“Yes,” said his father.
Ricky did so and changed his mind about introducing a further note of comedy. “Sorry,” he said. “But why?”
“Principally because it would be inappropriate, supposing Ferrant returns, for you to board in the house of your would-be murderer — if indeed he is that.”
“I want to stay. My work’s going better, I think. And — I’m sorry but I am mixed up in the ongoings. And anyway he hasn’t come back. Much more than all that, I want to see it out.”
They looked so gravely at him that he felt extremely uneasy.
From the street below there came seven syncopated toots from a car horn.
Ricky said in an artificial voice: “That’s Julia.”
Alleyn opened the window and leaned out. Ricky heard the familiar and disturbing voice.
“You?” Julia shouted. “What fun! We’ve been hunting you.”
“I’ll come down. Hold on.”
He nodded to Fox. “Meet you at Plank’s,” he said, and to Ricky. “See you later, old boy.”
As he went downstairs he thought: “Damn. He went white. He has got it badly.”
iii
Julia was in her dashing sports car and Bruno was doubled up in the token seat behind her. She was dressed in white, as Alleyn remembered seeing her in the ship, with a crimson scarf on her head and those elegant gloves. Enormous dark glasses emphasized her pallor and her remarkable mouth. She had a trick when she laughed of lifting her lip up and curving it in. This changed her into a gamine and was extremely appealing. “Poor old Rick,” Alleyn thought, “he hadn’t a chance. On the whole I daresay it’s been good for him.”
Ricky, standing back from his closed window, was able to see his father shake hands with Julia and at her suggestion get into the passenger’s seat. She looked at him as she sometimes looked at Ricky and had taken off her black glasses to smile at him. She talked — vividly, Ricky was sure — and he wondered at his father’s air of polite attention. When she talked like that to Ricky he felt himself develop a fatuous expression and indeed was sometimes obliged to pull his face together and shut his mouth.
His father did not look in the least fatuous.
Now Julia stopped talking and laughing. She leaned toward Alleyn and seemed to listen closely as he, still with that air of formal courtesy, spoke to her. So might her doctor or solicitor have behaved.
What could they be saying? he wondered. Something about Louis? Or could it be about him, by any chance? The thought perturbed him.
“Ricky,” Alleyn was saying, “was in a bit of a spot. I’d told him not to gossip.”
“And there have I been badgering him. Wretched Ricky!” cried Julia and broke into her splutter.
“He’ll recover. It must be pretty obvious to everybody in the Cove, in spite of all Sergeant Plank’s diplomacy, that there’s something in the wind.”
“About the accident, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“That it wasn’t an accident?”
“That it hasn’t been conclusively shown that it was. Is your cousin with you this morning?”
“Louis? Or Carlotta?”
“Louis.”
“You’re sitting on his coat. He’s gone to buy cigarettes.”
“I’m sorry.” He hitched the coat from under him and straightened it, pulling down the sleeves. “What a very smart hacking jacket,” he said.
“It goes too far in my opinion. He hooks it over his shoulders and looks like a mass-produced David Niven.”
“He’s lost a sleeve button. Have I sat it off? How awful, I’d better look.”
“You needn’t bother. I think my daughter wrenched it off. Why do you want to see Louis?”
“In case he noticed anything out-of-the-way when he returned to Leathers.”
Julia twisted around to look at her young-brother-in-law. “I don’t think he did, do you, Bruno?”
Bruno said in an uncomfortable voice. “I think he just said he didn’t see anybody or something like that.”
“And, by the way,” Alleyn said, “when you jumped that gap — a remarkable feat if I may say so — did you go down and inspect it beforehand?”
A pause. “No,” Bruno muttered at last.
“Really? So you wouldn’t have noticed anything particular about it — about the actual gap?”
Bruno shook his head.
“No rail, for instance, running through the thorn?”
“There wasn’t a rail.”
“Just the thorn? No wire?”
For a moment Alleyn thought Bruno was going to respond to this but he didn’t. He shook his head, looked at the floor of the car and said nothing.
Julia winked at Alleyn and bumped her knee against his.
Bruno said: “OK if I go to the shop?”
“Of course, darling. If you see Louis tell him who’s here, will you? He’s buying cigarettes, probably in the Cod-and-Bottle.”
Bruno slid out of the car and walked along the front, his shoulders hunched.
“You musn’t mind,” Julia said. “He’s got a thing about jumping the gap.”
“What sort of thing?”
“He thinks he may have been an incentive to the Harness.”
“Harness?”
“I’ve got a fixation about her name. The others think I do it to be funny but I don’t, poor thing.”
“I gather she was hell-bent on the jump anyway.”
“So she was but Bruno fancies he may have brought her up to boiling point and it makes him miserable. Only if it’s mentioned. He forgets in-between and goes cliff-climbing and bird-watching. How’s Cuth?” asked Julia, and when he didn’t reply at once, said: “Come on, you must know Cuth. The uncle.”
“In retirement.”
“Well, we all know that. The maids told Nanny he’s drinking himself to death out of remorse. I can’t imagine how they know. Well, one can guess. Postman. Customers wanting hacks. Ricky’s chum Syd before he bolted.”
“Has he bolted?”
“Cagey old Ricky just said he’s gone over to Saint Pierre-des-Roches, but the village thinks he bolted. According to Nanny. She has a wide circle of friends and all of them say Syd’s done a bunk.”
“Why do they think he’s done that?”
“Well it’s really — you mustn’t mind this, either,” said Julia opening her eyes very wide and beginning to gabble, “but you see, to begin with, Nanny says they all thought there must be funny business afloat when the inquest was adjourned and on top of that everyone knew she was going to have a baby. Well, I mean, Cuth seems to have bellowed away about it, far and wide. And as she was a constant caller at Syd’s place they put two and two together.” Julia stopped short. “Have you ever thought,” she said in a different voice, “how very appropriate that expression would be if it was ‘one and one together.’ ”
“It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I make you a present of it. Where was I?”
“I think you were going to tell me something that you hoped I wouldn’t mind.”
“Ah! Thank you. It was just that your arrival on the scene led everyone to believe that you were hard on Syd’s trail because Syd was the — what does ‘putative’ mean? Not that Nanny used the expression.”
“ ‘Supposed’, or ‘presumed.’ ”
“That’s what I thought. The putative papa. Somehow I don’t favor the theory. The next part gets vague: Nanny hurries over it rather, but the general idea seems to be that Syd was afraid Cuth would horsewhip him into marrying Dulcie.”
“And what steps is Syd supposed to have taken?”