at once began to protest that this was unfair, that nobody could have been fonder of his aunt than he was, that he used to pull her leg when she was alive and that she liked it. He was flustered and affronted and the others listened to him in an uncomfortable silence. ‘If we’ve got to talk about her,’ Douglas said hotly, ‘for God’s sake let’s be honest. We were all fond of her, weren’t we?’ Fabian hunched up his shoulders but said nothing. ‘We all took a pretty solid knock when she was murdered, didn’t we? We all agreed that Fabian should ask Mr Alleyn to come? All right. If we’ve got to hold a post-mortem on her character which, personally, seems to me to be a waste of time, I suppose we’re meant to say what we think.’
‘Certainly,’ said Fabian. ‘Unburden the bosom, work off the inhibitions. But it’s Ursy’s innings at the moment, isn’t it?’
‘You interrupted her, Fab.’
‘Did I? I’m sorry, Ursy,’ said Fabian gently. He slewed round – put his chin on the arm of her chair and looked up comically at her.
‘I’m ashamed of you,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Please go on. You’d got roughly to 1941 with Flossie in the full flush of her parliamentary career, you know. Here we were, Mr Alleyn. Douglas, recovered from his wound but passed unfit for further service, going the rounds of a kind of superior Shepherd’s Calendar. Terry, building up Flossie’s prestige with copious shorthand notes and cross-references. Ursula –’ He broke off for a moment. ‘Ursula provided enchantment,’ he said lightly, ‘and I, comedy. I fell off horses and collapsed at high altitudes, and fainted into sheep-dips. Perhaps these antics brought me en rapport with my unfortunate uncle who, at the same time, was fighting his own endocarditic battle. Carry on, Ursy.’
‘Carry on with what? What’s the good of my trying to give my picture of her when you all – when you all –’ Her voice wavered for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said more firmly. ‘The idea is that we each give our own account of the whole thing, isn’t it? The same account that I’ve bleated out at dictation speed to that monumental bore from the detective’s office. All right.’
‘One moment,’ said Alleyn’s voice out of the shadows.
He saw the four heads turn to him in the firelight.
‘There’s this difference,’ he said. ‘If I know anything of police routine you were continually stopped by questions. At the moment I don’t want to nail you down to an interrogation. I want you, if you can manage to do so, to talk about this tragedy as if you spoke of it for the first time. You realize, don’t you, that I’ve not come here, primarily, to arrest a murderer. I’ve been sent to try and discover if this particular crime has anything to do with unlawful behaviour in time of war.’
‘Exactly,’ said Douglas Grace. ‘Exactly, sir. And in my humble opinion,’ he added, stroking the back of his head, ‘it most undoubtedly has. However!’
‘All in good time,’ said Alleyn. ‘Now, Miss Harme, you’ve given us a clear picture of a rather isolated little community up to, let us say, something over a year ago. At the close of 1941 Mrs Rubrick is much occupied by her public duties, with Miss Lynne as her secretary. Captain Grace is a cadet on this sheep station. Mr Losse is recuperating and has begun, with Captain Grace’s help, to do some very specialized work. Mr Rubrick is a confirmed invalid. You are all fed by Mrs Duck, the cook, and attended by Markins, the houseman. What are you doing?’
‘Me?’ Ursula shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m nothing in particular. Auntie Florence called me her ADC. I helped wherever I could and did my VAD training in between. It was fun – something going to happen all the time. I adore that,’ cried Ursula. ‘To have events waiting for me like little presents in a treasure-hunt. She made everything exciting, all her events were tied up in gala wrappings with red ribbon. It was Heaven.’
‘Like the party that was to be held in the wool-shed?’ asked Fabian dryly.
‘Oh dear!’ said Ursula, catching her breath. ‘Yes. Like that one. I remember –’
III
The picture of that warm summer evening of fifteen months ago grew as she spoke of it. Alleyn, remembering his view through the dining-room window of a darkling garden, saw the shadowy company move along a lavender path and assemble on the lawn. The light dresses of the women glimmered in the dusk. Lancelike flames burned steadily as they lit cigarettes. They drew deck-chairs together. One of the women threw a coat of some thin texture over the back of her chair. A tall personable young man leant over the back in an attitude of somewhat studied gallantry. The smell of tobacco mingled with that of night-scented stocks and of earth and tussock that had not yet lost all warmth of the sun. It was the hour when sounds take on a significant clearness and the senses are sharpened to receive them. The voices of the party drifted vaguely yet profoundly across the dusk. Ursula could remember it very clearly.
‘You must be tired, Aunt Florence,’ she had said.
‘I don’t let myself be tired,’ answered that brave voice. ‘One mustn’t think about fatigue, Ursy, one must nurse a secret store of energy.’ And she spoke of Indian ascetics and their mastery of fatigue and of munition workers in England and of air-raid wardens. ‘If they can do so much surely I, with my humdrum old routine, can jog along at a decent trot.’ She stretched out her bare arms and strong hands to the girls on each side of her: ‘And with my Second Brain and my kind little ADC to back me up,’ she cried cheerfully, ‘what can I not do?’
Ursula slipped down to the warm dry grass and leant her cheek against her guardian’s knee. Her guardian’s vigorous fingers caressed rather thoroughly the hair which Ursula had been at some expense to have set on a three days’ visit down-country.
‘Let’s make a plan,’ said Aunt Florence.
It was a phrase Ursula loved. It was the prelude to adventure. It didn’t matter that the plan was concerned with nothing more exciting than a party in the wool-shed which would be attended by back-country men and their womenkind, dressed unhappily in co-operative store clothes, and by a sprinkling of such runholders as had enough enthusiasm and petrol to bring them many miles to Mount Moon. Aunt Florence invested it all in a pink cloud of anticipation. Even Douglas became enthusiastic and, leaning over the back of Flossie’s chair, began to make suggestions. Why not a dance? he asked, looking at Terence Lynne. Florence agreed. There would be a dance. Old Jimmy Wyke and his brothers who played accordions must practise together and take turn about with the radio-gramophone.
‘You ought to take that old piano over from the annexe,’ said Arthur Rubrick in his tired breathless voice, ‘and get young Cliff Johns to join forces with the others. He’s extraordinarily good. Play anything. Listen to him now.’
It was an unfortunate suggestion and Ursula felt the caressing fingers stiffen. As she recalled this moment, fifteen months later, for Alleyn, he heard her story recede backwards, into the past, and this quality, he realized, would be characteristic of all the stories he was to hear. They would dive backwards from the moment on the lawn into the events that foreshadowed it.
Ursula said she knew that Aunt Florence had been too thoughtful to worry Uncle Arthur with the downfall of young Cliff Johns. It was a story of the basest sort of ingratitude. Young Cliff, son of the manager, Tommy Johns, had been an unusual child. He had thrown his parents into a state of confusion and doubt by his early manifestations of aesthetic preferences, screaming and plugging his ears with his fists when his mother sang, yet listening with complacency for long periods to certain instrumental programmes on the wireless. He had taken a similar line over pictures and books. When he grew older and was collected in a lorry every morning and taken to a minute pink-painted State school out on the plateau, he developed a talent for writing florid compositions which changed their style with each new book he read, and much too fast for the comprehension of his teacher. His passion for music grew precociously and the schoolmistress wrote to his parents saying that his talent was exceptional. Her letter had an air of nervous enthusiasm. The boy, she said bravely, was phenomenal. He was, on the other hand, bad at arithmetic and games and made no attempt to conceal