Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘That’s right. It’s possible that Ferrant may still be waiting for the body – you’ll excuse me, won’t you, Mr Alleyn – to rise. He may think it’s caught up under the pier. Unless, of course, the chap in the ship has talked.’

  ‘The ship doesn’t return to St Pierre for some days. And Ricky got the man to promise he wouldn’t talk. He thinks he’ll stick to his word.’

  ‘Yerse,’ said Fox. ‘But we all know what a few drinks will do.’

  ‘Anyway, Ferrant has probably telephoned his wife and heard that Rick’s home and dry. I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘if he’s in the habit of sending her postcards with no message.’

  ‘Just to let her know where he is?’

  ‘And I wonder – I do very much wonder how far, if any distance at all, that excellent cook is wise to her husband’s proceedings.’

  Sergeant Plank returned with a plateload of enormous cheese and pickle sandwiches and a jug of beer.

  ‘It’s getting on for three o’clock,’ he said, ‘and the missus reckons you must be fair clemmed for a snack, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘Your missus, Sergeant Plank,’ said Alleyn, ‘is a pearl among ladies and you may tell her so with our grateful compliments.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Syd’s Pad Again

  When Ricky had eaten his solitary lunch he was unable to settle to anything. He had had a most disturbing morning and himself could hardly believe in it. The memory of Julia’s blouse creasing under the pressure of his fingers and of herself warm beneath it, her scent and the smooth resilience of her cheek were at once extraordinarily vivid yet scarcely to be believed. Much more credible was the ease with which she had dealt with him.

  ‘She stopped my nonsense,’ he thought, ‘with one arm tied behind her back. I suppose she’s a dab hand at disposing of excitable young males.’ For the first time he was acutely aware of the difference in their ages and began to wonder uncomfortably how old Julia, in fact, might be.

  Mixed up with all this and in a different though equally disturbing key was his father’s suggestion that he, Ricky, should take himself off. This he found completely unacceptable and wondered unhappily if they were about to have a family row about it. He was much attached to his father.

  And then there was the case itself, muddling to a degree, with its shifting focus, its inconsistencies and lack of perceptible design. He thought he would write a kind of résumé, and did so and was, he felt, none the wiser for it. Turn to his work, he could not.

  The harbour glittered under an early afternoon sun and beyond the heads there was a lovely blue and white channel. He decided to take a walk, first looking in his glass to discover, he thought, a slightly less grotesque face. His eye, at least, no longer leered, although the area beneath it still resembled an over-ripe plum.

  Since his return he had felt that Mrs Ferrant, not perhaps spied upon him, but kept an eye on him. He had an impression of doors being shut a fraction of a second after he left or returned to his room. As he stepped down into the street he was almost sure one of the parlour curtains moved slightly. This was disagreeable.

  He went into Mr Mercer’s shop to replace his lost espadrilles with a pair from a hanging cluster inside the door. Mr Mercer, in his dual role of postmaster, was in the tiny office reserved for Her Majesty’s Mail. On seeing Ricky he hurried out, carrying an air-letter and a postcard.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said Mr Mercer winningly, after a startled look at the eye. ‘Can I have the pleasure of helping you? And may I impose upon your kindness? Today’s post was a little delayed and the boy had started on his rounds. If you would – You would! Much obliged, I’m sure.’

  The letter was from Ricky’s mother and the postcard he saw at a glance was from St Pierre-des-Roches with a view of that fateful jetty. For Mrs Ferrant.

  When he was out in the street he examined the card. Ferrant’s writing again and again no message. He turned back to the house and pushed the card and the espadrilles through the letter flap. He put his mother’s letter in his pocket, and walked briskly down the front towards the Cod-and-Bottle and past it.

  Here was the lane, surely, that he had taken that dark night when he visited Syd’s pad – a long time ago, as it now seemed. The name, roughly painted on a decrepit board, hung lop-sided from its sign-post: ‘Fisherman’s Steps’.

  ‘Blow me down flat,’ thought Ricky, ‘if I don’t case the joint.’

  In the dark he had scarcely been aware of the steps, so worn, flattened and uneven had they become, but had stumbled after Syd like a blind man, only dimly conscious of the two or three cottages on either side. He saw now that they were unoccupied and falling into ruin. Clear of them the steps turned into a steep and sleazy path that separated areas of rank weeks littered with rusting tins. The path was heavily indented with hoof prints. ‘How strange,’ he thought, ‘those were left, I suppose, by Dulcie’s horse, Mungo: “put down” now, dead and buried, like its rider.’

  And here was Syd’s pad.

  It must originally have been a conventional T-plan cottage with rooms on either side of a central passage. At some stage of its decline the two front rooms had been knocked into one, making the long disjointed apartment he had visited that night. The house was in a state of dismal neglect. At the back an isolated privy faced a desolation of weeds.

  The hoof prints turned off to the right and ended in a morass overhung by a high bramble to which, Ricky thought, the horse must have been tethered.

  It was through the marginal twigs of this bush that he surveyed the pad and from here, with the strangest feeling of involvement in some repetitive expression of antagonism, thought he caught the slightest possible movement in one of the grimy curtains that covered the windows.

  Ricky may be said to have kept his head. He realized that if there was anybody looking out they could certainly see him. The curtains, he remembered, were of a flimsy character, an effective blind from outside but probably semi-transparent from within. Suppose Syd Jones had returned and was there at the window, Ricky himself would seem to be the spy, lurking but perfectly visible behind the brambles.

  He took out his pipe, which was already filled, and lit it, making a show of sheltering from the wind. When it was going he emerged and looked about him as if making up his mind where he would go and then, with what he hoped was an air of purposeful refreshment and enjoyment of the exercise, struck up the path, passing close by the pad. The going became steeper and very rough and before he had covered fifty feet the footpath had petered out.

  He continued, climbing the hill until he reached the edge of a grove of stunted pines that smelled warm in the afternoon sun. Three cows stared him out of countenance and then tossed their heads contemptuously and returned to their grazing. The prospect was mildly attractive: he looked down on cottage roofs and waterfront and away over the harbour and out to sea where the coast of Normandy showed up clearly. He sat down and took thought, keeping an eye on Syd’s pad and asking himself if he had only imagined he was watched from behind the curtain; if what he thought he had seen was merely some trick of light on the dirty glass.

  Suppose Syd had returned, when and how had he come?

  How far down the darkening path to subservience had Syd gone? Ricky called up the view of him through that shaming hole in Le Monde: the grope in the pockets, the bent head, hunched shoulders, furtively busy movements, slight jerk.

  Had Syd picked up a load of doctored paint tubes from Jerome et Cie? Did Syd himself, perhaps, do the doctoring in his pad? Was he at it now, behind his dirty curtains? If he was there, how had he come back? By air, last evening? Or early this morning? Or could there have been goings-on in the small hours – a boat from St Pierre? Looking like Ferrant at his night fishing?

  What had happened between Ferrant and Syd after Ricky left the café Further bullying? Had they left together and gone somewhere for Syd to sleep it off? Or have a trip? Or what?

  Ricky fetched up short. Was it remotely possible that Ferrant could by
some means have injected Syd with the idea of getting rid of him, Ricky? He knew nothing of the effects of heroin, if in fact Syd had taken heroin, or whether it would be possible to lay a subject on to commit an act of violence.

  And finally: had it after all been Syd who, under the influence of Ferrant or heroin or both, hid on the jetty and knocked him overboard?

  The more he thought of this explanation, the more likely he felt it to be.

  Almost, had he known it, he was following his father’s line of reasoning as he expounded it, not half a mile away, over in Sergeant Plank’s office. Almost, but not quite, because, at that point or there-abouts, Alleyn finished the last of Mrs Plank’s sandwiches and said: There is another possibility, you know. Sydney Jones may have cut loose from Ferrant and, inspired by dope, acted on his own. Ricky says he got the impression that there was someone else in the goods shed when he sheltered there.’

  ‘Might have sneaked in for another jolt of the stuff,’ Fox speculated, ‘and acted on the “rush”. It takes different people different ways.’

  ‘Incidentally, Br’er Fox, his addiction might have been the reason why he didn’t take the sorrel mare to the smith.’

  ‘Nipped off somewhere for a quickie?’

  ‘And now we are riding high on the wings of fancy.’

  ‘I do wonder, though, if Jones supplied Mr Harkness with those pills. “Dexies”, you say they are. And sold in France.’

  ‘Sold in St Pierre quite openly, Dupont tells me.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Plank asked, ‘but what’s a dexie?’

  ‘Street name for amphetamines,’ Alleyn replied. ‘Pep pills to you. Comparatively harmless taken moderately, but far from so when used to excess. Some pop artists take them to induce, I suppose, their particular brand of professional hysteria. Celebrated orators have been said to take them –’ He stopped short. ‘We shall see how Mr Harkness performs in that field on Sunday,’ he said.

  ‘If he can keep on his feet,’ Fox grunted.

  ‘He’ll contrive to do that, I fancy. He’s a zealot, he’s hag-ridden, he’s got something he wants to loose off if it’s only a dose of hell-fire, and he’s determined we shall get an earful. I back him to perform, pep-pills and scotch or no pep-pills and scotch.’

  ‘Might that,’ Plank ventured, ‘be why Syd Jones got these pills for him in the first place? To kind of work him up to it.’

  ‘ “Might, might, might”,’ Alleyn grunted. ‘Yes, of course, Plank. It might indeed, if Jones is the supplier.’

  ‘It’d be nice to know,’ Fox sighed, ‘where Jones and Ferrant are. Now.’

  And Ricky, up on his hillside, thought so too. He was becoming very bored with the prospect of the rusted roof and outside privy at Syd’s pad.

  He could not, however, rid himself of the notion that Syd might be on the watch down there, just as he’d got it into his head that Mrs Ferrant was keeping observation on him in her cottage. Had Syd crept out of his pad and did he lie in wait behind the bramble bush, for instance, with a blunt instrument?

  To shake off this unattractive fancy, he took out his mother’s letter and began to read it.

  Troy wrote as she talked and Ricky enjoyed her letters very much. She made exactly the right remarks, and not too many of them, about his work and told him sparsely about her own. He became absorbed and no longer aware of the countrified sounds around him: seagulls down in the Cove, intermittent chirping from the pine grove and an occasional stirring of its branches; even the distant and inconsequent pop of a shotgun where somebody might be shooting rabbits. And if subconsciously he heard, quite close at hand, footfalls on the turf, he attributed them to the three cows.

  Until a shadow fell across Troy’s letter and he looked up to find Ferrant standing over him with a grin on his face and a gun in his hand.

  II

  At about this same time – half past three in the afternoon – Sergeant Plank was despatched to Montjoy under orders to obtain a search-warrant, and if he was forced to do so, execute it at Leathers, collecting to that end two local constables from the central police station.

  ‘We’ll get very little joy up there,’ Alleyn said, ‘unless we find that missing length of wire. Remember the circumstances. Some time between about ten-thirty in the morning and sixish in the evening and before Dulcie Harkness jumped the gap, somebody rigged the wire. And the same person, after Dulcie had crashed, removed and disposed of it. Harkness, when he wasn’t haranguing his niece and ineffectually locking her up, was in his office cooking up hell-fire pamphlets. Jones took a short trip to the corn-chandler’s and back and didn’t obey orders to take the mare to the smith’s. We don’t know where he went or what he may have done. Louis Pharamond came and went, he says, round about three. He says he saw nobody and nothing untoward. As a matter of interest, somebody has dropped an expensive type of leather button in the horse-paddock, which he says he didn’t visit. He’s lost its double from his coat sleeve.

  ‘I think you’ll do well, Plank, to work out from the fence, taking in the stables and the barn. Unless you’re lucky you won’t finish today. And on a final note of jolly optimism there’s always the possibility that somebody from outside came in, rigged the trap, hung about until Dulcie was killed in it and then dismantled the wire and did a bunk, taking it with him.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Plank primly.

  ‘On which consideration you’d better get cracking. All right?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Good. I don’t need to talk about being active, thorough and diligent, do I?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Plank. And then: ‘I would like to ask, Mr Alleyn: is there any connection between the two investigations – Dulcie’s death and the dope scene?’

  Alleyn said slowly: ‘That’s the hundred-guinea one. There do seem to be very tenuous links, so tenuous that they may break down altogether, but for what they’re worth I’ll give them to you.’

  Plank listened with carefully restrained avidity.

  When Alleyn had finished they made their final arrangements. They telephoned the island airport for details of disembarking passengers. There had been none bearing a remote resemblance to Ferrant or Jones. Plank was to telephone his own station at fivethirty to report progress. If neither Alleyn nor Fox was there, Mrs Plank would take the message. ‘If by any delicious chance,’ Alleyn said, ‘you find anything before then, you’d better pack up and bring your booty here and be wary about dabs.’

  ‘And I take the car, sir?’

  ‘You do. You’d better lay on some form of tranport to be sent here for us in case of an emergency. Can you do this?’

  ‘The Super said you were to have the use of his own car, sir, if required.’

  ‘Very civil of him.’

  ‘I’ll arrange for it to be brought here.’

  ‘Good for you. Off you go.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘With our blessing, Sergeant Plank.’

  ‘Much obliged, I’m sure, sir,’ said Plank, and left after an inaudible exchange with his wife in the kitchen.

  ‘And what for us?’ Fox asked when he had gone.

  ‘ “And what for me, my love, and what for me?” ’ Alleyn muttered. ‘I think it’s about time we had a look at Mr Ferrant’s sea-going craft.’

  ‘Do we know where he keeps it exactly?’

  ‘No, and I don’t want to ask Madame. We’ll take a little prowl. Come and say goodbye to Mrs P.’

  He took the tray into the kitchen. Mrs Plank was ironing. ‘That was kind,’ he said, and unloaded crockery into the sink. ‘Is this the drill?’ he asked, and turned on the tap.

  ‘Don’t you touch them things!’ she shouted. Beg pardon, sir, I’m sure. It’s very kind but Joe’d never forgive me.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be fitting,’ she said in a flurry. ‘Not the thing at all.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Here!’ he said to the little girl who was ogling him round the leg of the table. ‘Can you dry?�
�

  She swung her barrel of a body from side to side and shook her head.

  ‘No, she can’t,’ said her mother.

  ‘Well, Fox can,’ Alleyn announced as his colleague loomed up in the doorway. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said, and they washed up together.

  ‘By the way, Mrs Plank,’ Alleyn asked, ‘do you happen to know where Gil Ferrant berths his boat?’

  She said she fancied it was anchored out in the harbour. He makes great use of it, said Mrs Plank.

  ‘When he goes night fishing?’

  ‘If that’s what it is.’

  This was a surprising reaction, but it turned out that Mrs Plank referred to the possibility of philandering escapades after dark in Fifi, which was the name of Ferrant’s craft. ‘How she puts up with it, I’m sure I don’t know,’ said Mrs Plank. ‘No choice in the matter, I dare say.’

  Fox clicked his tongue against his palate and severely contemplated the glass he polished. ‘Fancy that,’ he said.

  Unhampered by the austere presence of her husband, Mrs Plank elaborated. She said that mind you, Mr Fox, she wouldn’t go so far as to say for certain but her friend next door knew for a fact that the poor girl had been seen embarking Fifi after dark with Ferrant in attendance, and as for her and that Jones…She laughed shortly and told her daughter to go into the garden and make another mud pie. The little girl did so by inches, retiring backwards with her eyes on Alleyn as if he were royalty. Predictably she tripped on the doorstep and fell backwards on to the wire mat. She was still roaring when they left.

  ‘Didn’t amount to much joy,’ Fox said disparagingly as they walked down to the front. ‘All this about the girl. We knew she was – what’s that the prince called the tom in the play?’

  ‘ “Some road”?’

  ‘That’s right. The young chap took me to see it,’ said Fox, who usually referred in this fashion to his god-son. ‘Very enjoyable piece. Well, as I was saying, we knew already what this unfortunate girl was.’