Trust The Saint

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.

Several minutes further on, Mackenzie turned off into a narrow side road that twisted around and over a hill and swung down again, until suddenly the loch was spread out squarely before them once more and the lane curled past the first of two houses that could be seen standing solitarily apart from each other but each within a bowshot of the loch. Both of them stood out with equal harshness against the gentle curves and colors of the landscape with the same dark graceless austerity as the last village or the last town or any other buildings Simon had seen in Scotland, a country whose unbounded natural beauty seemed to have inspired no corresponding artistry in its architects, but rather to have goaded them into competition to offset it with the most contrasting ugliness into which bricks and stone and tile could be assembled. This was a paradox to which he had failed to fit a plausible theory for so long that he had finally given up trying.

Beside the first house, a man in a stained shirt and corduroy trousers tucked into muddy canvas leggings was digging in a vegetable garden. He looked up as Mackenzie brought his rattletrap to a stop, and walked slowly over to the hedge. He was short but powerfully built, and his hair flamed like a stormy sunset.

Mackenzie climbed out and beckoned to the Saint. As Simon reached them, the red-haired man was saying, “Aye, I’ve been over and seen what’s left o’ the dog. It’s more than they found of my sheep, I can tell ye.”

“But could it ha’ been the same thing that did it?” asked the Inspector.

“That’s no’ for me to say, Mackenzie. I’m no’ a detective. But remember, it wasna me who said the Monster took my sheep. It was the Bastions who thocht o’ that, it might be to head me off from askin’ if they hadn’t been the last to see it — pairhaps on their own Sunday dinner table. There’s nae such trick I wouldna put beyond the Sassenach.”

Mackenzie introduced them, “This is Mr Clanraith, whom I was tellin’ ye aboot. Fergus, I’d like ye to meet Mr Templar, who may be helpin’ me to investigate these goings-on.”

Clanraith gave Simon a muscular and horny grip across the untrimmed hedge, appraising him shrewdly from under shaggy ginger brows.

“Ye dinna look like a policeman, Mr Templar.”

“I try not to,” said the Saint expressionlessly. “Did you mean by what you were just saying that you don’t believe in the Monster at all?”

“I didna say that.”

“Then apart from anything else, you think there might actually be such a thing.”

“There might.”

“Living where you do, I should think you’d have as good a chance as anyone of seeing it yourself — if it does exist.”

The farmer peered at Simon suspiciously.

“Wad ye be a reporrter, Mr Templar, pairhaps?”

“No, I’m not,” Simon assured him, but the other remained obdurately wary.

“When a man tells o’ seem’ monsters, his best friends are apt to wonder if he may ha’ taken a wee drop too much. If I had seen anything, ever, I wadna be talkin’ aboot it to every stranger, to be made a laughin’-stock of.”

“But ye’ll admit,” Mackenzie put in, “it’s no’ exactly normal for a dog to be chewed up and killed the way this one was.”

“I wull say this,” Clanraith conceded guardedly. “It’s strange that nobody hairrd the dog bark, or e’en whimper.”

Through the Saint’s mind flickered an eerie vision of something amorphous and loathsome oozing soundlessly out of night-blackened water, flowing with obscene stealth towards a hound that slept unwarned by any of its senses.

“Do you mean it mightn’t’ve had a chance to let out even a yip?”

“I’m not sayin’,” Clanraith maintained cautiously. “But it was a guid watchdog, if naught else.”

A girl had stepped out of the house and come closer while they talked. She had Fergus Clanraith’s fiery hair and greenish eyes, but her skin was pink and white where his was weather-beaten and her lips were full where his were tight. She was half a head taller than he, and her figure was slim where it should be.

Now she said, “That’s right. He even barked whenever he heard me coming, although he saw me every day.”

Her voice was low and well-modulated, with only an attractive trace of her father’s accent.

“Then if it was a pairrson wha killed him, Annie, ’twad only mean it was a body he was still more used to.”

“But you can’t really believe that any human being would do a thing like that to a dog that knew them — least of all to their own dog!”

“That’s the trouble wi’ lettin’ a lass be brocht up an’ schooled on the wrong side o’ the Tweed,” Clanraith said darkly. “She forgets what the English ha’ done to honest Scotsmen no’ so lang syne.”

The girl’s eyes had kept returning to the Saint with candid interest, and it was to him that she explained, smiling, “Father still wishes he could fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie. He’s glad to let me do part-time secretarial work for Mr Bastion because I can live at home and keep house as well, but he still feels I’m guilty of fraternizing with the Enemy.”

“We’d best be gettin’ on and talk to them ourselves,” Mackenzie said. “And then we’ll see if Mr Templar has any more questions to ask.”

There was something in Annie Clanraith’s glance which seemed to say that she hoped that he would, and the Saint was inclined to be of the same sentiment. He had certainly not expected to find anyone so decorative in the cast of characters, and he began to feel a tentative quickening of optimism about this interruption in his travels. He could see her in his rear-view mirror, still standing by the hedge and following him with her gaze after her father had turned back to his digging.

About three hundred yards and a few bends farther on, Mackenzie veered between a pair of stone gate posts and chugged to a standstill on the circular driveway in front of the second house. Simon stopped behind him and then strolled after him to the front door, which was opened almost at once by a tall thin man in a pullover and baggy gray flannel slacks.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said the detective courteously. “I’m Inspector Mackenzie from Inverness. Are ye Mr Bastion?”

“Yes.”

Bastion had a bony face with a long aquiline nose, lank black hair flecked with gray, and a broad toothbrush mustache that gave him an indeterminately military appearance. His black eyes flickered to the Saint inquiringly.

“This is Mr Templar, who may be assistin’ me,” Mackenzie said. “The constable who was here this morning told me all aboot what ye showed him on the telephone, but could we hae a wee look for ourselves?”

“Oh, yes, certainly. Will you come this way?”

The way was around the house, across an uninspired formal garden at the back which looked overdue for the attention of a gardener, and through a small orchard beyond which a stretch of rough grass sloped quickly down to the water. As the meadow fell away, a pebbly beach came into view, and Simon saw that this was one of the rare breaches in the steep average angle of the loch’s sides. On either side of the little beach the ground swelled up again to form a shallow bowl that gave an easy natural access to the lake. The path that they traced led to a short rustic pier with a shabby skiff tied to it, and on the ground to one side of the pier was something covered with potato sacking.

“I haven’t touched anything, as the constable asked me,” Bastion said. “Except to cover him up.”

He bent down and carefully lifted off the burlap.

They looked down in silence at what was uncovered.

“The puir beastie,” Mackenzie said at last.

It had been a large dog of confused parentage in which the Alsatian may have predominated. What had happened to it was no nicer to look at than it is to catalog. Its head and hind quarters were partly mashed to a red pulp, and plainly traceable across its chest was a row of slot-like gashes, each about an inch long and close together, from which blood had run and clotted in the short fur. Mackenzie squatted and stretched the skin with gentle fingers to see the slits more clearly. The Saint also felt the chest: it had an unnatural contour where the line of punctures crossed it, and his probing touch found only sponginess where there should have been a hard cage of ribs.

His eyes met Mackenzie’s across the pitifully mangled form.

“That would be quite a row of teeth,” he remarked.

“Aye,” said the Inspector grimly. “But what lives here that has a mouth like that?”

They straightened up and surveyed the immediate surroundings. The ground here, only a stride or two from the beach, which in turn was less than a yard wide, was so moist that it was soggy, and pockets of muddy liquid stood in the deeper indentations with which it was plentifully rumpled. The carpet of coarse grass made individual impressions difficult to identify, but three or four shoe-heel prints could be positively distinguished.

“I’m afraid I made a lot of those tracks.” Bastion said. “I know you’re not supposed to go near anything, but all I could think of at the time was seeing if he was still alive and if I could do anything for him. The constable tramped around a bit too, when he was here.” He pointed past the body. “But neither of us had anything to do with those marks there.”

Close to the beach was a place where the turf looked as if it had been raked by something with three gigantic claws. One talon had caught in the roots of a tuft of grass and torn it up bodily: the clump lay on the pebbles at the water’s edge. Aside from that, the claws had left three parallel grooves, about four inches apart and each about half an inch wide. They dug into the ground at their upper ends to a depth of more than two inches, and dragged back towards the lake for a length of about ten inches as they tapered up.

Simon and Mackenzie stood on the pebbles to study the marks, Simon spanning them experimentally with his fingers while the detective took more exact measurements with a tape and entered them in his notebook.

“Anything wi’ a foot big enough to carry claws like that,” Mackenzie said, “I’d no’ wish to ha’ comin after me.”

“Well, they call it a Monster, don’t they?” said the Saint dryly. “It wouldn’t impress anyone if it made tracks like a mouse.”

Mackenzie unbent his knees stiffly, shooting the Saint a distrustful glance, and turned to Bastion. “When did ye find all this, sir?” he asked.

“I suppose it was about six o’clock,” Bastion said. “I woke up before dawn and couldn’t get to sleep again, so I decided to try a little early fishing. I got up as soon as it was light—”

“Ye didna hear any noise before that?”

“No.”

“It couldna ha’ been the dog barkin’ that woke ye?”

“Not that I’m aware of. And my wife is a very light sleeper, and she didn’t hear anything. But I was rather surprised when I didn’t see the dog outside. He doesn’t sleep in the house, but he’s always waiting on the doorstep in the morning. However, I came on down here — and that’s how I found him.”

“And you didn’t see anything else?” Simon asked. “In the lake, I mean.”

“No. I didn’t see the Monster. And when I looked for it, there wasn’t a ripple on the water. Of course, the dog may have been killed some time before, though his body was still warm.”

“Mr Bastion,” Mackenzie said, “do ye believe it was the Monster that killed him?”

Bastion looked at him and at the Saint.

“I’m not a superstitious man,” he replied. “But if it wasn’t a monster of some kind, what else could it have been?”

The Inspector closed his notebook with a snap that seemed to be echoed by his clamping lips. It was evident that he felt that the situation was wandering far outside his professional province. He scowled at the Saint as though he expected Simon to do something about it.

“It might be interesting,” Simon said thoughtfully, “if we got a vet to do a post-mortem.”

“What for?” Bastion demanded brusquely.

“Let’s face it,” said the Saint. “Those claw marks could be fakes. And the dog could have been mashed up with some sort of club — even a club with spikes set in it to leave wounds that’d look as if they were made by teeth. But by all accounts, no one could have got near enough to the dog to do that without him barking. Unless the dog was doped first. So before we go overboard on this Monster theory, I’d like to rule everything else out. An autopsy would do that.”

Bastion rubbed his scrubby mustache.

“I see your point. Yes. that might be a good idea.”

He helped them to shift the dog on to the sack which had previously covered it, and Simon and Mackenzie carried it between them back to the driveway and laid it in the trunk of the detective’s car.

“D’ye think we could ha’ a wurrd wi’ Mrs Bastion, sir?” Mackenzie asked, wiping his hands on a clean rag and passing it to the Saint.

“I suppose so,” Bastion assented dubiously. “Although she’s pretty upset about this, as you can imagine. It was really her dog more than mine. But come in, and I’ll see if she’ll talk to you for a minute.”

But Mrs Bastion herself settled that by meeting them in the hall, and she made it obvious that she had been watching them from a window.

“What are they doing with Golly, Noel?” she greeted her husband wildly. “Why are they taking him away?”

“They want to have him examined by a doctor, dear.”

Bastion went on to explain why, until she interrupted him again:

“Then don’t let them bring him back. It’s bad enough to have seen him the way he is, without having to look at him dissected.” She turned to Simon and Mackenzie. “You must understand how I feel. Golly was like a son to me. His name was really Goliath — I called him that because he was so big and fierce, but actually he was a pushover when you got on the right side of him.”

Words came from her in a driving torrent that suggested the corollary of a powerhouse. She was a big-boned strong-featured woman who made no attempt to minimize any of her probable forty-five years. Her blond hair was unwaved and pulled back into a tight bun, and her blue eyes were set in a nest of wrinkles that would have been called characterful on an outdoor man. Her lipstick, which needed renewing, had a slapdash air of being her one impatient concession to feminine artifice. But Bastion put a soothing arm around her as solicitously as if she had been a dimpled bride.

“I’m sure these officers will have him buried for us, Eleanor,” he said. “But while they’re here I think they wanted to ask you something.”

“Only to confairrm what Mr Bastion told us, ma’m,” said Mackenzie. “That ye didna hear any disturrbance last night.”

“Absolutely not. And if Golly had made a sound, I should have heard him. I always do. Why are you trying so hard to get around the facts? It’s as plain as a pikestaff that the Monster did it.”

“Some monsters have two legs,” Simon remarked.

“And I suppose you’re taught not to believe in any other kind. Even with the evidence under your very eyes.”

“I mind a time when some other footprints were found, ma’m,” Mackenzie put in deferentially, “which turrned oot to be a fraud.”

“I know exactly what you’re referring to. And that stupid hoax made a lot of idiots disbelieve the authentic photograph which was taken just before it, and refuse to accept an even better picture that was taken by a thoroughly reputable London surgeon about four months later. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve studied the subject. As a matter of fact, the reason we took this house was mainly because I’m hoping to discover the Monster.”

Two pairs of eyebrows shot up and lowered almost in unison, but it was the Saint who spoke for Mackenzie as well as himself.

“How would you do that, Mrs Bastion?” he inquired with some circumspection. “If the Monster has been well known around here for a few centuries, at least to everyone who believes in him—”

“It still hasn’t been scientifically and officially established. I’d like to have the credit for doing that, beyond any shadow of doubt, and having it named monstrum eleanoris.”

“Probably you gentlemen don’t know it,” Bastion elucidated, with a kind of quaintly protective pride, “but Mrs Bastion is a rather distinguished naturalist. She’s hunted every kind of big game there is, and even holds a couple of world’s records.”

“But I never had a trophy as important as this would be,” his better half took over again. “I expect you think I’m a little cracked — that there couldn’t really be any animal of any size in the world that hasn’t been discovered by this time. Tell them the facts of life, Noel.”

Bastion cleared his throat like a schoolboy preparing to recite, and said with much the same awkward air, “The gorilla was only discovered in 1847, the giant panda in 1869, and the okapi wasn’t discovered till 1901. Of course explorers brought back rumors of them, but people thought they were just native fairytales. And you yourselves probably remember reading about the first coelacanth being caught. That was only in 1938.”

“So why shouldn’t there still be something else left that I could be the first to prove?” Eleanor Bastion concluded for him. “The obvious thing to go after, I suppose, was the Abominable Snowman, but Mr Bastion can’t stand high altitudes. So I’m making do with the Loch Ness Monster.”

Inspector Mackenzie, who had for some time been looking progressively more confused and impatient in spite of his politely valiant efforts to conceal the fact, finally managed to interrupt the antiphonal barrage of what he could only be expected to regard as delirious irrelevancies.

“All that I’m consairrned wi’, ma’m,” he said heavily, “is tryin’ to detairrmine whether there’s a human felon to be apprehended. If it should turrn oot to be a monster, as ye’re thinkin’, it wadna be in my jurisdeection. However, in that case, pairhaps Mr Templar, who is no’ a police officer, could be o’ more help to ye.”

“Templar,” Bastion repeated slowly. “I feel as if I ought to recognize that name, now, but I was rather preoccupied with something else when I first heard it.”

“Do you have a halo on you somewhere?” quizzed Mrs Bastion, the huntress, in a tone which somehow suggested the aiming of a gun.

“Sometimes.”

“Well, by Jove!” Bastion said. “I should’ve guessed it, of course, if I’d been thinking about it. You didn’t sound like a policeman.”

Mackenzie winced faintly, but both the Bastions were too openly absorbed in re-appraising the Saint to notice it.

Simon Templar should have been hardened to that kind of scrutiny, but as the years went on it was beginning to cause him a mixture of embarrassment and petty irritation. He wished that new acquaintances could dispense with the reactions and stay with their original problems.

He said, rather roughly, “It’s just my bad luck that Mackenzie caught me as I was leaving Inverness. I was on my way to Loch Lomond, like any innocent tourist, to find out how bonnie the banks actually are. He talked me into taking the low road instead of the high road, and stopping here to stick my nose into your problem.”

“But that’s perfectly wonderful!” Mrs Bastion announced like a bugle. “Noel, ask him to stay the night. I mean, for the weekend. Or for the rest of the week, if he can spare the time.”

“Why — er — yes,” Bastion concurred obediently. “Yes, of course. We’d be delighted. The Saint ought to have some good ideas about catching a monster.”

Simon regarded him coolly, aware of the invisible glow of slightly malicious expectation emanating from Mackenzie, and made a reckless instant decision.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’d love it. I’ll bring in my things, and Mac can be on his way.”

He sauntered out without further palaver, happily conscious that only Mrs Bastion had not been moderately rocked by his casual acceptance.

They all ask for it, he thought. Cops and civilians alike, as soon as they hear the name. Well, let’s oblige them. And see how they like whatever comes of it.

Mackenzie followed him outside, with a certain ponderous dubiety which indicated that some of the joke had already evaporated.

“Ye’ll ha’ no authority in this, ye understand,” he emphasized, “except the rights o’ any private investigator — which are no’ the same in Scotland as in America, to judge by some of the books I’ve read.”

“I shall try very hard not to gang agley,” Simon assured him. “Just phone me the result of the PM as soon as you possibly can. And while you’re waiting for it, you might look up the law about shooting monsters. See if one had to take out a special license, or anything like that.”

He watched the detective drive away, and went back in with his two-suiter. He felt better already, with no official eyes and ears absorbing his most trivial responses. And it would be highly misleading to say that he found the bare facts of the case, as they had been presented to him, utterly banal and boring.

Noel Bastion showed him to a small but comfortable room upstairs, with a window that faced towards the home of Fergus Clanraith but which also afforded a sidelong glimpse of the loch. Mrs Bastion was already busy there, making up the bed.

“You can’t get any servants in a place like this,” she explained. “I’m lucky to have a woman who bicycles up from Fort Augustus once a week to do the heavy cleaning. They all want to stay in the towns where they can have what they think of as a bit of life.”

Simon looked at Bastion innocuously and remarked, “You’re lucky to find a secretary right on the spot like the one I met up the road.”

“Oh, you mean Annie Clanraith.” Bastion scrubbed a knuckle on his upper lip. “Yes. She was working in Liverpool, but she came home at Christmas to spend the holidays with her father. I had to get some typing done in a hurry, and she helped me out. It was Clanraith who talked her into staying. I couldn’t pay her as much as she’d been earning in Liverpool, but he pointed out that she’d end up with just as much in her pocket if she didn’t have to pay for board and lodging, which he’d give her if she kept house. He’s a widower, so it’s not a bad deal for him.”

“Noel’s a writer,” Mrs Bastion said. “His big book isn’t finished yet, but he works on it all the time.”

“It’s a life of Wellington,” said the writer. “It’s never been done, as I think it should be, by a professional soldier.”

“Mackenzie didn’t tell me anything about your background,” said the Saint. “What should he have called you — Colonel?”

“Only Major. But that was in the Regular Army.”

Simon did not miss the faintly defensive tone of the addendum. But the silent calculation he made was that the pension of a retired British Army major, unless augmented by some more commercial form of authorship than an unfinished biography of distinctly limited appeal, would not finance enough big-game safaris to earn an ambitious huntress a great reputation.

“There,” said Mrs Bastion finally. “Now if you’d like to settle in and make yourself at home, I’ll have some tea ready in five minutes.”

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:

“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.”

Simon was not so disappointed. Indeed, if a monster had actually appeared almost on schedule under their expectant eyes, he would have been inclined to sense the hand of a Hollywood B-picture producer rather than the finger of Fate.

“As you said yesterday, it’s a matter of patience,” he observed philosophically. “But the odds are that the rest of your eight hours, now, will be just routine. So if you’re not nervous I’ll ramble around a while.”

His rambling had brought him no nearer to the house than the orchard when the sight of a coppery-rosy head on top of a shapely free-swinging figure made his pulse fluctuate enjoyably with a reminder of the remotely possible promise of romantic compensation that had started to warm his interest the day before.

Annie Clanraith’s smile was so eager and happy to see him that he might have been an old and close friend who had been away for a long time.

“Inspector Mackenzie told my father he’d left you here when he drove away. I’m so glad you stayed!”

“I’m glad you’re glad,” said the Saint, and against her ingenuous sincerity it was impossible to make the reply sound even vestigially skeptical. “But what made it so important?”

“Just having someone new and alive to talk to. You haven’t stayed long enough to find out how bored you can be here.”

“But you’ve got a job that must be a little more attractive than going back to an office in Liverpool.”

“Oh, it’s not bad. And it helps to make Father comfortable. And it’s nice to live in such beautiful scenery, I expect you’ll say. But I read books and I look at the TV, and I can’t stop having my silly dreams.”

“A gal like you,” he said teasingly, “should have her hands full, fighting off other dreamers.”

“All I get my hands full of is pages and pages of military strategy, about a man who only managed to beat Napoleon. But at least Napoleon had Josephine. The only thing Wellington gave his name to was an old boot.”

Simon clucked sympathetically.

“He may have had moments with his boots off, you know. Or has your father taught you to believe nothing good of anyone who was ever born south of the Tweed?”

“You must have thought it was terrible, the way he talked about Mr Bastion. And he’s so nice, isn’t he? It’s too bad he’s married!”

“Maybe his wife doesn’t think so.”

“I mean, I’m a normal girl and I’m not old-fashioned, and the one thing I do miss here is a man to fight off. In fact, I’m beginning to feel that if one did come along I wouldn’t even struggle.”

“You sound as if that Scottish song was written about you,” said the Saint, and he sang softly:

She laughed.

“Well, at least you smiled at me, and that makes today look a little better.”

“Where were you going?”

“To work. I just walked over across the fields — it’s much shorter than by the lane.”

Now that she mentioned it, he could see a glimpse of the Clanraith house between the trees. He turned and walked with her through the untidy little garden, towards the Bastions’ entrance.

“I’m sorry that stops me offering to take you on a picnic.”

“I don’t have any luck, do I? There’s a dance in Fort Augustus tomorrow night, and I haven’t been dancing for months, but I don’t know a soul who’d take me.”

“I’d like to do something about that,” he said. “But it rather depends on what develops around here. Don’t give up hope yet, though.”

As they entered the hall, Bastion came out of a back room and said, “Ah, good morning, Annie. There are some pages I was revising last night on my desk. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She went on into the room he had just come from, and he turned to the Saint.

“I suppose you didn’t see anything.”

“If we had, you’d’ve heard plenty of gunfire and hollering.”

“Did you leave Eleanor down there?”

“Yes. But I don’t think she’s in any danger in broad daylight. Did Mackenzie call?”

“Not yet. I expect you’re anxious to hear from him. The telephone’s in the drawing room — why don’t you settle down there? You might like to browse through some of Eleanor’s collection of books about the Monster.”

Simon accepted the suggestion, and soon found himself so absorbed that only his empty stomach was conscious of the time when Bastion came in and told him that lunch was ready. Mrs Bastion had already returned and was dishing up an agreeably aromatic lamb stew which she apologized for having only warmed up.

“You were right, it was just routine,” she said. “A lot of waiting for nothing. But one of these days it won’t be for nothing.”

“I was thinking about it myself, dear,” Bastion said, “and it seems to me that there’s one bad weakness in your eight-hour-a-day system. There are enough odds against you already in only being able to see about a quarter of the loch, which leaves the Monster another three-quarters where it could just as easily pop up. But on top of that, watching only eight hours out of the twenty-four only gives us a one-third chance of being there even if it does pop up within range of our observation post. That doesn’t add to the odds against us, it multiplies them.”

“I know, but what can we do about it?”

“Since Mr Templar pointed out that anyone should really be safe enough with a high-powered rifle in their hands and everyone else within call, I thought that three of us could divide up the watches and cover the whole day from before dawn till after dusk, as long as one could possibly see anything. That is, if Mr Templar would help out. I know he can’t stay here indefinitely, but—”

“If it’ll make anybody feel better, I’d be glad to take a turn that way,” Simon said indifferently.

It might have been more polite to sound more enthusiastic, but he could not make himself believe that the Monster would actually be caught by any such system. He was impatient for Mackenzie’s report, which he thought was the essential detail.

The call came about two o’clock, and it was climactically negative.

“The doctor canna find a trrace o’ drugs or poison in the puir animal.”

Simon took a deep breath.

“What did he think of its injuries?”

“He said he’d ne’er seen the like o’ them. He dinna ken anything in the wurruld wi’ such crrushin’ power in its jaws as yon Monster must have. If ’twas no’ for the teeth marrks, he wad ha’ thocht it was done wi’ a club. But the autopsy makes that impossible.”

“So I take it you figure that rules you officially out,” said the Saint bluntly. “But give me a number where I can call you if the picture changes again.”

He wrote it down on a pad beside the telephone before he turned and relayed the report.

“That settles it,” said Mrs Bastion. “It can’t be anything else but an Niseag. And we’ve got all the more reason to try Noel’s idea of keeping watch all day.”

“I had a good sleep this morning, so I’ll start right away,” Bastion volunteered. “You’re entitled to a siesta.”

“I’ll take over after that,” she said. “I want to be out there again at twilight. I know I’m monopolizing the most promising times, but this matters more to me than to anyone else.”

Simon helped her with the dishes after they had had coffee, and then she excused herself.

“I’ll be fresher later if I do take a little nap. Why don’t you do the same? It was awfully good of you to get up in the middle of the night with me.”

“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?”

Bastion filled the thermos from the teapot, and capped it.

“I’m hanged if I know. I’d want to think some more about it. But first I’ve got to take this to Eleanor.”

“I’ll go with you,” said the Saint.

He followed the other out of the back door. Outside, the dusk was deepening with a mistiness that was beginning to do more than the failing light to reduce visibility. From the garden, one could see into the orchard but not beyond it.

“It’s equally hard for the ordinary man,” Simon continued relentlessly, “to imagine anyone who’s lived with another person as man and wife, making love and sharing the closest moments, suddenly turning around and killing the other one. But the prison cemeteries are full of ’em. And there are plenty more on the outside who didn’t get caught — or who are still planning it. At least half the time, the marriage has been getting a bit dull, and someone more attractive has come along. And then, for some idiotic reason, often connected with money, murder begins to seem cleverer than divorce.”

Bastion slackened his steps, half turning to peer at Simon from under heavily contracted brows.

“I’m not utterly dense, Templar, and I don’t like what you seem to be hinting at.”

“I don’t expect you to, chum. But I’m trying to stop a murder. Let me make a confession. When you and Eleanor have been out or in bed at various times, I’ve done quite a lot of prying. Which may be a breach of hospitality, but it’s less trouble than search warrants. You remember those scratches in the ground near the dead dog which I said could’ve been made with something that wasn’t claws? Well, I found a gaff among somebody’s fishing tackle that could’ve made them, and the point had fresh shiny scratches and even some mud smeared on it which can be analyzed. I haven’t been in the attic and found an embalmed shark’s head with several teeth missing, but I’ll bet Mackenzie could find one. And I haven’t yet found the club with the teeth set in it, because I haven’t yet been allowed down by the lake alone, but I think it’s there somewhere, probably stuffed under a bush, and just waiting to be hauled out when the right head is turned the wrong way.”

Major Bastion had come to a complete halt by that time.

“You unmitigated bounder,” he said shakily. “Are you going to have the impertinence to suggest that I’m trying to murder my wife, to come into her money and run off with a farmer’s daughter? Let me tell you that I’m the one who has the private income, and—”

“You poor feeble egotist,” Simon retorted harshly, “I didn’t suspect that for one second after she made herself rather cutely available to me, a guest in your house. She obviously wasn’t stupid, and no girl who wasn’t would have gambled a solid understanding with you against a transient flirtation. But didn’t you ever read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Or the Kinsey Report? And hasn’t it dawned on you that a forceful woman like Eleanor, just because she isn’t a glamor girl, couldn’t be bored to frenzy with a husband who only cares about the campaigns of Wellington?”

Noel Bastion opened his mouth, and his fists clenched, but whatever was intended to come from either never materialized. For at that moment came the scream.

Shrill with unearthly terror and agony, it split the darkening haze with an eldritch intensity that seemed to turn every hair on the Saint’s nape into an individual icicle. And it did not stop, but ululated again and again in weird cadences of hysteria.

For an immeasurable span they were both petrified, and then Bastion turned and began to run wildly across the meadow, towards the sound.

“Eleanor!” he yelled, insanely, in a voice almost as piercing as the screams.

He ran so frantically that the Saint had to call on all his reserves to make up for Bastion’s split-second start. But he did close the gap as Bastion stumbled and almost fell over something that lay squarely across their path. Simon had seen it an instant sooner, and swerved, mechanically identifying the steely glint that had caught his eye as a reflection from a long gun-barrel.

And then, looking ahead and upwards, he saw through the blue fogginess something for which he would never completely believe his eyes, yet which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Something gray-black and scaly-slimy, an immense amorphous mass from which a reptilian neck and head with strange protuberances reared and swayed far up over him. And in the hideous dripping jaws something of human shape from which the screams came, that writhed and flailed ineffectually with a peculiar-looking club...

With a sort of incoherent sob, Bastion scooped up the rifle at his feet and fired it. The horrendous mass convulsed, and into Simon’s eardrums, still buzzing from the heavy blast, came a sickening crunch that cut off the last shriek in the middle of a note.

The towering neck corkscrewed with frightful power, and the thing that had been human was flung dreadfully towards them. It fell with a kind of soggy limpness almost at their feet, as whatever had spat it out lurched backwards and was blotted out by the vaporous dimness with the sound of a gigantic splash while Bastion was still firing against the place where it had been...

As Bastion finally dropped the gun and sank slowly to his knees beside the body of his wife, Simon also looked down and saw that her hand was still spastically locked around the thinner end of the crude bludgeon in which had been set a row of shark’s teeth. Now that he saw it better, he saw that it was no home-made affair, but probably a souvenir of some expedition to the South Pacific. But you couldn’t be right all the time, about every last detail. Just as a few seconds ago, and until he saw Bastion with his head bowed like that over the woman who had plotted to murder him, he had never expected to be restrained in his comment by the irrational compassion that finally moved him.

“By God,” he thought, “now I know I’m aging.”

But aloud he said, “She worked awful hard to sell everyone on the Monster. If you like, we can leave it that way. Luckily I’m a witness to what happened just now. But I don’t have to say anything about — this.”

He released the club gently from the grip of the dead fingers, and carried it away with him as he went to telephone Mackenzie.