Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

Then he covered his face with his hands and bolted into the inner room. The door shut behind him with such violence that the framed legend above it crashed to the floor. Still the rain hammered on the iron roof.

Alleyn and Fox were on the stage with Plank hard at their heels. Nothing they said could be heard. Alleyn was at the door. It was locked. He and Fox stood back from it, collected themselves and shoulder-charged it. It resisted but Plank was there and joined in the next assault. It burst open and they plunged into the room.

Brother Cuth hung from a beam above the chair he had kicked away. His confession was pinned to his coat. He had used a length of wire from the coil in the old coach house.

iv

Alleyn pushed the confession across the table at Fox. “It’s all there,” he said. “He may have written it days ago or whenever he first made up his mind.

“He was determined to destroy the author of his damnation, as he saw her, and then himself. The method only presented itself after their row about Dulcie jumping the gap. He seems to have found some sort of satisfaction, some sense of justice in the act of her disobedience being the cause of her death. He must have… made his final preparations… during the time he was locked up in the back room before the service began. If we’d broken in the door on the first charge we might just have saved him. He wouldn’t have thanked us for it.”

“I don’t get it, sir,” Plank said. “Him risking the sorrel mare. It seems all out of character.”

“He didn’t think he was risking the mare. He’d ordered Jones to take her to the smith and he counted on Dulcie trying the jump with Mungo, the outlaw, the horse he wanted to destroy. In the verbal battle they exchanged, he told her the mare had gone to the smith and she said she’d do it on Mungo. It’s there, in the confession. He’s been very thorough.”

“When did he rig the wire in the gap?” Fox asked. He was reading the confession. “Oh yes. I see. As soon as Jones went to the corn chandlers, believing that on his return he would remove the sorrel mare to the blacksmith’s.”

“And unrigged it after the Ferrants left, when Jones was sleeping off his drugs in the loose-box.”

Fox said: “And that girl lying in full view there in the ditch, looking the way she did! You can’t wonder he went off the rails.” He read on.

Plank said: “And yet, Mr. Alleyn, by all accounts he used to be fond of her, too. She was his niece. He’d adopted her.”

“What’s all this he’s on about? Leviticus twenty, verse six,” Fox asked.

“Look it up in the Bible they so thoughtfully provide in your room, Br’er Fox. I did. It says: ‘ None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness. ’ ”

Fox thought it over and was scandalized. “I see,” he said. “Yes, I see.”

“To him,” Alleyn said, “she was the eternal temptress. The Scarlet Woman. The cause of his undoing. In a way, I suppose, he thought he was handing over the outcome to the Almighty. If she obeyed him and stayed in her room, nothing would happen. If she defied him, everthing would. Either way the decision came from on High.”

“Not my idea of Christianity,” Plank muttered. “The Missus and I are C of E,” he added.

“You know,” Alleyn said to Fox, “one might almost say Harkness was a sort of cross between Adam and the Ancient Mariner. ‘The woman tempted me,’ you know. And the subsequent revulsion followed by the awful necessity to talk about it, to make a proclamation before all the world and then to die.”

They said nothing for some time. At last Fox cleared his throat.

“What about the button?” he asked.

“In the absence of its owner, my guess would be that he went into the horse paddock out of curiosity to inspect Bruno’s jump and saw dead Dulcie. Dulcie who’d been threatening to shop her drug-running boyfriends. That, true to his practice as a strictly background figure of considerable importance, Louis decided to have seen nothing and removed himself from the terrain. Too bad he dropped a button.”

“Well,” Fox said after a further pause. “We haven’t had what you’d call a resounding success. Missed out with our homicide by seconds, lost a big fish on the drug scene, and ended up with a couple of tiddlers. And we’ve seen the young chap turn into a casualty on the way. How is he, Mr. Alleyn?”

“We’ve finished for the time being. Come and see,” said Alleyn.

Ricky had been discharged from hospital and was receiving in his bedroom at the hotel. Julia, Jasper, and Troy were all in attendance. The Pharamonds had brought grapes, books, champagne, and some more langouste sandwiches because the others had been a success. They had been describing, from their point of view, Cuth’s party as Julia only just continued not to call it.

“Darling,” she said to Ricky, “your papa was quite wonderful.” And to Troy, “No, but I promise. Superb.” She appealed to Fox. “You’ll bear me out, Mr. Fox.” Rather to his relief she did not wait for Fox to do so. “There we all were,” Julia continued at large. “I can’t tell you — the noise! And poor, poorest Cuth, trying with all his might to compete, rather, one couldn’t help thinking, like Mr. Noah in the deluge. I don’t mean to be funny but it did come into one’s head at the time. And really, you know, it was rather impressive. Especially when he pointed us out and said we were wallowers in the fleshpots of Egypt, though why Egypt, one asks oneself. And then all those—‘effects,’ don’t they call them? — and — and—”

Julia stopped short. “Would you agree,” she said, appealing to Alleyn, “that when something really awful happens it’s terribly important not to work up a sort of phony reaction? You know? Making out you’re more upset than you really are. Would you say that?”

Alleyn said: “In terms of self-respect I think I would.”

“Exactly,” said Julia. “It’s like using a special sort of pious voice about somebody who’s dead when you don’t really mind all that much.” She turned to Ricky and presented him with one of her most dazzling smiles. “But then you see,” she said, “thanks to your papa we only saw the storm scene, as I expect it would be called in Shakespeare. Because after they broke in the door a large man pulled the stage curtains across and then your papa came through like men in dinner jackets do in the theater and asked for a doctor and told us there’d been an accident and would we leave quietly. So we did. Of course if we’d—” Julia stopped. Her face had gone blank. “If we’d seen,” she said rapidly, “it would have been different.”

Ricky remembered what she had been like after she had seen Dulcie Harkness. And then he remembered Jasper saying: “The full shock and horror of a death is only experienced when it has been seen.”

Julia and Jasper said they must go and Alleyn went down with them to their car. Jasper touched Alleyn’s arm and they let Julia go ahead and get into the driver’s seat.

“About Louis,” Jasper said. “Is it to do with drugs?”

“We think it may be.”

“I’ve thought from time to time that something like that might be going on. But it all seemed unreal. We’ve never known anybody who was hooked.”

Alleyn echoed Julia. “If you had,” he said, “it would have been different.”

When he returned, it was to find Fox and Troy and Ricky quietly contented with each other’s company.

Alleyn put his arm round Troy.

‘“And so we say farewell,’ ” he said, ‘“to the Pharamonds and their Wonderful Island.’ Pack up your bags, chaps. We’re going home.”

The End