"This is the Scorpion's sacred lair," he figured, "and Wilfred wouldn't let himself forget it. He'd play it up to himself for all it was worth. It's the inner sanctum of the great ruthless organisation that doesn't exist. He'd sit in that chair in the evenings—at that desk—there—thinking what a wonderful man he was. And he'd look at whatever innocent bit of interior decoration hides his secret cache, and gloat over the letters and dossiers that he's got hidden there, and the money they've brought in or are going to bring in—the fat, slimy, wallowing slug. . . ."
Again his eyes travelled slowly round the room. The plainly papered walls could have hidden nothing, except behind the pictures, and he had tried every one of those. Dummy books he had ruled out at once, for a servant may always take down a book; but he had tested the back of every shelf—and found nothing. The whole floor was carpeted, and he gave that no more than a glance: his analysis of Wilfred Garniman's august meditations did not harmonise with the vision of the same gentleman crawling about on his hands and knees. And every drawer of the desk was already unlocked, and not one of them contained anything of compromising interest.
And that appeared to exhaust the possibilities. He stared speculatively at the fireplace—but he had done that before. It ignored the exterior architecture of the building and was a plain modern affair of blue tiles and tin, and it would have been difficult to work any grisly gadgets into its bluntly bourgeois lines. Or, it appeared, into the lines of anything else in that room.
"Which," said the Saint drowsily, "is absurd."
There remained of course, Wilfred Garniman's bedroom— the Saint had long since listed that as the only feasible alternative. But, somehow, he didn't like it. Plunder and pink poplin pyjamas didn't seem a psychologically satisfactory combination —particularly when the pyjamas must be presumed to surround something like Wilfred Garniman must have looked like without his Old Harrovian tie. The idea did not ring a bell. And yet, if the boodle and etceteral appurtenances thereof and howsoever were not in the bedroom, they must be in the study—some blistered whereabouts or what not. . . .
"Which," burbled the Saint, "is absluly' posrous. . . ."
The situation seemed less and less annoying. ... It really didn't matter very much. . . . Wilfred Garniman, if one came to think of it, was even fatter than Teal . . . and one made allowances for detectives. . . . Teal was fat, and Long Harry was long, and Patricia played around with Scorpions; which was all very odd and amusing, but nothing to get worked up about before breakfast, old dear . . .
Chapter IX
Somewhere in the infinite darkness appeared a tiny speck of white. It came hurtling towards him; and as it came it grew larger and whiter and more terrible, until it seemed as if it must smash and smother and pulp him into the squashed wreckage of the whole universe at his back. He let out a yell, and the upper half of the great white sky fell back like a shutter, sending a sudden blaze of dazzling light into his eyes. The lower bit of white touched his nose and mouth damply, and an acrid stinging smell stabbed right up into the top of his head and trickled down his throat like a thin stream of condensed fire. He gasped, coughed, choked—and saw Wilfred Garniman.
"Hullo, old toad," said the Saint weakly.
He breathed deeply, fanning out of his nasal passages the fiery tingle of the restorative that Garniman had made him inhale. His head cleared magically, so completely that for a few moments it felt as if a cold wind had blown clean through it; and the dazzle of the light dimmed out of his eyes. But he looked down, and saw that his wrists and ankles were securely bound.
"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.