Ransom Game Read Online Free

brook. Wherever you went, you were followed by the sound of running water, which is not the easiest sound to live with when you’ve settled down to a good read. The carpets on the three floors were colourcoded, each being a slightly different shade of burnt orange. At the time the place opened, the Beacon carried a story about how the architect had been inspired by an empty egg-cup. I was glad that they’d brought people like Ella Beames over from the old place. You needed the human touch under those bright triangular lights.
    I found Ella at her desk in the Special Collections department. She handed me three boxes of microfilm and a key to the microfilm room. It took me less than twenty minutes to find it, and half that again to fit the film on the machine My machine was the only vacant viewer in a line of five. To an observer we might have been a bunch of paraplegic exiles from the magazine rack at the United.
    The Beacon had had a field day with the Warren case. Only a war could have filled more space. There was a profile of George Warren, the wealthy chairman of Archon Incorporated, one of the largest and most diversified conglomerates on the exchange. I found that the cornerstone of the Warren fortune was shoepolish. First Warren Blacking in Britain, where the first of the Warrens employed the youthful Charles Dickens as a bottle labeller near Hungerford Stairs on the Thames. Then Warren Shoepolish in North America at the time of the first World War. It was after the second that the big push came: a branching out into wider and wider fields. In the records of Archon, the holding company that linked all these fields to a common Bay Street address, George Warren’s name was prominent at the time, but in the most recent history his name was hard to find. For the ten years or so preceding the kidnapping, Warren appeared to have contrived to stay out of the papers.
    There was a picture of the large house he had built up on the Escarpment so that it looked down on the few thousand acres of prime real estate he owned through one of his minor holdings. Passing mention was made of his private yacht club, built out of pique after a disagreement with the local millionaires-only club on the Niagara River, his fleet of Lear jets, his private island in the Caribbean, and his beautiful daughter, Gloria, who had become the focus of a kidnapping drama. There’d been an older brother, killed in a car accident shortly before the kidnapping. There was rather less said about him than the others, and I made a mental note to find out why. Warren’s wife had divorced him for a handsome settlement a decade before and had quickly spent that and the remainder of her active life at the gambling tables in the south of France. Now she lived quietly in genteel poverty near Ste-Maxime.
    I got the feeling that the family had been out of bounds to reporters on the paper before Gloria Warren’s abduction. I wasn’t surprised to see that Archon Incorporated owned the Beacon . Most of the pictures looked about thirty years old and came from out-of-town sources. Several showed the summer cottage at Dittrick Lake, a fashionable piece of vacation-land not far from Grantham. The paper’s artist had had a good time marking an X where the door to the frame cottage had been forced, arrows where the kidnappers’ car had been parked and more arrows and dotted lines criss-crossing maps of the whole territory involved in the case.
    Gloria had been staying for the long Labour Day weekend at the lakeside cottage. Her friend, Robert H. Jarman, had driven up for the day to go waterskiing with her. When they returned from the wharf to the cottage, about twenty yards distant, Gloria, entering the house first, was grabbed from behind. At the same moment, Jarman was sapped on the head. Neither saw a face. Jarman woke up tied hand and foot in the kitchen of the cottage with the ransom demand pinned to his beach robe. Immediately he got loose,