“They are signs,” Alleyn replied, trying not to sound too patient, “that a man with my training learns to treat with extreme reserve. They are not evidence.”
“No, but taken in conjunction with the evidence, such as it is?”
“They can’t be disregarded, certainly.”
Fabian said fretfully: “But I want you to get a picture of Flossie in the round. I don’t want you to have only my idea of her, which, truth to tell, is of a maddeningly arrogant piece of efficiency, but Ursula’s idea of a wonder-woman, Douglas’ idea of a manageable and not unprofitable aunt, Terence’s idea of an exacting employer — all these. But I didn’t mean to give you an inkling. I wanted you to hear for yourself, to start cold.”
“You say you haven’t spoken of her for six months. How am I to break the spell?”
“Isn’t it part of your job,” Fabian asked impatiently, “to be a corkscrew?”
“Lord help us,” said Alleyn good-humouredly, “I suppose it is.”
“Well then!” cried Fabian triumphantly. “Here’s a fair field with me to back you up. And, you know, I don’t believe it’s going to be so difficult. I believe they must be in much the same case as I am. It took a Herculean effort to write that letter. If I could have grabbed it back, I would have done so. I can’t tell you how much I funked the idea of starting this conversation, but, you see, now I have started there’s no holding me.”
“Have you warned them about this visitation?”
“I talked grandly about ‘an expert from a special branch.’ I said you were a high-up who’d been lent to this country. They know your visit is official and that the police and hush-hush birds have a hand in it. Honestly, I don’t think that alarms them much. At first, I suppose, each of us was afraid — personally afraid, I mean, afraid that we should be suspected. But I don’t think we four ever suspected each other. In that one thing we are agreed. And, would you believe it, as the weeks went on and the police interrogation persisted, we got just plain bored. Bored to exhaustion. Bored to the last nerve. Then it stopped, and instead of Flossie’s death fading a bit, it grew into a bogey that none of us talked about. We could see each other thinking of it and a nightmarish sort of watching game set in. In a funny kind of way I think they were relieved when I told them what I’d done. They know of course that your visit has something to do with our X Adjustment.”
“So they also know about your X Adjustment?”
“Only very vaguely, except Douglas. Just that it’s rather special. That couldn’t be helped.”
Alleyn stared out at the clear and uncompromising landscape. “It’s a rum go,” he said, and after a moment: “Have you thought carefully about this? Do you realize you’re starting something you may want to stop and — not be able to stop?”
“I’ve thought about it ad nauseam.”
“I think I ought to warn you. I’m a bit of state machinery. Anyone can start me up but only the state can switch me off.”
“O.K.”
“Well,” Alleyn said, “you have been warned.”
“At least,” said Fabian, “I’ll give you a good dinner.”
“Then you’re my host?”
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Arthur left Mount Moon to me and Flossie left her money to Douglas. You might say we were joint hosts,” said Fabian.
Mount Moon homestead was eighty years old and that is a great age for a house in the Antipodes. It had been built by Arthur Rubrick’s grandfather, from wood transported over the Pass in bullock wagons. It was originally a four-roomed cottage, but room after room had been added, at a rate about twice as slow as that achieved by the intrepid Mrs. Rubrick of those days in adding child after child to her husband’s quiver. The house bore a dim family resemblance to the Somersetshire seat which Arthur’s grandfather had thankfully relinquished to a less adventurous brother. Victorian gables and the inevitable conservatory, together with lesser family portraits and surplus pieces of furniture, traced unmistakably the family’s English origin. The garden had been laid out in a nostalgic mood, at considerable expense and with a bland disregard for the climate of the plateau. Of the trees old Rubrick had planted, only Lombardy poplars, Pinus insignis and a few natives had flourished. The tennis lawn, carved out of the tussocky hill-side, turned yellow and dusty during summer. The pleached walks of Somerset had been in part realized with hardy ramblers and, where these failed, with clipped fences of poplar. The dining-room windows looked down upon a queer transformation of what had been originally an essentially English conception of a well-planned garden. But beyond this unconvincing piece of pastiche— what uncompromising vastness! The plateau swam away into an illimitable haze of purple, its boundaries mingled with clouds. Above the cloud, suspended it seemed in a tincture of rose, floated the great mountains.
At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly lit wood in the open fire-places.
He considered once again the inmates of the home.
Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent, neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of land girl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousy.
Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs. Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.
“I am a New Zealander,” said Miss Harme, “but all my relations — I haven’t any close relations except my uncle— live in England. Aunt Flossie — she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that — was better than any real relation could have been.”
She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that, though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked, her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.
The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse — his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair — was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean, but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn “sir” each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.