‘Does it matter?’ she said harshly. ‘You then. You know where it is. Go and get it, but don’t let me see it in your hands.’
‘Before I go, there is one question. Why, when we discussed the search for the brooch, did you tell us you didn’t meet Arthur Rubrick in the long walk below the tennis court?’
‘I still say so.’
‘No, no. You’re an intelligent person. You heard what Losse and Grace said about the search. It was obvious you must have met him.’ He paused, and the memory returned to him of Fabian muttering: ‘Terry! Oh Lord, I do wish I hadn’t got up here. Silly old man!’ He sat on the wooden fender, facing Terence Lynne. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘there was an encounter, wasn’t there? A significant encounter? Something happened that would speak for itself to an observer at some distance.’
‘Who was it? Was it Douglas? Ursula?’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘If you know as much as this,’ she said, ‘you know, unless you’re trying to trap me, that he—he put his arms about me and kissed me. There’s nothing left. Everything has been coarsened now, and made common.’
‘Isn’t there something unsound in a happiness that fades in the light? I know this particular light is harsh and painful for you, but it is a passing thing. When it’s gone you will have your remembrances—’ He broke off for a moment and then added deliberately, ‘Whatever happens.’
She said impatiently: ‘Within the last hour, everything has altered. I told you. You don’t understand.’
‘I’ve got an inkling,’ he said. ‘Within the last hour there has been an attempt at a second murder. You think, don’t you, that I’m saying to myself: “This attempt follows, in character, the attack on Mrs Rubrick. Therefore it has been made by Mrs Rubrick’s assailant”.’
Terence looked attentively at him, a wary sidelong glance. She seemed to take alarm and rose quickly, facing him. ‘What do you mean…?’
‘You think,’ said Alleyn, ‘that because Arthur Rubrick is dead, I cannot suspect him of the murder of his wife.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
According to Arthur Rubrick
THERE WAS NOTHING further to be got from Terence Lynne. Alleyn went upstairs with her and stood in the open doorway while she fetched Arthur Rubrick’s diary from its hiding-place. She gave it to him without a word, and the last glimpse he had of her was of an inimical face, pale, framed in its loosened wings of black hair. She shut the door on him. He went downstairs and called Cliff Johns and Markins into the study. It was now ten o’clock.
Cliff was nervous, truculent, and inclined to give battle.
‘I don’t know why you want to pick on me again,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything, I couldn’t have done anything, and I’ve had just about enough of these sessions. If this is the Scotland Yard method, I don’t wonder at what modern psychiatrists say about British justice.’
‘Don’t you talk silly,’ Markins admonished him and added hurriedly: ‘Beg pardon, sir, I’m sure.’
‘It’s absolutely medieval,’ Cliff mumbled.
‘Now, see here,’ Alleyn said. ‘I heartily agree that you and I have had more than enough of these interviews. In the course of them, you have refused to give me certain information. I have now got that information from another source. I am going to repeat it to you and ask for your confirmation or denial. You’re in a difficult position. Indeed, it is my duty to tell you that what you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.’
Cliff wetted his lips. ‘But that’s what they say when—that means—’
‘It means that you’ll be well advised either to tell the truth or to say nothing at all.’
‘I didn’t kill her. I didn’t touch her.’
‘Let us start with this business of the whisky. Is it true that you caught Albert Black in the act of stealing it, and were yourself in the act of replacing it when Markins found you?’
Markins had moved behind Cliff to the desk. He sat at it, opened his pocket book and produced a stump of pencil from his waistcoat.
‘Anything to say about that?’ Alleyn asked Cliff. ‘True or untrue?’
‘Did he tell you?’
Alleyn raised an eyebrow. ‘I extracted it from his general manner. He admitted it. Why did you refuse to give this story to Mrs Rubrick?’
‘He wouldn’t hand it over until I promised. He’d have got the sack and might have got gaoled. A year before, one of the chaps on the place pinched some liquor. They searched his room and found it. She got the police on to him and he did a week in gaol. Albie was a bit tight when he took it. I told him he was crazy.’
‘I see.’
‘I told you it hadn’t anything to do with the case,’ Cliff muttered.
‘But hasn’t it? We’ll go on to the following night, the night Mrs Rubrick was murdered, the night when you, dog-tired after your sixteen-mile tramp, were supposed to have played difficult music very well for an hour on a wreck of a piano.’
‘They all heard me,’ Cliff cried out. ‘I can show you the music.’
‘What happened to that week’s instalment of the published radio programmes?’
As Cliff’s agitation mounted, he seemed to grow younger. His eyes widened and his lips trembled like a small boy’s.
‘Did you burn it?’ Alleyn asked.
Cliff did not answer.
‘You knew, of course, that the Art of Fugue was to be broadcast, followed by a Chopin Polonaise. You had started to work at the Bach and perhaps, while you waited for the programme to begin at 8.05 p.m., played the opening passages. You saw him playing, Markins, didn’t you?’
‘Yes sir,’ said Markins, still writing. Cliff started violently at the sound of his voice.
‘But at 8.05 you stopped and turned up the radio, which was probably already tuned to the station you wanted. From then, until just before your mother came, when you began to play again, the radio didn’t stop. But at some time during that fifty minutes you went to the wool-shed. It was almost dark when you came out. Albert Black saw you. He was drunk, but he remembered and when three weeks later Mrs Rubrick’s body was found and the police inquiry began, he used his knowledge for blackmail. He was afraid that when the whisky incident came to light, you would speak the truth. He drove a bargain with you. Now. Why did you go down to the wool-shed?’
‘I didn’t touch her. I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t know she was going to the shed. It just happened.’
‘You sat in the annexe with the door open. If, after you stopped playing and the radio took up the theme, you sat on the piano chair, you would be able to see down the track. You would be able to see Mrs Rubrick come through the gate at the end of the lavender path and walk up the track towards you. You’d see her turn off to the wool-shed and then she would disappear. I don’t for a moment suggest that you expected to see her. You couldn’t possibly do so. I merely suggest that you did see her. The door was open, otherwise they would not have been able to hear the Bach from the tennis lawn. Why did you leave the Art of Fugue and follow her to the wool-shed?’
Watching Cliff, Alleyn thought: ‘When people are afraid, how little their faces express. They become wooden, dead almost. There’s only a change of colour and a kind of stiffness in the mouth.’
‘Is there to be an answer?’ he asked.
‘I am innocent,’ said Cliff, and this gracious phrase came straight from his lips.
‘If that’s true, wouldn’t it be wise to tell me the facts? Do you want the murderer to be found?’
‘I haven’t got the hunter’s nose,’ said Cliff harshly.
‘At least, if you’re innocent, you want to clear yourself.’
‘How can I? How can I clear myself when there’s only me to say what happened! She’s dead, isn’t she?’ His voice rose shrilly. ‘And even if the dead could talk, she might still bear witness against me. If she had a moment to think, to realize she’d been hit, she may have thought it was me that did it. That may have been the last thought that flash
ed up in her mind before she died—that I was killing her.’
As if drawn by an intolerable restlessness, he moved aimlessly about the room, blundering short-sightedly against chairs. ‘That’s a pretty ghastly idea to get into your head, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ he demanded, his back to Alleyn.
‘Then she was alive when you went into the shed? Did you speak to her?’
Cliff turned on him. ‘Alive? You must be crazy. Alive! Would I feel like this if I’d been able to speak to her?’ His hands were closed on the back of a chair and he took in a shuddering breath. ‘Now,’ Alleyn thought, ‘it’s coming.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been different,’ Cliff said rapidly, ‘if I could have told her I was sorry, and tried to make her believe I wasn’t a thief? That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t know she was going to the shed. How could I? I just wanted to hear the Bach. I started off thinking I might try playing in unison with the radio, but it didn’t work, so I stopped and listened. Then I saw her come up the track and turn off to the shed. I wanted suddenly to tell her I was sorry. I sat by the radio for a long time listening and thinking about what I could say to her. I couldn’t make up my mind to go. Then, almost without properly willing it, I got up and walked out, leaving the music still going. I went down the hill, turning the phrases over in my mind. And then…to go in—into the dark—expecting to find her there and…I actually called out to her, you know. I wondered what she could be doing, standing so quiet somewhere in the dark. I could hear the music quite clearly. I called out: “Mrs Rubrick, are you there?” and my voice cracked. It hadn’t broken properly then, and it cracked and sounded rotten. I walked on, deeper into the shadow.’
He rubbed his face with a shaking hand.
‘Yes?’ Alleyn said. ‘You went on?’
‘There was a heap of empty bales beyond the press. I was quite close to it by then. It was so queer, her not being there. I don’t know what I thought about. I don’t know really if I’d any sort of idea about what was coming, but it seems to me now that I had got a kind of intuition. Like one of those nightmares, when something’s waiting for you and you have to go on to meet it. But I don’t know. That may not be true. It may not have happened till my foot touched hers.’
‘Under the empty bales?’
‘Yes, yes. Between the press and the wall. They were heaped up. I think I wondered what they were doing there. I suppose it was that. And then, in the dark, I stumbled into them. It’s very queer, but I knew at once that it was Mrs Rubrick and that she was dead.’
‘What did you do?’ Alleyn said gently.
‘I jumped back and bumped into the press. Then I didn’t move for a long time. I wanted to but I couldn’t. I kept thinking: “I ought to look at her.” But it was dark. I stooped down and grabbed up an armful of bales. I could just see something bright. It was that diamond thing. The other one was lost. Then I listened and there wasn’t any sound. And then, I put down my hand and it touched soft dead skin. My arms threw the bales down without my knowing what they did. I swear I meant to go and tell them, I swear I never thought, then, of anything else. It wasn’t till I was outside and he called out that I had any other idea.’
‘Albert Black called out?’
‘He was up the track a bit. He was drunk and stumbling. He called out: “Hey, Cliff, what have you been up to?” Then I felt suddenly like—well, as if I’d turned to water inside. It’s a lie to say people think when things like this happen to them. They don’t. And you don’t control your body either. It acts by itself. Mine did. I didn’t reason out anything, or tell myself what to do. It wasn’t really me that ran uphill, away from the track and round the back of the bunkhouse. It was me, afterwards, thawing back into my body, going to the annexe and beginning to think with the radio still playing. It was me remembering the row we’d had and what I’d said to her. It was me switching off the radio and playing, when I heard the door of our house bang and the dogs start barking. It was me, next day, when nobody said anything, and the next and the next. And the next three weeks, wondering where they’d put it, and whether it was somewhere near. I thought about that much more often than I thought about who had done it. Albie had the wind up, he thought I’d say he’d taken the whisky, and they’d start wondering if he had a grudge against her. She’d wanted Mr Rubrick to sack him. When he was drunk he used to talk as if he’d give her the works. Then, when they found her, he talked to me just like you said. He thought I did it, he still thinks I did it, and he was afraid I’d try and put it across him and say he was tight and went for her.’
He lurched round the chair and flung himself clumsily into it. His agitation, until now precariously under control, suddenly mastered him and he began to sob, angrily, beating his hands on the chair arm. ‘It’s gone,’ he stammered. ‘It’s gone. I can’t even listen now. There isn’t any music.’
Markins eyed him dubiously. Alleyn, after a moment’s hesitation, went to him and touched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘it’s not as bad as all that. There will be music again.’
‘There’s as neat a case against that boy as you’d wish to see,’ said Markins. ‘Isn’t that right, sir? He’s signed a statement admitting he did go into the shed, and we’ve only his word for it that the rest of the yarn’s not a tarradiddle. D’you think they’ll take his youth into consideration and send him to a reformatory?’
Alleyn was prevented from answering this question by the entrance of Tommy Johns, white to the lips and shaking with rage.
‘I’m that boy’s father,’ he began, standing before Alleyn and lowering his head like an angry monkey, ‘and I won’t stand for this third degree business. You’ve had him in here and grilled him till he’s broke down and said anything you liked to put into his mouth. They may be your ways, wherever you come from, but they’re not ours in this country and we won’t take it. I’ll make a public example of you. He’s out there, poor kid, all broke up and that weak and queer he’s not responsible for himself. I told him to keep his trap shut, silly young tyke, and as soon as he gets out of my sight this is what you do to him. Has anything been took down against him? Has he put his name to anything? By God, if he has, I’ll bring an action against you.’
‘Cliff has made a statement,’ Alleyn said, ‘and has signed it. In my opinion it’s a true statement.’
‘You’ve no right to make him do it. What’s your standing? You’ve no bloody right.’
‘On the contrary I am fully authorized by your police. Cliff has taken the only possible course to protect himself. I repeat that I believe him to have told the truth. When he’s got over the effects of the experiment he may want to talk to you about it. Until then, if I may advise you, I should leave him to himself.’
‘You’re trying to swing one across me.’
‘No.’
‘You reckon he done it. You’re looking for a case against him.’
‘Without much looking, there is already a tenable case against him. At the moment, however, I don’t think he committed either of these assaults. But, as you are here, Mr Johns—’
‘You’re lying,’ Tommy Johns interjected with great energy.
‘—I feel I should point out that your own alibis are in both instances extremely sketchy.’
Tommy Johns was at once very still. He leant forward, his arms flexed and hanging free of his body, his chin lowered. ‘I’d got no call to do it,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to do it? She treated me fair enough according to her ideas. I’ve got no motive.’
‘I imagine,’ Alleyn said, ‘it’s a fairly open secret on the place that the work Captain Grace and Mr Losse have been doing together is of military importance. That it is, in fact, an experimental war job and, as such, has been carried out in secrecy. You also know that Mrs Rubrick was particularly interested in anti-espionage precautions.’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Tommy Johns began, but Alleyn interrupted him. ‘You don’t see a windmill put up at a considerable expense to provide an
electric supply for one room only, and that a closely-guarded workroom, without wondering what it’s in aid of. Mrs Rubrick herself seems to have adopted a somewhat obvious attitude of precaution and mystery. The police investigation was along unmistakable lines. You can’t have failed to see that they were making strenuous efforts to link up murder with possible espionage. To put it bluntly, your name appears in the list of persons who might turn out to be agents in the pay of an enemy power, and therefore suspects in the murder of Mrs Rubrick. Of course, there’s a far more obvious motive: anger at Mrs Rubrick’s attitude towards your son in the matter of the stolen whisky, and fear of any further steps she might take.’
Tommy Johns uttered an extremely raw expletive.
‘I only mention it,’ said Alleyn, ‘to remind you that Cliff’s “grilling” as you call it, was in no way peculiar to him. Your turn may come, but not tonight. I’ve got to start work at five, and I must get some sleep. You pipe down like a sensible chap. If you and your boy had no hand in these assaults, you’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said, blinking. ‘The wife’s had about as much as she can take,’ he added indistinctly, and looked at Alleyn from under his jutting brows. ‘Oh, well,’ he said.
‘Murder takes it out of all hands,’ Alleyn murmured, piloting him to the door. Johns halted in front of Markins. ‘What’s he doing in here?’ he demanded.
‘I’m OK, Tommy,’ said Markins. ‘Don’t start in on me now.’
‘I haven’t forgot it was you that put the boy away with her in the first instance,’ said Johns. ‘The boy asked us not to let it make an unpleasantness, so we didn’t. But I haven’t forgot. You’re the fancy witness in this outfit, aren’t you? What’s he pay you for it?’