‘A reference, do you mean?’
‘Yes. He hadn’t actually been with these precious Kans. He says he was valet to an English artillery officer who’d picked him up in America. He says he was friendly with the Kans’ servants. He says that when his employer left Australia he applied to Kan for a job. But the Kans were winging their way to Japan. Markins said he’d like to try his luck in New Zealand and Kan remembered Flossie moaning about the servant problem in this country. Hence, the letter. That’s Kan’s story. The whole thing looks damned fishy to me. Markins, an efficient, well-trained servant, could have taken a job anywhere. Beyond the fact that he was born British but has an American passport we know nothing about him. He gave the name of his American employers but doesn’t know their present address.’
‘I think I should tell you,’ said Alleyn, ‘that the American employers have been traced for us and verify the story.’
This produced an impression. Fabian said, ‘Not Understood, or The Modest Detective! I take back some of my remarks about him. Only some,’ he added. ‘I still maintain that, taking him by and large, our Mr Jackson is almost certifiable.’
‘It makes no difference,’ Douglas said. ‘It proves nothing. My case rests on pretty firm ground, as I think you’ll agree, sir, when you’ve heard it.’
‘Do remember, Douglas,’ Fabian murmured, ‘that Mr Alleyn has seen the files.’
‘I realize that, but God knows what sort of a hash they’ve made of it. Now, I don’t want to be unnecessarily hard on the dead,’ said Douglas loudly; Fabian grimaced and muttered to himself; ‘but I look at it this way. It’s my duty to give an honest opinion, and I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that Aunt Floss liked to know about things. Not to mince matters, she was a very inquisitive woman, and what’s more she enjoyed showing people that she was in on everything.’
‘I know what you’re going to say next,’ said Ursula brightly, ‘and I disagree with every word of it.’
‘My dear girl, you’re talking through your hat. Look here, sir. When I got back from Greece and was marched out of the army and came here, I found Fabian doing a certain type of work. I needn’t be more explicit than that,’ said Douglas portentously and raised his eyebrows.
‘You’re superb, Douglas,’ said Fabian. ‘Of course you needn’t. Do remember that Mr Alleyn is the man who knows all.’
‘Be quiet, Losse,’ said Alleyn unexpectedly. Fabian opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘You’re a mosquito,’ Alleyn added mildly.
‘I really am sorry,’ said Fabian. ‘I know.’
‘Shall I go on?’ asked Douglas huffily.
‘Please do.’
‘Fabian told me about his work. He called it, for security reasons, the egg-beater. Fabian’s idea. I prefer simply the X Adjustment.’
‘I see,’ said Alleyn. ‘The X Adjustment.’ Fabian grinned.
‘And he asked me if I’d like to have a look at his notes and drawings and so on. As a gunner I was, of course, interested. I satisfied myself there was something in it. I’d taken my electrical engineering degree before I joined up, and was rather keen on the magnetic fuse idea. I need go no further at the moment,’ said Douglas with another significant glance.
Alleyn thought, ‘He really is superb,’ and nodded solemnly.
‘Of course,’ Douglas continued, ‘Auntie Floss had to be told something. I mean, we wanted a room and certain facilities, and so on. She advanced us the cash for our gear. There’s no electrical supply this side of the plateau. We built a windmill and got a small dynamo. Later on she was going to have the house wired, but at the moment we’ve only got the juice in the workroom. She paid for all that. We began to spend more and more time on it. And later on, when we were ready to show something to somebody in the right quarter, she was damned useful. She’d talk anybody into anything, would Flossie, and she got hold of a certain authority at army headquarters and arranged for us to go up north and see him. He sent a report Home and things began to look up. We’ve now had a very encouraging answer from – however! I need not go into that.’
‘Quite,’ said Alleyn. Fabian suddenly offered him a cigar which he refused.
‘Well, as I say, she was very helpful in many ways, but she did gimlet rather and she used to talk jolly indiscreetly at meal times.’
‘You should have heard her,’ said Fabian. ‘“Now, what do my two inventors think?” And then, you know, she’d pull an arch face and for all the world like one of the weird sisters in Macbeth, she’d lay her rather choppy finger on her lips and say, “But we mustn’t be indiscreet, must we?”’
Alleyn glanced up at the picture. The spare, wiry woman stared down at him with the blank inscrutability of all Academy portraits. He was visited by a strange notion. If the painted finger should be raised to those lips, that seemed to be strained with such difficulty over projecting teeth! If she could give him a secret signal: ‘Speak now. Ask this question. Be silent here, they are approaching a matter of importance.’
‘That’s how she carried on,’ Douglas agreed. ‘It was damned difficult, and of course everybody in the house knew we were doing something hush-hush. Fabian always said, “What of it? We keep our stuff locked up and even if we didn’t, nobody could understand it.” But I didn’t like the way Flossie talked. Later on, her attitude changed.’
‘That was after questions had been asked in the House about leakage of information to the enemy,’ said Ursula. ‘She took that very much to heart, Douglas, you know she did. And then that ship was torpedoed off the North Island. She was terribly upset.’
‘Personally,’ said Fabian, ‘I found her caution much more alarming than her curiosity. You’d have thought we had the Secret Death Ray of fiction on the stocks. She papered the walls with cautionary posters. Go on, Douglas.’
‘It was about three weeks before she was killed that it happened,’ said Douglas. ‘And if you don’t find a parallel between my experience and Ursy’s, I shall be very much surprised. Fabian and I had worked late on a certain improvement to a crucial part of our gadget, a safety device, let us call it.’
‘Why not,’ Fabian, ‘since it is one?’
‘I absolutely fail to understand your attitude, Fabian, and I’m sure Mr Alleyn does. Your bloody English facetiousness –’
‘All right. You’re perfectly right, old thing, only it’s just that all these portentous hints seem to me to be so many fancy touches. You know as well as I do that the idea of a sort of aerial magnetic mine must have occurred to countless schoolboys. The only thing that could possibly be of use to the most sanguinary dirty dog would be either the drawings or the dummy model.’
‘Exactly!’ Douglas shouted, and then immediately lowered his voice. ‘The drawings and the model.’
‘And it’s all right about Markins. He’s spending the evening with the Johns family.’
‘So he says,’ Douglas retorted. ‘Well, now, sir, on this night, three weeks before Aunt Floss was killed, I was worrying about the alteration in the safety device –’
His story did bear a curious resemblance to Ursula’s.
On this particular evening, at about nine o’clock, Douglas and Fabian stood outside their workroom door, having locked it up for the night. They were excited by the proposed alteration to the safety device which Fabian now thought could be improved still further. ‘We’d talked ourselves silly and decided to chuck it up for the night,’ said Douglas. He usually kept the keys of the workroom door and safe but on this occasion each of them said that he might feel inclined to return to the calculations later on that night. It was agreed that Douglas should leave the keys in a box on his dressing-table