Last Ditch (23 page)

They inched forward with frequent stops to listen and grope about them. A breeze had sprung up. There were rustlings, small indeterminate sounds, and from the pine-grove further up the hill, a vague soughing. This favoured their approach.

It was always possible, Alleyn thought, that they were being watched, that the lights had been put out and a chink opened at one of the windows. What would the men inside do then? And there was, he supposed, another possibility – that Ricky was being held somewhere else – in one of the deserted cottages, for instance, or even gagged and out in the open. But no. Why ‘Pad’ in the message? Unless they’d moved after sending the message. Should Fox return and try to screw a statement out of Mrs Ferrant? But then the emergence from the pad might happen and they would be a man short.

They had come to the place where a rough path branched off, leading round to the back of the house. Plank breathed this information in Alleyn’s ear: ‘We’ll get back to you double-quick, sir, if it’s the front. Can you make out the door?’ Alleyn squeezed his elbow and sensed rather than saw Plank’s withdrawal with PC Moss.

There was the door. They crept up to it, Alleyn and Fox on either side, with PC Cribbage behind Fox. There was a sharp crackle as Cribbage fell foul of some bush or dry stick. They froze and waited. The breeze carried a moisture with it that tasted salt on Alleyn’s lips. Nothing untoward happened.

Alleyn began to explore with his fingers the wall, the door and a step leading up to it. He sensed that Fox, on his side, was doing much the same thing.

The door was weather-worn and opened inwards. The handle was on Alleyn’s side. He found the keyhole, knelt and put his eye to it but could see nothing. The key was in the lock, evidently. Or had-n’t Ricky, describing the pad, talked about a heavy curtain masking the door? Alleyn thought he had.

He explored the bottom of the door. There was very little gap between it and the floor, but as he stared fixedly at the place where his finger rested he became aware of a lesser darkness, of the faintest possible thinning out of non-visibility that increased, infinitesimally, when he withdrew his hand.

Light, as faint as light could be, filtered through the gap between the door and the floor.

He slid his finger away from him along the gap and ran into something alive. Fox’s finger. Alleyn closed his hand round Fox’s and then traced on its hairy back the word LIGHT. Fox reversed the process. YES.

Alleyn knelt. He laid his right ear to the door and stopped up the left one.

There was sound. Something being moved. The thud of stockinged or soft-shod feet and then, only just perceptibly, voices.

He listened and listened, unconscious of aching knees, as if all his other faculties had been absorbed by the sense of hearing. The sounds continued. Once, one of the voices was raised. Of one thing he was certain – neither of them belonged to Ricky.

To Ricky, on the other side of the door. Quite close? Or locked up in some back room? Gagged? What had they done to him to turn his incisive Italianate script into the writing of an old man?

Monstrous it was, to wait and to do nothing. Should he, after all, have decided to break in? Suppose they shot him and Fox before the others could jump on them, what would they do to Ricky?

The sounds were so faint that the men must be at the end of the room farthest from the door. He wondered if Fox had heard them, or Cribbage.

He got to his feet, surprised to find how stiff he was. He waited for a minute or two and then eased across until he found Fox, who was leaning with his back to the wall, and whispered: ‘Hear them?’

‘Yes.’

‘At least we’ve come to the right place.’

‘Yes.’

Alleyn returned to his side of the door.

The minutes dragged into an hour. The noises continued intermittently, and, after a time, became more distant as if the men had moved to another room. They changed in character. There was a scraping metallic sound, only just detectable, and then silence.

It was no longer pitch dark. Shapes had begun to appear, shadows of definite form and patches of light. The moon, in its last quarter, had risen behind the pine-grove and soon would shine full upon them. Already he could see Fox and beyond him PC Cribbage, propped against the wall, his head drooping, his helmet inclined forward above his nose. He was asleep.

Even as Alleyn reached out to draw Fox’s attention to his neighbour, Cribbage’s knees bent. He slid down the wall and fell heavily to the ground, kicking the acetylene lamp. Wakened, he began to scramble to his feet and was kicked by Fox. He rose with abject caution.

Absolute silence had fallen inside the house.

Alleyn motioned to Fox, and Fox, with awful grandeur, motioned to the stricken Cribbage. They cat-walked across to Alleyn’s side of the door and stood behind him, all three of them pressed back against the wall.

‘
If
– ‘ Alleyn breathed, ‘we act.’

‘Right.’

They moved a little apart and waited, Alleyn with his ear to the door. The light that had shown so faintly across the threshold went out. He drew back and signalled to Fox. After a further eternal interval they all heard a rustle and clink as of a curtain being drawn.

The key was turned in the lock.

The deep framework surrounding the door prevented Alleyn from seeing it open, but he knew it
had
opened, very slightly. He knew that the man inside now looked out and saw nothing untoward where Fox and Cribbage had been. To see them, he would have to open up wide enough to push his head through and look to his right.

The door creaked.

In slow motion a black beret began to appear. An ear, a temple, the flat of a cheek and then, suddenly, the point of a jaw and an eye.
The eye looked into his. It opened wide and he drove his fist hard at the jaw.

Ferrant pitched forward. Fox caught him under the arms and Cribbage took him by the knees. Alleyn closed the door.

Ferrant’s right hand opened and Alleyn caught the gun that fell from it. ‘Lose him. Quick,’ he said. Fox and Cribbage carried Ferrant, head lolling and arms dangling, round the corner of the house. The operation had been virtually soundless and occupied a matter of seconds.

Alleyn moved back to his place by the door. There was still no sound from inside the house. Fox and Cribbage returned.

‘Still out,’ Fox muttered, and intimated that Ferrant was handcuffed to a small tree with his mouth stopped.

They took up their former positions, Alleyn with Ferrant’s gun – a French army automatic – in his hand. This one, he thought, was going to be simpler.

Two loud thumps came from within the house, followed by an exclamation that sounded like an oath. Then, soft but unmistakable, approaching footsteps and again the creak of the opening door.

‘Gil!’ Syd Jones whispered into the night. ‘What’s up? Where are you? Are you there, Gil?’

Like Ferrant, he widened the door-opening and like Ferrant, thrust his head out.

They used their high-powered torches. Syd’s face, a bearded mask, started up, blinking and expressionless. He found himself looking into the barrel of the automatic. ‘Hands up and into the room,’ Alleyn said. Fox kicked the door wide open, entered the house and switched on the light. Alleyn followed Syd, with Cribbage behind him.

At the far end of the room, face to wall, gagged and bound in his chair, was Ricky.

‘Fox,’ Alleyn said. Fox took the automatic and began the obligatory chant – ‘Sydney Jones, I arrest…’ Plank arrived and put on the handcuffs.

Alleyn, stooping over his son, was saying: ‘It’s me, old boy. You’ll be all right. It’s me.’ He removed the bloodied gag. Ricky’s mouth hung open. His tongue moved and he made a sound. Alleyn took his head carefully between his hands.

Ricky contrived to speak. ‘Oh, golly, Cid,’ he said. ‘Oh,
golly
!’

‘I know. Never mind. Won’t be long now. Hold on.’

He unstrapped the arms and they fell forward. He knelt to release the ankles.

Ricky’s white socks were bloodied and overhung his shoes. Alleyn turned the socks back and exposed wet ridges that had closed over the bonds.

From between the ridges protruded a twist of wire and two venomous little prongs.

Ricky lay on the bed. In the filthy little kitchen, PC Moss boiled up a saucepan of water and tore a sheet into strips. Sergeant Plank was at the station, telephoning for a doctor and ambulance.

Ferrant and Syd Jones, handcuffed together, sat side by side facing the table. Opposite them Alleyn stood with Fox beside him and Cribbage modestly in the background. The angled lamp had been directed to shine full in the prisoners’ faces.

On the table, stretched out to its full length on a sheet of paper, lay the wire that had bound Ricky’s ankles and cut into them. It left a trace of red on the paper.

To Ricky himself, lying in the shadow, his injuries thrumming through his nerves like music, the scene was familiar. It was an interrogation scene with obviously dramatic lighting, barked questions, mulish answers, suggested threats. It looked like a standard offering from a police story on television.

But it didn’t sound like one. His father and Fox did not bark their questions. Nor did they threaten, but were quiet and deadly cold and must, Ricky thought, be frightening indeed.

‘This wire,’ Alleyn was saying to Syd, ‘it’s yours, is it?’

Syd’s reply, if he made one, was inaudible.

‘Is it off the back of the picture frame there? It is? Where did you get it? Where?’ A pause. ‘Lying about? Where?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘At Leathers?’

‘S’right.’

‘When?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘You know very well. When?’

‘I don’t remember. It was some old junk. We didn’t want it.’

‘Was it before the accident?’

‘Yes. No. After.’

‘Where?’

‘In the stables.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know. Where?’

‘Hanging up. With a lot more.’

‘Did you cut it off?’

‘No. It was on its own. A separate bit. What’s the idea?’ Syd broke out with a miserable show of indignation. ‘So it’s a bit of old wire. So I took it to hang a picture. So what?’

Ferrant, on a jet of obscenities, French and English, told him to hold his tongue.

‘I didn’t tie him up,’ Syd said. ‘You did.’

‘
Merde.’

Alleyn said: ‘You will both be taken to the police station in Montjoy and charged with assault. Anything you say now – and then – will be taken down and may be used in evidence. For the moment, that’s all.’

‘Get up,’ said Fox.

Cribbage got them to their feet. He and Fox marshalled them towards the far end of the room. As they were about to pass the bed, looking straight before them, Fox laid massive hands upon their shoulders and turned them to confront it.

Ricky, from out of the mess they had made of his face, looked at them. Ferrant produced the blank indifference of the dock. Syd, whose face, as always, resembled the interior of an old-fashioned mattress, showed the whites of his eyes.

Fox shoved them round again and they were taken, under Cribbage’s surveillance, to the far end of the room.

PC Moss emerged from the kitchen with a saucepan containing boiled strips of sheet and presented it before Alleyn.

Alleyn said: ‘Thank you, Moss. I don’t know that we should do anything before the doctor’s seen him. Perhaps clean him up a bit.’

‘They’re sterile, sir,’ said Moss. ‘Boiled for ten minutes.’

‘Splendid.’

Alleyn went into the kitchen. Boiled water had been poured into a basin. He scrubbed his hands with soap that Syd evidently used on his brushes if not on himself. Alleyn returned to his son. Moss held the saucepan for him and he very cautiously swabbed Ricky’s mouth and eyes.

‘Better,’ said Ricky.

Alleyn looked again at the ankles. The wire had driven fibres from Ricky’s socks into the cuts.

‘I’d better not meddle,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’ll get on with the search, Fox.’ He bent over Ricky. ‘We’re getting the quack to have a look at you, old boy.’

‘I’ll be OK.’

‘Of course you will. But you’re bloody uncomfortable, I’m afraid.’

Ricky tried to speak, failed, and then with an enormous effort said: ‘Try some of the dope,’ and managed to wink.

Alleyn winked back, using the serio-comic family version with one corner of the mouth drawn down and the opposite eyebrow raised, a grimace beyond his son’s achievement at the moment. He hesitated and then said: ‘Rick, it’s important or I wouldn’t nag. How did you get here?’

With an enormous effort Ricky said: ‘Went for a walk.’

‘I see: you went for a walk? Past this pad? Is that it?’

‘Thought I’d case the joint.’

‘Dear God,’ Alleyn said quietly.

‘They copped me.’

‘That,’ said Alleyn, ‘is all I wanted to know. Sorry you’ve been troubled.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ricky faintly.

‘Fox,’ Alleyn said. ‘We search. All of us.’

‘What about them?’ Fox asked with a jerk of his head and an edge in his voice that Alleyn had never heard before. ‘Should we wire them up?’

‘No,’ Alleyn said. ‘We shouldn’t.’ And he instructed Cribbage to double-handcuff Ferrant and Syd, using the second pair of bracelets to link their free hands together behind their backs. They were sat on the floor with their shoulders to the wall. The search began.

At the end of half an hour they had opened the bottom ends of thirty tubes of paint and found capsules in eighteen of them. Dollops of squeezed-out paint neatly ornamented the table. Alleyn withdrew Fox into the kitchen.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the
corpus delicti.
What we don’t know yet is the exact procedure. Jones collected the paints in St Pierre, but were they already doctored or was he supplied with the capsules and drugs and left to do the job himself? It looks like the latter.’

‘Stuff left over?’

‘Yes. They were about to do a bolt, probably under orders to hide any stuff they couldn’t carry. And along came my enterprising son, “casing”, as he puts it, “the joint”.’

‘That,’ Fox murmured, ‘would put them about a bit.’