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.”