Ransom Game Read Online Free Page A

he telephoned George Warren. He and Warren knew one another, but Jarman wasn’t one of the family circle, I gathered. They contacted the Regional Police here in Grantham, and they brought in the Provincial Police because the lake was in their part of the forest. A joint war-room was established, the ransom note was studied and the police advised Warren to pretend to go along with the ransom demand. The kidnappers promised to return the girl unharmed on the payment of one million dollars. Warren was told to be at a certain public telephone booth in a crowded Grantham shopping mall at a certain time. He was warned not to go to the police, and told that his movements were being watched at all times. Very, very neat.
    Warren and Jarman took the money in two suitcases to the phone booth. They only brought five hundred thousand, which was haggling a little, I thought. The kidnappers could take it or leave it and kill the girl. Warren figured they’d jump for five hundred and take their licking like the honest hoods they were. Warren had raised the money through a bank he directed on the side. Jarman got to carry it. The police stood by in unmarked cars, but might as well have been disguised in T-shirts bearing the Inscription Police Athletic Club. A bugging device had been placed in one of the suitcases so that the bad guys could be traced and followed by the modern miracle of electronic tracking. Only somebody forgot to put in fresh batteries or something, and the modern miracle gave way to road blocks and tracking dogs on loan from the Provincial Police. At least they used real money. The temptation to use cut-up strips of paper instead must have been all but irresistible.
    â€œWe could have used phoney money,” a senior policeman explained, “but anything could have happened. How much money is a woman’s life worth?” I hope he asked George Warren that one. Not a cent over half a million.
    Soon the money was exchanged. Again, nobody saw anybody. Warren and Jarman were told to move to another country phone booth and there they were given instructions about where to drop the money and where to go to discover the missing girl. They found her wrapped up in a sleeping bag, trussed up like Sunday dinner, in an abandoned shed, an hour’s drive from where the pick-up was made. She was unharmed if you overlook a little shock and dehydration. She didn’t see a face or hear a word. There was a photograph of her with her head lowered and Jarman protecting her with one arm and making an ugly gesture at the camera with the other. His was a face you wouldn’t want to meet coming the opposite way along a cinder path.
    With the failure of the electronic bugging device, the police sealed off all highways and secondary roads within the Niagara Peninsula. They searched thousands of cars, upsetting countless tourists homeward-bound after the long holiday weekend. When the cops began getting their breaks they came from tips. There were lots of those, but in the end one of them paid off. Someone drew their attention to some swinging bachelors who met regularly in Suite 616 of the Norton Apartments. After a few discreet calls, a few questions. and answers, one group of men was isolated. In less than two weeks the four kidnappers were in custody. In three months, they had begun serving long sentences in Kingston Penitentiary.
    Crime doesn’t pay. Except that somewhere on the Niagara Peninsula, probably not twenty or thirty miles from where I was sitting, half a million dollars lay bundled up in two suitcases, just waiting to be picked up. I wondered whether I’d missed the item about the recovery of the money, but I hadn’t. The money was still there all right, and only Johnny Rosa knew where to pick it up. I could get interested in Johnny myself with big bucks like that riding just over the top of the next hill.
    That’s the sap of what I found in the main newspaper clippings. Then there were notices