Leslie Charteris - The Saint Returns

“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 attaché 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 attaché 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 attaché 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.”

Her face crumpled, wet-eyed and kittenish.

“Please! I won’t do anything wrong ever again, I swear. If you’ll just let me go.”

Kelly was hallooing from the top of the hill, unable as yet to see where they were. Simon looked at Phyllis and loosened his grip.

“You promise you’ll live a clean and decent life, devoting yourself to good works and never telling any lies?”

“Oh, I do! I promise!”

“All right, then.”

He let her go entirely. She was unbelieving.

“You mean?”

“Go on,” he said.

She stood on her tiptoes, gave him a swift kiss, and turned to run. As she passed the attaché case she snatched it up and took off down the hill like a rabbit.

“Don’t try to spend any of that money, though,” Simon called after her.

“It’s counterfeit!”

She stopped and turned.

“What did you say?” she shouted through clenched teeth.

“It’s all counterfeit. Just bait to get your father to lead me here.”

The word she said then was not so impressive as the way she said it. She took the attaché case and hurled it to the ground. Then she ran and disappeared among the trees.

Simon went and knelt by the case, which had fallen open, spilling bundles of money — quite genuine Irish money — out on the ground. He made certain estimates of the value of his time, the expense of repairs to his car, and other worthy considerations, and stowed away what some less generous people might have considered a disproportionate number of the bundles of bills in his jacket pockets. But the Saint was an extraordinarily generous man, and he saw no reason to make an exception when being generous with himself.