Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

“Better,” said Ricky.

Alleyn looked again at the ankles. The wire had driven fibers from Ricky’s socks into the cuts.

“I’d better not meddle,” Alleyn said. “We’ll get on with the search, Fox.” He bent over Ricky. “We’re getting the quack to have a look at you, old boy.”

“I’ll be OK.”

“Of course you will. But you’re bloody uncomfortable, I’m afraid.”

Ricky tried to speak, failed, and then with an enormous effort said: “Try some of the dope,” and managed to wink.

Alleyn winked back using the seriocomic family version with one corner of the mouth drawn down and the opposite eyebrow raised, a grimace beyond his son’s achievement at the moment. He hesitated and then said: “Rick, it’s important or I wouldn’t nag. How did you get here?”

With an enormous effort Ricky said: “Went for a walk.”

“I see: you went for a walk? Past this pad? Is that it?”

“Thought I’d case the joint.”

“Dear God,” Alleyn said quietly.

“They copped me.”

“That,” said Alleyn, “is all I wanted to know. Sorry you’ve been troubled.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Ricky faintly.

“Fox,” Alleyn said. “We search. All of us.”

“What about them?” Fox asked with a jerk of his head and an edge in his voice that Alleyn had never heard before: “Should we wire them up?”

“No,” Alleyn said. “We shouldn’t.” And he instructed Cribbage to double-handcuff Ferrant and Syd, using the second pair of bracelets to link their free hands together behind their backs. They were sat on the floor with their shoulders to the wall. The search began.

At the end of half an hour they had opened the bottom ends of thirty tubes of paint and found capsules in eighteen of them. Dollops of squeezed-out paint neatly ornamented the table. Alleyn withdrew Fox into the kitchen.

“Fair enough,” he said. “We’ve got the corpus delicti. What we don’t know yet is the exact procedure. Jones collected the paints in Saint Pierre but were they already doctored or was he supplied with the capsules and drugs and left to do the job himself? If the latter, there must be evidence of it here.”

“Stuff left over?”

“Yes. They were about to do a bolt, probably under orders to hide any stuff they couldn’t carry. And along came my enterprising son, ‘casing’ as he puts it, ‘the joint.’ ”

“That,” Fox murmured, “would put them about a bit.”

“Yes. What to do with him? Pull him in, which they did. But if they held him, sooner or later we’d set up a search. I imagine that they were in touch with Madame F. through that nefarious kid. Well, in their fluster, they hit on the not uningenious idea of using Rick as a screen for their getaway. And if Mrs. Plank had not been the golden lady she undoubtedly is, they might well have brought it off. I wish to hell that bloody quack would show up.”

“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” said Fox, meaning Ricky.

The meticulous search went on, inch by inch through the littered room, under the bed, stereo table, in the shelves and cupboards, and through heaps of occulted junk. They were about to move into an unspeakable little bedroom at the back when Alleyn said: “While we were outside, before Ferrant came to the door, I heard a metallic sound. Very faint.”

“In the house?”

“Yes. Did you?”

“I didn’t catch it. No,” said Fox.

“Let’s try the kitchen. You two,” he said to Cribbage and Moss, “carry on here.” He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

The kitchen was in the same state of squalor as the rest of the Pad. Its most conspicuous feature was a large and decrepit coal range of an ancient make with a boiler and tap on one side of the grate and an oven on the other. It looked as if it were never used. On top of it was a small modern electric stove. Alleyn removed this to the table and started on the range. He lifted the iron rings and probed inside with a bent poker, listening to the sound. He opened the oven, played his torch around the interior, and tapped the lining. He had let down the front of the grate and lifted the top when Fox gave a grunt.

“What?” Alleyn asked.

“His personal supply. Syringe. Dope. It’s ‘horse’ all right,” said Fox, meaning heroin. “There’s one tablet left.”

“Where?”

“Top shelf of the dresser. Behind an old cookbook. Rather appropriate.”

A siren sounded down on the front. “This’ll be the ambulance,” said Fox. “And the doctor. We hope.”

When Alleyn didn’t answer Fox turned and found him face down in the open top of the range. “There should be a cavity over the oven,” he said, “and there isn’t and — Yes. Surprise, surprise.”

He began pulling. A flat object was edged into view. The siren sounded again and nearer.

“It is the ambulance,” Alleyn said. “You get this lot out, Br’er Fox and no reward for guessing what’s the prize.”

He was back with Ricky before Fox had collected himself or anything else.

Ricky took a bleary look at his father and begged him in a stifled voice not to make him laugh.

“Why should you laugh?”

“When did you join the Black and White Minstrels? Your face. Oh God, I mustn’t laugh.”

Alleyn returned to the kitchen and looked at it in a cracked glass on the wall. The nose was black. He swabbed it with an unused bandage and again washed his hands. Fox had extracted a black attaché case from the stove and had forced the lock and opened it. “What’s that lot worth on the street market?” he asked.

“Two thousand quid if a penny,” said Alleyn and returned to his son. “We’ve got Jones’s very own dope,” he said, “and we’ve got the consignment in transit.” He walked down the room to Ferrant and Jones seated in discomfort on the floor. “You heard that, I suppose,” he said.

Ferrant, in his sharp suit and pink floral shirt, spat inaccurately at Alleyn. He had not spoken since his passage with Syd.

But Syd gazed up at Alleyn. He shivered and yawned and his nose ran. “Look,” he said, “give me a fix. Just one. Look, I need it. I got to have it. Look — for God’s sake.” He suddenly screamed. “Give it to me. I’ll tell you the lot. Get me a fix.”

iv

Ricky was in the Montjoy hospital, having managed a fuller account of his misadventures before being given something to settle him down for the night.

At half-past two in the morning, the relentlessly lit charge room at Montjoy police station smelted of stale bodies, breath, and tobacco, with an elusive background of Jeyes fluid.

Ferrant, who had refused to talk without the advice of a solicitor, had been taken to the cells while the station sergeant tried to raise one. Syd Jones whimpered, suffered onsets of cramp, had to be taken to the lavatory, yawned, ran at the nose, and repeatedly pleaded for a fix. Dr. Carey, called in to watch, said that no harm would be done if the drug was withheld for the time being.

Everything that Jones said confirmed their guesswork. He even showed signs of a miserable sort of complacence over his ingenuity in the matter of the paint tubes. He admitted, as if it were of little account, that it was he who tried to drown Ricky at Saint Pierre.

On one point only he was obdurate: he could not or would not say anything about Louis Pharamond, contriving, when questioned, to recover something of his old intransigence.

“Him,” he said. “Don’t give me him!” and then looked frightened and would say no more about Louis Pharamond.

Alleyn said: “Why didn’t you take the sorrel mare to the smith as you were told to? After you got back with the horse feed?”

Syd drove his fingers through his thicket of hair. “What are you on about now?” he moaned. “What’s that got to do with anything? OK, OK, so I biked back to my pad, didn’t I? So what?”