"I am a doomed man," he said sombrely, "and I have my privileges. If necessary, the Scorpion will wait for me."
Actually he had no intention of being late, for the plan of campaign that he had spent the nicotinised interval after dinner adapting to Patricia's presence required them to be at the rendezvous a shade in advance of the rest of the party.
But this the Scorpion did not know.
He drove up slowly, with his headlights dimmed, scanning the dark shadows at the side of the road. Exactly beside the point where his shaded lights picked up the grey-white blur of the appointed milestone, he saw the tiny red glow of a cigarette-end, and applied his brakes gently. The cigarette-end dropped and vanished under an invisible heel, and out of the gloom a tall dark shape stretched slowly upwards.
The Scorpion's right hand felt the cold bulk of the automatic pistol in his pocket as his other hand lowered the nearside window. He leaned over towards the opening.
"Garrot?"
The question came in a whisper to the man at the side of the road, and he stepped slowly forward and answered in a throaty undertone.
"Yes, sir?"
The Scorpion's head was bent low, so that the man outside the car could only see the shape of his hat.
"You obeyed your orders. That is good. Come closer. . . ."
The gun slipped silently out of the Scorpion's pocket, his forefinger curling quickly round the trigger as he drew it. He brought it up without a sound, so that the tip of the barrel rested on the ledge of the open window directly in line with the chest of the man twelve inches away. One lightning glance to left and right told him that the road was deserted.
"Now there is just one thing more——"
"There is," agreed Patricia Holm crisply. "Don't move!"
The Scorpion heard, and the glacial concentration of dispassionate unfriendliness in her voice froze him where he sat. He had not heard the noiseless turning of the handle of the door behind him, nor noticed the draught of cooler air that trickled through the car; but he felt the chilly hardness of the circle of steel that pressed into the base of his skull, and for a second he was paralysed. And in that second his target vanished.
"Drop that gun—outside the car. And let me hear it go!"
Again that crisp, commanding voice, as inclemently smooth as an arctic sea, whisked into his eardrums like a thin cold needle. He hesitated for a moment, and then, as the muzzle of the gun behind his neck increased its pressure by one warning ounce, he moved his hand obediently and relaxed his fingers. His automatic rattled on to the runningboard, and almost immediately the figure that he had taken for Long Harry rose into view again, and was framed in the square space of window.
But the voice that acknowledged the receipt of item, Colts, automatic, scorpions, for the use of, one, was not the voice of Long Harry. It was the most cavalier, the most mocking, the most cheerful voice that the Scorpion had ever heard—he noted those qualities about it subconsciously, for he was not in a position to revel in the discovery with any hilariously wholehearted abandon.
"O.K. . . . And how are you, my Scorpion?"
"Who are you?" asked the man in the car.
He still kept his head lowered, and under the brim of his hat his eyes were straining into the gloom for a glimpse of the man who had spoken; but the Saint's face was in shadow. Glancing away to one side, the Scorpion could focus the head of the girl whose gun continued to impress his cervical vertebrae with the sense of its rocklike steadiness; but a dark close-fitting hat covered the upper part of her head, and a scarf that was loosely knotted about her neck had been pulled up to veil her face from the eyes downwards.
The Saint's light laugh answered the question.
"I am the world's worst gunman, and the lady behind you is the next worst, but at this range we can say that we never miss. And that's all you need to worry about just now. The question that really arises is—who are you?"
"That is what you have still to discover," replied the man in the car impassively. "Where is Garrot?"
"Ah! That's what whole synods of experts are still trying to discover. Some would say that he was simply rotting, and others would say that that was simply rot. He might be floating around the glassy sea, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, with his new regulation nightie flying in the breeze behind; or he might be attending to the central heating plant in the basement. I was never much of a theologian myself——"
"Is he dead?"
"Very," said the Saint cheerfully. "I organised the decease myself."
"You killed him?"
"Oh, no! Nothing like that about me. I merely arranged for him to die. If you survive to read your morning paper tomorrow, you may be informed that the body of an unknown man has been fished out of the Thames. That will be Long Harry. Now come out and take your curtain, sweetheart!"
The Saint stepped back and twitched open the door, pocketing the Scorpion's gun as he did so.
And at the same moment he had a queer feeling of futility. He knew that that was not the moment when he was destined to lay the Scorpion by the heels.
Once or twice before, in a life which had only lasted as long as it had by reason of a vigilance that never blinked for one split second, and a forethought that was accustomed to skid along half a dozen moves ahead of the opposition performers in every game with the agility of a startled streak of lightning zipping through space on ball bearings with the wind behind it, he had experienced the same sensation—of feeling as if an intangible shutter had guillotined down in front of one vitally receptive lens in his alertness. Something was going to happen —his trained intuition told him that beyond all possibility of argument, and an admixture of plain horse-sense told him what would be the general trend of that forthcoming event, equally beyond all possibility of argument—but exactly what shape that event would take was more than any faculty of his could divine.
A tingling stillness settled upon the scene, and in the stillness some fact that he should have been reckoning with seemed to hammer frantically upon that closed window in his mind. He knew that that was so, but his brain produced no other response. Just for that fractional instant of time a cog slipped one pinion, and the faultless machine was at fault. The blind spot that roams around somewhere in every human cerebral system suddenly broke its moorings, and drifted down over the one minute area of co-ordinating apparatus of which Simon Templar had most need; and no effort of his could dislodge it.
"Step out, Cuthbert," snapped the Saint, with a slight rasp in his voice.
In the darkness inside the car, a slight blur of white caught and interested Simon's eye. It lay on the seat beside the driver. With that premonition of failure dancing about in his subconscious and making faces at his helpless stupidity, the Saint grabbed at the straw. He got it away—a piece of paper—and the Scorpion, seeing it go, snatched wildly but not soon enough.
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 j
amb 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 VII
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 Shepphard, 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 P
acific 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 swordstick 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."
The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 4
