Read Died in the Wool for Free Online

talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.
    â€˜I am a New Zealander,’ said Miss Harme, ‘but all my relations—I haven’t any close relations except my uncle—live in England. Aunt Flossie—she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that—was better than any real relation could have been.’
    She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.
    The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse, his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair, was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn ‘sir’ each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.
    Mrs Aceworthy, Arthur Rubrick’s elderly cousin who had come to Mount Moon on the death of his wife, was a large sandy woman with an air of uncertain authority and a tendency to bridle. Her manner towards Alleyn was cautious. He thought that she disapproved of his visit and he wondered how much Fabian Losse had told her. She spoke playfully and in inverted commas of ‘my family,’ and seemed to show a preference for the two New Zealanders, Douglas Grace and Ursula Harme.
    The vast landscape outside darkened and the candles on the dining-room table showed ghostly in the uncurtained window panes. When dinner was over they all moved into a comfortable, conglomerate sort of room hung with faded photographs of past cadets and lit cosily by a kerosene lamp. Mrs Aceworthy, with a vague murmur about ‘having to see to things’ left them with their coffee.
    Above the fireplace hung the full-dress portrait of a woman.
    It was a formal painting. The bare arms executed with machine-like precision, flowed wirily from shoulders to clasped hands. The dress was of mustard-coloured satin, very décolleté, and this hue was repeated in the brassy highlights of Mrs Rubrick’s incredibly golden coiffure. The painter had dealt remorselessly with a formidable display of jewellery. It was an Academy portrait by an experienced painter but his habit of flattery had met its Waterloo in Florence Rubrick’s face. No trick of understatement could soften that large mouth, closed with difficulty over protuberant teeth, or modify the acquisitive glare of the pale goitrous eyes which evidently had been fixed on the artist’s and therefore appeared, as laymen will say, to ‘follow one about the room.’ Upon each of the five persons seated in Arthur Rubrick’s study did his wife Florence seem to fix her arrogant and merciless stare.
    There was no other picture in the room. Alleyn looked round for a photograph of Arthur Rubrick but could find none that seemed likely.
    The flow of talk, which had run continuously if not quite easily throughout dinner, was now checked. The pauses grew longer and their interruptions more forced. Fabian Losse began to stare expectantly at Alleyn. Douglas Grace sang discordantly under his breath. The two girls fidgeted, caught each other’s eyes, and looked away again.
    Alleyn,