The Saint shook his head.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. You’ll certainly have to testify on the charges involving her. And frankly, it should be worth something to see the Ham’s performance when he finds out why he shouldn’t have avoided meeting the parents of that girl in the drama school that he gave such a shoddy deal to. At the very least, he would have known your real name was different from the stage label she was using.”
The convenient monster
“Of courrse,” said Inspector Robert Mackenzie, of the Inverness-shire Constabulary, with a burr as broad as his boots seeming to add an extra “r” to the word, “I know ye’re only in Scotland as an ordinary visitor, and no’ expectin’ to be mixed up in any criminal business.”
“That’s right,” said the Saint cheerfully.
He was so used to this sort of thing that the monotony sometimes became irritating, but Inspector Mackenzie made the conventional gambit with such courteous geniality that it almost sounded like an official welcome. He was a large and homely man with large red hands and small twinkling gray eyes and sandy hair carefully plastered over the bare patch above his forehead, and so very obviously and traditionally a policeman that Simon Templar actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for him. Short of a call from Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal in person, nothing could have brought back more sharply what the Saint often thought of as the good old days, and he took it as a compliment that even after so many years and even as far away as Scotland itself, he was not lost to the telescopic eye of Scotland Yard.
“And I suppose,” Mackenzie continued, “ye couldna even be bothered with a wee bit of a local mystery.”
“What’s your problem?” Simon asked. “Has somebody stolen the haggis you were fattening for the annual Police Banquet?”
The Inspector ignored this with the same stony dignity with which he would have greeted the hoary question about what a Scotsman wore under his kilt.
“It might be involvin’ the Loch Ness Monster,” he said with the utmost gravity. “Nae doot ye’ve hairrd of that.”
“All right,” said the Saint good-humouredly. “I started this. I suppose I had it coming. But you’re the first policeman who ever tried to pull my leg. Didn’t they tell you that I’m the guy who’s supposed to do the pulling?”
“I’m not makin’ a joke,” Mackenzie persisted aggrievedly, and the Saint stared at him.
It was in the spring of 1933 that a remarkable succession of sober and reputable witnesses began to testify that they had seen in Loch Ness a monstrous creature whose existence had been a legend of region since ancient times, but which few persons in this century had claimed to have seen for themselves. The descriptions varied in detail, as human observations are prone to do, but they seemed generally to agree that the beast was roughly thirty feet long and could swim at about the same number of miles per hour; it was a dark gray in color, with a small horse-like head on a long tapering neck, which it turned from side to side with the quick movements of an alert hen. There were divergencies as to whether it had one or more humps in its back, and whether it churned the water with flippers or a powerful tail, but all agreed that it could not be classified with anything known to modern natural history.
The reports culminated in December with a photograph showing a strange reptilian shape thrashing in the water, taken by a senior employee of the British Aluminum Company, which has a plant nearby. A number of experts certified the negative to be unretouched and unfaked, and the headline writers took it from there.
Within a fortnight, a London newspaper had a correspondent on the scene with a highly publicized big-game authority in tow; some footprints were found and casts made of them — which before the New Year was three days old had been pronounced by the chief zoologists of the British Museum to have all been made by the right hind foot of a hippopotamus, and a stuffed hippopotamus at that. In the nationwide guffaw which followed the exposure of this hoax, the whole matter exploded into a theme for cartoonists and comedians, and that aura of hilarious incredulity still coloured the Saint’s vague recollections of the subject.
It took a little while for him to convince himself that the Inspector’s straight face was not part of an elaborate exercise in Highland humor.
“What has the Monster done that’s illegal?” Simon inquired at length, with a gravity to match Mackenzie’s own.
“A few weeks ago, it’s thocht to haf eaten a sheep. And last night it may ha’ killed a dog.”
“Where was this?”
“The sheep belonged to Fergus Clanraith, who has a farm by the loch beyond Foyers, and the dog belongs to his neighbours, a couple named Bastion from doon in England who settled here last summer. ’Tis only aboot twenty miles away, if ye could spairr the time to run doon the road with me.”
The Saint sighed. In certain interludes, he thought that everything had already happened to him that could befall a man even with his exceptional gift for stumbling into fantastic situations and being offered bizarre assignments, but apparently there was always some still more preposterous imbroglio waiting to entangle him.
“Okay,” he said resignedly. “I’ve been slugged with practically every other improbability you could raise an eyebrow at, so why should I draw the line at dog-slaying monsters. Lay on, Macduff.”
“The name is Mackenzie,” said the Inspector seriously.
Simon paid his hotel bill and took his own car, for he had been intending to continue his pleasantly aimless wandering that day anyhow, and it would not make much difference to him where he stopped along the way. He followed Mackenzie’s somewhat venerable chariot out of Inverness on the road that takes the east bank of the Ness River, and in a few minutes the slaty grimness of the town had been gratefully forgotten in the green and gold loveliness of the countryside.
The road ran at a fairly straight tangent to the curves of the river and the Caledonian Canal, giving only infrequent glimpses of the seven locks built to lift shipping to the level of the lake, until at Dores he had his first view of Loch Ness at its full breadth.
The Great Glen of Scotland transects the country diagonally from north-east to south-west, as if a giant had tried to break off the upper end of the land between the deep natural notches formed by Loch Linnhe and the Beauly Firth. On the map which Simon had seen, the chain of lochs stretched in an almost crow-flight line that had made him look twice to be sure that there was not in fact a clear channel across from the Eastern to the Western Sea. Loch Ness itself, a tremendous trough twenty-four miles long but only averaging about a mile in width, suggested nothing more than an enlargement of the Canal system which gave access to it at both ends. But not many vessels seemed to avail themselves of the passage, for there was no boat in sight on the lake that afternoon. With the water as calm as a mill-pond and the fields and trees rising from its shores to a blue sky dappled with soft woolly clouds, it was as pretty as a picture postcard and utterly unconvincing to think of as a place which might be haunted by some outlandish horror from the mists of antiquity.
For a drive of twenty minutes, at the sedate pace set by Mackenzie, the highway paralleled the edge of the loch a little way up its steep stony banks. The opposite shore widened slightly into the tranquil beauty of Urquhart Bay with its ancient castle standing out gray and stately on the far point, and then returned to the original almost uniform breadth. Then, within fortunately brief sight of the unpicturesque aluminum works, it bore away to the south through the small stark village of Foyers and went winding up the glen of one of the tumbling streams that feed the lake.