Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "Excuse me, Constable," Hal interrupted. "A child has been kidnapped, and the perpetrators are armed."

  "Yes, right," Nubbit said, his face flushing even redder as he took his notepad from his uniform jacket. "Blessing. Arthur, it is."

  "Yes," Emily sighed wearily. They had already gone over the broad outlines of the situation with Nubbit but had felt as if they were forcing the information on a man who had other, grander things on his mind.

  "The lad who called told us you'd been wounded."

  "Nothing serious," Hal said.

  "Gunshot?"

  "No. They were carrying swords."

  "Swords, you say?"

  "That's right. Six men on horseback. Arabs, I think. They were dressed in some kind of costumes—balloon pants, turbans, that sort of thing. And they used swords."

  "No guns," Nubbit said, writing carefully. "Well, we can be grateful for that, at least."

  "What? That they didn't have guns? They had swords, for God's sake!"

  "Now, Mr. Blessing, we realize you've been through a bad patch—"

  "My name's Woczniak. The boy is Miss Blessing's nephew."

  "Spelling, please?" He poised his pencil over his notepad.

  "What are you going to do to locate Arthur?" Emily said exasperatedly.

  Nubbit came to attention, as if he were taking an oral examination in school. "We are proceeding on the assumption that the man who tried to kill the Blessing boy yesterday on the bus was somehow connected with today's events."

  Hal grunted in sarcastic dismissal.

  "Because the man on the bus was identified as an Arab by several different witnesses, we have sent his fingerprints and a morgue photograph to Metropolitan Police headquarters. They haven't got the material yet—"

  "Of course not," Hal grumbled.

  Nubbit cleared his throat. "However, I've spoken with people in London personally. Scotland Yard will send the prints and photograph on to Immigration and to Interpol." He glanced down at his notes. "Also, we've talked with residents of the area."

  "About what? A man riding on a bus from London?" Hal could feel his irritation approaching the breaking point. "What did you think the locals would be able to tell you about him?"

  "Well, I . . ." Nubbit shook his jowls. The young officer with him gave Hal a sour look and mumbled to his superior, "What did I tell you about him?"

  "Sir, I assure you we are doing the best we can." Nubbit said indignantly. "This may be difficult for you to understand, but generally these cases are solved because someone has seen something. Now, we're going to go back to the residents of the area and ask . . ."

  "We were alone," Hal said loudly. "It was dawn. There were no witnesses."

  Nubbit cocked his head and squinted at him. "You seem very sure about quite a lot."

  Hal’s hands clenched into fists. This moron doesn't believe me, he thought. He forced himself to open his hands. Hitting the cop in charge of the investigation wasn't going to help matters.

  Outside, the darkening clouds of a thunderhead were looming. Rain was on the way. "I think you ought to make castings of the hoofprints of those horses before the rain comes," he said as calmly as possible.

  "Hoofprint castings? In a farm meadow?"

  "The prints would be fresh." Hal said, forcing out the smooth if mechanical words. "Seal off the area. Then, after you've made the castings, check with local stables, breeders, saddlers, feed stores— anyone who might have had contact with these people. Try trucking companies for rentals. Unless the kidnappers rode those horses through the streets, the animals were brought in some kind of van, or else kept at a stable. Make a search of the field where we were assaulted. Maybe one of the horsemen dropped something . . ."

  Nubbit held up his hands, smiling. "Now, now, those are all fine ideas, sir, but you've got to remember we're a small constabulary."

  "Then get some help," Hal said coldly. "Christ knows you need it."

  "I've told you that our report has gone to Scotland Yard."

  "Are they sending someone?"

  "Well, I'm sure that's up to them," Nubbit said defiantly. "But as I've told you, we are prepared to do everything we can to retrieve the child."

  The woman who ran the inn peeked into the parlor where Hal, Emily, and the two policemen were standing. "Can I get anyone a cup of tea?" she asked.

  Nubbit turned toward her with a warm grin. "Well, now, Katie Sloan, since you're asking—"

  "Nubbit, get out of here," Hal said quietly.

  The constable's round head whipped toward him sharply. It was nearly glowing in its redness.

  "You heard me," Hal said.

  "Mr. Woczniak," the innkeeper began. Hal ignored her and spoke directly to Constable Nubbit.

  "I can't make you do your job," he said. "But I'll be damned if I'll let you sit on your fat ass while a bunch of killers get away with a ten-year-old kid. Now get out before I throw you out."

  The young constable with Nubbit flexed his shoulders. "That goes for you, too, Einstein," Hal added.

  The two policemen bustled out with great dignity.

  Mrs. Sloan watched them leave and then shook her head. "I've heard what happened to you out on the Tor," she said. "I wish we had a better police force to offer you."

  "Me, too," Hal said quietly. "May I use your telephone? It's long distance, but I'll pay for the call."

  "Certainly." She brought a black rotary telephone out of a cupboard and set it on a small table near one of the sofas. "Just let me know if you'd like some tea or a bit of something to eat."

  Emily nodded at her as she left.

  "I want to call the United States," Hal spoke into the phone. "Washington, D.C. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant Director Fred Koehler. My name is Hal Woczniak." He spelled it for the operator, than thanked her and hung up.

  Emily was seated on a hard chair, staring blankly across the room. Hal put his hand on her shoulder and kept it there until she looked up suddenly, as if she were surprised to see him.

  "We'll get him back," he said softly.

  She nodded slightly, the gesture of someone who did not believe what she had just been told but no longer wanted to talk about it. Then her eyes drifted away from him, again looking toward the window.

  When the telephone rang, Hal bolted across the room to answer it.

  "Yes?"

  "Mr. Woczniak? Hold on for your party, please."

  A moment later another voice crackled over the line. "Hal? That you?"

  "Right, Chief. I'm calling from somewhere in the south of England."

  "What the hell are you doing there?"

  "I'll tell you about it sometime. Right now I need a favor."

  There was silence at the other end.

  "I'm sober, Chief," Hal said.

  There was another silence. "Then I'm listening," the Chief said finally.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Inspector Brian Candy arrived from Scotland Yard with a tweed suit, a pair of socks that did not match, two assistants, a gray van filled with equipment, and a businesslike approach to his trade which Hal found both familiar and comforting.

  Candy climbed the three flights of stairs to Hal's room on the top floor of the inn and arrived without being out of breath. Quite a feat, Hal thought, considering the man's size. Candy was well over six feet tall and as broad as a bull. He nearly filled the room with his girth and quiet energy.

  "Constable Nubbit has already filled me in with most of . . . what he knows," Candy said graciously.

  Hal snorted. "About this case? Or was he still going on about auld Eamon Carpenter's dead cow?"

  Candy ducked his head and sneaked a smile. "He was kind enough to meet us on the road. My men have gone to the meadow to make the castings you suggested."

  Hal looked out the window. "It's been raining for forty minutes," he said quietly.

  Candy tightened his lips. "Unfortunate," he said. "Still, they may find something."

  At least he's not lying
to me, Hal thought. "Thank you for coming," he said.

  "No thanks necessary," Candy said. "When my superintendent gets rung up by one of his old friends in the FBI and he tells me to march, I only ask how far. Now suppose you tell me what's going on here."

  Hal nodded. He was perched on the windowsill and saw Candy take not one but three ballpoint pens from inside his jacket pocket and lay them on the table in front of him as he opened up a large spiral-bound notebook and looked up at Hal like a man with all the time in the world.

  As Hal went over the details of the morning ambush, he studied Candy's broad face. It was a face he liked instinctively, beefy and hard, with a bushy mustache and auburn hair that Hal guessed had, in childhood, earned him the nickname Red. He gave the impression of earnest competence, and it was easy for Hal to see him as a member somewhere of a regimental boxing team, probably a middleweight in those days, with a technically correct, plod-ahead style that—so unlike the flashy antics of American boxers—quietly piled up points and won him a lot of bouts by decision.

  The only thing that belied that impression was Candy's eyes. They were dark and quick and darting, the eyes of a casino pit boss watching a new dealer work.

  They were not the eyes of a man Hal wanted to lie to. Still, he wasn't about to tell anyone, let alone a police officer, about Camelot revisited and Merlin the magician disappearing in a puff of smoke while holding the Holy Grail. There were some things he had to keep to himself if he hoped to get any cooperation from the authorities.

  So he gave a truthful story, but carefully not the whole truth. He described how he had met both Taliesin and young Arthur Blessing and his aunt Emily on a bus while on tour. Very matter-of-factly, he told how he had disarmed someone who was trying to kill the boy.

  Candy looked up sharply and Woczniak knew why. If there was someone in custody who had been involved in an earlier attempt against the boy, the mystery was almost solved already.

  Hal shook his head. "No survivors, I'm afraid," he said. "The bastard bit down on a cyanide pill and was dead before the cops could question him."

  Recognition dawned in the inspector's eyes. "Right you are. I read the reports on that this morning. Didn't realize you were talking about the same boy. Some photographs and fingerprints were sent to headquarters, but they haven't arrived yet."

  "Of course not," Hal said. "Constable Nerdnick sent them."

  "The prints should be identified tomorrow. I'll have the results called in to me as soon as they come in. We'll be working out of the constabulary."

  "Can you keep the locals out of the way?"

  Candy smiled. "I think so." He checked over his notes. "The boy was willed this property by his mother, you say. Was she British?"

  He was looking at Emily, but she only stared straight ahead. She had said nothing since Candy's arrival.

  "Emily?" Hal prompted gently.

  Her eyes panicked, then focused on the Scotland Yard detective. "I'm sorry," she said.

  Candy nodded sympathetically and repeated the question.

  "No, she was an American," Emily answered. "Dilys—that's Dilys Blessing—was included in her . . . in Arthur's father's will. But since she wasn't alive at the time of the man's death, the property went to Arthur. That was a stipulation in the will."

  Candy wrote constantly, but never took his eyes off Emily. "What was the father's name?" he asked.

  Emily's face worked. Finally she pulled herself together enough to answer. "Abbott," she said. "Sir Bradford Welles Abbott. He was never married to my sister."

  "I see," he said noncommitally. "I understand you saw nothing of the episode this morning?"

  She shook her head numbly. "I went to the meadow to see what was taking them so long. I arrived too late."

  "It's just as well," Candy said quietly, then turned back to Hal.

  He's good, Hal thought with admiration. Candy had sensed that Emily was walking a thin wire and wouldn't push her too hard. In the end, he would get more out of her that way, Hal knew.

  "And the old man who was with you?" the inspector asked. "Taliesin. Odd name. Welsh. Where is he?"

  "He took off," Hal said.

  "Took off?"

  "The perps left with Arthur, and he chased them," Hal said.

  "On foot?"

  "Right."

  "Might he have been working with the kidnappers?"

  "No. They . . ." They cut off his head. "They wounded him. He was hurt."

  "Badly?"

  "No. I don't think so."

  "What was his first name?"

  "I don't know," Hal lied. The last thing he wanted was for Scotland Yard to begin a manhunt for the old man. It would waste what little time there was to find Arthur. "I met him on the bus."

  "Do you know anything about him? Where he worked, where he lived?"

  Hal shook his head, and folded his arms across his chest in an unconscious gesture of defiance. Candy looked at Emily, but she was no longer paying any attention to the inspector or his questions.

  "Excuse me," Candy said. "I need to make a telephone call."

  When he left the room, Hal let out a slow sigh of relief. Then he spotted the beer in an old metal bucket beside the small table where Candy had been sitting. Anticipating the inspector's arrival, Mrs. Sloan must have placed it there. There was even ice in the bucket.

  Slowly Hal walked over to it. There were three bottles. He took out two. He had wanted a drink all day, and especially wanted one now. The bottle was cold and sweating. He could imagine the taste of it on his cigarette-dried throat.

  "Care for a beer?" he asked Emily, but she didn't hear him.

  He sighed and put back both bottles. He couldn't risk it, not while Emily was in such bad shape. What was it they said about drunks—that one drink was too many and a thousand weren't enough? If he had one now, he knew, he would have a thousand. And when he woke up, stinking and lost, Arthur would be dead and Emily would be in a nuthouse. No, he wouldn't have one. Not yet. Not just yet.

  Soon he heard Candy's heavy footfalls coming back up the stairs. "I thought the Yard might have made some headway with the dead man's prints, but they've got nothing so far," he said. He added, "They're still working, though. If the fellow's ever been arrested and booked anywhere in Britain or the Continent, we'll know about it."

  And what if he hasn't? Hal thought. But he already knew the answer to that.

  "Suppose we go on to the kidnappers," Candy suggested. "You say they were Arabs?"

  "That's my guess. But it may have just been their clothes."

  "Fairy-tale costumes," Candy said noncommitally.

  Hal nodded. "Turbans, silk harem pants . . . Right out of the Arabian Nights."

  "Why do you suppose they were dressed so fancifully?"

  "I really don't know," Hal said.

  Candy wrote. "Did any of them speak? Call out a name, perhaps?"

  "The only one who talked was . . ." Suddenly he recalled what Taliesin had said. "There was a name. Saladin."

  "Which one was he?"

  "The leader."

  "The tall one."

  "At least seven feet," Hal said. "He had this devil's face and weird eyes, pitch-black. His skin was white, but not as if it was supposed to be white. It was unwholesome-looking, like a dark-skinned man who'd been out of the sun for years. In the states, we called it 'prison pallor.' He had a goatee."

  Hal glanced over at Candy and saw that the Scotland Yard inspector was staring hard at him.

  "What is it?" Hal asked.

  "Nothing."

  "Don't tell me that. You recognized him from my description, didn't you?"

  "No. I don't know any Saladin," Candy said crisply. "The description did remind me of someone, but it's not the man you're talking about."

  "Why not?"

  "He's dead."

  A crack of thunder shook the windows.

  "Gracious, it's getting bad."

  Everyone turned to see Mrs. Sloan in the doorway. She was panting and o
ut of breath from the long climb up the stairs.

  "Sorry to disturb you, but there's a telephone call for Inspector Candy downstairs." She snapped at the bodice of her housedress to cool off. "Terrible muggy, it is."

  Candy got up. "One thing to say for those boxy motels you Yanks have," he said. "Telephones in the rooms."

  Mrs. Sloan laughed. "I expect the exercise is good for you."

  Candy smiled at her ruefully and headed down the stairs with her.

  Hal and Emily sat in silence while the rain pelted the windows. He knew what Candy's call would be about.

  "Call off the search?" he asked when the inspector returned.

  Candy nodded. "Too much rain. But they did get some castings. And they picked up a few scraps of fabric. Looks like silk." He smiled hopefully, then walked over to the table and snapped his notebook shut. "If you think of anything else, give me a ring." He replaced the three ballpoint pens in his pocket, nodded, and lumbered toward the door.

  "Inspector?"

  Candy paused at the door.

  "You said the description I gave you reminded you of someone. Who?"

  "A murderer. Psychopath. I had a hand in arresting him."

  "What was his name?" Hal asked.

  Candy grinned crookedly. "No one knew. The chap wouldn't tell anyone, and he had no identification."

  "A homeless guy."

  "No, quite the contrary. He lived like a king. But he had no bank accounts, no credit cards, no driver's license."

  "What about the place where he lived?" Hal asked, professionally curious.

  "Rented. He signed the agreement with an X." Candy chuckled. "That's how the press referred to him during the trial. Mister X."

  "Wait a minute. Somebody must have known who he was. Neighbors . . ."

  "Only the servants. Dozens of them."

  "Well?"

  "None of them would talk. Not a word. They all served time for contempt. Still, none of them cracked."

  "He must have paid them well." Hal looked at Candy. The inspector was chewing the inside of his lip. "You want to tell me something?"

  Candy shrugged. "What?"