‘It finished up by the boss taking a bad turn. We helped him out into the open. You wasn’t about just then, Mr Losse, and he asked us not to say anything. He carried some kind of medicine on him that he sniffed up and it seemed to fix him. Tommy sent young Cliff for the station car and he drove the boss back to the house. He was very particular we shouldn’t mention it. Anxious to avoid trouble. He was a gentleman, was Mr Rubrick.’

‘Yes. Now, then, Mr Wilson, about the press. When you knocked off on the previous night it was full of wool, wasn’t it? The top half was on the bottom half and the wool had been tramped down but not pressed. Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that, to all intents and purposes, was what it looked like in the morning?’

‘So far as I noticed, but I did no more than glance at it, if that. Jack Merrywether never noticed anything.’

‘When did you finish shearing?’

‘Not till six that evening. We cleaned up the sheep that’d been brought in overnight and then there was a hold up. That was at eleven. The fresh ones we’d brought in hadn’t dried off. Then it come up sunny and we turned them out again. Everyone was snakey. Young Doug says the sheep are dry and I say they’re not and Tommy Johns says they’re not. The lorry turns up and Syd Barnes, he’s the driver, he has to shove in his oar and reckon they’re dry because he wants to get on with it and make the pub at the Pass before dark. So I tell the whole gang where they get off and by that time the sheep have dried and we start up again. Young Cliff was hanging round the shed doing nothing, and then he slopes off, and his father goes crook when he can’t find him. It was lovely.’

The whistle tooted and the shed was at once active. Five plunging sheep were dragged in by their hind legs from the pens, machinery whirred, a raw-boned man moved over to the press, spat on his hands, and bore down on the ratchet lever. Mr Wilson pinched out his cigarette, nodded and walked back to the sorter’s table.

Alleyn watched the presser complete his work. The bale was sewn up, removed, and shoved along the floor towards the double doors where he and Fabian still waited. This process was assisted by the use of a short hook which was caught into the corners of the bale. ‘The lorry backs in here,’ Fabian said, ‘and the packs are dumped on board. The floor’s the same height as the lorry, or a little higher. There’s no lifting. It’s the same sort of business in the wool store at the other end.’

‘Is that the same presser? Jack Merrywether?’