“It sounds as if I won’t be needed again until later tomorrow morning,” said the Saint. “But I’ll be reading and brooding. I’m almost as interested in an Niseag now as you are.”
He went back to the book he had left in the drawing room as the house settled into stillness. Annie Clanraith had already departed, before lunch, taking a sheaf of papers with her to type at home.
Presently he put the volume down on his thighs and lay passively thinking, stretched out on the couch. It was his uniquely personal method of tackling profound problems, to let himself relax into a state of blank receptiveness in which half-subconscious impressions could grow and flow together in delicately fluid adjustments that could presently mould a conclusion almost as concrete as knowledge. For some time he gazed sightlessly at the ceiling, and then he continued to meditate with his eyes closed...
He was awakened by Noel Bastion entering the room, humming tunelessly. The biographer of Wellington was instantly apologetic.
“I’m sorry, Templar — I thought you’d be in your room.”
“That’s all right.” Simon glanced at his watch, and was mildly surprised to discover how sleepy he must have been. “I was doing some thinking, and the strain must have been too much for me.”
“Eleanor relieved me an hour ago. I hadn’t seen anything, I’m afraid.”
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I’m pretty quiet on my feet. Must be a habit I got from commando training. Eleanor often says that if she could stalk like me she’d have a lot more trophies.” Bastion went to the bookcase, took down a book, and thumbed through it for some reference. “I’ve been trying to do some work, but it isn’t easy to concentrate.”
Simon stood up and stretched himself.
“I guess you’ll have to get used to working under difficulties if you’re going to be a part-time monster hunter for ten years — isn’t that how long Eleanor said she was ready to spend at it?”
“I’m hoping it’ll be a good deal less than that.”
“I was reading in this book More Than A Legend that in 1934, when the excitement about the Monster was at its height, a chap named Sir Edward Mountain hired a bunch of men and organized a systematic watch like you were suggesting, but spacing them all around the lake. It went on for a month or two, and they got a few pictures of distant splashings, but nothing that was scientifically accepted.”
Bastion put his volume back on the shelf.
“You’re still skeptical, aren’t you?”
“What I’ve been wondering,” said the Saint, “is why this savage behemoth with the big sharp teeth and the nutcracker jaws chomped up a dog but didn’t swallow even a little nibble of it.”
“Perhaps it isn’t carnivorous. An angry elephant will mash a man to a pulp, but it won’t eat him. And that dog could be very irritating, barking at everything—”
“According to what I heard, there wasn’t any barking. And I’m sure the sheep it’s supposed to have taken didn’t bark. But the sheep disappeared entirely, didn’t it?”
“That’s what Clanraith says. But for all we know, the sheep may have been stolen.”
“But that could have given somebody the idea of building up the Monster legend from there.”
Bastion shook his head.
“But the dog did bark at everyone,” he insisted stubbornly.
“Except the people he knew,” said the Saint, no less persistently. “Every dog is vulnerable to a few people. You yourself, for instance, if you’d wanted to, could have come along, and if he felt lazy he’d’ve opened one eye and then shut it again and gone back to sleep. Now, are you absolutely sure that nobody else was on those terms with him? Could a postman or a milkman have made friends with him? Or anyone else at all?”
The other man massaged his mustache.
“I don’t know... Well, perhaps Fergus Clanraith might.”
Simon blinked.
“But it sounded to me as if he didn’t exactly love the dog.”
“Perhaps he didn’t. But it must have known him pretty well. Eleanor likes to go hiking across country, and the dog always used to go with her. She’s always crossing Clanraith’s property and stopping to talk to him, she tells me. She gets on very well with him, which is more than I do.”
“What, that old curmudgeon?”
“I know, he’s full of that Scottish Nationalist nonsense. But Eleanor is half Scots herself, and that makes her almost human in his estimation. I believe they talk for hours about salmon fishing and grouse shooting.”
“I wondered if he had an appealing side hidden away somewhere,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “or if Annie got it all from her mother.”
Bastion’s deep-set sooty eyes flickered over him appraisingly.
“She’s rather an attractive filly, isn’t she?”
“I have a feeling that to a certain type of man, in certain circumstances, and perhaps at a certain age, her appeal might be quite dangerous.”
Noel Bastion had an odd expression of balancing some answer on the tip of his tongue, weighing it for advisability, changing his mind a couple of times about it, and finally swallowing it. He then tried to recover from the pause by making a business of consulting the clock on the mantelpiece.
“Will you excuse me? Eleanor asked me to bring her a thermos of tea about now. She hates to miss that, even for an Niseag.”
“Sure.”
Simon followed him into the kitchen, where a kettle was already simmering on the black coal stove. He watched while his host carefully scalded a teapot and measured leaves into it from a canister.
“You know, Major,” he said, “I’m not a detective by nature, even of the private variety.”
“I know. In fact, I think you used to be just the opposite.”
“That’s true, too. I do get into situations, though, where I have to do a bit of deducing, and sometimes I startle everyone by coming up with a brilliant hunch. But as a general rule, I’d rather prevent a crime than solve one. As it says in your kind of textbooks, a little preventive action can save a lot of counter-attacks.”
The Major had poured boiling water into the pot with a steady hand, and was opening a vacuum flask while he waited for the brew.
“You’re a bit late to prevent this one, aren’t you? — If it was a crime.”
“Not necessarily. Not if the death of Golly was only a stepping-stone — something to build on the story of a missing sheep, and pave the way for the Monster’s next victim to be a person. If a person were killed in a similar way now, the Monster explanation would get a lot more believers than if it had just happened out of the blue.”
Bastion put sugar and milk into the flask, without measuring, with the unhesitating positiveness of practise, and took the lid off the teapot to sniff and stir it.
“But good heavens, Templar, who could treat a dog like that, except a sadistic maniac?”
Simon lighted a cigarette. He was very certain now, and the certainty made him very calm.
“A professional killer,” he said. “There are quite a lot of them around who don’t have police records. People whose temperament and habits have developed a great callousness about death. But they’re not sadists. They’re normally kind to animals and even to human beings, when it’s normally useful to be. But fundamentally they see them as expendable, and when the time comes they can sacrifice them quite impersonally.”
“I know Clanraith’s a farmer, and he raises animals only to have them butchered,” Bastion said slowly. “But it’s hard to imagine him doing what you’re talking about, much as I dislike him.”
“Then you think we should discard him as a red herring?”