Riven’s wool store made his unspeakable discovery. By that time the trail was cold. The wool-shed had been cleaned out, the shearers had moved on, heavy rains had fallen, nobody could remember with any degree of accuracy the events of the fatal evening. Your colleagues of our inspired detective force are still giving an unconvincing impersonation of hounds with nose to ground. They return at intervals and ask us the same questions all over again. That’s all really. Or is it?”

“It’s a very neat résumé at all events,” said Alleyn. “But I’m afraid I shall have to imitate my detested colleagues and ask a great many questions.”

“I am resigned.”

“Good. First, then, is your household unchanged since Mrs. Rubrick’s death?”

“Arthur died of heart trouble three months after she disappeared. We’ve acquired a housekeeper, an elderly cousin of Arthur’s, called Mrs. Aceworthy, who quarrels with the outside men and preserves the proprieties between the two girls, Douglas and myself. Otherwise there’s been no change.”

“Yourself,” said Alleyn, counting. “Captain Grace, who is Mrs. Rubrick’s nephew, Miss Ursula Harme, her ward, and Miss Terence Lynne, her secretary. What about servants?”

“A cook, Mrs. Duck, if you’ll believe me, who has been at Mount Moon for fifteen years, and a man-servant Markins, whom Flossie acquired in a fashion to be related hereafter. He’s a phenomenon. Men-servants are practically nonexistent in this country.”