Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "They were all Arabs, weren't they."

  The inspector stared at him for a moment, then nodded. "I was told you were very good at your work. But you're wrong on this. The man's dead."

  "How?"

  "Fire. The sanitarium where Mr. X was serving a life sentence burned to the ground a month ago. His body was found."

  "Who identified it?"

  Candy smiled and shook his head. "He's dead, Mr. Woczniak."

  "Hal. Who came for the body? The servants?"

  "No one came," Candy said with a sigh. "The body was seven feet tall. It was found in Mr. X's cell in Maplebrook's basement. He was the only prisoner down there."

  "Was there dental I.D.?" Hal persisted.

  Candy frowned. He was thinking, Hal knew. The inspector was beginning to doubt. "There must have been," he said, but his face was still troubled.

  "Can you check?"

  The two men stood face to face for a moment. “I'll check," Candy said finally.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  After Inspector Candy left, Hal led Emily downstairs to the small pub.

  "A soda will do you good," he said, directing her toward one of the stools at the empty bar. They were the only customers in the place, and Mrs. Sloan was nowhere in sight.

  Emily stared glassily ahead. The whole business of their flight from Chicago and the repeated attempts on her own and Arthur's lives had taken their toll on her even before this latest, most crushing blow. She had been a nervous wreck on the bus; now it seemed that whatever sanity she had managed to hang onto up until that morning had evaporated. She just sat, staring, like a porcelain doll made up to look like a schoolmarm.

  Hal believed it would pass. He had seen people emerge from emotional stupors deeper than Emily's. His own had been worse, he realized, but he had come out of it only so he could crawl into a bottle.

  He wanted a drink badly. Seeing the bottles lined up and sparkling in the now-opened cabinet was a lot more difficult than he would have thought possible during his I-can-quit-anytime days.

  "Mrs. Sloan!" he called out at last. After another minute, the innkeeper leaned out through the kitchen door.

  "Oh, my, and there you are," she exclaimed, wiping her hands on her apron. "I was just making tonight's soup."

  "I'm sorry to bother you, but I wanted to give you back the keys to your car. Thank you."

  "Think nothing of it." She took them and threw them into a battered metal cash box just below the liquor bottles. "Now, what can I get you to drink?" She lumbered behind the bar, filling it like a battleship in a canal.

  "I'll have a . . ." Hal stopped, unable to squeeze the words out of his mouth. "Maybe just a soft drink," he managed at last. "For both of us."

  "Right you are." She went to a large locker at the end of the bar and brought out a bottle of grisly-looking orange liquid with a label Hal had never heard of. "Will this do?"

  "Fine," Hal said.

  "Have the police been of any help in finding the young one?"

  "They're looking for him."

  "It's truly sorry I am for you both," Mrs. Sloan said, and the plain, blunt features of her face showed that she meant it. "What a world."

  "Yeah," Hal said.

  Emily started to cry. She sat stock still in front of her untouched drink, her arms dangling at her sides, sobbing quietly.

  "Oh, now, I'm sorry, Missus." The woman held out two cocktail napkins for her. When Emily made no move to take them, Mrs. Sloan thrust them under her nose and commanded, "Blow."

  Emily obeyed, and the older woman wiped up her face. "But the little lad's going to be fine, you'll see. Why, didn't a Scotland Yard Inspector come himself? If anyone can find him, they can."

  Hal marveled at Mrs. Sloan's gentle authority. I'll bet she's raised ten kids, he thought.

  She took another wad of napkins and forced them into Emily's hand. "The lady wouldn't be feeling so poorly if you hadn't had to put up with that fleabrain Nubbit first," she said with a trace of annoyance.

  Hal smiled. "Funny. The constable seems very fond of you."

  "Hah. Always begging for a free apple tart, that one is. My sainted husband had the misfortune to be born cousin to him, but I wouldn't set him out to track down a missing kitten."

  "I don't know," Hal said. "I hear he's a great man when it comes to big cases like poisoned cows."

  "Oh, he told you that, did he? His moment of glory. His one and only major crime. It happened ten years ago and he's still looking for the one that did the poisoning. And if you ask him about it, he gets all dark and official-looking and says, 'The case is still open. The investigation is still proceeding.'"

  Her imitation was so good that Hal laughed out loud. To his surprise, Emily smiled, too.

  Hal took a sip of his drink. It was ghastly. And warm.

  "Oh, you'd be wanting ice," Mrs. Sloan said, gliding back toward the locker.

  "No, it's all right. Mrs. Sloan, have you lived here long?"

  "All my life. I was born right where Albert Carson's hardware store is, back when that whole part of the village was nothing but sheep farms."

  "Have you ever heard of a psychiatric hospital named Maplebrook?"

  "The asylum? Oh, yes. We called it the Towers around here. That was its name, you know, before it got fancied up. But it was still the same place inside." She shuddered. "A bad place."

  "I heard it burned down."

  "Aye. Never found who did it, neither."

  "It was arson?"

  "Whatever you want to call it. But it was no accident, and that's the truth."

  "Who would want to burn down an insane asylum?"

  Mrs. Sloan wiped a glass idly. "Ghosts, maybe," she said casually. Hal smiled in disbelief. She caught him. "Oh, you Yanks think you know so much, coming from your new country. That's because you haven't seen what we have. You haven't seen the castle rise up out of the morning mist, or heard the hoofbeats of the ghost horses as they ride."

  "The castle?" Hal felt his heart skipping. "You've seen it?"

  "As a girl. We all have, one time or another. It's been a while, though." She smiled. "It's like the fairies, they say. Once you stop believing in them, they won't come to you no more."

  I wouldn't bet on it, Hal thought. "Is the asylum far from here?"

  "Not more than twenty miles. There's not much left of the place, though, and good riddance, I say. Oops, I hear the soup boiling over." She turned and fled, with a certain rhinocerine grace, into the kitchen.

  Hal leaned across the bar and dumped the rest of his orange drink into the sink. He walked to the door. The rain seemed to be lessening and the skies appeared a little lighter.

  "There," Mrs. Sloan said, flinging open the hinged door with a whack of her mighty hand. "Leek and potato soup. Will the two of you be staying for supper?"

  "I think so. I'd like to take us out for a drive first, though. Is there a place around here where I could rent a car?"

  "Oh, Wilson-on-Hamble's too small for that sort of thing. How far do you need to go?"

  "Not very far," Hal said evasively. "Just a drive around the countryside."

  "Well, use mine, then." She took the keys out of the cash box and tossed them over to Hal. "Just don't be getting into any more bother with it."

  "No, I couldn't . . . not without paying you for your trouble, anyway."

  She laughed. "Hell's bells, anything you could pay would be more than it's worth. Fill up the petrol when you bring it back. That'll be a bargain for both of us."

  Hal picked up the keys. "It's a deal." He stood up, then helped Emily off her stool. She gave him a puzzled look but didn't ask where they were going. Hal didn't suppose she cared, really, as long as she wasn't alone. "Thank you," he called to Mrs. Sloan.

  She was wiping the bar clean. "It's due south. Turn left out of the parking lot and follow the signs to Lymington," she said without looking up.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Maplebrook," she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-
NINE

  The small Morris Minor lugged heavily up a steep hill, seemed to gather power at the crest, and then went into a long glide down into a lush verdant valley. Then, to the left of the spot where the road leveled out in the glen, Hal saw the remains of Maplebrook Hospital, several hundred yards back from the roadway.

  The damage to the old building had been extensive, even worse than he had anticipated. The roof had fallen in and three of the four outside walls had entirely collapsed. The interior of the one partly standing wall was a crazy quilt of scorch marks, broken-off stairs, and bits of flooring.

  No accidental fire can do this, Hal thought. He wondered why Inspector Candy hadn't told him that the sanitarium had been destroyed by arson.

  He slowed down at the bottom of the long hill, then pulled into a paved driveway past a small, discreet sign reading:

  Maplebrook Hospital

  All visitors and personnel must show identification

  at front gate

  Candy had mentioned that the fire had occurred only about a month before, but already the driveway had been grown over by the rough weedy grass that seemed always to thrive in England's damp climate. The bald tires on Mrs. Sloan's car skidded a few times on the long, twisting drive up to the high wrought-iron fence with its abandoned gatehouse.

  The gate was open now, flung wide for the fire engines and police and never closed. Hal didn't blame them. It was pretty obvious that there was nothing left of the place to vandalize. He drove on until the driveway was too torn up to negotiate, then stopped the car.

  "We're here," he said.

  "What is this place?" Emily asked slowly.

  "Just an old building I want to snoop around in." He opened the trunk and took out a long coil of rope and a high-powered flashlight with a handle he'd bought in a hardware store on the way.

  "What are they for?" Emily asked.

  "Precautions," Hal said. "Don't worry. We're in no danger, believe me."

  The driveway's blacktop was split into craze-lines, with big chunks of asphalt missing. Hal stooped down and picked up a piece. "The pavement exploded," he said. "This was one hell of a hot fire."

  The pile of rubble surrounding the wall was massive, though not particularly interesting: pieces of roof slates, ceiling plaster, stone, chunks of timber beams. The police had undoubtedly gone through it all thoroughly for any personal items or office records. But Hal was not looking for anything so obvious.

  He picked up a three-foot-long piece of charred wood and poked around in the debris, being careful about where he walked. There was a basement here someplace, and the floor hadn't entirely caved in on it. When the piece of wood sank through the rubble, he began to poke and kick until a man-sized hole opened up.

  Next, he held one end of the wooden post and slammed it onto the ground as hard as he could. It stayed in one piece.

  "This might do," he said. With a block of stone, he hammered it into the ground, then tied the rope around the post.

  "Are you going down there?" Emily asked.

  "Yup."

  "Hal, no—"

  "Just try to hold it in place for me while my weight's on it. Can you do that?"

  She looked up at him. Then, hesitantly, she nodded.

  "Good." He put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. "You're doing better already, you know that?"

  She went over to the post and braced it with both hands.

  "Perfect." He tossed the rope down the hole. "I'm going down," he said. Then he put the handle of the flashlight between his teeth and lowered himself through the hole into the basement.

  "I'm in," he shouted when his feet touched bottom.

  It was cool here, almost cold. The air still reeked of smoke. He was not able to stand up straight, due to the twisted and burned wooden beams crisscrossing overhead. In the beam of the flashlight, he could see piles of plaster that had fallen in from the upper stories.

  What the hell am I doing? he thought. One sneeze and five floors' worth of crud is going to come down on my head. He looked up through the beams and shattered plaster at the gray sky before going on into the labyrinthine waste of the basement.

  He heard one of the timbers squeak as it rubbed against another. He shuddered and crouched low and tried to pick his way toward one of the interior walls that still remained in the subterranean structure. The wind was whistling through the debris that surrounded him, twisted, jagged, like a cage built by a madman.

  He reached the wall. There was room to move along it. Timbers were propped against it, but there seemed to be some small passage possible if he stayed close to the ground.

  His hand hit something metallic on the wall. When he shone the flashlight on it, he saw that he had touched an electrical outlet. The wall was white plaster, but there were black singe marks around the outlet. The plaster crumbled under his hand. With his fingertips he dug around the outlet.

  The electric wires leading to the socket were burned but otherwise intact. Yet he could see that there had been some kind of flash fire inside the wall by the socket. He reached his hand far in and felt a dry crumbly substance, brought it out, and examined it in the flashlight beam.

  It felt like dried putty, but when he touched his tongue to it there was the distinctive etherish taste of plastic explosive. He put the little pea-shaped piece of plastique in his pocket and continued down the wall.

  He had to double up to get under one beam that was pressed against the wall, and when he struggled to get past it, he could feel the beam groan and slide an inch lower down.

  Get out of here, Hal, a voice inside him commanded. He pushed it out of his mind. There was no way he was leaving now.

  There was another electrical outlet some fifty feet on. Again, the metal fixture itself had blown loose from the wall into which it had been fastened. Another explosion.

  They've all been packed with plastique, he realized. Every socket. That would be enough to bring down a structure as big as Maplebrook.

  Someone had sabotaged the place. Someone with enough time to wire every wall socket in the building.

  A few yards further, the passageway turned at a right angle. The ceiling here was a little higher and he could almost walk upright. But behind him, timbers creaked as they continued to settle. He didn't think that he could go back the way he had come without some beams working loose and crashing down on him.

  And it would only take one to cripple me and pin me here forever, he thought.

  Another timber shifted, closer, by its sound. Sheepishly, he remembered his fire-and-arson training at Quantico in which the instructors had relentlessly driven home the axiom that a building destroyed by fire never really finished falling down. For weeks and even months after the initial blaze, it kept crumbling in on itself. Only heavy equipment could finally level the thing so that the ruin stopped shifting by itself.

  As if the building had read his mind, a shower of plaster and cement poured down from the ceiling less than ten feet behind him. Immediately afterward, a big timber groaned and then gave way with a tremendous crash. Hal dived headfirst into the tunnel and crawled as an avalanche of debris spilled into the space.

  You flunk, Woczniak.

  Somewhere overhead he heard Emily scream, but Hal could not respond. The cloud of dust created by the falling timber was so thick he could barely breathe. He squirmed along the stone floor on his belly, keeping the beam of the flashlight ahead of him even though his eyes were tearing and blinded.

  While he was crawling, his wounded shoulder bumped against something hard. He gasped with the pain, then coughed violently. He wouldn't be able to stay down here much longer, he knew.

  Then he trained the beam of his flashlight on the object he had crashed into. The dust was settling, and he could see the outlines of bars.

  Bars. A cell.

  Mr. X had been a prisoner on this floor. The only prisoner. Still keeping low, he hurried down the corridor, sweeping the light across each charred and empty cell, until he came upon one wi
th its door open.

  There he stopped. The cot in this cell had a sheet on it and a neatly folded blanket, burned black at one edge, at its foot.

  He was here.

  Hal studied the bare cell carefully with the flashlight. There were no pictures on the wall, no photos or letters, no cigarette butts, nothing to indicate that a human being had occupied this space. He checked the plumbing behind the toilet. Nothing had been taped there.

  He shook his head. He had never seen a cell so clean, so utterly devoid of the personality of its occupant. Then he saw on the floor near the bed a series of dark stains. He knelt over them with the flashlight. They looked like drops of blood, dried black with time. On his knees he followed them to the door and beyond, into the corridor.

  Hal sighed. So the man had died in here and had been carried out . . . No, wait a minute. Inspector Candy hadn't said anything about Mr. X dying of wounds. He had gone down in the fire, along with the rest of the inmates. From asphyxiation, most likely, judging from the relatively untouched condition of the basement cell.

  Hal's mind worked frantically. In a panic, Mr. X might have banged his head against the bars . . . But there was only one trail of blood drops, and it led outside the cell. He followed them back inside. There were stains next to the bed, but not on the sheet. Then he picked up the hard pillow and turned it over. There was a large, stiff smear of blood almost coating one side.

  It was puzzling. The trail was clear, from the corridor to the cell floor to the pillow. Yet Mr. X had not died of wounds. He followed the droplets of blood again. From the corridor into the cell . . .

  Suddenly he whirled. Of course, he thought. Mr. X hadn't been carried from the cell to the corridor. It had been the other way around. The bloodstains are leading from the outside in. He knelt down to examine them again. There was a faint smear still visible through some of the dried blood droplets, and the smear extended in the direction of the cell.

  Someone had dragged a bleeding man into the cell, waited for him to die, then turned the pillow over to conceal the blood.