To Hugh Clevely

Chapter I

How Simon Templar met Jill Trelawney,

and there were skylarking and

song in Belgrave street

1

THE big car had been sliding through the night like a great black slug with wide, flaming eyes that seared the road and carved a blazing tunnel of light through the darkness under the over-arching trees; and then the eyes were suddenly blinded, and the smooth pace of the slug grew slower and slower until it groped itself to a shadowy standstill under the hedge.

The man who had watched its approach, sitting under a tree, with the glowing end of his cigarette carefully shielded in his cupped hands, stretched silently to his feet. The car had stopped only a few yards from him, as he had expected. He stooped and trod his cigarette into the grass and came down to the road without a sound. There was no sound at all except the murmur of leaves in the night air, for the subdued hiss of the car's eight cylinders had ceased.

Momentarily, inside the car, a match flared up, revealing everything there with a startling clearness.

The rich crimson upholstery, the handful of perfect roses in the crystal bracket, the gleaming silver fittings — those might have been imagined from the exterior. So also, perhaps, might have been imagined the man with the battered face who wore a chauffeur's livery; or the rather vacantly good-looking man who sat alone in the back, with his light overcoat swept back from his spotless white shirt front, and his silk hat on the seat beside him. Or, perhaps, the girl…

Or perhaps not the girl.

The light of the match focussed the attention upon her particularly, for she was using it to light a cigarette. On the face of it, of course, she was exactly what one would have looked for. On the face of it, she was the kind of girl who goes very well with an expensive car, and there was really no reason why she should not be sitting at the wheel. On the face of it…

But there was something about her that put superficial judgments uneasily in the wrong. Tall she must have been, guessed the man who watched her from the shadows, and of a willowy slenderness that still left her a woman. And beautiful she was beyond dispute, with a perfectly natural beauty which yet had in it nothing of the commonplace. Her face was all her own, as was the cornfield gold of her hair. And no artifice known to the deceptions of women could have given her those tawny golden eyes…

"So you're Jill Trelawney!" thought the man in the shadows.

The light was extinguished as he thought it; but he carried every detail of the picture it had shown indelibly photographed on his brain. This was a living photograph. He had been given mere camera portraits of her before-some of them were in his pocket at that moment — but they were pale and insignificant things beside the memory of the reality, and he wondered dimly at the impertinence which presumed to try to capture such a face in dispassionate halftone.

"On the face of it — hell!" thought the man in the shadows.

But in the car, the man in evening dress said, more elegantly: "You're an extraordinary woman, Jill. Every time I see you—"

"You get more maudlin," the girl took him up calmly. "This is work — not a mothers' meeting."

The man in evening dress grunted querulously.

"I don't see why you have to be so snappy, Jill. We're all in the same boat—"

"I've yet to sail in a sauceboat, Weald."

The end of her cigarette glowed more brightly as she inhaled, and darkened again in an uncontested silence. Then the man with the battered face said, diffidently: "As long as Templar isn't around—"

"Templar!" The girl's voice cut in on the name like the crack of a whip. "Templar!" she said scathingly. "What are you trying to do, Pinky? Scare me? That man's a bee in your bonnet—"

"The Saint," said the man with the battered face diffidently, "would be a bee in anybody's bonnet what was up against him. See?"

If there had been a light, he would have been seen to be blushing. Mr. Budd always blushed when anyone spoke to him sharply. It was this weakness that had given him the nickname of "Pinky."

"There's a story—" ventured the man in evening dress; but he got no further.

"Isn't there always a story about any fancy dick?" demanded the girl scornfully. "I suppose you've never heard a story about Henderson — or Peters — or Teal — or Bill Kennedy? Who is this man Templar, anyway?"

"Ever seen a man pick up another man fifty pounds above his weight 'n' heave him over a six-foot wall like he was a sack of feathers?" asked Mr. Budd, in his diffident way. "Templar does that as a kind of warming-up exercise for a real fight. Ever seen a man stick a visiting card up edgeways 'n' cut it in half with a knife at fifteen paces? Templar does that standing on his head with his eyes shut. Ever seen a man take all the punishment six hoodlums can hand out to him 'n' come back smiling to qualify the whole half-dozen for an ambulance ride? Templar—"

"Frightened of him, Pinky?" inquired the girl quietly.

Mr. Budd sniffed.

"I been sparring partner — which is the same as saying human punchbag — to some of the best heavyweights what ever stepped into a ring," he answered, "but I always been paid handsome for the hidings I've took. I don't expect the Saint 'ud be ready to pay so much for the pleasure of beating me up. See?"

Mr. Budd did not add that since his sparring-partner days he had seen service in Chicago with "Blinder" Kellory and other gang leaders almost as notorious — men who shot on sight and asked questions at the inquest. He had acquitted himself with distinction in Kellory's "war" with "Scarface" Al Capone — and he said nothing about that, either. There was a peculiarly impressive quality about his reticence.

"Nobody's gonna say I'm frightened to fight anybody," said Mr. Budd pinkly, "but that don't stop me knowing when I'm gonna be licked. See?"

"If you take my advice, Jill," yapped the man in evening dress, "you'll settle with Templar before he gets the chance to do any mischief. It ought to be easy—"

The man in the shadows shook with a chuckle of pure amusement. It was a warm evening, and all the windows of the car were open. He could hear every word that was said. He was standing so near the car that he could have taken a pace forward, reached out a hand, and touched it. But he took two paces forward.

The girl said, with cool contempt, as though she were dealing with a sulky child: "If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed—"

"It would," said Stephen Weald shamelessly. "I know there are always stories, but the stories I've heard about the Saint don't make me happy. He's uncanny. They say—"

The words were strangled in his throat in a kind of sob, so that the other two looked at him quickly, though they could not have made out his face in the gloom. But the girl saw, in an instant, what Weald had seen — the deeper shadow that had blacked out the grey square of one window.

Then there was something else in the car, something living, besides themselves. It was strangely eerie, that transient certainty that something had moved in the car that belonged to none of them. But it was only an arm — a swift sure arm that reached through one open window with a crisp rustle of tweed sleeve which they all heard clearly in the silence — and a hand that found a switch and flooded them with light from the panel bulb over their heads.

"What do they say, Weald?" drawled a voice.

There was a curious tang about that voice. It struck all of them before they had blinked the darkness out of their eyes sufficiently to make out its owner, who now had his head and shoulders inside the car, leaning on his forearms in the window. It was the most cavalierly insolent voice any of them had ever heard.

It sent Pinky Budd a dull pink, and Stephen Weald a clammy grey-white.

Jill Trelawney's cheeks went hot with a rising flush of anger. Perhaps because of her greater sensitiveness, she appreciated the mocking arrogance of that voice more than either of the others. It carried every conceivable strength and concentration of insolence and impudence and biting challenge.

"Well?"

That gentle drawl again. It was amazing what that voice could do with one simple syllable. It jagged and rawed it with the touch of a high-speed saw, and drawled it out over a bed of hot Saharan sand in a hint of impish laughter.

"Templar!"

Budd dropped the name huskily, and Weald inhaled sibilantly through his teeth. The girl's lip curled.

"You were talking about me," drawled the man in the window.

It was a flat statement. He made it to the girl, ignoring the two men after one sweeping stare. For a fleeting second her voice failed her, and she was furious with herself. Then—

"Mr. Templar, I presume?" she said calmly.

The Saint bowed as profoundly as his position in the window admitted.

"Correct." A flickering little smile cut across his mouth. "Jill Trelawney?"

"Miss Trelawney."

"Miss Trelawney, of course. For the present. You'll be plain Trelawney to the judge, and in jail you'll just have a number."

It was extraordinary how a spark of hatred could be kindled and fanned to a flame in such an infinitesimal space of time. An instant before he had appeared in that window he had been nothing to her but a name — until then.

And now she was looking at the man through a blaze of anger that had leapt up to white heat within her in a moment. Before that, she had been frankly bored with the fears of Weald and Budd. She had dismissed them, callously. "If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed—" It had been completely impersonal. But now.

She knew what hate was. There were three men she hated, with everything she did and every breath she took. She would not have believed that there was room in her soul for more hatreds than that, and yet this new hatred seemed momentarily to overshadow all the others.

She was looking fixedly at him, unaware of anything or anyone else, engraving every feature of his appearance on her memory in lines of fire. He must have been tall above the average, she judged from the way he had to stoop to get his head in at the window; and his shoulders fitted uneasily in the aperture, wide as it was. A tall, lean buccaneer of a man, dark of hair and eyebrow, bronzed of skin, with a face incredibly clean-cut and deep-set blue eyes. The way those eyes looked at her was an insult in itself.

"I believe you were proposing to fix me," said the Saint. "Why not? I'm here, if you want me."

He broke the silence without an effort — indeed, you might have said he did not know that there had been a silence.

"If you want a fight," said Budd redly, "I'm here. See?"

"Wait a minute!"

The girl stopped Budd with a hand on his arm as he was fumbling with the door.

"Mr. Templar has his posse within call," she said cynically. "Why ask for trouble?"

The Saint's eyebrows twitched blandly.

"I have no posse. I had a gang once, but it died. Didn't they tell you I was working alone?"

"If they had," said the girl, "I shouldn't believe them. You don't look the kind of man who can bluff without a dozen armed men behind him."

He trembled with a gust of noiseless mirth.

"Quite right. I'm terrified, really!"

The mocking eyes glanced again from Budd to Weald, and back again to the girl. That maddening smile flickered again on the clean-cut lips with a glitter of perfect teeth.

"And are these two of the Lady's maids?"

"Suppose they are?" rapped the girl.

"What a dramatic ideal"

She discovered that the eyes could hold something even more infuriating than insolence, and that was a condescending amusement. A little while before she had been treating Stephen Weald like a fractious child: now she was receiving the same treatment herself.

"I'm glad you like it," she said sweetly.

"You're not," said the Saint cheerfully. "But let that pass. I came to give you a word of advice."

"Thanks very much."

"Not at all."

He pointed with a long brown finger past the girl.

"There's a house up there," he said. "Don't pretend you don't know, because I should hate you to have to tell any unnecessary lies. It belongs to Lord Essenden. My advice to you is — don't go there."

"Really?"

"They're holding a very good dance up at that house," said the Saint sardonically. "I should hate you to spoil it. All the wealth of the county is congregated together. If you could only have seen the jewels—"

She had opened her bag, and there was a white slip of pasteboard in her hand. She held it up so that he could see.

"I think this will admit me."

"Let me see it."

He had taken it from her fingers before she realized what he was doing. And yet he did not appear to have snatched it.

"Quite a good forgery," he remarked — "if it is a forgery.

But I could believe you capable of engineering a real invitation, Jill."

"It's quite genuine. And I want it back — please!"

Simon Templar looked down the muzzle of the automatic and seemed to see something humorous there.

He looked perfectly steadily into her eyes, and with perfect deliberation he tore the card into sixteen pieces and let them trickle through his fingers to the floor of the car.

"Your nerves are good, Templar!" she said through her teeth.

He appeared to consider the suggestion quite seriously.

"They've never troubled me. But that didn't require nerves. Another time I shall be more careful. This time, you hadn't had long enough to muster up the resolution to shoot. It wants a good bit of resolution to kill your first man in cold blood. But when you've thought it over… Yes, I think I shall be careful next time."

"You'd better!" snarled Weald shakily.

The Saint noticed his existence.

"You spoke?"

"I said you'd better be careful — next time!"

"Did you?" drawled the Saint.

He disappeared from the window, but the illusion that he had gone was soon dispelled. The door opened, and Simon Templar stood with one foot on the running board.

"Get out of that car!"

"I'm damned if I will—"

"You're damned, anyway. Come out!"

He reached in, caught Weald by the collar, and jerked him out into the road with one swift heave.

"Stephen Weald, dope trafficker, blackmailer, and confidence man — so much for you!"

The Saint's hand shot out, fastened on one of the ends of Weald's immaculate bow tie, pulled… That would have been enough at any time, the simplest gesture of contemptuous challenge; but the Saint invested it with a superbly assured insolence that had to be seen to be believed. For a moment Weald seemed stupefied. Then he lashed out, white-lipped, with both fists…

The Saint picked him out of the ditch and tumbled him back into the car.

"Next?"

"If you want a fight—" began Budd; and once again the girl stopped him.

"You mustn't annoy Mr. Templar," she said witheringly. "Mr. Templar's a very brave man — with his posse waiting for him up the road."

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"Still that story?" he protested. "How can I convince you?"

"Don't bother to try," she answered. "But if you'd like to come to 97, Belgrave Street, at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon, we'll be there."

"So shall I," said the Saint cheerfully. "And I give you my word of honour I shall come alone."

He held her eyes for a moment, and then he was gone; but a few seconds later he was back again as the self-starter burred under her foot.

"By the way," he said calmly, "I have to warn you that you'll receive a summons for standing here all this time with your lights out. Sorry, I'm sure."

He stood by the side of the road and watched the lights of the car out of sight. Perhaps he was laughing. Perhaps he was not laughing. Certainly he was amused. For the Saint, in his day, had made many enemies and many friends; yet he could recall no enemy that he had made for whom he felt such an instinctive friendliness. That he had gone out of his way to make himself particularly unpleasant to her was his very own business. his very own. Simon Templar had his own weird ideas of peaceful penetration.

But the smile that came to his lips as he stood there alone and invisible would have surprised no one more than Jill Trelawney, if she could have seen it.

He carried in his mind a vivid recollection of tawny golden eyes darkened with anger, of a golden head tilted in inimitable defiance, of an implacable hatred flaming in as lovely a face as he had ever seen. Jill Trelawney. She should have been some palely savage Scandinavian goddess, he thought, riding before the Valkyries with her golden hair wild in the wind.

As it was, she rode before what it pleased his own sense of humour to call the "Lady's maids" — and that, he admitted, was a very practical substitute.

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.

"And you remember my answer?"

"Not word for word, but—"

"I refused."

Teal nodded.

"I've thought, since, that perhaps that was one of the kindest things you ever did for me," he said.

The Saint smiled.

"Then I want you to take a deep breath and hold on to your socks, Claud Eustace, old okapi," he murmured, and the detective looked up.

"You want to try it?".

Simon nodded.

"Just lately," he said, "I've been feeling an awful urge towards that little den of yours on the Embankment. I believe I was really born to be a policeman. As the scourge of ungodliness, I should be ten times more deadly with an official position. And there's one particular case on hand at the moment which is only waiting for a bloke like me to knock the hell out of it. Teal, wouldn't you like to call me 'Sir'?"

"I should hate it," said Teal.

But there were others in Scotland Yard who thought differently.

For it had long since been agreed, among the heads of that gloomy organization of salaried kill-joys which exists for the purposes of causing traffic jams, suppressing riotous living and friendly wassail, and discouraging the noble sport of soaking the ungodly on the boko, that something had got to be done about the Saint. The only point which up to that time had never been quite unanimously agreed on was what exactly was to be done.

The days had been when, to quote one flippant commentary, Chief Inspector Teal would have given ten years' salary for the privilege of leading the Saint gently by the arm into the nearest police station, and a number of gentlemen in the underworld would have given ten years' liberty for the pleasure of transporting the Saint to the top of the chute of a blast furnace and quietly back-heeling him into the stew. These things may be read in other volumes of the Saint Saga. But somehow the Saint had continued to go his pleasantly piratical way unscathed, to the rage and terror of the underworld and the despair of Chief Inspector Teal — buccaneer in the suits of Savile Row, amused, cool, debonair, with hell-for-leather blue eyes and a Saintly smile…

And then, all at once, as it seemed, he had finished his work, and that should have been that. "The tumult and the shouting dies, the sinners and the Saints depart," as the Saint himself so beautifully put it. All adventures come to an end. But Jill Trelawney.

"Jill Trelawney," said the Saint dreamily, "is a new interest. I tell you, Teal, I was going to take the longest holiday of my life. But since Jill Trelawney is still at large, and your bunch of flat-footed nit-wits hasn't been able to do anything about it…"

And after considerable elaboration of his point, the Saint was permitted to say much the same thing to the commissioner; but this interview was briefer.

"You can try," said the chief. "There are some photographs and her dossier. We pulled her in last week, after the Angels wrecked the raid on Harp's dope joint—"

"And she showed up with a copper-bottomed alibi you could have sailed through a Pacific hurricane," drawled the Saint. "Yeah?"

"Get her," snapped the chief.

"Three weeks," drawled the Saint laconically, and walked out of Scotland Yard warbling a verse of the comedy song hit of the season — written by himself.

"I

Am the guy

Who killed Capone —"

As he passed the startled doorkeeper, he got a superb yodelling effect into the end of that last line.

And that was exactly thirty-six hours before he met Jill Trelawney for the first time.

And precisely at three o'clock on the afternoon after he had first met her, Simon Templar walked down Belgrave Street, indisputably the most astonishingly immaculate and elegant policeman that ever walked down Belgrave Street, was admitted to No. 97, was shown up the stairs, walked into the drawing room. If possible, he was more dark and cavalier and impudent by daylight than he had been by night. Weald and the girl were there.

"Good-afternoon," said the Saint.

His voice stoked the conventional greeting with an infinity of mocking arrogance. He was amused, in his cheerful way. He judged that the rankling thoughts of the intervening night and morning would not have improved their affection for him, and he was amused.

"Nice day," he drawled.

"We hardly expected you," said the girl.

"Your error," said the Saint comfortably.

He tossed his hat into a chair and glanced back at the door which had just closed behind him.

"I don't like your line in butlers," he said. "I suppose you know that Frederick Wells has a very eccentric record. Aren't you afraid he might disappear with the silver?"

"Wells is an excellent servant."

"Fine! And how's Pinky?"

"Budd is out at the moment. He'll be right back."

"Fine again!" The mocking blue eyes absorbed Stephen Weald from the feet upwards. "And what position does this freak hold in the establishment? Pantry boy?"

Weald gnawed his lip and said nothing. There was a cross of sticking plaster over the bruised cut in his chin to remind him that a man like Simon Templar is apt to confuse physical violence with abstract repartee. Stephen Weald felt cautious.

"Mr. Weald is a friend of mine," said the girl, "and I'd be obliged if you'd refrain from insulting him in my house."

"Anything to oblige," said the Saint affably. "I apologize."

And he contrived to make a second insult of the apology.

The girl had to call up all her resources of self-control to preserve an outward calm. Inwardly she felt all the fury that the Saint had aroused the night before boiling up afresh.

"I wonder," she said, with a strained evenness, "why nobody's ever murdered you, Simon Templar?"

"People have tried," the Saint said mildly. "It's never quite succeeded, somehow. But there's still hope."

He seemed to enjoy the thought. It was quite clear that his detestableness was no unfortunate trick of manner. It was too offensively deliberate. He had brought discourtesy in all its branches to a fine art, and he ladled out his masterpieces with no uncertain enthusiasm.

"How are the Angels this afternoon?" he inquired.

"They are" — she waved a vague hand—"here and there."

"Nice for them. May I sit down?"

"I think—"

"Thanks." He sat down. "But don't let me stop you thinking."

She took a cigarette from the box beside her and fitted it into a long amber holder. Weald applied a match.

"You forgot to ask me if I minded," said the Saint reproachfully. "Where are your manners, Jill?"

She turned in her chair — a movement far more abrupt than she meant it to be.

"If the police have to pester me," she said, "I should have appreciated their consideration if they'd sent a gentleman to do it."

"Sorry," said Simon. "Our gentlemen are all out pestering ladies. The chief thought I'd be good enough for you. Backchat. However, I'll pass on your complaint when I get back."

"If you get back."

"This afternoon," said the Saint. "And I shan't worry if he takes me off the job. Man-size criminals are my mark, and footling around with silly little girls like you is just squandering my unique qualities as a detective. More backchat."

Weald butted in, from the other side of the room:

"Jill, why do you waste time—"

"It amuses her," said the Saint. "When she's finished amusing herself, she'll tell us why my time's being wasted here at all. I didn't fall through a trapdoor in the hall, I wasn't electrocuted when I touched the banister rail, no mechanical gadget shot out of the wall and hit me over the head when I trod on the thirteenth stair. I wasn't shot by a spring gun on the way up. Where's your ingenuity?"

"Saint—"

"Of course, your father was English. Did you get your accent from him or from the talkies?"

He was enjoying himself. She was forced to the exasperating realization that he was playing with her, as if he were making a game of the encounter for his own secret satisfaction. At the least sign of resentment she gave, he registered the scoring of a point to himself as unmistakably as if he had chalked it up on a board.

"By the way," Simon said, "you really must stop annoying Essenden. He came in to see us the other day, and he was most upset. Remember that his nerves aren't as strong as mine. If you murdered him, for instance, I couldn't promise you that he wouldn't be really seriously annoyed."

"Whether I'm responsible for any shocks that Essenden's had, or not," said the girl calmly, "is still waiting to be proved."

"I don't expect it will wait very long," said the Saint comfortably. "You amateur crooks are never very clever."

Jill Trelawney took from her bag a tiny mirror and a gold-cased lipstick. She attended to the shaping of her mouth unconcernedly.

"Templar, you gave me your word of honour you would come alone today."

"Fancy that! And did you believe it?"

"I was prepared to."

"Child," said the Saint, "you amaze me."

He stood up and walked to the window in long jerky strides.

From there he beckoned her, looking down to the street from behind the curtains.

"Come here."

She came, after a pause, with a bored languidness; but it was impossible to make him show the least impatience.

"See there!"

He pointed down with a challenging forefinger.

"See and hear that man singing 'Rose in the Bud' at the harmonium? He's just waiting for me to come out and tell him he can go home. And you see the man farther up with the ice-cream cart? He's standing by. And the man selling newspapers on this side? More of the posse. You credited me with the darn thing, so I thought I'd live up to it. There's ten of 'em spread around this block now!"

"I'm sorry. I thought even your word of honour might be worth something. But now—"

"You'll know better next time, won't you?" Little flinty jags of amusement twinkled in his eyes. "What was the joke I was supposed to buy? Pinky Budd waiting downstairs in the hall with a handful of Angels? Or just a button you press up here that starts off the trapdoor and the electric banister rail and the mechanical gadget in the thirteenth stair?"

She faced him, flaming now without the slightest attempt at concealment, suddenly transformed into a beautiful tigress.

"You think you're clever — Saint!"

"I'm darn sure of it," murmured the Saint, modestly.

"You think—"

"Often and brilliantly. I kicked up the rug before I stepped on it, and saw the edge of the trap. I'm always suspicious of iron banister rails on indoor staircases. And the thirteenth stair gave an inch under my weight, so I ducked. But nothing happened. Rather lucky for you the things weren't working — in the circumstances — isn't it?"

It was bewildering to think that the girl, according to official records, was only twenty-two. Simon Templar treated her like a petulant child because it pleased him to do so. But in that moment he recognized her anger as a grown reality with nothing childish in it. That he chose to keep the recognition to himself was nobody's business.

"No one will stop you going back to your posse, Templar."

"I didn't think anyone would."

He glanced at his watch.

"They'll be expecting me in another five minutes. I only came because I didn't want to disappoint you — and because I thought you might have something interesting to say."

"I've nothing more to — say."

"But lots of things to do?"

"Possibly."

That extraordinarily mocking smile bared his teeth.

"If only," he murmured softly — "if only your father could hear those sweet words fall from your gentle lips!"

"You'll leave my father out of it—"

"You'd like me to, wouldn't you? But that won't make me do it."

There was a renewed hardness in her eyes that had no right to be there.

"My father was framed," she said in a low voice.

"There was a proper inquiry. An assistant commissioner of police isn't dismissed in disgrace for nothing. And is that an excuse for anything you do, anyway?"

"It satisfies me."

Her voice held a depth of passion that for a moment turned even Simon Templar into a sober listener. She had never flinched from his sardonically bantering stare, and now she met it more defiantly than ever. She went on, in that low, passionate voice: "The shock killed him. You know it could have been nothing else but that. And he died denying the charge—"

"So you think you've a right to take vengeance on the department for him?"

"They condemned him for a thing he'd never done. And the mud sticks to me as well, still, a year after his death. So I'll give them something to condemn me for."

The Saint looked at her.

"And what about that boy over in the States?" he asked quietly, and saw her start.

"What do you know about him?" she asked.

The Saint shrugged.

"It's surprising what a lot of odd things I know," he answered. "I think we may talk some more on that subject one day — Jill. Some day when you've forgotten this nonsense, and the Angels of Doom have grown their tails."

For a span of silence he held her eyes steadily — the big golden eyes which, he knew by his own instinct, were made for such gentle things as the softness into which he had betrayed them for a moment. And then that instant's light died out of them again, and the tawny hardness returned. She laughed a little.

"I'll go back when the slate's clean," she said; and so the Saint slipped lightly back into the role he had chosen to play.

"You missed your vocation," he said sweetly. "You ought to have been writing detective stories. Vengeance — and the Angels of Doom! Joke!"

He swung round in his smooth sweeping way and picked his hat out of the chair. Weald seemed about to say something, and, meeting the Saint's suddenly direct and interrogative gaze, refrained. Simon looked at the girl again.

"I'm leaving," he said. "We shall meet again. Quite soon. I promised to get you in three weeks, and two and a half days of it have gone. But I'll do it, don't you worry!"

"I'm not worrying, Templar. And next time you give me your word of honour—"

"Be suspicious of everything I say," Simon advised. "I have moments of extreme cunning, as you'll get to know. Good-afternoon, sweetheart."

He went put, leaving the door open, and walked down the stairs. He saw Pinky Budd standing in the hall with six men drawn up impassively behind him; but it would have taken more than that, at any time, to make Simon Templar's steps falter.

The girl spoke from the top of the stairs.

"Mr. Templar is leaving, Pinky. His men are waiting for him outside."

"Now that," said the Saint, "is tough luck on you — isn't it, Pinky?"

He walked straight for the door, and the guard stood aside without a word to give him gangway. Only Budd stood his ground, and Simon halted in front of him.

"Getting in my way, Pinky?"

Budd looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes. They were of a height as they stood, but Budd would have been a couple of inches taller if he had straightened his huge hunched shoulders. His long arms hung loosely at his sides, and the ham-like fists at the end of them were clenched.

"Nope, I'm not getting in your way. But I'll come 'n' find you again soon, Templar. See?"

"Do."

The Saint's hand came flat in the middle of Budd's chest and overbalanced him out of the road. And Simon Templar went through to the door.

A few strides up the street he stopped and laid half a crown on a harmonium.

"Do you know a song called 'A Farewell'?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," said the serenader.

"Play it for me," said the Saint. "And miss out the middle verse."

He went on towards Buckingham Palace Road as soon as he had heard the introductory bars moaned out on the machine; and his departure was watched by vengeful eyes from the drawing-room window.

"You let him get clean away," snivelled Weald. "We had him—"

"Don't be an imbecile!" snapped the girl. "He only came to see if he could tempt us into doing anything foolish. And if we had, he'd have been tickled to death. And I just asked him to come so I could get to know a little more about him, for future reference. He's—"

"What's that bull with the organ singing?"

They listened. The words of the unmelodious performance came clearly to their ears. The troubadour, startled by the magnitude of the Saint's largesse, was putting his heart into the job.

"Maaaye fairest chiiild-da, I have no gift to giiive

theeee; No lark-ka could pipe-pa to skies sow dull and

gra-a-ay;

Yet-ta, ere I gow, one lesson I can leeeave theeee For every da-a-ay…"

"I saw Templar speak to him—"

"Shut up, you fool!"

"Be gooood-da, sweet maaid, and-da let who can-na

be cle-evah;

Do nowble things, not-ta dream them, awl daaay lawng…"

The telephone bell screamed.

"See who it is, Weald. No, give it to me."

She took the instrument out of his hands. There was no need to ask who was the owner of the silkily endearing voice that came over the wire.

"Hullo!"

"Yes, Mr. Templar?"

"Please don't let the Angels pester the innocent gentleman with the criminal voice. He doesn't know me from Adam, and probably never will. I warned you I had moments of extreme cunning, didn't I?"

She hung up the receiver thoughtfully, ignoring Weald's splutter of questions.

The musician below, a man inspired, was repeating the last verse with increased fervour — perhaps as a consolation to himself for having been deprived of the middle one.

"Bee goooooda-da, sweet maaid-da,

and-da let whoo caan-na be cle-e-e-ev-ah…"

The girl stood by the window, and something like a smile touched her lips. "A humorist!" she said. Then the smile was gone altogether. "Second round to Simon Templar," she said softly. "And now, I think, we start!"

Chapter II

How Simon Templar was disturbed,

and there was further badinage in Belgrave street

1

IF It had been possible to prepare a place-time chart of the activities of the Angels of Doom, it would have shown, during the eighteen hours following Simon Templar's departure from the house in Belgrave Street, a distinct concentration of interest in the region of Upper Berkeley Mews, where the Saint had converted a couple of garages, with the rooms above, into the most ingeniously comfortable fortress in London. Also, like other concentrations of the Angels of Doom, it appeared to be conducted with considerable labour and expense for no prospect of immediate profit.

It may be suggested that the district of Mayfair was an eccentric situation for the home of a policeman; but Simon Templar thanked God he wasn't a real policeman. In fact, he must have been the weirdest kind of policeman that ever claimed to be attached to Scotland Yard. But attached he indisputably was, and could claim his official salutes from some of the men who would once have given their ears to arrest him. "Thus are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of walloping perished," he said to Teal at another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a respectable citizen, seemed much too good to be true — much too good… Teal had an uneasy feeling that no bad man who had suddenly reformed would have been quite so overpoweringly sanctimonious about it. All that he had ever seen of the Saint, all that he had ever known of him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing the law by strictly legal methods, and wondered…

Not that anyone's mystification would have worried Simon Templar in the least. If he had thought about it at all, he would have been impishly amused, in his serenely contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life, and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seeming to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate supply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.

One thing, however, could disturb his tranquillity, and that was to have business troubles intruded upon the hours which he had allotted to himself for rest or recreation. At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street, for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, happily engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new song dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours List, and a bullet smacked through the window behind him and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling, he was distinctly bored.

With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing gown. One glance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong, It seemed that there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours — and that was to be taken for a fool.

He glanced round the room and selected a battered pickelhaube — relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so, that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he displayed the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.

The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickelhaube with a noise like that of a dull gong.

Neither of the shots from outside had been accompanied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.

His servant met him in the hall.

"Count ten, and then open the front door — but lie flat on the ground when you do it!" snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.

He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.

He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles; or the car was an extraordinary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight.

"Joke!" murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.

Ordinary guns he was prepared for, and ready to take on any time. Not that he particularly fancied himself with guns, but he reckoned he could just about pull his weight in most kinds of rough stuff. But there was another kind of gun before tackling which Simon Templar always paused to take a deep breath and recite rapidly the verse from the hymn which contains a line about shelters from the stormy blast; and it was undoubtedly a specimen of that kind of gun which was spluttering a horizontal hailstorm of lead sufficiently close to his direction to be appreciably unpleasant.

Taking the breath, and postponing the recitation to a later date, Simon put up his head again; and as he did so the fire ceased, and the car picked up speed with a rush and swooped into the emptiness of Berkeley Square.

The Saint, standing at the corner of the mews and trying to draw a bead on one of the departing tires as the car turned into Mount Street, was briskly arrested.

"Don't be a bigger fool than you can help," he snarled; and the constable, recognizing him, released him with a stammered apology.

"It was a car, sir—"

"You amaze me," said the Saint, in awe. "I thought it was a team of racing camels. Get the number down in your book."

The policeman obeyed; and Simon, with a shrug,turned and shouldered his way back to the house through the nucleus of a gaping crowd.

He found Orace dabbing an ear with a stained handkerchief.

"Hurt?"

"Nossir — just a splinter er wood. They were firin' low."

"It's more painful through the stomach," said the Saint enigmatically, and went on upstairs.

The pursuit of the car from which the machine gun had been fired wasn't Simon Templar's business. It could be carried on just as effectively by the regulars — or just as ineffectively, for the number plates were certain to have been changed. But it made the Saint think.

When the assistant commissioner called in later for the story, however, Simon showed no signs of perturbation.

"It was Budd's idea, of course. He's seen service in Chicago. But machine guns in the streets of London are nothing new on me — I've had it happen before. There's no blamed originality in this racket, that's the trouble."

"They seem to think you're important."

"There's certainly some personal bias against me," admitted the Saint innocently. "I was expecting a demonstration — I had further words with Jill Trelawney yesterday. Cigarette?"

"Thanks."

The commissioner helped himself. He was a grizzled, hard-featured man who had worked his way up from the bottom of the ladder, and he had all the taciturn abruptness common to men who have risen in the world by nothing but a relentless devotion to the ambition of rising in the world.

"How did she strike you?"

"She didn't," said the Saint perversely."I think she would have, though, but for the low cunning with which I made my escape. She's a sweet child."

"Charming," agreed the commissioner ironically. "So gentle! Such endearing ways!"

"Ever meet her?"

"No. I knew her father, of course."

Simon grinned.

"He never made any friendly advance towards me," he murmured. "But of course there was some prejudice against me at the time. Tell me that story again — from the inside."

Cullis settled himself.

"The inside is that Trelawney swore all along that he'd been framed," he said. "It's not such an inside, anyway, because he told exactly the same tale at the inquiry. After all, that was the only defense open to him: he was caught so red-handed that no one could have thought out any other explanation except that he was guilty."

"The story?"

"Police plans were leaking out; raids falling flat regularly. Something had to be done. The chief commissioner took a chance on myself and another superintendent— we had the longest service records — and arranged for us to lead a surprise raid on a Thursday night. On Thursday morning he let it get round the Yard that the raid was to take place on Saturday. We raided on Thursday without any fuss, roped in a gang that had slipped us twice before, and kept everyone on the premises — including the men who made the raid, and they were officially supposed to be on leave. Therefore there was nobody left at the Yard, except the chief, who knew that the raid was over. We had one man sitting over the telephone and another over the letter box. First post on Friday morning, a letter came in. Just one word, typewritten: Saturday. It was on official paper, with the heading cut off, and the experts put it under the microscope and traced it to the typewriter in Trelawney's office."

"Which anyone might have used."

"It was postmarked Windsor. Trelawney went down to Windsor for a consultation on Thursday afternoon — and he went alone."

"Flimsy," said the Saint. "An accomplice might have posted it."

Cullis nodded.

"I know it wasn't any good by itself. But it was a clue. Nobody saw the letter but the chief and myself. We watched Trelawney ourselves. We were after Waldstein then. He was always slippery, and at that time we reckoned he was vanishing an average of one girl a week through the Pan-European Concert Agency, which was one of his most profitable incarnations. But he was clever, and he never appeared in person, and there was never a line of evidence. Then I had the inspiration. I suggested to the chief that he go to Trelawney with the story that one of Waldstein's men had squealed. He saw the point, and agreed. He told the tale of Trelawney, as he'd naturally have told him anything else in the way of business that he was pleased about. Waldstein was in Paris, and the chief said that the Sûreté had arranged to intercept any letters, telegrams, or telephone calls addressed to him, so that no one could warn him, and one of our men was going over to arrest him the next morning. And the next morning, bright and early, Trelawney chartered a special airplane and set off for Paris."

"No!"

"He did. The chief and I, having been waiting for just that, chased him in a faster airplane, and trailed him all the way from Le Bourget to Waldstein's hotel. Then, when we'd heard him ask for Waldstein at the office, the chief tapped him on the shoulder."

"And?"

"He'd got his story pat. Gosh, I've never met such a nerve! He just blinked a bit when he first saw the chief and me, but from then on he never batted an eyelid. We went into a private room, and the chief told him the game was up.

"What game?" asked Trelawney.

"What are you doing here?" asked the chief.

"What you told me to do," says Trelawney.

"I never told you to come here," says the chief.

"The chief says Trelawney went a bit white then, but I never noticed it. Anyway, Trelawney's story was that he'd been called up by the chief early that morning and told to go over and attend to Waldstein himself, as there was some difficulty with the French police, and Waldstein was likely to get away during the argument. We asked him why he hadn't gone to the Quai d'Orsay first, to present his papers, and he said the chief had told him to get Waldstein first and argue afterwards."

"Well?"

Cullis shrugged.

"After that, it was all over."

"Don't see it," said the Saint. "If Trelawney was guilty, why should he tell that story to the very man who would know at once that it wasn't true?"

"Brains," said the assistant commissioner. "He'd thought out the possibility of being caught, and he'd got his defense ready — a frame-up. That story was the best he could have told. It prepared his ground for when we opened his safe deposit and found, among others, banknotes that were traced to Waldstein."

"How did he account for those?"

"He couldn't."

"And afterwards?"

"The chief decided not to make a public scandal of it. For one thing, it would have been difficult to get a conviction, even on that evidence, because we couldn't bring Waldstein into it. Waldstein, in the eyes of the ignorant world, was a perfectly respectable citizen and is the same to this day. So there wasn't any lawful reason why he shouldn't have given Trelawney money. Still, Trelawney was asked for his resignation, and he died a month afterwards. I don't like thinking about that part of it — it isn't pleasant to think that I was indirectly responsible, even if he was a grafter."

Simon reached for an ashtray.

"And yet," he said, "it seems rather a fluke. Why should Waldstein have been the right bait? And why should Trelawney have walked into the trap so easily?"

Cullis shrugged again.

"Waldstein was the sort of man who might have been the right bait. We took a chance. If it had failed, we'd have had to think of something else. But if Waldstein was the right bait, Trelawney was bound to walk into the trap. If a man takes graft, he can't let his clients down; if he does, they can squeal on him. Waldstein being in Paris put Trelawney in a tight corner, but he had to take his chance. He didn't know how big a chance it was. Ordinarily, you see, he might easily have got away with it. But he didn't know that there was already some sort of evidence against him; he didn't know he was being followed; and he couldn't have guessed that there could be enough suspicion to lead to the opening of his safe deposit."

"Had he any particular enemies?"

"No more than the average successful policeman."

"No name you can remember hearing him mention?"

Cullis tugged at an iron-grey moustache.

"Heavens! I don't know!"

"No one of the name of — Essenden?"

It was a shot in the dark, but it creased two additional wrinkles into the assistant commissioner's lined forehead.

"What made you think of that?" he asked.

"I didn't," said the Saint. "It just fell out of the blue. But Jill was on her way to Essenden's when I first met her, and that was the first time the Angels have been seen out before an arrest. Get me?"

"But they were there to cover Dyson. Surely it's reasonable for them to have realized that it's easier to prevent a man being arrested than to get him away after the arrest?"

Simon nodded.

"I know. Still, I'm keeping an open mind."

He continued in communion with his open mind for some time after the commissioner had left — and went to bed with the mind, if possible, more open than before.

Perhaps Sir Francis Trelawney had been framed. Perhaps he had not been framed. If he had been framed, it had been brilliantly done. If he had not been framed. Well, it was quite natural that a girl like Jill Trelawney, as he estimated her, might refuse to believe it. And, either way, if you looked at it from the standpoint of a law-abiding citizen and an incipient policeman to boot, the rights and wrongs of the Trelawney case made no difference to the rights and wrongs of Jill.

Within the past five months, a complete dozen of valuable prisoners had been rescued from under the very arms of the law, long as those arms were traditionally reputed to be; and the manner of their rescue, in every case, betrayed such an exhaustive knowledge of police methods and routine that at times a complete reorganization of the Criminal Investigation Department's system seemed to be the only possible alternative to impotent surrender. And this, as is the way of such things, accurately coincided with one of those waves of police unpopularity and hysterical newspaper criticism which make commissioners and superintendents acidulated and old before their time. Clearly, it could not go on. The newspapers said so, and therefore it must have been so. And the Saint understood quite calmly and contentedly that, after the matter in which the Saint had made his debut as a law-abiding citizen, either the Angels of Doom or Simon Templar had got to come to a sudden and sticky end.

Completely comprehending this salient fact, the Saint drank his breakfast coffee black the next morning, and sent the milk bottle from outside his front door to an analyst. He had the report by lunchtime.

"At least," he told Cullis, "I'm collecting the makings of a case against the Angels."

"There was nothing against them before," assented the commissioner sarcastically.

Simon shook his head.

"There wasn't. Assaulting the police, obstructing the police — I tell you, in spite of everything, you could only have got them on minor charges. But attempted murder—"

"Or even real murder," said Cullis cheerfully.

2

"Slinky" Dyson had squealed. Simon Templar had to admit that nothing but that happy windfall had enabled him to step so promptly upon the tail of the Angels of Doom. Slinky was pulled sin for suspicious loitering one evening, and when they searched him they found on his person a compact leather wallet containing tools which were held to be house-breaking implements within the meaning of the Act. Simon happened to be in Marlborough Street police station at the time, and witnessed the discovery.

"I was waiting for a friend," said Slinky. "Honest I was."

"Honest you may have was," said the inspector heavily. "But you grew out of that years ago."

Shortly after Slinky had been locked up, he asked to speak to the inspector again, and the inspector thought the squeal sufficiently promising to fetch Teal in to hear it. And then Teal sent in the Saint.

"I told you I was waiting for a friend," said Slinky, "and that's gospel. But if you'd pulled me to-morrow… I was going down to take a look at Lord Essenden's party. I had a tip from the Angels. You'll find the letter in my room — I put it in the Bible on the shelf over the bed. They said I was to take what I liked, how I liked, and they'd see I made a good getaway. Now, you ain't told me why I'm here, but I know. There's been a scream. I don't know why they should want to shop me, but there's been a scream… An' I'd take is as a favour, sir, if you'd tell me who was the screamer."

"I don't know," said the Saint truthfully. "Maybe you talk in your sleep."

They found the letter as Slinky had said they would find it, and it was short and to the point.

And the Saint, acting upon it, went to Lord.Essenden's party unknown to Lord Essenden, and thus met Jill Trelawney and Stephen Weald and Pinky Budd; and what followed we know.

After the jokes of the machine gun and the milk, the Saint saw Slinky Dyson again, and was able to give some unhelpful information to that puzzled man.

"There was no scream," he said. "That is official. It was just your bad luck, Slinky."

Dyson scratched his head.

"I'll believe you, Mr. Templar. It was bad luck all right. But you'll remember my squeak, sir?"

"You were remanded for a week, weren't you?"

"Yes, Mr. Templar."

"If we let you out, will you take a job?"

"What sort of job?" asked Slinky suspiciously.

"Oh, not work," said the Saint soothingly. "I wouldn't dream of asking you to do that."

Slinky relaxed.

"I'll hear about it, Mr. Templar."

"How much do you want for a black eye?"

Slinky stared.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Templar?"

"You heard me."

The man shifted his eyes nervously, and giggled.

"Wh-what?"

"I didn't ask you to give an imitation of a consumptive Wyandotte laying a bad egg," said the Saint patiently. "I asked you how much you wanted for a black eye."

"You want to give me a black eye, Mr. Templar?"

"Very much indeed."

"What for?"

"Five pounds."

"What for after that?"

"Do you know how to get in touch with the Angels?"

Slinky shook his head.

"Never mind that," said the Saint. "I guess they'll hear about it, if you carry it round and talk a lot about how I gave it to you — without mentioning the five pounds. Tell the world how I beat you up and tried to make you howl on the Angels, and how you're going to get even with me one day. The Angels don't like me, and they'd be glad to find a man who hates me as much as you're going to. If we're lucky, you'll find yourself enlisted in the gang in less than no time. Then you keep me posted."

"You mean," said Slinky, "you want me to be your nose?"

"That's the idea."

Dyson sighed.

"I've never been a nose," he said solemnly. "No, Mr. Templar, it can't be done."

"You will be paid," said the Saint deliberately, "twenty pounds' cash for every genuine piece of news you send in about what the Angels are going to do next and how they're going to do it."

Slinky closed his eyes sanctimoniously.

"My conscience," he said, "wouldn't allow me to do a thing like that, Mr. Templar."

"You'll remember," the Saint reminded him persuasively, "that I could get you sent down for six months' hard right now."

Dyson blinked.

"If it wasn't for my principles," he said sadly, "I'd be very happy to oblige you, Mr. Templar."

Eventually, when he found that the Saint had no intention of raising his price, except in the matter of ten pounds instead of five for the black eye, he managed to choke down his conscience and accept. Simon arranged for him to be brought before the magistrate again the next morning, when he would be released, and started back to Scotland Yard in a taxi. But on the way he had an idea.

"The machine gun," he reflected, "was Pinky's voluntary. Weald would have thought of the prussic acid in the milk. We're still waiting for Jill's contribution — and it might be very cunning to meet it halfway."

The inspiration, duly considered, appealed to him; and he gave fresh instructions to the driver.

The door of the house in Belgrave Street was a long time opening in response to his peal on the bell. Perhaps to make up for this, it was very quick in starting to shut again as soon as Frederick Wells had recognized the caller. But Simon Templar was more than ordinarily skilful at thrusting himself in where he was not wanted.

"Not good enough, Freddie," he drawled regretfully, and closed the door himself — from the inside.

The butler glowered.

"Miss Trelawney is out," he said.

"You lie, Ferdinand," said the Saint pleasantly, and went on up the stairs.

He really had no idea whether the butler was lying or not, but he gave him the benefit of the doubt. As it happened, this generous impulse was justified, for Jill Trelawney opened the door of the sitting room just as Simon put his hand on the knob.

"Hullo," said the Saint amiably.

His eyes flickered with an offensively secret mirth, and he caught the answering blaze from hers before she veiled them in a frozen inscrutability.

"Lovely day, Jill," remarked the Saint, very amiably.

She relaxed wearily against the jamb.

"My — sainted — aunt! Have you got away from your keeper again?"

"Looks like it," said the Saint apologetically. "Yes, I will stay to tea, thanks. Ring down to the kitchen and tell them not to mix arsenic with the sugar, because I don't take sugar. And it's no use putting strychnine in the milk, because I don't take milk. Just tell 'em to shovel the whole bag of tricks in the teapot."

He walked calmly past her into the room, and sat down in the best chair. As an afterthought, he removed his hat.

The girl followed him in.

"Is your posse outside again?"

"I wonder?" said the Saint. "Why don't you go out and ask? You don't know where you are just now, do you? One time I tell you I haven't a posse, and I haven't. Another time I tell you I have a posse and I haven't. Now suppose I tell you I haven't a posse you'll know I have, won't you?"

She shrugged and took a cigarette from a silver box. Then she offered the box to him.

"Have one?"

"Not with you, darling."

"Did I hear you say 'No, thanks'?"

"Er — no, I don't think so," said the Saint seriously. "Did you?"

With the smoke trickling through her lips the girl looked at him.

"Have you come on business this time?" she inquired. "Or is this just another part of the official persecution?"

"Partly on business, partly on pleasure," said Simon, unabashed. "Which will you have first?"

"The business, please."

"It's a pleasure," said the Saint accommodatingly. "I've come to do you a good turn, Jill."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, that is so. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Ses you? Ses me. In fact, yes… I want to warn you. A dark man is going to cross your path. Beware of him. His name is Slinky Dyson."

The name roused no more response than a flicker of her eyelids.

"What about him?"

"He is a police spy," said the Saint solemnly. "I have been able to buy him over. In return for a cash reward he is going to try to join your gang and give me all the information about you that he can get hold of. So, whatever happens, don't be taken in by him."

She read with glittering eyes the dancing devil of amusement behind his expressionlessness.

"Is this another of your funny stories?"

"It is." The Saint sighed. "In fact, it's one of my best. Do you know, Jill, I'm afraid you're going to get in a devil of a muddle about me, aren't you? First the business of the posse, then this. Now, do you think I'm telling you the truth in the hope that you will think I'm bluffing and fall into the trap, or do you think I'm inventing the yarn to keep you away from a man I don't want you to have? I can't help thinking that some of these questions are going to make life very difficult for you for the next few days."

She tapped her cigarette delicately on the edge of an ashtray.

"Is that all you came to say?" she asked patiently.

"Not quite," said the Saint, in that tone of gentle mockery that would have been like sandpaper rasped across the nerves of anyone less self-possessed. "I just wanted to ask one thing — about your father."

She faced him.

"Haven't I told you," she said dangerously, "to leave my father out of this?"

"I know," said the Saint. "And I've told you that I shall bring anyone into it whom I choose to bring in. So we know where we are. And now listen to this. I've been making some inquiries about your father, and I've come on a name which interests me. It may mean something to you. The name is — Waldstein."

She stared at him narrowly.

"Well?"

The monosyllable dropped like a flake of hot metal.

"I thought you might be after him," said the Saint. "Do you mind telling me if I'm right?"

Slowly she nodded. "You're quite right — Templar!"

The Saint beamed.

"That's one of the most sensible things I've heard you say," he remarked. "In fact, if you concentrated your attention on Waldstein you'd be doing yourself and everyone else much more good than you're doing at present. If your father was framed, Waldstein knows all about it. I'll tell you that. But what good you expect to do by simply making yourself a nuisance to the police force in general is more than my logical mind can see."

She pointed to the table.

"I suppose you've seen the papers?"

"We have. All about the inefficiency of the police. Of course, everybody doesn't know that I'm in charge of the situation. But does it give you the satisfaction you want?"

"It gives me some satisfaction."

"We are also amused," said Simon. "The chiefs of the C. I. D. meet together twice a day to roar with laughter over it… And I think that's all for today. I'll see you again soon. If you like, I'll drop you a line to say when I'm coming, so that you can arrange to be out."

"Perhaps," she said silkily, "you will not be in a position to come again. So you might save the stamp."

"That's all right," said the Saint easily. "I shouldn't have stamped the letter."

He stood up and picked up his hat, which he brushed carefully with his sleeve. She made no move to delay him.

At the door he turned for his parting shot.

"Just for information," he said, "is there going to be any trouble about my leaving this time?"

"No," she said quietly. "Not just now."

He smiled.

"Something else arranged, I suppose. Not machine guns, I hope. And no more poisoned milk. I don't want you to let yourself down by repeating yourself too often, you know."

"You won't be in suspense for long," she said.

"I'm glad to hear it," said the Saint, with intense earnestness. "Well, bye-bye, old dear."

He strolled down the stairs, humming a little tune.

No one attempted to stop him. The hall was deserted. He let himself out and sauntered down Belgrave Street, swinging his stick.

As a bluffing interview it had not borne the fruit he had hoped for. Since their first encounters, the girl had recovered a great deal of the poise and self-control that his studied impudence had at first been able to flurry her into losing. On that occasion she had given nothing away of importance — only that she had an interest in Waldstein. This was perhaps one interest that Simon Templar shared with her wholeheartedly.

Chapter III

How Simon Templar made a slight error,

and Pinky Budd made a big one

1

Two days later, Simon Templar went unostentatiously to a certain public house in Aldgate. He was not noticed, for he had made some subtle alterations to his appearance and bearing. One man, however, recognized him, and they moved over to a quiet corner of the bar.

"Have they been in touch with you again?" was the Saint's immediate question.

Mr. Dyson nodded.

His right eye was still disfigured by a swollen black-and-blue bruise. Mr. Dyson, thinking it over subsequently, had decided that ten pounds was an inadequate compensation for the injury, but it was too late to reopen that discussion.

"They sent for me yesterday," he said. "I went at once, and they gave me a very good welcome."

"Did you drink it?" asked the Saint interestedly.

"They've definitely taken me on."

"And the news?"

"It was like this…"

Simon listened to a long recital which told him nothing at all of any value, and departed a pound poorer than he had been when he came. It was the highest value he could place upon Mr. Dyson's first budget of information, and Slinky's aggrieved pleading made no impression upon the Saint at all."

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 over 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.

"It is," said the Saint gently. "And now we're going to have a fight, aren't we?"

Dyson was still holding the murderous jackknife, but the Saint pushed him smoothly aside.

"You can put that away," he said. "This is a vegetarian party. Fairly vegetarian, anyway. I'm going to give Pinky beans, and— Oh, don't go yet, Pinky!"

Budd had made a dive for the door. The key was still in the lock, and if he had brought off the manoeuvre he might have been able to get outside and lock the door behind him. But the Saint was a shade quicker. The table was between him and Budd, but he hurled it aside as if it had been made of cardboard, and caught Budd's hand as it went to the lock.

Budd dropped the key with a scream of pain. He tried to kick, but Simon dodged neatly.

Then he pushed Budd away so that the man went reeling across the room, and the Saint picked up the key and put it in his trouser pocket. Then he slipped off his coat.

"And now, Pinky Budd, we have this fight, don't we?"

But Budd was coming on without any encouragement. He was on his toes, too. The fighting game had not dealt lightly with Pinky's face, but he had all the science and experience that he had won at the cost of his disfigurements.

He led off with a sledge-hammer left that would have ended the fight then and there if it had connected. But it did not connect. Simon ducked and landed a left-right beat to the body that made Budd grunt. Then the Saint was away again, sparring, and he also was on his toes.

Moreover, he was between Budd and the door, and he meant to stay there. Budd had asked for the fight, and he was going to get it. Budd might have been glad of the chance, or he might have wanted to get out of it, but he wasn't having the choice, anyway. Simon Templar was seeing to that. But to a certain extent that tactical necessity of keeping between Budd and the door was going to cramp his style. He appreciated the disadvantage in a fight which wasn't going to be an easy fight at any moment. But it couldn't be helped.

Budd's next lead was another left, but it was a feint. The Saint divined that and changed his guard. But he was a little slow in divining that the right cross which came over after the left was a second feint, and the half-arm jolt to the short ribs which followed it caught him unprepared drove him back gasping against the wall.

Budd came in like a tiger, left and right, and Simon dropped to one knee.

He straightened up with a raking uppercut that must have ricked Budd's neck as though a horse had kicked him under the chin. That blow would have been the end of the average man for some time to come. But Budd had been trained in a tougher school. He fell into a clinch that the Saint, still rib-bound from the smashing blow he had taken, was not quick enough to avoid. There Budd's weight told. There was no referee to give them the breakaway, and the professional was free to use every dirty trick of holding and heading and heeling for which a clinch gives openings. But the Saint also knew a few of those himself, and he broke the clinch eventually with a blow that would certainly have got him disqualified in any official contest. As he stepped out he swung up a pendulum left which should have caught Budd under the jaw. Pinky got his head back quickly enough, but not quite far enough, and the blow snicked up his nose.

It maddened him, but it also blinded him. No man, however tough, can have his nose snicked up in that particular way without having his vision momentarily fogged. And before Budd could see what was happening the Saint had sent in a pile-driving right-hander to the heart. Then he turned on his toes and followed through with a left to the solar plexus that had every ounce of his weight behind it, and Budd went smashing down as if a steam hammer had hit him.

Simon picked up his coat.

"We ought to be just in time to get that train, Slinky," he remarked, and then he turned round to find that Slinky Dyson had already gone.

With a shrug the Saint went out, locking the door behind him.

A taxi took him to Paddington, and he arrived outside the platform barrier just as the guard was blowing his whistle.

He had no ticket, but such minor difficulties were never allowed to stand in Simon Templar's way. Nor was the ticket collector. Simon picked him. up and sat him on a convenient luggage trolley, and raced down the platform as the train was gathering way. He opened the door of the first convenient carriage and swung into it. Looking back through the window, he saw the chase of porters tailing off breathlessly. They might telephone to Birmingham and prepare a reception for him there, but that would not take long to deal with.

Then he turned to inspect the other occupants of the carriage, whose flabbergasted comments had been audible behind him as he looked back out of the window; but the first person he noticed was not a man in the carriage. It was a man who happened to be passing down the corridor.

The Saint strode over a barricade of legs, odd luggage, and a bird cage, and went down the corridor in the man's wake. Coming up sufficiently close behind him, he trod heavily on the man's heels; and Stephen Weald turned with an oath.

"What the—"

The exclamation died suddenly, and Weald's face went grey as he recognized the offender.

Simon's lips twitched into a little smile of sprightly merriment.

"So we're all going to Birmingham together!"

Then, with a surprising abruptness, he turned away into the nearest carriage, where he had already perceived a vacant seat, and composed himself to the enjoyment of a cigarette.

Weald passed on.

A little farther down the corridor was the compartment in which he and the girl had found places. She looked up as he showed in the doorway, and he gave her an imperceptible signal. She came out to join him in the corridor.

"What is it?"

"Let's go to the dining car," said Weald. "We shan't be overheard there."

He led the way, and no more was said until they were securely ensconced and tea had been ordered.

"Well, what is it, Weald?"

"The Saint's on the train! I've just seen him."

She stopped in the act of fitting a cigarette into a holder.

"The Saint? You're dreaming."

He shook his head. The hand with which he offered her a match was shaking.

"I tell you I saw him. He spoke to me. He's in a compartment three divisions back from ours. I don't know how he got away, but he's done it."

The girl's eyes narrowed.

"It's that man Dyson. Heavens, Templar's clever! You were listening when he warned me about Dyson, weren't you? And we took it just the way the Saint meant us to take it. Dyson's done the double-cross."

"And Pinky—?"

"Pinky's a back number."

The girl admitted the fact grimly. She was calm about it.

"Why do you think the Saint is in this, Jill?"

"Who knows why the Saint does anything? You've read the stories in the newspapers — he was pardoned, and now he seems to be working right in with the police… But you're right. This isn't like any ordinary racket of the Saint's."

"What are we going to do?" asked Weald tremblingly.

"I'll tell you in a minute," she said. "Keep quiet, and don't bother me."

She drew at her cigarette, looking out of the window at the darkening scenery. It was some time before she looked at Weald again.

Then she said:

"We go on, of course!"

Weald's mouth fell open.

"But Templar's on the train. I'm not being funny—"

"Neither am I. The Saint's expecting to scare us off Donnell, but we aren't going to be scared. If he's on the train, we haven't a way out, anyway. The only thing for us to do is to go on. We may be able to deal with him at Donnell's, but we can't here, that's certain. The train's packed, and we'd never get away with it."

"He'll have a posse at Donnell's."

She laughed, a hard little laugh.

"That posse's another of the Saint's fairly tales. I don't believe a man like that would dream of using one. He's got too darn good an opinion of himself. Don't you see that it amuses him to go about alone like this and get away with it? He gets twice as much kudos for the job as he would if he went round with a bodyguard. But this time he isn't going to get away with it. That's my answer. If you know anything better I'll hear it."

Weald said nothing. The train ran on.

He avoided her eyes. Picking up his cup to drink mechanically, he spilt tea over the tablecloth. But that might have been the jolting of the train. He hoped she would think it was. He knew she was watching him.

What little colour there could be in his face had not come back since he saw the Saint, for Stephen Weald had seen the jaws of destruction yawning at him at the same time.

It had all happened so quietly and gently up to that point that he had never seen the danger until it was upon him. There had been nothing concrete in the mere knowledge that the Saint was after the Angels of Doom, imposing as the Saint's reputation was. And though each of Simon Templar's visits to Belgrave Street had been both an insult and a threat, none of them had been sufficiently terrifying to rouse an alarm which could not be dissipated with a drink after he had left. And now it seemed as if all that had changed as suddenly as if a charge of dynamite had been detonated under the whole situation. And all through such a simple thing. Before that there had been no evidence against any of them. But now there was. Simon Templar had been held up and bound and locked in a cellar, and now he was free to tell the tale, with Dyson's evidence to support it.

That might well be the beginning of the end. Weald had always had a wholesome respect for the tenacity of the police when once they got hold of a solid bone to chew. Throughout his career he had made a point of keeping away from any material contact with them. As long as they were working in the dark against him he could feel safe, but once they could make any definite accusation, and thus get a hold on him, there was no knowing where it might end.

But in Jill Trelawney there was no sign of weakening.

"We can still pull through," she said.

Weald's thin fingers twitched his tie nervously.

"How can you say that after what we know now?"

"We're not dead yet. In your way, you're right, of course. We've tripped over about the most ridiculous little thing that we could have tripped over, and if we aren't careful we'll go stumbling over the edge of the precipice. But I'm not giving an imitation of a jelly in an earthquake."

"Nor am I," said Weald angrily.

The mocking contempt remained in her eyes, and he knew that he was not believed.

With a certain grim concession to her sense of humour she remembered the Saint's warning before they left Belgrave Street. The Saint had certainly been right. In the circumstances, Weald was likely to be very much less use than a tin tombstone. She saw the way he put a hand to cover the twitching of his weak mouth, and realized that Stephen Weald was going to pieces rapidly.

Chapter IV

How Jill Trelawney told a lie, and

Simon Templar spoke nothing but the truth

1

HARRY DONNELL lived in a house in a mean street on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was a curious house, but as soon as he had seen it he knew that few other houses could have fulfilled his requirements so completely, for he had always boasted that if necessary he would resist arrest to the death.

This house had grown up, somehow, in the very inside of a block. Being completely surrounded by the other houses of the block necessarily deprived its rooms of most of the light of day, but Donnell could not see this as a disadvantage. The same fact made the house very difficult to attack, and this to his mind was compensation enough. In fact, the building could only be approached directly through a straight and narrow alleyway between two of the outer houses.

He rarely stirred out of doors except on business, preferring to sleep and drink and smoke at home, and amuse himself with his own inscrutable and animal meditations. He was at home when Jill Trelawney and Stephen Weald arrived, and went down to open the door to them himself when he recognized the signal on the bell which showed that the visitors were friendly.

"Good-afternoon, Miss Trelawney," he said politely, for Harry Donnell prided himself on his accomplishments as a ladies' man. Her manner, however, cut short any courtesies.

"The Saint's after you," she said bluntly. "Where can we talk?"

He looked at her, and then led the way upstairs without a word.

They went up two flights of dingy, creaking stairs, for the first and ground floors were devoted to the sleeping accommodations of his gang. On the second floor he opened a door and showed them into a big, bare room, of which the principal articles of furniture appeared to consist of a rough deal table and a case of whisky. This room, like most of the others in the house, was lighted only by a small and dirty window which admitted hardly any light, and the gloom was made gloomier by the fog of stale tobacco smoke which hung in the air.

Donnell closed the door behind them.

"Did you say the Saint?"

"I did. Do you know him?"

Donnell drew back his lips from a row of black and broken teeth.

"I met him — once."

"You look like meeting him again," said the girl shortly.

Donnell was not immediately impressed. He took a pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from a tin on the table.

"What do you mean?"

"He's after you for that show at Essenden's. He came and told me that he was going to take you himself. We shut him up in the cellar and came to warn you ourselves. But he got away somehow and caught the same train as we did. Weald saw him. We didn't see him again at the other end, but he can't be far behind. In fact, I know how far behind he is. He knows I'm coming here and he's hanging just far enough behind to get me into the trap as well. He's after me, too."

Donnell looked from her to Weald.

"Is this a joke?" he demanded.

And Weald's face told him it was not a joke. He turned to the girl again.

"Why didn't you get me on the telephone?" he asked harshly. "Isn't that what it's here for?"

"The exchange told me that the trunk line was out of order," said Jill quietly. "And don't talk to me like that. I don't like it."

Donnell faced her cold gaze three seconds and then dropped his eyes.

"No offense," he muttered.

"Forget it," said the girl briskly. "We've got about three or four minutes, I should say, before Templar turns up. I'd like him to have a welcome. He'll be alone — I'm certain of that. What can you do about it?"

"There are half a dozen of the boys downstairs."

"Can you stop him getting in?"

Donnell grinned.

"I could stop an army," he bragged.

"Can you stop the Saint?"

"Haven't you seen round this house?" asked Donnell. "I've had it ready for years, just for something like this. I'll take you round, if you like, and you can see for yourself."

Jill tightened the belt of her coat.

"I'll look round on my own, if you don't mind," she said. "I know what to look for, and it probably isn't what you'd show me. Give Weald a drink while I'm gone — I guess he needs it."

She went out, and Donnell picked up a bottle and a glass. He poured out four good fingers of the spirit, and Weald grabbed it and drank it neat. Then he turned to Donnell; the fire-water had steadied him up a bit — in a way.

"You believe it isn't a joke?" he said.

Donnell nodded.

"Yes, I believe it now."

"I'm up against it," panted Weald flabbily. "I'm up against it much more than you are. They can only get you for a bashing, but they can get me for a lot more."

"Ever beat up a 'tec?"

"More than that. I can't tell you. They might. Donnell, you've got to get us out of this!"

Donnell's eyebrows came down.

"What do you mean, get you out of it? What about me?"

Weald clutched his arm.

"You don't understand. I've got to get away. I've got to take the girl with me. Is there any back way out of this — any bolt hole you've prepared? I've got money—"

Donnell thrust him roughly into a chair and pushed the whisky bottle towards him. Weald helped himself greedily to another half-glassful.

"Now you're talking," said Donnell. "How much?"

Weald dragged a note case from his pocket. It bulged. Donnell's eyes fastened on it hungrily.

"A thousand, Donnell. It's all I can spare. I've got to leave myself some money to get clear."

"Let's see it."

Feverishly Weald counted out the notes with shaking fingers and put them on the table. Donnell moistened his thumb and counted them deliberately. Then he put them in his pocket.

"That cupboard behind you," he said. "The back of it's a sliding door. You'll find some stairs. Go right down. There's a tunnel under the block and the street, and it comes up in the cellar of a house on the other side."

"But you've got to hold Templar up."

Donnell struck his chest with a huge fist.

"Me? I'll hold the Saint up. I don't run away from anyone — but you can clear out when you want to. You'd be more trouble than use, anyway."

Weald swallowed the taunt without a protest.

"All right. As soon as the girl comes back you get out and say you're going to warn your gang. I'll look after the rest."

Donnell sat down heavily on a truckle bed in one corner. He took a massive revolver from his pocket, spilled the cartridges into his hand, and squinted up the barrel. He spun the cylinder with his fingers, tested the hammer action to his satisfaction, and reloaded the gun methodically.

"What's the idea?" he asked laconically. "You sweet on her?"

Weald nodded, with the bottle in his hand.

"That's not the half of it. I've been wanting her for months. I thought I'd do it gradually, working with her and making her like me. But there isn't time for any more fooling about. If the police are going to get me I'm going to get her first. I don't care if it's the last thing I do. Donnell — on the train — she was sneering at me!"

"Anyone would," said Donnell unemotionally. "A white-livered rat like you!"

Weald wiped his mouth. The whisky was going to his head.

"I'm not a white-livered rat, Donnell!" he blustered.

"You're a white-livered rat and a yellow cur at the same time," said Donnell without heat, testing the sights of his Colt on the whisky bottle.

Weald lurched towards him.

"Donnell, you take that back!"

"Don't be a blasted nuisance," said Donnell impatiently.

He took Weald's shoulder in a huge hand and pushed him away. Then Jill Trelawney came into the room.

"I've seen all I want to see," she said. "Donnell, will you go down and rouse up the boys?"

"I was just going to, Miss Trelawney," said Donnell heavily.

He went to the door and leered, behind her back, at Weald. Then he went out, and Weald heard him clumping heavily down the stairs.

"I didn't say you were to drink a whole bottle," remarked Jill, surveying Weald's unsteady balance.

"You don't understand, Jill. I've been finding a way out."

He walked rockily to the cupboard that Donnell had indicated and dragged open the doors. After some fumbling he was able to open the sliding door at the back, and then he found a switch. The light showed a flight of steps leading down into a damp and musty darkness.

"Our way out!" declaimed Weald grandiosely.

"Very interesting," said the girl, "but we don't happen to be going that way."

He stared.

"Not going that way?"

"How the Angels of Doom would miss you!" she said caustically. "Without you they'd be absolutely helpless. The great brain, always clear and alert in times of crisis."

"Jill!"

"Oh, be quiet!" Her sarcasm turned to contempt suddenly. "When you're sober you're futile, and when you're drunk you maunder. I don't know which is worse. Now pull yourself together. Donnell is ready to do his part, and his boys are with him, but he's looking to you and me to pull him through. The Angels have never failed yet, and they can't fail now."

"But, Jill —"

"And a little less of the 'Jill,' " she cut in icily. "This place can stand a siege for a week, and we can still get out that way if we have to. But I'm going to let Templar in — right in — and there's going to be no mistake about him this time."

He swayed towards her.

"And I say we're going out this way — now!" he shouted. "I've had about enough of being ordered about by you, and being snubbed, and treated like a child. Now you're going to do what I say, for a change. Come on!"

She regarded him with a calculating eye.

"About one more drink," she said, "and you'd be dead drunk. On the whole, I think I'd prefer that to your present state."

"Oh you would, would you?"

The resentment which Weald had been afraid to let loose before Donnell he had no need to control now. He grasped her shoulders with clumsy hands.

"That's the sort of talk I'm not standing from you any longer," he said shrilly. "You're going to stop it, right now, do you see? From now on I'm going to give the orders and you're going to obey them. I love you!"

"You're mad," she said coldly. But for the first time in her life a little imp of fear plucked at her heart.

He thrust his face down close to hers. She could smell the drink on his breath.

"I'm not mad. I've been mad before, but I'm sensible now. I want to take you away — out of here — out of England — out into the world! I'm going to give you jewels, and beautiful clothes. And you're going to love me, and there's going to be no one else. You're going to forget all this nonsense abut your father. You're not going to think about it any more. It's going to be just you and me, Jill! Lovely Jill—"

She flung him off so that he went reeling back against the wall and almost fell. Then she jerked from her bag the little automatic she always carried, but he leapt at her like a tiger and tore it out of her hands.

"No, Jill, that's not the way. Not like that. Like this."

His arms went round her. She fought him back desperately, but he was too strong for her. Once she was almost able to tear herself away, but he blundered after her, still clutching her sleeve, and caught her again. His lips were trying to find her mouth.

Suddenly she went limp in his arms. It was the only thing she could do at that moment — to pretend to faint, and thus give herself a chance to catch him off his guard. And for a space Stephen Weald looked down at her stupidly. Then, with a sudden resolution, he swung her off her feet and carried, her through the open cupboard.

Hampered by his burden, he could only feel his way down step by step. The direct light above was soon lost, and the stairs grew darker and darker. He went on. Then another light dawned below, and grew more powerful as he proceeded farther downward; at last the bulb which gave the light was on the level of his eyes. He went down beneath it, and presently found himself on level stone.

A corridor stretched away before him, lighted at long intervals by electric bulbs. He went on down it and felt a faint breath of fresh air on his face. Presently the tunnel forked. Donnell had not told him about that. He hesitated, and then plunged into the right-hand branch. In a few yards it took a turn, and a door faced him. He got it open and went into darkness. Groping round, he found a switch, and when he had clicked it over he discovered that he was in a dead end — the tunnel did not go on, but stopped in the room into which he had opened the door.

There was a tattered carpet on the floor, and a table and a chair on the carpet. In one corner was a couch, in another were a pile of tinned foods and a beaker of water.

He should have turned back and tried the left-hand branch of the tunnel, but he was not an athletic man, and the effort of carrying even such, a light weight as the girl for that distance had taxed his untrained muscles severely. He put her down on the couch and straightened up, mopping his streaming brow and breathing heavily.

His back was towards her when she opened her eyes, but she saw the bulge of the gun in his coat pocket. She raised herself cautiously and put out her hand. Her fingers were actually sliding into his pocket when he turned and saw her.

"Not that either, you little devil!" he snarled.

He caught her wrist and wrenched it away from the gun she had almost succeeded in grasping.

"You'd like to shoot me, wouldn't you?" he said thickly. "But you're not going to have the chance. You're going to love me. You're going to love me in spite of everything— even if I am Waldstein!"

She shrank away from him with wide eyes.

"Yes, even if I am Waldstein," he babbled. "Even if I did help to break your father. He was an officious nuisance. But you're quite different. You're going to settle with me in my way, Jill!"

2

There had been another man on the train to Birmingham, whom Simon Templar had not seen. He did not meet him until he had disembarked and was hailing a taxi; and, seeing him, the Saint was not pleased. But this was the kind of displeasure about which Simon Templar never let on, and it was the assistant commissioner who stared.

"Good Lord, Templar, how did you get here?"

"I came on a tricycle," said the Saint gravely. "Did you use a motor-scooter?"

"I got your message—"

"What message?"

Cullis tugged at his moustache.

"Dyson rang up to say you were caught at Belgrave Street. He said he was to tell me that you wanted to be left there, and I was to come to Birmingham and take Donnell."

The Saint looked at him thoughtfully.

"Is this another of the old Trelawney touches of humour?" he murmured. "I never sent you that message. What's more, I'll swear Dyson never sent it, either. He was never out of my sight from the time I was stuck up in Belgrave Street until a few seconds before I left. Someone's been pulling your leg!"

He bent his eyes on the commissioner's nether limbs as if he really entertained a morbid hope that he would find one of them longer than the other. Cullis pushed his hat back from his forehead.

"Just what's the idea?"

"There's some funny scheme behind it," said the Saint, with the air of a man announcing an epoch-making discovery, "and we've yet to learn what it is. However, since you're here, you can be of some use. Beetle round to the local police and make what arrangements you like. They can surround the block and be ready to take over Donnell when I bring him out. That'll save me some time."

"You're going in alone?"

"I'm afraid I've got to go in alone," said the Saint sadly. "You see, this is my nurse's afternoon off… See you at a dairy later, old pomegranate."

He tapped Cullis encouragingly in the stomach, climbed into the taxi, and closed the door, leaving the commissioner standing there with a blank look on his face.

He did not drive directly up to the mouth of the alleyway which admitted to the front door of Donnell's fortress. That would have been too blatant even for Simon Templar. Besides, reckless as he might be, he did not believe in suicide, and the long, straight alleyway which he would have to traverse if he approached in the ordinary way would leave even the worst of marksmen very little chance of missing him. And the Saint had no interest in any funeral festivities in which he could not occupy a vertical position.

He drove instead to a tobacconist's shop round the corner, and there he discharged the taxi. He went in and bought a packet of cigarettes, and then he showed his police identity card.

"Do you live in the rooms over here, or do they belong to someone else?"

"No, sir. I live there."

"I'll go right up," said the Saint. "Don't bother to show me the way. You stay right here and carry on business as usual. I shan't come back by this route, so don't wait up late for me."

He went through the shop and up the stairs.

From a window on the landing of the first floor he was able to survey the battleground.

It was unpromising. Donnell's house formed, as has been explained, a kind of island site in the centre of the block, separated by a matter of about fourteen feet from the houses that surrounded it. The four pairs of walls which surrounded the square canyon thus formed were bare of any convenience for passing between them except the solid ground at the bottom. And that was certain to be watched and covered from the windows of Donnell's house. From the window where he looked out, Simon Templar might, if he had been that kind of a lunatic, have considered the possibility of running a plank across to the window opposite and entering the house that way. It is interesting to record that he was not that kind of lunatic — he had, amongst other weaknesses, a distinct urge towards being buried in one piece, when his time came.

There was, however, one other solution.

He went on up the stairs. On the third floor the stairs came to an end, but above his head were a trap-door and a swinging ladder. He pulled the ladder down and mounted it.

He found himself in a kind of attic, lumbered with boxes and odds and ends of broken furniture. It had one cobwebbed window, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through; but Simon squeezed through it and emerged on the leads. At that point, from where he stood with his heels in the gutter, leaning back against the tiles of the roof with a sixty-foot drop in front of him, the flat roof of Donnell's house, with a high embrasured wall running round it and a kind of penthouse in the centre, was about six feet below him, and still fourteen feet away. But it was in the convenient position of not being overlooked by any of the windows from which his attack was likely to be watched for.

The Saint bent his knees and braced himself. He tested the strength of the gutter, found it firm, and without further hesitation launched himself into space.

He cleared the wall and landed on the flat concrete of Donnell's roof, stumbling forward and saving himself with his hands. Then he picked himself up and released the safety catch of his automatic.

He circumnavigated the penthouse warily. It was square and solidly built, with narrow barred windows, and had obviously been designed as a point of vantage from which any attempt to reach the house over the roofs could be repelled. On that occasion, however, the possibility seemed to have been overlooked, for no shots came from it to greet him.

He worked his way round it and came to a massive door faced with iron. There was no handle on the outside, and the Saint tried to open it without success.

He gave up the task after a few seconds, and went and looked over the wall down the face of the building.

There was a window directly below him, about six feet down, at the point where he had chanced to look over. He climbed up on the wall and looked down at it, considering the lie of the land.

The wall was about five feet high. Lowering himself over it, he was able to rest his toes on a ledge about three inches wide which ran round the outside. Then he had to stoop quickly and allow himself to fall literally into space, catching at the ledge with his fingers as he did so. For one hair-raising second he, had the awful sensation of hurtling downwards to certain death; but Simon Templar's nerves were like ice, and he knew the strength of his hands. His hooked fingers on the ledge brought him up with a jerk at the full stretch of his arms, and he hung there for a few seconds while he recovered his breath. His feet were then, he judged, at the level of the centre of the window which he had made his objective. And then he had to let go his hold again and drop another couple of feet down the side of the building, landing on his toes on the out-jutting sill and clutching at the window frame to recover his balance. He did so.

Then stooping a little, he was able to pull down the upper sash as quietly as it could be done, and climb down into the room.

There was no one there. He had not seriously expected that there would be, for the attention of the garrison would naturally be concentrated on the ways by which he might more ordinarily have been expected to attempt to enter. Certainly if there had been anyone in the room it would have meant the end of Simon Templar's useful career, for he could hardly have made any active resistance against being pushed off his unstable foothold into space. But there had been no one there to do it.

He crossed the room cautiously in the semidarkness, placing his feet with infinite precautions against making a noise which might be heard by anyone in a room below, and thus gained the door. The door was ajar. He opened it a little farther, slowly and with respect for its creaking hinges, and crept out onto the narrow landing.

The stairs faced him. He went down them like a cat, keeping close to the wall, where he would be least likely to make a loose board creak. In that way he came down to the second floor, and there the choice of four doors was open to him. He selected one at random, turned the knob silently, and entered with a rush that was swift and sudden without being noisy.

There was no one there. He saw that in his first lightning glance round. Then, reassured upon that point, his interest was taken by the sight of the open cupboard that seemed to lead through to a lighted flight of stairs.

This was not quite what he had expected — he had not credited Donnell with the provision of any such melodramatic devices as concealed doors and secret passages. And the look of things seemed to indicate that someone had recently passed that way in a hurry — and in such a hurry that he had forgotten to disguise his retreat by closing the cupboard doors behind him.

The Saint went quickly through to the hidden stairway, his gun in his hand.

He listened there and heard nothing. And then he went down into the darkness, and came at length upon the tunnel which Weald had found.

He could see no one ahead, and his steps quickened. Presently he came to the fork at which Weald had hesitated. As he paused there irresolute, his eye fell on something that sparkled on the stone flags. He bent and picked it up. It was a small drop earring.

And he was putting it in his pocket when he heard a muffled cry come faintly down the branch on his right. The Saint broke into a run.

Stephen Weald, with his back to the door, and so intent upon the object of his madness that he could notice nothing else, did not hear the Saint's entrance; and, indeed, he knew nothing whatever of the Saint's arrival until two steely hands took him by the scruff of the neck and literally bounced him off his feet.

Then he turned and saw the Saint, and his right hand dived for his pocket. But Simon was much too quick. His fist crashed up under Weald's jaw and dropped him in his tracks.

He turned to find the girl beside him. "Did you hear what he said — that he was Waldstein?" The Saint nodded.

"I did," he said, and bent and seized Weald by the collar and jerked him half upright. Then he got his arms under the man's limp body and hoisted him up in a lump, as he might have picked up a child. "Where are you going?"

The girl's voice checked him on his way to the door, and Simon glanced back over his shoulder.

"I'm going to collect Donnell and fill the party," he said. "We policemen have our jobs to hold down. D'you mind?"

Then he went on his way. He seemed totally unconscious of having performed any personal service for the girl, and he utterly ignored the sequel to the situation into which a hackneyed convention might pardonably have lured any other man. That sublimely bland indifference would have been as good as a blow between the eyes to anyone but Jill Trelawney. He went on up the stairs carrying Weald. He heard the girl following behind him; but she did not speak, and Simon appeared to take no notice of her presence.

And thus he stepped through the open cupboard, and found Harry Donnell waiting for him on the other side of a Colt.

Simon stood quite still.

Then—

"It's all right, Donnell," spoke the girl. "I've got him covered."

She was standing behind the Saint, so that Simon and his burden practically hid her. Donnell could not see the gun with which she was supposed to be covering the Saint, for her hand was behind Simon's back, but Donnell believed, and lowered his own gun.

The Saint felt only the gentle and significant pressure of the girl's open hand in the small of his back, and understood.

"Go on," said Jill Trelawny.

Simon advanced obediently.

The movement brought him right up to Harry Donell, who stood with his revolver lowered to the full length of a loose arm. There was only the width of Weald's body between them.

Simon relaxed his hold suddenly and dropped Weald unceremoniously to the floor; and then he hit Donnell accurately on the joint of the jaw.

Donnell went down, and the Saint was on him in a flash, wrenching the revolver out of his hand.

And then, as the Saint rose again, he laughed — a laugh of sheer delight.

"You know, Jill, the only real trouble about this game of ours is that it's too darned easy," he said; and there was a new note in his voice which she had never heard before, that made her look at him in a strange puzzlement and surprise.

3

But still for a moment the Saint seemed egotistically oblivious of every angle on the situation except his own. The gun he had taken covered Harry Donnell, who was crawling dazedly up to his feet; and the Saint had backed away to the table and was propping himself against it. His cigarette case clicked open, and a cigarette flicked into his mouth; his lighter flared, and a cloud of smoke drifted up through the gloom; he had his own private satisfaction. And Jill Trelawney said: "I suppose I ought "to thank you…"

The Saint tilted his head.

"Why?" he inquired blankly.

"You know why."

Simon shrugged — an elaborate shrug.

"I hope it will be a lesson to you," he said solemnly. "You must be more careful about the company you keep. Oh, and thanks for helping me to get Harry," said the Saint incidentally. "What made you do that?"

She looked at him.

"I thought it might go a little way towards settling the debt."

"So that we could start fighting again — all square?.. Yes, I should think we can call it quits."

"I suppose you'd like to take my gun?"

"Please."

She was fumbling in her bag, and the Saint was not watching her. He was smoking his cigarette and beaming with an infuriating smugness at Harry Donnell. About two seconds ago, his own weird intuition had raised an eyelid and wrinkled a thin hairline of clairvoyant light across his brain; and he knew exactly what was going to happen. There was just one little thing left that had to happen before the adventure took the twist that it had always been destined to take. And the Saint was not bothered about it at all, for he had his immoral views on these matters of private business. He had taken no further notice of Weald since he had dropped him to the floor. He had not even troubled to search Weald's pockets. And when he turned his head at the sound of the shot, he saw the automatic half-out of Weald's pocket, and the man lying still, and turned again to smile at another gun.

"Don't move," said Jill Trelawney quietly, and the Saint shook his head.

"Jill, you really mustn't commit murder in the presence of respectable policemen. If it happens again—"

"Never mind that," said the girl curtly.

"Oh, but I do," said the Saint. "May I smoke, or would you prefer to dance?"

The girl leaned against the wall, one hand on her hip, and the shining little nickelled automatic in the other.

"Your nerves are good, Simon Templar," she remarked coolly.

"I can say the same for yours."

She regarded him with a certain grim amusement.

"I suppose," she said, "it wouldn't be any use pleading that I shot Weald to save trouble? You can see that he was drawing when I fired. And saving the life of a valuable detective… Would it be any use?"

"Not much, I'm afraid," answered the Saint, in the same tone. "You see, I've got a gun myself, and there wasn't really any call for you to butt in. You just had to say 'Oi!'—and I would have done the work. Besides, Harry would just love to be a witness for the Crown — wouldn't you, Harry?"

He saw the venomous darkening of Donnell's eyes, and laughed.

"I'm sure you would, Harry — being the four-flushing skunk you are."

He had not moved from the table, and his right hand, holding Donnell's revolver, still rested loosely on his knee.

"You aren't going to be troublesome, Templar?" asked the girl gently, and Simon shrugged.

"You don't get me, Jill. Personally, I'm never troublesome." He held her eyes. "Others may be," he said.

The silence after he spoke was significant; and the girl listened on. And she also heard, outside, the sound of heavy hurrying footsteps on the stairs.

"Excuse me," said the Saint.

He stepped quickly to the door, and turned the key in the lock. Then he picked the table up and jammed it into the defense for ballast, with one edge under the handle of the door and the other slanting into the floor.

"That'll hold Donnell's boys for three or four minutes," he said.

She smiled.

"While I slip out through the tunnel?"

"While we slip out through the tunnel."

He saw the perplexity that narrowed her eyes, the hesitant parting of her lips, but he saw these things only in a sidelong glimpse as he crossed to the side of Harry Donnell. And he saw the vindictive resignation that twisted Donnell's mouth, and laughed.

"Sorry to trouble you again," said the Saint.

His fist shot up like the hoof of a plunging cayuse. But this time the Saint had had one essential fraction of a second more in which to meditate his manoeuvre — and that made all the difference in the world. And this time Donnell went down and stayed down in a peaceful sleep.

"Which is O. K.," drawled the Saint, after one professional glance at the sleeper.

He turned briskly.

"Are you all set for the fade-away, Jill? Want to powder your nose or anything first?"

She was still staring at him. The new atmosphere that had crept into his personality from the moment of his first swipe at Donnell's jaw had grown up like the strengthening light of an incredible dawn, and the intervening interlude had merely provided circumstances to shape its course without altering its temper in the least. And the gun that she had been levelling at him half the time had made no difference at all.

"Aren't you going to try to arrest me?" she asked, with a faint rasp of contempt laid like the thinnest veneer on the bewildering beginnings of preposterous understanding that lay beneath.

And Simon Templar smiled at her.

"Arrest you for ferreting out and bumping off the bloke I've been wanting to get at myself for years? Jill, darling, you have some odd ideas about me!.. But there really is a posse around this time — they're waiting at the other end of that there rat's hole, with the assistant commissioner himself in command, and you wouldn't have a hope in hell of getting through alone. D'you mind if I take over the artillery a moment?"

He detached the automatic from her unresisting hand, dropped it into his pocket, and swept her smoothly through the open door of the dummy cupboard. It was all done so calmly and quietly, with such an effortless ease of mastery, that all the strength seemed to ebb out of her. It was impossible to resist or even question him: she suffered herself to be steered down the stairs without a word.

"On the other hand," said the Saint, as if there had been no interruption between that remark and the conclusion of his last speech, "you'll have to consider yourself temporarily under arrest, otherwise there might be a spot of trouble which we shouldn't be in a position to deal with effectively."

She made no answer. In the same bewildered silence she found herself at the junction of the two forks in the tunnel; they took the left-hand fork this time, and went on for about a hundred yards before the light of the last electric bulb was lost behind them and they found themselves in darkness. She heard the crackle of the Saint's lighter, and saw another flight of steps on the right.

"Up here."

He took her arm and swung her round the turning and up the stairs. At the top, what appeared to be a blank wall faced them; the Saint's lighter went out as they reached it, and she heard him fumbling with something in the dark. Then a crack of light sprang into existence before her, widening rapidly, and she felt fresh air on her face as the Saint's figure silhouetted itself in the gap.

"Easy all," came the Saint's imperturbable accents; and she followed him through the opening to find the assistant commissioner putting away his gun.

They had stepped into a poorly furnished parlour; besides Cullis there were a couple of plain-clothes detectives and four uniformed policemen crowded into it.

"The first capture," said the Saint, taking the girl's arm again. "I laid out Donnell and Weald, but I couldn't bring them along with me. You'll find them in the house, if you get there quick enough — the rest of Donnell's boys were chipping bits out of the door when we left."

Cullis nodded; and the uniformed men filed through the opening in the wall. The plain-clothes men hesitated, but the Saint signalled them on.

"I'll take Trelawney myself — my share of this job is over."

As the detectives disappeared, the Saint opened the door and led Jill Trelawney out into a small bare hall. Cullis followed. Outside, a taxi was waiting and Simon pushed the girl in.

Then he turned back to the commissioner.

"You might find it entertaining to take a toddle up that tunnel yourself," he said. "There's something amusing in the room at the other end which the boys should be discovering about now. Oh, and you might give my love to Claud Eustace next time you see him. Tell him I always was the greatest detective of you all — the joke should make him scream."

Cullis nodded.

"Are you taking her to the station?"

"I am," said the Saint truthfully, and closed the door.

And then the Saint settled back and lighted another cigarette as the taxi drew away from the curb.

"We've just time to catch the next train to town with eighty seconds to spare," he remarked; and the girl turned to him with the nearest thing to a straight-forward smile that he had seen on her lips yet.

"And after that?"'

"I know a place near London where the train slows up to a walking pace. We can step off there, and the synthetic sleuths who will be infesting Paddington by the time the train gets in can wait for us as long as they like."

She met his eyes steadily.

"You mean that?"

"But of course!" said the Saint. "And you can ask me anything else you want to know. This is the end of my career as a policeman. I never thought the hell of a lot of the job, anyhow. I suppose you're wondering why?"

She nodded.

"I suppose I am."

"Well, I butted into this party more or less by way of a joke. A joke and a promise, Jill, which I may tell you about one day. Or maybe I won't. Whether you were right or wrong had nothing to do with it at all; but from what the late lamented Weald was saying when I crashed his sheik stuff it seems you're right, and that really has got something to do with the flowers that bloom in the spring."

There was another silence. She accepted a cigarette from his case, and a light.

Presently she said: "And after we leave the train?"

"Somewhere in this wide world," said the Saint, "there's a bloke by the name of Essenden. He is going to Paris tomorrow, and so are we."

Chapter V

How Lord Essenden was peeved,

and Simon Templar received a visitor

1

NOW, once upon a time Lord Essenden had fired a revolver at Simon Templar with intent to qualify him for a pair of wings and a white nightie. Simon bore Lord Essenden no malice for that, for the Saint was a philosopher, and he was philosophically ready to admit that on that occasion he. had been in the act of forcing open Lord Essenden's desk with a burglarious instrument, to wit, a jemmy; so that Lord Essenden might philosophically be held to have been within his rights. Besides, the bullet had missed him by a yard.

No, Simon Templar's interest in Essenden, and particularly in Essenden's trips to Paris, had always been commonplace and practical. Simon, having once upon a time watched and pried into Lord Essenden's affairs conscientiously and devotedly for some months, knew that Essenden, on his return from every visit he paid to Paris (and these visits were more frequent than the visits of a respectably married peer should rightly have been), was wont to pay large numbers of French francs into his bank in London. And the Saint, who had been younger than he was at this time, knew that Englishmen who are able to pay large numbers of French francs into their London banks when they return from a short visit to Paris are curiosities; and collecting curiosities was the Saint's vocation.

So Simon Templar and Jill Trelawney went to Paris and stayed two days at the Crillon in the Place de la Concorde, which they chose because Lord Essenden chose it. Also, during those two days the Saint held no conversation with Lord Essenden beyond once begging his pardon for treading on his toes in the lift.

It was during the forty-ninth hour of their residence at the Crillon that Simon learnt that Essenden was leaving by the early train next morning.

His room was on the same floor as Essenden's. He retired to it when Essenden retired, bidding the peer an affable good-night in the corridor, for that night the Saint had met Essenden in the bar and relaxed his aloofness. In fact, they had drunk whisky together. This without any reference to their previous encounter. On that occasion the Saint had been masked; and now, meeting Essenden in more propitious circumstances, he had no wish to rake up a stale quarrel.

So they drank whisky together, which was a dangerous thing for anyone to do with Simon Templar; and retired at the same hour. Simon undressed, put on pajamas and a dressing gown, gave Essenden an hour and a half in which to feel the full and final benefit of the whisky. Then he sauntered down the corridor to Essenden's room, knocked, received no answer, sauntered in, and found the peer sleeping peacefully. Essenden had not even troubled to undress. The Saint regarded him sadly, covered him tenderly with the quilt, and went out again some minutes later, closing the door behind him.

And that was really all that happened on that trip to Paris which is of importance for the purposes of this chronicle; for, on the next day Lord Essenden duly went back to London, and he went with a tale of woe that took him straight to an old acquaintance.

Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis, of Scotland Yard, disliked having to interview casual callers. Whenever it was possible he evaded the job. To secure an appointment to see him was, to a private individual, a virtual impossibility. Cullis would decide that the affair in question was either so unimportant that it could be adequately dealt with by a subordinate, or so important that it could only be adequately coped with by the chief commissioner, for he was by nature a retiring man. In this retirement he was helped by his rank; in the days when he had been a more humble superintendent, it had not been so easy to avoid personal contact with the general public.

To this rule, however, there were certain exceptions, of which Lord Essenden was one.

Lord Essenden could obtain audience with Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis at almost any hour; for Essenden was an important man, and had occupied a seat on more than one royal commission. Indeed, it was largely due to Essenden that Mr. Cullis held his present appointment. Essenden could not be denied. And so, when Essenden came to Scotland Yard that evening demanding converse with Mr. Cullis, on a day when Mr. Cullis was feeling more than usually unfriendly towards the whole wide world, he was received at once, when a prime minister might have been turned away unsatisfied.

He came in, a fussy little man with a melancholy moustache, and said, without preface: "Cullis, the Angels of Doom are back."

He had spoken before he saw Teal, who was also present, stolidly macerating chicle beside the commissioner's desk.

"What Angels of Doom?" asked Cullis sourly.

Essenden frowned.

"Who is this gentleman, Cullis?" he inquired. He appeared to hesitate over the word "gentleman."

"Chief Inspector Teal, who has taken charge of the case."

Cullis performed the necessary introduction briefly, and Essenden fidgeted into a chair without offering to shake hands.

"What angels of what doom?" repeated Cullis.

"Don't be difficult," said Essenden pettishly. "You know what I mean. Jill Trelawney's gang—"

"There never has been a gang," said Cullis. "Trelawney and Weald and Pinky Budd were the only Angels of Doom. Three people can't be called a gang."

"There were others—"

"To do the dirty work. But they weren't anything."

Essenden drummed his finger tips on the desk in an irritating tattoo.

"You know what I mean," he repeated. "Jill Trelawney's back, then — if you like that better. And so is the Saint."

"Where?"

"I came back from Paris yesterday—"

"And I went to Brixton last night," said Cullis annoyingly. "We do travel about, don't we? But what's that got to do with it?"

"The Saint was in Paris — and Trelawney was with him."

"That's better. You actually saw them?"

"Not exactly—"

Cullis bit the end off a cigar with appalling restraint.