“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.”