Trust the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Simon clucked sympathetically.

  “He may have had moments with his boots off, you know. Or has your father taught you to believe nothing good of anyone who was ever born south of the Tweed?”

  “You must have thought it was terrible, the way he talked about Mr Bastion. And he’s so nice, isn’t he? It’s too bad he’s married!”

  “Maybe his wife doesn’t think so.”

  “I mean, I’m a normal girl and I’m not old-fashioned, and the one thing I do miss here is a man to fight off. In fact, I’m beginning to feel that if one did come along I wouldn’t even struggle.”

  “You sound as if that Scottish song was written about you,” said the Saint, and he sang softly:

  “Ilke lassie has her laddie,

  Ne’er a ane ha’ I;

  But all the lads they smile at me,

  Comin’ through the rye.”

  She laughed.

  “Well, at least you smiled at me, and that makes today look a little better.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “To work. I just walked over across the fields—it’s much shorter than by the lane.”

  Now that she mentioned it, he could see a glimpse of the Clanraith house between the trees. He turned and walked with her through the untidy little garden, towards the Bastions’ entrance.

  “I’m sorry that stops me offering to take you on a picnic.”

  “I don’t have any luck, do I? There’s a dance in Fort Augustus tomorrow night, and I haven’t been dancing for months, but I don’t know a soul who’d take me.”

  “I’d like to do something about that,” he said. “But it rather depends on what develops around here. Don’t give up hope yet, though.”

  As they entered the hall, Bastion came out of a back room and said, “Ah, good morning, Annie. There are some pages I was revising last night on my desk. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She went on into the room he had just come from, and he turned to the Saint.

  “I suppose you didn’t see anything.”

  “If we had, you’d’ve heard plenty of gunfire and hollering.”

  “Did you leave Eleanor down there?”

  “Yes. But I don’t think she’s in any danger in broad daylight. Did Mackenzie call?”

  “Not yet. I expect you’re anxious to hear from him. The telephone’s in the drawing room—why don’t you settle down there? You might like to browse through some of Eleanor’s collection of books about the Monster.”

  Simon accepted the suggestion, and soon found himself so absorbed that only his empty stomach was conscious of the time when Bastion came in and told him that lunch was ready. Mrs Bastion had already returned and was dishing up an agreeably aromatic lamb stew which she apologized for having only warmed up.

  “You were right, it was just routine,” she said. “A lot of waiting for nothing. But one of these days it won’t be for nothing.”

  “I was thinking about it myself, dear,” Bastion said, “and it seems to me that there’s one bad weakness in your eight-hour-a-day system. There are enough odds against you already in only being able to see about a quarter of the loch, which leaves the Monster another three-quarters where it could just as easily pop up. But on top of that, watching only eight hours out of the twenty-four only gives us a one-third chance of being there even if it does pop up within range of our observation post. That doesn’t add to the odds against us, it multiplies them.”

  “I know, but what can we do about it?”

  “Since Mr Templar pointed out that anyone should really be safe enough with a high-powered rifle in their hands and everyone else within call, I thought that three of us could divide up the watches and cover the whole day from before dawn till after dusk, as long as one could possibly see anything. That is, if Mr Templar would help out. I know he can’t stay here indefinitely, but—”

  “If it’ll make anybody feel better, I’d be glad to take a turn that way,” Simon said indifferently.

  It might have been more polite to sound more enthusiastic, but he could not make himself believe that the Monster would actually be caught by any such system. He was impatient for Mackenzie’s report, which he thought was the essential detail.

  The call came about two o’clock, and it was climactically negative.

  “The doctor canna find a trrace o’ drugs or poison in the puir animal.”

  Simon took a deep breath.

  “What did he think of its injuries?”

  “He said he’d ne’er seen the like o’ them. He dinna ken anything in the wurruld wi’ such crrushin’ power in its jaws as yon Monster must have. If ’twas no’ for the teeth marrks, he wad ha’ thocht it was done wi’ a club. But the autopsy makes that impossible.”

  “So I take it you figure that rules you officially out,” said the Saint bluntly. “But give me a number where I can call you if the picture changes again.”

  He wrote it down on a pad beside the telephone before he turned and relayed the report.

  “That settles it,” said Mrs Bastion. “It can’t be anything else but an Niseag. And we’ve got all the more reason to try Noel’s idea of keeping watch all day.”

  “I had a good sleep this morning, so I’ll start right away,” Bastion volunteered. “You’re entitled to a siesta.”

  “I’ll take over after that,” she said. “I want to be out there again at twilight. I know I’m monopolizing the most promising times, but this matters more to me than to anyone else.”

  Simon helped her with the dishes after they had had coffee, and then she excused herself.

  “I’ll be fresher later if I do take a little nap. Why don’t you do the same? It was awfully good of you to get up in the middle of the night with me.”

  “It sounds as if I won’t be needed again until later tomorrow morning,” said the Saint. “But I’ll be reading and brooding. I’m almost as interested in an Niseag now as you are.”

  He went back to the book he had left in the drawing room as the house settled into stillness. Annie Clanraith had already departed, before lunch, taking a sheaf of papers with her to type at home.

  Presently he put the volume down on his thighs and lay passively thinking, stretched out on the couch. It was his uniquely personal method of tackling profound problems, to let himself relax into a state of blank receptiveness in which half-subconscious impressions could grow and flow together in delicately fluid adjustments that could presently mould a conclusion almost as concrete as knowledge. For some time he gazed sightlessly at the ceiling, and then he continued to meditate with his eyes closed…

  He was awakened by Noel Bastion entering the room, humming tunelessly. The biographer of Wellington was instantly apologetic.

  “I’m sorry, Templar—I thought you’d be in your room.”

  “That’s all right.” Simon glanced at his watch, and was mildly surprised to discover how sleepy he must have been. “I was doing some thinking, and the strain must have been too much for me.”

  “Eleanor relieved me an hour ago. I hadn’t seen anything, I’m afraid.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I’m pretty quiet on my feet. Must be a habit I got from commando training. Eleanor often says that if she could stalk like me she’d have a lot more trophies.” Bastion went to the bookcase, took down a book, and thumbed through it for some reference. “I’ve been trying to do some work, but it isn’t easy to concentrate.”

  Simon stood up and stretched himself.

  “I guess you’ll have to get used to working under difficulties if you’re going to be a part-time monster hunter for ten years—isn’t that how long Eleanor said she was ready to spend at it?”

  “I’m hoping it’ll be a good deal less than that.”

  “I was reading in this book More Than A Legend that in 1934, when the excitement about the Monster was at its height, a chap named Sir Edward Mountain hired a bunch of men and organized a systematic watch like you were suggesting, but spacing them all
around the lake. It went on for a month or two, and they got a few pictures of distant splashings, but nothing that was scientifically accepted.”

  Bastion put his volume back on the shelf.

  “You’re still skeptical, aren’t you?”

  “What I’ve been wondering,” said the Saint, “is why this savage behemoth with the big sharp teeth and the nutcracker jaws chomped up a dog but didn’t swallow even a little nibble of it.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t carnivorous. An angry elephant will mash a man to a pulp, but it won’t eat him. And that dog could be very irritating, barking at everything—”

  “According to what I heard, there wasn’t any barking. And I’m sure the sheep it’s supposed to have taken didn’t bark. But the sheep disappeared entirely, didn’t it?”

  “That’s what Clanraith says. But for all we know, the sheep may have been stolen.”

  “But that could have given somebody the idea of building up the Monster legend from there.”

  Bastion shook his head.

  “But the dog did bark at everyone,” he insisted stubbornly.

  “Except the people he knew,” said the Saint, no less persistently. “Every dog is vulnerable to a few people. You yourself, for instance, if you’d wanted to, could have come along, and if he felt lazy he’d’ve opened one eye and then shut it again and gone back to sleep. Now, are you absolutely sure that nobody else was on those terms with him? Could a postman or a milkman have made friends with him? Or anyone else at all?”

  The other man massaged his mustache.

  “I don’t know…Well, perhaps Fergus Clanraith might.”

  Simon blinked.

  “But it sounded to me as if he didn’t exactly love the dog.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t. But it must have known him pretty well. Eleanor likes to go hiking across country, and the dog always used to go with her. She’s always crossing Clanraith’s property and stopping to talk to him, she tells me. She gets on very well with him, which is more than I do.”

  “What, that old curmudgeon?”

  “I know, he’s full of that Scottish Nationalist nonsense. But Eleanor is half Scots herself, and that makes her almost human in his estimation. I believe they talk for hours about salmon fishing and grouse shooting.”

  “I wondered if he had an appealing side hidden away somewhere,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “or if Annie got it all from her mother.”

  Bastion’s deep-set sooty eyes flickered over him appraisingly.

  “She’s rather an attractive filly, isn’t she?”

  “I have a feeling that to a certain type of man, in certain circumstances, and perhaps at a certain age, her appeal might be quite dangerous.”

  Noel Bastion had an odd expression of balancing some answer on the tip of his tongue, weighing it for advisability, changing his mind a couple of times about it, and finally swallowing it. He then tried to recover from the pause by making a business of consulting the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “Will you excuse me? Eleanor asked me to bring her a thermos of tea about now. She hates to miss that, even for an Niseag.”

  “Sure.”

  Simon followed him into the kitchen, where a kettle was already simmering on the black coal stove. He watched while his host carefully scalded a teapot and measured leaves into it from a canister.

  “You know, Major,” he said, “I’m not a detective by nature, even of the private variety.”

  “I know. In fact, I think you used to be just the opposite.”

  “That’s true, too. I do get into situations, though, where I have to do a bit of deducing, and sometimes I startle everyone by coming up with a brilliant hunch. But as a general rule, I’d rather prevent a crime than solve one. As it says in your kind of textbooks, a little preventive action can save a lot of counter-attacks.”

  The Major had poured boiling water into the pot with a steady hand, and was opening a vacuum flask while he waited for the brew.

  “You’re a bit late to prevent this one, aren’t you?—If it was a crime.”

  “Not necessarily. Not if the death of Golly was only a stepping-stone—something to build on the story of a missing sheep, and pave the way for the Monster’s next victim to be a person. If a person were killed in a similar way now, the Monster explanation would get a lot more believers than if it had just happened out of the blue.”

  Bastion put sugar and milk into the flask, without measuring, with the unhesitating positiveness of practise, and took the lid off the teapot to sniff and stir it.

  “But good heavens, Templar, who could treat a dog like that, except a sadistic maniac?”

  Simon lighted a cigarette. He was very certain now, and the certainty made him very calm.

  “A professional killer,” he said. “There are quite a lot of them around who don’t have police records. People whose temperament and habits have developed a great callousness about death. But they’re not sadists. They’re normally kind to animals and even to human beings, when it’s normally useful to be. But fundamentally they see them as expendable, and when the time comes they can sacrifice them quite impersonally.”

  “I know Clanraith’s a farmer, and he raises animals only to have them butchered,” Bastion said slowly. “But it’s hard to imagine him doing what you’re talking about, much as I dislike him.”

  “Then you think we should discard him as a red herring?”

  Bastion filled the thermos from the teapot, and capped it.

  “I’m hanged if I know. I’d want to think some more about it. But first I’ve got to take this to Eleanor.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said the Saint.

  He followed the other out of the back door. Outside, the dusk was deepening with a mistiness that was beginning to do more than the failing light to reduce visibility. From the garden, one could see into the orchard but not beyond it.

  “It’s equally hard for the ordinary man,” Simon continued relentlessly, “to imagine anyone who’s lived with another person as man and wife, making love and sharing the closest moments, suddenly turning around and killing the other one. But the prison cemeteries are full of ’em. And there are plenty more on the outside who didn’t get caught—or who are still planning it. At least half the time, the marriage has been getting a bit dull, and someone more attractive has come along. And then, for some idiotic reason, often connected with money, murder begins to seem cleverer than divorce.”

  Bastion slackened his steps, half turning to peer at Simon from under heavily contracted brows.

  “I’m not utterly dense, Templar, and I don’t like what you seem to be hinting at.”

  “I don’t expect you to, chum. But I’m trying to stop a murder. Let me make a confession. When you and Eleanor have been out or in bed at various times, I’ve done quite a lot of prying. Which may be a breach of hospitality, but it’s less trouble than search warrants. You remember those scratches in the ground near the dead dog which I said could’ve been made with something that wasn’t claws? Well, I found a gaff among somebody’s fishing tackle that could’ve made them, and the point had fresh shiny scratches and even some mud smeared on it which can be analyzed. I haven’t been in the attic and found an embalmed shark’s head with several teeth missing, but I’ll bet Mackenzie could find one. And I haven’t yet found the club with the teeth set in it, because I haven’t yet been allowed down by the lake alone, but I think it’s there somewhere, probably stuffed under a bush, and just waiting to be hauled out when the right head is turned the wrong way.”

  Major Bastion had come to a complete halt by that time.

  “You unmitigated bounder,” he said shakily. “Are you going to have the impertinence to suggest that I’m trying to murder my wife, to come into her money and run off with a farmer’s daughter? Let me tell you that I’m the one who has the private income, and—”

  “You poor feeble egotist,” Simon retorted harshly, “I didn’t suspect that for one second after she made herself rather cutely available
to me, a guest in your house. She obviously wasn’t stupid, and no girl who wasn’t would have gambled a solid understanding with you against a transient flirtation. But didn’t you ever read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Or the Kinsey Report? And hasn’t it dawned on you that a forceful woman like Eleanor, just because she isn’t a glamor girl, couldn’t be bored to frenzy with a husband who only cares about the campaigns of Wellington?”

  Noel Bastion opened his mouth, and his fists clenched, but whatever was intended to come from either never materialized. For at that moment came the scream.

  Shrill with unearthly terror and agony, it split the darkening haze with an eldritch intensity that seemed to turn every hair on the Saint’s nape into an individual icicle. And it did not stop, but ululated again and again in weird cadences of hysteria.

  For an immeasurable span they were both petrified, and then Bastion turned and began to run wildly across the meadow, towards the sound.

  “Eleanor!” he yelled, insanely, in a voice almost as piercing as the screams.

  He ran so frantically that the Saint had to call on all his reserves to make up for Bastion’s split-second start. But he did close the gap as Bastion stumbled and almost fell over something that lay squarely across their path. Simon had seen it an instant sooner, and swerved, mechanically identifying the steely glint that had caught his eye as a reflection from a long gun-barrel.

  And then, looking ahead and upwards, he saw through the blue fogginess something for which he would never completely believe his eyes, yet which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Something gray-black and scaly-slimy, an immense amorphous mass from which a reptilian neck and head with strange protuberances reared and swayed far up over him. And in the hideous dripping jaws something of human shape from which the screams came, that writhed and flailed ineffectually with a peculiar-looking club…

  With a sort of incoherent sob, Bastion scooped up the rifle at his feet and fired it. The horrendous mass convulsed, and into Simon’s eardrums, still buzzing from the heavy blast, came a sickening crunch that cut off the last shriek in the middle of a note.