Last Ditch

7: Syd’s Pad Again

i

When Ricky had eaten his solitary lunch he was unable to settle to anything. He had had a most disturbing morning and himself could hardly believe in it. The memory of Julia’s blouse creasing under the pressure of his fingers and of herself warm beneath it, her scent, and the smooth resilience of her cheek were at once extraordinarily vivid yet scarcely to be believed. Much more credible was the ease with which she had dealt with him.

“She stopped my nonsense,” he thought, “with one arm tied behind her back. I suppose she’s a dab hand at disposing of excitable young males.” For the first time he was acutely aware of the difference in their ages and began to wonder uncomfortably how old Julia, in fact, might be.

Mixed up with all this and in a different though equally disturbing key was his father’s suggestion that he, Ricky, should take himself off. This he found completely unacceptable and wondered unhappily if they were about to have a family row about it. He was much attached to his father.

And then there was the case itself, muddling to a degree with its shifting focus, its inconsistencies and lack of perceptible design. He thought he would write a kind of résumé and did so and was, he felt, none the wiser for it. Turn to his work he could not.

The harbor glittered under an early afternoon sun and beyond the heads there was a lovely blue and white channel. He decided to take a walk, first looking in his glass to discover, he thought, a slightly less grotesque face. His eye, at least, no longer leered, although the area beneath it still resembled an overripe plum.

Since his return he had felt that Mrs. Ferrant not perhaps spied upon him, but kept an eye on him. He had an impression of doors being shut a fraction of a second after he left or returned to his room. As he stepped down into the street he was almost sure one of the parlor curtains moved slightly. This was disagreeable.

He went into Mr. Mercer’s shop to replace his lost espadrilles with a pair from a hanging cluster inside the door. Mr. Mercer, in his dual role of postmaster, was in the tiny office reserved for Her Majesty’s Mail. On seeing Ricky he hurried out carrying an airletter and a postcard.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said Mr. Mercer winningly after a startled look at the eye. “Can I have the pleasure of helping you? And may I impose upon your kindness? Today’s post was a little delayed and the boy had started on his rounds. If you would — You would! Much obliged I’m sure.”

The letter was from Ricky’s mother and the postcard he saw at a glance was from Saint Pierre-des-Roches with a view of that fateful jetty. For Mrs. Ferrant.

When he was out in the street he examined the card. Ferrant’s writing again, and again no message. He turned back to the house and pushed the card and the espadrilles through the letter flap. He put his mother’s letter in his pocket, and walked briskly down the front toward the Cod-and-Bottle and past it.

Here was the lane, surely, that he had taken that dark night when he visited Syd’s Pad — a long time ago as it now seemed. The name, roughly painted on a decrepit board, hung lopsided from its signpost. “Fisherman’s Steps.”

“Blow me down flat,” thought Ricky, “if I don’t case the joint.”

In the dark he had scarcely been aware of the steps, so worn, flattened, and uneven had they become, but had stumbled after Syd like a blind man only dimly conscious of the two or three cottages on either side. He saw, now, that they were unoccupied and falling into ruin. Clear of them the steps turned into a steep and sleazy path that separated areas of rank weeds littered with rusting tins. The path was heavily indented with hoofprints. “How strange,” he thought. “Those were left I suppose by Dulcie’s horse Mungo: ‘put down’ now, dead and buried, like its rider.”

And here was Syd’s Pad.

It must originally have been a conventional T-plan cottage with rooms on either side of a central passage. At some stage of its decline the two front rooms had been knocked into one, making the long disjointed apartment he had visited that night. The house was in a state of dismal neglect. At the back an isolated privy faced a desolation of weeds.

The hoofprints turned off to the right and ended in a morass overhung by a high bramble to which, Ricky thought, the horse must have been tethered.

It was through the marginal twigs of this bush that he surveyed the Pad and from here, with the strangest feeling of involvement in some repetitive expression of antagonism, thought he caught the slightest possible movement in one of the grimy curtains that covered the windows.

Ricky may be said to have kept his head. He realized that if there were anybody looking out they could certainly see him. The curtains, he remembered, were of a flimsy character, an effective blind from outside but probably semitransparent from within. Supposing Syd Jones to have returned and to be there at the window, Ricky himself would seem to be the spy, lurking but perfectly visible behind the brambles.

He took out his pipe, which was already filled, and lit it, making a show of sheltering from the wind. When it was going he emerged and looked about him as if making up his mind where he would go and then with what he hoped was an air of purposeful refreshment and enjoyment of the exercise, struck up the path, passing close by the Pad. The going became steeper and very rough, and before he had covered fifty feet the footpath had petered out.

He continued, climbing the hill until he reached the edge of a grove of stunted pines that smelled warm in the afternoon sun. Three cows stared him out of countenance and then tossed their heads contemptuously and returned to their grazing. The prospect was mildly attractive; he looked down on cottage roofs and waterfront and away over the harbor and out to sea where the coast of Normandy showed up clearly. He sat down and thought, keeping an eye on Syd’s Pad and asking himself if he had only imagined he was watched from behind the curtain, if what he thought he had seen was merely some trick of light on the dirty glass.

Suppose Syd had returned, when and how had he come?

How far down the darkening path to subservience had Syd gone? Ricky called up the view of him through that shaming hole in Le Monde: the grope in the pockets, the bent head, hunched shoulders, furtively busy movements, slight jerk.

Had Syd picked up a load of doctored paint tubes from Jerome et Cie? Did Syd himself, perhaps, do the doctoring in his Pad? Was he at it now, behind his dirty curtains? If he were there, how had he come back? By air, last evening? Or early this morning? Or could there have been goings-on in the small hours — a boat from Saint Pierre? Looking like Ferrant at his night fishing?

What had happened between Ferrant and Syd, after Ricky left the café? Further bullying? Had they left together and gone somewhere for Syd to sleep it off? Or have a trip? Or what?

Ricky fetched up short. Was it remotely possible that Ferrant could by some means have injected Syd with the idea of getting rid of him, Ricky? He knew nothing of the effects of heroin, if in fact Syd had taken heroin, or whether it would be possible to lay a subject on to commit an act of violence.

And finally: had it after all been Syd who, under the influence of Ferrant or heroin or both, hid on the jetty and knocked him overboard?

The more he thought of this explanation, the more likely he felt it to be.

Almost, had he known it, he was following his father’s line of reasoning as he expounded it, not half a mile away, over in Sergeant Plank’s office. Almost, but not quite, because, at that point or thereabouts, Alleyn finished the last of Mrs. Plank’s sandwiches and said: “There is another possibility, you know. Sydney Jones may have cut loose from Ferrant and, inspired by dope, acted on his own. Ricky says he got the impression that there was someone else in the goods shed when he sheltered there.”

“Might have sneaked in for another jolt of the stuff,” Fox speculated, “and acted on the ‘rush.’ It takes different people different ways.”

“Incidentally, Br’er Fox, his addiction might have been the reason why he didn’t take the sorrel mare to the smith.”

“Nipped off somewhere for a quickie?”

“And now we are riding high on the wings of fancy.”

“I do wonder, though, if Jones supplies Mr. Harkness with those pills. ‘Dexies,’ you say they are. And sold in France.”

“Sold in Saint Pierre quite openly, Dupont tells me.”

“Excuse me,” Plank asked, “but what’s a dexie?”

“Street name for amphetamines,” Alleyn replied. “Pep pills to you. Comparatively harmless taken moderately but far from so when used to excess. Some pop artists take them to induce, I suppose, their particular brand of professional hysteria. Celebrated orators have been said to take them—” He stopped short. “We shall see how Mr. Harkness performs in that field on Sunday,” he said.

“If he can keep on his feet,” Fox grunted.

“He’ll contrive to do that, I fancy. He’s a zealot, he’s hagridden, he’s got something he wants to loose off if it’s only a dose of hellfire, and he’s determined we shall get an earful. I back him to perform, pep pills and Scotch or no pep pills and Scotch.”

“Might that,” Plank ventured, “be why Syd Jones got these pills for him in the first place? To kind of work him up to it?”

“Might. Might. Might,” Alleyn grunted. “Yes, of course, Plank. It might indeed, if Jones is the supplier.”

“It’d be nice to know,” Fox sighed, “where Jones and Ferrant are. Now.”

And Ricky, up on his hillside, thought so too. He was becoming very bored with the prospect of the rusted roof and outside privy at Syd’s pad.

He could not, however, rid himself of the notion that Syd might be on the watch down there, just as he’d got it into his head that Mrs. Ferrant was keeping observation on him in her cottage. Had Syd crept out of his Pad and did he lie in wait behind the bramble bush, for instance, with a blunt instrument?

To shake off this unattractive fancy, he took out his mother’s letter and began to read it.

Troy wrote as she talked and Ricky enjoyed her letters very much. She made exactly the right remarks, and not too many of them, about his work and told him sparsely about her own. He became absorbed and no longer aware of the countrified sounds around him: seagulls down in the Cove; intermittent chirping from the pine grove and an occasional stirring of its branches; even the distant and inconsequent pop of a shotgun where somebody might be shooting rabbits. And if subconsciously he heard, quite close at hand, footfalls on the turf, he attributed them to the three cows.

Until a shadow fell across Troy’s letter and he looked up to find Ferrant standing over him with a grin on his face and a gun in his hand.

ii

At about this same time — half-past three in the afternoon — Sergeant Plank was despatched to Montjoy under orders to obtain a search warrant and, if he were forced to do so, to execute it at Leathers, collecting, to that end, two local constables from the central police station.

“We’ll get very little joy up there,” Alleyn said, “unless we find that missing length of wire. Remember the circumstances. Sometime between about ten-thirty in the morning and six-ish in the evening and before Dulcie Harkness jumped the gap somebody rigged the wire. And the same person, after Dulcie had crashed, removed and disposed of it. Harkness, when he wasn’t haranguing his niece and ineffectually locking her up, was in his office cooking up hellfire pamphlets. Jones took a short trip to the corn chandlers and back and didn’t obey orders to take the mare to the smith’s. We don’t know where he went or what he may have done. Louis Pharamond came and went, he says, round about three. He says he saw nobody and nothing untoward. As a matter of interest somebody had dropped an expensive type of leather button in the horse paddock which he says he didn’t visit. He’s lost its double from his coat sleeve.

“I think you’ll do well, Plank, to work out from the fence, taking in the stables and the barn. Unless you’re lucky you won’t finish today. And on a final note of jolly optimism, there’s always the possibility that somebody from outside came in, rigged the trap, hung about until Dulcie was killed in it, and then dismantled the wire and did a bunk, taking it with him.”

“Oh dear,” said Plank primly.

“On which consideration you’d better get cracking. All right?”

“Sir.”

“Good. I don’t need to talk about being active, thorough, and diligent, do I?”

“I hope not,” said Plank. And then: “I would like to ask, Mr. Alleyn: is there any connection between the two investigations — Dulcie’s death and the dope scene?”

Alleyn said slowly: “That’s the hundred-guinea one. There do seem to be very tenuous links, so tenuous that they may break down altogether, but for what they’re worth I’ll give them to you.”

Plank listened with carefully restrained avidity.

When Alleyn had finished they made their final arrangements. They telephoned the island airport for details of disembarking passengers. There had been none bearing a remote resemblance to Ferrant or Jones. Plank was to telephone his own station at five-thirty to report progress. If neither Alleyn nor Fox were there, Mrs. Plank would take the message. “If by any delicious chance,” Alleyn said, “you find it before then, you’d better pack up and bring your booty here and be wary about dabs.”

“And I take the car, sir?”

“You do. You’d better lay on some form of transport to be sent here for us in case of an emergency. Can you do this?”

“The Super said you were to have the use of his own car, sir, if required.”

“Very civil of him.”

“I’ll arrange for it to be brought here.”

“Good for you. Off you go.”

“Sir.”

“With our blessing, Sergeant Plank.”

“Much obliged I’m sure, sir,” said Plank and left after an inaudible exchange with his wife in the kitchen.

“And what for us?” Fox asked when he had gone.

‘“And what for me, my love, and what for me?’ ” Alleyn muttered. “I think it’s about time we had a look at Mr. Ferrant’s seagoing craft.”

“Do we know where he keeps it? Exactly?”

“No, and I don’t want to ask Madame. We’ll take a little prowl. Come and say goodbye to Mrs. P.”

He took the tray into the kitchen. Mrs. Plank was ironing. “That was kind,” he said and unloaded crockery into the sink. “Is this the drill?” he asked and turned on the tap.

“Don’t you touch them things!” she shouted. “Beg pardon, sir, I’m sure. It’s very kind but Joe’d never forgive me.”

“Why on earth not?”

“It wouldn’t be fitting,” she said in a flurry. “Not the thing at all.”

“I don’t see why. Here!” he said to the little girl who was ogling him around the leg of the table. “Can you dry?”

She swung her barrel of a body from side to side and shook her head.

“No, she can’t,” said her mother.

“Well, Fox can,” Alleyn announced as his colleague loomed up in the doorway. “Can’t you?”

“Pleasure,” he said and they washed up together.

“By the way, Mrs. Plank,” Alleyn asked. “Do you happen to know where Gil Ferrant berths his boat?”

She said she fancied it was anchored out in the harbor. He made great use of it, said Mrs. Plank.

“When he goes night fishing?”

“If that’s what it is.”

This was a surprising reaction but it turned out that Mrs. Plank referred to the possibility of philandering escapades after dark in “Fifi,” which was the name of Ferrant’s craft. “How she puts up with it I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. Plank. “No choice in the matter I daresay.”

Fox clicked his tongue against his palate and severely contemplated the glass he polished. “Fancy that,” he said.

Unhampered by the austere presence of her husband, Mrs. Plank elaborated. She said that mind you, Mr. Fox, she wouldn’t go so far as to say for certain but her friend next door knew for a fact that the poor girl had been seen embarking in “Fifi” after dark with Ferrant in attendance and as for her and that Jones… She laughed shortly and told her daughter to go into the garden and make another mud pie. The little girl did so by inches, retiring backwards with her eyes on Alleyn as if he were royalty. Predictably she tripped on the doorstep and fell, still backwards, on the wire mat. She was still roaring when they left.

“Didn’t amount to much joy,” Fox said disparagingly as they walked down to the front. “All this about the girl. We knew she was — what’s that the prince called the tom in the play?”

“ ‘Some road’?”

“That’s right. The young chap took me to see it,” said Fox, who usually referred in this fashion to his godson. “Very enjoyable piece. Well, as I was saying, we knew already what this unfortunate girl was.”

“We didn’t know she’d had to do with Ferrant, though. If it’s true. Or that she went boating with him after dark.”

“If it’s true,” they said together.

“Might be the longed-for link, if it is true,” Fox said. “In any case I suppose we add him to the list.”

“Oh yes. Yes. We prick him down. And if Rick’s got the right idea about the attack on him, I suppose we add a gloss to the name. ‘Prone to violence.’ ”

“There is that, too,” said Fox.

They were opposite the Ferrants’ cottage. Alleyn looked up at Ricky’s window. It was shut and there was no sign of him at his worktable.

“I think I’ll just have a word with him,” he said. “If he’s at home. I won’t be a moment.”

But Ricky was not at home. Mrs. Ferrant said he’d gone out about half an hour ago; she couldn’t say in what direction. He had not left a message. His bicycle was in the shed. She supposed the parcel in the hall must be his.

“Freshening himself up with a bit of exercise, no doubt,” said Fox gravely. “Heavy work, it must be, you know, this writing. When you come to think of it.”

“Yes, Foxkin, I expect it must,” Ricky’s father said with a friendly glance at his old colleague. “Meanwhile one must pursue the elusive ‘Fifi.’ From Rick’s story of the dead-of-night encounter between Ferrant and Louis Pharamond, it looks as if she sometimes ties up at the end of the pier. But if she anchors out in the harbor, he’ll need a dinghy. There are only four boats out there. Can you pick up the names?”

Fox, who was long-sighted, said: “ ‘Tinker.’ ‘Marleen.’ ‘Bonny Belle.’ Wait a bit. She’s coming round. Hold on. Yes. That’s her. Second from the right, covered with a tarpaulin. ‘Fifi.’ ”

“Damn.”

“Could we get a dinghy and row out?”

“With Madame Ferrant’s beady eye at the front parlor window?”

“Do you reckon?”

“I’d take a bet on it. Let’s trip blithely down the pier.”

They walked down the pier and stood with their hands in their pockets, ostensibly gazing out to sea. Alleyn pointed to the distant coast of France.

“To coin a phrase, don’t look now, but Fifi’s dinghy’s below, moored to the jetty with enough line to accommodate to the tide.”

“Is she though? Oh, yes.” said Fox, slewing his eyes down and round. “I see. ‘Fifi’ on the stern. Would she normally be left like that, though? Wouldn’t she knock herself out against the pier?”

“There are old tires down there for fenders. But you’d think she’d be hauled up the beach with the others. Or, of course, if the owner was aboard, tied up to ‘Fifi’.”

“Do we get anything out of this, then?”

“Let’s get back, shall we?”

They returned to the front and sat on the weatherworn bench. Alleyn got out his pipe.

“I’ve got news for you, Br’er Fox,” he said. “Last evening that dinghy was hauled up on the beach. I’m sure of it. I waited up in Rick’s room for an hour until he arrived and spent most of the time looking out of the window. There she was, half blue and half white and her name across her stern. She was just on the seaward side of the high-water mark with her anchor in the sand. She’d be afloat at high tide.”

“Is that so? Well, well. Now, how do you read that?” asked Fox.

“Like everything else that’s turned up — with modified rapture. Ferrant may let one of his mates in the cove have the use of his boat while he’s away.”

“In which case, wouldn’t the mate return it to the beach?”

“Again, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Alleyn said. And after a pause. “When I left last night, at ten o’clock, the tide was coming in. The sky was overcast and it was very dark. The dinghy wasn’t on the beach this morning.”

He lit his pipe. They were silent for some time.

Behind them the Ferrants’ front door banged. Alleyn turned quickly, half expecting to see Ricky, but it was only the boy, Louis, with his black hair sleeked like wet fur to his head. He was unnaturally tidy and French-looking in his matelot jersey and very short shorts.

He stared at them, stuck his hands in his pockets, and crossed the road, whistling and strutting a little.

“Hullo,” Alleyn said. “You’re Louis Ferrant, aren’t you?”

He nodded. He walked over to the low wall and lounged against it as Louis Pharamond had lounged that morning: self-consciously, deliberately. Alleyn experienced the curious reaction that is induced by unexpected cross-cutting in a film, as if the figure by the wall blinked by split seconds from child to man to child again.

“Where are you off to?” he asked. “Do you ever go fishing?”

The boy shook his head and then said: “Sometimes,” in an indifferent voice.

“With your father, perhaps?”

“He’s not here,” Louis said very quickly.

“You don’t go out by yourself? In the dinghy?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Or perhaps you can’t row,” Alleyn casually suggested.

“Yes. I can. I can so row. My papa won’t let anybody but me row the dinghy. Not anybody. I can row by myself even when it’s gros temps. Round the musoir, I can, and out to the cap. Easy.”

“I bet you wouldn’t go out on your own at night.”

“Huh! Easy! Often! I—”

He stopped short, looked uncomfortably at the house and turned sulky. “I can so row,” he muttered and began to walk away.

“I’ll get you to take me out one of these nights,” Alleyn said.

But Louis let out a small boy’s whoop and ran suddenly, down the road and around the corner.

“Let me tell you a fairy tale, Br’er Fox,” said Alleyn.

“Any time,” said Fox.

“It’s about a little boy who stayed up late because his mother told him to. When it was very dark and very late indeed and the tide was high, she sent him down to the strand where his papa’s dinghy was anchored and just afloat and he hauled up the anchor and rowed the dinghy out to his papa’s motorboat which was called ‘Fifi’ and he tied her up to ‘Fifi’ and waited for his papa who was not really his papa at all. Or perhaps, as it was a calm night, he rowed right out to the heads — the cap—and waited there. And presently his papa arrived in a boat from France that went back to France. So the little boy and his papa rowed all the way back to the pier and came home. And they left the dinghy tied up to the pier.”

“And what did the papa do then?” Fox asked in falsetto.

“That,” Alleyn said, “is the catch. He can hardly have bedded down with his lawful wedded wife and be lying doggo in the bedroom. Or can he?”

“Possible.”

“Yes. Or,” Alleyn said, “he may be bedded down somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Like Syd’s Pad, for example.”

“And why’s he come back? Because things are getting too hot over there?” Fox hazarded.

“Or, while we’re in the inventive vein, because they might be potentially even hotter over here and he wants to clean up damning evidence.”

“Where? Don’t tell me. At Syd’s Pad. Or,” Fox said, “could it be, don’t laugh, to clean up Syd?”

“Because, wait for it, Syd it was who made the attempt on Rick and bungled it and has become unreliable and expendable. Your turn.”

“A digression. Reverting to the deceased. While on friendly terms with Syd at his Pad, suppose she stumbled on something,” said Fox.

“What did she stumble on? Oh, I’m with you. On a doctored tube of emerald-oxide-of-chromium or on the basic supply of dope.”

“And fell out with Jones on account of it being his baby and he not being prepared to take responsibility and so she threatened to grass on him,” said Fox, warming to his work. “Or alternatively, yes, by gum, for Syd read Ferrant. It was his baby and he did her in. Shall I go on?”

“Be my guest.”

“Anyway one, or both of them, fixes up the death trap and polishes her off,” said Fox. “There you are! Bob’s your uncle.” He chuckled.

Alleyn did not reply. He got up and looked at Ricky’s window. It was still shut. The village was very quiet at this time in the afternoon.

“I wonder where he went for his walk,” he said. “I suppose he could have come back while we were on the pier.”

“He couldn’t have failed to see us.”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t butt in. He’s not at his table. When he’s there you can see him very clearly from the street. Good God, I’m behaving like a clucky old hen.”

Fox looked concerned but said nothing.

Alleyn said: “We’re not exactly active at the moment, are we? What the hell have we got in terms of visible, tangible, put-on-table evidence? Damnall.”

“A button.”

“True.”

“It wasn’t anywhere near the fence,” said Fox. “Might he just have forgotten?”

“He might, but I don’t think so. Fox, I’m going to get a search warrant for Syd’s Pad.”

“You are?”

“Yes. We can’t leave it any longer. Even if we’ve done no better than concoct a fairy tale, Jones does stand not only as an extremely dubious character but as a kind of link between the two crackpot cases we’re supposed to be handling. I’ve been hoping Dupont at his end might turn up something definite and in consequence haven’t taken any action with the sprats that might scare off the mackerel. But there’s a limit to masterly inactivity and we’ve reached it.”

“So we search,” Fox said. He fixed his gaze upon the distant coast of France. “What d’you reckon, Mr. Alleyn?” he asked. “Has he got back? Have they both got back? Jones and Ferrant?”

“Not according to the airport people.”

“By boat, then, like we fancied. In the night?”

“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we? Here comes a copper in the Super’s car. It’s ho for the nearest beak and a search warrant.”

“It’ll be a pity,” Fox remarked, “if nobody’s there after all. Bang goes the fairy tale. Back to square one.” He considered this possibility for a moment. “All the same,” he said, “although I don’t usually place any reliance on hunches I’ve got a funny kind of feeling there’s somebody in Syd’s Pad.”

iii

The really extraordinary feature of Ricky’s situation was his inability to believe in it. He had to keep reminding himself that Ferrant had a real gun of sorts and was pointing it into the small of his back. Ferrant had shown it to him and said it was real and that he would use it if Ricky did not do as he was told. Even then Ricky’s incredulity nearly got the better of him and he actually had to pull himself together and stop himself calling the bluff and suddenly bolting down the hill.

The situation was embarrassing rather than alarming. When Syd Jones slouched out of the Pad and met them and fastened his arms behind his back with a strap, Ricky thought that all three of them looked silly and not able to carry the scene off with style. This reaction was the more singular in that, at the same time, he knew they meant business and that he ought to be deeply alarmed.

And now, here he was, back in Syd’s Pad and in the broken-down chair he had occupied on his former visit, very uncomfortable because of his pinioned arms. The room smelled and looked as it had before and was in the same state of squalor. He saw that blankets had been rigged up over the windows. A solitary shaded lamp on the worktable gave all the light there was. His arms hurt him and broken springs dug into his bottom.

There was one new feature, apart from the blankets. Where there had been sketches drawing-pinned to the wall there now hung a roughly framed canvas. He recognized Leda and the Swan.

Ferrant lounged against the table with unconvincing insolence. Syd lay on his bed and looked seldom and furtively at Ricky. Nothing was said and, grotesquely, this silence had the character of a social hiatus. Ricky had some difficulty in breaking it.

“What is all this?” he asked, his voice sounding like somebody else’s. “Am I kidnapped or what?”

“That’s right, Mr. Alleyn,” Ferrant said. “That’s correct. You are our hostage, Mr. Alleyn.”

He was smoking. He inhaled and blew smoke out his nostrils. “What an act!” Ricky thought.

“Do you mind telling me why?” he asked.

“A pleasure, Mr. Alleyn. A great pleasure.”

Ricky thought: “If this were fiction it would be terrible stuff. One would write things like ‘sneered Ferrant’ and ‘said young Alleyn, very quietly.’ ”

He said: “Well, come on, then. Let’s have it.”

“You’re going to write a little note to your papa, Mr. Alleyn.”

For the first time an authentic cold trickle ran down Ricky’s spine. “To say what?” he asked.

Ferrant elaborated with all the panache of a grade-B film gangster. The message Ricky was to write would be delivered to the Cove police station — never mind by whom. Ricky, said tartly that he couldn’t care less by whom; what was he expected to say?

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Ferrant snarled out of the corner of his mouth. He moved around the table and sat down at it. He cocked up his feet in their corespondent shoes on the table and leveled his gun between his knees at Ricky. It was not a pose that Ricky, himself in acute discomfort, thought that Ferrant would find easy or pleasant to sustain.

He noticed that among the litter on the table were the remains of a meal: an open jackknife, cups, and a half-empty bottle of cognac. A piece of drawing paper lay near the lamp with an artist’s conté pencil beside it. There was a chair on that side of the table, opposite Ferrant.

“That’s the idea,” said Ferrant (“purred,” no doubt would be the chosen verb, thought Ricky). “We’ll have a little action, shall we?”

He nodded magnificently at Syd, who got off the bed and moved to Ricky. He bent over him, not looking in his face.

“Your breath stinks, Syd,” said Ricky.

Syd made a very raw reply. It was the first time he had spoken. He hauled ineffectually at Ricky and they floundered about aimlessly before Ricky got his balance. It was true that Syd smelled awful.

Obviously they wanted him on the chair, facing Ferrant. He managed to shoulder Syd off and sit on it.

“Now then,” he said. “What’s the drill?”

“We’ll take it ve-ry nice and slow,” said Ferrant and Ricky thought he’d been wanting to get the phrase off his chest, appropriate or not, as the situation developed. He repeated it: “Ni-ce and slow.”

“If you want me to write you’ll have to untruss me, won’t you?” Ricky pointed out.

“I’m giving the orders in this scene, mate, do you mind?” said Ferrant. He nodded again to Syd, who moved behind Ricky but did not release him.

Ricky had pins and needles in his forearms. It was difficult to move them. His upper arms, still pinioned, had gone numb. Ferrant raised the gun slightly.

“And we won’t try any funny business, will we?” he said. “We’ll listen carefully and do what we’re told like a good boy. Right?”

He waited for an answer and getting none began to lay down the law.

He said Ricky was to write a message in his own words and if he tried anything on he’d have to start again. He was to say that he was being held hostage and the price of his release was absolute inactivity on the part of the police until Ferrant and Syd had gone.

“Say,” Ferrant ordered, “that if they start anything you’ll be fixed. For keeps.”

That was to be the message.

How many strata of thought are there at any given moment in a human brain? In Ricky’s there was a kind of lethargy, a profound unbelief in the situation, a sense of nonreality, as if, in an approaching moment, he would find himself elsewhere and unmolested. With this there was a rising dry terror and an awareness of the necessity to think clearly about the immediate threat. And, overall, a desolate longing for his father.

“Suppose I won’t write it,” he said. “What about that?”

“Something not very nice about that. Something we don’t want to do.”

“If you mean you’ll shoot me you must be out of your mind. Where would that get you?” Ricky asked, forcing himself (and it cost him an enormous effort) to take hold of what he supposed must be reality. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “What do you want? To do a bolt because you’re up to your eyebrows in trouble? The hostage ploy’s exploded, you ought to know that. They’ll call your bluff. You’re not going to shoot me.”

Syd Jones mumbled, “You ought to know we mean business. What about yesterday? What about—”

“Shut up,” said Ferrant.

“All right,” said Ricky. “Yesterday. What about it? A footling attempt to do me in and a dead failure at that.”

To his own surprise he suddenly lost his temper with Syd. “You’ve been a bloody fool all along,” he shouted. “You thought I was on to whatever your game is with drugs, didn’t you? It wouldn’t have entered my head if you hadn’t made such an ass of yourself. You thought I sent you to see my parents because my father’s a cop. I sent you out of bloody kindness. You thought I was spying on you and tailed you over to Saint Pierre. You were dead wrong all along the line and did yourself a lot of harm. Now, God save the mark, you’re trying to play at kidnappers. You fool, Syd. If you shot me, here, it’d be the end of you. What do you think my father’d do about that one? He’d hunt you both down with the police of two nations to help him. You don’t mean business. Ferrant’s making a monkey of you and you’re too bloody dumb or too bloody doped to see it. Call yourself a painter. You’re a dirty little drug-runner’s sidekick and a failure at that.”

Syd hit him across the mouth. His upper lip banged against his teeth. Tears ran down his face. He lashed out with his foot. Syd fell backwards and sat on the floor. Ricky saw through his tears that Syd had the jackknife in his hand.

Ferrant, in command of a stream of whispered indecencies, rose and was frightening. He came around the table and winded Ricky with a savage jab under the ribs. Ricky doubled up in his chair and through the pain felt them lash his ankles together. Ferrant took his shoulders and jerked him upright. He began to hit him methodically with hard, openhanded slaps on his bruised face. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” Ricky thought.

Now Ferrant had the knife. He forced Ricky’s head back by the hair and held the point to his throat.

“Now,” whispered Ferrant, “who’s talking about who means business? Another squeal out of you, squire, and you’ll be gagged. And listen. Any more naughty stuff and you’ll end up with a slit windpipe at the bottom of the earth bog behind this shack. Your father won’t find you down there in a hurry and when he does he won’t fancy what he sees. Filth,” said Ferrant, using the French equivalent. He shook Ricky by the hair of his head and slapped his face again.

Ricky wondered afterward if this treatment had for a moment or two actually served to clear rather than fuddle his wits and even to extend his field of observation. Whether this was so or not, it was a fact that he now became aware beyond the circle of light cast by the single lamp, of suitcases that were vaguely familiar. Now he recognized them, ultrasmart pieces of luggage (“Très snob — presque cad” — who had said that?) suspended from Ferrant’s gloved hands as he walked down the street to the jetty in the early hours of the morning.

He saw, blearily, the familiar paint box lying open on the table with a litter of tubes and an open carton beside it. He even saw that one tube had been opened at the bottom and was gaping.

“They’re cleaning up,” he thought. And then: “They’re cooking up a getaway with the stuff. Tonight. They saw me watching the Pad, and they saw me up by the pine grove, and they hauled me in. Now they don’t know what to do with me. They’re improvising.”

Ferrant thrust his face at him. “That’s for a start,” he said. “How about it? You’ll write this message? Yes?”

Ricky tried to speak but found that his tongue was out of order and his upper lip bled on the inside and wouldn’t move. He made ungainly noises. Syd said: “Christ, you’ve croaked him.”

Ricky made an enormous effort. “Won’t work,” he hoped he’d said. Ferrant listened with exaggerated attention.

“What’s that? Won’t work? Oh, it’ll work, don’t worry,” he said. “Know how? You’re going down to the pier with us, see? And if your papa and his bloody fuzz start anything, you’ll croak.” He touched Ricky’s throat with the point of the knife. “See? Feel that? Now, get to it. Tell him.”

They released his right arm and strapped the left to the chair. Ferrant pushed the drawing paper toward him and tried to shove the pencil into his tingling hand. “Go on,” he said. “Go on. Take it! Take it.”

Ricky flexed his fingers and clenched and unclenched his hand. He felt horribly sick. Ferrant’s voice receded into the distance and was replaced by a thrumming sound. Something hard pressed against his forehead. It was the table. “But I haven’t passed out,” he thought. “Not quite.”

Syd Jones was saying: “No, Gil, don’t. Hell, Gil, not now. Not yet. Look, Gil, why don’t we gag him and tie him up and leave him? Why don’t we finish packing the stuff and stay quiet till it’s time and just leave him?”

“Do I have to go over it again? Look. So he doesn’t turn up. So his old man’s asking for him. Marie reckons he’s suspicious. They’ll be watching, don’t you worry. All right. So we leave him here and we walk straight into it. But if we’ve got him between us and look like we mean business, they won’t do a bloody thing. They can’t. We’ll take him in the dinghy as far as the boat and tip him overboard. By the time they’ve fished him out, we’re beyond the heads and on our way.”

“I don’t like it. Look at him. He’s passed out.”

Ricky stayed as he was. When Ferrant jerked his head back he groaned, opened his eyes, shut them again, and, when released, flopped forward on the table. “I must listen, listen, listen,” he thought. It was a horrid task; so much easier to give up, to yield, voluptuously almost, to whatever punch, slap, or agonizing tweak they chose to deal out. And what to do about writing? What would be the result if he did write — write what? What Ferrant had said — write to his father.

“Go on,” Ferrant was saying. “Get to it. You know what to put. Go on.”

His head was jerked up again by the hair. Perhaps his scalp rather than his mouth hurt most.

His fingers closed around the conté pencil. He dragged his hand over the paper.

“Kidnapped,” he wrote, “OK. They say if you’re inactive till they’ve gone I won’t be hurt. If not I will. Sorry.” He made a big attempt at organized thinking. “P.A.D.” he wrote as a signature and let the pencil slide out of his grip.

Ferrant read the message. “What’s this ‘P.A.D.’?” he demanded.

“Initials. Patrick Andrew David,” Ricky lied and thought it sounded like royalty.

“What’s this ‘Ricky’ stuff then?”

“Nickname. Always sign P.A.D.”

The paper was withdrawn. His face dropped painfully on his forearm and he closed his eyes. Their voices faded and he could no longer strain to listen. It would be delicious if in spite of the several pains that competed for his attention, he could sleep.

There was no such thing as time, only the rise and ebbing of pain to which a new element had been added, cutting into his ankles as if into the sorrel mare’s near fore.

iv

It took much longer than they had anticipated to get their search warrant. The magistrates court had risen and Alleyn was obliged to hunt down a Justice of the Peace in his home. He lived some distance on the far side of Montjoy in an important house at the foot of a precipitous lane. They had trouble finding him and when found he turned out to be a fusspot and a ditherer. On the return journey the car jibbed at the steep ascent and wouldn’t proceed until Fox had removed his considerable weight and applied it to the rear. Whereupon Alleyn, using a zigzagging technique, finally achieved the summit and was obliged to wait there for his laboring colleague. They then found that there was next to no petrol left in the tank and stopped at the first station to fill up. The man asked them if they knew they had a slow puncture.

By the time they got back to the Cove dusk was falling and Sergeant Plank had twice rung up from Leathers. Mrs. Plank, the victim of redundancy, reported that there was nothing to report but that he would report again at seven-thirty. She offered them high tea, which they declined. Alleyn left Fox to take the call, saying he would look in for a fleeting moment on Ricky, who would surely have returned, from his walk.

So he went around the corner to the Ferrants’ house. Ricky’s window was still shut. The boy, Louis, admitted Alleyn.

Mrs. Ferrant came out of her kitchen to the usual accompaniment of her television.

“Good evening, monsieur,” she said. “Your son has not yet returned.”

The idiot insistence of a commercial jingle blared to its conclusion before Alleyn spoke.

“He’s rather late, isn’t he?” Alleyn said.

She lifted her shoulders. “He has perhaps walked to Bon Accord and is eating there.”

“He didn’t say anything about doing that?”

“No. There was no need.”

“You would wish to know because of the meal, madame. It was inconsiderate of him.”

“C’est peu de chose.”

“Has he done this before?”

“Once, perhaps. Or more than once. I forget. You will excuse me, monsieur. I have the boy’s meal to attend to.”

“Of course. Forgive me. Your husband has not returned?”

“No, monsieur. I do not expect him. Excuse me.”

When she had shut the kitchen door after her, Alleyn lifted his clenched fist to his mouth, took in a deep breath, waited a second, and then went upstairs to Ricky’s room. Perhaps there would be a written message there that he had not, for some reason, wished to leave with Mrs. Ferrant.

There was no message. Ricky’s manuscript, weighted by a stone, was on his table. A photograph of his parents stared past his father at the empty room. The smell of Ricky, a tweed and shaving-soap smell mixed with his pipe, hung on the air.

“She was lying,” he thought. “He hasn’t gone to Bon Accord. What the hell did he say was the name of that pub, where they lunched?”

“Fisherman’s Rest” clicked up in his police-drilled memory. He returned to the worktable. On a notepad Ricky had written a telephone number and after it L’E.

“He’d not go there,” Alleyn thought. “Or would he? If Julia rang him up? Not without letting me know. But he couldn’t let me know.”

There was more writing — a lot of it — on an underleaf of the notepad. Alleyn saw that it was a quite exhaustive breakdown of the circumstances surrounding Ricky’s experiences before and during his visit to Saint Pierre-des-Roches.

Alleyn momentarily closed his eyes. “Madame F.,” he thought, “has no doubt enjoyed a good read.”

He took down the L’Espérance number and left a message under the stone. “Sorry I missed you, Cid.”

“She’ll read it, of course,” he thought and went downstairs. The kitchen door was ajar and the television silent.

“Bon soir, madame,” he called out cheerfully and let himself out.

Back at the police station he rang the Fisherman’s Rest at Bon Accord and to a background of bar conviviality was told that Ricky was not, and had not been, there. Fox, who had yielded to Mrs. Plank’s renewed hospitality, listened with well-controlled consternation.

Alleyn then rang L’Espérance. He was answered by a voice that he recognized as Bruno’s.

“Hullo,” he said. “Alleyn, here. I’m sorry to bother you but is Rick by any chance with you?”

“No, sir, we haven’t seen him since—”

He faded out. Alleyn heard his own name and then, close and unmistakable, Julia’s voice.

“It’s you! What fun. Have you mislaid your son?”

“I seem to have, for the moment.”

“We’ve not seen him since this morning. Could he be hunting you down in your smart hotel? Perhaps he’s met Louis and they’re up to no good in Montjoy.”

“Is Louis in Montjoy?”

“I think so. Carlotta,” cried Julia musically, “is Louis in Montjoy?” And after a pause, into the receiver: “She doesn’t seem to know.”

“I’m so sorry to have bothered you.”

“You needn’t be. Quite to the contrary. Hope you find him.”

“I expect I shall,” he said quite gaily. “Good-bye and thank you.”

When he had hung up, he and Fox looked steadily at each other.

Fox said: “There’ll be a simple explanation, of course.”

“If there is,” Alleyn said, “I’ll knock his block off,” and contrived to laugh. “You think of one, Fox,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Such as gone for a walk and sprained an ankle?”

“All right. Yes. That.”

“He wouldn’t be up at Leathers? No. Plank would have said.”

The telephone rang.

“That’ll be Plank,” said Fox and answered it. “Fox here. Yes. Nothing, eh? I’ll ask the Chief.” He looked at Alleyn who, with a most uncharacteristic gesture, passed his hand across his eyes.

“Tell him to — no, wait a moment. Tell them to knock off and report back here. And — you might just ask—”

Fox asked and got the expected reply.

“By God,” said Alleyn. “I wish this hadn’t happened. Damn the boy, I ought to have got him out of it to begin with.”

After a longish pause, Fox said: “I’m not of that opinion, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Alleyn.”

“I don’t mind, Br’er Fox. I hope you’re right.”

“It’ll just turn out he’s taken an extra long walk.”

“You didn’t hear Mrs. Ferrant. I think she knows something.”

“About the young chap?”

“Yes.”

Fox was silent.

“We must, of course, do what we’d do if someone came into the station and reported it,” Alleyn said.

“Tell them to wait,” Fox said promptly. “Give him until it gets dark and then if he hadn’t turned up we’d — well—”

“Set up a search.”

“That’s right,” said Fox uncomfortably.

“In the meantime we’ve got the official search on hand. Did Plank say what he’d beaten up in the way of help?”

“The chaps he’s got with him. A couple of coppers from the Montjoy factory,” said Fox, meaning the police station.

“We’ll take them with us. After all, we don’t know what we’ll find there, do we?” said Alleyn.