For at a quarter past eleven they ran Wilfred Garniman to earth at the Golden Apple Club. And Wilfred Garniman certainly had an Evening.
He was standing at the door of the ballroom, sardonically surveying the clientele, when a girl walked in and stopped beside him. He glanced round at her almost without thinking. Having done which, he stayed glancing—and thought a lot.
She was young, slim, fair-haired, and exquisite. Even Wilfred Garniman knew that. His rather tired eyes, taking in other details of her appearance, recognised the simple perfection of a fifty-guinea gown. And her face was utterly innocent of guile—Wilfred Garniman had a shrewd perception of these things also. She scanned the crowd anxiously, as though looking for someone, and in due course it became apparent that the someone was not present. Wilfred Garniman was the last man she looked at. Their glances met, and held for some seconds; and then the faintest ripple of a smile touched her lips.
And exactly one hour later, Simon Templar was ringing the bell at 28, Mallaby Road, Harrow.
He was not expecting a reply, but he always liked to be sure of his ground. He waited ten minutes, ringing the bell at intervals; and then he went in by a ground-floor window. It took him straight into Mr. Garniman's study. And there, after carefully drawing the curtains, the Saint was busy for some time. For thirty-five minutes by his watch, to be exact.
And then he sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette.
"Somewhere," he murmured thoughtfully, "there is a catch in this."
For the net result of a systematic and expert search had panned out at precisely nil.
And this the Saint was not expecting. Before he left the Carlton, he had propounded one theory with all the force of an incontestable fact.
"Wilfred may have decided to take my intrusion calmly, and trust that he'll be able to put me out of the way before I managed to strafe him good and proper; but he'd never leave himself without at least one line of retreat. And that implies being able to take his booty with him. He'd never have put it in a bank, because there'd always be the chance that someone might notice things and get curious. It will have been in a safe deposit; but it won't be there now."
Somewhere or other—somewhere within Wilfred Garniman's easy reach—there was a large quantity of good solid cash, ready and willing to be converted into all manner of music by anyone who picked it up and offered it a change of address. It might have been actually on Wilfred Garniman's person; but the Saint didn't think so. He had decided that it would most probably be somewhere in the house at Harrow; and as he drove out there he had prepared to save time by considering the potential hiding-places in advance. He had thought of many, and discarded them one by one, for various reasons; and his final judgment had led him unhesitatingly into the very room where he had spent thirty-five fruitless minutes . . . and where he was now getting set to spend some more.
"This is the Scorpion's sacred lair," he figured, "and Wilfred wouldn't let himself forget it. He'd play it up to himself for all it was worth. It's the inner sanctum of the great ruthless organisation that doesn't exist. He'd sit in that chair in the evenings—at that desk—there—thinking what a wonderful man he was. And he'd look at whatever innocent bit of interior decoration hides his secret cache, and gloat over the letters and dossiers that he's got hidden there, and the money they've brought in or are going to bring in—the fat, slimy, wallowing slug. . . ."
Again his eyes travelled slowly round the room. The plainly papered walls could have hidden nothing, except behind the pictures, and he had tried every one of those. Dummy books he had ruled out at once, for a servant may always take down a book; but he had tested the back of every shelf—and found nothing. The whole floor was carpeted, and he gave that no more than a glance: his analysis of Wilfred Garniman's august meditations did not harmonise with the vision of the same gentleman crawling about on his hands and knees. And every drawer of the desk was already unlocked, and not one of them contained anything of compromising interest.
And that appeared to exhaust the possibilities. He stared speculatively at the fireplace—but he had done that before. It ignored the exterior architecture of the building and was a plain modern affair of blue tiles and tin, and it would have been difficult to work any grisly gadgets into its bluntly bourgeois lines. Or, it appeared, into the lines of anything else in that room.
"Which," said the Saint drowsily, "is absurd."
There remained of course, Wilfred Garniman's bedroom— the Saint had long since listed that as the only feasible alternative. But, somehow, he didn't like it. Plunder and pink poplin pyjamas didn't seem a psychologically satisfactory combination —particularly when the pyjamas must be presumed to surround something like Wilfred Garniman must have looked like without his Old Harrovian tie. The idea did not ring a bell. And yet, if the boodle and etceteral appurtenances thereof and howsoever were not in the bedroom, they must be in the study—some blistered whereabouts or what not. . . .
"Which," burbled the Saint, "is absluly' posrous. . . ."
The situation seemed less and less annoying. ... It really didn't matter very much. . . . Wilfred Garniman, if one came to think of it, was even fatter than Teal . . . and one made allowances for detectives. . . . Teal was fat, and Long Harry was long, and Patricia played around with Scorpions; which was all very odd and amusing, but nothing to get worked up about before breakfast, old dear . . .
Chapter IX
Somewhere in the infinite darkness appeared a tiny speck of white. It came hurtling towards him; and as it came it grew larger and whiter and more terrible, until it seemed as if it must smash and smother and pulp him into the squashed wreckage of the whole universe at his back. He let out a yell, and the upper half of the great white sky fell back like a shutter, sending a sudden blaze of dazzling light into his eyes. The lower bit of white touched his nose and mouth damply, and an acrid stinging smell stabbed right up into the top of his head and trickled down his throat like a thin stream of condensed fire. He gasped, coughed, choked—and saw Wilfred Garniman.
"Hullo, old toad," said the Saint weakly.
He breathed deeply, fanning out of his nasal passages the fiery tingle of the restorative that Garniman had made him inhale. His head cleared magically, so completely that for a few moments it felt as if a cold wind had blown clean through it; and the dazzle of the light dimmed out of his eyes. But he looked down, and saw that his wrists and ankles were securely bound.
"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 ideological 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 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 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 overfed, 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 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.
The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 6
