Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Alleyn hurriedly agreed.

  ‘Very natural and proper,’ said Fox.

  ‘You shut up,’ said Mr Harkness, but absently and without rancour.

  ‘Mr Harkness,’ Alleyn began, and checked himself. ‘I’m sorry – should I be giving you your rank? I don’t know –’

  The shaky hand drifted to the toothbrush moustache. ‘I don’t insist on it,’ the thick voice mumbled. ‘Might of course. But let it pass. Mr’s good enough.’ The wraith of the riding-master faded and the distracted zealot returned. ‘Pride,’ said Mr Harkness, ‘is the dead-liest of all the sins. You were saying?’

  He leant towards Alleyn with a parody of anxious attentiveness.

  Alleyn was very careful. He explained that in cases of fatality the police had a duty to eliminate the possibility of any verdict but that of accident. Sometimes, he said, there were features that at first sight seemed to preclude this. ‘More often than not,’ he said, ‘these features turn out to be of no importance, but we do have to make sure of it.’

  With an owlish and insecure parody of the conscientious officer, Mr Harkness said: ‘Cer’nly. Good show.’

  Alleyn, with difficulty, took him through the period between the departure and return of the riding-party. It emerged that Mr Harkness had spent most of the day in the office concocting material for religious handouts. He gave a disjointed account of locking his niece in her room and of her presumed escape, and said distractedly that some time during the afternoon, he could not recall when, he had gone into the barn to pray but had noticed nothing untoward and had met nobody. He began to wilt.

  ‘Where did you have your lunch?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Harkness, and left the room.

  ‘Now what!’ Mr Fox exclaimed.

  ‘Call of nature?’ Sergeant Plank suggested.

  ‘Or the bottle,’ Alleyn said. ‘Damn.’

  He looked about the office: at faded photographs of equestrian occasions; of a barely recognizable and slim Mr Harkness in the uniform of a mounted-infantry regiment. A more recent photograph displayed a truculent young woman in jodhpurs displaying a sorrel mare.

  ‘That’s Dulce,’ said Sergeant Plank. ‘That was,’ he added.

  The desk was strewn with bills, receipts and a litter of brochures and pamphlets, some of a horsy description, others proclaiming in dated, execrable type the near approach of judgement and eternal damnation. In the centre was a letter pad covered in handwriting that began tidily and deteriorated into an illegible scrawl. This seemed to be a draft for a piece on the lusts of the flesh. Above and to the left of the desk was the corner-cupboard spotted by Ricky and Jasper Pharamond. The door was not quite closed and Alleyn flipped it open. Inside was the whisky bottle and behind this, as if thrust out of sight but still distinguishable, the card with a red ink skull-and-crossbones and the legend – ‘BEWARE! This Way Lies Damnation! ! !’ The bottle was empty.

  Alleyn reached out a long finger and lifted a corner of the card, exposing a small carton half-filled with capsules

  . ‘Look at this, Br’er Fox,’ he said.

  Fox put on his spectacles and peered.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, and after a closer look: ‘Simon Frères. Isn’t there something, now, about Simon Frères?’

  ‘Amphetamines. Dexies. Prohibited in Britain,’ Alleyn said. He opened the carton and shook one capsule into his palm. He had replaced the carton and pocketed the capsule when Fox said, ‘Coming.’

  Alleyn shut the cupboard door and was back in his chair as an uneven footstep announced the return of Mr Harkness. He came in on a renewed fog of scotch.

  ‘Apologize,’ he said, ‘Bowels all to blazes. Result of shock. You were saying?’

  ‘I’d said all of it, I think,’ Alleyn replied. ‘I was going to ask, though, if you’d mind our looking over the ground outside. Where it happened and so on.’

  ‘Go where you like,’ he said, ‘but don’t, please, please don’t, ask me to come.’

  ‘Of course, if you’d rather not.’

  ‘I dream about that gap,’ he whispered. There was a long and difficult silence. ‘They made me see her,’ he said at last. ‘Identification. She looked awful.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well,’ he said with one of his most disconcerting changes of manner, ‘I’ll leave you to it. Good hunting.’ Incredibly he let out a bark of what seemed to be laughter, and rose, with difficulty, to his feet. He had begun to weep.

  They had reached the outside door when he erupted into the passage, and ricocheting from one wall to the other, advanced towards Alleyn, upon whom he thrust a pink brochure.

  Alleyn took it and glanced at flaring headlines.

  ‘WINE IS A MOCKER,’ he saw. ‘STRONG DRINK IS RAGING.’

  ‘Read,’ Mr Harkness said with difficulty, ‘mark, learn and inwardly indigest. See you on Sunday.’

  He executed an abrupt turn and once more retired, waving airily as he did so. His uneven footsteps faded down the passage.

  Fox said thoughtfully: ‘He won’t last long at that rate.’

  ‘He’s not himself, Mr Fox,’ Plank said, rather as if he felt bound to raise excuses for a local product. ‘He’s very far from being himself. It’s the liquor.’

  ‘You don’t tell me.’

  ‘He’s not used to it, like.’

  ‘He’s learning, though,’ Fox said.

  Alleyn said: ‘Didn’t he drink? Normally?’

  ‘TT. Rabid. Hell-fire, according to him. Since he was Saved,’ Plank added.

  ‘Saved from what?’ Fox asked. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Eternal damnation and all that carry-on. What was that about “See you Sunday?” Has anything been said about seeing him on Sunday?’

  ‘Not by me,’ Alleyn said. ‘Wait a bit.’

  He consulted the pink brochure. Following some terrifying information about the evils of intemperance, it went on to urge a full attendance at the Usual Sunday Gathering in the Old Barn at Leathers with Service and Supper, Gents 50p, Ladies a Basket. Across these printed instructions a wildly irregular hand had scrawled: ‘Special! Day of Wrath! ! May 13th! ! ! Remember! ! ! !’

  ‘What’s funny about May 13th?’ asked Plank and then: ‘Oh. Of course. Dulcie.’

  ‘Will it be a kind of memorial service?’ Fox speculated.

  ‘Whatever it is, we shall attend it,’ said Alleyn. ‘Come on.’ And he led the way outside.

  The morning was sunny and windless. In the horse-paddock two of the Leathers string obligingly nibbled each others’ flanks. On the hillside beyond the blackthorn hedge three more grazed together, swishing their tails and occasionally tossing up their heads.

  ‘Peaceful scene, sir?’ Sergeant Plank suggested.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Alleyn agreed. ‘Would that be the Old Barn?’ He pointed to a building at some distance from the stables.

  ‘That’s it, sir. That’s where they hold their meetings. It’s taken on surprising in the district. By all accounts he’s got quite a following.’

  ‘Ever been to one, Plank?’

  ‘Me, Mr Alleyn? Not in my line. We’re C of E., me and my missus. They tell me this show’s very much in the blood-and-thunder line.’

  ‘We’ll take a look at the barn later.’

  They walked down to the gap in the hedge.

  An improvised but sturdy fence had been built enclosing the area where the sorrel mare had taken off for her two jumps. Pieces of raised weather-board covered the hoof prints.

  ‘Who ordered all this?’ Alleyn asked. ‘The Super?’

  After a moment Plank said: ‘Well, no, sir.’

  ‘You did it on your own?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Good for you, Plank. Very well done.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Plank, crimson with gratification.

  He lifted and replaced the boards for Alleyn. ‘There wasn’t anything much in the way of human prints,’ he said. ‘There’s been heavy rain. And, of course,
horses’ hoof prints all over the shop.’

  ‘You’ve saved these.’

  ‘I took casts,’ Plank murmured.

  ‘You’ll be getting yourself in line for a halo,’ said Alleyn, and they moved to the gap itself. The blackthorn in the gap had been considerably knocked about. Alleyn looked over it and down and across to the far bank where a sort of plastic tent had been erected. Above and around this a shallow drain had been dug.

  ‘That’s one hell of a dirty great jump,’ Alleyn said.

  There was a massive slide down the near bank and a scramble of hoof prints on the far one.

  ‘As I read them,’ Plank ventured, ‘it looks as if the mare made a mess of the jump, fell all ways down this bank and landed on top of her rider on the far side.’

  ‘And it looks to me,’ Alleyn rejoined, ‘that you’re not far wrong.’

  He examined the two posts on either side of the gap. They were half hidden by blackthorn, but when this was held aside, scars, noticed by Ricky, were clearly visible: on one post thin rounded grooves, obviously of recent date, on the other, similar grooves dragged upwards from the margin. Both posts were loose in the ground.

  At considerable discomfort to himself, Alleyn managed to clear a way to the base of the left-hand post and crawl into it.

  ‘The earth’s been disturbed,’ he grunted. ‘Round the base.’

  He backed out, groped in his pocket and produced his three inches of fencing wire from the coach-house.

  ‘Here comes the nitty-gritty bit,’ said Fox.

  He and Plank wrapped handkerchiefs round their hands and held back obstructing brambles. Alleyn cupped his scratched left hand under one of the grooves, and with his right finger and thumb insinuated his piece of wire into it. It fitted snugly.

  ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ said Fox.

  ‘A near relation at least. Let’s try elsewhere.’

  They did so, with the same result on both posts.

  ‘Well, Plank,’ Alleyn said, sucking the back of his hand, ‘how do you read the evidence?’

  ‘Sir, like I did before, if you’ll excuse my saying so, though I hadn’t linked it up with that coil in the coachhouse. Should have done, of course, but I missed it.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It looks like there was this wire, strained between the posts. It’d been there a long time, because coming, as we now know, from the lot in the coach-house it must have been rusty.’ Plank caught himself up. ‘Here. Wait a mo,’ he said. ‘Forget that. That was silly.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Ta. No. Wipe that. Excuse me, sir. But it had been there a long time because the wire marks are overgrown by thorn.’

  Fox cleared his throat.

  ‘What about that one, Fox?’ Alleyn said.

  ‘It doesn’t follow. Not for sure. It wants closer examination,’ Fox said. ‘It could have been rigged from the far side.’

  ‘I think so. Don’t you, Plank?’

  ‘Sir,’ said Plank, chastened.

  ‘Go on, though. When was it removed from the barn?’

  ‘Recently. Recently it was, sir. Because the cut end was fresh.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘We don’t know that, do we, sir?’

  ‘Not on the peg in the coach-house, at least. That lot’s in one piece. What does all this seem to indicate?’

  ‘I’d kind of thought,’ said Plank carefully, ‘it pointed to her having cut it away before she attempted the jump. It’s very dangerous, sir, isn’t it, in horse-jumping – wire is. Hidden wire.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Would the young chap,’ Fox asked, ‘have noticed it if it was in place when he jumped?’

  Alleyn walked back to the prints of the sorrel mare’s take-off and looked at the gap.

  ‘Old wire. It wouldn’t catch the light, would it? We’ll have to ask the young chap.’

  Plank cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘I did carry out a wee routine check along the hedgerow, and there’s no wire there. I’d say, never has been.’

  ‘Right.’ Alleyn hesitated for a moment. ‘Plank,’ he said, ‘I can’t talk to your Super till he’s off the danger list, so I’ll be asking you about matters I’d normally discuss with him.

  ‘Sir,’ said Plank, fighting down any overt signs of gratification.

  ‘Why was it decided to keep the case open?’

  ‘Well, sir, on account really of the wire. I reported what I could make out of the marks on the posts and the Super had a wee look-see. That was the day he took bad with the pain, like. It were that evening his appendix bust and they operated on him, and his last instructions to me was: “Apply for an adjournment and keep your trap shut. It’ll have to be the Yard.” ’

  ‘I see. Has anything been said to Mr Harkness about the wire?’

  ‘There has, but bloody-all come of it. Far’s I could make out it’s been there so long he’d forgotten about it. Was there, in fact, before he bought the place. He reckons Dulcie went down and cut it away before she jumped, which is what I thought seemed to make sense if anything he says can be so classed. But Gawd knows,’ said Plank, removing his helmet and looking inside it as if for an answer, ‘he was that put about there was no coming to grips with the man. Would you care to take a look at the far bank, sir? Where she lay?’

  They took a look at it and the horses in the field came and took a look at them, blowing contemptuously through their nostrils. Plank removed his tent and disclosed the pegs he had driven into the ground round dead Dulcie Harkness.

  ‘And you took photographs, did you?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘It’s a bit of a hobby with me,’ Plank said, and drew them from a pocket in his tunic. ‘I carry a camera round with me,’ he said. ‘On the off-chance of a nice picture.’

  Fox placed his glasses, looked and clicked his tongue. ‘Very nasty,’ he said. ‘Very unpleasant. Poor girl.’

  Plank, who contemplated his handiwork with a proprietary air, his head slightly tilted, said absently: ‘You wouldn’t hardly recognize her if it wasn’t for the shirt. I used a sharper aperture for this one,’ and he gave technical details.

  Alleyn thought of the picture in the office of a big blowzy girl in a check shirt, exhibiting the sorrel mare. He returned the photographs to their envelope and put them in his pocket. Plank replaced the tent.

  Alleyn said: ‘From the time the riding-party left until she was found, who was here? On the premises?’

  ‘There again!’ Plank cried out in vexation. ‘What’ve we got? Sir, we’ve got Cuth Harkness and that’s it. Now then!’ He produced his notebook, wetted his thumb and turned pages. ‘Harkness. Cuthbert,’ he said, and changed to his police-court voice.

  ‘I asked Mr Harkness where he and Miss Harkness and Mr Sydney Jones were situated and how employed subsequent to the departure of the riding-party. Mr Harkness replied that he instructed Jones to drive into Montjoy and collect horse fodder, which he later did. At this point Mr Harkness broke down and spoke very confusedly about Mr Jones – something about him not having got the mare re-shod as ordered. He shed tears considerably. Mr Jones, on being interviewed, testified that Mr Harkness had words with deceased who was in her room but who looked out of her window and spoke to him, he being at that time in the stable yard. I asked Mr Harkness: “Was she locked in her room?” He said she had carried on to that extent that he went quietly upstairs and turned the key in her door, which at this point was in the outside lock. When I examined the door, the key was in the inside lock and was in the unlocked position. I noted a gap of three-quarters of an inch between door and floor. I noted a thin rug laying in the gap. I pointed this out to Mr Harkness, who told me that he had left the key in the outside lock. I examined the rug and the area where it lay and formed the opinion it had been dragged into the room. The displacement of dust on the floor caused me to form this opinion, which was supported by Mr Harkness to the extent that the deceased had effected an escape in this manner when a schoolgirl.’ />
  Plank looked up. ‘I have the key, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Right. So your reading is that she waited until her uncle was gone and then poked the key on to the mat. With what?’

  ‘She carried one of those old-time pocket knives with a spike for getting stones out of hooves. It was in her breeches pocket.’

  ‘First Steps in Easy Detection,’ Alleyn murmured.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, all right. Could be. So you read it that at some stage after this performance she let herself out, went downstairs, cut away the wire and dumped it we don’t know where. But replaced the cutters –’

  Fox said: ‘Ah. Yes. There’s that.’

  ‘– and then saddled up the mare and rode to her death. I can’t,’ said Alleyn, rubbing his nose, ‘get it to run smoothly. It’s got a spurious feel about it. But then, of course, one hasn’t known that poor creature. What was she like, Plank?’

  After a considerable pause Plank said: ‘Big.’

  ‘One could see that. As a character? Come on, Plank.’

  ‘Well,’ said Plank, a countryman, ‘if she’d been a mare you’d of said she was always in season.’

  ‘That’s a peculiar way of expressing yourself, Sergeant Plank,’ Fox observed austerely.

  ‘My son said something to much the same effect,’ said Alleyn.

  They returned to the yard. When they were half-way up the horse-paddock, Alleyn stooped and poked at the ground. He came up with a small and muddy object in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Somebody’s lost a button?’ he said. ‘Rather a nice one. Off a sleeve, I should think.’

  ‘I never noticed it,’ said Plank.

  ‘It’d been trodden by a horse into the mud.’

  He put it in his pocket.

  ‘What’s the vet called, Plank?’ he asked.

  ‘Blacker, sir, Bob.’

  ‘Did you see the cut on the mare’s leg?’

  ‘No, sir. He’d bandaged her up when I looked at her.’

  ‘Like it or lump it, he’ll have to take it off. Ring him up, Plank.’