Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

“My son said something to much the same effect,” said Alleyn.

They returned to the yard. When they were halfway up the horse paddock Alleyn stooped and poked at the ground. He came up with a small and muddy object in the palm of his hand.

“Somebody’s lost a button,” he said. “Rather a nice one. Off a sleeve, I should think.”

“I never noticed it,” said Plank.

“It’d been trodden by a horse into the mud.”

He put it in his pocket.

“What’s the vet called, Plank?” he asked.

“Blacker, sir, Bob.”

“Did you see the cut on the mare’s leg?”

“No, sir. He’d bandaged her up when I looked at her.”

“Like it or lump it, he’ll have to take it off. Ring him up, Plank.”

When Mr. Blacker arrived he seemed to be, if anything, rather stimulated to find police on the spot. He didn’t even attempt to hide his curiosity and darted avid little glances from one to the other.

“Something funny in the wind, is there?” he said, “or what?”

Alleyn asked if he could see the injury to the mare’s leg. Blacker demurred, but more as a matter of form, Alleyn thought, than with any real concern. He went to the mare’s loose-box and was received with that air of complete acceptance and noninterest that animals seem to reserve for veterinary surgeons.

“How’s the girl, then?” asked Mr. Blacker.

She was wearing a halter. He moved her about the loose-box and then walked her around the yard and back.

“Nothing much the matter there , is there?” Plank ventured.

The mare stretched out her neck toward Alleyn and quivered her nostrils at him.

“Like to take hold of her?” the vet asked.

Alleyn did. She butted him uncomfortably, drooled slightly, and paid no attention to the removal of the bandage.

“There we are,” said Mr. Blacker. “Coming along nicely.”

Hair was growing in where it had been shaved off around the cut, which ran horizontally across the front of the foreleg about three inches above the hoof. It had healed, as Mr. Blacker said, good and pretty and they’d have to get those two stitches out, wouldn’t they? This was effected with a certain display of agitation on the part of the patient.

Alleyn said: “What caused it?”

“Bit of a puzzle, really. There were scratches from the blackthorn, which you’ll have seen was knocked about, and bruises and one or two superficial grazes, but she came down in soft ground. I couldn’t find anything to account for this cut. It went deep, you know. Almost to the bone. There wasn’t anything of the sort in the hedge but, my God, you’d have said it was wire.”

“Would you indeed?” Alleyn put his hand in his pocket and produced the few inches of wire he had cut from the coil in the coach house. He held it alongside the scar.

“Would that fit?” he asked.

“By God,” said Mr. Blacker, “it certainly would.”

Alleyn said, “I’m very much obliged to you, Blacker.”

“Glad to be of any help. Er — yes — er,” said Mr. Blacker, “I suppose, er, I mean, er—”

“You’re wondering why we’re here? On departmental police business, but your Super finding himself out of action suggested we might take a look at the scene of the accident.”

They were in the stable yard. The Leathers string of horses had moved to the brow of the hill. “Which,” Alleyn asked, “is Mungo, the wall-eyed bay?”

“That thing!” said Blacker. “We put it down a week ago. Cuth always meant to, you know, it was a wrong ’un. He’d taken a scunner on it after it kicked him. Way he talked about it, you’d have thought it was possessed of a devil. It was a real villain, I must say. Dulce fancied it, though. Thought she’d make a show jumper of it. Fantastic! Well, I’ll be on my way. Morning to you.”

When he had gone Alleyn said: “Shall we take a look at the barn? If open.”

It was a stone building standing some way beyond the stables and seemed to bear witness to the vanished farmstead, said by Plank to have predated Leathers. There were signs of a thatched roof having been replaced by galvanized iron. They found a key above the door, which carried the legend “Welcome to all” in amateurish capitals.

“That lets us in,” said Fox, drily.

The interior was well lit from uncurtained windows. There was no ceiling to hide the iron roof and birds could be heard scruffling about outside. The hall wore that air of inert expectancy characteristic of places of assembly caught, as it were, by surprise. A group of about a hundred seats, benches of various kinds, and a harmonium faced a platform approached by steps, on which stood a table, a large chair, and six smaller ones. The table carried a book prop and an iron object that appeared to symbolize fire, flanked by a cross and a sword.

“That’ll be Chris Beale, the smith’s, work,” said Plank, spotting it. “He’s one of them.”

The platform, set off by curtains, was backed by a whitewashed wall with a central door. This was unlocked and opened into a room fitted with a gas boiler, a sink, and cupboards with crockery. “ ‘Ladies a basket’ we must remember,” Alleyn muttered and returned to the platform. Above the door and occupying half of the width of the wall hung an enormous placard, scarlet and lettered in white. “THE WAGES OF SIN,” it alarmingly proclaimed, “ARE DEATH.”

The side walls, also, were garnished with dogmatic injunctions including quotations from the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy. One of these notices attracted Mr. Fox’s attention. “Watch,” it said, “For ye know not at what Hour the Master Cometh.”

“Do they reckon they do?” Fox asked Plank.

“Do what, Mr. Fox?”

“Know,” Fox said. “When.”

As if as in answer to his inquiry the front door opened to reveal Mr. Harkness. He stood there, against the light, swaying a little and making preliminary noises. Alleyn moved toward him.

“I hope,” he began, “you don’t mind our coming in. It does say on the door—”

A voice from within Mr. Harkness said, “Come one, come all. All are called. Few are chosen. See you Sunday.” He suddenly charged down the hall and up the steps, most precariously, to the door on the platform. Here he turned and roared in his more familiar manner. “It will be an unexamplimented experience. Thank you.”

He gave a military salute and plunged out of sight.

“I’ll think we’ll have it at that,” said Alleyn.

i

At half-past nine on that same morning, Ricky chucked his pen on his manuscript, ran his fingers through his hair, and plummeted into the nadir of doubt and depression that from time to time so punctually attends upon dealers in words. “I’m no good,” he thought, “it’s all a splurge of pretension and incompetence. I write about one thing and something entirely different is trying to emerge. Or is there quite simply nothing there to emerge? Over and out.”

He stared through the window at a choppy and comfortless harbor and his thoughts floated as inconsequently as driftwood among the events of the past weeks. He wallowed again between ship and jetty at Saint Pierre-des-Roches. He thought of Julia Pharamond and that teasing face was suddenly replaced by the frightful caved-in mask of dead Dulcie. Ferrant returned to make a fool of him and he asked himself for the hundredth time if it had been Ferrant or Syd Jones who tried to drown him. And for the hundredth time he found it a preposterous notion that anybody should try to drown him. And yet knew very well that it had been so and that his father believed him when he said as much.

So now he thought of his father and of Br’er Fox, who was his godfather. He wondered how exactly they behaved when they worked together on a case and if at that moment they were up at Leathers. Detecting. And then, with a certainty that quite astonished him, Ricky tumbled to it that the reason why he couldn’t write that morning was not because the events of the day before had distracted him or because he was bruised and sore and looked a sight or because the horror of Dulcie Harkness had been revived but simply because he wanted very badly indeed to be up there with his father, finding out about things.