Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  While the inspector spoke on the phone with Metropolitan headquarters, Higgins handed Hal a heavy white object that looked like a postmodernist sculpture.

  "Before the rain got to be too heavy, we were able to pull plaster hoofprints on two of the horses that were in that field," he said. His voice was so soft that Hal had to strain to hear him. He was probably keeping his voice down so as not to disturb his superior's telephone conversation, Hal knew; yet it seemed so natural for Higgins, as if he spent his life in the rarified atmosphere of a mobile laboratory and rarely had to raise his voice to a normal speaking level.

  Hal turned it over and was able to make out the imprint of a horseshoe.

  Chastain, the older technician, did not even bother to speak. He just held another plaster casting in front of him with a look of quiet triumph on his face.

  Hal smiled wanly. "Do these tell you much?" he asked finally, figuring that since his ignorance of their esoteric work was bound to come out sooner or later, there was no point in delaying the truth.

  "Oh, yes," Chastain said, smiling avuncularly.

  He did not seem inclined to continue. Fortunately, Higgins took up the slack. "We know that the print you're holding is from a very large horse, for one thing," he said in the near whisper that came so naturally to him. "Large but delicate, judging from the shallowness of the imprint and the spread of the hoof. Bred for sand. An Arabian, most likely. And the horse wasn't shod locally."

  "How can you tell that?" Hal asked.

  "From the heads of the nails," Higgins breathed. "We checked with the stables and the blacksmiths around here. It is common in this area to use rounded nails, you see. But if you look carefully, you'll find that the nail heads on that horseshoe are triangular." He raised an eyebrow in a significant manner.

  Chastain did, too. The same eyebrow. Hal took that to mean that both casts evinced the same anomaly.

  "And they came from different horses, I guess," Hal said.

  The older assistant frowned deeply and nodded.

  "Nearly two millimeters' difference in size," Higgins explained, "along with variations in weight distribution."

  "Different riders," Chastain enlarged.

  "Ah. So if they weren't shod here, then where?"

  "We have that on the wire," Higgins said. "If anybody in any department in Great Britain knows any blacksmith who shoes with that kind of nail, we'll have it."

  Hal nodded. He hated to ask the obvious, but someone had to. "What if they weren't shod in Great Britain?"

  Higgins only stared at him through a large thumbprint. Chastain shrugged.

  "Right," Hal said. "I don't suppose anybody saw the horses coming through town?"

  Chastain took the cast from Hal as he shook his head.

  "No," Higgins said. "But we found tire tracks on the other side of the woods, near the first evidence of equine activity. The tracks belong to a truck with a probable weight of twelve thousand kilograms or more."

  "Big enough for six horses," Hal said.

  Chastain lowered his eyelids and nodded.

  "But no imprints, unfortunately," Higgins continued. "We can conjecture about the weight of the vehicle because . . . well, because of a number of factors. But the rain washed away much of the imprint before we could cast it. We have photographs, however. They're developing now."

  As if on cue, Chastain opened a small door resembling the entrance to the lavatory on an airplane, and emerged a moment later with a still-wet photograph of a tire track.

  It was a large wheel, Hal could see that much, with a long scar running diagonally along it.

  "I couldn't quite recognize the make of tire," Higgins apologized.

  "Michelin," Chastain said, deftly relieving Hal of the photograph.

  "Okay. It's a start. Has anyone sold any large amounts of hay or horse pills or whatever?"

  Both men blinked. "Horse pills?" Higgins asked blankly.

  "Well, they've got to eat, don't they?"

  "Quite," Higgins said. "No, nothing of that nature."

  "Horses eat grass in summer," Chastain suggested. It had been his longest sentence so far.

  Inspector Candy saved Hal from further embarrassment by hanging up the phone. "Sorry, Hal," he said. "There's no match for the prints of the dead man on the bus. We've even checked with Interpol and Israeli intelligence, in case the bloke was a terrorist of some kind, but everyone's come up blank."

  Hal sighed. "Then the guy had no history."

  "And we never turned up the body of the old man, either."

  "Who?"

  "Taliesin. You said he was wounded when he ran into the woods after the horsemen."

  "Oh. Yeah," Hal said.

  "So he might still be alive."

  Oh, yes, Hal thought. Maybe not in any form that Frick and Frack could identify, but the old troublemaker is definitely alive somewhere.

  The question was where. The castle was gone. Just where did disembodied spirits go when the places they haunted vanished into the air?

  "Care for some tea?" Candy asked.

  Chastain smiled. Higgins had already lost interest in their visitor, and was looking through a microscope at a thread from a piece of muddy cloth.

  "No. No, thanks," Hal said. "You seem to have done everything possible." It was hard not to sound disappointed. The scientists, after all, had done an excellent job given what they'd had to work with. It had just been too damned little.

  "The Maplebrook files will be here in a couple of hours," Candy said, understanding Hal's despair. "Maybe you'd like to come back then."

  Hal nodded. "All right. I'll see how far Emily's come with the translation of that book. Thank you all for your information and time."

  Candy nodded. Chastain didn't hear him. He was huddled beside Higgins. Through a wordless mixture of grunts, facial gestures, and written notes, they were marveling over the treasure beneath the microscope.

  Hal left the van and drove Mrs. Sloan's Morris back to the inn. He walked through the door just in time to hear Emily screaming.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  "Lord, what's wrong?" Mrs. Sloan leapt up from her stool behind the bar when the shrill scream filled the inn. "She just went up not one minute ago."

  "Call Inspector Candy," Hal said as he ran up the stairs.

  Emily was huddled in the far comer of the bed. Her face was wreathed in terror. "Someone was here," she said, her voice quavering.

  Hal went to the open window. Careful not to touch the sill or frame, he leaned out and looked outside. It was night now, and he could see only the lower slate roof of the old inn building. The peak of that roof was just three feet below the window of Emily's room. But there was no sign of anybody on the roof. Whoever it was had probably slid down the steeply angled slate and then dropped the short ten feet to the ground below.

  He listened carefully. In the distance, he heard the faraway drone of a motorcycle.

  "I went downstairs to have some tea with Mrs. Sloan. When I got back, he was in the room. He threw me onto the bed. I thought he was going to kill me, but he just turned and jumped out the window."

  "What'd he look like?"

  "A lot like the man on the bus. They could have been brothers."

  On the small writing desk where Candy had taken his notes, the library book lay face down. Beside it was a postcard. Hal picked it up by its edges. It was a faded color photograph of an amusement park dominated by a Ferris wheel filled with people wearing dated clothes from the sixties. In the foreground, a man with sideburns and a woman whose hair was styled into a French twist pushed a baby in a stroller toward a carousel.

  Every day's a holiday at Heatherwood! read the caption at the bottom in red script. On the back, someone had written a message with a black fountain pen:

  The boy is safe. Wait for my communication. When it comes, bring the cup.

  "What is it? Emily said, walking up to the desk.

  "Don't touch it. There may be prints. It's the ransom note. They'll trade
Arthur for the cup."

  Emily's shoulders slumped. "Where is it, Hal? Arthur always kept it with him. If he doesn't have it . . . We've got to go back to the castle and look."

  "It's not there," Hal said.

  Her face colored. "How can you be so sure?"

  Because I know where it is, he thought. It's in some other goddamned dimension with a vaporized sorcerer.

  But he couldn't tell her that. "I'll go tomorrow and look again," he said.

  Emily was silent for a long moment. "They'll go through with the trade, won't they?" she asked. "I mean, they did send the note. If we can get the cup to them . . ."

  Hal knew what she was getting at, but had no answer for her. "Sure, they'll trade," he said. "They don't have any reason to keep Arthur."

  She chewed her lip and nodded. She wanted to believe that as much as Hal did. "I just wish . . ." She grimaced to keep herself from crying. "I wish I'd been better to him."

  "Emily—"

  "I always treated Arthur as if he were interrupting my life," she whispered. "But I wouldn't have had any life at all if it hadn’t been for him. He was the only human warmth I ever knew, and I pushed him away, again and again . . ."

  "Don't do this to yourself," Hal said, taking her hand. "The kid's tough. You've helped make him tough. He's going to come through this."

  Candy knocked on the door, then strode in. "What's the trouble?" he asked.

  Hal pointed at the postcard. "Emily had a visitor. He left that."

  Candy picked it up carefully and read it. "Did he say anything?"

  "No," Emily said. "He came through the window. I walked in on him."

  "Did he try to harm you?"

  "He knocked me onto the bed, but I think that was just to get me out of the way."

  "She says he looked just like the dead man from yesterday," Hal said.

  Candy nodded, reading the note through again. "What's this cup?"

  Hal shrugged. "It's something Arthur brought with him from the States. A lucky piece." He described the hollow sphere. "From what he told me, it's made of some kind of weird metal."

  "Weird? In what way?"

  Emily looked up. "We don't know," she answered. "I did some laboratory tests on it. It wasn't anything I'd ever seen before."

  "Would it be valuable?" Candy asked.

  "If it were truly a new element, then yes, of course. It would have immense scientific value. But I haven't run nearly enough tests to make a claim like that."

  "Apparently someone thinks it's valuable enough to take the boy for it." Candy stared at them both, blowing air out of his nose like a bull. "Why didn't you tell me about this before?"

  Neither answered.

  "Well, where is it?"

  "It disappeared," Hal said truthfully.

  "Where did it disappear? In the meadow?"

  Hal nodded. "Arthur might have dropped it."

  "He might," Candy said. "It's unlikely that Higgins and Chastain would have missed such a thing during their search." He stepped back and fixed Hal and Emily with a terrible look. "Unless you've got the thing, and you're holding it back."

  "No!" Emily screeched. "I wouldn't sell Arthur's life for a piece of metal!"

  Candy's eyes left hers and settled like death on Hal's. "How about you, Yank? How many pieces of silver would you need?"

  Hal clenched his jaw. The inspector knew he was lying about something, but Hal could no more tell him what had happened than he could tell Emily. Or anyone else. He barely believed it himself, and he had seen the bowl and the old man vanish with his own eyes. "I don't have it," he said.

  The inspector nodded perfunctorily. Whatever good relationship they might have had, Hal knew, was now destroyed. Candy would not trust him any longer. "Any idea why he chose this card?" He held up the photo of the amusement park.

  Hal shook his head. "It looks old. It might have just been lying around."

  Candy grunted in agreement. He started to leave, then turned around and faced Emily. "How far have you gotten on the book?"

  "I've skimmed almost halfway through. It seems to be a treatise on the final days of English rule in the Punjab before it became Pakistan. Pretty dry material, really."

  "You find out anything about the book?" Hal asked.

  Candy shrugged. "It is from Bournemouth."

  "Who was it checked out to?"

  "Actually, to the librarian himself," Candy said.

  "And who is he? Did you talk to him?"

  "I think you can leave that sort of thing to us, Mr. Woczniak."

  "Give me the name, all right?"

  The inspector sighed at Hal's mixture of bullying and pleading. Finally he opened his notebook. "Laghouat."

  "What?"

  "His name is Hamid Laghouat." He snapped the notebook shut and held up one hand. "I know, he sounds like an Arab. We're looking for him now."

  "Looking? He's gone?"

  "That's right. A few days before the fire."

  "Where'd he go?"

  "Left without a trace," Candy said.

  He let himself out.

  "Come on," Hal said, taking Emily's arm.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Downstairs, for dinner. There's no point in worrying on an empty stomach."

  He picked up the book and they made their way into the pub. Mrs. Sloan flung her arms around Emily.

  "There, I'm glad to see you've come to no harm," she said. "I'll have a gate put over that window tomorrow."

  "No need for that," Hal said. "Whoever it was just wanted us to know they could get in. If there had been a gate, they'd have found another way."

  "Would you like another room, then, Miss?"

  Emily shook her head. "Thank you. I'll be fine."

  "All right. Would you be wanting some soup?"

  "Soup and anything else you've got," Hal said.

  Mrs. Sloan laughed. "Right you are."

  They sat down at a small table. Hal immediately started leafing through the book page by page.

  "What are you looking for?" Emily asked.

  "I don't know. But the guy might have left something. This was hidden under the mattress."

  Emily rubbed her face with her hands. "If you're right, if Arthur's in the hands of an escaped mental patient . . . "

  "If I'm right, then we've got someone to look for," Hal corrected. "It means we can catch him."

  "But no one knows his name."

  "Only 'Saladin'. That's what Taliesin called him."

  "Do you think they knew each other?"

  "Yes," Hal said. "I don't know how, but the old man definitely recognized him. He was afraid of him."

  Emily shook her head. "That poor man," she said. "Whatever possessed him to run into the woods after six men on horseback?"

  Hal didn't answer, and they both ate in silence.

  "I don't think Saladin's his real name," Emily said suddenly.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, you said he was seven feet tall."

  "So?"

  "So the Saladin of history was seven feet tall. I think Mr. X. is either just copying King Saladin, or has some serious delusions."

  "Who's King Saladin?"

  Emily drank her water delicately. "In the twelfth century, a Kurd named Saladin conquered Egypt for the Syrians, then put himself on the Egyptian throne and turned against them. He was a great ruler, from all accounts, but he had no loyalties. A man without a country."

  "Sort of a freelance pharaoh," Hal said.

  "Right. There was no one else like him in history."

  "I guess he'd stand out in a crowd."

  "Actually, his height wasn't so unusual back then. The Persian nobility were all very tall. Darius, who fought Alexander the Great, was seven feet tall, too."

  "What else do you know about Saladin?" Hal asked. "How did he die?"

  Mrs. Sloan brought their soup, along with a basketful of hard rolls and, incongruously, two oranges. "Hope this makes you feel a bit better," she said.

  "I'm
sure it will." Hal bit into one of the rolls. He hadn't realized just how hungry he'd been. He had to force himself not to swallow it whole.

  "Natural causes, I think," Emily said with her mouth full.

  "What?" Hal's mind had turned entirely toward his digestive activities.

  "I think Saladin died of natural causes. I can look it up tomorrow if I can find a library or a good encyclopedia."

  Hal nodded and opened the book again, but he couldn't bring himself to stop eating. When he took another bite of his roll, the pages of the book flipped closed, and he found himself staring at the pocket on the inside front cover. Suddenly he dropped the roll and opened the book again. "Look at this." He turned the book around so that she could read the pocket. "The date. The date the book was checked out."

  "June the first," Emily read.

  "Right. But that was after the asylum burned down." Emily looked at him in confusion. Hal turned his hands palm-up as if looking for an answer in them. "Why would this librarian, Laghouat or whatever his name was, put a wrong date on the book?"

  He looked at it again, mumbling to himself. "June the first. June one. Six-one. Six-one! Page sixty-one."

  She opened the book. Page sixty-one was covered with marks.

  "They're just pencil dots," Emily said.

  "They're marks. And they're deliberate. What are the words under the dots?"

  Emily rummaged in her handbag for a piece of paper and a pen. "I wish I had an Urdu dictionary," she said.

  "Well, frankly, I don't think we're going to find one in this pub. Just do the best you can."

  She began to write, occasionally gazing off into space as a translation eluded her. Finally she put down the pen. "I might be mistaken," she said. "It doesn't make a lot of sense."

  "What's it say?"

  She pushed the piece of paper across the table toward Hal. "It says, 'All is in place."'

  The cop's instinct in Hal came boiling to the surface. The inmate had devised a plan for his escape which had involved destroying the building that held him and everyone inside it. This message was the equivalent of an all-systems-go signal.