and got bumped off in the first story. Have a heart, dear old Garbage-man!'
The other made no response; and the Saint sighed. In the matter of cross-talk comedy, Wilfred Garniman was a depressingly feeble performer. In the matter of murder, on the other hand, he was probably depressingly efficient; but the Saint couldn't help feeling that he made death a most gloomy business.
And then they came into a small low vault; and the Saint saw Patricia again.
Her eyes were open, and she looked at him steadily, with the faintest of smiles on her lips.
'Hullo, boy.''
'Hullo, lass.'
That was all.
Simon glanced round. In the centre of the floor there was a deep hole, and beside it was a great mound of earth. There was a dumpy white sack in one corner, and a neat conical heap of sand beside it.
Wilfred Garniman explained, in his monotonously apathetic way.
'We tried to sink a well here, but we gave it up. The hole is only about ten feet deep—it was not filled up again. I shall fill it up tonight.'
He picked up the girl and took her to the hole in the floor. Dropping on one knee at the edge, he lowered her to the stretch of his arms and let go. . . . He came back to the Saint, dusting his trousers.
'Will you continue to walk?' he inquired.
Simon stepped to the side of the pit, and turned. For a moment he gazed into the other man's eyes—the eyes of a man empty of the bowels of compassion. But the Saint's blue gaze was as cold and still as a polar sea.
'You're an overfed, pot-bellied swamp-hog,' he said; and then Garniman pushed him roughly backwards.
Quite unhurriedly, Wilfred Garniman took off his coat, unfastened his cuff-links, and rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. He opened the sack of cement and tipped out its contents into a hole that he trampled in the heap of sand. He picked up a spade, looked about him, and put it down again. Without the least variation of his heavily sedate stride he left the cellar, leaving the candle burning on the floor. In three or four minutes he was back again, carrying a brimming pail of water in either hand; and with the help of these he continued his unaccustomed labour, splashing gouts of water on his materials and stirring them carefully with the spade.
It took him over half an hour to reduce the mixture to a consistency smooth enough to satisfy him, for he was an inexperienced worker and yet he could afford to make no mistake. At the end of that time he was streaming with sweat, and his immaculate white collar and shirt-front were grubbily wilting rags; but those facts did not trouble him. No one will ever know what was in his mind while he did that work: perhaps he did not know himself, for his face was blank and tranquil.
His flabby muscles must have been aching, but he did not stop to rest. He took the spade over to the hole in the floor. The candle sent no light down there, but in the darkness he could see an irregular blur of white—he was not interested to gloat over it. Bending his back again, he began to shovel the earth back into the hole. It took an astonishing time, and he was breathing stertorously long before he had filled the pit up loosely level with the floor. Then he dropped the spade and tramped over the surface, packing it down tight and hard.
And then he laid over it the cement that he had prepared, finishing it off smoothly level with the floor.
Even then he did not rest—he was busy for another hour, filling the pails with earth and carrying them up the stairs and out into the garden and emptying them over the flowerbeds. He had a placidly accurate eye for detail and an enormous capacity for taking pains, had Mr. Wilfred Garniman; but it is doubtful if he gave more than a passing thought to the eternal meaning of what he had done.
Chapter X
To Mr. Teal, who in those days knew the Saint's habits almost as well as he knew his own, it was merely axiomatic that breakfast and Simon Templar coincided somewhere between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.; and therefore it is not surprising that the visit which he paid to 7, Upper Berkeley Mews on one historic morning resulted in a severe shock to his system. For a few moments after the door had been opened to him he stood bovinely rooted to the mat, looking like some watcher of the skies who has just seen the Great Bear turn a back-somersault and march rapidly over the horizon in column of all fours. And when he had pulled himself together, he followed the Saint into the sitting-room with the air of a man who is not at all certain that there is no basin of water balanced over the door to await his entrance.
'Have some gum, old dear,' invited the Saint hospitably; and Mr. Teal stopped by the table and blinked at him.
