Charteris, Leslie - 39, page 7
He crept forward like a stalking leopard into the road behind the car, carrying something in one hand which might have been even more alarming to Brine than a gun, had Brine been able to see it. It was a large can of white paint—a half gallon—with a strip of adhesive tape in the middle of both the top and the bottom.
When he had reached the rear of the car, Simon deftly and silently hooked the handle of the paint can over one of the bumper guards. Then he pulled the strips of tape from the top and bottom. Under each piece of tape was a small hole, and white paint began to drip slowly but regularly on to the dark earth of the road.
With as little sound as he had made in coming, the Saint moved away from the automobile and melted into the murky forest like a passing shadow.
When he was a safe distance from Brine, he quickened his pace and quickly covered the two hundred yards of woods which separated the Austin-Healey from his own car. He had arrived in the area before Brine and parked in an obscure little lane which was visible from neither of the roads which formed the crossing marked on the crude map the kidnappers had left behind at Kelly's house. Now that his private mission with the can of paint was finished, it was a simple matter to start his engine, drive down to the crossroads, and arrive just on time for the meeting.
His car was facing Brine's when he drove up, and in the glare of his own lights he could see Brine gesturing for him to drive alongside. Apparently the erstwhile detective wanted to keep the road ahead clear for a fast getaway, and also had no intention of leaving the security of the driver's seat of his car.
Simon stopped so that his open window was less than two feet from Brine's. He was greeted with a dim view of Brine's pudgy face and the snout of a revolver.
"Got the money?" Brine asked nervously.
Simon, remaining in his car, picked up the attache case which Drew had given him in the afternoon and handed it out through his window. Brine took it, dropped it onto the seat beside him, and kept his eye and gun on the Saint while his free hand fumbled with the latch. A few seconds later he held a handful of neatly stacked and banded bills alongside the gun, so that he could check their genuineness without dropping his guard. Then he put them back and inspected another handful. Obviously he was too nervous even to think of counting to see if the correct amount was there.
"This better be right," he said. "Any tricks and it's too bad."
"It's good money," the Saint said lightly. "I wouldn't mind having some of it myself."
Brine snorted.
"Give me your car key," he said.
Simon took the key from the ignition and handed it to Brine, who promptly threw it off into the bushes.
"Now, Mr. Brine," said the Saint with mild reproach, "that isn't very original. But at least it shows you learn by example. How long did you have to dive in that river the other day before you found yours?"
"I haven't any time for talking, Templar."
Brine started his car.
"What about Mildred and Kelly?" Simon asked.
"They'll be let loose somewhere near a telephone." He grinned. "Now if I were you I'd start hunting for that key."
He pulled quickly away as Simon leaned down, tore a strip of tape from a niche under the dashboard, and inserted one of his spare keys into the ignition. The satisfaction he got from reaping the benefit of that bit of foresight was minor compared to his relief at seeing— when he flicked on his headlights and turned around— the spots of white paint clearly marking the route by which Brine's car had disappeared.
Simon set a rate of speed which he felt would keep Brine from widening the gap between them. The white spots turned onto a paved road which led south for several miles, and then turned off into the woods again. The spots were difficult to see on the rocky lane, but it did not really matter since once on that particular pathway it would have been impossible for a car to deviate to one side or the other without leaving behind a swathe of broken undergrowth.
A little further on the woods became more sparse, and the crude road wound up the side of a hill. At the top of the hill was one of those broken-down castles which do so much to enhance the beauty of Irish tourist brochures.
Simon could see its single round tower black against the shredded clouds of the faintly luminous sky. With the lights of his car off, he drove to the edge of a grove which was within easy walking distance of the castle, but was far enough away that no one on top of the hill could have heard the sound of his engine or the careful opening and closing of the door.
The Saint stood for a minute looking up the slope at the crumbled heap of stone. If Brine or his partner had discovered the paint can on the bumper of the car, there could be trouble. The run up to the castle could be diversionary, and Simon would find that the white spots of paint led right off down the other side. That would mean, at the least, the loss of precious time. Worse, if Brine was on to the fact that he was being tailed, he could be lying in ambush somewhere among the broken walls above. But the Saint preferred to think that luck would stay with him. There was, after all, no logical reason for Brine to walk around and take a look at the rear of his car.
Simon chose the most direct path up the hill which offered a little cover in the form of scattered bushes and occasional low infrequent sections of an ancient stone wall. Probably stones from this wall as well as from the castle were a part of many a hearth in this neighborhood: the peasantry of all countries tended to regard noble relics of the past as no more than convenient quarries for common use.
There were few trees on the upper part of the hill. In fact, now that Simon had covered two-thirds of the distance between his car and the castle there was only one gnarled trunk breaking the open ground. He ran silently to it, then stopped in its shadow and looked at the ruins, which were now less than a hundred and fifty feet away. There was no trace of light escaping the gloom of the walls, and he could hear nothing except the wind.
He took the pistol from the holster under his left arm and moved on more cautiously than ever, covering the last stretch so quickly and soundlessly that even if someone had glimpsed him he might have been taken for an illusion of the night.
He was at the outer wall of the castle now. It had never been a large establishment. As in the case of most such places of any real antiquity, the tower had been built first—and built to last despite the neighboring lord's most vigorous efforts to knock it down. The peasants, in their search for chimney-stones, had not fared much better than the besiegers of former times. The tower still stood almost unscathed while the rest of the structure, built later with the knowledge that the old donjon could be used as the ultimate in defence, lay mostly fallen about it in heaps of rubble.
Simon went around one of the traces of wall and stopped suddenly, slipping behind a half-collapsed archway. There was Brine's car, no one in it, with the paint can still dripping, from the bumper. From the tower just beyond the car there came an unmistakable mutter of voices. The Saint circled, keeping himself out of sight, until he could see light through an arrow-slit window. Then he moved in and had a cautious look.
What he saw in the room at the base of the tower would have been enough to cause at least a temporary paralysis of the breathing mechanism in a man of less prescience.
The chamber was lighted with a kerosene lantern. Kneeling on the floor was Brine, flicking open the catch of the attache case which Simon had given him. Standing alongside was the thin detective, Mullins, showing large facial bruises which must have been a result of his encounter with the tinker and his family the night before. Brine bore some of the same marks.
This much of the lurid spectacle of thieves eagerly salivating as they prepared to inspect their spoils was not unusual or shocking. But there was a third person present: Mildred. She was standing next to Mullins, not with the air of a languishing princess, nor even with the tearfully grateful air of a formerly languishing princess who has just been ransomed. She was leaning forward with the look of a kitten about to be fed, and when Brine opened the case and grinned as he held up a double handful of fivers, she fell onto her knees beside him and hugged him around the neck.
"Oh, Dad!" she said. "I can't believe we really did it!" She was mixing laughter with her words, and even the sullen thin man smiled until he stretched a split lip and winced as he covered his mouth with one hand.
"Well, now, Phyllis," said Brine proudly, clapping the case shut again, "you've proven you're a chip off the old block this time. Your mother would have been proud of you."
Mullins shook his head nostalgically.
"True enough. What a pity Moll couldn't have been here to see this."
Brine indulged in a moment of sadness, then shook off the feeling.
"Well, well," he said. "We must let the dead bury the dead. And that goes for Simon Templar, too."
That remark produced a laugh from the two men, but ex-Mildred, now Phyllis, looked worried.
"You didn't hurt him?" she asked.
"Oh, no. But when Drew's daughter doesn't show up it'll be the Saint left holding the bag. Or holding nothing, I might say."
He laughed again.
"What about his pal?" asked Mullins.
They all looked toward a closed door so thick and so heavy with metal bindings that even the centuries had not brought it down from its massive hinges.
"Leave him, of course," shrugged Brine.
"We can't," Phyllis said. "He'd never get out, and he'd starve to death."
Brine clicked his tongue.
"Ah, Phyllis, I must warn you that your mother Moll was undone by that same sort of sentimentality. She was the only woman ever arrested in the Seaman's Home while putting money back in a man's trousers when she found he had eight hungry children. Of course they never believed her story." He looked around the chamber and concluded absently, "I'm not sure I ever believed it myself."
Mullins picked up a short length of rusted iron from the floor.
"This has a point on it," he said. "He can use it to work his way out."
"All right, then," Brine agreed impatiently, "but hurry it up, would you?"
Mildred threw the bolt on the door.
"Now don't you try anything," Brine called to the prisoner. "I'll have a gun on you. Mullins is going to throw you a little something you can chip your way out of there with in a couple of days if you work hard at it."
Simon did not get a look at Pat Kelly as Mildred opened the door a crack and Mullins tossed in the piece of metal, but he did hear his friend's voice, and it sounded gratifyingly robust and healthy.
"Ye bunch of cross-eyed orangoutangs! Let me out of here and I'll fix ye up with yer legs around yer necks so ye can see behind when ye walk!"
He went on in the same vein even after his words were muffled by the door slamming again. Simon, meanwhile, moved around the outside of the tower until he came to the entrance, which was a doorless irregular hole that led directly into the chamber he had watched through the window. He waited until Phyllis picked up the lantern and turned with Brine and Mullins to leave. Then he showed himself, lounging easily, automatic in hand, between them and freedom.
"Hello, friends," he said, with a pleasant smile.
Phyllis was the first to recover her voice.
"Simon! How did you . . . ever find me?"
"Your latest father left a trail," he answered.
"What trail?" demanded Brine.
"Father?" cried Phyllis uncomprehendingly.
"Oh, Mildred Phyllis Hitler Drew Brine," said the Saint with indulgent sadness, "I'm afraid you've come to the bottom of the name barrel. Somewhere at the core of all those lies there had to be a truth, and we might as well agree we've found it."
"He's been listening to us talk here," Mullins said.
"Wonderful deduction," said the Saint. "I can see how you became such a successful detective. Too bad you made such an unsuccessful crook."
Brine was licking his lips nervously, glancing at his daughter and Mullins.
"Templar," he blurted. "You're in this with us. You deserve a share. We'll split." He smiled hopefully. "How's that?"
"I agree that I deserve a share," Simon said. "Let's say something like a hundred per cent. I might send you a Christmas pudding in prison, though, if you'll tell me just when you decided to include me in your plans. Was it before or after you conned Drew into thinking you were on his daughter's trail?"
"You wouldn't believe it," Mullins said, "but we really were on to her trail—the real Mildred Drew's, I mean. So we made that deal with Drew to find her."
"And then you couldn't produce," volunteered the Saint, "so you decided to find a substitute Mildred."
"That was all my idea," Phyllis said proudly, looking no less ingenuously wide-eyed than she had in her role of millionaire's daughter. "And since they couldn't get anything for a Mildred who wasn't a Mildred, they had to pretend to kidnap her and get the money that way."
"And you needed a go-between who didn't know Mildred," Simon said. "Some innocent sucker who'd think he was serving everybody's best interests by carrying messages and money."
"Right!" said Phyllis brightly.
Brine's pride in the scheme was more apologetic.
"Of course we didn't plan to bring you into it till we just happened to hear your friend mention your name at a bar. Then we spotted you in the hotel, and . . ."
"And set up that performance where I was fishing," said the Saint.
Brine and Mullins both nodded.
"The whole thing sort of ... developed, you might say," Mullins put in. "No offense intended."
"We never went wrong before," said Brine hopefully.
"We were always straight, going toward our old age grinding through divorce investigations for twenty quid a week. I ... I guess the temptation was just too much."
"That might bring a tear to my eye," Simon said, "if I hadn't already used up my sympathy on Mildred's romantic problems. Now open the door there, and let my friend out."
Pat Kelly's last outburst had died away after the re-closing of the heavy door, and it seemed doubtful that he could have heard what had been going on since. Mullins looked apprehensively at the door.
"He's ... ah ... pretty mad," he said.
"Well, you won't mind that," said Simon. "Just throw the bolt and stand back. And Brine, you slide that case very gently across the floor in this direction."
Brine hesitated, but the Saint gave him an encouraging waggle of his revolver, and then the detective obediently sent the attache case scooting toward the exit. Mullins, in the meantime, with the tremulous caution of a demolition trainee defusing his first live bomb, was drawing back the bolt that held Pat Kelly prisoner.
That was when Phyllis dropped the lantern. The instant it shattered on the floor the wick went out and the place was blindingly dark. In the confusion of sounds and physical sensations, the Saint was aware that Pat had apparently charged out of his dungeon with such force and velocity that the massive door had swung wide and crashed back against the wall. It also seemed, judging from the accompanying crunch and groan, that Mullins had perhaps been flattened between the door and the wall like a hapless beetle caught in the pages of a rapidly slamming dictionary.
Simon yelled to identify himself to Kelly, and at the same time sensed from the shape of the bulk heaving itself at him out of the blackness that he was being attacked by Brine. He neatly sidestepped and tripped the fat man, whose impetus carried him sprawling to the floor.
"Simon!" Kelly was shouting. "Where are ye?"
"Grab the girl," Simon said. "Do you have a match?"
Kelly quickly produced a flame, which revealed two men unconscious on the floor, but no Phyllis. There was also no attache case.
"She must have run out while I was tending to Brine," Simon said. "You watch these goons. I'll catch her."
He hurried through the door, dodged around piles of stone, and heard the sound of the girl's running steps in the direction of the car. But he was too close behind to allow her any chance of starting the engine and pulling away. He had a glimpse of her jumping over some rocks and setting off at a dead run down the hillside.
Before he had chased her far she made the mistake of looking back over her shoulder to see whether or not he was gaining. She stumbled and fell violently head first, rolling several times but never loosing her grip on the case clutched against her chest.
She was lying face up, gasping for breath, when Simon arrived at her side.
"Hurt yourself?" he asked.
"My back," she moaned. "It's ... I think it's broken."
"They'll put it right for you in the prison hospital," the Saint said sympathetically.
He bent down to help her, and she winced with pain as she started to raise herself. Simon saw the sudden movement of her right arm and averted his face to avoid most of the handful of earth she flung at him. Even so she managed to roll away, and dash off again. This time, though, he caught her before she had gone twenty feet and swung her around, making her drop the attache case, and pinning her arms behind her.
"You want the money for yourself!" she cried. "You're no better than the rest of us. In fact you're worse."
"Worse?" asked Simon mildly.
"Yes." Phyllis's big eyes suddenly welled with tears. "They . . . forced me to do it."
"How?"
"My mother. She needs this dreadful operation. There's only one surgeon in the world who can do it. In America. And he charges ten thousand pounds."
The Saint threw back his head and laughed.
"It's true!" said Phyllis. "Really."
"I'm afraid the stage lost a great star when you decided on a life of crime."
Phyllis looked more genuinely upset than she had a moment before.
"Simon," she said, "you wouldn't . . . really turn me in would you?"
"Oh, yes. You're a very naughty girl."
