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 dis
tance
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 some
one 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 bet
ter 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 arch
way. 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 en
counter 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 f
ivers, 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 my
self.”
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, be
tween 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 de
serve 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 Mil
dred,” 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 roman
tic 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 demo
lition 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, judg
ing from
the accompanying crunch and groan, that Mul
lins 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 it
self 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?”