“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.”
Plank listened with carefully restrained avidity.
When Alleyn had finished they made their final arrangements. They telephoned the island airport for details of disembarking passengers. There had been none bearing a remote resemblance to Ferrant or Jones. Plank was to telephone his own station at five-thirty to report progress. If neither Alleyn nor Fox were there, Mrs. Plank would take the message. “If by any delicious chance,” Alleyn said, “you find it before then, you’d better pack up and bring your booty here and be wary about dabs.”
“And I take the car, sir?”
“You do. You’d better lay on some form of transport to be sent here for us in case of an emergency. Can you do this?”
“The Super said you were to have the use of his own car, sir, if required.”
“Very civil of him.”
“I’ll arrange for it to be brought here.”
“Good for you. Off you go.”
“Sir.”
“With our blessing, Sergeant Plank.”
“Much obliged I’m sure, sir,” said Plank and left after an inaudible exchange with his wife in the kitchen.
“And what for us?” Fox asked when he had gone.
‘“And what for me, my love, and what for me?’ ” Alleyn muttered. “I think it’s about time we had a look at Mr. Ferrant’s seagoing craft.”
“Do we know where he keeps it? Exactly?”
“No, and I don’t want to ask Madame. We’ll take a little prowl. Come and say goodbye to Mrs. P.”
He took the tray into the kitchen. Mrs. Plank was ironing. “That was kind,” he said and unloaded crockery into the sink. “Is this the drill?” he asked and turned on the tap.
“Don’t you touch them things!” she shouted. “Beg pardon, sir, I’m sure. It’s very kind but Joe’d never forgive me.”
“Why on earth not?”
“It wouldn’t be fitting,” she said in a flurry. “Not the thing at all.”
“I don’t see why. Here!” he said to the little girl who was ogling him around the leg of the table. “Can you dry?”
She swung her barrel of a body from side to side and shook her head.
“No, she can’t,” said her mother.
“Well, Fox can,” Alleyn announced as his colleague loomed up in the doorway. “Can’t you?”
“Pleasure,” he said and they washed up together.
“By the way, Mrs. Plank,” Alleyn asked. “Do you happen to know where Gil Ferrant berths his boat?”
She said she fancied it was anchored out in the harbor. He made great use of it, said Mrs. Plank.
“When he goes night fishing?”
“If that’s what it is.”
This was a surprising reaction but it turned out that Mrs. Plank referred to the possibility of philandering escapades after dark in “Fifi,” which was the name of Ferrant’s craft. “How she puts up with it I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. Plank. “No choice in the matter I daresay.”