The Saint vs Scotland Yard (10 page)

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 bour
geois 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 alterna
tive. 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 sur
round 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 there
of and howsoever were
not in the bedroom, they must be in
the study—some blistered whereabouts
or what not… .

“Which,” burbled the Saint, “is
ab
sluly’
pos
rous
.
…”

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 mur
mured
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 re
leased 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, per
haps 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 dis
honour. 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 de
liberation. 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 im
passivity, 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, loos
ing 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 ex
change 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 re
marked
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 un
pleasant
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.