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Part of a letter from Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to his wife:
… almost midnight and I am in the study with only poor Flossie Rubrick’s portrait for company. I’m afraid, my love, that you would be very much put out by this painting and, indeed, it is a dreadfully slick and glossy piece of work. Yet, with its baleful assistance and the post-mortem on her character I feel as if I had known her very well. In a sense, Fabian Losse was right when he said the secret of her end lay in her own character. Who but Florence Rubrick would have practised a speech in the dark to a handful of sheep during a search for her own diamonds? Who but she, having made up her mind that her nephew was an enemy agent, would have informed her husband, bound him over to secrecy, and decided to tackle the job herself? That it was Douglas Grace she suspected, and not Markins, is clear enough when one remembers that Rubrick clung to Markins after her death, and that after her interview with Grace, her ma
It’s all over. Already the inhabitants of Mount Moon are begi
I almost dare to say I may soon come home. I’ve just taken up my pen again after stopping to ruminate and fill my pipe. When you pause at midnight in this house, the landscape comes in through the windows and sends something exciting down your spinal column. Out there are the plateau, the cincture of mountains, the empty sparkling air. To the north, more mountains, a plain, turbulent straits, another island, thirteen thousand miles of sea and at the far end, you.
The case is wound up but as I stretch my cold fingers and look once again at the portrait of Florence Rubrick I regret very much that I didn’t accept her invitation and come, before she was dead, for a week-end at Mount Moon.
The End