‘So you mean to carry on mustering the high country and seeing as far through a brick wall as the next fellow?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Do you ever lend a hand at wool-sorting, or try to learn about it?’
‘I keep outside the shed. Always have.’
‘It’s a profitable job, isn’t it?’
‘Doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather go up the hill on a muster.’
‘And – no music?’
Cliff shuffled his feet.
‘Why?’ Alleyn persisted. Cliff rubbed his hands across his face and shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I told you I can’t.’
‘Not since the evening in the annexe? When you played for an hour or more on a very disreputable old instrument. That was the night following the incident over the bottle of whisky, wasn’t it?’
More than at anything else, Alleyn thought, more than at the reminder of Florence Rubrick’s death, even, Cliff sickened at the memory of this incident. It had been a serio-comic episode. Markins indignant at the window, the crash of a bursting bottle and the reek of spirits. Alleyn remembered that the tragedies of adolescence were felt most often in the self-esteem, and he said: ‘I want you to explain this whisky story, but, before you do, you might just remind yourself that there isn’t a creature living who doesn’t carry within him the memory of some particular shabbiness of which he’s much more ashamed than he would be of a major crime. Also that there’s probably not a boy in the world who hasn’t at some time or other committed petty larceny. I may add that I personally don’t give a damn whether you were silly enough to pinch Mr Rubrick’s whisky or not. But I am concerned to find out whether you told the truth when you said you didn’t pinch it, and why, if this was so, you wouldn’t explain what you were up to in the cellarage.’
‘I wasn’t taking it,’ Cliff muttered. ‘I hadn’t taken it.’
‘Bible oath before a beak?’
‘Yes. Before anybody.’ Cliff looked quickly at him. ‘I don’t know how to make it sound true. I don’t expect you to believe me.’
‘I’m doing my best, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if you’d tell me what in the world you were up to.’
Cliff was silent.
‘Not anything in the heroic line?’ Alleyn asked mildly.
Cliff opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘Because,’ Alleyn went on, ‘there are moments when the heroic line is no more than a spanner in the works of justice. I mean, if you didn’t kill Mrs Rubrick, you’re deliberately, for some fetish of your own, muddling the trail. The whisky may be completely irrelevant but we can’t tell. It’s a question of tidying up. Of course, if you did kill her, you may be wise to hold your tongue. I don’t know.’
‘But you know I didn’t,’ Cliff said, and his voice faded on a note of bewilderment. ‘I’ve got an alibi. I played.’
‘What was it you played?’
‘Bach’s Art of Fugue.’
‘Difficult?’ Alleyn asked and had to wait for a long time for his answer. Cliff made two false starts, checking his voice before it was articulate. ‘I’d worked at it,’ he said at last. ‘Now why,’ Alleyn wondered, ‘does he jib at telling me it was difficult?’
‘It must be disheartening work, slogging away at a bad instrument,’ he said. ‘It is bad, isn’t it?’
Again Cliff was unaccountably reluctant. ‘Not as bad as all that,’ he muttered and, with a sudden spurt: ‘A friend of mine in a music shop in town came out for a couple of days and tuned it for me. It wasn’t so bad.’
‘But nothing like the Bechstein in the drawing-room, for instance?’
‘It wasn’t so bad,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a good make. It used to be in the house here before – before she got the Bechstein.’
‘You must have missed playing the Bechstein.’
‘You can’t have everything,’ Cliff said.
‘Honour?’ Alleyn suggested lightly, ‘or concert grands? Is that it?’
He grinned unexpectedly. ‘Something of the sort,’ he said.
‘See here,’ said Alleyn. ‘Will you, without further ado and without me plodding round the by-ways of indirect attack – will you tell me the whole story of your falling out with Mrs Rubrick? You needn’t, of course. You can refuse to speak, as you did with my colleagues, and force me to behave as they did: listen to other people’s versions of the quarrel. Do you know that the police files devote two foolscap pages to hearsay accounts of the relationship between you and Mrs Rubrick?’
‘I can imagine it,’ said Cliff savagely. ‘Gestapo methods.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Alleyn said with such gravity that Cliff looked fixedly at him and turned red. ‘If you can spare the time,’ Alleyn went on, ‘I’d like to lend you a manual on police law. It would give you an immense feeling of security. You would learn from it that I am forbidden to quote in a court of law anything that you tell me about your relationship with Mrs Rubrick unless it is to read aloud a statement that you’ve signed before witnesses. And I’m not asking you to do that. I’m asking you to give me the facts of the case, so that I can make up my mind whether they have any bearing on her death.’
‘They haven’t.’
‘Very good. What are they?’
Cliff bent forward, driving his fingers through his hair. Alleyn felt suddenly impatient. ‘But it is the impatience,’ he thought, ‘of a middle-aged man,’ and he reminded himself of the enclosed tragedies of youth. ‘Like green figs,’ he said to himself, ‘closed in upon themselves. He is not yet eighteen,’ he thought, growing more tolerant, ‘and I bring a code to bear upon him.’ Then, since the habit was habitual with him, he disciplined his thoughts and prepared himself for another assault upon Cliff’s over-tragic silence. Before he could speak, Cliff raised his head and spoke with simplicity. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘In a way, it’ll be a relief. But I’m afraid it’s a long story. You see, it all hangs on her. The kind of woman she was.’
CHAPTER EIGHT ACCORDING TO CLIFF JOHNS
I
‘You didn’t know her,’ Cliff said. ‘That’s what makes everything so impossible. You don’t know what she was like.’
‘I’m learning,’ Alleyn said.
‘But it doesn’t make sense. I’ve read about that sort of thing, of course, but somehow I never dropped to it when it was happening to me – I mean not until it was too late to avoid a row. I was only a kid, of course. In the beginning.’
‘Yes,’ said Alleyn and waited.
Cliff turned his foot sideways and looked at the sole of his boot. Alleyn was surprised to see that he was blushing. ‘I suppose I’d better explain,’ he said at last, ‘that I’m not absolutely positive what the Oedipus Complex exactly is.’
‘And I’m not at all sure that I can help you. Let’s just have the whole story, clinical or otherwise, may we?’
‘Right-oh, then. You see, when I was a kid she started taking an interest in me. What they said when I used to go to the Lake School over there on the flat,’ he jerked his head at the plateau, ‘about my liking music and so on. I was scared of her at first. You may have the idea that in this country there’s no class consciousness but it’s