The Saint Meets His Match (33 page)

The Saint had kindly
warned her about the alarms on
the ground-floor windows.
He had also been good enough
to explain his method of
approach by way of the drain pipe. But she did not feel confident to cope with
drain pipes. Ivy was easier, if more risky and more noisy and
at the back
of the house there was a patch of ivy running
to
a very convenient window on the first floor.

She went up as if she had
been born in a circus.

The ledge of the window
came easily under her feet,
and she found that the latch was not even
fastened. She
slid up the lower sash with
the merest rustle of sound, and
lowered herself warily over the sill.

The darkness inside was
impenetrable, but that meant
nothing to her. She moved
through the room inch by inch,
with her fingers weaving
sensitively in front of her,
and reached the door in
utter silence after several seconds.
Not until she was
out on the landing, with the door
closed again behind
her, did she dare to switch on her
tiny electric
torch.

By its light she found the
stairs and went down them
into the hall. Crossing the hall, she opened a
door on the
far side and cautiously closed
it again behind her. Then
she went
over to a window, located the alarms with her
torch, disconnected them, and opened the window wide,
drawing the
heavy curtains again when she had finished.

The beam of her torch
filtered through the darkness,
flickering over every part
of the room. A massive safe
that stood in one corner
she ignored without a moment’s hesitation—Cullis would never have taken the
risk of
keeping anything incriminating in a place which would
be the obvious objective of any chance intruder. She went
over the bookcase shelf by shelf, shifting the books one by
one and searching expertly for a dummy row or a panel
concealed in the back of the case, but she found nothing
The pictures on the walls detained her for very little
longer: there was nothing concealed behind any of them.
And then she lighted another cigarette and looked
around her with a rather rueful frown.

In any modern house, she
knew, the range of possible secret hiding places was limited. Secret panels and
in
genious flooring arrangements cannot be installed with
out structural alterations that involve too much curiosi
ty to be effective. And yet, somehow, that was the room in which she
had expected to find something—if there was
anything
to find. In Cullis’s own bedroom, on the other hand … possibly. But not
probably. Thus her intuition
answered her, and she
returned to a second search of the study with a little tightening of
determination on her lips. Eventually the search narrowed itself down to an
ornate
Chippendale bureau which stood between the windows.
She went over it patiently. None of the drawers was
locked, and for that very reason she spared herself the
trouble of investigating their contents. But she pulled
each one out and measured it against its fellows and
against the desk itself in the hope of finding some telltale
discrepancy; and she found none. But she did decide that
there was a rather curious thickness of wood in the con
struction of the writing surface. She went over it inquis
itively, tapping it with her fingernails: it seemed to give
back a hollow sound, and her heart beat a little faster.
Then she observed a slight gap between two of the pieces
of wood of which it was composed.

She slid the blade of a
penknife into the gap; but it
must have been one of her
elbows which touched the
necessary control, for
part of the back of the desk seemed
to give way
under.her unconscious pressure, and the two
pieces
of wood between which her knife was moving sud
denly
flew back with a click, and she found herself look
ing down at a thin,
flat, japanned deed box.

And at that moment she
heard the creak of a hinge
behind her, and spun round
with her gun in her hand
as the lights went on.

There was a silence.

Then——

“Good-morning, Mr.
Cullis,” said Jill.

Their guns covered each other steadily—the
deadlock
was complete.

“What do you
want?”

Cullis spoke harshly. His eyes, straining
behind her,
rested on the open top of the
desk, and she saw a slight
quiver of
movement under his moustache.

“It should be
obvious,” said the girl.

His eyes held hers. He
could not have recognized
her, but an intuitive idea
seemed to flash into his brain.
She could almost read its
arrival in his face, and stood without flinching as he took a pace forward and
scanned
her more closely.

“Jill
Trelawney!”

She saw the gleam of
understanding that flashed under
his lowered brows, and
answered with a sudden tense urg
ency in her voice as she
saw the stirring of his index fin
ger behind the
trigger guard of his revolver.

“Quite right. But
don’t you think you’d better hear
one thing before you
shoot?”

In some subtle way, her
tone commanded audience.
Cullis relaxed a fraction.

“Why?”

“Because it might
save you from doing something very
foolish.”

“You’re very
thoughtful.”

“I’m careful,” said the girl quietly.
“Cullis, have you
heard so little about
me that you really believe I’d be
so
easy to catch as this? Did you even think I came here
alone? … Your wisdom teeth are not cut yet.
Perhaps
you’d forgotten—the
Saint!”

He shifted his feet without
answering, and there was
a grim purposefulness in her voice which
dominated him
   
in spite of himself. And she followed up her advantage without an
instant’s pause.

“I didn’t come here
alone. I have some nerve, Cullis,
but burgling an
assistant commissioner’s house single-
handed wants a bit
more nerve even than I’ve got. I took
this room while the
Saint went over the rest of the house—
looking for
you!
 
…
I don’t know how you missed each
other,
but you wouldn’t have heard him, or even seen
him.
He’s like a cat in the dark. He might have found
you
in a passage, or on the stairs—anywhere. But maybe
he
didn’t want to. Maybe he just followed you like a
ghost,
waiting for his best chance. Maybe he’s coming up
behind
you now”—her voice rose a little—“and when he’s
right behind you——
GET HIM, SAINT!”

She spoke with a sudden
fierce sharpness, like the crack
of a gun, and Cullis took
the bait
…
for a sufficient
fraction
 
of a
 
second.

He jerked his head half
round involuntarily, and that
was enough. Enough for Jill Trelawney to shift
her auto
matic unerringly and touch the
trigger… . The roar
of the
explosion battered against the walls, drowning the metallic smack of her bullet
finding its mark. But
she never
missed. Cullis’s right hand went strangely limp;
his revolver flopped
dully into the carpet, and he stood
staring
stupidly at the pulped wreckage of his thumb.

“Don’t move.”
She stepped back towards the curtains, and the weapon in her hand never wavered
from its mark
by one millimetre. Gently she edged
herself between the
hangings, and stopped there a moment to speak her fare
well.

“I might have
finished the job with that shot,” she said,
“but
I still want you alive.
…
I expect you’ll be hear
ing from me again.”

At that very moment she
heard a heavy footfall behind
her, but she could not
wait. Whoever it might be, she
must take her chance—that
single shot she had fired,
ringing through the open window, must have
thundered
over the half of Hampstead, and
her luck could not be ex
pected to
hold out till the end of the world.

Her
deduction was right: she heard a shrill scream
of
a police whistle as she leapt swiftly backwards and
spun
around. Of the man whose footsteps she thought
she
had heard she could see nothing, and she was not
interested
to pursue him. But she could see an unmistaka
ble
shape at the gate by which she had entered, and with
out
hesitation she turned towards the back of the house
and
went racing over the lawn.

Running footsteps sounded
distinctly on the gravel
behind her, and then there
was a shot, and a bullet sang
past her head; but it was
too dark for Cullis to take a
good aim, and with his
right hand incapacitated he
would be lucky to touch
her. And at that moment she felt,
for some reason,
supremely confident in the efficacy of her
own luck against his.

At the end of the lawn her
feet sank into the soft earth
of flower beds; beyond,
she saw a low wall. She tumbled
over it anyhow, picked
herself up, and stumbled over the
deserted ground
ahead.

She could hear voices
behind her, and once when she
glanced back she saw the light of a bull’s-eye
lantern
bobbing about in the dark behind.

The going was treacherous
and uneven, but she hur
ried along as swiftly as
she could. Her luck held. Once
a loose scaffold pole
caught her foot and almost brought
her down, and once
she ran straight into a low pile of
bricks that barked
her shins and grazed her knuckles;
but she made her
way across the rest of the ground with
out further damage, and presently turned
out of a deeply
rutted track into the road
behind.

There she slowed up her
steps, and went on with a
leisurely slouching
stride. At any moment someone might
come running past to investigate the
uproar, and she had
no desire to attract
attention. But the road was appar
ently
deserted, except for a small two-seater drawn up by
the curb a little way ahead.

At least, she thought, the
road was deserted, but as
she drew nearly level with
the two-seater she heard a quick
step behind her. A hand
gripped her arm.

She whirled round, her
hand reaching again for the
butt of her automatic, and
looked into the smiling face
of the Saint.

“It’s a cop,” he
said. “And now, will you walk home,
or
shall we ride?”

And he was calmly climbing
into the car and feeling
around for the starter
while she still stared at him.

Chapter XII

HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT HOME,

AND
CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL
DID NOT

T
HERE
was silence for some distance before Simon
Templar
condescended to make a remark or Jill Trelawney
could think of one. Then—

“Lucky I rolled
up,” said the Saint calmly. “Saved you
a
taxi fare home.”

She did not venture to
inquire what he had been doing
there himself, but a few
minutes later he volunteered
an explanation.

“But you oughtn’t to
be poaching on my preserves,”
he said
aggrievedly. “I told you I was watching this place.
After I’d left you, I went right back home and changed
into more ordinary clothes and came along here in my
own time. I just arrived in time to hear your bit of fancy
shooting. Did you kill him?”

He put the question with
such a cheerful carelessness
that she had to laugh.