“And what about the outside staff at that time? As far as I can remember there was Mr. Thomas Johns, the manager, his wife and his son Cliff, an odd man — is roustabout the right word? — called Albert Black, three shepherds, five visiting shearers, a wool classer, three boys, two gardeners, a cow-man and a station cook. Right?”
“Correct, even to the cow-man. I need tell you nothing, I see.”
“On the night of the disappearance, the shearers, the gardeners, the boys, the station cook, the classer, the shepherds and the cow-man were all at an entertainment held some fifteen miles away?”
“Dance at the Social Hall, Lakeside. It’s across the flat on the main road,” said Fabian, jerking his head at the vast emptiness of the plateau. “Arthur let them take the station lorry. We had more petrol in those days.”
“That leaves the house-party, the Johns family, Mrs. Duck, the roustabout, and Markins?”
“Exactly.”
Alleyn clasped his long hands round his knee and turned to his companion. “Now, Mr. Losse,” he said tranquilly, “will you tell me exactly why you asked me to come?”
Fabian beat his open palm against the driving wheel. “I told you in my letter. I’m living in a nightmare. Look at the place. Our nearest neighbour’s ten miles up the road. What do you think it feels like? And when in January shearing came round again, there were the same men, the same routine, the same long evenings, the same smell of lavender and honeysuckle and oily wool. We’re crutching now and getting it all over again. The shearers talk about it. They stop when any of us come up, but every smoke-oh and every time they knock off it’s The Murder. What a beastly soft noise the word makes. They’re using the wool press of course. The other evening I caught one of the boys that sweep up the crutchings squatting in the press while the other packed a fleece round him. Experimenting. God, I gave them a fright, the little bastards.” He swung round and confronted Alleyn. “We don’t talk about it. We’ve clamped down on it now for six months. That’s bad for all of us. It’s interfering with my work. I’m doing nothing.”
“Your work. Yes, I was coming to that.”
“I suppose the police told you.”
“I’d heard already at Army Headquarters. It overlaps my job out here.”
“I suppose so,” said Fabian. “Yes, of course.”
“You realize, don’t you, that I’m out here on a specific job? I’m here to investigate the possible leakage of information to the enemy. My peace-time job as a C.I.D. man has nothing to do with my present employment. But for the suggestion that Mrs. Rubrick’s death may have some connection with our particular problem I should not have come. It’s with the knowledge and at the invitation of my colleagues that I’m here.”
“I got a rise with my bait then,” said Fabian. “What did you think of my brain child?”
‘They showed me the blueprints. Beyond me, of course. I’m not a gunner. But I could at least appreciate its importance and also the extreme necessity of keeping your work secret. It is from that point of view, I believe, that the suggestion of espionage has cropped up?”
“Yes. To my mind it’s an absurd suggestion. We work in a room that is locked when we’re not in it and the papers and gear — any of them that matter — are always shut up in a safe.”
“We?”
“Douglas Grace has worked with me. He’s done the practical stuff. My side is purely theoretical. I was at Home when war broke out and took an inglorious part in the now mercifully forgotten Norwegian campaign. I picked up rheumatic fever but, with an extraordinarily bad sense of timing, got back into active service just in time to get a crack on the head at Dunkirk.” Fabian paused for a moment as if he had been about to say something further but now changed his mind. “Ah well,” he said, “there it was. Later on still when I was supposed to be fairly fit they put me into a special show in England. That’s when I got the germ of the idea. I cracked up again rather thoroughly and they kicked me out for good. While I was still too groggy to defend myself, Flossie, who was Home on a visit, bore down upon me and conceived the idea of bringing her poor English nephew-in-law back with her to recuperate in this country. She said she was used to looking after invalids, meaning poor old Arthur’s endocarditis. I started messing about with my notion soon after I got here.”
“And her own nephew? Captain Grace?”
“He was actually taking an engineering course at Heidelberg in 1939 but he left on the advice of some of his German friends and returned to England. May I take this opportunity of assuring you that Douglas is not in the pay of Hitler or any of his myrmidons, a belief ardently nursed, I feel sure, by Sub-Inspector Jackson. He enlisted when he got to England, was transferred to a New Zealand unit, and was subsequently pinked in the bottom by the Luftwaffe in Greece. Flossie hauled him in as soon as he was demobilized. He used to work here as a cadet in his school holidays. He’s always been good with his hands. He’d got a small precision lathe and some useful instruments. I pulled him in. It’s Douglas who’s got this bee in his bonnet. He will insist that in some fantastic way his Auntie Flossie’s death is mixed up with our eggbeater, which is what we ambiguously call our magnetic fuse.”
“Why does he think so?”
Fabian did not answer.
“Has he any data—” Alleyn began.
“Look here, sir,” said Fabian abruptly. “I’ve got a notion for your visit. It may not appeal to you. In fact you may dismiss it as the purest tripe, but here it is. You’re full of official information about the whole miserable show, aren’t you? All those files! You know, for example, that any one of us could have left the garden and gone to the shearing shed. You may even have gathered that apart from protracted irritation, which God knows may be sufficient motive, none of us had any reason for killing Flossie. We were a tolerably happy collection of people. Flossie bossed us about but more or less we went our own way.” He paused and added unexpectedly: “Most of us. Very well. It seems to me that, as Flossie was murdered, there was something about Flossie that only one of us knew. Something monstrous. I mean something monstrously out of the character that I, for one, have conceived of as being ‘Flossie Rubrick’ —something murder-worthy. Now that something may not appear in any one of the Flossies that each of us has formed for his or her self, but to a newcomer, an expert, might it not appear in the collective Flossie that emerges from all these units put together? Or am I talking unadulterated bilge?”
Alleyn said carefully: “Women have been murdered for some chance intrusion upon other people’s affairs, some idiotic blunder that has nothing to do with character.”
“Yes. But in the mind of the murderer of such a victim she is forever The Intruder. If he could be persuaded to talk of his victim, don’t you feel that something of that aspect of her character in his mind would come out? To a sensitive observer?”
“I’m a policeman in a strange country,” said Alleyn. “You mustn’t try me too high.”
“At any rate,” said Fabian with an air of relief that was unexpectedly naïve, “you’re not laughing at me.”
“Of course not, but I don’t fully understand you.”
“The official stuff has been useless. It’s a year old. It’s just a string of uncorrelated details. For what it’s worth you’ve got it in these precious files. It doesn’t give you a picture of a Flossie Rubrick who was murder-worthy.”
“You know,” said Alleyn cheerfully, “that’s only another way of saying there was no apparent motive.”
“All right. I’m being too elaborate. Put it this way. If factual evidence doesn’t produce a motive, isn’t it at least possible that something might come out of our collective idea of Flossie?”
“If it could be discovered.”
“Well, but couldn’t it?” Fabian was now earnest and persuasive. Alleyn began to wonder if he had been very profoundly disturbed by his experience and was indeed a little unhinged. “If we could get them all together and start them talking, couldn’t you, an expert, coming fresh to the situation, get something? By the colour of our voices, by our very evasions? Aren’t those signs that a man with your training would be able to read? Aren’t they?”