Died in the Wool

Title Page

Copyright

Cast of Characters

Prologue – 1939–1942

1 Alleyn at Mount Moon

2 According to Ursula Harme

3 According to Douglas Grace

4 According to Fabian Losse

5 According to Terence Lynne

6 According to the Files

7 According to Ben Wilson

8 According to Cliff Johns

9 Attack

10 Night Piece

11 According to Arthur Rubrick

Epilogue – According to Alleyn

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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.