Died in the Wool Read Free Page A

stores for Mount Moon. The service car drove away to the south in its attendant cloud of dust. Alleyn and Losse took the road to Mount Moon.

    â€˜It’s a relief to me that you’ve come, sir,’ said Losse after they had driven in silence for some minutes. ‘I hope I haven’t misled you with my dark hints of espionage. They had to be dark, you know, because they are based entirely on conjecture. Personally I find the whole theory of espionage dubious, indeed I don’t believe in it for a moment. But I used it as bait.’
    â€˜Does anyone believe in it?’
    â€˜My deceased aunt’s nephew, Douglas Grace, urges it passionately. He wanted to come and meet you in order to press his case but I thought I’d get in first. After all it was I who wrote to you and not Douglas.’
    The road they had taken was rough, little more than a pair of wheel tracks separated by a tussocky ridge. It ran up to the foothills of the eastern mountains and skirted them. Far to the west now, midway across the plateau, Alleyn could still see the service car, a clouded point of movement driving south.
    â€˜I didn’t expect you to come,’ said Fabian Losse.
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜No. Of course I wouldn’t have known anything about you if Flossie herself hadn’t told me. That’s rather a curious thought, isn’t it? Horrible in a way. It was not long before it happened that you met, was it? I remember her returning from her lawful parliamentary occasions (you knew, of course, that she was an MP) full of the meeting and of dark hints about your mission in this country. “Of course I tell you nothing that you shouldn’t know but if you imagine there are no fifth columnists in this country…” I think she expected to be put on some secret convention but as far as I know that never came off. Did she invite you to Mount Moon?’
    â€˜Yes. It was extremely kind of her. Unfortunately, at the moment…’
    â€˜I know, I know. More pressing business. We pictured you in a false beard, dodging round geysers.’
    Alleyn grinned. ‘You can eliminate the false beard, at least,’ he said.
    â€˜But not the geysers? However, curiosity, as Flossie would have said, is the most potent weapon in the fifth-column armoury. Flossie was my aunt by marriage, you know,’ Fabian added unexpectedly. ‘Her husband, the ever-patient Arthur, was my blood uncle, if that’s the correct expression. He survived her by three months: Curious, isn’t it? In spite of his chronic endocarditis, Flossie, alive, did him no serious damage. Dead, she polished him off completely. I hope you don’t think me very heartless.’
    â€˜I was wondering,’ Alleyn murmured, ‘if Mrs Rubrick’s death was a shock only to her husband.’
    â€˜Well, hardly that,’ Fabian began and then glanced sharply at his guest. ‘You mean you think that because I’m suffering from shock, I adopt a gay ruthlessness to mask my lacerated nerves?’ He drove for a few moments in silence and then, speaking very rapidly and on a high note, he said: ‘If your aunt by marriage turned up in a highly compressed state in the middle of a wool bale, would you be able to pass it off with the most accomplished sang-froid? Or would you? Perhaps, in your profession, you would.’ He waited and then said very quickly, as if he uttered an indecency, ‘I had to identify her.’
    â€˜Don’t you think,’ Alleyn said, ‘that this is a good moment to tell me the whole story, from the beginning?’
    â€˜That was my idea, of course. Do forgive me. I’m afraid my instinct is to regard you as omniscience itself. An oracle. To be consulted rather than informed. How much, by the way, do you know?’
    Alleyn, who had had his share of precious young moderns, wondered if this particular specimen was habitually so disjointed in speech and manner. He knew