Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Ah,’ said Fox. ‘There’s always that, Sarge. There’s always that.’

  ‘Well, I know there is, Mr Fox. But it does seem to me – well…Considering –’

  ‘Considering,’ Alleyn said, ‘that Harkness locked her up in her room and on pain of hell-fire and damnation forbade her to jump – Considering that, would you say, Plank?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I would.’

  Mr Fox, who was replacing Miss Harkness’s undergarments with the careful devotion of a lady’s maid, said generously, ‘Which is what you might call a glimpse of the obvious, I’ll say that for it.’

  ‘Well, ta, Mr Fox,’ said Plank, mollified.

  Alleyn was going through the pockets of a hacking-jacket that hung from the back of a chair. They yielded a grubby handkerchief, small change and a rumpled envelope of good paper addressed in a civilized hand. It had been opened. Alleyn drew out a single sheet with an engraved heading: L’Esperance and the address. On it was written in the same hand. ‘Cliffs. Thursday. Usual time. L.P.’

  He showed it to the others.

  ‘ “L.P.” eh,’ Fox remarked.

  ‘It doesn’t stand for “long playing”,’ said Alleyn, ‘although I suppose, in a cockeyed sense, it just might.’

  ‘Plank,’ he said, as they drove away from Leathers, ‘I want you to go over everything that Sydney Jones told you about the dialogue with Harkness after the riding party left. Not only the row with Dulcie but what he said to Jones himself. We won’t need your notebook again: just tell me.’

  Plank, who was driving, did so. Jones had described Harkness in the yard and Dulcie at her bedroom window, hurling insults at each other. Dulcie had said she could take not only the sorrel mare, but also the wall-eyed Mungo over the gap in the blackthorn hedge. Her uncle violently forbade her, under threat of a hiding, to make the attempt on any of the horses, least of all the mare. He had added the gratuitous opinion that she sat a jumping horse like a sack of potatoes. She had sworn at him and banged down the window.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘According to Jones, Harkness had told him to drive the car to a corn merchant on the way to Montjoy and pick up some sacks of fodder.’

  ‘Rick remembers,’ Alleyn said, ‘that after the body was found, Mr Harkness said Jones had been told to take the mare to the smith to be re-shod and that he’d given this order to get the mare out of Dulcie’s way. Harkness had added that because Jones didn’t carry out this order he was as good as a murderer. Didn’t Jones tell you about this?’

  ‘Not a word, sir. No, he never.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Swear to it, sir.’

  Fox said: ‘Mr Harkness isn’t what you’d call a reliable witness. He could have invented the bit about the blacksmith.’

  ‘He wasn’t drinking then, Mr Fox. That set in later,’ said Plank, who seemed set upon casting little rays of favourable light upon the character of Mr Harkness. ‘But he was very much upset,’ he added. ‘I will say that for him. Distracted is what he was.’

  ‘However distracted,’ Alleyn said, ‘one would hardly expect him to cook up a pointless fairy-tale, would one? I’d better talk to Rick about this,’ he said vexedly, and asked Plank to drive into the Cove. ‘Come and take a look at your godson, Br’er Fox,’ he suggested, and to Plank: ‘Drop us round the corner at the station. You’ll be able to put in half an hour catching up on routine.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh, sir,’ said Plank.

  They passed the Ferrants’ house, turned into the side lane and pulled up at the corner cottage, which was also the local police station. A compact little woman with tight hair and rosy cheeks was hoeing vigorously in the garden. Nearby a little girl with Plank’s face at the wrong end of a telescope was knocking up a mud pie in a flowerpot.

  Plank, all smartness, was out of the driver’s seat and opening the doors in a flash.

  ‘Is this Mrs Plank?’ Alleyn said, and advanced upon her, bare-headed. She was flustered and apologized for her mucky hand. Fox was presented. He and Alleyn admired the garden.

  ‘It’s beginning to look better,’ Mrs Plank said. ‘It was a terrible old mess when we first came four years ago.’

  ‘Have you had many moves?’ Alleyn asked them, and they said this was the third.

  ‘And that makes things difficult,’ Alleyn said, knowing constant transfers to be a source of discontent.

  He had them talking freely in no time: about the disastrous effect on the children’s education and the problems of settling into a new patch where you never knew what the locals would be like: friendly or suspicious, helpful or resentful; of how, on the whole, the Cove people were not bad, but you had to get used to being kept at a distance.

  Alleyn edged the conversation round to the neighbours. Did Mrs Plank know the Ferrants round the corner with whom his son lodged? Not well, she said shortly. Mrs Ferrant kept herself to herself. Mrs Plank felt sorry for her. ‘Really,’ Alleyn asked. ‘Why?’

  Finding herself in the delicious situation where gossip could be regarded as a duty, Mrs Plank said that what with Ferrant away in France half the time, and where they got the money for it nobody knew, and never taking her with him and when he was home the way he carried on so free for all that he gave her washing machines and fridges and the name he had in the Cove for his bold behaviour and yet being secretive with it: well, the general feeling was that Mrs Ferrant was to be pitied. Although, come to that, Mrs Ferrant herself wasn’t all that –

  ‘Now then, Mother,’ said Plank uneasily.

  ‘Well, I know,’ she said, ‘and so do you, Joe.’ Alleyn had a picture of the village policeman’s wife, cut off from the cosy interchange of speculative gossip, always having to watch her tongue and always conscious of being on the outside.

  ‘I’m sure Mrs Plank’s the soul of discretion,’ he said. ‘And we’re grateful for any tips about the local situation, aren’t we, Plank? About Mrs Ferrant – you were saying?’

  It emerged that Mrs Plank had acquired one friend only with whom she was on cosy terms: her next-door neighbour in the lane, a widow who, in the past, had been a sewing-maid up at L’Esperance at the time when Mrs Ferrant was in service there. Ten years ago that would be, said Mrs Plank, and added with a quick glance at her husband that Mrs Ferrant had left to get married. The boy was not yet eleven. Louis, they called him. ‘Mind you,’ Mrs Plank ended, ‘they’re French.’

  ‘So are most of the islanders, mother,’ said Plank. She tossed her head at him. ‘You know yourself, Joe,’ she said, ‘there’s been trouble. With him.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Maintenance,’ said Plank. ‘Child. Up to Bon Accord.’

  ‘Ah. Don’t tell me. He’s no good, that one,’ cried Mrs Plank in triumph.

  Mr Fox said, predictably, that they’d have to get her in the Force, and upon that playful note they parted.

  Alleyn and Fox turned right from the lane on to the front. They crossed over to the far side and looked up at Ricky’s window, which was wide open. There he was with his tousled head of hair, so like his mother’s, bent over his work. Alleyn watched him for a moment or two, willing him to look up. Presently he did and a smile broke over his bruised face.

  ‘Good morning, Cid me dear,’ said Ricky. ‘Good morning, Br’er Fox. Coming up? Or shall I come down?’

  ‘We’ll come up.’

  Ricky opened the front door to them. He wore a slightly shamefaced air and had a postcard in his hand.

  ‘Mrs F. is out marketing,’ he said. ‘Look. On the mat, mixed up with my mail. Just arrived.’ He shut the door.

  The postcard displayed a hectically-coloured view of a market-square and bore a legend: ‘La place du marché, La Tournière.’ Ricky turned it over. It had a French stamp and was addressed in an awkward hand to ‘M. Ferrant’, but carried no message.

  ‘It’s his writing,’ Ricky said. ‘He’s given me receipts. That’s how he writes his name. Look at the postmark, Cid.’

>   ‘One a.m. La Tournière. Posted yesterday. Air mail.’

  ‘But he was in St Pierre yesterday. Even if it wasn’t Ferrant who shoved me off the jetty, it certainly was Ferrant who made me look silly in the café. Where is La Tourniére?’

  ‘North of Marseilles,’ said his father.

  ‘Marseilles! But that’s – what?’

  ‘At a guess, between six and seven hundred kilometres by air from St Pierre. Come upstairs,’ said Alleyn.

  He dropped the card on the mat and was on the top landing before the other two reached half-way. They all moved into Ricky’s room as Mrs Ferrant fitted her key in the front door.

  ‘How did you know she was coming?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘What? Oh, she dumped her shopping bag against the door while she fished for her key. Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘No,’ said Ricky.

  ‘We haven’t all got radioactive ears,’ said Mr Fox, looking benignly upon his godson.

  Alleyn said abruptly: ‘Rick, why do you think it was Ferrant who shoved you overboard?’

  ‘Why? I don’t know why. I just felt sure it was he. I can’t say more than that – I just – I dunno. I was certain. Come to think of it, it might have been Syd.’

  ‘For the sake of argument we’ll suppose it was Ferrant. He may have felt he’d better remove to a distant spot, contrived to get himself flown to La Tournière and posted this card at the airport. What time was it when you took the plunge?’

  ‘According to my ruined wrist watch, eight minutes past three.’

  Fox said: ‘When we came into St Pierre at four yesterday a plane for Marseilles was taking off. If it calls at – ‘ Mr Fox arranged his mouth in an elaborate pout – ‘La Tournière, it could be there by six-thirty, couldn’t it? Just?’

  ‘Is there anything,’ Ricky ventured, ‘against him having been staying at La Tournière, and deciding to fly up to St Pierre by an early plane yesterday morning?’

  ‘What was it you used to say, Mr Alleyn?’ Mr Fox asked demurely. ‘ “Stop laughing. The child’s quite right”!’

  ‘My very words,’ said Alleyn. ‘All right, Rick, that may be the answer. Either way, Fox, the peloton des narcotiques, as you would no doubt call the French drug squad, had better be consulted. Ferrant’s on their list as well as ours. He’s thought to consort with someone in the upper strata of the trade.’

  ‘Where?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘In Marseilles.’

  ‘I say! Could he have been under orders to get rid of me? Because Syd had reported I’d rumbled his game with the paints?’

  Fox shot a quick look at Alleyn and made a rumbling noise in his throat.

  Alleyn said, ‘Remember we haven’t anything to show for the theory about Jones and his paints. It may be as baseless as one of those cherubim that so continually do cry. But we’ve got to follow it up. Next time, if there is a next time, that Master Syd sets out for London with his paintbox they’ll take him and his flake white to pieces at Weymouth and they won’t find so much as a lone pep pill in the lot. Either he’s in the clear or he’ll have seen the light and shut up shop.’

  ‘Couldn’t you – couldn’t it be proved one way or the other?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘Such as?’ said Fox, who was inclined to treat his godson as a sort of grown-up infant prodigy.

  ‘Well,’ said Ricky with diminishing assurance, ‘such as searching his pad.’

  ‘Presumably, he’s still in France,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘All the better.’

  ‘Troy and I agreed,’ Alleyn said to Fox, ‘that taking one consideration with another it was better to keep our child uninformed about the policeman’s lot. Clearly, we have succeeded brilliantly.’

  ‘Come off it, Cid,’ said Ricky, grinning.

  ‘However, we haven’t come here to discuss police law but to ask you to recall something Harkness said about his orders to Syd Jones. Do you remember?’

  ‘Do you mean when he said he’d ordered Syd to take the sorrel mare to the blacksmith and he was in an awful stink because Syd hadn’t done it? He said Syd was as good as a murderer.’

  ‘What did Jones do with himself?’

  ‘I suppose he cleared off quite early. After he’d collected some horse-feed, I think.’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Fox said heavily, ‘who was on the premises from the time the riding-party left until they returned. Apart from the two Harknesses. Or has Plank gone into that, would you say?’

  ‘We’ll ask him. All right, Rick. I don’t think we’ll be hounding you any more.’

  ‘I’d rather be hounded than kept out.’

  Fox said: ‘I dare say you don’t care to talk about work in progress.’ He looked with respect at the weighted heap of manuscript on Ricky’s table.

  ‘It’s a struggle, Br’er Fox.’

  ‘Would I be on the wrong wavelength if I said it might turn out to be all the better for that?’

  ‘You couldn’t say anything nicer,’ said Ricky. ‘And I only hope you’re right.’

  ‘He often is,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘About people at Leathers during that afternoon,’ Ricky said. ‘There is, of course, Louis Pharamond.’ And he described Louis’s cramp and early return.

  ‘Nobody tells us anything,’ Alleyn cheerfully complained. ‘What time would he have got back?’

  ‘If he pushed along, I suppose about three-ish. When he left he was carrying his right boot and had his right foot out of its stirrup. He’s very good on a horse.’

  ‘Has he said anything about the scene at Leathers when he got there?’

  Ricky stared at his father. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t he give evidence at the inquest, for pity’s sake?’

  ‘No. No, he didn’t. I don’t think they realized he returned early.’

  ‘But surely one of you must have said something about it?’

  ‘I dare say the others did. I haven’t seen them since the inquest. I should think he probably unsaddled his horse, left it in the loose-box and came away without seeing anybody. It was there when we got back. Of course if there’d been anything untoward, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he?’

  After a considerable pause, during which Fox cleared his throat, Alleyn said he hoped so, and added that as investigating officers they could hardly be blamed if they didn’t know at any given time whether they were looking into a possible homicide or a big deal in heroin. It would be tidier, he said, if some kind of link could be found.

  Ricky said: ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi, what?’ asked his father.

  ‘Well – I’d forgotten. You might say there is a link.’

  ‘ “Define, define, well-educated infant,” ’ Alleyn quoted patiently.

  ‘I’m sure it’s of no moment, mind you, but the night I came home late from Syd’s pad…’ and he described the meeting on the jetty between Ferrant and Louis Pharamond.

  ‘What time,’ Alleyn said, after a long pause, ‘was this?’

  ‘About one-ish.’

  ‘Funny time to meet, didn’t you rather think?’

  ‘I thought Louis Pharamond might go fishing with Ferrant. I didn’t know whether they’d been together in the boat or what. It was jolly dark,’ Ricky said resentfully.

  ‘It was your impression, though, that they had just met?’

  ‘Yes. Well – yes, it was.’

  ‘And all you heard was Louis Pharamond saying, “All right?” or “OK, careful”, or “Watch it”. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Cid,’ said Ricky. ‘Subsequent events have kind of wiped it.’

  Fox said : ’Understandable.’

  Alleyn said perhaps it was and added that he would have to wait upon the Pharamonds anyway. Upon this Ricky looking very uncomfortable, told him about Julia’s telephone call and intention of asking them to dinner. ‘I said I knew you’d adore to but were horribly busy. Was that OK?’

  ‘Half of it was, at least. Yes, old boy, you were the soul of tact. Sure you
don’t fancy the Diplomatic after all? How did she know I was here?’

  ‘Louis caught sight of you in the hotel. Last night.’

  ‘I see. I don’t, on the whole, think this is an occasion for dinner-parties. Will they all be at home this morning, do you suppose?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘One other thing, Rick. I’m afraid we may have to cut short your sojourn at the Cove.’

  Ricky stared at him: ‘Oh no!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why?’

  Alleyn walked over to the door, opened it and had an aerial view of Mrs Ferrant on her knees, polishing the stairs. She raised her head and they looked into each other’s faces.

  ‘Bonjour, madame!’ Alleyn called out jovially. ‘Comment ça va?’

  ‘Pas si mat, monsieur,’ she said.

  ‘Toujours affairée, n’est pas?’

  She agreed. That was how it went. He said he was about to look for her. He had lost his ball-point pen and wondered if she had come across it in the petit salon last evening after he left. Alas, no. Definitely, it was not in the petit salon. He thanked her and with further compliments re-entered the room and shut the door.

  Ricky began in a highish voice. ‘Now, look here, Cid –’

  Alleyn and Fox simultaneously raised their forefingers. Ricky, against his better judgement, giggled. ‘You look like mature Gentlemen of the Chorus,’ he said, but he said it quietly. ‘Shall I shut the window? In case of prowlers on the pavement?’

  ‘Yes,’ said his father.

  Ricky did so and changed his mind about introducing a further note of comedy. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But why?’

  ‘Principally because it would be inappropriate, supposing Ferrant returns, for you to board in the house of your would-be murderer – if indeed he is that.’

  ‘I want to stay. My work’s going better, I think. And – I’m sorry, but I am mixed up in the on-goings. And anyway he hasn’t come back. Much more than all that, I want to see it out.’

  They looked so gravely at him that he felt extremely uneasy.

  From the street below there came seven syncopated toots from a car horn.

  Ricky said in an artificial voice: ‘That’s Julia.’

  Alleyn opened the window and leaned out. Ricky heard the familiar and disturbing voice.