The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

'That's a pretty useful line of dope, Wilfred,' he mur­mured huskily. 'How did you do it?'

Garniman was folding up his handkerchief and returning it to his pocket, working with slow meticulous hands.

'The pressure of your head on the back of the chair re­leased the gas,' he replied calmly. 'It's an idea of my own—I have always been prepared to have to entertain undesirable visitors. The lightest pressure is sufficient.'

Simon nodded.

'It certainly is a great game,' he remarked. 'I never noticed a thing, though I remember now that I was blithering to myself rather inanely just before I went under. And so the little man works off his own bright ideas. . . . Wilfred, you're coming on.'

'I brought my dancing partner with me,' said Garniman, quite casually.

He waved a fat indicative hand; and the Saint, squirming over to follow the gesture, saw Patricia in another chair. For a second or two he looked at her; then he turned slowly round again.

'There's no satisfying you jazz fiends, is there?' he drawled. 'Now I suppose you'll wind up the gramophone and start again. . . . But the girl seems to have lost the spirit of the thing. . . .'

Garniman sat down at the desk and regarded the Saint with the heavy inscrutable face of a great gross image.

'I had seen her before, dancing with you at the Jericho, long before we first met—I never forget a face. After she had succeeded in planting herself on me, I spent a little time assuring myself that I was not mistaken; and then the solution was simple. A few drops from a bottle that I am never without —in her champagne—and the impression was that she became helplessly drunk. She will recover without our assistance, per­haps in five minutes, perhaps in half an hour—according to her strength.' Wilfred Garniman's fleshy lips loosened in the travesty of a smile. 'You underestimated me, Templar.'

'That,' said the Saint, 'remains to be seen.'

Mr. Garniman shrugged.

'Need I explain that you have come to the end of your interesting and adventurous life?'

Simon twitched an eyebrow, and slid his mouth mockingly sideways.

'What—not again?' he sighed, and Garniman's smooth fore­head crinkled.

'I don't understand.'

'But you haven't seen so many of these situations through as I have, old horse,' said the Saint. 'I've lost count of the number of times this sort of thing has happened to me. I know the tradition demands it, but I think they might give me a rest sometimes. What's the programme this time—do you sew me up in the bath and light the geyser, or am I run through the mangle and buried under the billiard-table? Or can you think of something really original?'

Garniman inclined his head ironically. 'I trust you will find my method satisfactory,' he said. He lighted a cigarette, and rose from the desk again; and as he picked up a length of rope from the floor and moved across to Patricia, the Saint warbled on in the same tone of gentle weariness.

'Mind how you fix those ankles, Wilfred. That gauzy silk stuff you see on the limbs costs about five pounds a leg, and it ladders if a fly settles on it. Oh, and while we're on the subject: don't let's have any nonsense about death or dishonour. The child mightn't want to die. And besides, that stuff is played out, anyway. . . .'

Garniman made no reply.

He continued with his task in his ponderous methodical way, making every movement with immensely phlegmatic de­liberation. The Saint, who had known many criminals, and who was making no great exaggeration when he said that this particular situation had long since lost all its pristine charm for him, could recall no one in his experience who had ever been so dispassionate. Cold-blooded ruthlessness, a granite im­passivity, he had met before; but through it all, deep as it might be, there had always run a perceptible taut thread of vindictive purpose. In Wilfred Garniman there showed noth­ing of this. He went about his work in the same way that he might have gone about the setting of a mouse-trap—with ele­phantine efficiency, and a complete blank in the ideological compartment of his brain. And Simon Templar knew with an eerie intuition that this was no pose, as it might have been in others. And then he knew that Wilfred Garniman was mad.

Garniman finished, and straightened up. And then, still with­out speaking, he picked Patricia up in his arms and carried her out of the room.