Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

After posting his long letter to his parents, Ricky thought that now, perhaps, he could push the whole business of Dulcie Harkness into the background and get on with his work. The answer couldn’t reach him for at least three days and when it came it might well give half-a-dozen good suggestions why there should be fresh scars, as of wire, on the posts of the broken-down fence and why the wire that might have made them had been removed and why there was a gash that the vet couldn’t explain on a sorrel mare’s near foreleg and why there was a new-looking cut end to a coil of old wire in the coach house. And perhaps his father would advise him to refrain from teaching his grandmother, in the unlikely person of Sergeant Plank, to suck eggs.

Tomorrow was the day when the Island Belle made her dawn call at the cove. There was a three-day-a-week air service but Ricky liked the idea of the little ship. He came to a sudden decision. If the day was fine he would go to Saint Pierre-des-Roches, return in the evening to Montjoy, and either walk the eight miles or so to the Cove or stand himself a taxi. The break might help him to get things into perspective. He wondered if he were merely concocting an elaborate excuse for not getting on with his work.

“I may run into Mr. Ferrant,” he thought, “taking his ease at his inn. I might even have a look at Jerome et Cie’s factory. Anyway, I’ll go.”

He told Mrs. Ferrant of his intention and that disconcerting woman bestowed one of her protracted stares upon him and then said she’d give him something to eat at half-past four in the morning. He implored her to do no such thing but merely fill his thermos flask overnight with her excellent coffee and allow him to cut himself a “piece.”

She said, “I don’t know why you want to go over there; it’s no great masterpiece, that place.”

“Mr. Ferrant likes it, doesn’t he?”

“Him.”

“If there’s anything you want to send him, Mrs. Ferrant, I’ll take it with pleasure.”

She gave a short laugh that might as well have been a snort.

“He’s got everything he wants,” she said and turned away. Ricky thought that on her way downstairs she said something about the unlikelihood of his encountering Mr. Ferrant but he couldn’t be sure of this.

He woke himself up at four to a clear sky and a waning moon. The harbor was stretched like silk between its confines with the inverted village for a pattern. A party of gulls sat motionless on their upside-down images, and the jetty was deserted.

When he was dressed and shaved he stole down to the kitchen. It was much the biggest room in the house and the Ferrants used it as a living room. It had television and radio, armchairs, and a hideous dresser with a great array of china. Holy oleographs abounded. The stove and refrigerator looked brand new and so did an array of pots and pans. Ricky felt as if he had disturbed the kitchen in a nightlife of its own.

It was warm and smelled of recent cooking. His thermos stood in the middle of the table and, beside it, a message on the back of an envelope.

Mr. Allen.

Food in warm drawer.

When he opened the drawer he found a dish of toasted bacon sandwiches. She must have come down and prepared them while he was getting up. They were delicious. When he had finished them and drunk his coffee, he washed up in a gingerly fashion. It was now twenty to five. Ricky felt adventurous. He wondered if perhaps he would want to stay in Saint Pierre-des-Roches, and on an impulse returned to his room and pushed overnight gear and an extra shirt and jeans into his rucksack.

And now, there was the Island Belle coming quietly into harbor with not a living soul to see her, it seemed, but Ricky.

He went downstairs and wrote on the envelope.

Thank you. Delicious. May stay a day or two but more likely back tonight.

Then he let himself out and walked down the empty street to the jetty. The sleeping houses in the Cove looked pallid and withdrawn. He felt as if he saw them for the first time.

The Island Belle was already alongside. Two local men, known to Ricky at the pub, were putting a few crates on board. He exchanged a word with them and then followed them up the gangway. A sailor took charge of the crates and wished him good morning.

The Belle was a small craft, not more than five hundred tons. She did not make regular trips to the Devon and Cornwall coast but generally confined herself to trading between the islands and nearby French ports. The captain was on the bridge, an elderly bearded man, who gave Ricky an informal salute. A bell rang. The gangway was hauled up, and one of the cove men freed the mooring ropes. The Belle slid out into the harbor.

Ricky watched the village shift back, rearrange itself, and become a picture rather than a reality. He went indoors and found a little box of a purser’s office where a man in a peaked cap sold him a return ticket. He looked into the empty saloon with its three tables, wall benches, and shuttered miniature bar.

When he returned on deck they were already outside the heads and responding, he found with misgiving, to a considerable swell. The chilly dawn breeze caught him and he began to walk briskly along the starboard side, past the wheelhouse and toward the forward hatch.

Crates of fish covered with tarpaulins were lashed together on the deck. Ricky stopped short. Someone was standing motionless on the far side of the crates with his back turned. This person wore a magenta woolen cap pulled down over his ears, with the collar of his coat turned up to meet it. A sailor, Ricky supposed.

Conscious of a feeling of inward uneasiness, he moved forward, seeking a passageway around the cargo, and had found one when the man in the magenta cap turned. It was Sydney Jones.

Ricky hadn’t seen him since they met in the drive to Leathers on the day of the accident. On that occasion, Syd’s inexplicable refusal to speak to or look at him seemed to put a stop to any further exchanges. Ricky’s mother had written a brief account of his visit. “When he dropped to it that your poor papa was a policeman,” she wrote, “which was just before he went back to the Yard, Jones lost not a second in shaking our dust off his sandals. Truly we were nice to him. Daddy thinks he was suffering from a hangover. I’m afraid his work isn’t much cop, poor chap. Sorry, darling.”

And here they were, confronted. Not for long, however. Syd, gray in the face, jerked away and Ricky was left staring at his back across a crate of fish.

“Ah, to hell with it,” he thought and walked around the cargo.

“Look here,” he said. “What is all this? What’ve I done?”

Syd made a plunge, an attempt, it seemed, to dodge around him, but they were both caught by an ample roll of the Island Belle and executed an involuntary pas de deux that landed them nose to nose across the fish crate as if in earnest and loving colloquy. Syd’s dark glasses slid away from his washed-out eyes.

In spite of growing queasiness Ricky burst out laughing. Syd mouthed at him. He was regrowing his beard.

“Come on,” Ricky said. “Let’s know the worst. You can’t insult me! Tell me all.” He was beginning to be cold. Quite definitely all was not well within. Syd contemplated him with unconcealed disgust.

“Come on,” Ricky repeated with an awful attempt at jauntiness. “What’s it all about, for God’s sake?”

Clinging to the fish crate and exhibiting intense venom, Syd almost shrieked at him: “It’s about me wanting to be on my bloody pat, that’s what it’s about. Get it? It’s about I can’t take you crawling round after me. It’s about I’m not one of those. It’s not my scene, see? No way. See? No way . So do me a favor and—”