‘That’s it,’ Alleyn agreed hurriedly. ‘I only want to know the routine as you went through with it that morning, step by step. So that I can get an idea of how things went. Step by step,’ he repeated. ‘Put yourself in my position, Mr Wilson. Suppose you had to find out, all of a sudden, exactly what took place at dawn in a—in a pickle factory or a young ladies’ boarding school, or a maternity hospital. I mean—’ Alleyn thrust his cigarettes at Mr Wilson and clapped him nervously on the shoulder. ‘Be a good chap, for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘and spit it out.’

‘Ta,’ said Mr Wilson, lighting the new cigarette at the butt of the old one. ‘Oh, well,’ he said resignedly, and Alleyn sat down on a wool-pack.

Once embarked, Mr Wilson made better showing than might have been hoped for. There was a tendency to skip and become cryptic but Fabian acted as a sort of interpreter and on the whole he did not too badly. A picture of the working day in a wool-shed began to take shape. Everybody had been short-tempered that morning, it seemed. Mr Wilson himself had a bad attack of some gastric complaint to which he was prone and which had developed during the night on the journey back from the dance. At a quarter to two that morning, when they reached Mount Moon, he was, he said, proper crook, and he had spent the remainder of the night in acute discomfort. No, he said wearily, they’d noticed nothing funny in the wool-shed when they came home. They were not in the mood, Alleyn gathered, to notice anything. The farm lorry had sprung a puncture down by the front gate, and they decided to leave it there until morning. They walked the half-mile up to the homestead, with the liquor dying out in them as they did so. They hadn’t talked much until they got level with the yards, and there a violent political argument had suddenly developed between two of the shearers, ‘I told them to pass it up,’ said Mr Wilson, ‘and we all turned in.’

They were up again at dawn. The sky was overcast and when Albie Black went down to open up the shed a very light drizzle had set in. If this continued, it meant that when the sheep under cover were shorn, the men would have to knock off until the next batch had dried. This was the last day’s shearing and the lorry was to call in the afternoon for the clip, which should have been ready before noon. Albie Black went to light the hurricane lantern and found that the boys hadn’t filled it with kerosene as he had instructed. He cursed and turned to the candle, only to find it had burnt down to a stump and been squashed out so firmly that the wick had sunk into the wax. He got a fresh piece of candle from another part of the shed, gouged the old stump out and tossed it into the pens. By this time it was light enough to do without it. When Mr Wilson arrived, Albie poured out his complaints and Mr Wilson, himself enraged by gastric disorder, gave the boys the sharp edge of his tongue. He was further incensed by finding, as he put it, ‘a dump of wool in my number two bin that hadn’t been there when we knocked off the night before. All mucked up, it was, as if someone had been messing it about and then tried to roll it up proper.’