His right hand moved like lightning, and the detonation of his heavy automatic in the confined space was like a vindictive thunderclap. It left the girl with a strange hot sting of powder on her wrist and a dull buzzing in her ears. And through the buzzing drifted the Saint's unruffled accents:
Patricia looked at him, white-faced.
'What was it?' she asked, with the faintest tremor in her voice.
'Just an odd spot of scorpion,' answered Simon Templar gently. 'An unpleasant specimen of the breed—the last time I saw one like that was up in the hills north of Puruk-jahu. Looks like a pal of mine has been doing some quick travelling, or ... Yes.' The Saint grinned. 'Get on the phone to the Zoo, old dear, and tell 'em they can have their property back if they care to send round and scrape it off the carpet. I don't think we shall want it any more, shall we?'
Patricia shuddered.
She had stripped away the brown paper and found a little cardboard box such as cheap jewellery is sometimes packed in. When she raised the lid, the tiny blue-green horror, like a miniature deformed lobster, had been lying there in a nest of cotton-wool; while she stared at it, it had rustled on to her and . . .
'It—wasn't very big,' she said, in a tone that tried to match the Saint's for lightness.
'Scorpions run to all sizes,' said the Saint cheerfully, 'and as often as not their poisonousness is in inverse ratio to their size in boots. Mostly, they're very minor troubles—I've been stung myself, and all I got was a sore and swollen arm. But the late lamented was a member of the one and only sure-certain and no-hokum family of homicides in the species. Pity I bumped it off so quickly—it might have been really valuable stuffed.'
Patricia's finger-tips slid mechanically around the rough edges of the hole that the nickel-cased .45 bullet had smashed through the polished mahogany table before ruining the carpet and losing itself somewhere in the floor. Then she looked steadily at the Saint.
'Why should anyone send you a scorpion?' she asked.
Simon Templar shrugged.
'It was the immortal Paragot who said: 'In this country the unexpected always happens, which paralyses the brain'. And if a real man-sized Scorpion can't be expected to send his young brothers to visit his friends as a token of esteem, what can he be expected to do?'
'Is that all?'
'All what?'
'All you propose to tell me.'
The Saint regarded her for a moment. He saw the tall slim lines of reposeful strength in her body, the fine moulding of the chin, the eyes as blue and level as his own. And slowly he screwed the cap on his fountain pen; and he stood up and came round the table.
'I'll tell you as much more as you want to know,' he said.
'Just like in the mad old days?'
'They had their moments, hadn't they?'
She nodded.
'Sometimes I wish we were back in them,' she said wistfully. 'I didn't fall in love with you in a pair of Anderson and Sheppard trousers——'
'They were!' cried the Saint indignantly. 'I distinctly remember ——'
Patricia laughed suddenly. Her hands fell on his shoulders.
'Give me a cigarette, boy,' she said, 'and tell me what's been happening.'
And he did so—though what he had to tell was little enough. And Chief Inspector Teal himself knew no more. The Scorpion had grown up in darkness, had struck from the darkness, and crawled back deeper into the dark. Those who could have spoken dared not speak, and those who might have spoken died too soon . . .
But as he told his tale, the Saint saw the light of all the mad old days awakening again in Patricia's eyes, and it was in a full and complete understanding of that light that he came to the one thing that Chief Inspector Teal would have given his ears to know.
