"I didn't come here alone. I have some nerve, Cullis, but burgling an assistant commissioner's house single-handed wants a bit more nerve even than I've got. I took this room while the Saint went over the rest of the house — looking for you!.. I don't know how you missed each other, but you wouldn't have heard him, or even seen him. He's like a cat in the dark. He might have found you in a passage, or on the stairs — anywhere. But maybe he didn't want to. Maybe he just followed you like a ghost, waiting for his best chance. Maybe he's coming up behind you now" — her voice rose a little—"and when he's right behind you — GET HIM, SAINT!"
She spoke with a sudden fierce sharpness, like the crack of a gun, and Cullis took the bait… for a sufficient fraction of a second.
He jerked his head half round involuntarily, and that was enough. Enough for Jill Trelawney to shift her automatic unerringly and touch the trigger… The roar of the explosion battered against the walls, drowning the metallic smack of her bullet finding its mark. But she never missed. Cullis's right hand went strangely limp; his revolver flopped dully into the carpet, and he stood staring stupidly at the pulped wreckage of his thumb.
"Don't move." She stepped back towards the curtains, and the weapon in her hand never wavered from its mark by one millimetre. Gently she edged herself between the hangings, and stopped there a moment to speak her farewell.
"I might have finished the job with that shot," she said, "but I still want you alive… I expect you'll be hearing from me again."
At that very moment she heard a heavy footfall behind her, but she could not wait. Whoever it might be, she must take her chance — that single shot she had fired, ringing through the open window, must have thundered over the half of Hampstead, and her luck could not be expected to hold out till the end of the world.
Her deduction was right: she heard a shrill scream of a police whistle as she leapt swiftly backwards and spun around. Of the man whose footsteps she thought she had heard she could see nothing, and she was not interested to pursue him. But she could see an unmistakable shape at the gate by which she had entered, and without hesitation she turned towards the back of the house and went racing over the lawn.
Running footsteps sounded distinctly on the gravel behind her, and then there was a shot, and a bullet sang past her head; but it was too dark for Cullis to take a good aim, and with his right hand incapacitated he would be lucky to touch her. And at that moment she felt, for some reason, supremely confident in the efficacy of her own luck against his.
At the end of the lawn her feet sank into the soft earth of flower beds; beyond, she saw a low wall. She tumbled over it anyhow, picked herself up, and stumbled over the deserted ground ahead.
She could hear voices behind her, and once when she glanced back she saw the light of a bull's-eye lantern bobbing about in the dark behind.