Died in the Wool

Died in the Wool
Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh returns to her New Zealand roots to transplant the classic country house murder mystery to an upland sheep station on South Island – and produces one of her most exotic and intriguing novels.One summer evening in 1942 Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband’s wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech – and disappears.Three weeks later she turns up at an auction – packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead…

NGAIO MARSH

Died in the Wool

Copyright (#ulink_8639acce-95b0-517e-a11a-139b5a2ccc10)

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Died in the Wool first published in Great Britain by Collins 1945

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1945

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Source ISBN: 9780006512394

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344581

Version: 2017-12-18

Contents

Title Page (#ueed0b92c-a7fd-5f0c-8cd0-4a519bb138b2)

Copyright (#u937f1bad-9e83-5578-85d5-59dbb773f482)

Cast of Characters (#u5d4a7dd3-a761-5978-9471-4195f61d36e1)

Prologue – 1939–1942 (#u21b5eac8-c2ea-5195-b0f9-8ffa8da1fc78)

1 Alleyn at Mount Moon (#u2ad6ab39-77ba-5a2d-8eb3-16fcd0ed71d9)

2 According to Ursula Harme (#u1a613a8a-3a6e-5dd9-934d-800299732e7c)

3 According to Douglas Grace (#ucfa7e12b-5817-599d-845c-deaf850fd66c)

4 According to Fabian Losse (#litres_trial_promo)

5 According to Terence Lynne (#litres_trial_promo)

6 According to the Files (#litres_trial_promo)

7 According to Ben Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)

8 According to Cliff Johns (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Attack (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Night Piece (#litres_trial_promo)

11 According to Arthur Rubrick (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue – According to Alleyn (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Cast of Characters (#ulink_2914c6d2-11eb-5d43-811a-d3fe993c4426)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_52e1421d-bd89-5ce4-b885-2012a5125ace)

1939.

‘I am Mrs Rubrick of Mount Moon,’ said the golden-headed lady. ‘And I should like to come in.’

The man at the stage-door looked down into her face. Its nose and eyes thrust out at him, pale, all of them, and flecked with brown. Seen at close quarters these features appeared to be slightly out of perspective. The rest of the face receded from them, fell away to insignificance. Even the mouth with its slighty projecting, its never quite hidden teeth, was forgotten in favour of that acquisitive nose, those protuberant exacting eyes. ‘I should like to come in,’ Flossie Rubrick repeated.

The man glanced over his shoulder into the hall. ‘There are seats at the back,’ he said. ‘Behind the buyers’ benches.’

‘I know there are. But I don’t want to see the backs of the buyers. I want to watch their faces. I’m Mrs Rubrick of Mount Moon and my wool clip should be coming up in the next half-hour. I want to sit up here somewhere.’ She looked beyond the man at the door, through a pair of scenic book-wings to the stage where an auctioneer in shirt-sleeves sat at a high rostrum, gabbling. ‘Just there,’ said Flossie Rubrick, ‘on that chair by those painted things. That will do quite well.’ She moved past the man at the door. ‘How do you do?’ she said piercingly as she came face-to-face with a second figure. ‘You don’t mind if I come in, do you? I’m Mrs Arthur Rubrick. May I sit down?’

She settled herself on a chair she had chosen, pulling it forward until she could look through an open door in the proscenium and down into the front of the house. She was a tiny creature and it was a tall chair. Her feet scarcely reached the floor. The auctioneer’s clerks who sat below his rostrum, glanced up curiously from their papers.

‘Lot one seven six,’ gabbled the auctioneer. ‘Mount Silver.’

‘Eleven,’ a voice shouted.

In the auditorium two men, their arms stretched rigid, sprang to their feet and screamed. ‘Three!’ Flossie settled her furs and looked at them with interest. ‘Eleven-three,’ said the auctioneer.

The chairs proper to the front of the hall had been replaced by rows of desks, each of which was labelled with the name of its occupant’s firm. Van Huys. Riven Bros. Dubois. Yen. Steiner. James Ogden. Hartz. Ormerod. Rhodes. Markino. James Barnett. Dressed in business men’s suits woven from good wool, the buyers had come in from the four corners of the world for the summer wool sales. They might have been carefully selected types, so eloquently did they display their nationality. Van Huys’s buyer with his round wooden head and soft hat, Dubois’s, sleek, with a thin moustache and heavy grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, old Jimmy Ormerod who bought for himself, screamed like a stallion, and turned purple in the face, Hartz with horn-rimmed glasses who barked, and Mr Kurata Kan of Markino’s with his falsetto yelp. Each buyer held printed lists before him, and from time to time, like a well-trained chorus-ensemble, they would all turn a page. The auctioneer’s recital was uninflected, and monotonous; yet, as if the buyers were marionettes and he their puppet-master, they would twitch into violent action and as suddenly return to their nervously intent immobility. Some holding the papers before their eyes, stood waiting for a particular wool clip to come up. Others wrote at their desks. Each had trained himself to jerk in a flash from watchful relaxation into spreadeagled yelling urgency. Many of them smoked continuously and Flossie Rubrick saw them through drifts of blue tobacco clouds.

In the open doorways and under the gallery stood groups of men whose faces and hands were raddled and creased by the sun and whose clothes were those of the country man in town. They were the wool-growers, the run-holders, the sheep-cockies, the back-countrymen. Upon the behaviour of the buyers their manner of living for the next twelve months would depend. The wool sale was what it all amounted to; long musters over high country, nights spent by shepherds in tin huts on mountain sides, late snows that came down into lambing paddocks, noisy rituals of dipping, crutching, shearing; the final down-country journey of the wool bales – this was the brief and final comment on the sheep man’s working year.