The Saint Meets His Match (32 page)

“Cullis is getting
the wind up,” repeated the Saint com
fortably.
“Our blithe and burbling Mr. Cullis is feeling
the
draught in the most southerly quarter of his B.V.D.‘s.
He’s already afraid of
the inquiry on your father being
reopened,
so he abstracted certain important papers from
your dossier. And he knows you’re dangerous, so he employed Duodecimo to
move you off the map. Yes, I think
we
could say poetically that our Mr. Cullis is soaring
rapidly aloft on the wings of an upward gale.”

“I see,” said
Jill softly.

“But you didn’t see
before?” asked the Saint. “Didn’t
you
realize that there were really only two men concerned
in
catching your father—the chief commissioner himself,
and
Superintendent Cullis as was. Putting the chief com
missioner
above suspicion, we’re left with Cullis. He could
have
written the raid letter on your father’s typewriter.
He could have
telephoned the fake message which sent
your
father to Paris, and then taken the chief commission
er along to see the fun. And he was the man who
took
your father’s strong box out of
the safe deposit and
opened it in the
Yard. If Cullis was in league with Waldstein, what could have been easier than
for him to pretend to discover notes which could be traced back to Waldstein
in
your father’s box?”

The girl had been gazing
intently at nothing in partic
ular while the Saint
released that brief theory. But now
she turned suddenly
with an extraordinarily keen query
in her eyes.

“When did you figure
all this out?” she asked.

“In my spare
time,” said the Saint airily. “But that
doesn’t
matter. The thing that matters is that Assistant
Commissioner
Cullis has put himself in the cart. He has pulled his flivver, and you and I
are the souls who are go
ing to take the buggy
ride. Partly by luck, and partly by
our own good
judgment, we’ve got the bulge on him—for
the moment. And the
letter I’m going to write to him tonight will let him know it. I’ll put it in
his letter box my
self, and sit in the
garden and watch him read it—it’ll be
worth
the rheumatism. And when he’s thoroughly digest
ed that letter, I’m going to have an encore entertainment
figured out for him that will make him feel like
a small
balloon that’s floated in between an infuriated porcupine
and a bent pin by the time the curtain comes
down!”

2

He left soon afterwards,
without elucidating his riddle,
and she was alone with her perplexity.

She tried to compose
herself for a night’s rest, but sleep
would not come. She
was too preoccupied with other
things, and she was not a
girl who could be satisfied to
remain in a state of
mystified expectancy. She had to take every bull by the horns. And while
inactivity would have irked her no less at any other time, that vexation was
now
made a thousand times worse by the feeling that it
implied her own retirement from a sphere of active use
fulness.
           

For an hour she tossed
about in her bed. Sleep lay
heavy on her eyes, but her
brain was too restless to let her
relapse info that
void of contented lassitude which merges
into
dreams. And when, presently, she heard the chimes of
a
neighbouring clock striking the halfhour after mid
night, she rose with a
sigh, lighted a cigarette, pulled on
her
kimono, and went back into the studio.

The embers of the fire
still glowed in the grate; she
raked them over, put on
some more coal, and watched
the flames lick up again
into a blaze. And then she began to pace the room restlessly.

There was a big cupboard in
one corner. She saw it
every time she passed in
her restless pacing. It fascinated her, caught her eye from every angle, until
she was forced
to stop and stare at it. Perhaps even
then the germ of
what she wanted to do was budding in
her brain. The cup
board was locked—she had tried the
door before, when she
had been looking for a
place to hang her clothes. What
could there be inside it?
She found her mind reaching out
covetously towards the
obvious answer. That studio was
admittedly the Saint’s most
secret bolt hole. And how
could a man of such
flamboyantly distinctive personality and appearance be sure of keeping even the
most cautious
bolt hole indefinitely secret? Only by
one means… .

And almost without her
conscious volition, she found
herself digging a plain household screwdriver
out of a
drawer in the kitchen.

The cupboard was locked,
certainly, but it was the kind
of lock that exists for
the purpose of discouragement
rather than actual
hindrance. She slid the blade of the
screwdriver into
the gap between the two doors, and
levered with a
gently increasing pressure… . The lock
burst away from the
flimsy screws that held it with less
noise
than the sound of a book dropped on a bare floor.

Jill Trelawney lighted
another cigarette and inspected
her find.

She knew
 
she could only make one find that would
be of any
use to her. Reckless as she might be, and
thoughtlessly
as she might have dashed off to the rescue of
an arrested Saint without a moment’s heed for the risk to
herself, in any enterprise such as she was
meditating then
there were sober and
practical considerations to be
reckoned
with. She would gain nothing by throwing a single point in the game away. But
if that locked cup
board provided the
means of saving that single point, just
in case of accidents …

And it did.

As the doors flew open,
she looked at three complete
outfits hung in a little
row—a set of workman’s overalls,
a suit of violently purple
check and a Shaftesbury Avenue
nattiness, and a filthy
and ragged costume such as a down-
at-heels
sandwichman might wear. And neatly arranged
on
adjacent shelves were the shirts, socks, ties, mufflers,
overcoats, hats, and shoes to complete the disguises down
to the last
minute detail.

For a few seconds she
surveyed the treasure trove; and
then, with slow
deliberation, she crushed out her cig
arette… .

The outfit she contrived
for herself from the materials
at her disposal was a
heterogeneous affair, but it was the
best she could do.
A shabby pair of trousers, with the ends
tucked
up inside the legs and secured with safety pins,
fitted
her passably well; but tall as she was, there was no
coat
in the collection that she could wear. A stained and
tattered
mackintosh, however, could be made to pass,
with
the sleeves treated in a similar manner to the legs of
the
trousers; and a gaudy scarf knotted about her neck
would
conceal the deficiencies of her costume in other
respects.
She pulled a tweed cap well down onto her head,
tucking her hair away
out of sight beneath it. From the
kitchen
she was able to grub out enough grime to disguise
her face and hands against any casual scrutiny;
her own
low-heeled walking shoes were
heavy enough to pass mus
ter. And
then she inspected the completed work of art in a
full-length mirror, and found that it was good…
.

And thus, after one
searching glance round, she went out in quest of her share of the adventure.

The only thrill she felt
was not due to anything like
nerves. It was simply a
vast relief to be clear of the studio,
in
which she had been practically a prisoner for the last
ten days, and to be out
again on an active enterprise in
stead of
merely sitting at home and having enigmatic
information, which was really worse than no information
at all, brought to her by the Saint.

The Saint, at any rate, had
told her enough about Mr.
Assistant Commissioner
Cullis to decide her that Simon
Templar’s simple plan,
whatever it was, could not be
good enough.

It wasn’t for Jill
Trelawney to sit tight and wait for
Cullis to come out
of his hole and fight. Far from that——
she was going out to meet Mr. Cullis.

A faint tingle of unleashed
delight vibrated through
her as she walked. She hummed a little tune;
and the
melancholy droop of the unlighted
cigarette attached to
the corner of her mouth had no counterpart in her
spirits.
The cool freshness of the night
air went to her head; after the wearisome atmosphere of the studio, it came
like a
draught of wine to a parched
man. Respectable restraint
and Jill
Trelawney definitely failed to blend. For days
past she had been feeling that the enforced idleness had
been crushing her into an intolerable groove, even
sap
ping from her the very personality
without which she would become nothing but an ordinary unadventurous
woman—a ridiculous idea to anyone who had ever
known
her, and most intolerable of
all to herself.

In her elation she hardly
noticed the passage of time or distance, and picked her route almost by
instinct. Almost
before she realized how far she had
travelled, she had
passed Belsize Park Underground
Station; she paused
there a moment to pick up her bearings,
and then, a hundred yards farther on, she struck away down a dark
side street within measurable distance of her goal.

She rounded first one
corner and then another, and paused under a lamppost to light her cigarette.
The ac
tion was more instinctive than necessary: in the
whole of her body there was not a nerve quivering for need of the sedative, but
the draught of velvety smoke helped to col
lect
her thoughts and lent balance to her impetuosity; and
she
felt, in a moment’s touch of self-mockery, that it was a
debonair thing to do. It was the sort of thing the Saint
would have done.
…

From where she stood she
surveyed the lie of the land.

It was simple enough. The
house stood away from the
road, exactly as the Saint
had described it, in its own
rather spacious grounds,
and there was not a light show
ing anywhere. To find it
almost without hesitation had
been easy enough. The
studio in Chelsea had been amply
equipped for the simple
preparation of any such excur
sion. There had been a
telephone directory from which to
discover Cullis’s
address, a street directory in which to find the exact location of his house,
and a large-scale map from
which to read the most
straightforward approach. These three reference alone would have been material
enough
even for anyone less accustomed to rapid and concise
thinking than Jill Trelawney, and the investigation had
not taken her more than three minutes. After which she
had a faultlessly photographic memory in which to hold
the results of that investigation in their place. She remem
bered that at the back of the house there was a piece of
land on which no buildings were marked on the map; but
under the faint light of a half-fledged moon she could see
the dark masses of scaffolding and unfinished walls in the
background, and marked down that terrain as a con
venient avenue of escape in case of need.

In
her own way she
had had her fair share of luck. The
last patrolling
policeman she had seen had been near
Baker Street, and
the road in which she now stood was
deserted. Knowing
the habits of policemen on night
patrol, her keen eyes
probed deep into every patch of
shadow around her; but
there was no one there.

She turned off the road
and slipped noiselessly over the
low gate into the front
garden.