Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

“To L’Espérance.”

“Indeed?”

“I do la blanchisserie de fin for the ladies. I deliver it there.”

“Is that the usual procedure?”

“No,” she said composedly. “Usually one of their staff picks it up. As we were driving in that direction and the washing was ready, I delivered it.”

“Speaking of deliveries, you do know, don’t you, that young Louis — to distinguish him,” said Alleyn, “from the elder Louis — delivered a note from your husband addressed to me. At the police station? Here very late last night? He pushed it under the door, rang the bell, and ran away.”

“That’s a bloody lie,” said Mrs. Ferrant. In English.

The conversation so far had been conducted in a lofty mixture of French and English and, in both languages, at a high level of decorum. It was startling to hear Mrs. Ferrant come out strongly in basic British fishwife.

“But it isn’t, you know,” Alleyn said mildly. “It’s what happened.”

“No! I swear it. The boy has done nothing. Nothing. He was in bed and asleep by nine o’clock.”

The front door banged.

“ Maman! Maman !” cried a treble voice, “Where are you?”

Mrs. Ferrant’s hand went to her mouth.

They heard young Louis run down the passage and in and out of the kitchen.

“ Maman ! Are you upstairs? Where are you?”

“ Ferme ton bec ,” she let out in the standard maternal screech. “I am busy. Stop that noise.”

But he returned, running up the passage, and burst into the parlor.

“ Maman ,” he said, “they have nicked papa. The boys are saying it. They nicked him last night at the house where he gave me the letter.” He stared at Alleyn. “Him,” he said, and pointed. “The fuzz. He’s nicked papa.”

Mrs. Ferrant raised her formidable right arm in what no doubt was a familiar gesture.

Louis said, “No, Maman !” and cringed.

Alleyn said: “Do you often give Louis a coup for speaking the truth, Mrs. Ferrant?”

She thrust the receipted bill at him. “Take it and remove yourself,” she said. “I have nothing more to say to you.”

“I shall do so. With the fondest remembrances of your sole à la Dieppoise .”

Upstairs, in Ricky’s room Fox said: “What do we get out of that lot?”

“Apart from confirmation of various bits of surmise and conjecture I should say damnall, or very nearly so. If it’s of interest, I think she’s jealous of her husband and completely under his thumb. I think she hates his guts and would go to almost any length to obey his orders. Otherwise, damnall.”

They packed up Ricky’s belongings. The morning had turned sunny and the view from the window, described with affection in his letters, was at its best. The harbor was spangled, seagulls swooped and coasted, and down on the front, a covey of small boys frisked and skittered. Louis was not among them.

Alleyn laid his hand on the stack of paper that was Ricky’s manuscript and wondered how long the view from the window would remain vivid in his son’s memory. All his life, perhaps, if anything came of the book. He covered the pile with a sheet of plain paper and put it into an attaché case, together with a quantity of loose notes. Fox packed the clothes. In a drawer of the wardrobe he found letters Ricky had received from his parents.

“Mrs. F. will have enjoyed a good read,” said Alleyn grimly.

When everything was ready and the room had taken on that blank, unoccupied look, they put Ricky’s baggage in the car. Alleyn, for motives he would have found hard to define but suspected to be less than noble, left five pounds on the dressing table.

Before they shut the front door they heard her cross the passage and mount the stairs.

“She’ll chuck it after you,” predicted Fox.

“What’s the betting? Give her a chance.”

They waited. Mrs. Ferrant did not throw the five pounds after them. She snapped the window curtains across the upstairs room. A faint tremor seemed to suggest that she watched them through the crack.

They returned to Montjoy after a brief visit to Syd’s Pad, where they found Moss and Cribbage, who had completed an exhaustive search and had assembled the fruits of it on the work table: a tidy haul, Alleyn said. He pressed his thumb down on tubes of paint and felt the presence of buried capsules. He looked at the collection, still nestling under protective rows of flake white: capsules waiting to be inserted. And at a chair the legs of which were scored with wire and smudged with blood.

“You’ve done very well,” he said and turned to Plank. “Normally,” he said, “I’d have sent for Detective-Sergeant Thompson who’s my particular chap at the Yard, but seeing you’re an expert, Plank, I think we’ll ask you to take the photographs of this area for us. How do you feel about tackling the job?”

Scarlet with gratification, Plank intimated that he felt fine and was dropped at his station to collect photographic gear. Moss and Cribbage were to take alternate watches at the Pad until such time as the exhibits were removed. Fox and Alleyn returned to Montjoy.

As their car climbed up the steep lane to the main road, Alleyn looked down on the Cove and wondered whether or not he would have occasion to return to it.

When he walked into his room at the Hotel Montjoy, he found Troy there waiting for him.

iii

Sunday came in to the promise of halcyon weather. A clear sky and a light breeze brought an air of expectation to the island.

Ricky’s progress was satisfactory, and though his face resembled, in Troy’s words, one of Turner’s more intemperate sunsets, no bones were broken and no permanent disfigurement need be expected. His ankles were still very swollen and painful but there was no sign of infection and with the aid of sticks he hoped to be able to hobble out of hospital tomorrow.

In the morning Alleyn and Fox had a session on the balcony outside the Alleyns’ room. They trudged through the body of evidence point by point in familiar pursuit of an overall pattern.

“You know,” Fox said, pushing his spectacles up his forehead when they paused for Alleyn to light his pipe, “the unusual feature of this case, as I see it, is its lack of definition. Take the homicide aspect, now. As a general rule we know who we’re after. There’s no mystery. It’s a matter of finding enough material to justify an arrest. It’s not like that, this time,” Fox said vexedly. “You may have your ideas and so may I, Mr. Alleyn. We may even think there’s only the one possibility that doesn’t present an unanswerable objection, but there’s not what I’d call a hard case to be made out. We’ve got the drug scene on the one hand and this poor girl on the other. Are they connected? Well, are they? Was she knocked off because she threatened to shop them on account of requiring a husband? And if so, which would she shop? Or all? We’ve got three names that might, as you might say, qualify — but only one available for the purpose of marriage.”

“The miserable Syd.”

“Quite so. Then there’s this uncle. There were all these scenes with him. Threats and all the rest of it. Motive, you might think. But he wasn’t drinking at that time and you can’t imagine him risking his own horseflesh. The mare he’s so keen on just as likely to be killed as the girl. And in any case he’d threatened to give her what for if she had a go. And he ordered Jones to remove the mare so’s she couldn’t try. No, I reckon we’ve got to boil it down to those three unless — by cripey, I wonder.”

“What?”

“What was it you quoted yesterday about a female informant in France? I’ve got it,” said Fox and repeated it. He thought it over, became restless, shook his head, and broke out again. “We’ve no nice, firm times for anything,” he lamented. “Mr. and Mrs. Ferrant, S. Jones, Mr. Louis Pharamond all flitting about the premises, in and out and roundabout and Mr. Harkness locking the girl up. The girl getting out and getting herself killed. Mr. Harkness writing these silly pamphlets. I don’t know,” Fox said and readjusted his glasses. “It’s mad.”