The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “That’s a pretty useful line of dope, Wilfred,” he murmured huskily. “How did you do it?”

  Garniman was folding up his handkerchief and returning it to his pocket, working with slow meticulous hands.

  “The pressure of your head on the back of the chair released the gas,” he replied calmly. “It’s an idea of my own—I have always been prepared to have to entertain undesirable visitors. The lightest pressure is sufficient.”

  Simon nodded.

  “It certainly is a great game,” he remarked. “I never noticed a thing, though I remember now that I was blithering to myself rather inanely just before I went under. And so the little man works off his own bright ideas…Wilfred, you’re coming on.”

  “I brought my dancing partner with me,” said Garniman, quite casually.

  He waved a fat indicative hand, and the Saint, squirming over to follow the gesture, saw Patricia in another chair. For a second or two he looked at her; then he turned slowly round again.

  “There’s no satisfying you jazz fiends, is there?” he drawled. “Now I suppose you’ll wind up the gramophone and start again…But the girl seems to have lost the spirit of the thing…”

  Garniman sat down at the desk and regarded the Saint with the heavy inscrutable face of a great gross image.

  “I had seen her before, dancing with you at the Jericho, long before we first met—I never forget a face. After she had succeeded in planting herself on me, I spent a little time assuring myself that I was not mistaken, and then the solution was simple. A few drops from a bottle that I am never without—in her champagne—and the impression was that she became helplessly drunk. She will recover without our assistance, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps in half an hour—according to her strength.” Wilfred Garniman’s fleshy lips loosened in the travesty of a smile. “You underestimated me, Templar.”

  “That,” said the Saint, “remains to be seen.” Mr Garniman shrugged.

  “Need I explain that you have come to the end of your interesting and adventurous life?”

  Simon twitched an eyebrow, and slid his mouth mockingly sideways.

  “What—not again?” he sighed, and Garniman’s smooth forehead crinkled.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But you haven’t seen so many of these situations through as I have, old horse,” said the Saint. “I’ve lost count of the number of times this sort of thing has happened to me. I know the tradition demands it, but I think they might give me a rest sometimes. What’s the programme this time—do you sew me up in the bath and light the geyser, or am I run through the mangle and buried under the billiard-table? Or can you think of something really original?”

  Garniman inclined his head ironically. “I trust you will find my method satisfactory,” he said. He lighted a cigarette, and rose from the desk again, and as he picked up a length of rope from the floor and moved across to Patricia, the Saint warbled on in the same tone of gentle weariness.

  “Mind how you fix those ankles, Wilfred. That gauzy silk stuff you see on the limbs costs about five pounds a leg, and it ladders if a fly settles on it. Oh, and while we’re on the subject: don’t let’s have any nonsense about death or dishonour. The child mightn’t want to die. And besides, that stuff is played out, anyway…”

  Garniman made no reply.

  He continued with his task in his ponderous methodical way, making every movement with immensely phlegmatic deliberation. The Saint, who had known many criminals, and who was making no great exaggeration when he said that this particular situation had long since lost all its pristine charm for him, could recall no one in his experience who had ever been so dispassionate. Cold-blooded ruthlessness, a granite impassivity, he had met before, but through it all, deep as it might be, there had always run a perceptible taut thread of vindictive purpose. In Wilfred Garniman there showed nothing of this. He went about his work in the same way that he might have gone about the setting of a mouse-trap—with elephantine efficiency, and a complete blank in the teleological compartment of his brain. And Simon Templar knew with an eerie intuition that this was no pose, as it might have been in others. And then he knew that Wilfred Garniman was mad.

  Garniman finished, and straightened up. And then, still without speaking, he picked Patricia up in his arms and carried her out of the room.

  The Saint braced his muscles.

  His whole body tightened to the effort like a tempered steel spring, and his arms swelled and corded up until the sleeves were stretched and strained around them. For an instant he was absolutely motionless, except for the tremors of titanic tension that shuddered down his frame like wind-ripples over a quiet pool…And then he relaxed and went limp, loosing his breath in a great gasp. And the Saintly smile crawled a trifle crookedly over his face.

  “Which makes things difficult,” he whispered—to the four unanswering walls.

  For the cords about his wrists still held him firmly.

  Free to move as he chose, he could have broken those ropes with his hands, but bound as he was, he could apply scarcely a quarter of his strength. And the ropes were good ones—new, half-inch, three-ply Manila. He had made the test, and he relaxed. To have struggled longer would have wasted valuable strength to no purpose. And he had come out without Belle, the little knife that ordinarily went with him everywhere, in a sheath strapped to his left forearm—the knife that had saved him on countless other occasions such as this.

  Clumsily he pulled himself out of the chair, and rolled the few yards to the desk. There was a telephone there; he dragged himself to his knees and lifted the receiver. The exchange took an eternity to answer. He gave Teal’s private number, and heard the preliminary buzz in the receiver as he was connected up, and then Wilfred Garniman spoke behind him, from the doorway.

  “Ah! You are still active, Templar?”

  He crossed the room with quick lumbering strides, and snatched the instrument away. For a second or two he listened with the receiver at his ear; then he hung it up and put the telephone down at the far end of the desk.

  “You have not been at all successful this evening,” he remarked stolidly.

  “But you must admit we keep on trying,” said the Saint cheerfully.

  Wilfred Garniman took the cigarette from his mouth. His expressionless eyes contemplated the Saint abstractedly.

  “I am beginning to believe that your prowess was overrated. You came here hoping to find documents or money—perhaps both. You were unsuccessful.”

  “Er—temporarily.”

  “Yet a little ingenuity would have saved you from an unpleasant experience—and shown you quite another function of this piece of furniture.”

  Garniman pointed to the armchair. He tilted it over on its back, prised up a couple of tacks, and allowed the canvas finishing of the bottom to fall away. Underneath was a dark steel door, secured by three swivel catches.

  “I made the whole chair myself—it was a clever piece of work,” he said, and then he dismissed the subject almost as if it had never been raised. “I shall now require you to rejoin your friend, Templar. Will you be carried, or would you prefer to walk?”

  “How far are we going?” asked the Saint cautiously.

  “Only a few yards.”

  “I’ll walk, thanks.”

  Garniman knelt down and tugged at the ankle ropes. A strand slipped under his manipulations, giving an eighteen-inch hobble.

  “Stand up.”

  Simon obeyed. Garniman gripped his arm and led him out of the room. They went down the hall, and passed through a low door under the stairs. They stumbled down a flight of narrow stone steps. At the bottom, Garniman picked up a candlestick from a niche in the wall and steered the Saint along a short flagged passage.

  “You know, Wilf,” murmured the Saint conversationally, “this has happened to me twice before in the last six months. And each time it was gas. Is it going to be gas again this time, or are you breaking away from the rules?”

  “It will not be g
as,” replied Garniman flatly.

  He was as heavily passionless as a contented animal. And the Saint chattered on blithely.

  “I hate to disappoint you—as the actress said to the bishop—but I really can’t oblige you now. You must see it, Wilfred. I’ve got such a lot more to do before the end of the volume, and it’d wreck the whole show if I went and got bumped off in the first story. Have a heart, dear old Garbage-man!”

  The other made no response, and the Saint sighed. In the matter of cross-talk comedy, Wilfred Garniman was a depressingly feeble performer. In the matter of murder, on the other hand, he was probably depressingly efficient, but the Saint couldn’t help feeling that he made death a most gloomy business.

  And then they came into a small low vault, and the Saint saw Patricia again.

  Her eyes were open, and she looked at him steadily, with the faintest of smiles on her lips.

  “Hullo, boy.”

  “Hullo, lass.”

  That was all.

  Simon glanced round. In the centre of the floor there was a deep hole, and beside it was a great mound of earth. There was a dumpy white sack in one corner, and a neat conical heap of sand beside it.

  Wilfred Garniman explained, in his monotonously apathetic way.

  “We tried to sink a well here, but we gave it up. The hole is only about ten feet deep—it was not filled up again. I shall fill it up tonight.”

  He picked up the girl and took her to the hole in the floor. Dropping on one knee at the edge, he lowered her to the stretch of his arms and let go…He came back to the Saint, dusting his trousers.

  “Will you continue to walk?” he inquired.

  Simon stepped to the side of the pit, and turned. For a moment he gazed into the other man’s eyes—the eyes of a man empty of the bowels of compassion. But the Saint’s blue gaze was as cold and still as a polar sea.

  “You’re an over-fed, pot-bellied swamp-hog,” he said, and then Garniman pushed him roughly backwards.

  Quite unhurriedly, Wilfred Garniman took off his coat, unfastened his cuff-links, and rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. He opened the sack of cement and tipped out its contents into a hole that he trampled in the heap of sand. He picked up a spade, looked about him, and put it down again. Without the least variation of his heavily sedate stride he left the cellar, leaving the candle burning on the floor. In three or four minutes he was back again, carrying a brimming pail of water in either hand, and with the help of these he continued his unaccustomed labour, splashing gouts of water on his materials and stirring them carefully with the spade.

  It took him over half an hour to reduce the mixture to a consistency smooth enough to satisfy him, for he was an inexperienced worker and yet he could afford to make no mistake. At the end of that time he was streaming with sweat, and his immaculate white collar and shirt-front were grubbily wilting rags, but those facts did not trouble him. No one will ever know what was in his mind while he did that work: perhaps he did not know himself, for his face was blank and tranquil.

  His flabby muscles must have been aching, but he did not stop to rest. He took the spade over to the hole in the floor. The candle sent no light down there, but in the darkness he could see an irregular blur of white—he was not interested to gloat over it. Bending his back again, he began to shovel the earth back into the hole. It took an astonishing time, and he was breathing stertorously long before he had filled the pit up loosely level with the floor. Then he dropped the spade and tramped over the surface, packing it down tight and hard.

  And then he laid over it the cement that he had prepared, finishing it off smoothly level with the floor.

  Even then he did not rest—he was busy for another hour, filling the pails with earth and carrying them up the stairs and out into the garden and emptying them over the flower-beds. He had a placidly accurate eye for detail and an enormous capacity for taking pains, had Mr Wilfred Garniman, but it is doubtful if he gave more than a passing thought to the eternal meaning of what he had done.

  CHAPTER 10

  To Mr Teal, who in those days knew the Saint’s habits almost as well as he knew his own, it was merely axiomatic that breakfast and Simon Templar coincided somewhere between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and therefore it is not surprising that the visit which he paid to 7, Upper Berkeley Mews on one historic morning resulted in a severe shock to his system. For a few moments after the door had been opened to him he stood bovinely rooted to the mat, looking like some watcher of the skies who has just seen the Great Bear turn a back-somersault and march rapidly over the horizon in column of all fours. And when he had pulled himself together, he followed the Saint into the sitting-room with the air of a man who is not at all certain that there is no basin of water balanced over the door to await his entrance.

  “Have some gum, old dear,” invited the Saint hospitably, and Mr Teal stopped by the table and blinked at him.

  “What’s the idea?” he demanded suspiciously.

  The Saint looked perplexed.

  “What idea, brother?”

  “Is your clock fast, or haven’t you been to bed yet?”

  Simon grinned.

  “Neither. I’m going to travel, and Pat and I have got to push out and book passages and arrange for international overdrafts and all that sort of thing.” He waved towards Patricia Holm, who was smoking a cigarette over The Times. “Pat, you have met Claud Eustace, haven’t you? Made his pile in Consolidated Gas. Mr Teal, Miss Holm. Miss Holm, Mr Teal. Consider yourselves divorced.”

  Teal picked up the packet of spearmint that sat sedately in the centre of the table, and put it down again uneasily. He produced another packet from his own pocket.

  “Did you say you were going away?” he asked.

  “I did. I’m worn out, and I feel I need a complete rest—I did a couple of hours’ work yesterday, and at my time of life…”

  “Where were you going?”

  The Saint shrugged.

  “Doubtless Thomas Cook will provide. We thought of some nice warm islands. It may be the Canaries, the Balearic or Little by Little—”

  “And what about the Scorpion?”

  “Oh yes, the Scorpion…Well, you can have him all to yourself now, Claud.”

  Simon glanced towards the mantelpiece, and the detective followed his gaze. There was a raw puncture in the panelling where a stiletto had recently reposed, but the papers that had been pinned there were gone. The Saint took the sheaf from his pocket.

  “I was just going to beetle along and pay my income tax,” he said airily. “Are you walking Hanover Square way?”

  Teal looked at him thoughtfully, and it may be recorded to the credit of the detective’s somnolently cyclopean self-control that not a muscle of his face moved.

  “Yes, I’ll go with you—I expect you’ll be wanting a drink,” he said, and then his eyes fell on the Saint’s wrist.

  He motioned frantically at it.

  “Did you sprain that trying to get the last drops out of the barrel?” he inquired.

  Simon pulled down his sleeve.

  “As a matter of fact, it was a burn,” he said.

  “The Scorpion?”

  “Patricia.”

  Teal’s eyes descended one millimetre. He looked at the girl, and she smiled at him in a seraphic way which made the detective’s internal organs wriggle. Previously, he had been wont to console himself with the reflection that that peculiarly exasperating kind of sweetness in the smile was the original and unalienable copyright of one lone face out of all the faces in the wide world. He returned his gaze to the Saint.

  “Domestic strife?” he queried, and Simon assumed an expression of pained reproach.

  “We aren’t married,” he said.

  Patricia flicked her cigarette into the fireplace and came over. She tucked one hand into the belt of her plain tweed suit, and laid the other on Simon Templar’s shoulder. And she continued to smile seraphically upon the detective.

  “You see, we we
re being buried alive,” she explained simply.

  “All down in the—er—what’s-its of the earth,” said the Saint.

  “Simon hadn’t got his knife, but he remembered his cigarette-lighter just in time. He couldn’t reach it himself, so I had to do it. And he never made a sound—I never knew till afterwards—”

  “It was a minor detail,” said the Saint.

  He twitched a small photograph from his pocket and passed it to Teal.

  “From the Scorpion’s passport,” he said. “I found it in a drawer of his desk. That was before he caught me with as neat a trick as I’ve come across—the armchairs in his study will repay a sleuth-like investigation, Claud. Then, if you pass on to the cellars, you’ll find a piece of cement flooring that had only just begun to floor. Pat and I are supposed to be under there. Which reminds me—if you decide to dig down in the hope of finding us, you’ll find my second-best boiled shirt somewhere in the depths. We had to leave it behind. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it, but I can give you my word that even the most pliant rubber dickey rattles like a suit of armour when you’re trying to move quietly.”

  For a space the detective stared at him.

  Then he took out a notebook.

  It was, in its way, one of the most heroic things he ever did.

  “Where is this place?” he asked.

  “Twenty-eight, Mallaby Road, Arrer. The name is Wilfred Garniman. And about that shirt—if you had it washed at the place where they do yours before you go toddling round the night clubs, and sent it on to me at Palma, I expect I could find a place to burn it. And I’ve got some old boots upstairs which I thought maybe you might like—”

  Teal replaced his notebook and pencil.

  “I don’t want to ask too many questions,” he said. “But if Garniman knows you got away—”

  Simon shook his head.