Saint and the Fiction Makers by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

father an excuse to cancel out an eighty-thousand-pound trust fund just a year before it’s released to me. So long as I’m going to be rich, I might as well be filthy rich.’
    Simon laughed.
    ‘I appreciate that laudable ambition. Where do Mama and Papa think you are now? In finishing school?’
    ‘You are a flatterer,’ the girl said, tossing her hair. ‘I’m twenty-four years old, and schools almost finished me a long time ago. My mother’s dead, and my father’s too preoccupied with his own business to think very deeply about my location as long as I’m not in his way. I keep him satisfied with various stories. I get friends to mail him my letters from highly respectable places. Of course the friends don’t know what I’m really doing either. I spent the last three months with a girl friend in Italy who forwarded my mail and thought I was in Spain with a bullfighter.’
    ‘And all the time you were here,’ Simon said.
    She drained her glass.
    ‘Working like a galley slave. The nearest thing I’ve seen to a bullfighter is the postman dodging dogs on his bicycle.’
    ‘Which probably explains the frustrated look in your eyes, darling,’ he remarked.
    Darling met his mischievous grin with a determined frown.
    ‘Sir, if you’re going to take advantage of a lady’s loneliness, I shall have to ask you to leave and never break down my door again.’
    ‘You could look at it another way,’ the Saint suggested. ‘Maybe I’m the hero who’s going to rescue the damsel from the dark castle.’
    ‘Maybe so.’
    Her face had softened, but it immediately became more businesslike.
    ‘Now,’ she continued, ‘this is all lots of fun, but shouldn’t we get down to work?’
    ‘Fine,’ Simon agreed. ‘First, are your other doors and windows locked?’
    ‘Yes. But what a creepy thing to ask! Do you think somebody might try to kidnap me?’
    ‘Maybe you can tell me that. Frankly, the amount I know about this situation is so limited that my guesses would be just that—guesses. If there had been only one man in Hugoson’s apartment we’d at least have the possibility of some crackpot autograph hound carrying his hobby to completely nutty extremes. But there were at least two people, so that’s out. The other guesses involve newspapermen or unethical publishers, if you can believe that.’
    The Saint rested himself sidesaddle on the desk. The girl had shoved the dummy out of the armchair onto the floor and flopped down into the cushions herself.
    ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty far out.’
    ‘Any guess seems far out. Unless maybe this whole situation had nothing to do with you as an author at all. But if that were the case, why would the evil ones be tracking you down under the name of Amos Klein? If they were after ransom from your father, for instance, they’d have tried to trace you under your real name, whatever that is.’
    The girl wrinkled her nose.
    ‘You’re not going to tell me the real name?’ Simon asked. ‘I give my word not to let the world in on the secret. “Darling” is fine, but it could be slightly awkward if I had to introduce you.’
    ‘It’s Amity,’ she said, looking wretched. ‘Amity Little.’
    ‘Aha. I see where you got Amos Klein.’ Simon tried the sound of it, maintaining a strictly straight face. ‘Amity Little. Sounds like a missionary.’
    ‘My father’s notion,’ Amity said. ‘He’s a Quaker. You can see why I’m not terribly keen on telling people—nor on seeing it emblazoned on the jackets of thrillers.’
    ‘I do see, darling,’ said Simon. ‘Now, to get back to our theories before your mysterious admirers show up here, is it possible they could have started out with a plan to kidnap Amity Little for ransom from her loving father, and then accidentally discovered that Amity Little and Amos Klein were the same? That would seem to promise them even more profit—they could ask Hugoson for ransom as well. And of course one of the last