Last Ditch

6: Morning at the Cove

i

At half-past nine on that same morning, Ricky chucked his pen on his manuscript, ran his fingers through his hair, and plummeted into the nadir of doubt and depression that from time to time so punctually attends upon dealers in words. “I’m no good,” he thought, “it’s all a splurge of pretension and incompetence. I write about one thing and something entirely different is trying to emerge. Or is there quite simply nothing there to emerge? Over and out.”

He stared through the window at a choppy and comfortless harbor and his thoughts floated as inconsequently as driftwood among the events of the past weeks. He wallowed again between ship and jetty at Saint Pierre-des-Roches. He thought of Julia Pharamond and that teasing face was suddenly replaced by the frightful caved-in mask of dead Dulcie. Ferrant returned to make a fool of him and he asked himself for the hundredth time if it had been Ferrant or Syd Jones who tried to drown him. And for the hundredth time he found it a preposterous notion that anybody should try to drown him. And yet knew very well that it had been so and that his father believed him when he said as much.

So now he thought of his father and of Br’er Fox, who was his godfather. He wondered how exactly they behaved when they worked together on a case and if at that moment they were up at Leathers. Detecting. And then, with a certainty that quite astonished him, Ricky tumbled to it that the reason why he couldn’t write that morning was not because the events of the day before had distracted him or because he was bruised and sore and looked a sight or because the horror of Dulcie Harkness had been revived but simply because he wanted very badly indeed to be up there with his father, finding out about things.

“Oh no!” he thought. “I won’t take that. That’s not my scene. I’ve other things to do. Or have I?” He was very disturbed.

He hadn’t seen any of the Pharamonds since the day of the postponed inquest. Jasper had rung up and asked him to dinner but Ricky had said he was in a bad patch with his work and had promised himself there would be no more junkets until he had got over it. He could hear Julia in the background shouting instructions.

“Tell him to bring his book and we’ll all write it for him.”

Jasper had explained that Julia was in the bath and she, in the background, screamed that umbrage would be taken if Ricky didn’t come. It had emerged that the next day the Pharamonds were flying over to London to see the ballet and meant to stay on for a week or so if anything amusing offered. Ricky had stuck to his guns and not dined at L’Espérance and had wasted a good deal of the evening regretting it.

He wondered if they were still in London. Did they always hunt in a pack? Were they as rich as they seemed to be? Julia had said that Jasper had inherited a fortune from his Brazilian grandfather. And had Louis also inherited a fortune? Louis didn’t seem to do work of any description. Jasper was at least writing a book about the binomial theorem but Louis — Ricky wouldn’t be surprised if Louis was a bit hot: speculated rashly, perhaps, or launched slightly dubious companies. But then he didn’t care for Louis and his bedroom eyes. Louis was the sort of man that women, God knew why, seemed to fall for. Even his cousin Julia when they danced together.

Julia. It would perhaps be just as well, bearing in mind his father’s strictures upon talkativeness, if Julia were still in London. If she were at L’Espérance she would wish to know why his father was here; she would ask them both to dinner and say — he could see her magnolia face and her impertinent eyes — that they were slyboots, both of them. Perhaps his father would not go, but sooner or later he, Ricky, would, and once under the spell, could he trust himself not to blurt something out? No, it would be much better if the Pharamonds had decided to prolong their London visit. Much better.

And having settled that question he felt braced and took up his pen.

He heard the telephone ring and Mrs. Ferrant come out of the kitchen, releasing televisual voices from within.

He knew it was going to be for him and he knew it would be Julia.

Mrs. Ferrant shouted from the foot of the stairs and returned to the box.

As usual Ricky felt as if he had sunk much too rapidly in a fast lift. The telephone was in the passage and before he picked up the receiver he could hear it gabbling. Julia was admonishing her daughter. “All I can say, Selina, is this. Putting mud in Nanny’s reticule is the unfunniest thing you could possibly do and just so boring that I can’t be bothered talking about it. Please go away.”

“I’ve only just come,” Ricky said.

“Ricky?”

“None other.”

“You sound peculiar.”

“I’m merely breathless.”

“Have you been running?”

“No,” said Ricky crossly. He took a plunge. “You have that effect on me,” he said.

“Smashing! I must tell Jasper.”

“When did you come back?”

“Just this moment. The ballet was out of this world. And there were some fantastic parties. Lots of jolly chums.”

Ricky was stabbed by jealousy. “How lovely,” he said.

“I’ve rung up to know if it can possibly be true that your superb papa is among us.”

“Here we go,” Ricky thought. He said. “How did you know?”

“Louis caught sight of him in the hotel last night.”

“But — I thought you said you’d only just got back.”

“Louis didn’t come to London. He doesn’t like the ballet. He stayed at the Hotel Montjoy to escape from Selina and Julietta. Has Troy come too?”

“No, she’s busily painting a tree in London.”

“Louis says your papa seemed to be hobnobbing with an elderly policeman.”

“There’s meant to be some sort of reorganization going on in the force.”

“Are they going to raise Sergeant Plank to dizzy heights? I’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Very much.”

“You’re huffy, aren’t you?”

“No!” Ricky cried. “I’m not. Never less.”

“Nevertheless what?”

“I didn’t say ‘nevertheless.’ I said I was never less huffy.”

“Well then, you’re being slyboots as usual and not divulging some dynamic bit of gossip.” A pause and then the voice said, “Ricky, dear. I don’t know why I tease you.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Promise? Very well, then, is it in order for us to ring up your father and ask him to dine? Or lunch?”

“Yes — well — yes, of course. He’d adore it. Only thing: he is very much occupied it seems.”

“Does it? Well, one can but try,” she said coolly. Ricky felt inclined to say, “Who’s being huffy now?” but he only made vague noises and felt wretched.

“Of course you’d be invited too,” she threw out.

“Thank you, Julia.”

“You still sound odd.”

“I fell in the sea at Saint Pierre.”

“How too extraordinary! What were you doing in Saint Pierre? Or in the sea if it comes to that? Never mind. You should have said so at once and we wouldn’t have been at cross-purposes like funny men on the box. Ricky?”

“Yes, Julia.”

“Has the inquest been reopened?”

“No.”

“I see. I feel we shall never get rid of Miss Harness.”

“Harkness.”

“I don’t do it on purpose. To me she is Harness.”

“I know.”

“I hoped in my shallow way that the ballet and fun things would put her out of my head. But they haven’t.” She added hurriedly, furtively almost, “I dream about it. Seeing her. Isn’t that awful?”

“I’m so terribly sorry. So do I, if it’s any comfort.”

“You do? Not fair to say I’m glad. Ricky — don’t answer if you musn’t — but Ricky — was she murdered?”

“I don’t know. Honestly. How could I?”

“Your father.”

“Julia — please don’t.”

“I’m sorry. How’s your book going?”

“Not very fast.”

“How’s Mr. Jones? At least I can ask you how Mr. Jones is.”

“Oh God!” Ricky said under his breath, and aloud: “He’s away. Over at Saint Pierre-des-Roches.”

“I see. I think I must find out what Selina is doing. It’s Nanny’s evening off and there’s an ominous silence. Goodbye.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about all of you.”

“Have you?”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Ricky was cast down by this exchange. It had been miserably unsatisfactory. He felt that the relationship so elegantly achieved with Julia had been lost in a matter of minutes and there he was floundering about among evasions and excuses while she got more and more remote. She hadn’t spluttered. Not once.

Mrs. Ferrant opened the kitchen door, releasing the honeyed cajolements of a commercial jingle and the subtle aroma of a béarnaise sauce.

“I didn’t think to ask,” she said, “did you happen to see him over in Saint Pierre?”

“Yes,” said Ricky. “We ran into each other.”

“Any message?”

“No. Nothing particular.”

She said: “That black eye of yours is a proper masterpiece, isn’t it?”

Ricky returned to his room.

ii

Alleyn had finished outdoors at Leathers. He went inside to ask Mr. Harkness if he might look at his niece’s bedroom and found him snoring hideously in his office chair. He could not be roused to a sensible condition. Alleyn, in Fox’s presence, formally put his request and took the snort that followed it as a sign of consent.

They all went upstairs to Dulcie’s room.

It was exactly what might have been expected. The walls were covered in horsey photographs, the drawers and wardrobe were stuffed with equestrian gear. Riding boots stood along the floor. The bed was dragged together rather than made. On a table beside it were three battered pornographic paperbacks. A tube of contraceptive pills was in the drawer: half empty.

“Must have been careless,” Fox said. They began a systematic search.

After an unproductive minute or two Plank said: “You don’t suppose she thought taking that dirty great jump might do the trick, do you, sir?”

“Who can tell? On what we’ve got it sounds more as if the jump was the climax of a blazing row with her uncle. Did they blast off at each other as a regular practice do you know, Plank?”

“Only after he took up with this funny religion, or so they reckon in the Cove. Before that they was thought to be on very pleasant terms. He taught her to ride and was uncommon proud of the way she shaped up.”

Fox threw his head back in order to contemplate from under his spectacles an item of Miss Harkness’s underwear. “Free in her ways,” he mused, “by all accounts. By your account if it comes to that, Sarge.”

Sergeant Plank reddened. “According to the talk,” he said, “that was the trouble between them. After he took queer with his Inner Brethren he cut up rough over Dulcie’s life-style. The general opinion is, he tried to hammer it out of her but what a hope. I daresay her being in the family way put the lid on it.” He entered the wardrobe and was enveloped in overcoats.

“When the Pharamonds and my son went to pick up their horses they interrupted a ding-dong go during which she roared out that she was pregnant and he called her a Whore of Babylon.”

“I never knew that,” said Plank’s voice, stuffy with clothes. “Is that a fact.”

“You wouldn’t get round to wondering,” Fox suggested, “if his attitude could have led to anything serious?”

Plank, still red-faced, emerged from the wardrobe, “No, Mr. Fox,” he said loudly. “Not to him rigging wire in the gap. Not Cuth Harkness. Not a chap like him, given over to horses and their management. And that mare the apple of his eye! It’s not in the man to do it, drunk or sober, dotty or sane.” He appealed to Alleyn. “I’ve known the man for four years and it’s not on, sir, it’s not bloody on. Excuse me. Like you was saying yourself, sir, about this being an affair of character. Well, there’s no part of this crime, if it is a crime, in Cuth Harkness’s character and I’d stake my promotion on it.”

Alleyn said: “It’s a point well taken. You might just remember something else they tell us.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Don’t get emotionally involved.”

“Ah,” said Fox. “There’s always that, Sarge. There’s always that.”

“Well, I know there is, Mr. Fox. But it does seem to me — well — Considering—”

“Considering,” Alleyn said, “that Harkness locked her up in her room and on pain of hellfire and damnation forbade her to jump. Considering that, would you say, Plank?”

“Yes, sir. I would.”

Mr. Fox, who was replacing Miss Harkness’s undergarments with the careful devotion of a lady’s maid, said generously, “Which is what you might call a glimpse of the obvious, I’ll say that for it.”

“Well, ta, Mr. Fox,” said Plank, mollified.

Alleyn was going through the pockets of a hacking jacket that hung from the back of a chair. They yielded a grubby handkerchief, small change, and a rumpled envelope of good paper, addressed in a civilized hand. It had been opened. Alleyn drew out a single sheet with an engraved heading — L’Espérance and the address. On it was written in the same hand, “Cliffs. Thursday. Usual time. L.P.”

He showed it to the others.

“ ‘L.P.’ eh,” Fox remarked.

“It doesn’t stand for ‘long playing,’ ” said Alleyn, “although I suppose, in a cockeyed sense, it just might.”

“Plank,” he said as they drove away from Leathers. “I want you to go over everything that Sydney Jones told you about the dialogue with Harkness after the riding party left. Not only the row with Dulcie but what he said to Jones himself. We won’t need your notebook again: just tell me.”

Plank, who was driving, did so. Jones had described Harkness in the yard and Dulcie at her bedroom window, hurling insults at each other. Dulcie had said she could take not only the sorrel mare, but the walleyed Mungo over the gap in the blackthorn hedge. Her uncle violently forbad her, under threat of a hiding, to make the attempt on any of the horses, least of all the mare. He had added the gratuitous opinion that she sat a jumping horse like a sack of potatoes. She had sworn at him and banged down the window.

“And then?”

“According to Jones, Harkness had told him to drive the car to a corn merchant on the way to Montjoy and pick up some sacks of fodder.”

“Rick remembers,” Alleyn said, “that after the body was found, Mr. Harkness said Jones had been told to take the mare to the smith to be reshod and that he’d given this order to get the mare out of Dulcie’s way. Harkness had added that because Jones didn’t carry out this order he was as good as a murderer. Didn’t Jones tell you about this?”

“Not a word, sir. No, he never.”

“Sure?”

“Swear to it, sir.”

Fox said: “Mr. Harkness isn’t what you’d call a reliable witness. He could have invented the bit about the blacksmith.”

“He wasn’t drinking then, Mr. Fox. That set in later,” said Plank, who seemed set upon casting little rays of favorable light upon the character of Mr. Harkness. “But he was very much upset,” he added. “I will say that for him. Distracted is what he was.”

“However distracted,” Alleyn said, “one would hardly expect him to cook up a pointless fairy tale, would one? I’d better talk to Rick about this,” he said vexedly and asked Plank to drive into the Cove. “Come and take a look at your godson, Br’er Fox,” he suggested, and to Plank: “Drop us round the corner at the station. You’ll be able to put in half an hour catching up on routine.”

“Don’t make me laugh, sir,” said Plank.

They passed the Ferrants’ house, turned into the side lane, and pulled up at the corner cottage that was also the local police station. A compact little woman with tight hair and rosy cheeks was hoeing vigorously in the garden. Nearby a little girl with Plank’s face at the wrong end of a telescope was knocking up a mud pie in a flowerpot.

Plank, all smartness, was out of the driver’s seat and opening the doors in a flash.

“Is this Mrs. Plank?” Alleyn said and advanced upon her, bareheaded. She was flustered and apologized for her mucky hand. Fox was presented. He and Alleyn admired the garden.

“It’s beginning to look better,” Mrs. Plank said. “It was a terrible old mess when we first came four years ago.”

“Have you had many moves?” Alleyn asked them and they said this was the third.

“And that makes things difficult,” Alleyn said, knowing constant transfers to be a source of discontent.

He had them talking freely in no time: about the disastrous effect on the children’s education and the problems of settling into a new patch where you never knew what the locals would be like — friendly or suspicious, helpful or resentful. Of how, on the whole, the Cove people were not bad but you had to get used to being kept at a distance.

Alleyn edged the conversation around to the neighbors. Did Mrs. Plank know the Ferrants around the corner with whom his son lodged? Not well, she said shortly. Mrs. Ferrant kept herself to herself. She, Mrs. Plank, felt sorry for her. “Really?” Alleyn asked. “Why?”

Finding herself in the delicious situation where gossip could be regarded as a duty, Mrs. Plank said that what with Ferrant away in France half the time and where they got the money for it nobody knew and never taking her with him and when he was home the way he carried on so free for all that he gave her washing machines and fridges and the name he had in the Cove for his bold behavior and yet being secretive with it: well, the general feeling was that Mrs. Ferrant was to be pitied. Although, come to that, Mrs. Ferrant herself wasn’t all that—

“Now then, mother,” said Plank uneasily.

“Well, I know,” she said, “and so do you, Joe.” Alleyn had a picture of the village policeman’s wife, cut off from the cozy interchange of speculative gossip, always having to watch her tongue and always conscious of being on the outside.

“I’m sure Mrs. Plank’s the soul of discretion,” he said. “And we’re grateful for any tips about the local situation, aren’t we, Plank? About Mrs. Ferrant — you were saying?”

It emerged that Mrs. Plank had acquired one friend only with whom she was on cozy terms: her next-door neighbor in the lane, a widow who, in the past, had been a sewing maid up at L’Espérance at the time when Mrs. Ferrant was in service there. Ten years ago that would be, said Mrs. Plank and added with a quick glance at her husband that Mrs. Ferrant had left to get married. The boy was not yet eleven. Louis, they called him. “Mind you,” Mrs. Plank ended, “they’re French.”

“So are most of the islanders, mother,” said Plank. She tossed her head at him. “You know yourself, Joe,” she said, “there’s been trouble. With him.”

“What sort of trouble?” Alleyn asked.

“Maintenance,” said Plank. “Child. Up to Bon Accord.”

“Ah. Don’t tell me. He’s no good, that one,” cried Mrs. Plank in triumph.

Mr. Fox said, predictably, that they’d have to get her in the force and upon that playful note they parted.

Alleyn and Fox turned right from the lane on to the front. They crossed over to the far side and looked up at Ricky’s window, which was wide open. There he was with his tousled head of hair, so like his mother’s, bent over his work. Alleyn watched him for a moment or two, willing him to look up. Presently he did and a smile broke over his bruised face.

“Good morning, Cid, me dear,” said Ricky. “Good morning, Br’er Fox. Coming up? Or shall I come down?”

“We’ll come up.”

Ricky opened the front door to them. He wore a slightly shamefaced air and had a postcard in his hand.

“Mrs. F. is out marketing,” he said. “Look. On the mat, mixed up with my mail. Just arrived.” He shut the door.

The postcard displayed a hectically colored view of a market square and bore a legend: “La place-du-marché, La Tournière.” Ricky turned it over. It had a French stamp and was addressed in an awkward hand to “M. Ferrant” but carried no message.

“It’s his writing,” Ricky said. “He’s given me receipts. That’s how he writes his name. Look at the postmark, Cid.”

“I am. La Tournière. Posted yesterday. Air mail.”

“But he was in Saint Pierre yesterday. Even if it wasn’t Ferrant who shoved me off the jetty, it certainly was Ferrant who made me look silly in the café. Where is La Tournière?”

“North of Marseilles,” said his father.

“Marseilles! But that’s — what?”

“At a guess, between six and seven hundred kilometers by air from Saint Pierre. Come upstairs,” said Alleyn.

He dropped the card on the mat and was on the top landing before the other two were halfway up. They all moved into Ricky’s room as Mrs. Ferrant fitted her key in the front door.

“How did you know she was coming?” Ricky asked.

“What? Oh, she dumped her shopping bag against the door while she fished for her key. Didn’t you hear?”

“No,” said Ricky.

“We haven’t all got radioactive ears,” said Mr. Fox, looking benignly upon his godson.

Alleyn said abruptly: “Rick, why do you think it was Ferrant who shoved you overboard?”

“Why? I don’t know why. I just felt sure it was he. I can’t say more than that — I just — I dunno. I was certain. Come to think of it, it might have been Syd.”

“For the sake of argument we’ll suppose it was Ferrant. He may have felt he’d better remove to a distant spot, contrived to get himself flown to La Tournière, and posted this card at the airport. What time was it when you took the plunge?”

“According to my ruined wristwatch, eight minutes past three.”

Fox said: “When we came into Saint Pierre at four yesterday a plane for Marseilles was taking off. If it calls at—” Mr. Fox arranged his mouth in an elaborate pout “—La Tournière; it could be there by six-thirty, couldn’t it? Just?”

“Is there anything,” Ricky ventured, “against him having been staying at La Tournière, and deciding to fly up to Saint Pierre by an early plane yesterday morning?”

“What was it you used to say, Mr. Alleyn?” Mr. Fox asked demurely. “ ‘Stop laughing. The child’s quite right!’ ”

“My very words,” said Alleyn. “All right, Rick, that may be the answer. Either way, Fox, the peloton des narcotiques, as you would no doubt call the French drug squad, had better be consulted. Ferrant’s on their list as well as ours. He’s thought to consort with someone in the upper strata of the trade.”

“Where?” Ricky asked.

“In Marseilles.”

“I say! Could he have been under orders to get rid of me? Because Syd had reported I’d rumbled his game with the paints?”

Fox shot a quick look at Alleyn and made a rumbling noise in his throat.

Alleyn said, “Remember, we haven’t anything to show for the theory about Jones and his paints. It may be as baseless as one of those cherubim that so continually do cry. But we’ve got to follow it up. Next time, if there is a next time, that Master Syd sets out for London with his paint box they’ll take him and his flake white to pieces at Weymouth and they won’t find so much as a lone pep pill in the lot. Either he’s in the clear or he’ll have seen the light and shut up shop.”

“Couldn’t — you — couldn’t it be proved one way or the other?” Ricky asked.

“Such as?” said Fox who was inclined to treat his godson as a sort of grown-up infant prodigy.

“Well—” said Ricky with diminishing assurance, “such as searching his Pad.”

“Presumably he’s still in France,” said Alleyn.

“All the better.”

“Troy and I agreed,” Alleyn said to Fox, “that taking one consideration with another it was better to keep our child uninformed about the policeman’s lot. Clearly, we have succeeded brilliantly.”

“Come off it, Cid,” said Ricky, grinning.

“However, we haven’t come here to discuss police law but to ask you to recall something Harkness said about his orders to Syd Jones. Do you remember?”

“Do you mean when he said he’d ordered Syd to take the sorrel mare to the blacksmith and he was in an awful stink because Syd hadn’t done it? He said Syd was as good as a murderer.”

“What did Jones do with himself?”

“I suppose he cleared off quite early. After he’d collected some horse feed, I think.”

“We don’t know,” Fox said heavily, “who was on the premises from the time the riding party left until they returned. Apart from the two Harknesses. Or has Plank gone into that, would you say?”

“We’ll ask him. All right, Rick. I don’t think we’ll be hounding you any more.”

“I’d rather be hounded than kept out.”

Fox said: “I daresay you don’t care to talk about work in progress.” He looked with respect at the weighted heap of manuscript on Ricky’s table.

“It’s a struggle, Br’er Fox.”

“Would I be on the wrong wavelength if I said it might turn out to be all the better for that?”

“You couldn’t say anything nicer,” said Ricky. “And I only hope you’re right.”

“He often is,” said Alleyn.

“About people at Leathers during that afternoon,” Ricky said. “There is, of course, Louis Pharamond.” And he described Louis’s cramp and early return.

“Nobody tells us anything,” Alleyn cheerfully complained. “What time would he have got back?”

“If he pushed along, I suppose about threeish. When he left he was carrying his right boot and had his right foot out of its stirrup. He’s very good on a horse.”

“Has he said anything about the scene at Leathers when he got there?”

Ricky stared at his father. “Funny,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Didn’t he give evidence at the inquest, for pity’s sake?”

“No. No, he didn’t. I don’t think they realized he returned early.”

“But surely one of you must have said something about it?”

“I daresay the others did. I haven’t seen them since the inquest. I should think he probably unsaddled his horse, left it in the loose-box, and came away without seeing anybody. It was there when we got back. Of course if there’d been anything untoward, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he?”

After a considerable pause during which Fox cleared his throat Alleyn said he hoped so and added that as investigating officers they could hardly be blamed if they didn’t know at any given time whether they were looking into a possible homicide or a big deal in heroin. It would be tidier, he said, if some kind of link could be found.

Ricky said: “Hi.”

“Hi, what?” asked his father.

“Well — I’d forgotten. You might say there is a link.”

“ ‘Define, define, well-educated infant,’ ” Alleyn quoted patiently.

“I’m sure it’s of no moment, mind you, but the night I came home late from Syd’s Pad—” and he described the meeting on the jetty between Ferrant and Louis Pharamond.

“What time,” Alleyn said after a long pause, “was this?”

“About one-ish.”

“Funny time to meet, didn’t you rather think?”

“I thought Louis Pharamond might go fishing with Ferrant. I didn’t know whether they’d been together in the boat or what. It was jolly dark,” Ricky said resentfully.

“It was your impression, though, that they had just met?”

“Yes. Well — yes, it was.”

“And all you heard was Louis Pharamond saying: ‘All right?’ or ‘OK, careful,’ or ‘Watch it.’ Yes?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Cid,” said Ricky. “Subsequent events have kind of wiped it.”

Fox said: “Understandable.”

Alleyn said perhaps it was and added that he would have to wait upon the Pharamonds anyway. Upon this, Ricky, looking very uncomfortable, told him about Julia’s telephone call and her intention of asking them to dinner. “I said I knew you’d adore to but were horribly busy. Was that OK?”

“Half of it was, at least. Yes, old boy, you were the soul of tact. Sure you don’t fancy the diplomatic after all? How did she know I was here?”

“Louis caught sight of you in the hotel. Last night.”

“I see. I don’t, on the whole, think this is an occasion for dinner parties. Will they all be at home this morning, do you suppose?”

“Probably.”

“One other thing, Rick. I’m afraid we may have to cut short your sojourn at the Cove.”

Ricky stared at him. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “Why?”

Alleyn walked over to the door, opened it, and had an aerial view of Mrs. Ferrant on her knees, polishing the stairs. She raised her head and they looked into each other’s faces.

“Bonjour, madame!” Alleyn called out jovially, “Comment ça va?”

“Pas si mal, monsieur, ” she said.

“Toujours affairée, n’est-ce pas?”

She agreed. That was how it went. He said he was about to look for her. He had lost his ball-point pen and wondered if she had come across it in the petit salon last evening after he left. Alas, no. Definitely, it was not in the petit salon. He thanked her and with further compliments reentered the room and shut the door.

Ricky began in a highish voice. “Now, look here, Cid—”

Alleyn and Fox simultaneously raised their forefingers. Ricky, against his better judgment, giggled. “You look like mature Gentlemen of the Chorus,” he said, but he said it quietly. “Shall I shut the window? In case of prowlers on the pavement?”

“Yes,” said his father.

Ricky did so and changed his mind about introducing a further note of comedy. “Sorry,” he said. “But why?”

“Principally because it would be inappropriate, supposing Ferrant returns, for you to board in the house of your would-be murderer — if indeed he is that.”

“I want to stay. My work’s going better, I think. And — I’m sorry but I am mixed up in the ongoings. And anyway he hasn’t come back. Much more than all that, I want to see it out.”

They looked so gravely at him that he felt extremely uneasy.

From the street below there came seven syncopated toots from a car horn.

Ricky said in an artificial voice: “That’s Julia.”

Alleyn opened the window and leaned out. Ricky heard the familiar and disturbing voice.

“You?” Julia shouted. “What fun! We’ve been hunting you.”

“I’ll come down. Hold on.”

He nodded to Fox. “Meet you at Plank’s,” he said, and to Ricky. “See you later, old boy.”

As he went downstairs he thought: “Damn. He went white. He has got it badly.”

iii

Julia was in her dashing sports car and Bruno was doubled up in the token seat behind her. She was dressed in white, as Alleyn remembered seeing her in the ship, with a crimson scarf on her head and those elegant gloves. Enormous dark glasses emphasized her pallor and her remarkable mouth. She had a trick when she laughed of lifting her lip up and curving it in. This changed her into a gamine and was extremely appealing. “Poor old Rick,” Alleyn thought, “he hadn’t a chance. On the whole I daresay it’s been good for him.”

Ricky, standing back from his closed window, was able to see his father shake hands with Julia and at her suggestion get into the passenger’s seat. She looked at him as she sometimes looked at Ricky and had taken off her black glasses to smile at him. She talked — vividly, Ricky was sure — and he wondered at his father’s air of polite attention. When she talked like that to Ricky he felt himself develop a fatuous expression and indeed was sometimes obliged to pull his face together and shut his mouth.

His father did not look in the least fatuous.

Now Julia stopped talking and laughing. She leaned toward Alleyn and seemed to listen closely as he, still with that air of formal courtesy, spoke to her. So might her doctor or solicitor have behaved.

What could they be saying? he wondered. Something about Louis? Or could it be about him, by any chance? The thought perturbed him.

“Ricky,” Alleyn was saying, “was in a bit of a spot. I’d told him not to gossip.”

“And there have I been badgering him. Wretched Ricky!” cried Julia and broke into her splutter.

“He’ll recover. It must be pretty obvious to everybody in the Cove, in spite of all Sergeant Plank’s diplomacy, that there’s something in the wind.”

“About the accident, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“That it wasn’t an accident?”

“That it hasn’t been conclusively shown that it was. Is your cousin with you this morning?”

“Louis? Or Carlotta?”

“Louis.”

“You’re sitting on his coat. He’s gone to buy cigarettes.”

“I’m sorry.” He hitched the coat from under him and straightened it, pulling down the sleeves. “What a very smart hacking jacket,” he said.

“It goes too far in my opinion. He hooks it over his shoulders and looks like a mass-produced David Niven.”

“He’s lost a sleeve button. Have I sat it off? How awful, I’d better look.”

“You needn’t bother. I think my daughter wrenched it off. Why do you want to see Louis?”

“In case he noticed anything out-of-the-way when he returned to Leathers.”

Julia twisted around to look at her young-brother-in-law. “I don’t think he did, do you, Bruno?”

Bruno said in an uncomfortable voice. “I think he just said he didn’t see anybody or something like that.”

“And, by the way,” Alleyn said, “when you jumped that gap — a remarkable feat if I may say so — did you go down and inspect it beforehand?”

A pause. “No,” Bruno muttered at last.

“Really? So you wouldn’t have noticed anything particular about it — about the actual gap?”

Bruno shook his head.

“No rail, for instance, running through the thorn?”

“There wasn’t a rail.”

“Just the thorn? No wire?”

For a moment Alleyn thought Bruno was going to respond to this but he didn’t. He shook his head, looked at the floor of the car and said nothing.

Julia winked at Alleyn and bumped her knee against his.

Bruno said: “OK if I go to the shop?”

“Of course, darling. If you see Louis tell him who’s here, will you? He’s buying cigarettes, probably in the Cod-and-Bottle.”

Bruno slid out of the car and walked along the front, his shoulders hunched.

“You musn’t mind,” Julia said. “He’s got a thing about jumping the gap.”

“What sort of thing?”

“He thinks he may have been an incentive to the Harness.”

“Harness?”

“I’ve got a fixation about her name. The others think I do it to be funny but I don’t, poor thing.”

“I gather she was hell-bent on the jump anyway.”

“So she was but Bruno fancies he may have brought her up to boiling point and it makes him miserable. Only if it’s mentioned. He forgets in-between and goes cliff-climbing and bird-watching. How’s Cuth?” asked Julia, and when he didn’t reply at once, said: “Come on, you must know Cuth. The uncle.”

“In retirement.”

“Well, we all know that. The maids told Nanny he’s drinking himself to death out of remorse. I can’t imagine how they know. Well, one can guess. Postman. Customers wanting hacks. Ricky’s chum Syd before he bolted.”

“Has he bolted?”

“Cagey old Ricky just said he’s gone over to Saint Pierre-des-Roches, but the village thinks he bolted. According to Nanny. She has a wide circle of friends and all of them say Syd’s done a bunk.”

“Why do they think he’s done that?”

“Well it’s really — you mustn’t mind this, either,” said Julia opening her eyes very wide and beginning to gabble, “but you see, to begin with, Nanny says they all thought there must be funny business afloat when the inquest was adjourned and on top of that everyone knew she was going to have a baby. Well, I mean, Cuth seems to have bellowed away about it, far and wide. And as she was a constant caller at Syd’s place they put two and two together.” Julia stopped short. “Have you ever thought,” she said in a different voice, “how very appropriate that expression would be if it was ‘one and one together.’ ”

“It hadn’t occurred to me.”

“I make you a present of it. Where was I?”

“I think you were going to tell me something that you hoped I wouldn’t mind.”

“Ah! Thank you. It was just that your arrival on the scene led everyone to believe that you were hard on Syd’s trail because Syd was the — what does ‘putative’ mean? Not that Nanny used the expression.”

“ ‘Supposed’, or ‘presumed.’ ”

“That’s what I thought. The putative papa. Somehow I don’t favor the theory. The next part gets vague: Nanny hurries over it rather, but the general idea seems to be that Syd was afraid Cuth would horsewhip him into marrying Dulcie.”

“And what steps is Syd supposed to have taken?”

“They don’t say it in so many words.”

“What do they say? It doesn’t matter how many words.”

“They hint.”

“What do they hint?”

“That Syd egged her on. To jump. Hoping.”

“I see,” said Alleyn.

“And then, of course, your arriving on the scene—”

“I only arrived last night.”

“Nanny was at a whist-drive last night. The W.I. Some of the husbands picked their ladies up on the way home from the Cod-and-Bottle where they had been introduced to you by Sergeant Plank.”

“I see,” said Alleyn again.

“That’s what I hoped you wouldn’t mind: the whist-drive ladies all saying it looked pretty funny. It seems nobody really believes you merely came to give Sergeant Plank and the boys in blue a new look. They’re all very thrilled to have you, I may say.”

“Too kind.”

“So are we, of course. Here they come. I expect you’d like to have your word with Louis, wouldn’t you? I’ll pay Ricky a little visit.”

“He’s got a black eye and will be self-conscious but enchanted.”

Alleyn, a quick mover, was out of the car and had the door open for her. She gave him a steady look. “How very kind,” she said and left him.

The presence of Louis Pharamond on the front had the effect of turning it into some kind of resort — some little harbor only just “discovered,” perhaps, but shortly to be developed and ruined. His blue silk polo-necked jersey, his sharkskin trousers, his golden wristwatch, even the medallion he wore on a thin chain were none of them excessive but one felt it was only by a stroke of good luck that he hadn’t gone too far with, say, some definitely regrettable ring or even an earring.

Bruno, who trailed after Louis with his hands in his denim pockets, turned into the shop. Louis advanced alone and bridged the awkward gap between himself and Alleyn with smiles and expressions of pleasurable recognition.

“This is a nice surprise!” he cried with outstretched hand. “Who’d have thought we’d meet again so soon!”

There was the weather-worn bench close by, where Ricky had sat in the early hours of the morning. Village worthies sometimes gathered there as if inviting the intervention of some TV commentator. Alleyn, having negotiated Louis’s effusive greetings, suggested that they might move to this bench and they did so.

“I gather,” he said, “you’ve guessed that I’m here on a job.” Louis was all attention: appropriately grave, entirely correct.

“Well, yes, we have wondered, actually. The riding-school girl, isn’t it? Rotten bad show.” He added with an air of diffidence that one didn’t, of course, want to speak out of turn, but did this mean there was any suspicion that it wasn’t an accident?

Alleyn wondered how many more times he was to say that they were obliged to make sure.

“Anything else,” said Louis, “is unbelievable. It’s — well, I mean what could it be but an accident?” And he rehearsed the situation as it had presented itself to the Pharamonds. “I mean,” he said, “she was hell-bent on doing it. And with her weight up — she was a great hefty wench, you know. Not to put too fine a point on it. I’d say she must have ridden every ounce of eleven stone. Well, it was a foregone conclusion.”

Alleyn said it looked like that, certainly.

“We’re trying to find out,” he said, “as closely as may be, when it happened. The medical report very tentatively puts it at between four and five hours of when she was found. But even that is uncertain. She may have survived the injuries for some considerable time or she may have died immediately.”

“Yes, I see.”

“When did you arrive back at Leathers? I know about the cramp.”

Louis sat with his lightly clasped hands between his knees. Perhaps they tightened their grasp on each other; if so, that was his only movement.

“I?” he said. “I don’t know exactly. I suppose it would have been about three o’clock. I rode back by the shortest route. The cramp cleared up quite soon and I put on my boot and took most of it at an easy canter.”

“When you arrived was anybody about?”

“Not a soul. I unsaddled the hack and walked home.”

“Meeting anybody?”

“Meeting nobody.”

“Did you happen to look across the horse paddock to the hedge?”

Louis ran his hand down the back of his head.

“I simply don’t remember,” he said. “I suppose I might have. If I did there was nothing out-of-the-way to be seen.”

“No obvious break in the gap, for instance?”

He shook his head.

“No sign of the sorrel mare on the hillside?”

“Certainly not. But I really don’t think I looked in that direction.”

“I thought you might have been interested in young Bruno’s jump.”

“Young Bruno behaved like a clodhopper. No, I’m sorry. I’m no good to you, I’m afraid.”

“You know Miss Harkness, didn’t you?”

“She came to lunch one day at L’Espérance — on Ricky’s first visit, by the way. I suppose he told you.”

“Yes, he did. Apart from that?”

“Not to say ‘knew,’ ” Louis said. He seemed to examine this remark and hesitated as if about to qualify it. For a second one might have almost thought it had suggested some equivocation. “She came into the pub sometimes when I was there,” he said. “Once or twice, I wouldn’t remember. She wasn’t,” Louis said, “exactly calculated to snatch one’s breath away. Poor lady.”

“Did you meet her on a Thursday afternoon near the foot of a track going down the cliffs?”

The movement Louis made was like a reflex action, slight but involving his whole body and instantly repressed. It almost came as a shock to find him still sitting quietly on the bench.

“Good Lord!” he said, “I believe I did. How on earth did you know? Yes. Yes, it was an afternoon when I’d been for a walk along the bay. So I did.”

“Did you meet by appointment?”

That brought him to his feet. Against a background of sparkling harbor and cheerful sky he stood like an advertisement for men’s wear, leaning back easily against the seawall. An obliging handful of wind lifted his hair.

“Look here,” Louis said, “I don’t much like all this. Do you mind explaining?”

“Not a bit. Your note was in the pocket of her hacking jacket.”

“Damn,” said Louis quietly. He waited for a moment and then with a graceful, impetuous movement reseated himself by Alleyn.

“I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world,” he said.

“No?”

“On several counts. There’s Carlotta, first of all, and most of all. I mean, I know I’m a naughty boy sometimes and so does she but this is different. In the light of what’s happened. It’d be horrid for Carlotta.”

He waited for Alleyn to say something but Alleyn was silent.

“You do understand, I’m sure. I mean it was nothing. No question of any — attachment. You might say she simply happened to be damn good at one thing and made no bones about it. As was obvious to all. But — well, you’ll understand — I’d hate Carlotta to know. For it to come out. Under the circs.”

“It won’t unless it’s relevant.”

“Thank God for that. I don’t see how it possibly could be.”

“Was this meeting at the cliffs the first time?”

“I’m not sure — yes, I think it might have been.”

“Not according to the note. The note said ‘Usual time.’ ”

“All right, then. It wasn’t. I said I wasn’t sure.”

“One would have thought,” Alleyn said mildly, “you’d remember.”

“Basically the whole thing meant so little. I’ve tried to explain. It was nothing. Absolutely casual. It would have petered out, as you might say, without leaving a trace.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“She was pregnant.”

“If you’re trying to suggest—” Louis broke off. He had spoken loudly but now, after a quick look up at Ricky’s window stopped short. In the silence that followed Julia’s voice could be heard. Alleyn looked around and was in time to see her appear briefly at the closed window. She waved to them and then turned away. Ricky could be dimly seen in the background.

“There is absolutely no question of that,” Louis said. “You can dismiss any such notion.”

“Have you any theory on the parentage?”

For a moment or two he hesitated and then said that, “not to put too fine a point on it, it might be anybody.” By one of those quirks of foresight Alleyn knew what his next remark would be and out it came. “She was quite a girl,” Louis said.

“So I’ve been told,” said Alleyn.

Louis waited. “Is that all you wanted to see me about?” he asked at last.

“Pretty well, I think. We’d just like to be sure about any possible callers at Leathers during the day. A tidying-up process. Routine.”

“Yes, I see. I’m sorry if I didn’t take kindly to being grilled.”

“It was hardly that, I hope.”

“Well — you did trick me over that unlucky note, didn’t you?”

“You should see us when we get really nasty,” Alleyn said.

“It’s just because of Carlotta. You do understand?”

“I think so.”

“I suppose I’m pretty hopeless,” said Louis. “But still…” He stretched elaborately as if freeing himself from the situation. “Ricky seems to be enjoying the giddy pleasures of life in Deep Cove and la maison Ferrant,” he said. “I can’t imagine what he finds to do with himself when he’s not writing.”

“There’s been some talk of night fishing and assignations with his landlord in the early hours of the morning, but I don’t think anything’s come of it. Do you ever go in for that?”

Louis didn’t answer. It was as if for a split second he had become the victim of suspended animation, a “still” introduced into a motion picture with the smile unerased on his face. This hitch in time was momentary, so brief that it might have been an illusion. The smile broadened and he said: “Me? Not my scene, I’m afraid. Too keen on my creature comforts.”

He took out his cigarette case and filled it with a steady hand from a new packet. “Is there anything else?” he asked.

“Not that I can think of,” Alleyn said cheerfully. “I’m sorry I had to raise uncomfortable ghosts.”

“Oh,” Louis said, “I’ll survive. I wish I could have been more help.” He looked up at Ricky’s.window. “What’s all this we hear about him taking a plunge?”

Alleyn said it appeared that Ricky had slipped on the wet wharf, knocked his face against a gangway stanchion, and fallen in.

“He’s a pretty picture,” he said, “and loath to display himself.”

Louis said they’d soon see about that and with a sudden and uncomfortable display of high spirits, threw a handful of fine gravel at the window. Some of it miscarried and spattered on the front door. Ricky loomed up, empurpled and unwilling, behind the glass. Louis gestured for him to open the window and when he had done so shouted, “ ‘But soft, what light from yonder window breaks,’ ” in a stagey voice. Julia appeared beside Ricky and took his arm.

“Do pipe down, Louis,” she said. “You’re inflaming the populace.”

And indeed the populace in the shape of one doubled-up ancient-of-days on his way to the Cod-and-Bottle and three preschool-aged children had paused to gape at Louis. Two windows were opened. Mr. Mercer came out of his shop and went in again.

More dramatically, the front door of the Ferrants’ house was thrown wide and out stormed Mrs. Ferrant, screaming as she came: “Louis! Assez de bruit! What are you doing, Petit méchant!”

She came face to face with Louis Pharamond, stopped dead, and shut her mouth like a trap.

“Good morning, Marie,” he said. “Were you looking for me?”

Her eyes narrowed and her hands clenched. For a moment Alleyn thought she was going to have at Louis but she turned instead to him. “Pardon, Monsieur Alleyn,” she said. “A stupid mistake. My son occasionally has the bad manners to throw stones.” And with a certain magnificence she returned indoors.

“Let’s face it,” said Louis, “I am not, in that department, a popular boy.” He looked up at Julia in the window. “We’ll be late for luncheon,” he called. “Coming?”

“Go and find Bruno, then,” she said. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

Alleyn looked at his watch. “I’m running shamefully late,” he said. “Will you forgive me?”

“For almost anything,” Julia called, “except not coming to see us. Au revoir.”

iv

Ricky would not have chosen for Julia to see him with his black eye, which was half-closed and made him look as if he lewdly winked at people. He had felt sheepish and uncomfortable when she walked into his room but, although she did laugh, it was sympathetically, and at first she didn’t ask him to elaborate on his accident. This surprised him, because after all it would have been a natural thing to do. Perversely, although relieved, he felt slightly hurt at the avoidance.

Nor did she tease him with questions about his father’s activities, but related the Pharamonds’ London adventures, asked him about his writing, and repeated her nonsense offer to help him with it. She dodged about from one topic to another. The children, she said, had become too awful. “They writhe and ogle and have suddenly turned just so common that I begin to think they must be changelings and not Jasper’s and mine at all.”

“Oh, come,” said Ricky.

“I promise! Of course, I love them to distraction and put it all down to everybody but me spoiling them. We’ve decided that they shall have a tutor.”

“Aren’t they rather small for that?” Ricky ventured.

“Not at all. He needn’t teach them anything, just rule them with a rod of iron and think of strenuous and exhausting games. I had rather wondered if Mr. Jones might do.”

“You can’t by any chance mean that?”

“Not really. It did just cross my mind that perhaps he could teach them painting. Selina’s style is rather like his own. With guidance she might develop into a sort of Granddaughter Moses. Still, as you tell me he’s junketing in Saint Pierre-des-Roches these ideas are only wishful thinking on my part. I merely throw them out.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Didn’t you go jaunting together to Saint Pierre?”

“No, no,” he said in a hurry. “Not together. Only, as it happened, at the same time. I was just a day-tripper.”

“Well,” said Julia gazing at his face, “you certainly do seem to have tripped in a big way.”

Ricky joined painfully in her amusement. It was at this point that Julia had walked over to the window and waved to Alleyn and Louis.

“They look portentous,” she said and then, with an air of understatement that was not quite successful, she said: “It’s not fair.”

“I don’t understand? What isn’t?”

“The two of them, down there. The ‘confrontation.’ Isn’t that one of the in words? Oh, come off it, Ricky. You know what I mean. Diamond cut paste. One guess which is which.”

This was so utterly unlike anything Julia had ever said to him in their brief acquaintance and, in its content, so acutely embarrassing, that he could find no reply. She had come close to him and looked into his face searchingly as if hesitating on the edge of some further extravagance or indiscretion.

Ricky’s hands began to tingle and his heart to thump.

“Poorest Ricky,” she said and gently laid her palm against his unbruised cheek, “I’ve muddled you. Never mind.”

Ricky’s thoughts were six-deep and simultaneous. He thought: “That’s torn it,” and at the same time, “this is it: this is Julia in my arms and these are her ribs,” and “if I kiss her I’ll probably hurt my face,” and even, bouleversé though he was, “what does she mean about Louis?” And then he was kissing her.

“No, no,” Julia was saying. “My dear boy, no. What are you up to! Ricky, please.”

Now they stood apart. She said: “Bless my soul, you did take me by surprise,” and made a shocked face at him. “ ‘Out upon you, fie upon you Bold Faced Jig,’ ” she quoted.

“She’s not even disconcerted,” he thought. “I might be Selina for all she feels about it.”

He said: “I’m sorry, but you do sort of trigger one off, you know.”

“Do I? How lovely! It’s very gratifying to know one hasn’t lost the knack. I must tell Jasper, it’ll be good for him.”

“How can you?” Ricky said quietly.

“My dear, I’m sorry. That was beastly of me. I won’t tell Jasper. I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She waited for a moment and then began to make conversation as if he were an awkward visitor who had, somehow or another, to be put at his ease. He did his best to respond and in some degree succeeded, but he was humiliated and confusedly resentful.

“Have you,” she said at last, “had your invitation to Cuth’s party?”

“His party? No.”

“Not exactly a party perhaps although it’s ‘ladies a basket,’ we must remember. You must remember. It’s one of his services. In the barn at Leathers on Sunday. You’re sure to be asked. Do come and bring your papa. Actually it seems anyone is welcome. Gents fifty pence. We’ve all been invited and I think we’re all going although Louis may be away. It has ‘The Truth!’ written by hand all over it with rows of exciting marks and ‘Revelation!’ in enormous capitals on the last page. You must come back to L’Espérance afterwards for supper in case the baskets are not very filling.”

It had been at this point that Louis threw gravel at the window. When Ricky looked down and saw him there with Alleyn standing behind him it was if they were suddenly exhibited as an illustration to Julia’s extraordinary observations. He was given, as he afterwards thought, a new look at his father — at his quietude and his air of authority. And there was handsome Louis in the foreground, all eyes and teeth, acting his boots off. Ricky understood what Julia had meant when she said it wasn’t fair.

In response to Louis’s gesture he opened the window and was witness to the idiotic quotation from Romeo, Julia’s quelling of Louis, and Mrs. Ferrant’s eruption into the scene and departure from it.

When Julia had dealt crisply with the remaining situation she shut the window and returned to Ricky.

“High time the Pharamonds removed themselves,” she said. She looked directly into his eyes, broke into her laugh, kissed him rapidly on his unbruised side, and was gone.

She gave a cheerful greeting to Mrs. Ferrant as she saw herself off.

Ricky stood stock-still in his room. He heard the car start up and climb the hill to the main road. When he looked out his father had gone and the little street was deserted.

“And after all that,” he thought, “I suppose I’m meant to get on with my book.”

v

Around the corner in Sergeant Plank’s office, Alleyn talked to his contact in Marseilles, M. l’Inspecteur Dupont. They spoke in French and were listened to with painful concentration by Mr. Fox. Dupont had one of those Provençal voices that can be raised to a sort of metallic clatter guaranteed to extinguish any opposition. It penetrated every corner of the little room and caused Mr. Fox extreme consternation.

At last, when Alleyn, after an exchange of compliments, hung up the receiver, Fox leaned back in his chair, unknitted his brow, and sighed deeply.

“It’s the pace,” he said heavily. “That’s what gets you — that and the noise. I suppose,” he added wistfully, turning to Sergeant Plank, “you had no difficulty?”

“Me, Mr. Fox? I don’t speak French. We only came here four years ago. We’ve tried to learn it, the Missus and me, but we don’t seem to make much headway and in any case the lingo they use over here’s a patois. The chaps always seem to drop into it when I look in at the Cod-and-Bottle,” said Plank in his simple way. Another symptom, Alleyn thought, of the country policeman’s loneliness.

“Well,” he said, “for what it’s worth, Ferrant has been spotted in La Tournière and in Marseilles.”

“I got that all right,” said Fox, cheering up a little.

“And he’s made a trip to a place outside Marseilles where one of the big boys hangs out in splendor and is strongly suspected. They haven’t been able to pin anything on him. The old, old story.”

“What are they doing about it?”

“A lot. Well — quite a lot. No flies, by and large, on the narcotics squad in Marseilles; they get the practice if they look for it and could be very active. But it’s the old story. The French are never madly enthusiastic about something they haven’t set up themselves. Nor, between you and me and the junkie, are they as vigilant at the ports as they might be. Still, Dupont’s one of their good numbers. He’s all right as long as you don’t step on his amour propre. He says they’ve got a dossier as fat as a bible on this character — a Corsican, he is, like most of them: a qualified chemist and a near millionaire with a château halfway between Marseilles and La Tournière and within easy distance of a highly sophisticated laboratory disguised as an innocent research setup where this expert turns morphine into heroin.”

“Well!” said Fox. “If they’ve got all this why don’t they pull chummy in?”

“French law is very fussy about the necessity for detailed, conclusive, and precise evidence before going in for a knockoff. And they haven’t got enough of that. What they have got is a definite line on Ferrant. He’s been staying off and on in an expensive hotel in La Tournière known to be a rendezvous for heroin merchants. He left there unexpectedly yesterday morning. Yes, I know. Rick’s idea. They’ve been keeping obbo on him for weeks. Apparently the tip-off came from an ex-mistress in the hell-knows-no-fury department.”

“Did I catch the name Jones?” asked Fox.

“You did. Following up their line on Ferrant, they began to look out for anybody else from the Island who made regular trips to Saint Pierre and they came up with Syd. So far they haven’t got much joy out of that but, as you may have noticed, when I told Inspector Dupont that Jones is matey with Ferrant, the decibel count in his conversation rose dramatically. There’s one other factor, a characteristic of so many cases in the heroin scene: they keep getting shadowy hints of another untraced person somewhere on a higher rung in the hierarchy, who controls the island side of operations. One has to remember the rackets are highly sophisticated and organized down to the last detail. In a way they work rather like labor gangs in totalitarian countries: somebody watching and reporting and himself being watched and reported upon all the way up to the top. One would expect an intermediary between, say, an operative like Ferrant and a top figure like the millionaire in a château outside Marseilles. Dupont feels sure there is such a character.”

“What do we get out of all this?” Fox asked.

Alleyn got up and moved restlessly about the little office. A bluebottle banged at the windowpane. In the kitchen, Mrs. Plank could be heard talking to her daughter.

“What I get,” Alleyn said at last, “is no doubt a great slab of fantasy. It’s based on conjecture and, as such, should be dismissed.”

“We might as well hear it,” said Fox.

“All right. If only to get it out of my system. It goes like this. Ferrant is in La Tournière and Syd Jones is in Saint Pierre, having arrived at the crack of dawn yesterday morning. Syd is now persuaded that Ricky is spying on him and has followed him to Saint Pierre for that purpose. He has grown more and more worried and on landing rings up Ferrant. The conversation is guarded but they have an alarm code that means ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ Ferrant comes to Saint Pierre by the early morning plane — Dupont says there’s one that leaves at seven. They are to meet in the café opposite the premises of Jerome et Cie. Ricky sits in the café being a sleuth and squinting through a hole in Le Monde at Syd. At which ludicrous employment he is caught by Ferrant. Ricky leaves the café. Syd, who seems to have gone to pieces and given himself a jolt of something, heroin one supposes, now tells Ferrant his story and Ferrant, having seen for himself my poor child’s antics with the paper and bearing in mind that I’m a copper, decides that Ricky is highly expendable. One of the two keeps tabs on Ricky, is rewarded by a thunderstorm, and takes the opportunity to shove him overboard between the jetty and the ship.” Alleyn’s eyes closed for half a second. “The ship,” he repeated, “was rolling. Within a couple of feet of the legs of the jetty.”

He walked over to the window and stood there with his back to the other men. “I suppose,” he said, “he was saved by the turn of the bilge. If the ship had been lower in the water—” He broke off.

“Yes. Quite so,” Fox said. Plank cleared his throat.

For a moment or two none of them spoke. Mrs. Plank in her kitchen sang mutedly and the little girl kept up what seemed to be a barrage of questions.

Alleyn turned back into the room.

“He thought it was Ferrant,” he said. “I don’t know quite why, apart from the conjectural motive.”

“How doped up was this other type, Jones?”

“Exactly, Br’er Fox. We don’t know.”

“If he’s on the main-line racket — and it seems he is—”

“Yes.”

“And under this Ferrant’s influence—”

“It’s a thought, isn’t it? Well, there you are,” Alleyn said. “A slice of confectionery from a plain cook and you don’t have to swallow it.”

There was a long pause which Fox broke by saying, “It fits.”

Plank made a confirmatory noise in his throat. “So what happens next?” asked Fox. “Supposing this is the case?”

Alleyn said: “All right. For the hell of it — supposing. What does Ferrant do? Hang about Saint Pierre waiting—” Alleyn said rapidly—“for news of a body found floating under the jetty? Does he go back to La Tournière and report? If so, to whom? And what is Syd Jones up to? Supposing that he’s got his next quota of injected paint tubes, if in fact they are injected, does he hang about Saint Pierre? Or does he lose his nerve and make a break for Lord knows where?”

“If he’s hooked on dope,” Fox said, “he’s had it.”

Plank said: “Excuse me, Mr. Fox. Meaning?”

“Meaning as far as his employers are concerned.”

Alleyn said: “Drug merchants don’t use drug consumers inside the organization, Plank. They’re completely unpredictable and much too dangerous. If Jones is in process of becoming a junkie he’s out, automatically, and if his bosses think he’s a risk he might very easily be out altogether.”

“Would he go to earth somewhere over there? In France?” Fox wondered. And then: “Never mind that for the moment, Mr. Alleyn. True or not, and I’d take long odds on your theory being the case, I don’t at all fancy the position our young man has got himself into. And I don’t suppose you do either.”

“Of course I don’t,” Alleyn said with a violence that made Sergeant Plank blink. “I’m in two minds whether to pack him off home or what the devil to do about him. He’s hell-bent on sticking round here and I’m not sure I don’t sympathize with him.”

Fox said: “And yet, wouldn’t you say that when they do find out he escaped and came back here, they’ll realize that anything he knows he’ll have already handed on to you? So there won’t be the same reason for getting rid of him. The beans, as you might say, are spilled.”

“I’d thought of that too, Br’er Fox. These people are far too sophisticated to go about indulging in unnecessary liquidations. All the same—”

He broke off and glanced at Sergeant Plank whose air of deference was heavily laced with devouring curiosity. “The fact of the matter is,” Alleyn said quickly, “I find it difficult to look objectively at the position, which is a terrible confession from a senior cop. I don’t know what the drill ought to be. Should I ask to be relieved from the case because of personal involvement?”

“Joey,” Mrs. Plank called from the kitchen and her husband excused himself.

“Fox,” Alleyn said, “what the hell should a self-respecting copper do when his boy gets himself bogged down, and dangerously so, in a case like this? Send him abroad somewhere? If they are laying for him that’d be no solution. This lot is one of the big ones with fingers everywhere. And I can’t treat Rick like a kid. He’s a man and what’s more I don’t think he’d take it if I did and, by God, I wouldn’t want him to take it.”

Fox, after some consideration, said it was an unusual situation. “I can’t say,” he admitted, “that I can recollect anything of the sort occurring in my experience. Or yours either, Mr. Alleyn, I daresay. Very unusual. You could think, if you weren’t personally concerned, that there’s a piquant element.”

“For the love of Mike, Fox!”

“It was only a passing fancy. You were wondering what would be the correct line to take?”

“I was.”

“With respect, then, I reckon he should do as I think he wants to do. Stay put and act under your orders.”

“Here?”

“Here.”

“If Ferrant comes back? Or Jones?”

“It would be interesting to see the reaction when they met.”

“Always supposing Ferrant’s the man. Or Jones.”

“That’s right. It’s possible that Ferrant may still be waiting for the body, you’ll excuse me won’t you, Mr. Alleyn, to rise. He may think it’s caught up under the pier. Unless, of course, the chap in the ship has talked.”

“The ship doesn’t return to Saint Pierre for some days. And Ricky got the man to promise he wouldn’t talk. He thinks he’ll stick to his word.”

“Yerse,” said Fox. “But we all know what a few drinks will do.”

“Anyway, Ferrant has probably telephoned his wife and heard that Rick’s home and dry. I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if he’s in the habit of sending her postcards with no message.”

“Just to let her know where he is?”

“And I wonder — I do very much wonder — how far, if any distance at all, that excellent cook is wise to her husband’s proceedings.”

Sergeant Plank returned with a plateload of enormous cheese and pickle sandwiches and a jug of beer.

“It’s getting on for three o’clock,” he said, “and the Missus reckons you must be fair clemmed for a snack, Mr. Alleyn.”

“Your Missus, Sergeant Plank,” said Alleyn, “is a pearl among ladies and you may tell her so with our grateful compliments.”