The Saint had embarked on his Scottish trip with an open mind and an attitude of benevolent optimism, but if anyone had prophesied that it would lead to him sipping tea in the drawing room of two practically total strangers, with his valise unpacked in their guest bedroom, and solemnly chatting about a monster as if it were as real as a monkey, he would probably have been mildly derisive. His hostess, however, was obsessed with the topic.
“Listen to this,” she said, fetching a well-worn volume from a bookcase. “It’s a quotation from the biography of St Columba, written about the middle of the seventh century. It tells about his visit to Inverness some hundred years before, and it says:
He was obliged to cross the water of Nesa, and when he had come to the bank he sees some of the inhabitants bringing an unfortunate fellow whom, as those who were bringing him related, a little while before some aquatic monster seized and savagely bit while he was swimming... The blessed man orders one of his companions to swim out and bring him from over the water a coble... Lugne Mocumin without delay takes off his clothes except his tunic and casts himself into the water. But the monster comes up and moves towards the man as he swam... The blessed man, seeing it, commanded the ferocious monster saying, “Go thou no further nor touch the man; go back at once.” Then on hearing this word of the Saint the monster was terrified and fled away again more quickly than if it had been dragged off by ropes.
“I must try to remember that formula,” Simon murmured, “and hope the Monster can’t tell one Saint from another.”
“ ‘Monster is really a rather stupid name for it,” Mrs Bastion said. “It encourages people to be illogical about it. Actually, in the old days the local people called it an Niseag, which is simply the name ‘Ness’ in Gaelic with a feminine diminutive ending. You could literally translate it as ‘Nessie.’ ”
“That does sound a lot cuter,” Simon agreed. “If you forget how it plays with dogs.”
Eleanor Bastion’s weathered face went pale, but the muscles under the skin did not flinch.
“I haven’t forgotten Golly. But I was trying to keep my mind off him.”
“Assuming this beastie does exist,” said the Saint, “how did it get here?”
“Why did it have to ‘get’ here at all? I find it easier to believe that it always was here. The loch is 750 feet deep, which is twice the mean depth of the North Sea. An Niseag is a creature that obviously prefers the depths and only comes to the surface occasionally. I think its original home was always at the bottom of the loch, and it was trapped there when some prehistoric geological upheaval cut off the loch from the sea.”
“And it’s lived there ever since — for how many million years?”
“Not the original ones — I suppose we must assume at least a couple. But their descendants. Like many primitive creatures, it probably lives to a tremendous age.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Most likely something of the plesiosaurus family. The descriptions sound more like that than anything — large body, long neck, paddle-like legs. Some people claim to have seen stumpy projections on its head, rather like the horns of a snail, which aren’t part of the usual reconstruction of a plesiosaurus. But after all, we’ve never seen much of a plesiosaurus except its skeleton. You wouldn’t know exactly what a snail looked like if you’d only seen its shell.”
“But if Nessie has been here all this time, why wasn’t she reported much longer ago?”
“She was. You heard that story about St Columba. And if you think only modern observations are worth paying attention to, several reliable sightings were recorded from 1871 onwards.”
“But there was no motor road along the loch, until 1933,” Bastion managed to contribute at last, “and a trip like you made today would have been quite an expedition. So there weren’t many witnesses about until fairly recently, of the type that scientists would take seriously.”
Simon lighted a cigarette. The picture was clear enough. Like the flying saucers, it depended on what you wanted to believe — and whom.
Except that here there was not only fantasy to be thought of. There could be felony.
“What would you have to do to make it an official discovery?”
“We have movie and still cameras with the most powerful telephoto lenses you can buy,” said the woman. “I spend eight hours a day simply watching the lake, just like anyone might put in at a regular job, but I vary the times of day systematically. Noel sometimes puts in a few hours as well. We have a view for several miles in both directions, and by the law of averages an Niseag must come up eventually in the area we’re covering. Whenever that happens, our lenses will get close-up pictures that’ll show every detail beyond any possibility of argument. It’s simply a matter of patience, and when I came here I made up my mind that I’d spend ten years on it if necessary.”
“And now,” said the Saint, “I guess you’re more convinced than ever that you’re on the right track and the scent is hot.”
Mrs Bastion looked him in the eyes with terrifying equanimity.
“Now,” she said, “I’m going to watch with a Weatherby Magnum as well as the cameras. An Niseag can’t be much bigger than an elephant, and it isn’t any more bullet-proof. I used to think it’d be a crime to kill the last survivor of a species, but since I saw what it did to poor Golly I’d like to have it as a trophy as well as a picture.”
There was much more of this conversation, but nothing that would not seem repetitious in verbatim quotation. Mrs Bastion had accumulated numerous other books on the subject, from any of which she was prepared to read excerpts in support of her convictions.
It was hardly 8:30, however, after a supper of cold meat and salad, when she announced that she was going to bed.
“I want to get up at two o’clock and be out at the loch well before daylight — the same time when that thing must have been there this morning.”
“Okay,” said the Saint. “Knock on my door, and I’ll go with you.”
He remained to accept a nightcap of Peter Dawson, which seemed to taste especially rich and smooth in the land where they made it. Probably this was his imagination, but it gave him a pleasant feeling of drinking the wine of the country on its own home ground.
“If you’re going to be kind enough to look after her, I may sleep a bit later,” Bastion said. “I must get some work done on my book tonight, while there’s a little peace and quiet. Not that Eleanor can’t take care of herself better than most women, but I wouldn’t like her being out there alone after what’s happened.”
“You’re thoroughly sold on this monster yourself, are you?”
The other stared into his glass.
“It’s the sort of thing that all my instincts and experience would take with a grain of salt. But you’ve seen for yourself that it isn’t easy to argue with Eleanor. And I must admit that she makes a terrific case for it. But until this morning I was keeping an open mind.”
“And now it isn’t so open?”
“Quite frankly, I’m pretty shaken. I feel it’s got to be settled now, one way or the other. Perhaps you’ll have some luck tomorrow.”
It did in fact turn out to be a vigil that gave Simon goose-pimples, but they were caused almost entirely by the pre-dawn chill of the air. Daylight came slowly, through a gray and leaky-looking overcast. The lake remained unruffled, guarding its secrets under a pale pearly glaze.
“I wonder what we did wrong,” Mrs Bastion said at last, when the daylight was as broad as the clouds evidently intended to let it become. “The thing should have come back to where it made its last kill. Perhaps if we hadn’t been so sentimental we should have left Golly right where he was and built a machan over him where we could have stood watch in turns.”