The Saint vs Scotland Yard (11 page)

“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 gas,” 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 busi
ness.

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 overfed, pot-bellied swamp-hog,” he said; and
then
Garniman pushed him roughly backwards.

Quite unhurriedly, Wilfred Garniman took off his coat, un
fastened
his cuff-links, and rolled his sleeves up above his
elbows. He opened the
sack of cement and tipped out its con
tents 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 mate
rials 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 inex
perienced 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 flowerbeds.
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 X

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 be
tween 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 expres
sion 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 were 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 ciga
rette-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.

“Wilfred does not know. He went out to fetch some water
to dilute
the concrete, and we moved while he was away. Later
on I saw him carting
out the surplus earth and dumping it on
the gardening notes.
When you were playing on the sands of
Southend in a pair of pink shrimping
drawers, Teal, did you
ever notice that you can always dig more out
of a hole than
you can put back in it? Wilfred had quite enough mud left
over to make him happy.”

Teal nodded.

“That’s
 
all I wanted,”
he said,
 
and the Saint smiled.

“Perhaps we can give you a lift,” he suggested politely.

They drove to Hanover Square in the Saint’s car. The Saint
was in
form. Teal knew that by the way he drove. Teal was
not happy about it.
Teal was even less happy when the Saint
insisted on being escorted into the
office.