Last Ditch Read online

  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 wind-pipe 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 afterwards 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 – The ultra smart 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 paintbox 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 towards 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 round 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 in 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 labouring 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 round 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 pen 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. Wha
t 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 work table. 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 St Pierre-des-Roches.

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

  He took down the L’Esperance 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’Esperance. 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. ‘Goodbye 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.

  CHAPTER 8

  Night Watches

  The thing they got wrong in the gangster films, Ricky thought, was what it did to you being tied up. The film victims, once they were released, did one or two obligatory staggers and then became as nimble as fleas and started fighting again. He knew that when, if ever, he was released, his legs would not support him, his arms would be senseless and his head so compounded of pain that it would hang down and wobble like a wilted dahlia.

  He could not guess how long it was since they gagged him. Jones had made a pad out of rag and Ferrant had forced it between his teeth and bound it with another rag, It tasted of turpentine and stung his cut lip. They had done this when Syd said he’d heard something outside. Ferrant had switched off the light and they were very still until there was a scratching at the door.

  ‘It’s the kid,’ Ferrant said.

  He opened the door a little way and after a moment shut it again very quietly. Syd switched on the light. Young Louis was there. He wore a black smock like a French schoolboy and a beret, He had a satchel on his back. His stewed-prune eyes stared greedily at Ricky out of a blackened face.

  Ferrant held out his hand and Louis put a note in it. Ferrant read it – it was evidently very short – and gave it to Syd.

  Louis said: ‘Papa, he asked me if I could row the boat.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The fuzz. He asked if I was afraid to go out in her at night.’

  ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘I said I wasn’t. I didn’t say anything else, Papa. Honest.’

  ‘By God, you better not.’

  ‘Maman says he’s getting worried about him.’ Louis pointed to Ricky. ‘You got him so he can’t talk, haven’t you, Papa? Have you worked him over? His face looks like you have. What are you going to do with him, Papa?’

  ‘Tais-toi donc. Keep your tongue behind your teeth. Passe-moi la boustifaille.’

  Louis gave him the satchel.

  ‘Good. Now, there is more for you to do. Take this envelope. Do not open it. You see it has his name on it. The detective’s name. Listen carefully. You are to push it under the door at the police station and nobody must see you. Do not put it through the slot. Under the door. Then push the bell and away home quick and silent before the door is opened. Very quick. Very silent. And nobody to see you. Repeat it.’

  He did, accurately.

  ‘That is right. Now go.’

  ‘I’ve blacked my face. Like a gunman. So’s nobody can see me.’

  ‘Good. The light, Syd.’

  Syd switched it off and on again when the door was shut.

  ‘Is he safe?’ Syd asked.

  ‘Yes. Get on with it.’

  ‘We can’t take –’ Syd stopped short and looked at Ricky – ‘everything,’ he said.

  They had paid no attention to him for a long time. It was as if by trussing him up they had turned him into an unthinking as well as an inaminate object.

  They had been busy. His chair had been turned away from the table and manhandled excruciatingly to bring him face to the wall. There had been some talk of a blindfold, he thought, but he kept his eyes shut and let his head flop, and they left him there, still gagged, and could be heard moving purposefully about the room.

  He opened his eyes. Leda and the Swan had gone from their place on the wall and now lay face down on the floor close to his feet. He recognized the frame and wondered bemusedly by what means it had hung up there because there was no cord or wire to be seen, although there were the usual ring-screws.
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br />   Ferrant and Syd went quietly about their business. They spoke seldom and in low voices but they generated a floating sense of urgency and at times seemed to argue. He began to long for the moment to come when they would have to release whatever it was that bound and cut into his ankles. If he was to walk between them down to the boat, that was what they would have to do. And where would The Cid be, then? Watching with Br’er Fox from the window in Ricky’s room? Unable to do anything because if he did…Would The Cid ever get that message? Where was he now? Now, when Ricky wanted him so badly. ‘It’s too much,’ he thought. ‘Yesterday and the thunder and lightning and the sea and blacking my eye and now all this: face, jaw, mouth, ankle: no, it’s too much. The wall poured upwards, his eyes closed and he fainted.

  The boy Louis did not follow the path down to the front but turned off it to his right and slithered, darkling, along tortuous passages that ran uphill and down, behind the backs of cottages, some occupied and some deserted.

  The moon had not yet risen and the going was tricky, but he was sure-footed and knew his ground. He was excited and thought of himself in terms of his favourite comic strip as a Miracle Kid.

  He came out of his labyrinth at the top of the lane that ran down to the police station.

  Here he crouched for a moment in the blackest of the shadows. There was no need to crouch, the lane was deserted, but he enjoyed doing it and then flattening himself against a wall and edging downhill.

  The blue lamp was on, but the station windows were dark while those in the living-quarters glowed. He could hear music: radio or telly, with the fuzz family watching it and the Miracle Kid, all on his own, out in the dark.

  ‘Whee-ee! !’

  Across the lane like the Black Shadow. Envelope. Under the door. Stuck. Push. Bell. Push. ‘Zing! ! !’

  In by the back door with Maman waiting. Hands in pockets. Cool. Slouch in wagging the hips.

  ‘Eh bien?’ said Mrs Ferrant, nodding her head up and down. ‘Tu es fort satisfait de ta petite personne, hein?’