The Saint vs Scotland Yard (8 page)

“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 anx
ious…”

“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 disorgan
ised——
”

“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 disap
peared
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 sup
pose it
would be useless for me to communicate your confes
sion 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 tech
nique 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 it 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—but 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 fantas
tic 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.”

Garniman was still silent; and the Saint looked at him, and
laughed
caressingly.

“On the other hand—if you’re bright enough to see a few
objections
to that idea—you might prefer to push quietly on to
your beautiful office
and think over some of the other things
I’ve said.
Particularly those pregnant words about my income tax.”

“Is that all you have to say?” asked Garniman, in the same
low voice;
and the Saint nodded.

“It’ll do for now,” he said lightly. “And since you seem
to have decided against the police, I think I’ll beetle off and
concentrate
on the method by which you’re going to be in
duced to contribute to
the Inland Revenue.”

The slightest glitter of expression came to Wilfred Garniman’s
eyes for
a moment, and was gone again. He walked to
the door and opened
it.

“I’m obliged,” he said.

“After you, dear old reed-warbler,” said the Saint cour
teously.

He permitted Garniman to precede him out of the room,
and stood
in the hall adjusting the piratical slant of his hat.

“I presume we shall meet again?” Garniman remarked.

His tone was level and conversational. And the Saint smiled.

“You might even bet on it,” he said.

“Then—
au
  
revoir.”

The Saint tilted back his hat and watched the other turn on
his heels
and go up the stairs.

Then he opened the door and stepped out; and the heavy
ornamental
stone flower-pot that began to gravitate earthwards
at the same moment
actually flicked the brim of his Stetson
before it split
thunderously on the flagged path an inch be
hind his right heel.

Simon revolved slowly, his hands still in his pockets, and
cocked an
eyebrow at the debris; and then he strolled back
under the porch and
applied his forefinger to the bell.

Presently the maid answered the door.

“I think Mr. Garniman has dropped the aspidistra,” he murmured
chattily, and resumed, his interrupted exit before
the bulging eyes of
an audience of one.

Chapter VIII

“But what on earth,” asked Patricia helplessly, “was the
point of that?”

“It was an exercise in tact,” said the Saint modestly.

The girl stared.

“If I could only see it,” she begun; and then the Saint
laughed.

“You will, old darling,” he said.

He leaned back and lighted another cigarette.

“Mr. Wilfred Garniman,” he remarked, “is a surprisingly
intelligent
sort of cove. There was very little nonsense—and
most of what there
was was my own free gift to the nation. I
grant you he added to
his present charge-sheet by offering me
a cigarette and then a
drink; but that’s only because, as I’ve
told you before, he’s
an amateur. I’m afraid he’s been reading
too many thrillers,
and they’ve put ideas into his head. But on
the really important
point he was most professionally bright.
The way the calm
suddenly broke out in the middle of the
storm was quite
astonishing to watch.”

“And by this time,” said Patricia, “he’s probably going on
being calm a couple of hundred miles away.”

Simon shook his head.

“Not Wilfred,” he said confidently. “Except when he’s
loos
ing off six-shooters and throwing architecture about, Wilfred is
a really
first-class amateur. And he is so rapid on the uptake
that if he fell off
the fortieth floor of the Empire Building he
would be sitting on
the roof before he knew what had hap
pened. Without any assistance from me,
he divined that I had
no intention of calling in the police. So he
knew he wasn’t
very much worse off than he was before.”

“Why?”

“He may be an amateur, as I keep telling you, but he’s
efficient.
Long before his house started to fall to pieces on me,
he’d begun to make
friendly attempts to bump me off. That
was because he’d
surveyed all the risks before he started in business, and he figured that his
graft was exactly the kind of
graft that would make me sit up and take
notice. In which he
was darned right. I just breezed in and proved it to him.
He
told me himself that he was unmarried; I wasn’t able to get
him to
tell me anything about his lawful affairs, but the
butcher told me that
he was supposed to be ‘something in the
City’—so I acquired two items of
information. I also verified his
home
address, which was the most important thing; and I
impressed him with my own brilliance and charm of
person
ality, which was the next most
important. I played the perfect
clown,
because that’s the way these situations always get me,
but in the intervals between laughs I did
everything that I set
out to do. And
he knew it—as I meant him to.”

“And what happens next?”