Last Ditch (13 page)

‘By and large,’ Mr Fox had said, ‘people like to know about personalities in the Force so long as they’re in the clear themselves. They get quite curious to meet you, Mr Alleyn, when they hear about your little idiosyncrasies: it takes the stiffness out of the first enquiries, if you see what I mean. In theatrical parlance,’ Fox had added, ‘they call it building up an entrance.’

‘In common-or-garden parlance,’ Alleyn said warmly, ‘it makes a bloody great fool out of me.’ Fox had smiled slightly.

On this occasion it was clear that the Foxian method had been engaged and, it was pretty obvious, abetted, by Sergeant Plank. Alleyn found himself the object of fixed and silent attention in the bar of the Cod-and-Bottle and the evident subject of intense speculation.

Mr Fox, who was infallible in remembering names at first hearing, performed introductions and Alleyn shook hands all round. Throats were cleared and boots were shuffled. Bob Maistre deployed his own technique as host and asked Alleyn how he’d found the young chap, then, and what was all this they’d heard about him getting himself
into trouble over to St Pierre? Alleyn gave a lively account of his son losing his footing on the wet jetty, hitting his jaw on an iron stanchion and falling between the jetty and the
Island Belle.

‘Could have been a serious business,’ he said, ‘as far as I can make out. No knowing what might have happened if it hadn’t been for this chap aboard the ship – Jim le Compte, isn’t it?’

It emerged that Jim le Compte was a Cove man and this led easily to the introduction of local gossip, easing round under Plank’s pilotage, to Mr Ferrant and to wags of the head and knowing grins suggesting that Gil Ferrant was a character, a one, a bit of a lad.

‘He’s lucky,’ Alleyn said lightly, ‘to be able to afford jaunts in France, I wish I could.’

This drew forth confused speculations as to Gil Ferrant’s resources: his rich aunties in Brittany, his phenomenal luck on the French lotteries, his being, in general, a pretty warm customer.

This turn of conversation was, to Alleyn’s hidden fury, interrupted by Sergeant Plank, who offered the suggestion that no doubt the Chief Super’s professional duties sometimes took him across the Channel. Seeing it was expected of him, Alleyn responded with an anecdote or two about a sensational case involving the pursuit and arrest in Marseilles, with the assistance of the French force, of a notable child-killer. This, as Fox said afterwards, went down like a nice long drink, but, as he pointed out to Sergeant Plank, had the undesirable effect of cutting off any further local gossip. ‘It was well-meant on your part, Sarge,’ Mr Fox conceded, ‘but it broke the thread. It stopped the flow of info.’

‘I’m a source of local info myself, Mr Fox,’ Sergeant Plank ventured. ‘In my own person, I am.’

‘True enough as far as it goes, Sarge, but you’re overlooking a salient factor. As the Chief Super has frequently remarked, ours is a solitary class of employment. We can, and in your own type of patch, the village community, we often do, establish friendly relations. Trespassing, local vandalism, creating nuisances, trouble with neighbours and they’re all over you, but let something big turn up and you’ll find yourself out on your own. They’ll herd together like sheep and you won’t be included in the flock. It can be uncomfortable till you get used to it.’

Fox left a moment or two for this to sink in. He then cleared his throat and continued. ‘The effect of the diversion,’ he said, ‘was this.
The thread of local gossip being broken, what did they do? They got all curious about the Chief. What’s he here for? Is it the Harkness fatality, and if not, what is it? And if it is, why is it? Enough to create the wrong atmosphere at the site of investigation.’

Whether or not these pronouncements were correct, the atmosphere at Leathers the next morning, as disseminated by Mr Harkness, the sole occupant, was far from comfortable. Alleyn, Fox and Plank arrived at eight-thirty to find shuttered windows and a notice pinned to the front door: ‘Stables Closed till Further Notice.’ They knocked and rang to no effect.

‘He’ll be round at the back,’ Plank said, and led the way to the stables.

At first they seemed to be deserted. A smell of straw and horse-droppings hung on the air, flies buzzed, and in the old open coach-house a couple of pigeons waddled about the floor, pecked here and there and flew up to the rafters where they defecated off-handedly on the roof of the battered car. In the end loose-box the sorrel mare reversed herself, looked out, rolled her eyes, pricked her ears at them and trembled her nostrils in an all but inaudible whinny.

‘Will I see if I can knock Cuth Harkness up, sir?’ offered Plank.

‘Wait a bit, Plank. Don’t rush it.’

Alleyn strolled over to the loose-box. ‘Hullo, old girl,’ he said, ‘how goes it?’ He leant on the half-door and looked her over. The near foreleg was still bandaged. She nibbled his ear with velvet lips. ‘Feeling bored, are you?’ he said, and moved down the row of empty loose-boxes to the coach-house.

There was the coil of old wire where Ricky had seen it, hanging from a peg above a pile of empty sacks. It was rather heavier than picture-hanging wire and looked as if it had been there for a long time. But as Ricky had noticed, there was a freshly-cut end. Alleyn called Fox and the sergeant over. Plank’s boots, being of the regulation sort, loudly announced his passage across the yard. He changed to tip-toe and an unnerving squeak.

‘Take a look,’ Alleyn murmured.

‘I reckon,’ Plank said after a heavy-breathed examination, ‘that could be it, Mr Alleyn. I reckon that would fit.’

‘Do you, by George,’ Alleyn said.

There was an open box in the corner filled with a jumble of odds-and-ends and a number of tools, among them a pair of wire-cutters. With uncanny speed Alleyn used them to nip off three inches of wire from the reverse end.

‘That, Sergeant Plank,’ he said, as he replaced the cutters, ‘is something we must never, never do.’

‘I’ll try to remember, sir,’ said Sergeant Plank demurely.

‘Mr Harkness,’ Fox said, ‘seems to be coming, Mr Alleyn.’

And indeed he could be heard coughing hideously inside the house. Alleyn reached the door in a breath and the other two stood behind him. He knocked briskly.

Footsteps sounded in the passage and an indistinguishable grumbling. A lock was turned and the door dragged open a few inches. Mr Harkness, blinking and unshaven, peered out at them through a little gale of Scotch whisky.

‘The stables are closed,’ he said thickly, and made as if to shut the door. Alleyn’s foot was across the threshold.

‘Mr Harkness?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. We’re police officers. Could you give us a moment?’

For a second or two he neither spoke nor moved. Then he pulled the door wide open.

‘Police, are you?’ Mr Harkness said. ‘What for? Is it about my poor sinful niece again, God forgive her, but that’s asking too much of Him? Come in.’

He showed them into his office and gave them chairs and seemed to become aware, for the first time, of Sergeant Plank.

‘Joey Plank,’ he said. ‘You again. Can’t you let it alone? What’s the good? It won’t bring her back. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and she’s finding that out for herself where she’s gone. Who are these gentlemen?’

Plank introduced them: ‘The Chief Superintendent is on an administrative visit to the island, Mr Harkness,’ he said, ‘and has kindly offered to take a wee look-see at our little trouble.’

‘Why do you talk in that silly way about it?’ Mr Harkness asked fretfully. ‘It’s not a little trouble, it’s hell and damnation and she’s brought it on herself and I’m the cause of it. I’m sorry,’ he said, and turned to Alleyn with a startling change to normality. ‘You’ll think me awfully rude but I dare say you’ll understand what a shock this has been.’

‘Of course we do,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’re sorry to break in on you like this, but Superintendent Curie in Montjoy suggested it.’

‘I suppose he thinks he knows what he’s talking about,’ Mr Harkness grumbled. His manner now suggested a mixture of hope-lessness and irritation. His eyes were bloodshot, his hands unsteady and his breath was dreadful. ‘What’s this about the possibility of foul play? What do they think I am, then? If there was any chance of foul play, wouldn’t I be zealous in the pursuit of unrighteousness? Wouldn’t I be sleepless night and day as the hound of Heaven until the awful truth was hunted down?’ He glared moistly at Alleyn. ‘Well, ‘he shouted. ‘Come on!
Wouldn’t I?
’

‘I’m sure you would,’ Alleyn hurriedly agreed.

‘Very natural and proper,’ said Fox.

‘You shut up,’ said Mr Harkness, but absently and without rancour.

‘Mr Harkness,’ Alleyn began, and checked himself. ‘I’m sorry – should I be giving you your rank? I don’t know –’

The shaky hand drifted to the toothbrush moustache. ‘I don’t insist on it,’ the thick voice mumbled. ‘Might of course. But let it pass. Mr’s good enough.’ The wraith of the riding-master faded and the distracted zealot returned. ‘Pride,’ said Mr Harkness, ‘is the dead-liest of all the sins. You were saying?’

He leant towards Alleyn with a parody of anxious attentiveness.

Alleyn was very careful. He explained that in cases of fatality the police had a duty to eliminate the possibility of any verdict but that of accident. Sometimes, he said, there were features that at first sight seemed to preclude this. ‘More often than not,’ he said, ‘these features turn out to be of no importance, but we do have to make sure of it.’

With an owlish and insecure parody of the conscientious officer, Mr Harkness said: ‘Cer’nly. Good show.’

Alleyn, with difficulty, took him through the period between the departure and return of the riding-party. It emerged that Mr Harkness had spent most of the day in the office concocting material for religious handouts. He gave a disjointed account of locking his niece in her room and of her presumed escape, and said distractedly that some time during the afternoon, he could not recall when, he had gone into the barn to pray but had noticed nothing untoward and had met nobody. He began to wilt.

‘Where did you have your lunch?’ Alleyn asked.

‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Harkness, and left the room.

‘Now what!’ Mr Fox exclaimed.

‘Call of nature?’ Sergeant Plank suggested.

‘Or the bottle,’ Alleyn said. ‘Damn.’

He looked about the office: at faded photographs of equestrian occasions; of a barely recognizable and slim Mr Harkness in the uniform of a mounted-infantry regiment. A more recent photograph displayed a truculent young woman in jodhpurs displaying a sorrel mare.

‘That’s Dulce,’ said Sergeant Plank. ‘That was,’ he added.

The desk was strewn with bills, receipts and a litter of brochures and pamphlets, some of a horsy description, others proclaiming in dated, execrable type the near approach of judgement and eternal damnation. In the centre was a letter pad covered in handwriting that began tidily and deteriorated into an illegible scrawl. This seemed to be a draft for a piece on the lusts of the flesh. Above and to the left of the desk was the corner-cupboard spotted by Ricky and Jasper Pharamond. The door was not quite closed and Alleyn flipped it open. Inside was the whisky bottle and behind this, as if thrust out of sight but still distinguishable, the card with a red ink skull-and-crossbones and the legend – ‘BEWARE! This Way Lies Damnation! ! !’ The bottle was empty.

Alleyn reached out a long finger and lifted a corner of the card, exposing a small carton half-filled with capsules

‘Look at this, Br’er Fox,’ he said.

Fox put on his spectacles and peered.

‘Well, well,’ he said, and after a closer look: ‘Simon Frères. Isn’t there something, now, about Simon Frères?’

‘Amphetamines. Dexies. Prohibited in Britain,’ Alleyn said. He opened the carton and shook one capsule into his palm. He had replaced the carton and pocketed the capsule when Fox said, ‘Coming.’

Alleyn shut the cupboard door and was back in his chair as an uneven footstep announced the return of Mr Harkness. He came in on a renewed fog of scotch.

‘Apologize,’ he said, ‘Bowels all to blazes. Result of shock. You were saying?’

‘I’d said all of it, I think,’ Alleyn replied. ‘I was going to ask, though, if you’d mind our looking over the ground outside. Where it happened and so on.’

‘Go where you like,’ he said, ‘but don’t, please, please don’t, ask me to come.’

‘Of course, if you’d rather not.’

‘I dream about that gap,’ he whispered. There was a long and difficult silence. ‘They made me see her,’ he said at last. ‘Identification. She looked awful.’

‘I know.’

‘Well,’ he said with one of his most disconcerting changes of manner, ‘I’ll leave you to it. Good hunting.’ Incredibly he let out a bark of what seemed to be laughter, and rose, with difficulty, to his feet. He had begun to weep.

They had reached the outside door when he erupted into the passage, and ricocheting from one wall to the other, advanced towards Alleyn, upon whom he thrust a pink brochure.

Alleyn took it and glanced at flaring headlines.

‘WINE IS A MOCKER,’ he saw. ‘STRONG DRINK IS RAGING.’

‘Read,’ Mr Harkness said with difficulty, ‘mark, learn and inwardly indigest. See you on Sunday.’

He executed an abrupt turn and once more retired, waving airily as he did so. His uneven footsteps faded down the passage.

Fox said thoughtfully: ‘He won’t last long at that rate.’

‘He’s not himself, Mr Fox,’ Plank said, rather as if he felt bound to raise excuses for a local product. ‘He’s very far from being himself. It’s the liquor.’

‘You don’t tell me.’

‘He’s not used to it, like.’

‘He’s learning, though,’ Fox said.

Alleyn said: ‘Didn’t he drink? Normally?’

‘TT. Rabid. Hell-fire, according to him. Since he was Saved,’ Plank added.

‘Saved from what?’ Fox asked. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Eternal damnation and all that carry-on. What was that about “See you Sunday?” Has anything been said about seeing him on Sunday?’

‘Not by me,’ Alleyn said. ‘Wait a bit.’

He consulted the pink brochure. Following some terrifying information about the evils of intemperance, it went on to urge a full attendance at the Usual Sunday Gathering in the Old Barn at Leathers with Service and Supper, Gents 50p, Ladies a Basket.
Across these printed instructions a wildly irregular hand had scrawled: ‘Special! Day of Wrath! ! May 13th! ! ! Remember! ! ! !’