Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 5: Died in the Wool, Final Curtain, Swing Brother Swing

Merrywether’s reaction to his summons was disquieting. No sooner had Fabian spoken his introductory phrases than the presser turned pale and stared at Alleyn with an expression of panic.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t of come back on this job if it hadn’t of been for the war. That’s how it affected me. I’d have turned it up only for the war and there being a shortage. “Look,” I said to Mr Johns and Ben Wilson, I said: “not if it’s the same outfit,” I said. “You don’t get me coming at the Mount Moon job if it’s the same press again,” I said. Then they told me it was a new press and I give in. I come to oblige. Not willing, though. I didn’t fancy it and I don’t yet. Call me soft if you like, but that’s how I am. If anybody starts asking me about you know what, it catches me smack in the belly. I feel shocking. I don’t reckon I’ll ever shake it off. Now!’

Alleyn murmured sympathetically.

‘Look at it whatever way you like,’ Merrywether continued argumentatively, ‘and it’s still a fair cow. You think you’re mastering the sensation and then somebody comes along and starts asking you a lot of silly questions and you feel terrible again.’

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Alleyn said hurriedly, ‘there’s only one detail I’d like to check.’ He glanced at the bale hook which Merrywether still grasped in his pink freckled hand. Merrywether followed his glance. His fingers opened and the hook crashed on the floor. With clairvoyant accuracy he roared out: ‘I know what you mean and I never! It wasn’t there. I never touched it with the hook. Now!’ And before Alleyn could reply, he added: ‘You ask me why. All right. They’d dumped the hook on me. There you are! Deliberate, I reckon.’

‘Dumped it on you? The hook? Hid it?’

‘That’s right. Deliberate. Stuck it up on a beam over there.’ He gestured excitedly at the far wall of the shed. ‘There’s two of those hooks and that’s what they done with them. In that dark corner and high up, where I couldn’t see them. So what do I do? Go crook at the fleecies. Naturally. I get the idea they done it to swing one across me. They’re boys and they act like boys. Cheeky. I’d told them off the day before, and I reckoned they’d come back at me with this one. “You come to light with them two hooks,” I said, “or I’ll knock your blocks off for you.” Well, of course, they says they don’t know anything about it, and I don’t believe them and away we go. And by this time the bins are full and me and my mate are behind on our job.’

Alleyn walked over to the wall and reached up. He could just get his hand on the beam.

‘So you moved the bales without using hooks?’

‘That’s right. Now don’t ask me if we noticed anything. If we’d noticed anything we’d have said something, wouldn’t we? All right.’

‘When did you find the hooks?’

‘That night when we was clearing up, Albie Black starts in again on the boys, saying they never done their job, not filling up the kerosene lamps and fooling round with the candle. So we all look over where the lantern and the candle are on the wall and my mate says they’ve been swarming up the wall like a couple of blasted monkeys. “What’s that up there,” he howls. He’s a tall joker, and he walks across and yanks down the bale hooks off of the top beam. The boys reckon they don’t know how the hooks got up there, and we argue round the point till Tommy Johns has to bring up the matter of who the hell put his foot through his overall pants. Oh, it was a lovely day.’

‘When the bales were finally loaded on the lorry –’ Alleyn began, but at once Merrywether took fright. ‘Now, don’t you start in on me about that,’ he scolded, ‘I never noticed nothing. How would I? I never handled it.’

‘All right, my dear man,’ said Alleyn pacifically, ‘you didn’t. That disposes of that. Don’t be so damned touchy; I never knew such a chap.’

‘I got to consider my stomach,’ said Merrywether darkly.

‘Your stomach’ll have to lump it, I’m afraid. Who stencilled the Mount Moon mark on the bales?’

‘Young Cliff.’

‘And who sewed up the bales?’

‘I did. Now!’

‘All right. Now the bale with which I’m concerned was the first one you handled that morning. When you started work, it was full of wool that apparently had been trampled down but not pressed. You pressed it. You told the police you noticed no change whatever, nothing remarkable or unusual in the condition of the bale. It was exactly as you’d left it the night before.’

‘So it was the same. Wouldn’t I of noticed if it hadn’t been?’

‘I should have thought so, certainly. The floor, for instance, round the press.’

‘What about it?’ Merrywether began on a high note. Alleyn saw his hands contract. He blinked, his sandy lashes moving like shutters over his light eyes. ‘What about the floor?’ he said, less truculently.

‘I notice how smooth the surface is. Would that be the natural grease in the fleeces? It’s particularly noticeable on the shearing-board and round the press where the bales may act as polishing agents when they are shoved across the floor.’ He glanced at Merrywether’s feet. ‘You wear ordinary boots. The soles must get quite glassy in here, I should have thought.’

‘Not to notice,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘The floor was in its normal condition that morning, was it? No odd pieces of wool lying about?’

‘I told you –’ Merrywether began, but Alleyn interrupted him. ‘And as smooth as ever?’ he said. Merrywether was silent. ‘Come now,’ said Alleyn, ‘haven’t you remembered something that escaped your memory before, when Sub-Inspector Jackson talked to you?’

‘I couldn’t be expected – I was crook. The way he kept asking me how could I of shifted a pack with you-know-what inside it. It turned my stomach on me.’

‘I know. But the floor. Thinking back, now. Was there anything about the floor, round the press, when you arrived here that morning? Was it swept and polished as usual?’

‘It was swept.’

‘And polished?’

‘All right, all right, it wasn’t. How was I to remember, three weeks later? The way I’d got churned up over what, in all innocence, I done? It never crossed me mind till just now when you brought it up. I noticed it and yet I never noticed it if you can understand.’

‘I know,’ said Alleyn.

‘But, in pity’s name, Jack,’ cried Fabian, who had been silent throughout the entire interview, ‘what did you not notice?’

‘The floor was kind of smudged,’ said Merrywether.

III

In the men’s midday dinner hour, Fabian brought Cliff Johns to the study. Alleyn felt curious about this boy who had so unexpectedly refused the patronage of Florence Rubrick. He had asked Fabian to leave them alone together and now, as he watched the unco-ordinated movements of the youth’s hands, he wondered if Cliff knew that, in defiance of his alibi, he was Sub-Inspector Jackson’s pet among the suspects.

He got the boy to sit down and asked him if he understood the reason for the interview. Cliff nodded and clenched and unclenched his wide mobile hands. Behind him, beyond open windows, glared a noonday garden, the plateau, blank with sunshine, and the mountains, etherealized now by an intensity of light. Shadows on those ranges appeared translucent as though the sky beyond shone through. Their snows dazzled the eyes and seemed to be composed of light without substance. A nimbus of light rimmed Cliff’s hair. Alleyn thought that his wife would have liked to paint the boy, and would have found pleasure in reflected colour that swam in the hollow of his temples and beneath the sharp arches of his brows. He said: ‘Are you interested in painting as well as music?’

Cliff blinked at him and shuffled his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine is keen. Anything that – I mean – there aren’t so many people – I mean –’

‘I only asked you,’ Alleyn said, ‘because I wondered if it would be as difficult to express this extraordinary landscape in terms of music as it would be to do so in terms of paint.’ Cliff looked sharply at him. ‘I don’t understand music, you see,’ Alleyn went on. ‘But paint does say something to me. When I heard that music was your particular thing, I felt rather lost. The technique of approach through channels of interest wouldn’t work. So I thought I’d try a switch-over. Any good or rotten?’

‘I’d rather do without a channel of approach, I think,’ Cliff said. ‘I’d rather get it over, if you don’t mind.’ But, instead of allowing Alleyn to follow this suggestion, he added, half-shamefaced: ‘That’s what I wanted to do. With music, I mean. Say something about this.’ He jerked his head at the vastness beyond the window and added with an air of defiance, ‘And I don’t mean the introduction of native bird song and Maori hakas into an ersatz symphony.’ Alleyn heard an echo of Fabian Losse in this speech.

‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that the forcible injection of local colour is the catch in any aesthetic treatment of this country. There is no forcing the growth of an art, is there, and, happily, no denying it when the moment is ripe. Is your music good?’

Cliff sank his head between his shoulders and, with the profundity of the very young, said: ‘It might have been. I’ve chucked it.’

‘Why?’

Cliff muttered undistinguishably, caught Alleyn’s eye and blurted out: ‘The kind of things that have happened to me.’

‘I see. You mean, of course, the difference of opinion with Mrs Rubrick, and her murder. Do you really believe that you’ll be worse off for these horrors? I’ve always had a notion that, if his craft has a sound core, an artist should ripen with experience, however beastly the experience may be at the time. But perhaps that’s a layman’s idea. Perhaps you had two remedies: your music and’– he looked out of the windows –‘all this. You chose the landscape. Is that it?’

‘They wouldn’t have me for the army.’

‘You aren’t yet eighteen, are you?’

‘They wouldn’t have me. Eyes and feet,’ said Cliff, as if the naming of these members was an offence against decency. ‘I can see as well as anybody, and I can muster the high country for three days without noticing my feet. That’s the army for you.’

‘So you mean to carry on mustering the high country and seeing as far through a brick wall as the next fellow?’