Died in the Wool by Ngaio Marsh Page A

certain higher authority, and waited for the reply before she tackled Markins. Good Lord, that might have been the very letter she started writing while I was there!’
    â€˜I think,’ said Alleyn, ‘that I should have heard if she’d done that.’
    â€˜Yes,’ agreed Fabian. ‘Yes. After all, you are the higher authority, aren’t you?’
    Again there was a silence, an awkward one. Alleyn thought: Damn that boy, he’s said precisely the wrong thing. He’s made them self-conscious again.
    â€˜Well, there’s my case against Markins,’ said Douglas grandly. ‘I don’t pretend it’s complete or anything like that, but I’ll swear there’s something in it, and you can’t deny that after she disappeared his behaviour was suspicious.’
    â€˜I can deny it,’ said Fabian, ‘and what’s more I jolly well do. Categorically, whatever that may mean. He was worried and so were all of us.’
    â€˜He was jumpy.’
    â€˜We were all as jumpy as cats. Why shouldn’t he jump with us? It’d have been much more suspicious if he’d remained all suave and imperturbable. You’re reasoning backwards, Douglas.’
    â€˜I couldn’t stand the sight of the chap about the house,’ said Douglas. ‘I can’t now. It’s monstrous that he should still be here.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘Why is he still here?’
    â€˜You might well ask,’ Douglas rejoined. ‘You’ll scarcely credit it, sir, but he’s here because the police asked Uncle Arthur to keep him on. It was like this…’
    The story moved forward. Out of the narrative grew a theme of mounting dissonance, anxiety and fear. Five days after Florence had walked down the lavender path and turned to the left, the overture opened on the sharp note of a telephone bell. The post office at the Pass had a wire for Mrs Rubrick. Should they read it? Terence took it down. ‘Trust you are not indisposed your presence urgently requested at Thursday’s meeting.’ It was signed by a brother MP. There followed a confused and hurried passage. Florence had not gone north! Where was she? Inquiries, tentative at first but growing hourly less guarded and more frantic, long distance calls, calls to her lawyers, with whom she was known to have made an appointment, to hospitals and police stations, the abandonment of privacy following a dominion-wide SOS on the air; search parties radiating from Mount Moon and culminating in the sudden collapse of Arthur Rubrick; his refusal to have a trained nurse or indeed any one but Terence and Markins to look after him: all these abnormalities followed each other in an ominous crescendo that reached its peak in the dreadful finality of discovery. As this phase unfolded, Alleyn thought he could trace a change of mood in the little company assembled in the study. At first Douglas alone stated the theme. Then, one by one, at first reluctantly, then with increasing freedom the other voices joined in, and it seemed to Alleyn that after their long avoidance of the subject they now found ease in speaking of it. After the impact of the discovery, there followed the slow assembly of official themes: the inquest adjourned, the constant appearance of the police, and the tremendous complications of the public funeral: these events mingled like phrases of a movement until they were interrupted emphatically by Fabian. When Douglas, who had evidently been impressed by it, described Flossie’s cortège—‘there were three bands’—Fabian shocked them all by breaking into laughter. Laughter bubbled out of him. He stammered, ‘It was so horrible…disgusting…I’m terribly sorry, but when you think of what had happened to her…and then to have three brass bands…Oh, God, it’s so electrically comic!’ He drew in his breath in a shuddering