At the far end of the room, face to wall, gagged and bound in his chair, was Ricky.
“Fox,” Alleyn said. Fox took the automatic and began the obligatory chant—“Sydney Jones, I arrest—” Plank arrived and put on the handcuffs.
Alleyn, stooping over his son, was saying: “It’s me, old boy. You’ll be all right. It’s me.” He removed the bloodied gag. Ricky’s mouth hung open. His tongue moved and he made a sound. Alleyn took his head carefully between his hands.
Ricky contrived to speak. “Oh, golly, Cid,” he said. “Oh, golly!”
“I know. Never mind. Won’t be long, now. Hold on.”
He unstrapped the arms and they fell forward. He knelt to release the ankles.
Ricky’s white socks were bloodied and overhung his shoes. Alleyn turned the socks back and exposed wet ridges that had closed over the bonds.
From between the ridges protruded a twist of wire and two venomous little prongs.
iii
Ricky lay on the bed. In the filthy little kitchen, P.C. Moss boiled up a saucepan of water and tore a sheet into strips. Sergeant Plank was at the station, telephoning for a doctor and ambulance.
Ferrant and Syd Jones, handcuffed together, sat side by side facing the table. Opposite them Alleyn stood with Fox beside him and Cribbage modestly in the background. The angled lamp had been directed to shine full in the prisoners’ faces.
On the table, stretched out to its full length on a sheet of paper, lay the wire that had bound Ricky’s ankles and cut into them. It left a trace of red on the paper.
To Ricky himself, lying in the shadow, his injuries thrumming through his nerves like music, the scene was familiar. It was an interrogation scene with obviously dramatic lighting, barked questions, mulish answers, suggested threats. It looked like a standard offering from a police story on television.
But it didn’t sound like one. His father and Fox did not bark their questions. Nor did they threaten but were quiet and deadly cold and must, Ricky thought, be frightening indeed.
“This wire,” Alleyn was saying to Syd, “it’s yours, is it?”
Syd’s reply, if he made one, was inaudible.
“Is it off the back of the picture frame there? It is? Where did you get it? There?” A pause. “Lying about? Where?”
“I don’t remember.”
“At Leathers?”
“S’right.”
“When?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You know very well. When?”
“I don’t remember. It was some old junk. He didn’t want it.”
“Was it before the accident?”
“Yes. No. After.”
“Where?”
“In the stables.”
“Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know. Where?”
“Hanging up. With a lot more.”
“Did you cut if off?”
“No. It was on its own. A separate bit. What’s the idea?” Syd broke out with a miserable show of indignation. “So it’s a bit of old wire. So I took it to hang a picture. So what?”
Ferrant, on a jet of obscenities, French and English, told him to hold his tongue.
“I didn’t tie him up,” Syd said. “You did.”
“Merde.”
Alleyn said: “You will both be taken to the police station in Montjoy and charged with assault. Anything you say now — and then — will be taken down and may be used in evidence. For the moment, that’s all.”
“Get up,” said Fox.
Cribbage got them to their feet. He and Fox marshaled them toward the far end of the room. As they were about to pass the bed, looking straight before them, Fox laid massive hands upon their shoulders and turned them to confront it.
Ricky, from out of the mess they had made of his face, looked at them. Ferrant produced the blank indifference of the dock. Syd, whose face, as always, resembled the interior of an old-fashioned mattress, showed the whites of his eyes.
Fox shoved them around again and they were taken, under Cribbage’s surveillance, to the far end of the room.
Constable Moss emerged from the kitchen with a saucepan containing boiled strips of sheet and presented it before Alleyn.
Alleyn said: “Thank you, Moss. I don’t know that we should do anything before the doctor’s seen him. Perhaps clean him up a bit.”
“They’re sterile, sir,” said Moss. “Boiled for ten minutes.”
“Splendid.”
Alleyn went into the kitchen. Boiled water had been poured into a basin. He scrubbed his hands with soap that Syd evidently used on his brushes if not on himself. Alleyn returned to his son. Moss held the saucepan for him and he very cautiously swabbed Ricky’s mouth and eyes.
“Better,” said Ricky.
Alleyn looked again at the ankles. The wire had driven fibers from Ricky’s socks into the cuts.
“I’d better not meddle,” Alleyn said. “We’ll get on with the search, Fox.” He bent over Ricky. “We’re getting the quack to have a look at you, old boy.”
“I’ll be OK.”
“Of course you will. But you’re bloody uncomfortable, I’m afraid.”
Ricky tried to speak, failed, and then with an enormous effort said: “Try some of the dope,” and managed to wink.
Alleyn winked back using the seriocomic family version with one corner of the mouth drawn down and the opposite eyebrow raised, a grimace beyond his son’s achievement at the moment. He hesitated and then said: “Rick, it’s important or I wouldn’t nag. How did you get here?”
With an enormous effort Ricky said: “Went for a walk.”
“I see: you went for a walk? Past this pad? Is that it?”
“Thought I’d case the joint.”
“Dear God,” Alleyn said quietly.
“They copped me.”
“That,” said Alleyn, “is all I wanted to know. Sorry you’ve been troubled.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Ricky faintly.
“Fox,” Alleyn said. “We search. All of us.”
“What about them?” Fox asked with a jerk of his head and an edge in his voice that Alleyn had never heard before: “Should we wire them up?”
“No,” Alleyn said. “We shouldn’t.” And he instructed Cribbage to double-handcuff Ferrant and Syd, using the second pair of bracelets to link their free hands together behind their backs. They were sat on the floor with their shoulders to the wall. The search began.
At the end of half an hour they had opened the bottom ends of thirty tubes of paint and found capsules in eighteen of them. Dollops of squeezed-out paint neatly ornamented the table. Alleyn withdrew Fox into the kitchen.
“Fair enough,” he said. “We’ve got the corpus delicti. What we don’t know yet is the exact procedure. Jones collected the paints in Saint Pierre but were they already doctored or was he supplied with the capsules and drugs and left to do the job himself? If the latter, there must be evidence of it here.”
“Stuff left over?”
“Yes. They were about to do a bolt, probably under orders to hide any stuff they couldn’t carry. And along came my enterprising son, ‘casing’ as he puts it, ‘the joint.’ ”
“That,” Fox murmured, “would put them about a bit.”
“Yes. What to do with him? Pull him in, which they did. But if they held him, sooner or later we’d set up a search. I imagine that they were in touch with Madame F. through that nefarious kid. Well, in their fluster, they hit on the not uningenious idea of using Rick as a screen for their getaway. And if Mrs. Plank had not been the golden lady she undoubtedly is, they might well have brought it off. I wish to hell that bloody quack would show up.”
“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” said Fox, meaning Ricky.
The meticulous search went on, inch by inch through the littered room, under the bed, stereo table, in the shelves and cupboards, and through heaps of occulted junk. They were about to move into an unspeakable little bedroom at the back when Alleyn said: “While we were outside, before Ferrant came to the door, I heard a metallic sound. Very faint.”