2
The first mention of the Angels of Doom had filtered through the underworld some four or five months previously. It was no more than a rumour, a whispered story passed from mouth to mouth, of the sort that an unromantic Criminal Investigation Department is taught to take with many grains of salt. The mind of the criminal runs to nicknames; and "Angels of Doom" was a fairly typical specimen. It was also the one and only thing about Jill Trelawney which conformed to any of the precedents of crime known to New Scotland Yard.
There was a certain Ferdinand Dipper, well known to the police under a variety of names, who made much money by dancing. That is to say, certain strenuous middle-aged ladies paid him a quite reasonable fee for his services as a professional partner, and later found themselves paying him quite unreasonable fees for holding his tongue about the equivocal situations into which they had somehow been engineered. Dipper was clever, and his victims were foolish, and therefore for a long time the community had to surfer him in silence; but one day a woman less foolish than the rest repented of her folly the day after she had given Ferdinand an open check for two thousand pounds, and a detective tapped him on the shoulder as he put his foot on the gangway of the Maid of Thanet at Dover. They travelled back to London together by the next train; but the detective, who was human, accepted a cigarette from an exotically beautiful woman who entered their compartment to ask for a match. A porter woke him at Victoria, and a week later Ferdinand sent him a picture postcard and his love from Algeciras. And in due course information trickled in to headquarters through the devious channels by which such information ordinarily arrives.
"The Angels of Doom," said the information.
No crime is ever committed but every member of the underworld knows definitely who did it; but the task of the Criminal Investigation Department is not made any easier by the fact that six different sources of information will point with equal definiteness to six different persons. In this case, however, there was a certain amount of unanimity; but the C.I.D., who had never heard of the Angels of Doom before, shrugged their shoulders and wondered how Ferdinand had worked it.
Three weeks later, George Gallon, motor bandit, shot a policeman in Regent Street in the course of the getaway from a smash-and-grab raid at three o'clock of a stormy morning, and successfully disappeared. But about Gallon the police had certain information up their sleeves, and three armed men went cautiously to a little cottage on the Yorkshire moors to take him while he slept. The next day, a letter signed with the name of the Angels of Doom came to Scotland Yard and told a story, and the three men were found and released. But Gallon was not found; and the tale of the three men, that the room in which they found him must have been saturated with some odourless soporific gas, made the commissioner's lip curl. Nor was he amused when Gallon wrote later from some obscure South American republic to say that he was quite well, thanks.
More than three months passed, during which the name of the Angels of Doom grew more menacing every week, and so it came about that amongst the extensive and really rather prosaic and monotonous files of the Records Office at Scotland Yard there arrived one dossier of a totally different type from its companions. The outside cover was labelled in a commonplace manner enough, like all the other dossiers, with a simple name; and this name was Jill Trelawney. Inside, however, was to be found a very large section occupying nearly three hundred closely written pages, under a subheading which was anything but commonplace. Indeed, that subheading must have caused many searchings of heart to the staid member of the clerical department who had had to type it out, and must similarly have bothered the man responsible for the cross-indexing of the records, when he had had to print it neatly on one of his respectable little cards for the files. For that subheading was "The Angels of Doom," which Records Office must have felt was a heading far more suitable for inclusion in a library of sensational fiction than for a collection of data dealing solely with sober fact.
How Simon Templar came upon the scene was another matter — but really quite a simple one. For the Saint could never resist anything like that. He read of the early exploits of the Angels of Doom in the rare newspapers that he took the trouble to peruse, and was interested. Later, he heard further facts about Jill Trelawney from Chief Inspector Teal himself, and was even more interested. And the day came when he inveigled Chief Inspector Teal into accepting an invitation to lunch; and when the detective had been suitably mellowed by a menu selected with the Saint's infallible instinct for luxurious living, the Saint said, casually: "By the way, Claud Eustace, do you happen to remember that I was once invited to join the Special Branch?"
And Chief Inspector Teal removed the eight-inch cigar from his face and blinked — suspiciously.
"I remember," he said.