Trust the Saint (21 page)

“You’re still skeptical, aren’t you?”

“What I’ve been wondering,” said the Saint, “is why this savage behemoth with the big sharp teeth and the nutcracker jaws chomped up a dog but didn’t swallow even a little nibble of it.”

“Perhaps it isn’t carnivorous. An angry elephant will mash a man to a pulp, but it won’t eat him. And that dog could be very irritating, barking at everything—”

“According to what I heard, there wasn’t any barking. And I’m sure the sheep it’s supposed to have taken didn’t bark. But the sheep disappeared entirely, didn’t it?”

“That’s what Clanraith says. But for all we know, the sheep may have been stolen.”

“But that could have given somebody the idea of building up the Monster legend from there.”

Bastion shook his head.

“But the dog did bark at everyone,” he insisted stubbornly.

“Except the people he knew,” said the Saint, no less persistently. “Every dog is vulnerable to a few people. You yourself, for instance, if you’d wanted to, could have come along, and if he felt lazy he’d’ve opened one eye and then shut it again and gone back to sleep. Now, are you absolutely sure that nobody else was on those terms with him? Could a postman or a milkman have made friends with him? Or anyone else at all?”

The other man massaged his mustache.

“I don’t know … Well, perhaps Fergus Clanraith might.”

Simon blinked.

“But it sounded to me as if he didn’t exactly love the dog.”

“Perhaps he didn’t. But it must have known him pretty well. Eleanor likes to go hiking across country, and the dog always used to go with her. She’s always crossing Clanraith’s property and stopping to talk to him, she tells me. She gets on very well with him, which is more than I do.”

“What, that old curmudgeon?”

“I know, he’s full of that Scottish Nationalist nonsense. But Eleanor is half Scots herself, and that makes her almost human in his estimation. I believe they talk for hours about salmon fishing and grouse shooting.”

“I wondered if he had an appealling side hidden away somewhere,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “or if Annie got it all from her mother.”

Bastion’s deep-set sooty eyes flickered over him ap-praisingly.

“She’s rather an attractive filly, isn’t she?”

“I have a feeling that to a certain type of man, in certain circumstances, and perhaps at a certain age, her appeal might be quite dangerous.”

Noel Bastion had an odd expression of balancing some answer on the tip of his tongue, weighing it for advisability, changing his mind a couple of times about it, and finally swallowing it. He then tried to recover from the pause by making a business of consulting the clock on the mantelpiece.

“Will you excuse me? Eleanor asked me to bring her a thermos of tea about now. She hates to miss that, even for an Niseag.” Sure.

Simon followed him into the kitchen, where a kettle was already simmering on the black coal stove. He watched while his host carefully scalded a teapot and measured leaves into it from a canister.

“You know, Major,” he said, “I’m not a detective by nature, even of the private variety.”

“I know. In fact, I think you used to be just the opposite.”

“That’s true, too. I do get into situations, though, where I have to do a bit of deducing, and sometimes I startle everyone by coming up with a brilliant hunch. But as a general rule, I’d rather prevent a crime than solve one. As it says in your kind of textbooks, a little preventive action can save a lot of counter-attacks.”

The Major had poured boiling water into the pot with a steady hand, and was opening a vacuum flask while he waited for the brew.

“You’re a bit late to prevent this one, aren’t you?—if it was a crime.”

“Not necessarily. Not if the death of Golly was only a stepping-stone—something to build on the story of a missing sheep, and pave the way for the Monster’s next victim to be a person. If a person were killed in a similar way now, the Monster explanation would get a lot more believers than if it had just happened out of the blue.”

Bastion put sugar and milk into the flask, without measuring, with the unhesitating positiveness of practise, and took the lid off the teapot to sniff and stir it.

“But good heavens, Templar, who could treat a dog like that, except a sadistic maniac?”

Simon lighted a cigarette. He was very certain now, and the certainty made him very calm.

“A professional killer,” he said. “There are quite a lot of them around who don’t have police records. People whose temperament and habits have developed a great callousness about death. But they’re not sadists. They’re normally kind to animals and even to human beings, when it’s normally useful to be. But fundamentally they see them as expendable, and when the time comes they can sacrifice them quite impersonally.”

“I know Clanraith’s a farmer, and he raises animals only to have them butchered,” Bastion said slowly. “But it’s hard to imagine him doing what you’re talking about, much as I dislike him.”

“Then you think we should discard him as a red her-ring?”

Bastion filled the thermos from the teapot, and capped it.

“I’m hanged if I know. I’d want to think some more about it. But first I’ve got to take this to Eleanor.”

‘Til go with you,” said the Saint.

He followed the other out of the back door. Outside, the dusk was deepening with a mistiness that was beginning to do more than the failing light to reduce visibility. From the garden, one could see into the orchard but not beyond it.

“It’s equally hard for the ordinary man,” Simon continued relentlessly, “to imagine anyone who’s lived with another person as man and wife, making love and sharing the closest moments, suddenly turning around and killing the other one. But the prison cemeteries are full of ‘em. And there are plenty more on the outside who didn’t get caught—or who are still planning it. At least half the time, the marriage has been getting a bit dull, and someone more attractive has come along. And then, for some idiotic reason, often connected with money, murder begins to seem cleverer than divorce.”

Bastion slackened his steps, half turning to peer at Simon from under heavily contracted brows.

“I’m not utterly dense, Templar, and I don’t like what you seem to be hinting at.”

“I don’t expect you to, chum. But I’m trying to stop a murder. Let me make a confession. When you and Eleanor have been out or in bed at various times, I’ve done quite a lot of prying. Which may be a breach of hospitality, but it’s less trouble than search warrants. You remember those scratches in the ground near the dead dog which I said could’ve been made with something that wasn’t claws? Well, I found a gaff among somebody’s fishing tackle that could’ve made them, and the point had fresh shiny scratches and even some mud smeared on it which can be analyzed. I haven’t been in the attic and found an embalmed shark’s head with several teeth missing, but I’ll bet Mackenzie could find one. And I haven’t yet found the club with the teeth set in it, because I haven’t yet been allowed down by the lake alone; but I think it’s there somewhere, probably stuffed under a bush, and just waiting to be hauled out when the right head is turned the wrong way.”

Major Bastion had come to a complete halt by that time.

“You unmitigated bounder,” he said shakily. “Are you going to have the impertinence to suggest that I’m trying to murder my wife, to come into her money and run off with a fanner’s daughter? Let me tell you that I’m the one who has the private income, and—”

“You poor feeble egotist,” Simon retorted harshly, “I didn’t suspect that for one second after she made herself rather cutely available to me, a guest in your house. She obviously wasn’t stupid, and no girl who wasn’t would have gambled a solid understanding with you against a transient flirtation. But didn’t you ever read Lady Chat-terley’s Lover? Or the Kinsey Report? And hasn’t it dawned on you that a forceful woman like Eleanor, just because she isn’t a glamor girl, couldn’t be bored to frenzy with a husband who only cares about the campaigns of Wellington?”

Noel Bastion opened his mouth, and his fists clenched, but whatever was intended to come from either never materialized. For at that moment came the scream.

Shrill with unearthly terror and agony, it split the darkening haze with an eldritch intensity that seemed to turn every hair on the Saint’s nape into an individual icicle. And it did not stop, but ululated again and again in weird cadences of hysteria.

For an immeasurable span they were both petrified; and then Bastion turned and began to run wildly across the meadow, towards the sound.

“Eleanor!” he yelled, insanely, in a voice almost as piercing as the screams.

He ran so frantically that the Saint had to call on all his reserves to make up for Bastion’s split-second start. But he did close the gap as Bastion stumbled and almost fell over something that lay squarely across their path. Simon had seen it an instant sooner, and swerved, mechanically identifying the steely glint that had caught his eye as a reflection from a long gun-barrel.

And then, looking ahead and upwards, he saw through the blue fogginess something for which he would never completely believe his eyes, yet which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Something gray-black and scaly-slimy, an immense amorphous mass from which a reptilian neck and head with strange protuberances reared and swayed far up over him. And in the hideous dripping jaws something of human shape, from which the screams came, that writhed and flailed ineffectually with a peculiar-looking club …

With a sort of incoherent sob, Bastion scooped up the rifle at his feet and fired it. The horrendous mass convulsed; and into Simon’s eardrums, still buzzing from the heavy blast, came a sickening crunch that cut off the last shriek in the middle of a note.

The towering neck corkscrewed with frightful power, and the thing that had been human was flung dreadfully towards them. It fell with a kind of soggy limpness almost at their feet, as whatever had spat it out lurched backwards and was blotted out by the vaporous dimness with the sound of a gigantic splash while Bastion was still firing again at the place where it had been… .

As Bastion finally dropped the gun and sank slowly to his knees beside the body of his wife, Simon also looked down and saw that her hand was still spasmically locked around the thinner end of the crude bludgeon in which had been set a row of shark’s teeth. Now that he saw it better, he saw that it was no home-made affair, but probably a souvenir of some expedition to the South Pacific. But you couldn’t be right all the time, about every last detail. Just as a few seconds ago, and until he saw Bastion with his head bowed like that over the woman who had plotted to murder him, he had never expected to be restrained in his comment by the irrational compassion that finally moved him.

“By God,” he thought, “now I know I’m aging.”

But aloud he said: “She worked awful hard to sell everyone on the Monster. If you like, we can leave it that way. Luckily I’m a witness to what happened just now. But I don’t have to say anything about—this.”

He released the club gently from the grip of the dead fingers, and carried it away with him as he went to telephone Mackenzie.