Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  Evidently the Island Belle would not sail for some time. The cars and a number of crates were yet, he supposed, to be put aboard her. He thought he remembered that a notice of some sort was exhibited at the foot of the gangway: probably the time of sailing. The Cove and his own familiar island began to seem very attractive. He would find out when the Island Belle sailed, return to the hotel for his rucksack, pay his bill and rejoin her.

  He pulled his hood well over his face and squelched out of the shed into the storm.

  It was only a short distance to the ship’s moorings. Her bows rose and fell and above the storm he could hear her rubbing-strake grind against the jetty. He walked forward into the rain and was halfblinded. When he came alongside the ship he stopped at the edge of the jetty and peered up, wondering if there was a watchman aboard.

  The blow came as if it was part of the storm, a violence that struck him below the shoulders. The jetty had gone from under his feet. The side of the ship flew upwards. He thought: ‘This is abominable,’ and was hit in the face. Green cold enclosed him and his mouth was full of water. Then he knew what had happened.

  He had fallen between the turn of the bilge and the jetty, had struck against something on his way down and had sunk and risen. Salt water stung the back of his nose and lodged in his throat. He floundered in a narrow channel between the legs of the jetty and the sloping side of the bilge.

  ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ thought Ricky, struggling in his prison, and knew quite definitely that he had been pushed.

  III

  He had no idea how much leeway the ship’s moorings allowed her or whether she might roll to such a degree that he could be crushed against the legs of the jetty, the only motionless things in a heaving universe.

  His head cleared. Instinctive physical reactions had kept him afloat for the first moments. He now got himself under control. ‘I ought to yell,’ he thought, and a distant thunderclap answered him. He turned on his back; the ship rolled and disclosed a faint daylight moon careering across a gap in the clouds. With great difficulty he began to swim, sometimes touching the piles and grazing his hands and feet on barnacles. The turn of the bilge passed slowly above him and at last was gone. He had cleared the bows of the Island Belle. There was St Pierre-des-Roches with the Hotel Beau Rivage and the hill and the church spire above it.

  Now, should he yell for help? But there was still Somebody up there perhaps who wanted him drowned, crushed, whatever way – dead. He trod water, bobbing and ducking, and looked about him.

  Not three feet away was a steel ladder.

  When he reached and clung to it he still thought of the assailant who might be up there, waiting. He was now so cold that it would be better to risk anything rather than stay where he was. So he climbed, slowly. He had lost his espadrilles and the rungs bit into his feet. There was a sound like a voice very far away: In his head, he thought: Not real. Half-way up he paused. Everything had become quiet. It no longer rained.

  ‘Hey! Hey there! Are you all right?’

  For a moment he didn’t know where to look. The voice seemed to have come out of the sky. Then he saw, in the bows of the ship, leaning over the taffrail, a man in oilskins and sou’wester. He waved at Ricky.

  ‘Are you OK, mate?’ shouted the man.

  Ricky tried to answer but could only produce a croak.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll be with you. Hang on.’

  Ricky hauled himself up another three rungs. His reeling head was just below the level of the jetty. He pushed his left arm through the rungs of the ladder and hung there, clinging with his right hand. He heard boots clump down the gangway and along the jetty towards him.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ said the voice, close above him. He let his head flop back. The face under the sou’wester was red and concerned and looked very big against the sky. An arm and a purplish hand reached down. ‘Come on, then,’ said the voice, ‘only a couple more.’

  ‘I’m sort of – gone –’ Ricky whispered.

  ‘Not you. You’re fine. Make the effort, Jack.’

  He made the effort and was caught by the arms and saved.

  He lay on the jetty saying: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ and being sick.

  The man was very kind. He took off his oilskin and spread it over Ricky, whose teeth now chattered like castanets. He lay on his back and saw the clouds part and disperse. He felt the sun on his face.

  ‘You’re doing good, mate,’ said the man. ‘How’s about we go on board and take a drop of something for the cold? You was aboard us this morning? That right?’

  ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘Up she rises. Take it easy. Lovely.’

  He was on his feet. They began to move along the jetty.

  ‘Is there anybody else?’ Ricky said.

  ‘How’d you mean, anybody else?’

  ‘Watching.’

  ‘You’re not yourself. You’ll be all right. Here we go, then.’

  Ricky made heavy work of the gangway. Once on board he did what he was told. The man took him into the little saloon. He helped him strip and brought him a vest and heavy underpants. He lay on a bench and was covered with a blanket and overcoats and given half a tumbler of raw whisky. It made him gasp and shudder, but it ran through him like fire. ‘Super,’ he said. ‘That’s super.’

  ‘What happened, then? Did you slip on the jetty or what?’

  ‘I was pushed. No, I’m not wandering and I’m not tight – yet. I was given a bloody great shove in the back. I swear I was. Listen.’

  The man listened. He scraped his jaw and eyed Ricky and every now and then wagged his head.

  ‘I was looking up at the deck, trying to see if anyone was about. I wanted to know when she sails. I was on the edge almost. I can feel it now – two hands hard in the small of my back. I took a bloody great stride into damn-all and dropped. I hit something. Under my eye, it was.’

  The man leant forward and peered at his face. ‘It’s coming up lovely,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll say that for you.’

  ‘Didn’t you see anybody?’

  ‘Me! I was taking a bit of kip, mate, wasn’t I? Below. Something woke me, see. Thunder or what-have-you and I come up on deck and there you was, swimming and ducking and grabbing the ladder. I hailed you but you didn’t seem to take no notice. Not at first you didn’t.’

  ‘He must have been hiding in the goods shed. He must have followed me down and sneaked into the shed.’

  ‘Reckon you think you know who done it, do you? Somebody got it in for you, like?’ He stared at Ricky. ‘You don’t look the type,’ he said. ‘Nor yet you don’t sound like it, neither.’

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ Ricky sighed. He was beginning to feel sleepy.

  ‘Look,’ said the man, ‘we sail at six. Was you thinking of sailing with us, then? Just to know, like. No hurry.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ricky said. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Where’s your dunnage?’

  Ricky pulled himself together and told him. The man said his mate, the second deckhand, was relieving him as watchman at four-thirty. He offered to collect Ricky’s belongings from the hotel and pay his bill. Ricky fished his waterproof wallet out of an inside pocket of his raincoat and found that the notes were not too wet to be presentable.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ he said. ‘Look. Take a taxi. Buy yourself a bottle of scotch from me. You will, won’t you?’

  He said he would. He also said his name was Jim le Compte and they’d have to get Ricky dressed proper and sitting up before the Old Man came aboard them.

  And by six o’clock Ricky was sitting in the saloon fully dressed with a rug over his knees. It was a smoother crossing than he had feared and rather to his surprise he was not sea-sick, but slept through most of it. At Montjoy he said goodbye to his friend. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Jim, I owe you a lot already. Will you do something more for me?’

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘Forget about there being anyone else in it. I
just skidded and fell. Please don’t think,’ Ricky added, ‘that I’m in any sort of trouble. Believe me, I’m not. Word of honour. But – will you be a good chap and leave it that way?’

  Le Compte looked at him for some moments with his head on one side. ‘Fair enough, squire,’ he said at last. ‘If that’s the way you want it. You skidded and fell.’

  ‘You are a good chap,’ said Ricky. He went ashore carrying a rucksack full of wet clothes and took a taxi to the Cove.

  He let himself in and went straight upstairs, passing Mrs Ferrant who was speaking on the telephone.

  When he entered his room a very tall man got up out of the armchair.

  It was his father.

  IV

  ‘So you see I’m on duty,’ said Alleyn. ‘Fox and I have got a couple of tarted-up apartments at the Neo-Ritz, or whatever it calls itself, in Montjoy, the use of a police car and a tidy programme of routine work ahead. I wouldn’t have any business talking to you, Rick, except that by an exasperating twist, you may turn out to be a source of information.’

  ‘Hi!’ said Ricky excitedly. ‘Is it about Miss Harkness?’

  ‘Why?’ Alleyn asked sharply.

  ‘I only wondered.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you what it’s about normally, but if we’re to get any further I think I’ll have to. And Rick – I want an absolute assurance that you’ll discuss this business with nobody. But nobody. In the smallest degree. It must be as if it’d never been. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Ricky, and his father thought he heard a tinge of regret.

  ‘Nobody,’ Alleyn repeated. ‘And certainly not Julia Pharamond.’

  Ricky blushed.

  ‘As far as you’re concerned, Fox and I have come over to discuss a proposed adjustment to reciprocal procedure between the island constabulary and the mainland police. We shall be sweating it out at interminable and deadly-boring meetings. That’s the story. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, Cid.’

  ‘Cid’, deriving from CID, was the name Ricky and his friends gave his father.

  ‘Yes. And nobody’s going to believe it when we start nosing round at the riding stables. But never mind. Let’s say that as we were here, the local chaps thought they’d like a second opinion. By the way, talking about local chaps, the Super at Montjoy hasn’t helped matters by bursting his appendix and having an urgent operation. The local sergeant at the Cove – Plank – but, of course, you know Plank – is detailed to the job.’

  ‘He’s nobody’s fool.’

  ‘Good. Now, coming back to you. The really important bit to remember is that we must be held to take no interest whatever in Mr Ferrant’s holidays and we’ve never even heard of Sydney Jones.’

  ‘But,’ Ricky ventured, ‘I’ve told the Pharamonds about his visit to you and Mum.’

  ‘Damn. All right, then. It passed off quietly and nothing has ever come of it.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so. Loud and clear.’

  ‘Yes, Cid.’

  ‘Good. All right. Are you hungry, by the way?’

  ‘Now you mention it.’

  ‘Could that formidable lady downstairs be persuaded to give us both something to eat?’

  ‘I’m sure. I’ll ask her.’

  ‘You’d better tell her you slid on the wet wharf and banged your cheek on a stanchion.’

  ‘She’ll think I was drunk.’

  ‘Good. You smell like a scotch hangover anyway. Are you sure you’re all right, old boy? Sure?’

  ‘Fine. Now. I’ll have a word with Mrs F.’

  When he’d gone, Alleyn looked out of the window at the darkening Cove and turned over Ricky’s account of his visit to St Pierre-des-Roches and the events that preceded it. People, he reflected, liked to talk about police cases in terms of a jigsaw puzzle and that was fair enough as far as it went. But in this instance he couldn’t be sure that the bits all belonged to the same puzzle. ‘Only connect,’ Forster owlishly laid down as the novelist’s law. He could equally have been setting out a guide for investigating officers.

  There had never been any question of Ricky following in his father’s footsteps. From the time when his son went to his first school, Alleyn had been at pains to keep his job at a remove as far as the boy was concerned. Ricky’s academic career had been more than satisfactory and about as far removed from the squalor, bore-dom, horror and cynicism of a policeman’s lot as it would be possible to imagine.

  And now? Here they were, both of them, converging on a case that might well turn out to be all compact of such elements. And over and above everything else, here was Ricky, escaped from what, almost certainly, had been a murderous attack, the thought of which sent an icy spasm through his father’s stomach. Get him out of it, smartly, now, before there was any further involvement, he thought – and then had to recognize that already Ricky’s involvement was too far advanced for this to be possible. He must be treated as someone who might, himself in the clear, provide the police with ‘helpful information’.

  And at the back of his extreme distaste for this development, why was there an indefinable warmth, a latent pleasure? He wondered if perhaps an old loneliness had been, or looked to become, a little assuaged.

  Ricky came back with the assurance that Mrs Ferrant was concocting a dish, the mere smell of which would cause the salivary glands of a hermit to spout like fountains.

  ‘She’s devoured by curiosity,’ he said. ‘About you. Why you’re here. What you do. Whether you’re cross with me. The lot. She’d winkle information out of a Trappist monk, that one would. I can’t wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For her to start on you.’

  ‘Rick,’ Alleyn said. ‘She’s Mrs Ferrant, and Ferrant, you tell me, is mysteriously affluent, goes in for solitary night-fishing, pays dressy visits to St Pierre-des-Roches and seems to be thick with Jones. With Jones who also visits there and goes to London carrying paint and who, since he’s found out your father is a cop, has taken a scunner to you. You think Jones dopes. So do I. Ferrant seems to have a bully’s ascendancy over Jones. One of them, you think, tried to murder you. It follows that you watch your step with Mrs Ferrant, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. And I always have. Not because of any of that but because she’s so bloody insatiable. About the Pharamonds in particular. Especially about Louis.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ll tell you what. I think when she was cooking or whatever she did up at L’Esperance, she had a romp on the side with Louis.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the way he talks about her. The bedside manner. And – well, because of that kid.’

  ‘The Ferrant kid?’

  ‘That’s right. There’s a look. Unmistakable, I’d have thought. Dark and cheeky and a bit of a slyboots.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘Wait for it.’

  ‘Louis?’ Ricky nodded.

  ‘It’s as common a French name as can be,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Ricky agreed, ‘and it’d be going altogether too far, one would think, wouldn’t one? To christen him that if Louis was –’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘It’s probably just my dirty mind after all. And – well –’

  ‘You don’t like Louis Pharamond?’

  ‘Not much. Does it show?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘He was on that voyage when you met them, wasn’t he?’ Ricky asked. Alleyn nodded. ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Which signifies,” Alleyn said, ‘damn all.’

  ‘He had something going with Miss Harkness.’

  ‘For pity’s sake!’ Alleyn exclaimed. ‘How many more and why do you think so?’

  Ricky described the incident on the cliffs. ‘It had been a rendezvous,’ he said rather importantly. ‘You could tell.’

  ‘I don’t quite see how when you say you were lying flat on your face behind
a rock, but let that pass.’

  Ricky tried not to grin. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I bet I’m right. He’s a prowler.’

  ‘Rick,’ Alleyn said after a pause, ‘I’m here on a sort of double job which is my Assistant Commissioner’s Machiavellian idea of econ-omy. I’m here because the local police are worried about the death of Dulcie Harkness and have asked us to nod in, and I’m also supposed in an off-hand, carefree manner to look into the possibility of this island being a penultimate station in one of the heroin routes into Great Britain.’

  ‘Lawks!’

  ‘Yes. Of course you’ve read about the ways the trade is run. Every kind of outlandish means of transit is employed – electric light-fittings, component parts for hearing aids, artificial limbs, fat men’s navels, anything hollow – you name it. If the thing’s going on here there’s got to be some way of getting the stuff out of Marseilles, where the con-version into heroin is effected, across to St Pierre, from there to the island and thence to the mainland. Anything suggest itself?’

  ‘Such as why did Jones cut up so rough when I trod on his paint?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He does seem to make frequent trips – Hi!’ Ricky said, interrupting himself. ‘Would this mean Jerome et Cie were in it or that Jones was on his own?’

  ‘Probably the former, but it’s anyone’s guess.’

  ‘And Ferrant? The way he behaved with Syd at St Pierre. Could they be in cahoots? Is there anything on Ferrant?’

  ‘The narcotics boys say he’s being watched. Apparently he makes these pleasure trips rather often and has been known to fly down to Marseilles and the Cte d’Azur where he’s been seen hob-nobbing with recognized traders.’

  ‘But what’s he supposed to do?’

  ‘They’ve nothing definite. He may have the odd rendezvous on calm nights when he goes fishing. Suppose – and this is the wildest guesswork – but suppose a gentleman with similar propensities puts out from St Pierre with a consignment of artists’ paints. They’ve been opened at the bottom and capsules of heroin pushed up and filled in nice and tidy with paint. Then a certain amount is squeezed out at the top and the tubes messed about to look used. And in due course they go into Syd Jones’s paintbox among his rightful materials and he takes one of his trips over to London. The stuff he totes round to shops and artists’ studios is of course pure as pure. The Customs people have got used to him and his paintbox. They probably did their stuff at some early stages before he began to operate. Even now, if they got curious, the odds are they’d hit on the wrong tube. One would suppose he doesn’t distribute more than a mini-mum of the doctored jobs among his legitimate material. Of which the vermilion you put your great hoof on was one.’