Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 5: Died in the Wool, Final Curtain, Swing Brother Swing. Ngaio Marsh
It came through a doorless opening from which a sacking curtain had been pulled back and through the open portholes that were exits for the sheep. From where Alleyn stood the shearers themselves were outlined with light and each sheep’s woolly coat had a bright nimbus. This strangely dramatic illumination focused attention on the shearing-board. The rest of the interior seemed at first to be lost in a swimming dusk. But presently a wool-sorter’s bench, ranked packs, and pens filled with waiting sheep took shape in the shadows and Alleyn was able to form a comprehensive picture of the whole scene.
For a time he watched only the shearers. He saw them lug sheep out of the pens by their hind legs and handle them with dexterity so that they became quiescent, voluptuously quiescent almost, lolling back against the shearers’ legs in a ridiculous sitting posture, or suffering their necks to be held between the shearers’ knees while the mechanically-propelled blades, hanging from long arms with flexible joints, rolled away their wool.
‘Is this crutching?’ he asked.
‘That’s it. De-bagging, you might call it.’
Alleyn saw the dirty wool turn back in a wave that was cream inside and watched the quarter-denuded sheep shoved away through the portholes. He saw the broomies, two silent boys, sweep the dirty crutchings up to the sorter and fling them out on his rack. He saw the wool sorted and tossed into bins and finally he followed it to the press.
The press was in a central position, some distance from the shearing-board. It faced the main portion of the shed and actually looked, Alleyn thought, a little like an improvised rostrum. Here Flossie Rubrick was to have stood on the night of her wool-shed party. From here she was to harangue a mob of friends, voters, and fellow-high-countrymen, almost as quiescent as the shorn sheep. Alleyn sharpened his memory until it could encompass the figure of the woman with whom he had spoken for a few minutes. A tiny woman with a clear and insistent voice and an ugly face. A woman who wished to acquire him as a guest and from whom he had escaped with difficulty. He remembered her sharp stare and her rather too-self-confident manner. These recollections remained unchanged by last night’s spate of conflicting impressions and it was the wraith of the persistent little woman he had met whom he now conjured up in the dark end of the wool-shed. Where had she stood? From what direction had her assailant come?
‘She was going to try her voice, you know,’ said Fabian at his elbow.
‘Yes, but from where? The press? It was full of unpressed wool and open, when the men stopped work the previous night. Did she clamp down the pressing-lid or whatever it’s called and climb up?’
‘That’s what we’ve always supposed.’
‘Is the new press in exactly the same place?’
‘Yes. Under that red show ticket nailed up on the post.’
Alleyn walked past the shearing-board or floor. The wall opposite was a five-foot-high partition separating the indoor pens from the rest of the shed. Further along, behind the press, this wall was extended up towards the roof. At some time a nail had been driven through it from the other side and the point, now rusty, projected close to the wool-press. He stopped to look at it. The machines still thrummed and the sheep plunged and skidded as they were hauled out of the pens. The work went on but Alleyn thought that the men knew exactly what he was doing. He straightened up. Above the rusty nail there ran a cross beam in the wall on which anybody intending to mount the press might find foothold. Round the nail they had found a thread of Flossie’s dress material. The apex of the tear in her dress had been uppermost, so it had been caused by an upward pull. ‘As she climbed the press,’ thought Alleyn, ‘not when her assailant disposed of the body. It was too securely bound and the press opens from the front. He would truss the body, then clear the tramped wool out of the pack, leaving only the bottom layer, then open the front of the press and get the body into the bale, then would begin the repacking. But where was she when he struck her? A downward blow from behind near the base of the skull and grazing the back of the neck. Was she bent forward, her hands on the press? Stooping to free her dress? Was she in the act of climbing down from the press to speak to him, her feet already on the floor, her back towards him? That seemed most likely,’ he thought.
Near the wool-press a hurricane lantern hung from a nail in the wall. Further along, to the left, a rough candlestick hammered out of tin was nailed high up on a joist. It held a guttered stump of candle. A box of matches stood beside it. These appointments had been there at the time of the tragedy. Had Flossie lit the lantern or the candle? Surely. It was dusk outside and the wool-shed must have been in darkness. How strange, he thought, as the image of a tiny indomitable woman, lit fantastically, grew in his imagination. There she must have stood, in semi-darkness, shouting out the phrases of which Terence Lynne and Fabian Losse had grown weary, while her sharp voice echoed in the emptiness. ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ How far had she got? What did her assailant hear as he approached? Was he – or she – actually an audience, stationed by Flossie at the far end of the shed, to mark the resonant phrases? Or did he creep in under cover of the darkness and wait until she descended? With the branding iron grasped in his right hand? Behind her and to her right, the inside pens had been crowded with sheep waiting for the next day’s shearing, too closely packed to do more than shift a little and tap with their small hooves on the slatted floor. Did they bleat at all, Alleyn wondered, when Flossie tried her voice? ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ ‘Ba-a-a.’ From where he stood Alleyn could see slantwise through the five portholes and the open doorway at the end of the shearing-board. The sun was bright on the sheep-pens outside. But when Florence Rubrick stood on the wool-press it had been almost dark outside, the portholes must have been shut and the sacking curtain dropped over the doorway. The main doors of the shed had been shut that night and a heap of folded wool bales that had fallen across the floor, inside the main entrance, had not been disturbed. The murderer, then, had come in by this sacking door. Did Flossie see the sacking drawn aside and a black silhouette against the dusk? Or did he, perhaps, crawl in through one of the portholes, unobserved. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure …’
A whistle tooted. Each shearer finished crutching the sheep in hand and loosed it through a porthole. The engine stopped and the wool-shed was suddenly quiet. The noise from outside became dominant again.
‘Smoke-oh,’ Fabian explained. ‘Come and meet Ben Wilson.’
Ben Wilson was the sorter, boss of the shed, an elderly mild man who shook hands solemnly with Alleyn and said nothing. Fabian explained why Alleyn was there and Wilson looked at the floor and still said nothing. ‘Shall we move away a bit,’ Alleyn suggested, and they walked to the double doors at the far end of the shed and stood there, enveloped in sunshine and the silence of Ben Wilson. Alleyn offered his cigarette case. Mr Wilson said, ‘Ta,’ and took one.
‘It’s the same old story, Ben,’ said Fabian, ‘but we’re hoping Mr Alleyn may get a bit further than the other experts. We’re lucky to have him.’
Mr Wilson glanced at Alleyn and then at the floor. He smoked cautiously, sheltering his cigarette with the palm of his hand. He had the air of a man whose life’s object was to avoid making the slightest advance to anybody.
‘You were here for the January shearing when Mrs Rubrick was killed, weren’t you, Mr Wilson?’ asked Alleyn.
‘That’s right,’ said Mr Wilson.
‘I’m afraid you must be completely fed up with policemen and their questions.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And I’m afraid mine will be precisely the same set of questions all over again.’ Alleyn waited and Mr Wilson with an extremely smug expression, compounded, it seemed, of mistrust, complacency and resignation said, ‘You’re telling me.’
‘All right,’ said Alleyn. ‘Here goes, then. On the night of January 29th, 1942, when Mrs Rubrick was stunned, suffocated, bound, and packed into a wool bale in the replica of the press over there, you were in charge of the shed as usual, I suppose?’
‘I was over at Lakeside,’ Mr Wilson muttered as if the statement was an obscenity.
‘At the time she was