L. C.
The dizzy daughter{Adapted by Fleming Lee
Original story by D. R. Motton
Teleplay by Leigh Vance}
1
The golden sun grew fat in its old age, and as it sank low over the distant Irish hills the whole countryside seemed to share in the hush of its going. There was no breeze. The birds were still, and even the stream, moving deep and slow between green banks, made scarcely a murmur. Only now and then a trout, striking at some floating insect in the shallows, would break the silence with a sudden splash whose purl quickly smoothed and silently vanished.
Simon Templar stood tall and lean by the water, his blue eyes watching the surface for signs of trout within range of his line. An ambiguous swirl downstream failed to distract him. He had chosen this pool because instinct — sharpened by a lifetime of hunting human prey, and not rarely being hunted himself — told him that in this widening of the stream would be lurking a prize worthy of his time and skill.
So he waited, poised and strong, his rod held ready.
That the man known somewhat incongruously as the Saint should be found in such peaceful surroundings was unusual. (His true character was better described by another of his informal appellations, voiced by police officers and criminals with equal unease, the Robin Hood of Modern Crime.) That such peace should last long, even in rural Kildare, half an hour’s drive from Dublin, was inconceivable, for the Saint could no more escape adventure than a fish could escape its brook and stroll off across the fields, and in general he had no desire to do so.
But even a man whose natural medium is excitement occasionally wants a change of pace, and for the moment Simon Templar wanted and had found it — though his sixth sense, nagging like the faintly expanding sound of a speeding car in the distance, warned him to enjoy it thoroughly now before his fated propensity for trouble swung the balance back to normal.
The Saint had driven into Dublin on the previous afternoon with the plan of meeting an old friend, the soldier of fortune, Patrick Kelly, at the Gresham Hotel, spending the night there, while Kelly enjoyed a reunion with comrades-at-arms, and then going out to Kelly’s house in the country seventy miles west for two or three days of fishing.
All had gone as planned up to and including Kelly’s enjoyment of his reunion, in which he had insisted Simon take part. But Kelly’s enjoyment had been so immense, and celebrated with such grand libations of porter and thrice-distilled Gaelic fire, that he had found himself disinclined to go on with the rest of the schedule when Simon wakened him by house phone at noon. He had found himself unready, in fact, to leave his hotel bed, and had announced in that brief interval between prolonged periods of unconsciousness that the drive to his cottage would have to be delayed at least until evening — and since they would be paying for another night in the hotel anyway, probably until the next morning.
The Saint, after a one p.m. brunch, had gone on out into the country for two reasons: he was in the mood for fishing, and he did not want to spend the afternoon near the hotel, where he would almost inevitably get involved in somebody else’s problems. Among Pat Kelly’s more exuberant activities of the night before, once he got to the table-pounding stage, had been the repeated proud bellowing of Simon’s name not only in the Cocktail Bar of the Gresham, but also in numerous other places along the streets of Dublin’s fair city. Such widespread advertising of the Saint’s presence was a virtual guarantee that he would not have been able to spend an afternoon in town undisturbed by some stranger.
Near the center of the stream the surface swirled, and a slowly waving tail broke the orange-gold reflections of overhanging trees. The Saint made a perfect cast upstream of the fish. The brightly colored fly drifted with the current toward the target of concentric ripples made by the trout’s rising, and Simon carefully reeled in just enough of the floating line to insure control if the big fish struck.
The sound of the fast-moving automobile which a few moments before had been almost imperceptible was now much closer. Tires squealed less than two hundred yards away. The only road in the vicinity followed the stream where Simon was fishing, and he was standing within thirty feet of a sharp curve in the pavement. He was not worried about his own safety, however, but about his car, which was parked on the shoulder between road and stream and could easily be demolished if the speeder overshot the turn.
Irish country roads are not made for fast travel. Cars are few, carts and sheep are plentiful, and a normal brisk driving speed is thirty-five miles per hour. So it was particularly irritating to Simon that some maniac had chosen this stretch of asphalt on which to attempt suicide, and that the aberration had to occur just when a rising trout begged for all his concentration.
Once the racing car hit the curve, there was nothing Simon could do but jerk the fly from the very mouth of the expectant fish and prepare to dodge a hurtling ton of metal. It was a green Volkswagen, and it skidded with an anguished howl of scorching rubber, rear end swinging as the driver narrowly missed Simon’s car by slamming on brakes and heading for the old stone wall on the opposite side of the road. Then to avoid smashing into the wall the driver made an immediate sudden turn back toward the outside of the curve. The Volkswagen pirouetted completely around on all four wheels as if it had been on ice, miraculously failed to turn over, left the road, and skidded toward the stream, its locked rear wheels plowing up turf, and came to a halt between two trees without hitting either.
As Simon strode toward it, his rod still in hand, the engine was dead, and the driver, a girl, was slumped forward over the wheel. But, before he had covered half the distance between them, she looked up suddenly with terror in her eyes, and it was obvious that she had been shaken rather than knocked unconscious.
She was young — scarcely nineteen, Simon estimated on first sight — and the deep brown eyes that were fixed on him were extraordinarily large. Her chestnut hair was chopped short, her mouth was small and provocative, her nose pert and uptilted.
The Saint realized instantly that neither the acrobatics of her car nor his own appearance — which considering his frame of mind probably had a rather threatening aspect — was the cause of the stark fear on her pretty face. After the initial moment of staring at him, she looked up the road in the direction from which she had come, grabbed at the door handle, and scrambled out of her car.
It was then that Simon heard the second car rushing nearer, with the same screech of tires on curves which had preceded the arrival of the girl, and realized that it was the apparent cause of her panic.
“Le Mans is that way,” he said helpfully, gesturing with his fishing rod. “You must have missed a turn somewhere.”
“Please!” she cried. “Help me!”
She was hurrying toward him, the short tight skirt of her stylish suit restricting her legs, her stiletto heels stabbing into the damp earth of the stream’s bank.
“Help you do what?” he asked. “Change tires for the next stretch? I’m sorry, but I don’t have much sympathy for anybody who...”
“They’ll get me,” she gasped, stumbling up to him and clutching his arms. “Hide me. Do something.”
She was a foot shorter than the Saint, and had to look almost straight up to meet his skeptical blue eyes at that close range.
“This reminds me of a movie I saw once,” he said blandly. “Except there the girl kissed the stranger and said, ‘Please don’t look up — hold me!’ and then along came...”