Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

“It’s hard to explain,” Ricky sighed. He was beginning to feel sleepy.

“Look,” said the man, “we sail at six. Was you thinking of sailing with us, then? Just to know, like. No hurry.”

“Oh yes,” Ricky said. “Yes, please.”

“Where’s your dunnage?”

Ricky pulled himself together and told him. The man said his mate, the second deckhand, was relieving him as watchman at four-thirty. He offered to collect Ricky’s belongings from the hotel and pay his bill. Ricky fished his waterproof wallet out of an inside pocket of his raincoat and found that the notes were not too wet to be presentable.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “Look. Take a taxi. Buy yourself a bottle of Scotch from me. You will, won’t you?”

He said he would. He also said his name was Jim Le Compte and they’d have to get Ricky dressed proper and sitting up before the Old Man came aboard them.

And by six o’clock Ricky was sitting in the saloon fully dressed with a rug over his knees. It was a smoother crossing than he had expected, and rather to his surprise he was not seasick, but slept through most of it. At Montjoy he said goodbye to his friend. “Look,” he said, “Jim, I owe you a lot already. Will you do something more for me?”

“What would that be?”

“Forget about there being anyone else in it. I just skidded and fell. Please don’t think,” Ricky added, “that I’m in any sort of trouble. Believe me, I’m not. Word of honor. But — will you be a good chap and leave it that way?”

Le Compte looked at him for some moments with his head on one side. “Fair enough, squire,” he said at last. “If that’s the way you want it. You skidded and fell.”

“You are a good chap,” said Ricky. He went ashore carrying a rucksack full of wet clothes and took a taxi to the Cove.

He let himself in and went straight upstairs, passing Mrs. Ferrant who was speaking on the telephone.

When he entered his room a very tall man rose from the armchair.

It was his father.

iv

“So you see I’m on duty,” said Alleyn. “Fox and I have got a couple of tarted-up apartments at the Neo-Ritz or whatever it calls itself in Montjoy, the use of a police car, and a tidy program of routine work ahead. I wouldn’t have any business talking to you, Rick, except that by an exasperating twist you may turn out to be a source of information.”

“Hi!” said Ricky excitedly. “Is it about Miss Harkness?”

“Why?” Alleyn asked sharply.

“I only wondered.”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you what it’s about normally, but if we’re to get any further I think I’ll have to. And Rick — I want an absolute assurance that you’ll discuss this business with nobody. But nobody. In the smallest degree. It must be as if it’d never been. Right?”

“Right,” said Ricky and his father thought he heard a tinge of regret.

“Nobody,” Alleyn repeated. “And certainly not Julia Pharamond.”

Ricky blushed.

“As far as you’re concerned, Fox and I have come over to discuss a proposed adjustment to reciprocal procedure between the island constabulary and the mainland police. We shall be sweating it out at interminable and deadly boring meetings. That’s the story. Got it?”

“Yes, Cid.” (“Cid,” deriving from C.I.D., was the name Ricky and his friends gave his father.)

“Yes. And nobody’s going to believe it when we start nosing round at the riding stables. But never mind. Let’s say that as we were here, the local chaps thought they’d like a second opinion. By the way, talking about local chaps, the Super at Montjoy who called us in hasn’t helped matters by bursting his appendix and having an urgent operation. The local sergeant at the Cove, Plank — but of course you know Plank — is detailed to the job.”

“He’s nobody’s fool.”

“Good. Now, coming back to you. The really important bit to remember is that we must be held to take no interest whatever in Monsieur Ferrant’s holidays and we’ve never even heard of Sydney Jones.”

“But,” Ricky ventured, “I’ve told the Pharamonds about his visit to you and Mum.”

“Damn. All right, then. It passed off quietly and nothing has ever come of it.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. Loud and clear.”

“Yes, Cid.”

“Good. All right. Are you hungry, by the way?”

“Now you mention it.”

“Could that formidable lady downstairs be persuaded to give us both something to eat?”

“I’m sure. I’ll ask her.”

“You’d better tell her you slid on the wet wharf and banged your cheek on a stanchion.”

“She’ll think I was drunk.”

“Good. You smell like a Scotch hangover anyway. Are you sure you’re all right, old boy? Sure?”

“Fine. Now. I’ll have a word with Mrs. F.”

When he’d gone, Alleyn looked out the window at the darkening Cove and turned over Ricky’s account of his visit to Saint Pierre-des-Roches and the events that preceded it. People, he reflected, liked to talk about police cases in terms of a jigsaw puzzle, and that was fair enough as far as it went. But in this instance he couldn’t be sure that the bits all belonged to the puzzle. “Only connect” Forster owlishly laid down as the novelist’s law. He could equally have been setting out a guide for investigating officers.

There had never been any question of Ricky following in his father’s footsteps. From the time when his son went to his first school, Alleyn had been at pains to keep his job at a remove as far as the boy was concerned. Ricky’s academic career had been more than satisfactory and about as far removed from the squalor, boredom, horror, and cynicism of a policeman’s lot as it would be possible to imagine.

And now? Here they were, both of them, converging on a case that might well turn out to be all compact of such elements. And over and above everything else, here was Ricky escaped from what, almost certainly, had been a murderous attack, the thought of which sent an icy spasm through his father’s stomach. Get him out of it, smartly, now, before there was any further involvement, he thought — and then had to recognize that already Ricky’s involvement was too far advanced for this to be possible. He must be treated as someone who might, himself in the clear, provide the police with “helpful information.”

And at the back of his extreme distaste for this development why was there an indefinable warmth, a latent pleasure? He wondered if perhaps an old loneliness had been, or looked to become, a little assuaged.

Ricky came back with the assurance that Mrs. Ferrant was concocting a dish the mere smell of which would cause the salivary glands of a hermit to spout like fountains.

“She’s devoured by curiosity,” he said. “About you. Why you’re here. What you do. Whether you’re cross with me. The lot. She’d winkle information out of a Trappist monk, that one would. I can’t wait.”

“For what?”

“For her to start on you.”

“Rick,” Alleyn said. “She’s Mrs. Ferrant, and Ferrant, you tell me, is mysteriously affluent, goes in for solitary night fishing, pays dressy visits to Saint Pierre-des-Roches, and seems to be thick with Jones. With Jones who also visits there and goes to London carrying paint and who, since he’s found out your father is a cop, has taken a scunner to you. You think Jones dopes. So do I. Ferrant seems to have a bully’s ascendancy over Jones. One of them, you think, tried to murder you. It follows that you watch your step with Mrs. Ferrant, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, of course. And I always have. Not because of any of that but because she’s so bloody insatiable. About the Pharamonds in particular. Especially about Louis.”