Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

It was no longer pitch dark. Shapes had begun to appear, shadows of definite form and patches of light. The moon, in its last quarter, had risen behind the pine grove and soon would shine full upon them. Already he could see Fox and beyond him P.C. Cribbage, propped against the wall, his head drooping, his helmet inclined forward above his nose. He was asleep.

Even as Alleyn reached out to draw Fox’s attention to his neighbor, Cribbage’s knees bent. He slid down the wall and fell heavily to the ground, kicking the acetylene lamp. Wakened, he began to scramble to his feet and was kicked by Fox. He rose with abject caution.

Absolute silence had fallen inside the house.

Alleyn motioned to Fox and Fox, with awful grandeur, motioned to the stricken Cribbage. They cat-walked across to Alleyn’s side of the door and stood behind him, all three of them pressed back against the wall.

“ If— ” Alleyn breathed. “We act.”

“Right.”

They moved a little apart and waited. Alleyn with his ear to the door. The light that had shown so faintly across the threshold went out. He drew back and signaled to Fox. After a further eternal interval they all heard a rustle and clink as of a curtain being drawn.

The key was turned in the lock.

The deep framework surrounding the door prevented Alleyn from seeing it open but he knew it had opened, very slightly. He knew that the man inside now looked out and saw nothing untoward where Fox and Cribbage had been. To see them, he would have to open up wide enough to push his head through and look to his right.

The door creaked.

In slow motion a black beret began to appear. An ear, a temple, the flat of a cheek, and then, suddenly, the point of a jaw and an eye. The eye looked into his. It opened wide and Alleyn drove his fist hard at the jaw.

Ferrant pitched forward. Fox caught him under the arms and Cribbage took him by the knees. Alleyn closed the door.

Ferrant’s right hand opened and Alleyn caught the gun that fell from it. “Lose him. Quick,” he said. Fox and Cribbage carried Ferrant, head lolling and arms dangling, around the corner of the house. The operation had been virtually soundless and had taken a matter of seconds.

Alleyn moved back to his place by the door. There was still no sound from inside the house. Fox and Cribbage returned.

“Still out,” Fox muttered and intimated that Ferrant was handcuffed to a small tree with his mouth stopped.

They took up their former positions, Alleyn with Ferrant’s gun — a French army automatic — in his hand. This one, he thought, was going to be simpler.

Two loud thumps came from within the house followed by an exclamation that sounded like an oath. Then, soft but unmistakable, approaching footsteps and again the creak of the opening door.

“Gil!” Syd Jones whispered into the night. “What’s up? Where are you? Are you there, Gil?”

Like Ferrant, he widened the door opening and, like Ferrant, thrust his head out.

They used their high-powered torches. Syd’s face, a bearded mask, started up, blinking and expressionless. He found himself looking into the barrel of the automatic, “Hands up and into the room,” Alleyn said. Fox kicked the door wide open, entered the house, and switched on the light. Alleyn followed Syd with Cribbage behind him.

At the far end of the room, face to wall, gagged and bound in his chair, was Ricky.

“Fox,” Alleyn said. Fox took the automatic and began the obligatory chant—“Sydney Jones, I arrest—” Plank arrived and put on the handcuffs.

Alleyn, stooping over his son, was saying: “It’s me, old boy. You’ll be all right. It’s me.” He removed the bloodied gag. Ricky’s mouth hung open. His tongue moved and he made a sound. Alleyn took his head carefully between his hands.

Ricky contrived to speak. “Oh, golly, Cid,” he said. “Oh, golly !”

“I know. Never mind. Won’t be long, now. Hold on.”

He unstrapped the arms and they fell forward. He knelt to release the ankles.

Ricky’s white socks were bloodied and overhung his shoes. Alleyn turned the socks back and exposed wet ridges that had closed over the bonds.

From between the ridges protruded a twist of wire and two venomous little prongs.

iii

Ricky lay on the bed. In the filthy little kitchen, P.C. Moss boiled up a saucepan of water and tore a sheet into strips. Sergeant Plank was at the station, telephoning for a doctor and ambulance.

Ferrant and Syd Jones, handcuffed together, sat side by side facing the table. Opposite them Alleyn stood with Fox beside him and Cribbage modestly in the background. The angled lamp had been directed to shine full in the prisoners’ faces.

On the table, stretched out to its full length on a sheet of paper, lay the wire that had bound Ricky’s ankles and cut into them. It left a trace of red on the paper.

To Ricky himself, lying in the shadow, his injuries thrumming through his nerves like music, the scene was familiar. It was an interrogation scene with obviously dramatic lighting, barked questions, mulish answers, suggested threats. It looked like a standard offering from a police story on television.

But it didn’t sound like one. His father and Fox did not bark their questions. Nor did they threaten but were quiet and deadly cold and must, Ricky thought, be frightening indeed.

“This wire,” Alleyn was saying to Syd, “it’s yours, is it?”

Syd’s reply, if he made one, was inaudible.

“Is it off the back of the picture frame there? It is? Where did you get it? There?” A pause. “Lying about? Where?”

“I don’t remember.”

“At Leathers?”

“S’right.”

“When?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You know very well. When?”

“I don’t remember. It was some old junk. He didn’t want it.”

“Was it before the accident?”

“Yes. No. After.”

“Where?”

“In the stables.”

“Where, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know. Where?”

“Hanging up. With a lot more.”

“Did you cut if off?”

“No. It was on its own. A separate bit. What’s the idea?” Syd broke out with a miserable show of indignation. “So it’s a bit of old wire. So I took it to hang a picture. So what?”

Ferrant, on a jet of obscenities, French and English, told him to hold his tongue.

“I didn’t tie him up,” Syd said. “You did.”

“ Merde .”

Alleyn said: “You will both be taken to the police station in Montjoy and charged with assault. Anything you say now — and then — will be taken down and may be used in evidence. For the moment, that’s all.”

“Get up,” said Fox.

Cribbage got them to their feet. He and Fox marshaled them toward the far end of the room. As they were about to pass the bed, looking straight before them, Fox laid massive hands upon their shoulders and turned them to confront it.

Ricky, from out of the mess they had made of his face, looked at them. Ferrant produced the blank indifference of the dock. Syd, whose face, as always, resembled the interior of an old-fashioned mattress, showed the whites of his eyes.

Fox shoved them around again and they were taken, under Cribbage’s surveillance, to the far end of the room.

Constable Moss emerged from the kitchen with a saucepan containing boiled strips of sheet and presented it before Alleyn.

Alleyn said: “Thank you, Moss. I don’t know that we should do anything before the doctor’s seen him. Perhaps clean him up a bit.”

“They’re sterile, sir,” said Moss. “Boiled for ten minutes.”

“Splendid.”

Alleyn went into the kitchen. Boiled water had been poured into a basin. He scrubbed his hands with soap that Syd evidently used on his brushes if not on himself. Alleyn returned to his son. Moss held the saucepan for him and he very cautiously swabbed Ricky’s mouth and eyes.