Died in the Wool (11 page)

‘Go on with the story, Douglas,' said Terence.

‘Wait,' said Fabian. ‘I've got to explain. It's my turn. I want to explain.'

‘No,' cried Ursula. ‘Please not.'

‘We agreed to tell him everything. I've got to explain why I can't join in this
nil nisi
stuff. It crops up at every turn. Let's clear it up and then get on with the job.'

‘No!'

‘I've got to, Ursy. Please don't interrupt, it's so deadly important. And, after all, one can't make a fool of oneself without some sort of apology.'

‘Mr Alleyn will understand.' Ursula appealed urgently to Alleyn, her hands still pressed down on Fabian's shoulders. ‘It's the war,' she said. ‘He was dreadfully ill after Dunkirk. You mustn't mind.'

‘For pity's sake shut up, darling, and let me tell him,' said Fabian violently.

‘But it's crazy. I won't let you, Fabian. I won't let you.'

‘You can't stop me,' he said.

‘What the hell is this about?' Douglas asked angrily.

‘It's about me,' said Fabian. ‘It's about whether or not I killed your Aunt Florence. Now, for God's sake, hold your tongue and listen.'

S
ITTING ON THE
floor and hugging his knees, Fabian began his narrative. At first he stammered. The phrases tumbled over each other and his lips trembled. As often as this happened he paused, frowning, and, in a level voice, repeated the sentence he had bungled, so that presently he was master of himself and spoke composedly.

‘I think I told you,' he said, ‘that I got a crack on the head at Dunkirk. I also told you, didn't I, that for some weeks after I was supposed to be more or less patched up, they put me on a specialized job in England. It was then I got the notion of a magnetic fuse for anti-aircraft shells, which is, to make no bones about it, the general idea behind our precious X Adjustment. I suppose, if things had gone normally, I'd have muddled away at it there in England, but they didn't.

‘I went to my job one morning with a splitting headache. What an admirably chosen expression that is: “a splitting headache.” My head really felt like that. I'd had bad bouts of it before and tried not to pay any attention. I was sitting at my desk looking at a memorandum from my senior officer and thinking I must collect myself and do something about it. I remember pulling a sheet of paper towards me. An age of nothingness followed this and then I came up in horrible waves out of dark into light. I was hanging over a gate in a road a few minutes away from my own billet. It was a very high gate, an eight-barred affair with wire on top, and padlocked. The place beyond was army property. I must have climbed up. I was very sick. After a bit I looked at my watch. I'd missed an hour. It was as if it had been cut out of my mind. I looked at my right hand and saw there was ink on my fingers. Then I went home, feeling filthily ill. I rang up the office and I suppose I sounded peculiar because the army quack came in the next morning and had a look at me. He said it was the crack on my skull. I've got the report he gave me to bring out here. You can see it if you like.

‘While he was with me the letter came.

‘It was addressed to me by me. That gives one an unpleasant feeling at any time. When I opened it, six sheets of office paper fell out. They were covered in my writing and figures. Nonsense they were, disjointed bits and pieces from my notes and calculations hopelessly jumbled together. I showed them to the doctor. He found it all enthralling and had me marched out of the army. That was when Flossie turned up.'

Fabian paused for a moment, his chin on his knees.

‘I only had two other goes of it,' he said at last, rousing himself. ‘One was in the ship. I was supposed to be resting in my deck-chair. Ursy says she found me climbing. This time it was up the companionway to the boat-deck. I don't know if I told you that when I caught my packet at Dunkirk I was climbing up a rope ladder into a rescue ship. I've sometimes wondered if there's a connection. Ursy couldn't get me to come down so she stayed with me. I wandered about, it seems, and generally made a nuisance of myself: I got very angry about something and said I was going to knock hell out of Flossie. A point to remember, Mr Alleyn. I think I've mentioned before that Flossie's ministrations in the ship were very agitating and tiresome. Ursy seems to have kept me quiet. When I came up to the surface she was there and she helped me get back to my cabin. I made her promise not to tell Flossie. The ship's doctor was generally tight so we didn't trouble him either.

‘Then the last go. The last go. I suppose you've guessed. It was on what your friend in the force calls the Night In Question. It was, in point of fact, while I was among the vegetable marrows hunting for Flossie's brooch. Unhappily, this time Ursy was not there.

‘I suppose,' Fabian said, shifting his position and looking at his hands, ‘that I'd walked about, with my nose to the ground, for so long that I'd upset my equilibrium or something. I don't know. All I do know is that I heard the two girls having their argument in the bottom path and then without the slightest warning there was the black-out and, after the usual age of nothingness, that abominable, that disgusting sense of coming up to the surface. There I was at the opposite end of the vegetable garden, under a poplar tree, feeling like death and bruised all over. I heard Uncle Arthur call out, “Here it is. I've found it.” I heard the others exclaim and shout to each other and then to me. So I pulled myself together and trotted round to meet them. It was almost dark by then. They couldn't see my face which I dare say was bright green. Anyway, they were all congratulating themselves over the blasted brooch. I trailed indoors after them and genteelly sipped soda water while they drank hock and Uncle Arthur's whisky. He was pretty well knocked up himself, poor old thing. So I escaped notice, except—'

He moved away a little from Ursula and looked up at her with a singularly sweet smile. ‘Except by Ursula,' he said. ‘She appeared to have noted the resemblance to a dead fish and she tackled me about it the next morning. So I told her that I'd had another of my Turns as poor Flossie called them.'

‘It's so silly,' Ursula whispered. ‘The whole thing's so silly. Mr Alleyn is going to laugh at you.'

‘Is he? I hope he is. I must say it'd be a great relief to me if Mr Alleyn began to rock with professional laughter, but at the moment I see no signs of it. Of course, you know where all this is leading, sir, don't you?'

‘I think so,' said Alleyn. ‘You wonder, don't you, if in a condition of amnesia or automatism or unconscious behaviour or whatever it should be called, you could have gone to the wool-shed and committed this crime?'

‘That's it.'

‘You say you heard Miss Harme and Miss Lynne talking in the bottom path?'

‘Yes. I heard Terry say, “Why not just do what we're asked. It would be so much simpler.” '

‘Did you say that, Miss Lynne?'

‘Something like it, I believe.'

‘Yes,' said Ursula. ‘She said that. I remember.'

‘And then I blacked out,' said Fabian.

‘Soon after you came to yourself again you heard Mr Rubrick call out that he had found the diamond clip?'

‘Yes. It's the first thing I was fully aware of. His voice.'

‘And how long,' Alleyn asked Terence Lynne, ‘was the interval between your remark and the discovery of the brooch?'

‘Perhaps ten minutes. No longer.'

‘I see. Mr Losse,' said Alleyn, ‘you seem to me to be a more than usually intelligent young man.'

‘Thank you,' said Fabian, ‘for those few unsolicited orchids.'

‘So why on earth, I wonder, have you produced this ridiculous tarradiddle?'

‘There!' cried Ursula. ‘There! What did I tell you.'

‘All I can say,' said Fabian stiffly, ‘is that I am extremely relieved that Mr Alleyn considers pure tarradiddle a statement upon which I found it difficult to embark and which was, in effect, a confession.'

‘My dear chap,' said Alleyn, ‘I don't doubt for a moment that you've had these beastly experiences. I spoke carelessly and I apologize. What I do suggest is that the inference you have drawn is quite preposterous. I don't say that, pathologically speaking, you were incapable of committing this crime, but I do say that, physically speaking, on the evidence we've got, you couldn't possibly have done so.'

‘Ten minutes,' said Fabian.

‘Exactly. Ten minutes. Ten minutes in which to travel about a fifth of a mile, strike a blow, and—I'm sorry to be specific over unpleasant details but it's as well to clear this up—suffocate your victim—remove a great deal of wool from the press, bind up the body, dispose of it, and refill the press. You couldn't have done it during the short time you were conscious and I don't imagine you are going to tell me you returned later, master of yourself, to tidy up a crime you didn't remember committing. As you know, those must have been the circumstances. You wore white flannels, I understand? Very well, what sort of state were they in when you came to yourself?'

‘Loamy,' said Fabian. ‘Don't forget the vegetable marrows. Evidently I'd collapsed into them.'

‘But not woolly? Not stained in any other way?'

Ursula got up quickly and walked over to the window.

‘Need we?' asked Fabian, watching her.

‘Certainly not. It can wait.'

‘No,' said Ursula. ‘We asked for it; let's get on with it. I'm all right. I'm only getting a cigarette.'

Her back was towards them. Her voice sounded remote and it was impossible to glean from it the colour of her thoughts. ‘Let's get on with it,' she repeated.

‘You may remember,' said Fabian, ‘that the murderer was supposed to have used a suit of overalls, belonging to Tommy Johns and a pair of working gloves out of one of the pockets. The overalls hung on a nail near the press. Next morning when Tommy put them on he found a seam had split and he noticed—other details.'

‘If that theory is correct,' said Alleyn, ‘and I think that very probably it is, another minute or two is added to the timetable. You know, you must have thought all this out for yourself. You must have thrashed it out a great many times. To reach the wool-shed and escape the notice of the rest of the party in the garden, you would have had to go round about, either through the house or by way of the side lawn and the yards at the back. You couldn't have used the bottom path because Miss Lynne or Miss Harme would have seen you. Now, before dinner I ran by the most direct route from the vegetable garden to the wool-shed and it took me two minutes. In your case the direct route is impossible. By the indirect routes it took three and four minutes respectively. That leaves a margin, at the best, of about four minutes in which to commit the crime. Can you wonder that I described your theory, inaccurately perhaps but with some justification, as a tarradiddle?'

‘In England,' Fabian said, ‘after I'd had my first lapse, I went rather thoroughly into the whole business of unconscious behaviour following injuries to the head. I was—' his mouth twisted, ‘—rather interested. The condition is quite well known and apparently not even fantastically unusual. Oddly enough it's sometimes accompanied by an increase in physical strength.'

‘But not,' Alleyn pointed out mildly, ‘by the speed of a scalded cat going off madly in all directions.'

‘All right, all right,' said Fabian with a jerk of his head. ‘I'm immensely relieved. Naturally.'

‘I still don't see —' Alleyn began, but Fabian, with a spurt of nervous irritation, cut him short: ‘Can you see, at least, that a man in my condition might become morbidly apprehensive about his own actions? To have even one minute cut out of my life, leaving an unknown black lane down which you must have wandered, horribly busy! It's a disgusting, an intolerable thing to happen to you. You feel that nothing was impossible during the lost time, nothing!'

‘I see,' said Alleyn's voice quietly in the shadow.

‘I assure you I'm not burning to persuade you. You say I couldn't have done it. All right. Grand. And now, for God's sake let's get on with it.'

Ursula came back from the window and sat on the arm of the sofa. Fabian got to his feet, and moved restlessly about the room. There was a brief silence.

‘I've always thought,' Fabian said abruptly, ‘that the Buchmanite habit of public confession was one of the few really indecent practices of modern times but I must say it has its horrid fascination. Once you start on it, it's very difficult to leave off. It's like taking the cap off a steam whistle. I'm afraid there's still a squeak left in me.'

‘Well, I don't pretend to understand—' Douglas began.

‘Of course not,' Fabian rejoined. ‘How should you? You're not the neurotic sort like me, Douglas, are you? I wasn't that sort before, you know. Before Dunkirk, I mean. You were wounded in the bottom, I was cracked on the head. That's the difference between us.'