Trust the Saint (19 page)

“What for?” Bastion demanded brusquely.

“Let’s face it,” said the Saint. “Those claw marks could be fakes. And the dog could have been mashed up with some sort of club—even a club with spikes set in it to leave wounds that’d look as if they were made by teeth. But by all accounts, no one could have got near enough to the dog to do that without him barking. Unless the dog was doped first. So before we go overboard on this Monster theory, I’d like to rule everything else out. An autopsy would do that.”

Bastion rubbed his scrubby mustache.

“I see your point. Yes, that might be a good idea.”

He helped them to shift the dog on to the sack which had previously covered it, and Simon and Mackenzie carried it between them back to the driveway and laid it in the trunk of the detective’s car.

“D’ye think we could ha’ a wurrd wi’ Mrs Bastion, sir?” Mackenzie asked, wiping his hands on a clean rag and passing it to the Saint.

“I suppose so,” Bastion assented dubiously. “Although she’s pretty upset about this, as you can imagine. It was really her dog more than mine. But come in, and I’ll see if she’ll talk to you for a minute.”

But Mrs Bastion herself settled that by meeting them in the hall, and she made it obvious that she had been watching them from a window.

“What are they doing with Golly, Noel?” she greeted her husband wildly. “Why are they taking him away?”

“They want to have him examined by a doctor, dear.”

Bastion went on to explain why, until she interrupted him again:

“Then don’t let them bring him back. It’s bad enough to have seen him the way he is, without having to look at him dissected.” She turned to Simon and Mackenzie. “You must understand how I feel. Golly was like a son to me. His name was really Goliath—I called him that because he was so big and fierce, but actually he was a pushover when you got on the right side of him.”

Words came from her in a driving torrent that suggested the corollary of a power-house. She was a big-boned strong-featured woman who made no attempt to minimize any of her probable forty-five years. Her blond hair was unwaved and pulled back into a tight bun, and her blue eyes were set in a nest of wrinkles that would have been called characterful on an outdoor man. Her lipstick, which needed renewing, had a slapdash air of being her one impatient concession to feminine artifice. But Bastion put a soothing arm around her as solicitously as if she had been a dimpled bride.

“I’m sure these officers will have him buried for us, Eleanor,” he said. “But while they’re here I think they wanted to ask you something.”

“Only to confairrm what Mr Bastion told us, ma’m” said Mackenzie. “That ye didna hear any disturrbance last night.”

“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 coela-canth 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 authorrity in this, ye underrstand,” he emphasized, “except the rights o’ any private investigator —which are no’ the same in Scotland as in America, to judge by some o’ 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 has 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 British 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 eam 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.”