Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

“Excuse me,” said Mr. Harkness and left the room.

“Now what!” Mr. Fox exclaimed.

“Call of nature?” Sergeant Plank suggested.

“Or the bottle,” Alleyn said. “Damn.”

He looked about the office: at faded photographs of equestrian occasions, of a barely recognizable and slim Mr. Harkness in the uniform of a mounted-infantry regiment. A more recent photograph displayed a truculent young woman in jodhpurs displaying a sorrel mare.

“That’s Dulce,” said Sergeant Plank. “That was,” he added.

The desk was strewn with bills, receipts, and a litter of brochures and pamphlets, some of a horsey description, others proclaiming in dated, execrable type the near approach of judgment and eternal damnation. In the center was a letter pad covered in handwriting that began tidily and deteriorated into an illegible scrawl. This seemed to be a draft for a piece on the lusts of the flesh. Above and to the left of the desk was the corner cupboard spotted by Ricky and Jasper Pharamond. The door was not quite closed and Alleyn flipped it open. Inside was the whiskey bottle and behind this, as if thrust out of sight, but still distinguishable, the card with a red-ink skull and crossbones and the legend — “BEWARE!!! This Way Lies Damnation!!!” The bottle was empty.

Alleyn reached out a long finger and lifted a corner of the card, exposing a small carton half filled with capsules.

“Look at this, Br’er Fox,” he said.

Fox put on his spectacles and peered.

“Well, well,” he said and after a closer look: “ Simon Frères . Isn’t there something, now, about Simon Frères?”

“Amphetamines. Dexies. Prohibited in Britain,” Alleyn said. He opened the carton and shook one capsule into his palm. He had replaced the carton and pocketed the capsule when Fox said, “Coming.”

Alleyn shut the cupboard door and was back in his chair as an uneven footstep announced the return of Mr. Harkness. He came in on a renewed fog of Scotch.

“Apologize,” he said. “Bowels, all to blazes. Result of shock. You were saying?”

“I’d said all of it, I think,” Alleyn replied. “I was going to ask, though, if you’d mind our looking over the ground outside. Where it happened and so on.”

“Go where you like,” he said, “but don’t, please, please, don’t ask me to come.”

“Of course, if you’d rather not.”

“I dream about that gap,” he whispered. There was a long and difficult silence. “They made me see her,” he said at last. “Identification. She looked awful.”

“I know.”

“Well,” he said with one of his most disconcerting changes of manner. “I’ll leave you to it. Good hunting.” Incredibly he let out a bark of what seemed to be laughter and rose with difficulty to his feet. He had begun to weep.

They had reached the outside door when he erupted into the passage and ricocheting from one wall to the other, advanced toward Alleyn upon whom he thrust a pink brochure.

Alleyn took it and glanced at flaring headlines.

“WINE IS A MOCKER” [he saw].

“STRONG DRINK IS RAGING.”

“Read,” Mr. Harkness said with difficulty, “mark, learn and inwardly indigestion. See you on Sunday.”

He executed an abrupt turn and once more retired, waving airily as he did so. His uneven footsteps faded down the passage.

Fox said thoughtfully: “He won’t last long at that rate.”

“He’s not himself, Mr. Fox,” Plank said, rather as if he felt bound to raise excuses for a local product. “He’s very far from being himself. It’s the liquor.”

“You don’t tell me.”

“He’s not used to it, like.”

“He’s learning, though,” Fox said.

Alleyn said: “Didn’t he drink? Normally?”

“T.T. Rabid. Hellfire according to him. Since he was Saved,” Plank added.

“Saved from what?” Fox asked. “Oh, I see what you mean. Eternal damnation and all that carry-on. What was that about ‘See you Sunday’? Has anything been said about seeing him on Sunday?”

“Not by me,” Alleyn said. “Wait a bit.”

He consulted the pink brochure. Following some terrifying information about the evils of intemperance it went on to urge a full attendance at the Usual Sunday Gathering in the Old Barn at Leathers with Service and Supper, Gents 50p, Ladies a Basket. Across these printed instructions a wildly irregular hand had scrawled: “Special! Day of Wrath!! May 13th!!! Remember!!!!”

“What’s funny about May thirteenth?” asked Plank and then: “Oh. Of course. Dulcie.”

“Will it be a kind of memorial service?” Fox speculated.

“Whatever it is, we shall attend it,” said Alleyn. “Come on.” And he led the way outside.

The morning was sunny and windless. In the horse paddock two of the Leathers string obligingly nibbled each other’s flanks. On the hillside beyond the blackthorn hedge three more grazed together, swishing their tails and occasionally tossing up their heads.

“Peaceful scene, sir?” Sergeant Plank suggested.

“Isn’t it?” Alleyn agreed. “Would that be the Old Barn?” He pointed to a building at some distance from the stables.

“That’s it, sir. That’s where they hold their meetings. It’s taken on surprising in the district. By all accounts he’s got quite a following.”

“Ever been to one, Plank?”

“Me, Mr. Alleyn? Not in my line. We’re C of E, me and my Missus. They tell me this show’s very much in the blood-and-thunder line.”

“We’ll take a look at the barn later.”

They walked down to the gap in the hedge.

An improvised but sturdy fence had been built, enclosing the area where the sorrel mare had taken off for her two jumps. Pieces of raised and weathered board covered the hoofprints.

“Who ordered all this?” Alleyn asked. “The Super?”

After a moment Plank said: “Well, no sir.”

“You did it on your own?”

“Sir.”

“Good for you, Plank. Very well done.”

“Sir,” said Plank, crimson with gratification.

He lifted and replaced the boards for Alleyn. “There wasn’t anything much in the way of human prints,” he said.

“There’s been heavy rain. And, of course, horses’ hoofprints all over the shop.”

“You’ve saved these.”

“I took casts,” Plank murmured.

“You’ll be getting yourself in line for a halo,” said Alleyn and they moved to the gap itself. The blackthorn in the gap had been considerably knocked about. Alleyn looked over it and down and across to the far bank where a sort of plastic tent had been erected. Above and around this a shallow drain had been dug.

“That’s one hell of a dirty great jump,” Alleyn said.

There was a massive slide down the near bank and a scramble of hoofprints on the far one.

“As I read them,” Plank ventured, “it looks as if the mare made a mess of the jump, fell all ways down this bank, and landed on top of her rider on the far side.”

“And it looks to me,” Alleyn rejoined, “as if you’re not far wrong.”

He examined the two posts on either side of the gap. They were half hidden by blackthorn, but when this was held aside, scars, noticed by Ricky, were clearly visible: on one post thin, rounded grooves, obviously of recent date; on the other, similar grooves dragged upwards from the margin. Both posts were loose in the ground.

At considerable discomfort to himself, Alleyn managed to clear a way to the base of the left-hand post and crawl up to it.

“The earth’s been disturbed,” he grunted. “Around the base.”

He backed out, groped in his pocket, and produced his three inches of fencing wire from the coach house.

“Here comes the nitty-gritty bit,” said Fox.