Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  But it didn’t sound like one. His father and Fox did not bark their questions. Nor did they threaten, but were quiet and deadly cold and must, Ricky thought, be frightening indeed.

  ‘This wire,’ Alleyn was saying to Syd, ‘it’s yours, is it?’

  Syd’s reply, if he made one, was inaudible.

  ‘Is it off the back of the picture frame there? It is? Where did you get it? Where?’ A pause. ‘Lying about? Where?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘At Leathers?’

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You know very well. When?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It was some old junk. We didn’t want it.’

  ‘Was it before the accident?’

  ‘Yes. No. After.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the stables.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You know. Where?’

  ‘Hanging up. With a lot more.’

  ‘Did you cut it off?’

  ‘No. It was on its own. A separate bit. What’s the idea?’ Syd broke out with a miserable show of indignation. ‘So it’s a bit of old wire. So I took it to hang a picture. So what?’

  Ferrant, on a jet of obscenities, French and English, told him to hold his tongue.

  ‘I didn’t tie him up,’ Syd said. ‘You did.’

  ‘Merde.’

  Alleyn said: ‘You will both be taken to the police station in Montjoy and charged with assault. Anything you say now – and then – will be taken down and may be used in evidence. For the moment, that’s all.’

  ‘Get up,’ said Fox.

  Cribbage got them to their feet. He and Fox marshalled them towards the far end of the room. As they were about to pass the bed, looking straight before them, Fox laid massive hands upon their shoulders and turned them to confront it.

  Ricky, from out of the mess they had made of his face, looked at them. Ferrant produced the blank indifference of the dock. Syd, whose face, as always, resembled the interior of an old-fashioned mattress, showed the whites of his eyes.

  Fox shoved them round again and they were taken, under Cribbage’s surveillance, to the far end of the room.

  PC Moss emerged from the kitchen with a saucepan containing boiled strips of sheet and presented it before Alleyn.

  Alleyn said: ‘Thank you, Moss. I don’t know that we should do anything before the doctor’s seen him. Perhaps clean him up a bit.’

  ‘They’re sterile, sir,’ said Moss. ‘Boiled for ten minutes.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  Alleyn went into the kitchen. Boiled water had been poured into a basin. He scrubbed his hands with soap that Syd evidently used on his brushes if not on himself. Alleyn returned to his son. Moss held the saucepan for him and he very cautiously swabbed Ricky’s mouth and eyes.

  ‘Better,’ said Ricky.

  Alleyn looked again at the ankles. The wire had driven fibres from Ricky’s socks into the cuts.

  ‘I’d better not meddle,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’ll get on with the search, Fox.’ He bent over Ricky. ‘We’re getting the quack to have a look at you, old boy.’

  ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Of course you will. But you’re bloody uncomfortable, I’m afraid.’

  Ricky tried to speak, failed, and then with an enormous effort said: ‘Try some of the dope,’ and managed to wink.

  Alleyn winked back, using the serio-comic family version with one corner of the mouth drawn down and the opposite eyebrow raised, a grimace beyond his son’s achievement at the moment. He hesitated and then said: ‘Rick, it’s important or I wouldn’t nag. How did you get here?’

  With an enormous effort Ricky said: ‘Went for a walk.’

  ‘I see: you went for a walk? Past this pad? Is that it?’

  ‘Thought I’d case the joint.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Alleyn said quietly.

  ‘They copped me.’

  ‘That,’ said Alleyn, ‘is all I wanted to know. Sorry you’ve been troubled.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ricky faintly.

  ‘Fox,’ Alleyn said. ‘We search. All of us.’

  ‘What about them?’ Fox asked with a jerk of his head and an edge in his voice that Alleyn had never heard before. ‘Should we wire them up?’

  ‘No,’ Alleyn said. ‘We shouldn’t.’ And he instructed Cribbage to double-handcuff Ferrant and Syd, using the second pair of bracelets to link their free hands together behind their backs. They were sat on the floor with their shoulders to the wall. The search began.

  At the end of half an hour they had opened the bottom ends of thirty tubes of paint and found capsules in eighteen of them. Dollops of squeezed-out paint neatly ornamented the table. Alleyn withdrew Fox into the kitchen.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the corpus delicti. What we don’t know yet is the exact procedure. Jones collected the paints in St Pierre, but were they already doctored or was he supplied with the capsules and drugs and left to do the job himself? It looks like the latter.’

  ‘Stuff left over?’

  ‘Yes. They were about to do a bolt, probably under orders to hide any stuff they couldn’t carry. And along came my enterprising son, “casing”, as he puts it, “the joint”.’

  ‘That,’ Fox murmured, ‘would put them about a bit.’

  ‘Yes. What to do with him? Pull him in, which they did. But if they held him, sooner or later we’d set up a search. I imagine that they were in touch with Madame F. through that nefarious kid. Well, in their fluster, they hit on the not uningenious idea of using Rick as a screen for their getaway. And if Mrs Plank had not been the golden lady she undoubtedly is, they might well have brought it off. I wish to hell that bloody quack would show up.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right,’ said Fox, meaning Ricky.

  The meticulous search went on, inch by inch through the littered room, under the bed, stereo table, in the shelves and cupboards and through heaps of occulted junk. They were about to move into an unspeakable little bedroom at the back when Alleyn said: ‘While we were outside, before Ferrant came to the door, I heard a metallic sound. Very faint.’

  ‘In the house?’

  ‘Yes. Did you?’

  ‘I didn’t catch it. No,’ said Fox.

  ‘Let’s try the kitchen. You two,’ he said to Cribbage and Moss, ‘carry on here.’ He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

  The kitchen was in the same state of squalor as the rest of the pad. Its most conspicuous feature was a large and decrepit coal range of an ancient make with a boiler and tap on one side of the grate and an oven on the other. It looked as if it was never used, On top of it was a small modern electric stove. Alleyn removed this to the table and started on the range. He lifted the iron rings and probed inside with a bent poker, listening to the sound. He opened the oven, played his torch round the interior and tapped the lining. He had let down the front of the grate and lifted the top when Fox gave a grunt.

  ‘What?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘His personal supply. Syringe. Dope. It’s “horse” all right,’ said Fox, meaning heroin. ‘There’s one tablet left.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Top shelf of the dresser. Behind an old cook-book. Rather appropriate.’

  A motor-siren sounded down on the front. ‘This’ll be the ambulance,’ said Fox. ‘And the doctor. We hope.’

  When Alleyn didn’t answer, Fox turned and found him face down in the open top of the range. ‘There should be a cavity over the oven,’ he said, ‘and there isn’t and – Yes. Surprise, surprise.’

  He began pulling. A flat object was edged into view. The siren sounded again and nearer.

  ‘It is the ambulance,’ Alleyn said. ‘You get this lot out, Br’er Fox, and no reward for guessing what’s the prize.’

  He was back with Ricky before Fox had collected himself or anything else.

 
; Ricky took a bleary look at his father and begged him, in a stifled voice, not to make him laugh.

  ‘Why should you laugh?’

  ‘When did you join the Black and White Minstrels? Your face. Oh God, I mustn’t laugh.’

  Alleyn returned to the kitchen and looked at it in a cracked glass on the wall. The nose was black. He swabbed it with an unused bandage and again washed his hands. Fox had extracted a black attaché case from the stove and had forced the lock and opened it. ‘What’s that lot worth on the street market?’ he asked.

  ‘Two thousand quid if a penny,’ said Alleyn, and returned to his son. ‘We’ve got Jones’s very own dope,’ he said, ‘and we’ve got the consignment in transit.’ He walked down the room to Ferrant and Jones, seated in discomfort on the floor. ‘You heard that, I suppose,’ he said.

  Ferrant, in his sharp suit and pink floral shirt, spat inaccurately at Alleyn. He had not spoken since his passage with Syd.

  But Syd gazed up at Alleyn. He shivered and yawned and his nose ran. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘give me a fix. Just one. Look, I need it. I got to have it. Look – for God’s sake.’ He suddenly screamed. ‘Give it to me! I’ll tell you the lot! Get me a fix!’

  IV

  Ricky was in the Montjoy Hospital, having managed a fuller account of his misadventures before being given something to settle him down for the night.

  At half past two in the morning, the relentlessly-lit charge-room at Montjoy police station smelt of stale bodies, breath and tobacco with an elusive background of Jeyes fluid.

  Ferrant, who had refused to talk without the advice of a solicitor, had been taken to the cells while the station sergeant tried to raise one. Syd Jones whimpered, suffered onsets of cramp, had to be taken to the lavatory, yawned, ran at the nose and repeatedly pleaded for a fix. Dr Carey, called in to watch, said that no harm would be done if the drug was withheld for the time being.

  Everything that Jones said confirmed their guesswork. He even showed signs of a miserable sort of complacence over his ingenuity in the matter of the paint tubes. He admitted, as if it was of little account, that it was he who tried to drown Ricky at St Pierre.

  On one point only he was obdurate: he could not or would not say anything about Louis Pharamond, contriving, when questioned, to recover something of his old intransigence.

  ‘Him,’ he said. ‘Don’t give me him!’ and then looked frightened and would say no more about Louis Pharamond.

  Alleyn said: ‘Why didn’t you take the sorrel mare to the smith, as you were told to, after you got back with the horse-feed?’

  Syd drove his fingers through his thicket of hair. ‘What are you on about now?’ he moaned. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? OK, OK, so I biked back to my pad, didn’t I? So what?’

  ‘To get yourself a fix?’

  ‘Yeah. OK. Yeah.’

  For the twentieth time he got up and shambled about the room, stamping and grabbing at the calf of his leg. ‘I got cramp,’ he said. He fetched up in front of Fox. ‘I’ll make a complaint,’ he said. ‘I’ll have it in for you lot the way you’re treating me. Sadists. Fascist pigs.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Fox.

  Syd appealed to Dr Carey. ‘Doc,’ he said, ‘you’ll look after me. Won’t you, Doc? You got to, haven’t you? For Christ’s sake, Doc’

  ‘You’ll have to hang on a bit longer,’ said Doctor Carey, and glanced at Alleyn. Syd broke down completely and wept. Alleyn said: ‘Give him what he needs.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Really.’

  Dr Carey went out of the room.

  Syd, fingering his beard and biting his dirty fingers, let out a kind of laugh. ‘I couldn’t help it, could I?’ he gabbled, and looked sideways at Alleyn, who had turned away from him and didn’t reply.

  ‘It was Gil used the wire on him, not me,’ Syd said to Alleyn’s back.

  Fox walked over to Plank, who throughout the long hours had taken notes. Fox leant over him and turned the pages back.

  ‘Is this correct?’ he asked Syd. ‘What you’ve deposed about the wire? Where you got it and what you wanted it for?’

  ‘I’ve said so, haven’t I? Yes. Yes. Yes. For the picture.’

  ‘Why won’t you talk about Mr Louis Pharamond?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Who’s the next above Ferrant? Who gives the orders?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve told you. Where’s the doc? Where’s he gone?’

  ‘He’ll be here,’ said Fox. ‘You’ll get your fix if you’ll talk about your boss. And I don’t mean Harkness. I mean who gives the orders? Is it Louis Pharamond?’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. They’d knock me off. I would if I could. They’d get me. Honest. I can’t.’ Syd returned to his chair and wept.

  Without turning round Alleyn said: ‘Let it be, Fox.’

  Dr Carey came back with a prepared syringe and a swab. Syd, with a trembling hand, pushed up his sleeve.

  ‘Good God,’ said the doctor, ‘you’ve been making a mess of yourself, haven’t you?’ He gave the injection.

  The reaction was instantaneous. It was a metamorphosis – as if Syd’s entire person thawed and re-formed into a blissful transfiguration of itself. He lolled back in his chair and giggled. ‘Fantastic,’ he said.

  Dr Carey watched him for a moment and then joined Alleyn at the far end of the room.

  ‘He’s well away,’ he said. He’s had ten milligrammes and he’s full of well-being: the classic euphoria. You’ve seen for yourselves what the withdrawal symptoms can be like.’

  Alleyn said: ‘May I put a hypothetical case to you? There may be no answer to it. It may be just plain silly.’

  ‘We can give it a go,’ said Dr Carey.

  ‘Suppose, on the afternoon of Dulcie Harkness’s death, having taken himself off to his pad, he treated himself, to an injection of heroin. Is it within the bounds of possibility that he could return on his motor-bike to Leathers, help himself to a length of wire from the stables, rig it across the gap in the fence, wait until Dulcie Harkness was dying or dead, remove the wire and return to his pad, to reappear on his bike, apparently in full control of himself, later on in the evening?’

  Dr Carey was silent for some time. Syd Jones had begun to hum tunelessly under his breath.

  Carey said at last, ‘Frankly, I don’t know how to answer you. Since my time in the casualty ward at St Luke’s I’ve had no experience of drug addiction. I know symptoms vary widely from case to case. You’d do better to consult a specialist.’

  ‘You wouldn’t rule it out altogether?’

  ‘For what it’s worth – I don’t think I’d do that, quite.’

  ‘I’ll get that bugger,’ Syd Jones announced happily. ‘I’ll bloody well get him.’

  ‘What bugger?’ Fox asked.

  ‘That’d be telling. Think I’d let you in? You got to be joking, Big Fuzz.’

  ‘About my son?’ Alleyn asked Dr Carey.

  ‘Ah yes, of course. He’s settled down nicely.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’ll be all right. There’s been quite a bit of pain and considerable shock. He’s had something that’ll help him sleep. And routine injections against tetanus and so on. The cuts round the ankles were nasty. We’d like to keep him under observation.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ll tell his mother.’

  ‘Of course I’m completely in the dark,’ said Dr Carey. ‘Or nearly so. But, damn it all, I am supposed to be the police surgeon round here. And there is an adjourned inquest coming up.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Alleyn, pulling himself together, ‘I know, and I’m sorry. You shall hear all. In the meantime what shall we do with this specimen?’

  Syd Jones, gloomily surveyed by Fox, laughed, talked incomprehensibly and drifted into song.

  ‘You won’t get any sense out of him. I’d put him in the cells and have him supervised. He’ll go to sleep sooner or later,’ said Dr Carey.


  Syd was removed, laughing heartily as he went. Fox went out to arrange for a constable to sit in his cell until he fell asleep, and Alleyn, who now felt as if he’d been hauled through a mangle, pulled himself together and gave Dr Carey a succinct account of the case as it had developed. They sat on the hideously uncomfortable wall bench. It was now ten minutes past three in the morning. The station sergeant came in with cups of strong tea: the third brew since they’d arrived five hours ago.

  Dr Carey said: ‘No, thanks, I’m for my bed.’ He stood up, stretched, held out his hand and was professionally alerted. ‘You look done up,’ he said. ‘Not surprising. Will you get off now?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, I expect so.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Montjoy.’

  ‘Like anything to help you sleep?’

  ‘Lord, no,’ said Alleyn, ‘I’d drop off in a gravel pit. Nice of you to offer, though. Good night.’

  He went to bed at his hotel, fell instantly and profoundly asleep and, having ordered breakfast in his room at 7.30 and arranged with himself to wake at 7, did so and put in a call to his wife. It went through at once.

  ‘That’s your waking-up voice,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind. Is anything the matter?’

  ‘There was but it’s all right now.’

  ‘Ricky?’

  ‘Need you ask? But darling, repeat, it’s all right now. I promise.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  He told her.

  ‘When’s the first plane?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Nine-twenty from Heathrow. You transfer at St Pierre-des-Roches.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Hotel Montjoy and George VI Hospital.’

  ‘Rory, say if you’d rather I didn’t. You will, won’t you?’

  ‘I’d rather you did, but God knows where I’ll be when you get here. We may well blow up for a crisis.’

  ‘Could you book a room?’

  ‘I could. This one.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be in it.’

  Troy hung up. Alleyn rang up the hospital and was told Ricky had enjoyed a fairly comfortable night and was improving. He bathed, dressed, ate his breakfast and was about to call the hotel office when the telephone rang again. He expected it would be Fox and was surprised and not overjoyed to hear Julia Pharamond’s voice.