Trust the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  It took a little while for him to convince himself that the Inspector’s straight face was not part of an elaborate exercise in Highland humor.

  “What has the Monster done that’s illegal?” Simon inquired at length, with a gravity to match Mackenzie’s own.

  “A few weeks ago, it’s thocht to haf eaten a sheep. And last night it may ha’ killed a dog.”

  “Where was this?”

  “The sheep belonged to Fergus Clanraith, who has a farm by the loch beyond Foyers, and the dog belongs to his neighbours, a couple named Bastion from doon in England who settled here last summer. ’Tis only aboot twenty miles away, if ye could spairr the time to run doon the road with me.”

  The Saint sighed. In certain interludes, he thought that everything had already happened to him that could befall a man even with his exceptional gift for stumbling into fantastic situations and being offered bizarre assignments, but apparently there was always some still more preposterous imbroglio waiting to entangle him.

  “Okay,” he said resignedly. “I’ve been slugged with practically every other improbability you could raise an eyebrow at, so why should I draw the line at dog-slaying monsters. Lay on, Macduff.”

  “The name is Mackenzie,” said the Inspector seriously.

  Simon paid his hotel bill and took his own car, for he had been intending to continue his pleasantly aimless wandering that day anyhow, and it would not make much difference to him where he stopped along the way. He followed Mackenzie’s somewhat venerable chariot out of Inverness on the road that takes the east bank of the Ness River, and in a few minutes the slaty grimness of the town had been gratefully forgotten in the green and gold loveliness of the countryside.

  The road ran at a fairly straight tangent to the curves of the river and the Caledonian Canal, giving only infrequent glimpses of the seven locks built to lift shipping to the level of the lake, until at Dores he had his first view of Loch Ness at its full breadth.

  The Great Glen of Scotland transects the country diagonally from north-east to south-west, as if a giant had tried to break off the upper end of the land between the deep natural notches formed by Loch Linnhe and the Beauly Firth. On the map which Simon had seen, the chain of lochs stretched in an almost crow-flight line that had made him look twice to be sure that there was not in fact a clear channel across from the Eastern to the Western Sea. Loch Ness itself, a tremendous trough twenty-four miles long but only averaging about a mile in width, suggested nothing more than an enlargement of the Canal system which gave access to it at both ends. But not many vessels seemed to avail themselves of the passage, for there was no boat in sight on the lake that afternoon. With the water as calm as a mill-pond and the fields and trees rising from its shores to a blue sky dappled with soft woolly clouds, it was as pretty as a picture postcard and utterly unconvincing to think of as a place which might be haunted by some outlandish horror from the mists of antiquity.

  For a drive of twenty minutes, at the sedate pace set by Mackenzie, the highway paralleled the edge of the loch a little way up its steep stony banks. The opposite shore widened slightly into the tranquil beauty of Urquhart Bay with its ancient castle standing out gray and stately on the far point, and then returned to the original almost uniform breadth. Then, within fortunately brief sight of the unpicturesque aluminum works, it bore away to the south through the small stark village of Foyers and went winding up the glen of one of the tumbling streams that feed the lake.

  Several minutes further on, Mackenzie turned off into a narrow side road that twisted around and over a hill and swung down again, until suddenly the loch was spread out squarely before them once more and the lane curled past the first of two houses that could be seen standing solitarily apart from each other but each within a bowshot of the loch. Both of them stood out with equal harshness against the gentle curves and colors of the landscape with the same dark graceless austerity as the last village or the last town or any other buildings Simon had seen in Scotland, a country whose unbounded natural beauty seemed to have inspired no corresponding artistry in its architects, but rather to have goaded them into competition to offset it with the most contrasting ugliness into which bricks and stone and tile could be assembled. This was a paradox to which he had failed to fit a plausible theory for so long that he had finally given up trying.

  Beside the first house, a man in a stained shirt and corduroy trousers tucked into muddy canvas leggings was digging in a vegetable garden. He looked up as Mackenzie brought his rattletrap to a stop, and walked slowly over to the hedge. He was short but powerfully built, and his hair flamed like a stormy sunset.

  Mackenzie climbed out and beckoned to the Saint. As Simon reached them, the red-haired man was saying, “Aye, I’ve been over and seen what’s left o’ the dog. It’s more than they found of my sheep, I can tell ye.”

  “But could it ha’ been the same thing that did it?” asked the Inspector.

  “That’s no’ for me to say, Mackenzie. I’m no’ a detective. But remember, it wasna me who said the Monster took my sheep. It was the Bastions who thocht o’ that, it might be to head me off from askin’ if they hadn’t been the last to see it—pairhaps on their own Sunday dinner table. There’s nae such trick I wouldna put beyond the Sassenach.”

  Mackenzie introduced them, “This is Mr Clanraith, whom I was tellin’ ye aboot. Fergus, I’d like ye to meet Mr Templar, who may be helpin’ me to investigate these goings-on.”

  Clanraith gave Simon a muscular and horny grip across the untrimmed hedge, appraising him shrewdly from under shaggy ginger brows.

  “Ye dinna look like a policeman, Mr Templar.”

  “I try not to,” said the Saint expressionlessly. “Did you mean by what you were just saying that you don’t believe in the Monster at all?”

  “I didna say that.”

  “Then apart from anything else, you think there might actually be such a thing.”

  “There might.”

  “Living where you do, I should think you’d have as good a chance as anyone of seeing it yourself—if it does exist.”

  The farmer peered at Simon suspiciously.

  “Wad ye be a reporrter, Mr Templar, pairhaps?”

  “No, I’m not,” Simon assured him, but the other remained obdurately wary.

  “When a man tells o’ seem’ monsters, his best friends are apt to wonder if he may ha’ taken a wee drop too much. If I had seen anything, ever, I wadna be talkin’ aboot it to every stranger, to be made a laughin’-stock of.”

  “But ye’ll admit,” Mackenzie put in, “it’s no’ exactly normal for a dog to be chewed up and killed the way this one was.”

  “I wull say this,” Clanraith conceded guardedly. “It’s strange that nobody hairrd the dog bark, or e’en whimper.”

  Through the Saint’s mind flickered an eerie vision of something amorphous and loathsome oozing soundlessly out of night-blackened water, flowing with obscene stealth towards a hound that slept unwarned by any of its senses.

  “Do you mean it mightn’t’ve had a chance to let out even a yip?”

  “I’m not sayin’,” Clanraith maintained cautiously. “But it was a guid watchdog, if naught else.”

  A girl had stepped out of the house and come closer while they talked. She had Fergus Clanraith’s fiery hair and greenish eyes, but her skin was pink and white where his was weather-beaten and her lips were full where his were tight. She was half a head taller than he, and her figure was slim where it should be.

  Now she said, “That’s right. He even barked whenever he heard me coming, although he saw me every day.”

  Her voice was low and well-modulated, with only an attractive trace of her father’s accent.

  “Then if it was a pairrson wha killed him, Annie, ’twad only mean it was a body he was still more used to.”

  “But you can’t really believe that any human being would do a thing like that to a dog that knew them—least of all to their own dog!”

  “That’s the
trouble wi’ lettin’ a lass be brocht up an’ schooled on the wrong side o’ the Tweed,” Clanraith said darkly. “She forgets what the English ha’ done to honest Scotsmen no’ so lang syne.”

  The girl’s eyes had kept returning to the Saint with candid interest, and it was to him that she explained, smiling, “Father still wishes he could fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie. He’s glad to let me do part-time secretarial work for Mr Bastion because I can live at home and keep house as well, but he still feels I’m guilty of fraternizing with the Enemy.”

  “We’d best be gettin’ on and talk to them ourselves,” Mackenzie said. “And then we’ll see if Mr Templar has any more questions to ask.”

  There was something in Annie Clanraith’s glance which seemed to say that she hoped that he would, and the Saint was inclined to be of the same sentiment. He had certainly not expected to find anyone so decorative in the cast of characters, and he began to feel a tentative quickening of optimism about this interruption in his travels. He could see her in his rear-view mirror, still standing by the hedge and following him with her gaze after her father had turned back to his digging.

  About three hundred yards and a few bends farther on, Mackenzie veered between a pair of stone gate posts and chugged to a standstill on the circular driveway in front of the second house. Simon stopped behind him and then strolled after him to the front door, which was opened almost at once by a tall thin man in a pullover and baggy gray flannel slacks.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said the detective courteously. “I’m Inspector Mackenzie from Inverness. Are ye Mr Bastion?”

  “Yes.”

  Bastion had a bony face with a long aquiline nose, lank black hair flecked with gray, and a broad toothbrush mustache that gave him an indeterminately military appearance. His black eyes flickered to the Saint inquiringly.

  “This is Mr Templar, who may be assistin’ me,” Mackenzie said. “The constable who was here this morning told me all aboot what ye showed him on the telephone, but could we hae a wee look for ourselves?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. Will you come this way?”

  The way was around the house, across an uninspired formal garden at the back which looked overdue for the attention of a gardener, and through a small orchard beyond which a stretch of rough grass sloped quickly down to the water. As the meadow fell away, a pebbly beach came into view, and Simon saw that this was one of the rare breaches in the steep average angle of the loch’s sides. On either side of the little beach the ground swelled up again to form a shallow bowl that gave an easy natural access to the lake. The path that they traced led to a short rustic pier with a shabby skiff tied to it, and on the ground to one side of the pier was something covered with potato sacking.

  “I haven’t touched anything, as the constable asked me,” Bastion said. “Except to cover him up.”

  He bent down and carefully lifted off the burlap.

  They looked down in silence at what was uncovered.

  “The puir beastie,” Mackenzie said at last.

  It had been a large dog of confused parentage in which the Alsatian may have predominated. What had happened to it was no nicer to look at than it is to catalog. Its head and hind quarters were partly mashed to a red pulp, and plainly traceable across its chest was a row of slot-like gashes, each about an inch long and close together, from which blood had run and clotted in the short fur. Mackenzie squatted and stretched the skin with gentle fingers to see the slits more clearly. The Saint also felt the chest: it had an unnatural contour where the line of punctures crossed it, and his probing touch found only sponginess where there should have been a hard cage of ribs.

  His eyes met Mackenzie’s across the pitifully mangled form.

  “That would be quite a row of teeth,” he remarked.

  “Aye,” said the Inspector grimly. “But what lives here that has a mouth like that?”

  They straightened up and surveyed the immediate surroundings. The ground here, only a stride or two from the beach, which in turn was less than a yard wide, was so moist that it was soggy, and pockets of muddy liquid stood in the deeper indentations with which it was plentifully rumpled. The carpet of coarse grass made individual impressions difficult to identify, but three or four shoe-heel prints could be positively distinguished.

  “I’m afraid I made a lot of those tracks.” Bastion said. “I know you’re not supposed to go near anything, but all I could think of at the time was seeing if he was still alive and if I could do anything for him. The constable tramped around a bit too, when he was here.” He pointed past the body. “But neither of us had anything to do with those marks there.”

  Close to the beach was a place where the turf looked as if it had been raked by something with three gigantic claws. One talon had caught in the roots of a tuft of grass and torn it up bodily: the clump lay on the pebbles at the water’s edge. Aside from that, the claws had left three parallel grooves, about four inches apart and each about half an inch wide. They dug into the ground at their upper ends to a depth of more than two inches, and dragged back towards the lake for a length of about ten inches as they tapered up.

  Simon and Mackenzie stood on the pebbles to study the marks, Simon spanning them experimentally with his fingers while the detective took more exact measurements with a tape and entered them in his notebook.

  “Anything wi’ a foot big enough to carry claws like that,” Mackenzie said, “I’d no’ wish to ha’ comin after me.”

  “Well, they call it a Monster, don’t they?” said the Saint dryly. “It wouldn’t impress anyone if it made tracks like a mouse.”

  Mackenzie unbent his knees stiffly, shooting the Saint a distrustful glance, and turned to Bastion. “When did ye find all this, sir?” he asked.

  “I suppose it was about six o’clock,” Bastion said. “I woke up before dawn and couldn’t get to sleep again, so I decided to try a little early fishing. I got up as soon as it was light—”

  “Ye didna hear any noise before that?”

  “No.”

  “It couldna ha’ been the dog barkin’ that woke ye?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. And my wife is a very light sleeper, and she didn’t hear anything. But I was rather surprised when I didn’t see the dog outside. He doesn’t sleep in the house, but he’s always waiting on the doorstep in the morning. However, I came on down here—and that’s how I found him.”

  “And you didn’t see anything else?” Simon asked. “In the lake, I mean.”

  “No. I didn’t see the Monster. And when I looked for it, there wasn’t a ripple on the water. Of course, the dog may have been killed some time before, though his body was still warm.”

  “Mr Bastion,” Mackenzie said, “do ye believe it was the Monster that killed him?”

  Bastion looked at him and at the Saint.

  “I’m not a superstitious man,” he replied. “But if it wasn’t a monster of some kind, what else could it have been?”

  The Inspector closed his notebook with a snap that seemed to be echoed by his clamping lips. It was evident that he felt that the situation was wandering far outside his professional province. He scowled at the Saint as though he expected Simon to do something about it.

  “It might be interesting,” Simon said thoughtfully, “if we got a vet to do a post-mortem.”

  “What for?” Bastion demanded brusquely.

  “Let’s face it,” said the Saint. “Those claw marks could be fakes. And the dog could have been mashed up with some sort of club—even a club with spikes set in it to leave wounds that’d look as if they were made by teeth. But by all accounts, no one could have got near enough to the dog to do that without him barking. Unless the dog was doped first. So before we go overboard on this Monster theory, I’d like to rule everything else out. An autopsy would do that.”

  Bastion rubbed his scrubby mustache.

  “I see your point. Yes. that might be a good idea.”

  He helped them to shift the dog on to the sack which ha
d previously covered it, and Simon and Mackenzie carried it between them back to the driveway and laid it in the trunk of the detective’s car.

  “D’ye think we could ha’ a wurrd wi’ Mrs Bastion, sir?” Mackenzie asked, wiping his hands on a clean rag and passing it to the Saint.

  “I suppose so,” Bastion assented dubiously. “Although she’s pretty upset about this, as you can imagine. It was really her dog more than mine. But come in, and I’ll see if she’ll talk to you for a minute.”

  But Mrs Bastion herself settled that by meeting them in the hall, and she made it obvious that she had been watching them from a window.

  “What are they doing with Golly, Noel?” she greeted her husband wildly. “Why are they taking him away?”

  “They want to have him examined by a doctor, dear.”

  Bastion went on to explain why, until she interrupted him again:

  “Then don’t let them bring him back. It’s bad enough to have seen him the way he is, without having to look at him dissected.” She turned to Simon and Mackenzie. “You must understand how I feel. Golly was like a son to me. His name was really Goliath—I called him that because he was so big and fierce, but actually he was a pushover when you got on the right side of him.”

  Words came from her in a driving torrent that suggested the corollary of a powerhouse. She was a big-boned strong-featured woman who made no attempt to minimize any of her probable forty-five years. Her blond hair was unwaved and pulled back into a tight bun, and her blue eyes were set in a nest of wrinkles that would have been called characterful on an outdoor man. Her lipstick, which needed renewing, had a slapdash air of being her one impatient concession to feminine artifice. But Bastion put a soothing arm around her as solicitously as if she had been a dimpled bride.

  “I’m sure these officers will have him buried for us, Eleanor,” he said. “But while they’re here I think they wanted to ask you something.”

  “Only to confairrm what Mr Bastion told us, ma’m,” said Mackenzie. “That ye didna hear any disturrbance last night.”