A little further on the woods became more sparse, and the crude road wound up the side of a hill. At the top of the hill was one of those broken-down castles which do so much to enhance the beauty of Irish tourist brochures.
Simon could see its single round tower black against the shredded clouds of the faintly luminous sky. With the lights of his car off, he drove to the edge of a grove which was within easy walking distance of the castle, but was far enough away that no one on top of the hill could have heard the sound of his engine or the careful opening and closing of the door.
The Saint stood for a minute looking up the slope at the crumbled heap of stone. If Brine or his partner had discovered the paint can on the bumper of the car, there could be trouble. The run up to the castle could be diversionary, and Simon would find that the white spots of paint led right off down the other side. That would mean, at the least, the loss of precious time. Worse, if Brine was on to the fact that he was being tailed, he could be lying in ambush somewhere among the broken walls above. But the Saint preferred to think that luck would stay with him. There was, after all, no logical reason for Brine to walk around and take a look at the rear of his car.
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 distance 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 someone 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 better 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 archway. 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 attaché 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 encounter 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 fivers, 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 myself.”
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, between them and freedom.
“Hello, friends,” he said, with a pleasant smile.