Died in the Wool

CHAPTER IV ACCORDING TO FABIAN

Sitting on the floor and hugging his knees, Fabian began his narrative. At first he stammered. The phrases tumbled over each other and his lips trembled. As often as this happened he paused, frowning, and, in a level voice, repeated the sentence he had bungled, so that presently he was master of himself and spoke composedly.

“I think I told you,” he said, “that I got a crack on the head at Dunkirk. I also told you, didn’t I, that for some weeks after I was supposed to be more or less patched up they put me on a specialized job in England? It was then I got the notion of a magnetic fuse for anti-aircraft shells, which is, to make no bones about it, the general idea behind our precious X Adjustment. I suppose, if things had gone normally, I’d have muddled away at it there in England, but they didn’t.

“I went to my job one morning with a splitting headache. What an admirably chosen expression that is—‘a splitting headache.’ My head really felt like that. I’d had bad bouts of it before and tried not to pay any attention. I was sitting at my desk looking at a memorandum from my senior officer and thinking I must collect myself and do something about it. I remember pulling a sheet of paper towards me. An age of nothingness followed this and then I came up in horrible waves out of dark into light. I was hanging over a gate in a road a few minutes away from my own billet. It was a very high gate, an eight-barred affair with wire on top and padlocked. The place beyond was army property. I must have climbed up. I was very sick. After a bit I looked at my watch. It’d missed an hour. It was as if it had been cut out of my mind. I looked at my right hand and saw there was ink on my fingers. Then I went home, feeling filthily ill. I rang up the office and I suppose I sounded peculiar because the army quack came in the next morning and had a look at me. He said it was the crack on my skull. I’ve got the report he gave me to bring out here. You can see it if you like.

“While he was with me the letter came.

“It was addressed to me by me. That gives one an unpleasant feeling at any time. When I opened it six sheets of office paper fell out. They were covered in my writing and figures. Nonsense they were, disjointed bits and pieces from my notes and calculations hopelessly jumbled together. I showed them to the doctor. He found it all enthralling and had me marched out of the army. That was when Flossie turned up.”

Fabian paused for a moment, his chin on his knees.

“I only had two other goes of it,” he said at last, rousing himself. “One was in the ship. I was supposed to be resting in my deck-chair. Ursy says she found me climbing. This time it was up the companion-way to the boat deck. I don’t know if I told you that when I caught my packet at Dunkirk I was climbing up a rope ladder into a rescue ship. I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s a connection. Ursy couldn’t get me to come down so she stayed with me. I wandered about, it seems, and generally made a nuisance of myself. I got very angry about something and said I was going to knock hell out of Flossie. A point to remember, Mr. Alleyn. I think I’ve mentioned before that Flossie’s ministrations in the ship were very agitating and tiresome. Ursy seems to have kept me quiet. When I came up to the surface she was there, and she helped me get back to my cabin. I made her promise not to tell Flossie. The ship’s doctor was generally tight so we didn’t trouble him either.

“Then the last go. The last go. I suppose you’ve guessed. It was on what your friend in the force calls the Night in Question. It was, in point of fact, while I was among the vegetable marrows hunting for Flossie’s brooch. Unhappily, this time Ursy was not there.”

“I suppose,” Fabian said, shifting his position and looking at his hands, “that I’d walked about, with my nose to the ground, for so long that I’d upset my equilibrium or something. I don’t know. All I do know is that I heard the two girls having their argument in the bottom path and then, without the slightest warning, there was the blackout, and, after the usual age of nothingness, that abominable, that disgusting sense of coming up to the surface. There I was at the opposite end of the vegetable garden, under a poplar tree, feeling like death and bruised all over. I heard Uncle Arthur call out: ‘Here it is. I’ve found it.’ I heard the others exclaim and shout to each other and then to me. So I pulled myself together and trotted round to meet them. It was almost dark by then. They couldn’t see my face which I daresay was bright green. Anyway they were all congratulating themselves over the blasted brooch. I trailed indoors after them and genteelly sipped soda-water while they drank hock and Uncle Arthur’s whisky. He was pretty well knocked up himself, poor old thing. So I escaped notice, except—”

He moved away a little from Ursula and looked up at her with a singularly sweet smile. “Except by Ursula,” he said. “She appeared to have noted the resemblance to a dead groper and she tackled me about it the next morning. So I told her that I’d had another of my ‘turns,’ as poor Flossie called them.”

“It’s so silly,” Ursula whispered. “The whole thing’s so silly. Mr. Alleyn is going to laugh at you.”

“Is he? I hope he is. I must say it’d be a great relief to me if Mr. Alleyn began to rock with professional laughter, but at the moment I see no signs of it. Of course you know where all this is leading, sir, don’t you?”

“I think so,” said Alleyn. “You wonder, don’t you, if in a condition of amnesia or automatism or unconscious behaviour or whatever it should be called, you could have gone to the wool-shed and committed this crime?”

“That’s it.”

“You say you heard Miss Harme and Miss Lynne talking in the bottom path?”

“Yes. I heard Terry say, ‘Why not just do what we’re asked? It would be so much simpler.’ ”

“Did you say that, Miss Lynne?”

“Something like it, I believe.”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “She said that! I remember.”

“And then I blacked-out,” said Fabian.

“Soon after you came to yourself again you heard Mr. Rubrick call out that he had found the diamond clip?”

“Yes. It’s the first thing I was fully aware of. His voice.”

“And how long,” Alleyn asked Terence Lynne, “was the interval between your remark and the discovery of the brooch?”

“Perhaps ten minutes. No longer.”

“I see. Mr. Losse,” said Alleyn, “you seem to me to be a more than usually intelligent young man.”

“Thank you,” said Fabian, “for those few unsolicited orchids.”

“So why on earth, I wonder, have you produced this ridiculous taradiddle?”

“There!” cried Ursula. “There! What did I tell you?”

“All I can say,” said Fabian stiffly, “is that I am extremely relieved that Mr. Alleyn considers pure taradiddle a statement upon which I found it difficult to embark and which was, in effect, a confession.”

“My dear chap,” said Alleyn. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you’ve had these beastly experiences. I spoke carelessly and I apologize. What I do suggest is that the inference you have drawn is quite preposterous. I don’t say that, pathologically speaking, you were incapable of committing this crime, but I do say that, physically speaking, on the evidence we’ve got, you couldn’t possibly have done so.”

“Ten minutes,” said Fabian.

“Exactly. Ten minutes. Ten minutes in which to travel about a fifth of a mile, strike a blow, and — I’m sorry to be specific over unpleasant details but it’s as well to clear this up — suffocate your victim, remove a great deal of wool from the press, bind up the body, dispose of it, and refill the press. You couldn’t have done it during the short time you were unconscious, and I don’t imagine you are going to tell me you returned later, master of yourself, to tidy up a crime you didn’t remember committing. As you know, these must have been the circumstances. You wore white flannels, I understand? Very well, what sort of state were they in when you came to yourself?”

“Loamy,” said Fabian. “Don’t forget the vegetable marrows. Evidently I’d collapsed into them.”

“But not woolly? Not stained in any other way?”

Ursula got up quickly and walked over to the window.

“Need we?” asked Fabian, watching her.

“Certainly not. It can wait.”

“No,” said Ursula. “We asked for it; let’s get on with it. I’m all right. I’m only getting a cigarette.”

Her back was towards them. Her voice sounded remote and it was impossible to glean from it the colour of her thoughts. “Let’s get on with it,” she repeated.

“You may remember,” said Fabian, “that the murderer was supposed to have used a suit of overalls belonging to Tommy Johns and a pair of working gloves out of one of the pockets. The overalls hung on a nail near the press. Next morning when Tommy put them on he found a seam had split and he noticed — other details.”

“If that theory is correct,” said Alleyn, “and I think that very probably it is, another minute or two is added to the time-table. You know you must have thought all this out for yourself. You must have thrashed it out a great many times. To reach the wool-shed and escape the notice of the rest of the party in the garden, you would have had to go round about, either through the house or by way of the side lawn and the yards at the back. You couldn’t have used the bottom path because Miss Lynne or Miss Harme would have seen you. Now, before dinner I ran by the most direct route from the vegetable garden to the wool-shed and it took me two minutes. In your case the direct route is impossible. By the indirect routes it took three and four minutes respectively. That leaves a margin, at the best, of about four minutes in which to commit the crime. Can you wonder that I described your theory, inaccurately perhaps but with some justification, as a taradiddle?”

“In England,” Fabian said, “after I’d had my first lapse, I went rather thoroughly into the whole business of unconscious behaviour following injuries to the head. I was—” his mouth twisted—“rather interested. The condition is quite well-known and apparently not even fantastically unusual. Oddly enough it’s sometimes accompanied by an increase in physical strength.”

“But not,” Alleyn pointed out mildly, “by the speed of a scalded cat going off madly in all directions.”

“All right, all right,” said Fabian with a jerk of his head. “I’m immensely relieved. Naturally.”

“I still don’t see—” Alleyn began, but Fabian, with a spurt of nervous irritation, cut him short: “Can you see, at least, that a man in my condition might become morbidly apprehensive about his own actions? To have even one minute cut out of your life, leaving an unknown black lane down which you must have wandered, horribly busy! It’s a disgusting, an intolerable thing to happen to you. You feel that nothing was impossible during the lost time, nothing!”

“I see,” said Alleyn’s voice quietly in the shadow.

“I assure you I’m not burning to persuade you. You say I couldn’t have done it. All right. Grand. And now, for God’s sake let’s get on with it.”

Ursula came back from the window and sat on the arm of the sofa. Fabian got to his feet, and moved restlessly about the room. There was a brief silence.

“I’ve always thought,” Fabian said abruptly, “that the Buchmanite habit of public confession was one of the few really indecent practices of modern times, but I must say it has its horrid fascination. Once you start on it, it’s very difficult to leave off. It’s like taking the cap off a steam whistle. I’m afraid there’s still a squeak left in me.”

“Well, I don’t pretend to understand—” Douglas began.

“Of course not,” Fabian rejoined. “How should you? You’re not the neurotic sort like me, Douglas, are you? I wasn’t that sort before, you know. Before Dunkirk, I mean. You were wounded in the bottom, I was cracked on the head. That’s the difference between us.”

“To accuse yourself of murder—”

“War neurosis, my dear Doug. Typical case: ‘Losse, F., First Lieut. Subject to attacks of depression. Refusal to discuss condition. Treatment: Murder in the family followed by psychotherapy (police brand) and Buchmanism. Patient evinced marked desire to talk about himself. Sense of guilt strongly manifested. Cure, doubtful.’ ”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Of course not. Sense of guilt aggravated by history of violent antagonism to victim. In fact,” said Fabian, coming to a halt before Alleyn’s chair, “three weeks before she was killed, Flossie and I had one hell of a row!”

Alleyn looked up at Fabian and saw his lips tremble into a sneer. He made a small breathy sound something like laughter. He wore the conceited, defiant air of the neurotic who bitterly despises his own weakness. Difficult, Alleyn thought, and damned tiresome. He’s going to treat me like an alienist. Blast! “And,” he said, “so you had a row?”

Ursula bent forward and put her hand in Fabian’s. For a moment his fingers closed tightly about hers and then, with an impatient movement, he jerked away from her.

“Oh, yes,” he said loudly. “I’m afraid, since I’ve started on my course of indecent exposure, I’ve got to tell you about that too. I’m sorry I can’t wait until we’re alone together. Very boring for the others. Especially Douglas. Douggy always pays. And I apologize to Ursula because she comes into it. Sorry, Ursy, very bad form.”

“If you mean what I think you mean,” said Douglas, “I most certainly agree. Surely Ursy can be left out of this.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Douglas,” Ursula said impatiently. “It’s what he’s doing to himself that matters.”

“And to Douglas, of course,” Fabian cut in loudly. “Don’t forget what I’m doing to poor old Douglas. He becomes the traditional figure of fun. Upon my word it’s like a fin de siècle farce. Flossie was the duenna of course, and you, Douglas, her candidate for the mariage de convenance. Ursy is the wayward heroine who shakes her curls and looks elsewhere. I, at least, should have the sympathy of the audience if only because I didn’t get it from anybody else. There is no hero, I go sour in the part. You ought to be the confidante, Terry, but I’ve an idea you ran a little sub-plot of your own.”

“I told you,” said Terence Lynne, clearly, “that if we started to talk like this, one, if not all of us, would regret it.”

Fabian turned on her with extraordinary venom. “But that one won’t be you, will it, Terry? At least, not yet.”

She put her work down in her lap. A thread of scarlet wool trickled over her black dress and fell in a little pool on the floor. “No,” she said easily, “it won’t be me. Except that I find all this talk rather embarrassing. And I don’t know what you mean by your ‘not yet,’ Fabian.”

“You will please keep Terry’s name…” Douglas began.

“Poor Douglas!” said Fabian. “Popping up all over the place as the little pattern of chivalry. But it’s no good you know. I’m hell-bent on my Buchmanism. And, really, Ursy, you needn’t mind. I may have a crack in my skull and seem to be a bit crazy, but I did pay you the dubious compliment of asking you to marry me.”

“It’s a further sidelight on Flossie,” Fabian said, “that the story is really significant,” and as he listened to it Alleyn was inclined to agree with him. It was also a sidelight, he thought, on the character of Ursula Harme, who, when she found there was no stopping Fabian, took the surprising and admirable line of discussing their extraordinary courtship objectively and with an air of judicial impartiality.

Fabian, it appeared, had fallen in love with her during the voyage out. He said, jeering at himself, that he had made up his mind to keep his feelings to himself: “Because, taking me by and large, I was not a suitable claimant for the hand of Mrs. Rubrick’s ward.” On his arrival in New Zealand he had consulted a specialist and had shown him the official report on his injury and subsequent condition. By that time Fabian was feeling very much better. His headaches were less frequent and there had been no recrudescence of the blackouts. The specialist took fresh X-ray photographs of his head, and, comparing them with the English ones, found an improvement at the site of injury. He told Fabian to go slow and said there was no reason why he should not make a complete recovery. Fabian, greatly cheered, returned to Mount Moon. He attempted to take part in the normal activities of a sheep station but found that undue exertion still upset him, and he finally settled down to work seriously on his magnetic fuse.

“All this time,” he said, “I did not change either in my feeling for Ursy or in my decision to say nothing about it. She was heavenly kind to me, which perhaps made things a little more difficult, but I had no idea, none at all, that she was in the least fond of me. I avoided anything like a declaration, not only because I thought it would be dishonest, but because I believed it would be useless and embarrassing.”

Fabian made this statement with simplicity and firmness, and Alleyn thought: He’s working his way out of this. Evidently it was necessary for him to speak.

One afternoon some months after his arrival at Mount Moon, Flossie had plunged upstairs and beat excitedly on the workroom door. Fabian opened it and she shook a piece of paper in his face. “Read that,” she shouted. “My Favourite Nephew! Isn’t it perfectly splendid!”

It was a cable taken down by Markins over the telephone, and it announced the imminent return of Douglas Grace. Flossie was delighted. He was, she repeated emphatically, her Favourite Nephew. “So sweet always to his old aunt. We had such high old times together in London before the war.” Douglas was to come straight to Mount Moon. As a schoolboy he had spent all his holidays there. “It’s his home,” said Flossie emphatically. His father had been killed in 1918, and his mother had died some three years ago when Douglas was taking a post-graduate engineering course at Heidelberg. “So he’s only got his old auntie,” said Flossie. “Your uncle says that if he’s demobilized he shall stay here as a salaried cadet. We don’t know how badly he’s been hurt, of course.” Fabian asked where Douglas had been wounded. “A muscular wound,” said Flossie evasively, and then added, “the glutœus maximus” and was deeply offended when Fabian laughed. But she was too excited to remain long in a huff, and Fabian saw that she hovered on the edge of a confidence. “Isn’t it fun,” she exclaimed, letting her lips fly apart over her prominent teeth, “that Ursy and Douglas should meet! My little A.D.C. and my Favourite Nephew. And you, of course, Fab. I’ve told Ursy so much about Douglas that she feels she knows him already.” Here Flossie gave Fabian a very sharp, gimlet-like glance. He came out, shut the workroom door and locked it. He felt a cold jolt of apprehension in the pit of his stomach, a dreadful turning-over. Flossie took his arm and walked him along the passage. “You’ll call me a silly, romantic old thing,” she began, and even in his distress he found time to reflect how irritating she was when she playfully assumed octogenarian whimsies. “It’s only a little dream of course,” she continued, “but it would make me so happy if they should come together. It’s always been a little plot of poor old Floosie’s. Now, if I was a French guardian and aunt…” She gave Fabian’s arm a little squeeze. “Ah, well,” she said, “we’ll see.” He received another gimlet-like glance. “He’ll be very good for you, Fab,” she said firmly. “He’s so sane and vigorous. Take you out of yourself. Ha!”

So Douglas arrived at Mount Moon, and presently the two young men began their partnership in the workroom. Fabian said, wryly, that from the beginning he had watched for an attraction to spring up between Ursula and Douglas. “Certainly Flossie made every possible effort to promote it. She left no stone unturned. The trips à deux to the Pass! The elaborate sortings-out. She displayed the virtuosity of Tommy Johns in the drafting yards. Ursy and Douglas to the right. Terry, Uncle Arthur and me to the left. It was masterly and quite shameless. One evening when, on the eve of one of her trips north, her machinations had been particularly blatant, Uncle Arthur called her ‘Pandora,’ but she missed the allusion and thought he was making a joke about her luggage.”

For a time Fabian had thought her plot was going to work and tried to accustom himself to the notion. He watched, sick with uncertainty, for intimate glances, private jokes, the small change of courtship, to develop between Ursula and Douglas and thought he saw them where they didn’t exist. “I was even glad to keep Douglas in the workshop because then, at least, I knew they were not together. I was mean and subtle but I tried not to be, and I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“I merely thought he was fed-up with me,” Ursula said to Alleyn. “He treated me with deathly courtesy.”

And then on a day when Fabian had one of his now very rare headaches, there had been a scene between them. “A ridiculous scene,” he said, looking gently at Ursula. “I needn’t describe it. We talked at cross-purposes like people in a Victorian novel.”

“And I bawled and wept and said if I irritated him he needn’t talk to me at all, and then,” said Ursula, “we had a magic scene in which everything was sorted out and it all looked as if it was going to be heaven.”

“But it didn’t work out that way,” Fabian said. “I came to earth and remembered I’d no business making love to anybody and, ten minutes too late, did the little hero number and told Ursy to forget me. She said no. We had the sort of argument that you might imagine from the context. I weakened, of course. I never was much good at heroics and— well, we agreed I should see the quack again and stand by what he told me. But we’d reckoned without our Floss.”

Fabian turned back to the fire-place and, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looked up at the portrait of his aunt.

“I told you she was as clever as a bagful of monkeys, didn’t I? That’s what this thing doesn’t convey. She was sharp. For example she was wise enough to avoid tackling Ursy about me, and, still more remarkable, she had denied herself, too, many heart-to-heart talks with Ursy about Douglas. I imagine what she did say was indirect, a building-up of allusive romantics. She was by no means incapable of subtlety. Just a spot or two of the Beatrice and Benedict stuff, and the merest hint that she’d be so so happy if ever — and then a change of topic… Like that, wasn’t it, Ursy?”

“But she would have liked it,” said Ursula unhappily. “She was so fond of Douglas.”

“And not so proud of me. From what you’ve heard already, Mr. Alleyn, you’ll have gathered that my popularity had waned. I wasn’t a good enough yes-man for Flossie. I hadn’t responded too well to her terrifying ministrations when she nursed me, and she didn’t really like my friendship with Uncle Arthur.”

“That’s nonsense,” Ursula said. “Honestly, darling, it’s the purest bilge. She told me it was so nice for Uncle Arthur having you to talk to.”

“You old innocent,” he said, “of course she did. She disliked it intensely. It was something outside the Flossie System, something she wasn’t in on. I was very fond of my Uncle Arthur,” Fabian said thoughtfully, “he was a good vintage, dry, with a nice bouquet. Wasn’t he, Terry?”

“You’re straying from the point,” said Terence.

“Right. After Ursy and I had come to our decision I tried to be very non-committal and unexalted, but I suppose I made a poor fist at it. I was — translated. I’m afraid,” said Fabian abruptly, “that all this is intolerably egotistical but I don’t see how that can be avoided. At any rate, Flossie spotted something was up. That eye of hers! You do get a hint of it in the portrait. It was sort of blank and yet the pupils had the look of drills. Ursy managed better than I did. She rather made up to you, Douglas, didn’t she, during lunch?”

The fire had burned low and the glowing ball of the kerosene lamp was behind Douglas, but Alleyn thought that he had turned redder in the face. His hand went to his moustache and he said in an easy, jocular voice: “I think Ursy and I understood each other pretty well, didn’t we, Ursy? We both knew our Flossie, what?”

Ursy moved uncomfortably. “No, Douglas,” she said. “I won’t quite take that. I mean — oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

“Come on, Douglas,” said Fabian with something of his former impishness, “be a little gent and take your medicine.”

“I’ve said a dozen times already that I fail to see what we gain by parading matters that are merely personal before Mr. Alleyn. Talk about dirty linen!”

“But, my God, isn’t it better to wash it, however publicly, than to hide it away, still dirty, in our cupboards? I’m persuaded,” said Fabian vigorously, “that only by getting the whole story, the whole complicated mix-up of emotions and circumstances sorted out and related shall we ever get at the truth. And, after all, this particular bit of linen is perfectly clean. Only rather comic, like Mr. Robertson Hare’s underpants.”

“Honestly!” said Ursula and giggled.

“Come on now, Douglas. Egged on by Flossie you did make a formal pass at Ursy that very afternoon. Didn’t you, now?”

“I only want to spare Ursy—”

“No you don’t,” said Fabian. “Come off it, Doug. You want to spare yourself, old cock. This is how it went, I fancy: Flossie, observing my exaltation, told you that it was high time you made a move. Encouraged by Ursy’s carryings-on at lunch — you overdid it a bit, Ursy — and gingered up by Flossie, you proposed and were refused.”

“You didn’t really mind, though, did you, Douglas?” asked Ursula gently. “I mean, it was all rather spur-of-the-momentish, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” said Douglas. “Yes, it was. But I don’t mean…”

“Give it up,” Fabian advised him kindly. “Or were you by any chance in love with Ursy?”

“Naturally. I wouldn’t have asked Ursy to be my wife…” Douglas began and then swore softly to himself.

“And with the wealthy aunt’s blessing why shouldn’t the good little heir speak up like a man? We’ll let it go at that,” said Fabian. “Ursy said her piece, Mr. Alleyn, and Douglas took it like a hero, and the next thing that happened was me on the mat before Flossie.”

The scene had been formidable and had taken place there, in the study. Flossie, Fabian explained, had contrived to give the whole thing an air of the grossest impropriety. She had spoken in a cold hushed voice. “Fabian, I’m afraid what I’m going to say to you is very serious and most unpleasant. I am bitterly disappointed and dreadfully grieved. I think you know what it is that has hurt me so much, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t an inkling so far, Aunt Flossie,” Fabian had answered brightly and with profound inward misgivings.

“If you think for a minute, Fabian, I’m sure your conscience will tell you.”

But Fabian refused to play this uncomfortable game and remained obstinately unhelpful. Flossie extended her long upper lip and the corners of her mouth turned down dolorously. “Oh, Fabian, Fabian!” she said in a wounded voice, and after an unfruitful pause she added: “And I put such trust in you. Such trust!” She bit her lip and shielded her eyes wearily. “You refuse to help me, then. I had hoped it would be easier than this. What have you been saying to Ursula? What have you done, Fabian?”

This persistent repetition of his name had jarred intolerably on his nerves, Fabian said, but he had replied without emphasis. “I’m afraid I’ve told Ursula that I’m fond of her.”

“Do you realize how dreadfully wrong that was? What right had you to speak to Ursy?”

There was only one answer to this. “None,” said Fabian.

“None,” Flossie repeated. “None! You see? Oh, Fabian.”

“Ursula returns my love,” said Fabian, taking some pleasure in the old-fashioned phrase.

Two brick-red patches appeared over Flossie’s cheekbones. She abandoned her martyrdom. “Nonsense,” she said sharply.

“I know it’s incredible, but I have her word for it.”

“She’s a child. You’ve taken advantage of her youth.”

“That’s ridiculous, Aunt Florence,” said Fabian.

“She’s sorry for you,” said Flossie cruelly. “It’s pity she feels. You’ve played on her sympathy for your bad health. That’s what it is. Pity,” she added with an air of originality, “may be akin to love, but it’s not love and you’ve behaved most unscrupulously in appealing to it.”

“I made no appeal. I agree that I’ve no business to ask Ursula to marry me and I said as much to her.”

“That was very astute of you,” she said.

“I said there must be no engagement between us unless my doctor could give me a clean bill of health. I assure you, Aunt Florence, I’ve no intention of asking her to marry a crock.”

“If you were bursting with health,” Flossie shouted, “you’d still be entirely unsuited to each other.” She elaborated her theme, pointing out to Fabian the weaknesses in his character — his conceit, his cynicism, his absence of ideals. She emphasized the difference in their circumstances. No doubt, she said, Fabian knew very well that Ursula had an income of her own and, on her uncle’s death, would be extremely well provided for. Fabian said that he agreed with everything Flossie said but that after all it was for Ursula to decide. He added that if the X Adjustment came up to their expectations he would be in a better position financially and could hope for regular employment in specialized and experimental jobs. Flossie stared at him. Almost, Fabian said, you could see her lay back her ears.

“I shall speak to Ursula,” she said.

This announcement filled him with dismay. He lost his head and implored her to wait until he had seen the doctor. “You see,” he told Alleyn, “I knew so well what would happen. Ursy, of course, doesn’t agree with me, but the truth is that for her Flossie was a purely symbolic figure. You’ve heard what Flossie did for Ursy. When Ursy was thirteen years old, and completely desolate, Flossie came along like a plain but comforting goddess and snatched her up into a system of pink clouds. She still sees her as the beneficent super-mother. Flossie had a complete success with Ursula. She caught her young. She loaded her down with a sense of gratitude and gingered her up with inoculations of heroine-worship. Flossie was, as people say, everything to Ursula. She combined the roles of adored form-mistress, queen-mother and lover.”

“I never heard such utter tripe,” said Ursula, quite undisconcerted by this analysis. “All this talk of queen-mothers! Do pipe down, darling.”

“I mean it,” Fabian persisted. “Instead of having a good healthy giggle about some frightful youth or mooning over a talkie idol or turning violently Anglo-Catholic, which is the correct behaviour in female adolescence, you converted all these normal impulses into a blind devotion to Flossie.

“Shut up, do. We’ve had it all out a dozen times.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if it had passed off in the normal way, but it became a fixation.”

“She was marvellous to me. I owed everything to her. I was decently grateful. And I loved her. I’d have been a monster if I didn’t. You and your fixations!”

“Would you believe it,” said Fabian, angrily addressing himself to Alleyn, “this silly girl, although she says she loves me, won’t marry me, not because I’m a bad bargain physically, which I admit, but simply because Flossie, who’s dead, screwed some sort of undertaking out of her that she’d give me up.”

“I promised to wait two years and I’m going to keep my promise.”

“There!” cried Fabian triumphantly. “A promise under duress if ever there was one. Imagine the interview. All the emotional jiggery-pokery that she’d tried on me and then some. ‘Darling little Ursy, if I’d had a baby of my own she couldn’t have been dearer. Poor old Floosie knows best. You’re making me so unhappy.’ Faugh!” said Fabian violently. “It’s enough to make you sick.”

“I didn’t think anybody ever said ‘Faugh’ in real life,” Ursula observed. “Only Hamlet: ‘And smelt so. Faugh!’ ”

“That was ‘Puh!’ ” said Alleyn mildly.

“Well, there you have it,” said Fabian after a pause. “Ursy went off the day after our respective scenes with Flossie. The Red Cross people rang up to know if she could do her sixty-hours hospital duty. I’ve always considered that Flossie arranged it. Ursula wrote to me from the hospital and that was the first I knew about this outrageous promise. And, by the way, Flossie didn’t commute the sentence into two years’ probation until afterwards. At first she exacted a straight-out pledge that Ursy would give me up altogether. The alteration was due, I fancy, to my uncle.”

“You confided in him?” Alleyn asked.

“He found out for himself. He was extraordinarily perceptive. He seemed to me,” said Fabian, “to resemble some instrument. He would catch and echo in himself, delicately, the coarser sounds made by other people. I suppose his ill health made for a contemplative habit of mind. At all events he achieved it. He was very quiet always. One would sometimes almost forget he was in the room, and then one would look up and meet his eye and know that he had been with one all the time; perhaps critically, perhaps sympathetically. That didn’t matter. He was a good companion. It was like that over this affair with Ursy. Apparently he had known all the time that I was in love with her. He asked me to come and see him while he was having his afternoon rest. It was the first time, I believe, that he’d ever asked me a direct question. He said: ‘Has it reached a climax, then, between you and that child?’ You know, he was fond of you, Ursy. He said, once, that since Flossie was not transparent he could hardly expect that you would notice him.”

“I liked him very much,” said Ursula defensively, “he was just so quiet that somehow one didn’t notice him.”

“I told him the whole story. It was one of his bad days. He was breathing short and I was afraid I’d tire him but he made me go on. When I’d finished he asked me what we were going to do if the doctor didn’t give me a clean bill. I said I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter much because Flossie was going to take a stand about it and I was afraid of her influence over Ursy. He said he believed that might be overcome. I thought then that perhaps he meant to tackle Flossie. I still think that he may have been responsible for her suddenly commuting the life sentence into a mere two years, but of course her row with Douglas over Markins may have had something to do with it. You were never quite the same hot favourite after that, were you, Douglas?”

“Not quite,” Douglas agreed sadly.

“Perhaps it was a bit of both,” Fabian continued. “But I fancy Uncle Arthur did tackle her. Before I left him he said with that wheezy little laugh of his: ‘It takes a strong man to be a weak husband. Matrimonially speaking a condition of perpetual apology is difficult to sustain. I’ve failed signally in the role.’ I think I know what he meant, don’t you, Terry?”

“I?” said Terence. “Why do you ask me?”

“Because, unlike Ursy, you were not blinded by Flossie’s splendours. You must have been able to look at them both objectively.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, but so quietly that perhaps only Alleyn heard her.

“And he must have been attached to you, you know, because when he became so ill you were the one he wanted to see.”

As if answering some implied criticism in this Douglas said: “I don’t know what we’d have done without Terry all through that time. She was marvellous.”

“I know,” said Fabian, still looking at her. “You see, Terry, I’ve often thought that of all of us you’re best equipped to look at the whole thing in perspective. Or are you?”

“I wasn’t a relation,” said Terence, “if that’s what you mean. I was an outsider, a paid employee.”

“Put it that way if you like. What I meant was that in your case there were no emotional complications.” He waited, and then, with a precise repetition of his former inflection, he added: “Or were there?”

“How could there be? I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”

“Not much in our line, is it, Terry?” said Douglas, instantly forming an alliance. “When it comes to all this messing about and holding post-mortems and wondering what everybody was thinking about everybody else, you and I are out of the picture, aren’t we?”

“All right,” said Fabian, “let’s put it to the authority. What do you say, Mr. Alleyn? Is this admittedly ragged discussion a complete waste of time? Does it leave you precisely where you were with the police files? Or has it, if only in the remotest degree, helped you along the path towards a solution?”

“It’s of interest,” Alleyn replied. “It’s given me something that no amount of poring over the files could have produced.”

“And my third question?” Fabian persisted.

“I can’t answer it,” Alleyn rejoined gravely. “But I do hope, very much, that you’ll carry on with the discussion.”

“There you are, Terry,” said Fabian, “it’s up to you, you see.”

“To do what?”

“To carry forward the theme to be sure. To tell us where we were wrong and why. To give us, without prejudice, your portrait of Flossie Rubrick.”

Again Fabian looked up at the painting. “You said you thought that blank affair up there was like her. Why?”

Without glancing at the portrait, Miss Lynne said: “It’s a stupid-looking face in the picture. In my opinion that’s what she was. A stupid woman.”