The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

'After you, dear old reed-warbler,' said the Saint cour­teously.

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 be­hind 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 loos­ing 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 hap­pened. 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 person­ality, 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?'

'The private war will go on,' said the Saint comfortably.

His deductions, as usual, were precisely true; but there was one twist in the affairs of Wilfred Garniman of which he did not know, and if he had known of it he might not have taken life quite so easily as he did for the next few days. That is just possible.

On the morning of that first interview, he had hung around in the middle distances of Mallaby Road with intent to in­crease his store of information; but Mr. Garniman had driven off to his righteous