“Why do you talk in that silly way about it?” Mr. Harkness asked fretfully. “It’s not a little trouble, it’s hell and damnation and she’s brought it on herself and I’m the cause of it. I’m sorry,” he said and turned to Alleyn with a startling change to normality. “You’ll think me awfully rude but I daresay you’ll understand what a shock this has been.”
“Of course we do,” Alleyn said. “We’re sorry to break in on you like this but Superintendent Curie in Montjoy suggested it.”
“I suppose he thinks he knows what he’s talking about,” Mr. Harkness grumbled. His manner now suggested a mixture of hopelessness and irritation. His eyes were bloodshot, his hands unsteady, and his breath was dreadful. “What’s this about the possibility of foul play? What do they think I am, then? If there was any chance of foul play wouldn’t I be zealous in the pursuit of unrighteousness? Wouldn’t I be sleepless night and day as the hound of Heaven until the awful truth was hunted down?” He glared moistly at Alleyn. “Well,” he shouted. “Come on! Wouldn’t I?”
“I’m sure you would,” Alleyn hurriedly agreed.
“Very natural and proper,” said Fox.
“You shut up,” said Mr. Harkness but absently and without rancor.
“Mr. Harkness,” Alleyn began and checked himself. “I’m sorry — should I be giving you your rank? I don’t know—”
The shaky hand drifted to the toothbrush moustache. “I don’t insist on it,” the thick voice mumbled. “Might of course. But let it pass. ‘Mr.’ is good enough.” The wraith of the riding master faded and the distracted zealot returned. “Pride,” said Mr. Harkness, “is the deadliest of all the sins. You were saying?”
He leaned toward Alleyn with a parody of anxious attentiveness.
Alleyn was very careful. He explained that in cases of fatality the police had a duty to eliminate the possibility of any verdict but that of accident. Sometimes, he said, there were features that at first sight seemed to preclude this. “More often than not,” he said, “these features turn out to be of no importance, but we do have to make sure of it.”
With an owlish and insecure parody of the conscientious officer, Mr. Harkness said: “Cer’nly. Good show.”
Alleyn, with difficulty, took him through the period between the departure and return of the riding party. It emerged that Mr. Harkness had spent most of the day in the office concocting material for religious handouts. He gave a disjointed account of locking his niece in her room and of her presumed escape and said distractedly that some time during the afternoon, he could not recall when, he had gone into the barn to pray but had noticed nothing untoward and had met nobody. He began to wilt.
“Where did you have your lunch?” Alleyn asked.
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Harkness and left the room.
“Now what!” Mr. Fox exclaimed.
“Call of nature?” Sergeant Plank suggested.
“Or the bottle,” Alleyn said. “Damn.”
He looked about the office: at faded photographs of equestrian occasions, of a barely recognizable and slim Mr. Harkness in the uniform of a mounted-infantry regiment. A more recent photograph displayed a truculent young woman in jodhpurs displaying a sorrel mare.
“That’s Dulce,” said Sergeant Plank. “That was,” he added.
The desk was strewn with bills, receipts, and a litter of brochures and pamphlets, some of a horsey description, others proclaiming in dated, execrable type the near approach of judgment and eternal damnation. In the center was a letter pad covered in handwriting that began tidily and deteriorated into an illegible scrawl. This seemed to be a draft for a piece on the lusts of the flesh. Above and to the left of the desk was the corner cupboard spotted by Ricky and Jasper Pharamond. The door was not quite closed and Alleyn flipped it open. Inside was the whiskey bottle and behind this, as if thrust out of sight, but still distinguishable, the card with a red-ink skull and crossbones and the legend — “BEWARE!!! This Way Lies Damnation!!!” The bottle was empty.
Alleyn reached out a long finger and lifted a corner of the card, exposing a small carton half filled with capsules.
“Look at this, Br’er Fox,” he said.
Fox put on his spectacles and peered.
“Well, well,” he said and after a closer look: “Simon Frères. Isn’t there something, now, about Simon Frères?”
“Amphetamines. Dexies. Prohibited in Britain,” Alleyn said. He opened the carton and shook one capsule into his palm. He had replaced the carton and pocketed the capsule when Fox said, “Coming.”
Alleyn shut the cupboard door and was back in his chair as an uneven footstep announced the return of Mr. Harkness. He came in on a renewed fog of Scotch.
“Apologize,” he said. “Bowels, all to blazes. Result of shock. You were saying?”
“I’d said all of it, I think,” Alleyn replied. “I was going to ask, though, if you’d mind our looking over the ground outside. Where it happened and so on.”
“Go where you like,” he said, “but don’t, please, please, don’t ask me to come.”
“Of course, if you’d rather not.”
“I dream about that gap,” he whispered. There was a long and difficult silence. “They made me see her,” he said at last. “Identification. She looked awful.”
“I know.”
“Well,” he said with one of his most disconcerting changes of manner. “I’ll leave you to it. Good hunting.” Incredibly he let out a bark of what seemed to be laughter and rose with difficulty to his feet. He had begun to weep.
They had reached the outside door when he erupted into the passage and ricocheting from one wall to the other, advanced toward Alleyn upon whom he thrust a pink brochure.
Alleyn took it and glanced at flaring headlines.
“WINE IS A MOCKER” [he saw].
“STRONG DRINK IS RAGING.”
“Read,” Mr. Harkness said with difficulty, “mark, learn and inwardly indigestion. See you on Sunday.”
He executed an abrupt turn and once more retired, waving airily as he did so. His uneven footsteps faded down the passage.
Fox said thoughtfully: “He won’t last long at that rate.”
“He’s not himself, Mr. Fox,” Plank said, rather as if he felt bound to raise excuses for a local product. “He’s very far from being himself. It’s the liquor.”
“You don’t tell me.”
“He’s not used to it, like.”
“He’s learning, though,” Fox said.
Alleyn said: “Didn’t he drink? Normally?”
“T.T. Rabid. Hellfire according to him. Since he was Saved,” Plank added.
“Saved from what?” Fox asked. “Oh, I see what you mean. Eternal damnation and all that carry-on. What was that about ‘See you Sunday’? Has anything been said about seeing him on Sunday?”
“Not by me,” Alleyn said. “Wait a bit.”
He consulted the pink brochure. Following some terrifying information about the evils of intemperance it went on to urge a full attendance at the Usual Sunday Gathering in the Old Barn at Leathers with Service and Supper, Gents 50p, Ladies a Basket. Across these printed instructions a wildly irregular hand had scrawled: “Special! Day of Wrath!! May 13th!!! Remember!!!!”
“What’s funny about May thirteenth?” asked Plank and then: “Oh. Of course. Dulcie.”
“Will it be a kind of memorial service?” Fox speculated.
“Whatever it is, we shall attend it,” said Alleyn. “Come on.” And he led the way outside.
The morning was sunny and windless. In the horse paddock two of the Leathers string obligingly nibbled each other’s flanks. On the hillside beyond the blackthorn hedge three more grazed together, swishing their tails and occasionally tossing up their heads.