Last Ditch (14 page)

‘What’s funny about May 13th?’ asked Plank and then: ‘Oh. Of course. Dulcie.’

‘Will it be a kind of memorial service?’ Fox speculated.

‘Whatever it is, we shall attend it,’ said Alleyn. ‘Come on.’ And he led the way outside.

The morning was sunny and windless. In the horse-paddock two of the Leathers string obligingly nibbled each others’ flanks. On the hillside beyond the blackthorn hedge three more grazed together, swishing their tails and occasionally tossing up their heads.

‘Peaceful scene, sir?’ Sergeant Plank suggested.

‘Isn’t it?’ Alleyn agreed. ‘Would that be the Old Barn?’ He pointed to a building at some distance from the stables.

‘That’s it, sir. That’s where they hold their meetings. It’s taken on surprising in the district. By all accounts he’s got quite a following.’

‘Ever been to one, Plank?’

‘Me, Mr Alleyn? Not in my line. We’re C of E., me and my missus. They tell me this show’s very much in the blood-and-thunder line.’

‘We’ll take a look at the barn later.’

They walked down to the gap in the hedge.

An improvised but sturdy fence had been built enclosing the area where the sorrel mare had taken off for her two jumps. Pieces of raised weather-board covered the hoof prints.

‘Who ordered all this?’ Alleyn asked. ‘The Super?’

After a moment Plank said: ‘Well, no, sir.’

‘You did it on your own?’

‘Sir.’

‘Good for you, Plank. Very well done.’

‘Sir,’ said Plank, crimson with gratification.

He lifted and replaced the boards for Alleyn. ‘There wasn’t anything much in the way of human prints,’ he said. ‘There’s been heavy rain. And, of course, horses’ hoof prints all over the shop.’

‘You’ve saved these.’

‘I took casts,’ Plank murmured.

‘You’ll be getting yourself in line for a halo,’ said Alleyn, and they moved to the gap itself. The blackthorn in the gap had been considerably knocked about. Alleyn looked over it and down and across to
the far bank where a sort of plastic tent had been erected. Above and around this a shallow drain had been dug.

‘That’s one hell of a dirty great jump,’ Alleyn said.

There was a massive slide down the near bank and a scramble of hoof prints on the far one.

‘As I read them,’ Plank ventured, ‘it looks as if the mare made a mess of the jump, fell all ways down this bank and landed on top of her rider on the far side.’

‘And it looks to me,’ Alleyn rejoined, ‘that you’re not far wrong.’

He examined the two posts on either side of the gap. They were half hidden by blackthorn, but when this was held aside, scars, noticed by Ricky, were clearly visible: on one post thin rounded grooves, obviously of recent date, on the other, similar grooves dragged upwards from the margin. Both posts were loose in the ground.

At considerable discomfort to himself, Alleyn managed to clear a way to the base of the left-hand post and crawl into it.

‘The earth’s been disturbed,’ he grunted. ‘Round the base.’

He backed out, groped in his pocket and produced his three inches of fencing wire from the coach-house.

‘Here comes the nitty-gritty bit,’ said Fox.

He and Plank wrapped handkerchiefs round their hands and held back obstructing brambles. Alleyn cupped his scratched left hand under one of the grooves, and with his right finger and thumb insinuated his piece of wire into it. It fitted snugly.

‘Bob’s your uncle,’ said Fox.

‘A near relation at least. Let’s try elsewhere.’

They did so, with the same result on both posts.

‘Well, Plank,’ Alleyn said, sucking the back of his hand, ‘how do you read the evidence?’

‘Sir, like I did before, if you’ll excuse my saying so, though I hadn’t linked it up with that coil in the coachhouse. Should have done, of course, but I missed it.’

‘Well?’

‘It looks like there was this wire, strained between the posts. It’d been there a long time, because coming, as we now know, from the lot in the coach-house it must have been rusty.’ Plank caught himself up. ‘Here. Wait a mo,’ he said. ‘Forget that. That was silly.’

‘Take your time.’

‘Ta. No. Wipe that. Excuse me, sir. But it had been there a long time because the wire marks are overgrown by thorn.’

Fox cleared his throat.

‘What about that one, Fox?’ Alleyn said.

‘It doesn’t follow. Not for sure. It wants closer examination,’ Fox said. ‘It could have been rigged from the far side.’

‘I think so. Don’t you, Plank?’

‘Sir,’ said Plank, chastened.

‘Go on, though. When was it removed from the barn?’

‘Recently. Recently it was, sir. Because the cut end was fresh.’

‘Where is it?’

‘We don’t know that, do we, sir?’

‘Not on the peg in the coach-house, at least. That lot’s in one piece. What does all this seem to indicate?’

‘I’d kind of thought,’ said Plank carefully, ‘it pointed to her having cut it away before she attempted the jump. It’s very dangerous, sir, isn’t it, in horse-jumping – wire is. Hidden wire.’

‘Very.’

‘Would the young chap,’ Fox asked, ‘have noticed it if it was in place when he jumped?’

Alleyn walked back to the prints of the sorrel mare’s take-off and looked at the gap.

‘Old wire. It wouldn’t catch the light, would it? We’ll have to ask the young chap.’

Plank cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘I did carry out a wee routine check along the hedgerow, and there’s no wire there. I’d say, never has been.’

‘Right.’ Alleyn hesitated for a moment. ‘Plank,’ he said, ‘I can’t talk to your Super till he’s off the danger list, so I’ll be asking you about matters I’d normally discuss with him.

‘Sir,’ said Plank, fighting down any overt signs of gratification.

‘Why was it decided to keep the case open?’

‘Well, sir, on account really of the wire. I reported what I could make out of the marks on the posts and the Super had a wee look-see. That was the day he took bad with the pain, like. It were that evening his appendix bust and they operated on him, and his last
instructions to me was: “Apply for an adjournment and keep your trap shut. It’ll have to be the Yard.” ’

‘I see. Has anything been said to Mr Harkness about the wire?’

‘There has, but bloody-all come of it. Far’s I could make out it’s been there so long he’d forgotten about it.
Was
there, in fact, before he bought the place. He reckons Dulcie went down and cut it away before she jumped, which is what I thought seemed to make sense if anything he says can be so classed. But Gawd knows,’ said Plank, removing his helmet and looking inside it as if for an answer, ‘he was that put about there was no coming to grips with the man. Would you care to take a look at the far bank, sir? Where she lay?’

They took a look at it and the horses in the field came and took a look at them, blowing contemptuously through their nostrils. Plank removed his tent and disclosed the pegs he had driven into the ground round dead Dulcie Harkness.

‘And you took photographs, did you?’ Alleyn asked.

‘It’s a bit of a hobby with me,’ Plank said, and drew them from a pocket in his tunic. ‘I carry a camera round with me,’ he said. ‘On the off-chance of a nice picture.’

Fox placed his glasses, looked and clicked his tongue. ‘Very nasty,’ he said. ‘Very unpleasant. Poor girl.’

Plank, who contemplated his handiwork with a proprietary air, his head slightly tilted, said absently: ‘You wouldn’t hardly recognize her if it wasn’t for the shirt. I used a sharper aperture for this one,’ and he gave technical details.

Alleyn thought of the picture in the office of a big blowzy girl in a check shirt, exhibiting the sorrel mare. He returned the photographs to their envelope and put them in his pocket. Plank replaced the tent.

Alleyn said: ‘From the time the riding-party left until she was found, who was here? On the premises?’

‘There again!’ Plank cried out in vexation. ‘What’ve we got? Sir, we’ve got Cuth Harkness and that’s it. Now then!’ He produced his notebook, wetted his thumb and turned pages. ‘Harkness. Cuthbert,’ he said, and changed to his police-court voice.

‘I asked Mr Harkness where he and Miss Harkness and Mr Sydney Jones were situated and how employed subsequent to the departure of the riding-party. Mr Harkness replied that he instructed Jones to
drive into Montjoy and collect horse fodder, which he later did. At this point Mr Harkness broke down and spoke very confusedly about Mr Jones – something about him not having got the mare re-shod as ordered. He shed tears considerably. Mr Jones, on being interviewed, testified that Mr Harkness had words with deceased who was in her room but who looked out of her window and spoke to him, he being at that time in the stable yard. I asked Mr Harkness: “Was she locked in her room?” He said she had carried on to that extent that he went quietly upstairs and turned the key in her door, which at this point was in the outside lock. When I examined the door, the key was in the inside lock and was in the unlocked position. I noted a gap of three-quarters of an inch between door and floor. I noted a thin rug laying in the gap. I pointed this out to Mr Harkness, who told me that he had left the key in the outside lock. I examined the rug and the area where it lay and formed the opinion it had been dragged into the room. The displacement of dust on the floor caused me to form this opinion, which was supported by Mr Harkness to the extent that the deceased had effected an escape in this manner when a schoolgirl.’

Plank looked up. ‘I have the key, sir,’ he said.

‘Right. So your reading is that she waited until her uncle was gone and then poked the key on to the mat. With what?’

‘She carried one of those old-time pocket knives with a spike for getting stones out of hooves. It was in her breeches pocket.’

‘
First Steps in Easy Detection
,’ Alleyn murmured.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes, all right. Could be. So you read it that at some stage after this performance she let herself out, went downstairs, cut away the wire and dumped it we don’t know where. But replaced the cutters –’

Fox said: ‘Ah. Yes. There’s that.’

‘– and then saddled up the mare and rode to her death. I can’t,’ said Alleyn, rubbing his nose, ‘get it to run smoothly. It’s got a spurious feel about it. But then, of course, one hasn’t known that poor creature. What was she like, Plank?’

After a considerable pause Plank said: ‘Big.’

‘One could see that. As a character? Come on, Plank.’

‘Well,’ said Plank, a countryman, ‘if she’d been a mare you’d of said she was always in season.’

‘That’s a peculiar way of expressing yourself, Sergeant Plank,’ Fox observed austerely.

‘My son said something to much the same effect,’ said Alleyn.

They returned to the yard. When they were half-way up the horse-paddock, Alleyn stooped and poked at the ground. He came up with a small and muddy object in the palm of his hand.

‘Somebody’s lost a button?’ he said. ‘Rather a nice one. Off a sleeve, I should think.’

‘I never noticed it,’ said Plank.

‘It’d been trodden by a horse into the mud.’

He put it in his pocket.

‘What’s the vet called, Plank?’ he asked.

‘Blacker, sir, Bob.’

‘Did you see the cut on the mare’s leg?’

‘No, sir. He’d bandaged her up when I looked at her.’

‘Like it or lump it, he’ll have to take it off. Ring him up, Plank.’

When Mr Blacker arrived, he seemed to be, if anything, rather stimulated to find police on the spot. He didn’t even attempt to hide his curiosity and darted avid little glances from one to the other.

‘Something funny in the wind, is there?’ he said, ‘or what?’

Alleyn asked if he could see the injury to the mare’s leg. Blacker demurred but more as a matter of form, Alleyn thought, than with any real concern. He went to the mare’s loose-box and was received with that air of complete acceptance and non-interest which animals seem to reserve for veterinary surgeons.

‘How’s the girl, then?’ asked Mr Blacker.

She was wearing a halter. He moved her about the loose-box and then walked her round the yard and back.

‘Nothing much the matter
there,
is there?’ Plank ventured.

The mare stretched out her neck towards Alleyn and quivered her nostrils at him.

‘Like to take hold of her?’ the vet said.

Alleyn did. She butted him uncomfortably, drooled slightly and paid no attention to the removal of the bandage.

‘There we are,’ said Mr Blacker. ‘Coming along nicely.’

Hair was growing in where it had been shaved off round the cut, which ran horizontally across the front of the foreleg about three inches above the hoof. It had healed, as Mr Blacker said, good and
pretty and they’d have to get those two stitches out, wouldn’t they? This was effected with a certain display of agitation on the part of the patient.

Alleyn said: ‘What caused it?’

‘Bit of a puzzle, really. There were scratches from the blackthorn, which you’ll have seen was knocked about, and bruises and one or two superficial grazes, but she came down in soft ground. I couldn’t find anything to account for this cut. It went deep, you know. Almost to the bone. There wasn’t anything of the sort in the hedge but, my God, you’d have said it was wire.’

‘Would you indeed?’ Alleyn put his hand in his pocket and produced the few inches of wire he had cut from the coil in the coach-house. He held it alongside the scar.

‘Would that fit?’ he asked.

‘By God,’ said Mr Blacker, ‘it certainly would.’

Alleyn said, ‘I’m very much obliged to you, Blacker.’

‘Glad to be of any help. Er – yes – er,’ said Mr Blacker, ‘I suppose, er, I mean, er…’

‘You’re wondering why we’re here? On departmental police business, but your Super, finding himself out of action, suggested we might take a look at the scene of the accident.’

They were in the stable yard. The Leathers string of horses had moved to the brow of the hill. ‘Which,’ Alleyn asked, ‘is Mungo, the wall-eyed bay?’

‘That thing!’ said Blacker. ‘We put it down a week ago. Cuth always meant to, you know, it was a wrong ‘un. He’d taken a scunner to it after it kicked him. Way he talked about it, you’d have thought it was possessed of a devil. It was a real villain, I must say. Dulce fancied it, though. Thought she’d make a show-jumper of it. Fantastic! Well, I’ll be on my way. Morning to you.’