The kitchen was in the same state of squalor as the rest of the Pad. Its most conspicuous feature was a large and decrepit coal range of an ancient make with a boiler and tap on one side of the grate and an oven on the other. It looked as if it were never used. On top of it was a small modern electric stove. Alleyn removed this to the table and started on the range. He lifted the iron rings and probed inside with a bent poker, listening to the sound. He opened the oven, played his torch around the interior, and tapped the lining. He had let down the front of the grate and lifted the top when Fox gave a grunt.

“What?” Alleyn asked.

“His personal supply. Syringe. Dope. It’s ‘horse’ all right,” said Fox, meaning heroin. “There’s one tablet left.”

“Where?”

“Top shelf of the dresser. Behind an old cookbook. Rather appropriate.”

A siren sounded down on the front. “This’ll be the ambulance,” said Fox. “And the doctor. We hope.”

When Alleyn didn’t answer Fox turned and found him face down in the open top of the range. “There should be a cavity over the oven,” he said, “and there isn’t and — Yes. Surprise, surprise.”

He began pulling. A flat object was edged into view. The siren sounded again and nearer.

“It is the ambulance,” Alleyn said. “You get this lot out, Br’er Fox and no reward for guessing what’s the prize.”

He was back with Ricky before Fox had collected himself or anything else.

Ricky took a bleary look at his father and begged him in a stifled voice not to make him laugh.

“Why should you laugh?”

“When did you join the Black and White Minstrels? Your face. Oh God, I mustn’t laugh.”

Alleyn returned to the kitchen and looked at it in a cracked glass on the wall. The nose was black. He swabbed it with an unused bandage and again washed his hands. Fox had extracted a black attaché case from the stove and had forced the lock and opened it. “What’s that lot worth on the street market?” he asked.

“Two thousand quid if a penny,” said Alleyn and returned to his son. “We’ve got Jones’s very own dope,” he said, “and we’ve got the consignment in transit.” He walked down the room to Ferrant and Jones seated in discomfort on the floor. “You heard that, I suppose,” he said.

Ferrant, in his sharp suit and pink floral shirt, spat inaccurately at Alleyn. He had not spoken since his passage with Syd.

But Syd gazed up at Alleyn. He shivered and yawned and his nose ran. “Look,” he said, “give me a fix. Just one. Look, I need it. I got to have it. Look — for God’s sake.” He suddenly screamed. “Give it to me. I’ll tell you the lot. Get me a fix.”

iv

Ricky was in the Montjoy hospital, having managed a fuller account of his misadventures before being given something to settle him down for the night.

At half-past two in the morning, the relentlessly lit charge room at Montjoy police station smelted of stale bodies, breath, and tobacco, with an elusive background of Jeyes fluid.

Ferrant, who had refused to talk without the advice of a solicitor, had been taken to the cells while the station sergeant tried to raise one. Syd Jones whimpered, suffered onsets of cramp, had to be taken to the lavatory, yawned, ran at the nose, and repeatedly pleaded for a fix. Dr. Carey, called in to watch, said that no harm would be done if the drug was withheld for the time being.

Everything that Jones said confirmed their guesswork. He even showed signs of a miserable sort of complacence over his ingenuity in the matter of the paint tubes. He admitted, as if it were of little account, that it was he who tried to drown Ricky at Saint Pierre.

On one point only he was obdurate: he could not or would not say anything about Louis Pharamond, contriving, when questioned, to recover something of his old intransigence.

“Him,” he said. “Don’t give me him!” and then looked frightened and would say no more about Louis Pharamond.

Alleyn said: “Why didn’t you take the sorrel mare to the smith as you were told to? After you got back with the horse feed?”

Syd drove his fingers through his thicket of hair. “What are you on about now?” he moaned. “What’s that got to do with anything? OK, OK, so I biked back to my pad, didn’t I? So what?”

“To get yourself a fix?”

“Yeah. OK. Yeah.”

For the twentieth time he got up and shambled about the room, stamping and grabbing at the calf of his leg. “I got cramp,” he said. He fetched up in front of Fox. “I’ll have it in for you lot the way you’re treating me. Sadists. Fascist pigs.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Fox.

Syd appealed to Dr. Carey. “Doc,” he said. “You’ll look after me. Won’t you, doc? You got to, haven’t you? For Christ’s sake, doc.”

“You’ll have to hang on a bit longer,” said Dr. Carey and glanced at Alleyn. Syd broke down completely and wept.

Alleyn said: “Give him what he needs.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Doctor Carey went out of the room.

Syd, fingering his beard and biting his dirty fingers, let out a kind of laugh. “I couldn’t help it, could I?” he gabbled and looked sideways at Alleyn who had turned away from him and didn’t reply.

“It was Gil used the wire on him, not me,” Syd said to Alleyn’s back.

Fox walked over to Plank who throughout the long hours had taken notes. Fox leaned over him and turned the pages back.

“Is this correct?” he asked Syd. “What you’ve deposed about the wire? Where you got it and what you wanted it for?”

“I’ve said so, haven’t I? Yes. Yes. Yes. For the picture.”

“Why won’t you talk about Mr. Louis Pharamond?”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“Who’s the next above Ferrant? Who gives the orders?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you. Where’s the doc? Where’s he gone?”

“He’ll be here,” said Fox. “You’ll get your fix if you’ll talk about your boss. And I don’t mean Harkness. I mean who gives the orders. Is it Louis Pharamond?”

“I can’t. I can’t. They’d knock me off. I would if I could. They’d get me. Honest. I can’t.” Syd returned to his chair and wept.

Without turning around Alleyn said: “Let it be, Fox.”

Doctor Carey came back with a prepared syringe and a swab. Syd with a trembling hand pushed up his sleeve.

“Good God,” said the doctor, “you’ve been making a mess of yourself, haven’t you?” He gave the injection.

The reaction was instantaneous. It was a metamorphosis — as if Syd’s entire person thawed and re-formed into a blissful transfiguration of itself. He lolled back in his chair and giggled. “Fantastic,” he said.

Doctor Carey watched him for a moment and then joined Alleyn at the far end of the room.

“He’s well away,” he said. “He’s had ten milligrams and he’s full of well-being: the classic euphoria. You’ve seen for yourselves what the withdrawal symptoms can be like.”

Alleyn said: “May I put a hypothetical case to you? There may be no answer to it. It may be just plain silly.”

“We can give it a go,” said Dr. Carey.

“Suppose, on the afternoon of Dulcie Harkness’s death, having taken himself off to his Pad he treated himself to an injection of heroin. Is it within the bounds of possibility that he could return on his motorbike to Leathers, help himself to a length of wire from the stables, rig it across the gap in the fence, wait until Dulcie Harkness was dying or dead, remove the wire, and return to his Pad? To reappear on his bike, apparently in full control of himself, later on in the evening?”

Doctor Carey was silent for some time. Syd Jones had begun to hum, tunelessly, under his breath.

Carey said at last, “Frankly I don’t know how to answer you. Since my time in the casualty ward at Saint Luke’s I’ve had no experience of drug addiction. I know symptoms vary widely from case to case. You’d do better to consult a specialist.”

“You wouldn’t rule it out altogether?”