Read The Summons for Free Online Page A

papers.”
    “I don’t see the papers. I’m a free man, John. I do as I like.”
    “Well, he bluffed his way through God knows how many electronically locked doors disguised as a police officer. To be fair to the prison staff there was a disturbance in one of the halls at the time. It hasn’t been established yet whether the trouble was started deliberately as a cover for the escape. Anyway, Mount joy had up to two hours’ start before the alarm was raised. He is either foolhardy or extremely cunning because instead of heading straight for the road he made his way toward the neighboring prison at Parkhurst, which you’ll know is just across a field from Albany. There, he visited the married quarters and stole a Metro belonging to a prison officer’s wife. It was found abandoned two days later at Bembridge.”
    “That’s an odd way to go. Isn’t Bembridge way out on the eastern tip of the Island?”
    “This man does nothing predictable. While all places north of Albany were being combed, he stole a small sailing dinghy, a Mirror, from outside a holiday cottage near the harbor.”
    “Lucky.”
    “Not really. He had the choice of several. People are slaphappy with their boats on the Island. The owner left all the gear on board. All Mountjoy had to do was wheel the thing down to the beach under cover of darkness, poke under the cover and take out the sails and rig it.”
    “Where did he learn to sail?”
    “Does it matter?” said Tott, betraying impatience.
    “It must have mattered to him when he launched the boat.”
    Wigfull said as if it shouldn’t be necessary to state the obvious, “He went to school at Eastbourne. Public school.”
    Diamond—the product of a grammar school—stoutly refused to take anything for granted. “Do they teach the boys to sail?”
    “Generally in Mirrors.”
    Wigfull’s inside knowledge of the public school system was matched by the expertise he had just acquired in sailing. “He must have launched it under cover of darkness, and sailed hard eastward. There was a flood tide during those nights that would tend to drag him toward Portsmouth and he actually navigated it across fifteen miles of sea to West Wittering.”
    “How do you know all this?”
    “The owner came down from London to shut up the cottage at Bembridge and found his boat missing. Bits of the hull have been found all along the foreshore at West Wittering. He might have assumed Mountjoy had drowned if a local farmer hadn’t found some sails and a lifejacket bundled in a hedge. Meanwhile there were search teams combing the Island between Albany and Cowes, every ferry was under observation and helicopters were patroling the Solent.”
    “And he made his way to Bath?”
    Wigfull gave a nod. “Everything I tell you now is under embargo. The media will have to hold off until we resolve it one way or another. Nothing was heard of Mountjoy for almost a week. Then yesterday evening a phone call was taken by the switchboard operator at the Royal Crescent Hotel. The caller was male, an educated voice. He told the girl to write down what he said and see that it reached the police as soon as possible. This is what we were given.” He handed across a sheet from a message pad with the Royal Crescent heading.
    Diamond gave it a glance intended at first to demonstrate his reluctance to be involved, but the sight of his name in the message was irresistible. He picked it up and read:
    Mr. Tott, for the girl’s sake, tell Diamond to be ready with a car tomorrow at 9 A.M. He is to be alone. No radio and no bugs and no one to follow. Remember I have nothing to lose.
    “The girl? Is it a kidnap, then?” Diamond said, and without letting his eyes meet Julie’s he went on blandly to ask, “Do we know who she is?”
    “My daughter Samantha,” said Tott, his voice breaking with emotion.
    “Ah.”
    After a deferential pause, Wigfull added, “Which is why we are so concerned.”
    “You’d be concerned whoever it was,”