Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

Ricky, caught in a kind of indolence, couldn’t make up his mind to leave the balcony. He still lounged on the balustrade and stared down at the scene below. Into a straggle of pedestrians there emerged from beneath him someone who seemed to have come out of the church itself, a figure with a purplish-red cap. It wore a belted coat and something square hung from its shoulder.

Ricky was not really at all surprised.

A frightful rumpus outraged his eardrums and upheaved his diaphragm. The church clock, under his feet, was striking ten.

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The last stroke of ten still rumbled on the air as Ricky watched the midget that was Syd walk up the street and, sure enough, turn in at the gateway to Jerome et Cie’s factory. Had he come out of the church? Had he already been lurking in some dark corner when Ricky came in? Or had he followed Ricky? Why had he gone there? To say his prayers? To look for something to paint? To rest his legs? The box, loaded as it always seemed to be with large tubes of paint, must be extremely heavy. And yet he had shifted it casually from one shoulder to the other and there was nothing in the movement to suggest weight. Perhaps it was empty and he was going to get a load of free paints from Jerome et Cie.

Ricky was visited by a sequence of disturbing notions. Did Sydney Jones really think that he, Ricky, was following him around, spying on him or — unspeakable thought — lustfully pursuing him? Or was the boot on the other foot? Was Syd, in fact, keeping Ricky under observation? Had Syd, for some unguessable reason, followed him on board the Island Belle ? Into the bistro? Up the hill to the church? When cornered, were the abuse and insults a shambling attempt to throw him off the scent? Which was the hunter and which the hunted?

It had been after Syd’s return from London and after Dulcie’s death that he had, definitively, turned hostile. Why? Had anything happened when he lunched with Ricky’s parents to make him so peculiar? Was it because Troy had not thought well of his paintings? Or had asked if he was messing about with drugs?

And here Ricky suddenly remembered Syd’s face, six inches from his own when they were vis-à-vis across the fish crate and Syd’s dark glasses had slid down his nose. Were his eyes not pin-pupilled? And did he not habitually snuffle and sweat? And what about the night at Syd’s Pad when he asked if Ricky had ever taken a trip? And behaved very much as if he’d taken something or another himself? Could drugs in fact be the explanation? Of everything? The scene he made when vermillion paint burst out of the wrong end of the tube? The sulks? The silly violence? Everything?

A squalid, boring explanation, he thought, and one that didn’t really satisfy him. There was something else. It came to him that he would very much like to rake the whole thing over with his father.

He descended the church tower and went out to the street. Which way? On up the hill to Jerome et Cie or back to the town? Without consciously coming to a decision he found he had turned to the right and was approaching the entrance to the factory.

Opposite it was a café with chairs and tables set out under an awning. The day was beginning to be hot. He had walked quite a long way and climbed a tower. He chose a table beside a potted rubber plant whose leaves shielded him from the factory entrance but were not dense enough to prevent him watching it. He ordered beer and a roll and began to feel like a character in a roman policier . He supposed his father had often done this sort of thing and tried to imagine him, with his air of casual elegance, “keeping observation” hour after hour with a pile of saucers mounting on the table. “At a certain little café in the suburbs of Saint Pierre-des-Roches…,” thought Ricky. That was how they began roman policiers in the salad days of the genre.

The beer was cold and delicious. It was fun to be keeping his own spot of observation, however pointless it might turn out to be.

Someone had left a copy of Le Monde on the table. He picked it up and began laboriously to read it, maintaining through the rubber plant leaves a pretty constant watch on the factory gates.

Feeling as if the waiters and every customer in the café observed him with astonishment, he contrived to make a hole in the paper which might be useful if, by some freakish chance, Syd should take it into his head to refresh himself when he emerged from the factory. Time went by slowly. It really was getting awfully hot. The newspaper tipped forward. He gave a galvanic jerk, opened his eyes and found himself looking through the rubber plant leaves at Syd Jones, crossing the street toward him.

Ricky whipped the paper up in front of his face and found that the peephole he had made was virtually useless. He stole a quick look over the top and there was Syd, sure enough, seating himself at a distant table with his back to Ricky. He dumped his paint box on the unoccupied seat. There was no doubt that now it was extremely heavy.

Ricky asked himself what the devil he thought he was up to and why it had become so important to find a reason for Syd Jones’s taking a scunner to him. And why was he so concerned to find out if Syd doped himself? Was it because there were details in a pattern that refused to emerge and somehow or another — yes, that, absurdly, was it — could be associated with the death of Dulcie Harkness?

Having arrived at this preposterous conclusion, what was he going to do about it? Waste his little holiday by playing an inane game of hide-and-seek with Syd Jones and return to the island no wiser than when he left it?

There were no looking glasses in this café, and Syd had his back to Ricky, who had widened the hole in Le Monde . He was assured that his legs were unrecognizable since he had changed into jeans and espadrilles.

The waiter took an order from Syd and came back with café-nature and a glass of water.

And now Ricky became riveted to the hole in his paper. Syd looked round furtively. There were only four other people including Ricky in the cafe and he had chosen a table far removed from any of them. Suddenly, as far as Ricky could make out, he put the glass on the seat of his chair, between his thighs. He then appeared to take something out of the breast pocket of his shirt. His head was sunk on his chest, and he leaned forward as if to rest his left forearm on his knee and seemed intent on some hidden object. He became very still. After a few seconds his right arm jerked slightly, there was a further manipulation of some sort, he raised his head, and his body seemed to relax as if in the gift of the sun.

“That settles the drug question, poor sod,” thought Ricky.

But he didn’t think it settled anything else.

Syd began to tap the ground with his foot as though keeping time with an invisible band. With the fingers of his right hand he beat a tattoo on the lid of his paint box. Ricky heard him laugh contentedly. The waiter walked over to his table and looked at him. Syd groped in his pocket and dropped quite a little handful of coins on the table. The waiter picked up what was owing and waited for his tip. Syd made a wide extravagant gesture. “Help yourself,” Ricky heard him say. “ Servez-vous, mon vieux ,” in execrable French. “ Prenez le tout .” The man bowed and swept up the coins. He turned away and, for the benefit of his fellow waiter, lifted his shoulders and rolled his head. Syd had not touched his coffee.

“Good morning, Mr. Alleyn.”

Every nerve in Ricky’s body seemed to leap. He let out an exclamation, dropped the newspaper and turned to find Mr. Ferrant smiling down at him.

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