You, Simpson!
Now, listen you! Now the price is double, just for you clowns trying to be cute! Here’s the last word! Twenty thousand pounds in an overnight bag on the platform of the East Westerly station at 11:58 tonight! We don’t care how you raise the money, but raise it, or you’ll be reading about your friends’ bodies being dumped from a speeding car in tomorrow’s papers!
Again, understandably, there was no signature, but this time, contrary to the last time, there had been no attempt to disguise the handwriting, and as a result Simpson was able to get the gist of the letter with less difficulty.
He pursed his lips and frowned. The tone of the letter, it seemed to him, was distinctly unfriendly, far more so than the first missive, and Simpson could only surmise that Tim Briggs had probably said or done something to irritate the writer. It would not be the first time Briggs had acted that way. And not only was the note, in his opinion, rather brusque — if not outright rude — but it also raised the ransom demand from ten to twenty thousand pounds. But certainly, if they had been unable to pay the ten thousand pounds, what on earth made the dear man think they could now come up with twenty thousand?
He read the note a second time, and frowned again. He could easily picture Briggs’s small body being dumped from a speeding car — although he hoped the kidnapers realized that speeding was illegal on many highways, not to mention dumping — but he doubted the kidnaper’s ability to make good his threat in the case of the more corpulent Carruthers. Still, even one friendly body dumped from a car, even within the legal speed limit, and even where dumping was permitted, was obviously one too many. Besides, it was possible the man was merely using the dumping of bodies from speeding cars as hyperbole, when he actually had a much less dramatic plan for their disposal in his mind. Hyperbole, to demonstrate a point, and if not used to excess, was quite acceptable in writing, as Simpson well knew; he had used it frequently in those days when he was writing novels. He remembered well, in his book Death by Dying, where he had his villain, one Orville Smurch, in the process of tying the heiress to the railroad tracks, tell her that in minutes she would look like a plate of sautéed — Simpson brought himself back to earth with a start, ashamed of his mental lapse in view of the direness of his friends’ predicament. This was certainly no time for daydreaming! Get on with it! Tackle the problem! Concentrate! Resolve!
But, how...?
For one brief moment he considered seeking the help of the most intelligent person he knew, Sir Percival Pugh, but he put that thought out of mind almost instantly. If they couldn’t pay the kidnaper, where on earth would they ever get the funds with which to pay Sir Percival, who was probably ten times more exigent than any kidnaper when it came to collecting fees? No, Simpson said sadly to himself, he supposed there was nothing for it except to go up to East Westerly himself, and try to explain the situation.
He fished in his pockets and came up with a few shillings and fewer pence. Scarcely enough for one-way fare, let alone a return. He thought a moment and then nodded. In his rooms he had the cardboard insert from a shirt that had recently come back from the laundry (and, he reminded himself, that was another bill that required payment! And people asking for twenty thousand quid just like that, as if money grew on trees! Although it would be pleasant if it did. Imagine a tree bearing one-pound notes! With his height he could easily beat any other four pickers, fill a basket while they were still trying to find a ladder...). With a start he brought himself back to the present. That cardboard insert was the same consistency, as he recalled, as the stuff from which they made train tickets. Now, if he could remember the size of a normal ticket, he could cut a duplicate out of that cardboard. A little crayon for the numbers and those inexplicable lines they put on railway tickets for no reason at all, and certainly at night, when most guards were sleepy, or preoccupied with wondering why their mates got all the good working hours, he should be able to pass it off as legitimate. He had used that ploy in a book once, as he recalled. Was it The Mayfair Molester? Or Love on the Guillotine?
He realized he was daydreaming again, and rose hurriedly to his feet. Then he sat down again. He had most of the day and half the night before he had to appear on the East Westerly platform, and he might as well spend most of those hours here. His rooms were on the way to Euston Station, and he was sure he knew exactly where he had that bit of crayon — in a shoe, he believed, or back of the clock — so what was the rush? It was in just such a rush, as he recalled, that his hero, Maxwell Valiant, nearly came to grief in his book Tunnel of Hate. Or was it Three Fathoms High...?
Chapter 10
Clarence W. Alexander, once again standing on the deserted platform of the East Westerly railroad station as the clock approached midnight — and beginning to feel like a native of the place — was a bit sorry, now that he had time to consider it, that he had demanded the full twenty thousand pounds from Clifford Simpson. Twenty thousand pounds, in his estimation, was a lot of money to pay for two old men whose main pursuits in life, apparently, were to eat and drink. Clarence knew, for example, that had he himself been the surviving member of the trio, he would no more pay twenty thousand pounds for the release of the other two than he would have gambled with someone else’s dice. In fact, were he the surviving member, he would accept the kidnaping of the other two as an act of God, cash in as quickly as he could, and be on the next plane for distant parts, just in case either of the others survived.
On that basis he had a chilling feeling that Clifford Simpson would not appear, and that this trip of his to East Westerly had been unnecessary. That “one-for-all-and-all-for-one” malarkey was probably just so much newspaper talk; Simpson was undoubtably congratulating himself on his good fortune at the moment, and probably thanking his unknown benefactor — if he was anything like his two friends — with a glass in his hand.
In fact, Clarence had come so close to convincing himself he was wasting his time, that only the mournful hoot of the eleven fifty-eight, warning of its impending arrival, kept him from leaving the platform at once. But seeing the wavering lights of the train approaching, he decided to stick around for a few more moments, and he was therefore quite pleasantly surprised to see the tall cadaverous figure of Clifford Simpson actually emerge from the last door of the train with an overnight case in his hand. A moment later the case had been put down, but there the desired scenario ended; rather than retreat to the train, Simpson, like Briggs, remained standing beside the case, until once again the train, not yet thoroughly rested but aware of the demands of schedule, put its weary bones in motion and limped from the station.
Oh no! Clarence thought. Not again! With a sigh of resignation he came from the shadows.
“Mr. Simpson, I suppose?”
“That’s ‘Mr. Simpson, I presume,’ I presume,” Simpson said, and beamed down at the smaller man. “And speaking of presumptions, I gather you are the kidnaper?”
Clarence glared and looked around in the darkness. It was not the type of greeting he would have preferred, but fortunately the platform remained deserted, nor did it appear there were any persons within earshot, or even beyond earshot, if it came to that. He turned back to see that Simpson had picked up the overnight bag in the meanwhile and was waiting, a pleasant anticipatory smile on his somewhat horselike face.
“Now, you look here, skinny!” Clarence said grimly, with a feeling he had done the scene on stage many times before and would probably be condemned to repeat it endlessly until ticket sales weakened, or the theater burned down. “Why don’t you just hand me that overnight bag and get on the next train to London? And go beddy-bye? And save us all a lot of trouble?”