Simon stuffed the paper into his coat pocket, and with his other hand he took the Scorpion by the neck.
“Step!” repeated the Saint crisply.
And then his forebodings were fulfilled—simply and straightforwardly, as he had known they would be.
The Scorpion had never stopped the engine of his car—that was the infinitesimal yet sufficient fact that had been struggling ineffectively to register itself upon the Saint’s brain. The sound was scarcely anything at all, even to the Saint’s hypersensitive ears—scarcely more than a rhythmic pulsing disturbance of the stillness of the night. Yet all at once—too late—it seemed to rise and racket in his mind like the thunder of a hundred dynamos, and it was then that he saw his mistake.
But that was after the Scorpion had let in the clutch.
In the blackness, his left hand must have been stealthily engaging the gears, and then, as a pair of swiftly growing lights pin-pointed in his driving-mirror, he unleashed the car with a bang.
The Saint, with one foot in the road and the other on the running-board, was flung off his balance. As he stumbled, the jamb of the door crashed agonisingly into the elbow of the arm that reached out to the driver’s collar, and something like a thousand red-hot needles prickled right down his forearm to the tip of his little finger and numbed every muscle through which it passed.
As he dropped back into the road, he heard the crack of Patricia’s gun.
The side of the car slid past him, gathering speed, and he whipped out the Scorpion’s own automatic. Quite casually, he plugged the off-side back tyre, and then a glare of light came into the tail of his eye, and he stepped quickly across to Patricia.
“Walk on,” he said quietly.
They fell into step and sauntered slowly on, and the headlights of the car behind threw their shadows thirty yards ahead.
“That jerk,” said Patricia ruefully, “my shot missed him by a yard. I’m sorry.”
Simon nodded.
“I know. It was my fault. I should have switched his engine off.”
The other car flashed past them, and Simon cursed it fluently.
“The real joy of having the country full of automobiles,” he said, “is that it makes gunning so easy. You can shoot anyone up anywhere, and everyone except the victim will think it was only a backfire. But it’s when people can see the gun that the deception kind of disintegrates.” He gazed gloomily after the dwindling tail light of the unwelcome interruption. “If only that four-wheeled gas-crocodile had burst a blood-vessel two miles back, we mightn’t have been on our way home yet.”
“I heard you shoot once—”
“And he’s still going—on the other three wheels. I’m not expecting he’ll stop to mend that leak.”
Patricia sighed.
“It was short and sweet, anyway,” she said. “Couldn’t you have stopped that other car and followed?”
He shook his head.
“Teal could have stopped it, but I’m not a policeman. I think this is a bit early for us to start gingering up our publicity campaign.”
“I wish it had been a better show, boy,” said Patricia wistfully, slipping her arm through his, and the Saint stopped to stare at her.
In the darkness, this was not very effective, but he did it.
“You bloodthirsty child!” he said.
And then he laughed.
“But that wasn’t the final curtain,” he said. “If you like to note it down, I’ll make you a prophecy: the mortality among Scorpions is going to rise one unit, and for once it will not be my fault.”
They were back in Hatfield before she had made up her mind to ask him if he was referring to Long Harry, and for once the Saint did not look innocently outraged at the suggestion.
“Long Harry is alive and well, to the best of my knowledge and belief,” he said, “but I arranged the rough outline of his decease with Teal over the telephone. If we didn’t kill Long Harry, the Scorpion would, and I figure our method will be less fatal. But as for the Scorpion himself—well, Pat, I’m dreadfully afraid I’ve promised to let them hang him according to the law. I’m getting so respectable these days that I feel I may be removed to Heaven in a fiery chariot at any moment.”
He examined his souvenir of the evening in a corner of the deserted hotel smoking-room a little later, over a final and benedictory tankard of beer. It was an envelope, postmarked in the South-Western district at 11 a.m. that morning, and addressed to Wilfred Garniman, Esq., 28, Mallaby Road, Harrow. From it the Saint extracted a single sheet of paper, written in a feminine hand.
Dear Mr Garniman,
Can you come round for dinner and a game of bridge on Tuesday next? Colonel Barnes will be making a fourth.
Yours sincerely
(Mrs) R. Venables.
For a space he contemplated the missive with an exasperated scowl darkening the beauty of his features; then he passed it to Patricia, and reached out for the consolation of draught Bass with one hand and for a cigarette with the other. The scowl continued to darken.
Patricia read, and looked at him perplexedly.
“It looks perfectly ordinary,” she said.
“It looks a damned sight too ordinary!” exploded the Saint. “How the devil can you blackmail a man for being invited to play bridge?”
The girl frowned.
“But I don’t see. Why should this be anyone else’s letter?”
“And why shouldn’t Mr Wilfred Garniman be the man I want?”
“Of course. Didn’t you get it from that man in the car?”
“I saw it on the seat beside him—it must have come out of his pocket when he pulled his gun.”
“Well?” she prompted.
“Why shouldn’t this be the beginning of the Scorpion’s triumphal march towards the high jump?” asked the Saint.
“That’s what I want to know.”
Simon surveyed her in silence. And, as he did so, the scowl faded slowly from his face. Deep in his eyes a pair of little blue devils roused up, executed a tentative double-shuffle, and paused with their heads on one side.
“Why not?” insisted Patricia.
Slowly, gently, and with tremendous precision, the Saintly smile twitched at the corners of Simon’s lips, expanded, grew, and irradiated his whole face.
“I’m blowed if I know why not,” said the Saint seraphically. “It’s just that I have a weakness for getting both feet on the bus before I tell the world I’m travelling. And the obvious deduction seemed too good to be true.”
CHAPTER 7
Mallaby Road, Harrow, as the Saint discovered, was one of those jolly roads in which ladies and gentlemen live. Lords and ladies may be found in such places as Mayfair, Monte Carlo, and St Moritz; men and women may be found almost anywhere; but Ladies and Gentlemen blossom in their full beauty only in such places as Mallaby Road, Harrow. This was a road about two hundred yards long, containing thirty of the stately homes of England, each of them a miraculously preserved specimen of Elizabethan architecture, each of them exactly the same as the other twenty-nine, and each of them surrounded by identical lawns, flower-beds, and atmospheres of overpowering gentility.
Simon Templar, entering Mallaby Road at nine o’clock—an hour of the morning at which his vitality was always rather low—felt slightly stunned.
There being no other visible distinguishing marks or peculiarities about it, he discovered No. 28 by the simple process of looking at the figures on the garden gates, and found it after inspecting thirteen other numbers which were not 28. He started on the wrong side of the road.
To the maid who opened the door he gave a card bearing the name of Mr Andrew Herrick and the official imprint of The Daily Record. Simon Templar had no right whatever to either of these decorations, which were the exclusive property of a reporter whom he had once interviewed, but a little thing like that never bothered the Saint. He kept every visiting card that was ever given him and a few that had not been consciously donated, and drew appropriately
upon his stock in time of need.
“Mr Garniman is just finishing breakfast, sir,” said the maid doubtfully, “but I’ll ask him if he’ll see you.”
“I’m sure he will,” said the Saint, and he said it so winningly that if the maid’s name had been Mrs Garniman the prophecy would have passed automatically into the realm of sublimely concrete certainties.
As it was, the prophecy merely proved to be correct.
Mr Garniman saw the Saint, and the Saint saw Mr Garniman. These things happened simultaneously, but the Saint won on points. There was a lot of Mr Garniman.
“I’m afraid I can’t spare you very long, Mr Herrick,” he said. “I have to go out in a few minutes. What did you want to see me about?”
His restless grey eyes flittered shrewdly over the Saint as he spoke, but Simon endured the scrutiny with the peaceful calm which only the man who wears the suits of Anderson and Sheppard, the shirts of Harman, the shoes of Lobb, and self-refrigerating conscience can achieve.
“I came to ask you if you could tell us anything about the Scorpion,” said the Saint calmly.
Well, that is one way of putting it. On the other hand, one could say with equal truth that his manner would have made a sheet of plate glass look like a futurist sculptor’s impression of a bit of the Pacific Ocean during a hurricane. And the innocence of the Saintly face would have made a Botticelli angel look positively sinister in comparison.
His gaze rested on Mr Wilfred Garniman’s fleshy prow with no more than a reasonable directness, but he saw the momentary flicker of expression that preceded Mr Garniman’s blandly puzzled frown, and wistfully wondered whether, if he unsheathed his sword-stick and prodded it vigorously into Mr Garniman’s immediate future, there would be a loud pop, or merely a faint sizzling sound. That he overcame this insidious temptation, and allowed no sign of the soul-shattering struggle to register itself on his face, was merely a tribute to the persistently sobering influence of Mr Lionel Delborn’s official proclamation and the Saint’s sternly practical devotion to business.
“Scorpion?” repeated Mr Garniman, frowning. “I’m afraid I don’t quite—”
“Understand. Exactly. Well, I expected I should have to explain.”
“I wish you would. I really don’t know—”
“Why we should consider you an authority on scorpions. Precisely. The Editor told me you’d say that.”
“If you’d—”
“Tell you the reason for this rather extraordinary procedure—”
“I should certainly see if I could help you in any way, but at the same time—”
“You don’t see what use you could be. Absolutely. Now, shall we go on like this or shall we sing the rest in chorus?”
Mr Garniman blinked.
“Do you want to ask me some questions?”
“I should love to,” said the Saint heartily. “You don’t think Mrs Garniman will object?”
“Mrs Garniman?”
“Mrs Garniman.”
Mr Garniman blinked again.
“Are you—”
“Certain—”
“Are you certain you haven’t made a mistake? There is no Mrs Garniman.”
“Don’t mention it,” said the Saint affably.
He turned the pages of an enormous notebook.
“ ‘Interviewed Luis Cartaro. Diamond rings and Marcel wave. Query—Do Pimples Make Good Mothers? Said—’ Sorry, wrong page…Here we are: ‘Memo. See Wilfred Garniman and ask the big—ask him about scorpions. 28 Mallaby Road, Harrow.’ That’s right, isn’t it?”
“That’s my name and address,” said Garniman shortly. “But I have still to learn the reason for this—er—”
“Visit,” supplied the Saint. He was certainly feeling helpful this morning.
He closed his book and returned it to his pocket.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we heard that the Saint was interested in you.”
He was not even looking at Garniman as he spoke. But the mirror over the mantelpiece was in the tail of his eyes, and thus he saw the other’s hands, which were clasped behind his back, close and unclose—once.
“The Saint?” said Garniman. “Really—”
“Are you sure I’m not detaining you?” asked the Saint, suddenly very brisk and solicitous. “If your staff will be anxious…”
“My staff can wait a few minutes.”
“That’s very good of you. But if we telephoned them—”
“I assure you—that is quite unnecessary.”
“I shouldn’t like to think of your office being disorganised—”
“You need not trouble,” said Garniman. He moved across the room. “Will you smoke?”
“Thanks,” said the Saint.
He had just taken the first puff from a cigarette when Garniman turned round with a carved ebony box in his hand.
“Oh,” said Mr Garniman, a trifle blankly.
“Not at all,” said the Saint, who was never embarrassed. “Have one of mine?”
He extended his case, but Garniman shook his head.
“I never smoke during the day. Would it be too early to offer you a drink?”
“I’m afraid so—much too late,” agreed Simon blandly.
Garniman returned the ebony box to the side table from which he had taken it. Then he swung round abruptly.
“Well?” he demanded. “What’s the idea?”
The Saint appeared perplexed.
“What’s what idea?” he inquired innocently.
Garniman’s eyebrows came down a little.
“What’s all this about scorpions—and the Saint?”
“According to the Saint—”
“I don’t understand you. I thought the Saint had disappeared long ago.”
“Then you were grievously in error, dear heart,” murmured Simon Templar coolly. “Because I am myself the Saint.”
He lounged against a book-case, smiling and debonair, and his lazy blue eyes rested mockingly on the other’s pale plump face.
“And I’m afraid you’re the Scorpion, Wilfred,” he said.
For a moment Mr Garniman stood quite still. And then he shrugged.
“I believe I read in the newspapers that you had been pardoned and had retired from business,” he said, “so I suppose it would be useless for me to communicate your confession to the police. As for this scorpion that you have referred to several times—”
“Yourself,” the Saint corrected him gently, and Garniman shrugged again.
“Whatever delusion you are suffering from—”
“Not a delusion, Wilfred.”
“It is immaterial to me what you call it.”
The Saint seemed to lounge even more languidly, his hands deep in his pockets, a thoughtful and reckless smile playing lightly about his lips.
“I call it a fact,” he said softly. “And you will keep your hands away from that bell until I’ve finished talking…You are the Scorpion, Wilfred, and you’re probably the most successful blackmailer of the age. I grant you that—your technique is novel and thorough. But blackmail is a nasty crime. Your ingenuity has already driven two men to suicide. That was stupid of them, but it was also very naughty of you. In fact, it would really give me great pleasure to peg you in your front garden and push this highly desirable residence over on top of you, but for one thing. I’ve promised to reserve you for the hangman and for another thing I’ve got my income tax to pay, so—Excuse me one moment.”
Something like a flying chip of frozen quicksilver flashed across the room and plonked crisply into the wooden panel around the bell-push towards which Garniman’s fingers were sidling. It actually passed between his second and third fingers, so that he felt the swift chill of its passage and snatched his hand away as if he had received an electric shock. But the Saint continued his languid propping up of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he did not appear to have moved.
“Just do what you’re told, Wilfred, and everything will be quite all right—b
ut I’ve got lots more of them there missiles packed in my pants,” murmured the Saint soothingly, warningly, and untruthfully—though Mr Garniman had no means of perceiving this last adverb. “What was I saying?…Oh yes. I have my income tax to pay—”
Garniman took a sudden step forward, and his lips twisted in a snarl.
“Look here—”
“Where?” asked the Saint excitedly.
Mr Garniman swallowed. The Saint heard him distinctly.
“You thrust yourself in here under a false name—you behave like a raving lunatic—then you make the most wild and fantastic accusations—you—”
“Throw knives about the place—”
“What the devil,” bellowed Mr Garniman, “do you mean by it?”
“Sir,” suggested the Saint mildly.
“What the devil,” bellowed Mr Garniman, “do you mean—‘sir’?”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
Mr Garniman glared. “What the—”
“O.K.,” said the Saint pleasantly. “I heard you the second time. So long as you go on calling me ‘sir,’ I shall know that everything is perfectly respectable and polite. And now we’ve lost the place again. Half a minute…Here we are : ‘I have my income tax to pay—’ ”
“Will you get out at once,” asked Garniman, rather quietly, “or must I send for the police?”
Simon considered the question.
“I should send for the police,” he suggested at length.
He hitched himself off the book-case and sauntered leisurely across the room. He detached his little knife from the bell panel, tested the point delicately on his thumb, and restored the weapon to the sheath under his left sleeve, and Wilfred Garniman watched him without speaking. And then the Saint turned.
“Certainly—I should send for the police,” he drawled. “They will be interested. It’s quite true that I had a pardon for some old offences, but whether I’ve gone out of business, or whether I’m simply just a little cleverer than Chief Inspector Teal, is a point that is often debated at Scotland Yard. I think that any light you could throw on the problem would be welcomed.”
The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 5
