“Absolutely not. And if Golly had made a sound, I should have heard him. I always do. Why are you trying so hard to get around the facts? It’s as plain as a pikestaff that the Monster did it.”
“Some monsters have two legs,” Simon remarked.
“And I suppose you’re taught not to believe in any other kind. Even with the evidence under your very eyes.”
“I mind a time when some other footprints were found, ma’m,” Mackenzie put in deferentially, “which turrned oot to be a fraud.”
“I know exactly what you’re referring to. And that stupid hoax made a lot of idiots disbelieve the authentic photograph which was taken just before it, and refuse to accept an even better picture that was taken by a thoroughly reputable London surgeon about four months later. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve studied the subject. As a matter of fact, the reason we took this house was mainly because I’m hoping to discover the Monster.”
Two pairs of eyebrows shot up and lowered almost in unison, but it was the Saint who spoke for Mackenzie as well as himself.
“How would you do that, Mrs Bastion?” he inquired with some circumspection. “If the Monster has been well known around here for a few centuries, at least to everyone who believes in him—”
“It still hasn’t been scientifically and officially established. I’d like to have the credit for doing that, beyond any shadow of doubt, and having it named monstrum eleanoris.”
“Probably you gentlemen don’t know it,” Bastion elucidated, with a kind of quaintly protective pride, “but Mrs Bastion is a rather distinguished naturalist. She’s hunted every kind of big game there is, and even holds a couple of world’s records.”
“But I never had a trophy as important as this would be,” his better half took over again. “I expect you think I’m a little cracked—that there couldn’t really be any animal of any size in the world that hasn’t been discovered by this time. Tell them the facts of life, Noel.”
Bastion cleared his throat like a schoolboy preparing to recite, and said with much the same awkward air, “The gorilla was only discovered in 1847, the giant panda in 1869, and the okapi wasn’t discovered till 1901. Of course explorers brought back rumors of them, but people thought they were just native fairytales. And you yourselves probably remember reading about the first coelacanth being caught. That was only in 1938.”
“So why shouldn’t there still be something else left that I could be the first to prove?” Eleanor Bastion concluded for him. “The obvious thing to go after, I suppose, was the Abominable Snowman, but Mr Bastion can’t stand high altitudes. So I’m making do with the Loch Ness Monster.”
Inspector Mackenzie, who had for some time been looking progressively more confused and impatient in spite of his politely valiant efforts to conceal the fact, finally managed to interrupt the antiphonal barrage of what he could only be expected to regard as delirious irrelevancies.
“All that I’m consairrned wi’, ma’m,” he said heavily, “is tryin’ to detairrmine whether there’s a human felon to be apprehended. If it should turrn oot to be a monster, as ye’re thinkin’, it wadna be in my jurisdeection. However, in that case, pairhaps Mr Templar, who is no’ a police officer, could be o’ more help to ye.”
“Templar,” Bastion repeated slowly. “I feel as if I ought to recognize that name, now, but I was rather preoccupied with something else when I first heard it.”
“Do you have a halo on you somewhere?” quizzed Mrs Bastion, the huntress, in a tone which somehow suggested the aiming of a gun.
“Sometimes.”
“Well, by Jove!” Bastion said. “I should’ve guessed it, of course, if I’d been thinking about it. You didn’t sound like a policeman.”
Mackenzie winced faintly, but both the Bastions were too openly absorbed in re-appraising the Saint to notice it.
Simon Templar should have been hardened to that kind of scrutiny, but as the years went on it was beginning to cause him a mixture of embarrassment and petty irritation. He wished that new acquaintances could dispense with the reactions and stay with their original problems.
He said, rather roughly, “It’s just my bad luck that Mackenzie caught me as I was leaving Inverness. I was on my way to Loch Lomond, like any innocent tourist, to find out how bonnie the banks actually are. He talked me into taking the low road instead of the high road, and stopping here to stick my nose into your problem.”
“But that’s perfectly wonderful!” Mrs Bastion announced like a bugle. “Noel, ask him to stay the night. I mean, for the weekend. Or for the rest of the week, if he can spare the time.”
“Why—er—yes,” Bastion concurred obediently. “Yes, of course. We’d be delighted. The Saint ought to have some good ideas about catching a monster.”
Simon regarded him coolly, aware of the invisible glow of slightly malicious expectation emanating from Mackenzie, and made a reckless instant decision.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’d love it. I’ll bring in my things, and Mac can be on his way.”
He sauntered out without further palaver, happily conscious that only Mrs Bastion had not been moderately rocked by his casual acceptance.
They all ask for it, he thought. Cops and civilians alike, as soon as they hear the name. Well, let’s oblige them. And see how they like whatever comes of it.
Mackenzie followed him outside, with a certain ponderous dubiety which indicated that some of the joke had already evaporated.
“Ye’ll ha’ no authority in this, ye understand,” he emphasized, “except the rights o’ any private investigator—which are no’ the same in Scotland as in America, to judge by some of the books I’ve read.”
“I shall try very hard not to gang agley,” Simon assured him. “Just phone me the result of the PM as soon as you possibly can. And while you’re waiting for it, you might look up the law about shooting monsters. See if one had to take out a special license, or anything like that.”
He watched the detective drive away, and went back in with his two-suiter. He felt better already, with no official eyes and ears absorbing his most trivial responses. And it would be highly misleading to say that he found the bare facts of the case, as they had been presented to him, utterly banal and boring.
Noel Bastion showed him to a small but comfortable room upstairs, with a window that faced towards the home of Fergus Clanraith but which also afforded a sidelong glimpse of the loch. Mrs Bastion was already busy there, making up the bed.
“You can’t get any servants in a place like this,” she explained. “I’m lucky to have a woman who bicycles up from Fort Augustus once a week to do the heavy cleaning. They all want to stay in the towns where they can have what they think of as a bit of life.”
Simon looked at Bastion innocuously and remarked, “You’re lucky to find a secretary right on the spot like the one I met up the road.”
“Oh, you mean Annie Clanraith.” Bastion scrubbed a knuckle on his upper lip. “Yes. She was working in Liverpool, but she came home at Christmas to spend the holidays with her father. I had to get some typing done in a hurry, and she helped me out. It was Clanraith who talked her into staying. I couldn’t pay her as much as she’d been earning in Liverpool, but he pointed out that she’d end up with just as much in her pocket if she didn’t have to pay for board and lodging, which he’d give her if she kept house. He’s a widower, so it’s not a bad deal for him.”
“Noel’s a writer,” Mrs Bastion said. “His big book isn’t finished yet, but he works on it all the time.”
“It’s a life of Wellington,” said the writer. “It’s never been done, as I think it should be, by a professional soldier.”
“Mackenzie didn’t tell me anything about your background,” said the Saint. “What should he have called you—Colonel?”
“Only Major. But that was in the Regular Army.”
Simon did not miss the faintly defensive tone of the addendum. But the silent calculation he made was that the pension of a retired B
ritish Army major, unless augmented by some more commercial form of authorship than an unfinished biography of distinctly limited appeal, would not finance enough big-game safaris to earn an ambitious huntress a great reputation.
“There,” said Mrs Bastion finally. “Now if you’d like to settle in and make yourself at home, I’ll have some tea ready in five minutes.”
The Saint had embarked on his Scottish trip with an open mind and an attitude of benevolent optimism, but if anyone had prophesied that it would lead to him sipping tea in the drawing room of two practically total strangers, with his valise unpacked in their guest bedroom, and solemnly chatting about a monster as if it were as real as a monkey, he would probably have been mildly derisive. His hostess, however, was obsessed with the topic.
“Listen to this,” she said, fetching a well-worn volume from a bookcase. “It’s a quotation from the biography of St Columba, written about the middle of the seventh century. It tells about his visit to Inverness some hundred years before, and it says:
He was obliged to cross the water of Nesa, and when he had come to the bank he sees some of the inhabitants bringing an unfortunate fellow whom, as those who were bringing him related, a little while before some aquatic monster seized and savagely bit while he was swimming…The blessed man orders one of his companions to swim out and bring him from over the water a coble…Lugne Mocumin without delay takes off his clothes except his tunic and casts himself into the water. But the monster comes up and moves towards the man as he swam…The blessed man, seeing it, commanded the ferocious monster saying, “Go thou no further nor touch the man; go back at once.” Then on hearing this word of the Saint the monster was terrified and fled away again more quickly than if it had been dragged off by ropes.
“I must try to remember that formula,” Simon murmured, “and hope the Monster can’t tell one Saint from another.”
“ ‘Monster is really a rather stupid name for it,” Mrs Bastion said. “It encourages people to be illogical about it. Actually, in the old days the local people called it an Niseag, which is simply the name ‘Ness’ in Gaelic with a feminine diminutive ending. You could literally translate it as ‘Nessie.’ ”
“That does sound a lot cuter,” Simon agreed. “If you forget how it plays with dogs.”
Eleanor Bastion’s weathered face went pale, but the muscles under the skin did not flinch.
“I haven’t forgotten Golly. But I was trying to keep my mind off him.”
“Assuming this beastie does exist,” said the Saint, “how did it get here?”
“Why did it have to ‘get’ here at all? I find it easier to believe that it always was here. The loch is 750 feet deep, which is twice the mean depth of the North Sea. An Niseag is a creature that obviously prefers the depths and only comes to the surface occasionally. I think its original home was always at the bottom of the loch, and it was trapped there when some prehistoric geological upheaval cut off the loch from the sea.”
“And it’s lived there ever since—for how many million years?”
“Not the original ones—I suppose we must assume at least a couple. But their descendants. Like many primitive creatures, it probably lives to a tremendous age.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Most likely something of the plesiosaurus family. The descriptions sound more like that than anything—large body, long neck, paddle-like legs. Some people claim to have seen stumpy projections on its head, rather like the horns of a snail, which aren’t part of the usual reconstruction of a plesiosaurus. But after all, we’ve never seen much of a plesiosaurus except its skeleton. You wouldn’t know exactly what a snail looked like if you’d only seen its shell.”
“But if Nessie has been here all this time, why wasn’t she reported much longer ago?”
“She was. You heard that story about St Columba. And if you think only modern observations are worth paying attention to, several reliable sightings were recorded from 1871 onwards.”
“But there was no motor road along the loch, until 1933,” Bastion managed to contribute at last, “and a trip like you made today would have been quite an expedition. So there weren’t many witnesses about until fairly recently, of the type that scientists would take seriously.”
Simon lighted a cigarette. The picture was clear enough. Like the flying saucers, it depended on what you wanted to believe—and whom.
Except that here there was not only fantasy to be thought of. There could be felony.
“What would you have to do to make it an official discovery?”
“We have movie and still cameras with the most powerful telephoto lenses you can buy,” said the woman. “I spend eight hours a day simply watching the lake, just like anyone might put in at a regular job, but I vary the times of day systematically. Noel sometimes puts in a few hours as well. We have a view for several miles in both directions, and by the law of averages an Niseag must come up eventually in the area we’re covering. Whenever that happens, our lenses will get close-up pictures that’ll show every detail beyond any possibility of argument. It’s simply a matter of patience, and when I came here I made up my mind that I’d spend ten years on it if necessary.”
“And now,” said the Saint, “I guess you’re more convinced than ever that you’re on the right track and the scent is hot.”
Mrs Bastion looked him in the eyes with terrifying equanimity.
“Now,” she said, “I’m going to watch with a Weatherby Magnum as well as the cameras. An Niseag can’t be much bigger than an elephant, and it isn’t any more bullet-proof. I used to think it’d be a crime to kill the last survivor of a species, but since I saw what it did to poor Golly I’d like to have it as a trophy as well as a picture.”
There was much more of this conversation, but nothing that would not seem repetitious in verbatim quotation. Mrs Bastion had accumulated numerous other books on the subject, from any of which she was prepared to read excerpts in support of her convictions.
It was hardly 8:30, however, after a supper of cold meat and salad, when she announced that she was going to bed.
“I want to get up at two o’clock and be out at the loch well before daylight—the same time when that thing must have been there this morning.”
“Okay,” said the Saint. “Knock on my door, and I’ll go with you.”
He remained to accept a nightcap of Peter Dawson, which seemed to taste especially rich and smooth in the land where they made it. Probably this was his imagination, but it gave him a pleasant feeling of drinking the wine of the country on its own home ground.
“If you’re going to be kind enough to look after her, I may sleep a bit later,” Bastion said. “I must get some work done on my book tonight, while there’s a little peace and quiet. Not that Eleanor can’t take care of herself better than most women, but I wouldn’t like her being out there alone after what’s happened.”
“You’re thoroughly sold on this monster yourself, are you?”
The other stared into his glass.
“It’s the sort of thing that all my instincts and experience would take with a grain of salt. But you’ve seen for yourself that it isn’t easy to argue with Eleanor. And I must admit that she makes a terrific case for it. But until this morning I was keeping an open mind.”
“And now it isn’t so open?”
“Quite frankly, I’m pretty shaken. I feel it’s got to be settled now, one way or the other. Perhaps you’ll have some luck tomorrow.”
It did in fact turn out to be a vigil that gave Simon goose-pimples, but they were caused almost entirely by the pre-dawn chill of the air. Daylight came slowly, through a gray and leaky-looking overcast. The lake remained unruffled, guarding its secrets under a pale pearly glaze.
“I wonder what we did wrong,” Mrs Bastion said at last, when the daylight was as broad as the clouds evidently intended to let it become. “The thing should have come back to where it made its last kill. Perhaps if we hadn’t been so sentimental we should hav
e left Golly right where he was and built a machan over him where we could have stood watch in turns.”
Simon was not so disappointed. Indeed, if a monster had actually appeared almost on schedule under their expectant eyes, he would have been inclined to sense the hand of a Hollywood B-picture producer rather than the finger of Fate.
“As you said yesterday, it’s a matter of patience,” he observed philosophically. “But the odds are that the rest of your eight hours, now, will be just routine. So if you’re not nervous I’ll ramble around a while.”
His rambling had brought him no nearer to the house than the orchard when the sight of a coppery-rosy head on top of a shapely free-swinging figure made his pulse fluctuate enjoyably with a reminder of the remotely possible promise of romantic compensation that had started to warm his interest the day before.
Annie Clanraith’s smile was so eager and happy to see him that he might have been an old and close friend who had been away for a long time.
“Inspector Mackenzie told my father he’d left you here when he drove away. I’m so glad you stayed!”
“I’m glad you’re glad,” said the Saint, and against her ingenuous sincerity it was impossible to make the reply sound even vestigially skeptical. “But what made it so important?”
“Just having someone new and alive to talk to. You haven’t stayed long enough to find out how bored you can be here.”
“But you’ve got a job that must be a little more attractive than going back to an office in Liverpool.”
“Oh, it’s not bad. And it helps to make Father comfortable. And it’s nice to live in such beautiful scenery, I expect you’ll say. But I read books and I look at the TV, and I can’t stop having my silly dreams.”
“A gal like you,” he said teasingly, “should have her hands full, fighting off other dreamers.”
“All I get my hands full of is pages and pages of military strategy, about a man who only managed to beat Napoleon. But at least Napoleon had Josephine. The only thing Wellington gave his name to was an old boot.”
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 16
