The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

by Leslie Charteris

  He got back to the Yard to hear some real news.

  "Your Angels have been out again while you weren't watching them," said Cullis, as soon as the Saint had answered his summons. "Essenden was beaten up last night."

  "Badly?"

  "Not very. The servants were still about, and Essenden was able to let off a yell which fetched them around in a bunch. The man got away. It seems that Essenden found him in his bedroom when he went upstairs about eleven o'clock. He tried to tackle the man, and got the worst of the fight. The burglar was using a cosh."

  "And who did the good work?"

  "Probably your friend Slinky. I've put a warrant out for him, anyway."

  "Then take it back," said the Saint. "Slinky never used a cosh in his life. Besides, I happen to know that he didn't do it."

  "I suppose he told you so?"

  "He didn't—that's why I believe him. Have you had the report from Records on the general features of the show?"

  "I've given them the details. The report should be through any minute now."

  The report, as a matter of fact, was brought up a few minutes later. The Saint ran through the list of names submitted as possible authors of the crime, and selected one without much hesitation.

  "Harry Donnell's the man."

  "At Essenden's?" interjected Cullis skeptically, "Harry Donnell works the Midlands. Besides, his gang don't go in for ordinary burglary."

  "Who said it was an ordinary burglary?" asked the Saint. "I tell you Harry Donnell's the man on that list who'd be most pleased to take on an easy job of bashing like that. I could probably tell your Records Office a few things they didn't know about Harry—you seem to forget that I used to know everything there was to know about the various birds in his line of business. I'm going to pull him in. Before I go I'm going to tell Jill Trelawney that I'm going to do it. I'll go round and see her now. She'll probably try to fix me for some sticky end this time. But that's a minor detail. Having failed in that she'll try to get on the phone to Donnell and warn him—I expect he went back to Birmingham this morning. You'll arrange for the exchange operator to tell her that the line to Birmingham is out of order. Then, if I know anything about Jill Tre­lawney, she'll set out to try to beat me to Birmingham Herself. She's got to keep up her reputation for rescues, especially when the man to be rescued is wanted for doing a job for her. . . ."

  He outlined his plan in more detail.

  It was one which had come into his head on the spur of the moment, but the more he examined it the better it seemed to be. There was no evidence against Jill Tre­lawney on any of the scores which were at present held against her, and the Saint would have been bored stiff to spend his time sifting over ancient history in the hope of building up a live case out of dead material. Besides— which was far more important—that procedure wouldn't have fitted in at all with the real ambition that the story of the Angels of Doom had brought into his young life. And to set Jill Trelawney racing into Birmingham to the rescue of Harry Donnell struck him as being a much more entertaining way of spending the day.

  In spite of the two attempts which had already been made on his life, he bore the girl no malice. Far from it. The Saint was used to that kind of thing. In fact, he had already found more amusement in the pursuit of Jill Trelawney than he had anticipated when he first set forth to make her acquaintance, and he was now preparing to find some more—but this, however, he did not confide to the commissioner.

  They talked for a while longer, and the Saint left cer­tain definite instructions to be passed on to the appropriate quarter. And then, as the Saint rose to go, the com­missioner was moved to revert to a thought suggested by the original subject of the interview.

  "Isn't it curious," said the commissioner, "that only the other night you should have been asking whether there might be a reason for the Angels to have a feud with Essenden?"

  "Isn't it a scream?" agreed the Saint.

  He set off for Belgrave Street in one of his moods of Saintly optimism.

  It struck him that he was spending a great deal of his time in Belgrave Street. This would be his third visit that week.

  He had no illusions about the possible outcome of it— the gun with which he had provided himself before leaving testified to that. A man cannot make himself as con­sistently unpopular as, for his own inscrutable reasons, it had in this case pleased the Saint to make himself, without there growing up, sooner or later, a state of ten­sion in which something has to break. The thing broken should, of course, have been Simon Templar, but up to that time the thing broken had somehow failed to, be Simon Templar. But this time ...

  In the three days since his last visit life had been al­lowed to deal peacefully with him. He had used the milk from outside his front door with a sublime confidence in its purity, and had not been disappointed. He had walked in and out of the house without any fear of being again enfiladed by machine-gun fire; and in that again his judg­ment had proved to be right. On the other hand, he had treated letters and parcels delivered to him, and taxis which offered themselves for his hire, with considerable suspicion. He had as yet found no justification for this carefulness, but he realized that the calm could only be the herald of a storm. Possibly this third visit to Belgrave Street would precipitate the storm. He was prepared for it to do so.

  He was kept waiting outside for some time before his summons was answered. He did not stand at the top of the stairs, however, while he was waiting, in a position where sudden death might reach him through the letter box, but placed himself on the pavement behind the shelter of one of the pillars of the portico. From behind this, with one eye looking round it, he was able to see the slight movement of a curtain in a ground-floor window as some­one looked out to discover who the visitor was. Simon allowed his face to be seen, and then withdrew into cover until the door opened. Then he entered quickly.

  "Miss Trelawney is expecting you," said Wells as he closed the door.

  The Saint glanced searchingly round the hall and up the stairs as far as he could see. There was no one else about.

  He smiled seraphically.

  "You're getting quite truthful in your old age, Fred­die," he remarked, and went up the stairs.

  The girl met him on the landing.

  "I got your message to say you were coming."

  "I hope it gave you a thrill," said the Saint earnestly.

  He looked past her into the sitting room.

  "Are you staying to tea again?" she asked sweetly.

  "Before I've finished," said Simon, "I expect you'll be wanting me to stay the week."

  "Come in."

  "Thanks. I will. Aren't we getting polite?"

  He went through.

  In the sitting room he found Weald and Budd, as he had expected to find them, though they had not been exposed to the field of view which he had from the land­ing through the open door.

  "Hullo, Weald! And are you looking for Waldstein, too?"

  Weald's sallow face went a shade paler, but he did not answer at once. The Saint's mocking gaze shifted to Budd.

  "Been doing any more fighting lately, Pinky? I heard that some tough guy beat up a couple of little boys in Shoreditch the other night, and I thought of you at once."

  Pinky's fists clenched.

  "If you're looking for trouble, Templar," he said pinkly, "I'm waiting for you, see?"

  "I know that," said the Saint offensively. "I could hear you breathing as I came up the stairs."

  He heard the door close behind him, and turned to face the girl again.

  It was a careless move, but he had not been expecting the hostilities to be reopened quite so quickly. The fact that the mere presence of his own charming personality might be considered by anyone else as a hostile movement in itself had escaped him. In these circumstances there is, by convention, a certain amount of warbling and woofling before any active unpleasantness is displayed. Simon Templar had always found this so—it took a certain amount of time for his enemies to get ove
r the confident effrontery of his own bearing, and, in these days, their ingrained respect for the law which he was temporarily representing—before they nerved themselves to action. But this was not his first visit to Belgrave Street, nor their first sight of him, and they might have been expected to show enough intelligence to fortify themselves against his coming beforehand. Simon, however, had not expected it. It was the first slip he had made with the Angels of Doom.

  He felt the sharp pressure in his back, and knew what it was without having to turn and look. Even then he did not turn.

  Without batting an eyelid he said what he had come to say, exactly as if he had noticed nothing amiss whatever.

  "I've still some more news to give you, Jill."

  There was a certain mockery in the eyes that returned his gaze.

  "Do you still want to give it?"

  "Why, yes," said the Saint innocently. "Why not?"

  Weald spoke behind him.

  "We're listening, Templar. Don't move too suddenly, because I might think you were going to put up a fight."

  The Saint turned slowly and glanced down at the gun in Weald's hand.

  "Oh, that! Wonderful how science helps you boys all along the line. And a silencer, too. Do you know, I always thought those things were only used in stories written for little boys?"

  "It's good enough for me."

  "I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be too good for you," said the Saint. "Except, perhaps, a really muti­nous sewer." Then he turned round again. "Do you know a man named Donnell, Jill?"

  "Very well."

  "Then you'd better go ring him up and tell him good­bye. He's going to Dartmoor for a long holiday, and he mightn't remember you when he comes out."

  She laughed.

  "The police in Birmingham have been saying things like that about Harry Donnell for the last two years, and they've never taken him."

  "Possibly," said the Saint in his modest way. "But this time the police of Birmingham aren't concerned."

  "Then who's going to take him?"

  Simon smoothed his hair.

  "I am."

  Pinky Budd chuckled throatily.

  "Not 'arf, you ain't!"

  "Not 'arf, I ain't," agreed the Saint courteously.

  "May I ask," said the girl, "how you think you're going to Birmingham?"

  "By train."

  "After you leave here?"

  "After I leave here."

  "D'you think you're leaving?" interjected Weald.

  "I'm sure of it," said the Saint calmly. "Slinky Dyson will let me out. He's an old friend of mine."

  The girl opened the door. Dyson was outside.

  "Here's your friend the Saint," she said.

  "Hullo, Slinky," said the Saint. "How's the eye?"

  Dyson slouched into the room.

  "Search him," ordered Weald.

  Dyson obeyed, doing the job with ungentle hands. Simon made no resistance. In the circumstances that would only have been a mediocre way of committing suicide.

  "How true you run to type, Jill!" he murmured. "This is just what I was expecting. And now, of course, you'll tell me that I'm going to be kept here as your prisoner until you choose to let me go. Or are you going to lock me in the cellar and leave the hose running? That was tried once. Or perhaps you're going to ask me to join your gang. That'd be quite original."

  "Sit down," snapped Weald.

  Simon sat down as if he had been meaning to do so all the time.

  Jill Trelawney was at the telephone. The Saint ob­served her out of the corner of his eye while he selected and lighted a cigarette from his case. He waited quite patiently while she tried to make the call, but he feigned surprise when she failed.

  "That really upsets me," he said. "Now you'll have to go to Birmingham yourself. I hate to think I'm putting you to so much inconvenience."

  He saw Budd busying himself with some loose rope, and when the ex-prize fighter came over with the obvious intention of binding him, the Saint put his hands behind him without being told to. Weald was talking to the girl.——

  "Do you really mean to go to Birmingham?"

  "Yes. It's the only thing to do. I can't get in touch with Donnell by telephone, and it wouldn't be safe to send a wire."

  "And suppose it's a trap?"

  "You can suppose it's what you like. The Saint's clever. But I think I've got the hang of him now. It's just a repeti­tion of that posse joke. He's come to tell us that he's going to get Donnell just because he thinks we won't believe it. And if he does get Donnell, Donnell will squeal. If you've got cold feet you can stay here. But I'm going. Budd can go with me if you don't like it. He'll be more use than you, anyway."

  "I'll go with you."

  "Have it your own way."

  She came back to watch Budd putting the finishing touches to the Saint's roping.

  "You'll be pleased to hear," she said, "that for once I'm going to believe you."

  "So I heard," said the Saint. "Hope you have a nice journey. Will you leave Dyson to look after me? I'm sure he'd treat me very kindly."

  She shook her head.

  "Budd," she said, "will be even kinder."

  It was a blow at the very foundations of the scheme which the Saint had built up, but not a muscle of his face betrayed his feelings.

  He spoke to her as if there were no one else in the room, holding her eyes in spite of herself with that mocking stare of his.

  "Jill Trelawney," he said, "you're a fool. If there were degrees in pure, undiluted imbecility I should give you first prize. You're going to Birmingham with Weald. When you get there you're going to walk into a pile of trouble. Weald will be as much use to you as a tin tomb­stone. Not that the thought worries me, but I'm just telling you now, and I'd like you to remember it afterwards. Before to-night you're going to wish you'd been born with some sort of imitation of a brain. That's all. I shall see you again in Birmingham—don't worry."

  She smiled, with a lift of her eyebrows.

  "Aren't you thoughtful for me, Simon Templar?"

  "We don't mind doing these things for old customers," said the Saint benignly.

  He was still looking at her. The bantering gaze of his blue eyes from under the lazily drooping eyelids, the faint smile, the hint of a lilt of laughter in his voice—these things could rarely have been more airily perfect in their mockery.

  "And while you're on your way," said the Saint, "you might have time to remember that I never asked you to become a customer. You're making the most blind paralytic fool of yourself that ever a woman made of anything that God had given her such a long start on! But that's your own idea, isn't it? Now go ahead and prove it's right. Go to Birmingham, take that diseased blot of a Stephen Weald with you——"

  Weald stepped forward.

  "What did you say, Templar?"

  "I said 'diseased blot of a Stephen Weald,' " said the Saint pleasantly. "Any objection?"

  "I have," said Weald. "This——"

  He struck the Saint three times in the face with his fist.

  ". . . and this---for the first time I met you."

  Simon sat like a rock.

  "You've found some courage since then," he remarked, in a voice of steel and granite. "Been taking pink pills or something?"

  Then the girl stepped between them.

  "That'll do," she said curtly. "Weald, go and get your coat. Pinky, you and Dyson can carry Templar downstairs."

  "So it's to be the cellar and the hose pipe, is it?" drawled the Saint, unimpressed.

  "Just the cellar, for the present," she answered coolly. "I'll decide what else is to be done with you when I come back."

  "If. If you come back," said the Saint indulgently.

  2

  Simon lay in the cellar where he had been carelessly dropped, and meditated his position by the light of the single dusty globe which provided the sole illumination in the place. Having dropped him there, Budd and Dyson departed, but the hope that they might have gone for
good, thereby leaving him to try all the tricks of escape he knew upon the ropes with which he had been tied, was soon dispelled. They returned in a few moments, Budd carrying a table and Dyson a couple of chairs. Then they closed the door and sat down.

  Clearly, the watch was intended to be a close one. Budd took a pack of greasy cards from his pocket, and the two men settled down to a game.

  Cautiously, as well as he could without attracting at­tention, the Saint tested his bonds. The process did not take him long. His expert tests soon proved that the rop­ing had been done by a practised hand. It remained, therefore, to depend on the loyalty of Slinky Dyson. And how much was that worth? In an interval in the game he caught Dyson's eye. Slinky's expression did not change, but Simon found something reassuring in that unpromis­ing fact.

  For a quarter of an hour the game continued, and then Slinky wiped his mouth with a soiled handkerchief.

  "This is a thirsty job," he complained.

  "Ain't it?" agreed Budd. "Would you like a drink?"

  "Not 'arf. Is there anything?"

  Budd nodded.

  "I'll see if I can find something. You keep your eyes skinned for Templar, see?"

  "You bet I will."

  Budd rose and went out, leaving the door open, and Simon listened without speaking as the sound of the man's heavy footsteps faded up the stairs.

  A moment later he found Dyson beside him.

  "I don't want to hustle you," said the Saint easily, "but if you've nothing else to do at the moment——"

  Dyson swallowed.

  "If Budd comes back and catches me at this I'm a goner," he said.

  He had opened a murderous-looking jackknife, and Simon felt the ropes loosen about his arms and legs as Dyson slashed clumsily at them. Then, beyond the sound of Dyson's laboured breathing, he heard Budd coming back. Slinky gave a little grunt of panic.

  "You'll see I'm all right, Mr. Templar, won't you?"

  "Sure," said the Saint.

  He stood up and swiftly untwisted the loose cords that held him and dropped them on the floor.

  Pinky Budd saw him standing up free beside the table, and very carefully he put down the tray he was carrying.

  "So that's the idea!" breathed Budd.