The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

by Leslie Charteris

  "But he's known to be an associate of Trelawney's."

  "And what then?"

  "He was Trelawney's accomplice at Essenden's."

  "Accomplice?" queried Teal patiently.

  "He was with her. He must know where she's hiding now."

  "Of course he must. But who's going to prove that in a court of law? We shouldn't do anything by pulling him in, even if we could. No, our best hope is to go on watching him and hoping that sooner or later he'll lead us to Jill Trelawney. And I can't help thinking that that's not much of a hope—with a man like Simon Templar."

  Cullis's eyes returned to the ransacked dossier.

  "The chief will have to be told about this," he said.

  "I've already told him," said Teal. "He was all set to turn Scotland Yard inside out, only I was able to per­suade him not to. I'd like a chance to do something on my own before the whole world hears what fools we are."

  He stood up. He had been seated in the assistant com­missioner's chair throughout the interview, leaning back and chewing gum as if the office belonged to him; for Mr. Teal was a very privileged person. His extraordinarily apathetic acceptance of that morning's startling discovery puzzled his chief. It is not every day that important papers are abstracted without trace from the Records Office, yet Teal seemed as wearily resigned to the fact as if he had only had to inform the commissioner that a plumber had been arrested the previous night for being drunk and disorderly in the Old Kent Road. Cullis was puzzled, for he seemed to detect a thread of melancholy fatalism behind the few remarks that Teal had made on the subject.

  "I'll be getting along," Teal said glumly.

  Cullis stood by the window with three deep furrows of thought in his forehead. As Teal reached the door he roused out of his abstracted concentration.

  "That man Gugliemi?" he said.

  "He's being shipped off to-morrow. The deportation order came through this morning. What about him?"

  "Where is he now?"

  Teal raised his mournful eyebrows.

  "Brixton, I think. I'll find out for you. Why?"

  "I've got an idea."

  "I had one of those myself, once," said Teal reminis­cently. "What is this idea?"

  "I'm thinking of taking a leaf out of the Saint's book. Dyson was useful to him, if you remember, and I have an idea that Gugliemi may be useful to me. Every one of the men we've got on to watch Trelawney and Weald has been worse than useless. Gugliemi might get by where an ordinary plain-clothes man would be spotted a mile off. Also——"

  He paused abruptly.

  "Also?" prompted Teal.

  Cullis closed his mouth.

  "That will keep," he said.

  And he kept his idea to himself, and Teal had to go out with his curiosity unsatisfied.

  Gugliemi was duly located in Brixton Prison half an hour later, and Cullis, receiving the information, spoke personally to the governor of the prison over the tele­phone.

  Within the hour Gugliemi arrived at Scotland Yard in a taxicab between two warders, and was taken straight to the assistant commissioner's room. And a little while later the two warders returned alone.

  Teal, an inquisitive man, returned to the assistant com­missioner's room later in the afternoon, and found that Gugliemi had mysteriously disappeared, although no escort had been detailed to conduct him back to the prison.

  "The deportation order will be stayed for seven days," said Cullis in answer to Teal's inquiry.

  "What's the big idea?" asked Teal.

  "Gugliemi," said Cullis heavily, "is an enthusiastic collector of butterflies. I've told him that a very rare specimen of butterfly, called Trelawney, has been seen in England, and I have agreed to let him go out with his butterfly net and try to find it before he's sent back to Italy."

  Mr. Teal was not amused.

  Chapter X

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SPOKE OF BIRDS-

  NESTING, AND DUODECIMO GUGLIEMI

  ALSO BECAME AMOROUS

  IT MUST be admitted at once that Duodecimo Gugliemi had never been cited as an advertisement for his native land. A sublime disregard for the laws of property would alone have been enough to disqualify him in that respect; as it was, he was affected also with an amorous tempera­ment which, combined with a sudden and jealous temper, had not taken long to make Italy too hot to hold him. Leaving Italy for the sake of his health, he had crossed the Alps into Austria; but the Austrian prisons did not agree with him, and, again for the sake of his health, he had taken another northward move into German territory. He had seen the insides of jails in Munich and Bonn, and had narrowly escaped even more unpleasant retribution in Leipzig. In Berlin he had led an unimpeachably re­spectable life for six weeks, during which time he was in hospital with double pneumonia. Recovering, he left Berlin with an unspotted escutcheon, and migrated into France; and from France, after some ups and downs, he came to England, from which country, but for the inter­vention of Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis, he would speedily have departed back to the land of his birth. Actually the thirteenth child of a family that had been christened in numerical order, he had been permitted to slip into the appellation of a brother who had died of a surfeit of pickled onions at the tender age of two; but that, according to his own story, was the only good for­tune that had come to him in a world that had mercilessly persecuted his most innocent enterprises.

  He was a small and dapper little man, very amusing company in his perky way, with a fascination for barmaids and an innate skill with the stiletto; and certainly he looked less like an English plain-clothes man than any thing in trousers. Which may account for the fact that Simon Templar, sallying forth one morning from Upper Berkeley Mews, and alert for waiting sleuths, observed two large men in very plain clothes on the other side of the road, and entirely overlooked Duodecimo Gugliemi.

  These large men in very plain clothes were among the trials of his life which Simon Templar endured with the exemplary patience with which he faced all his tribula­tions. Ever since his first brush with the law, on and off, he had been favoured with these attentions; and the en­tertainment which he had at first derived from this silent persecution was beginning to lose its zest. It was not that the continual watching annoyed him, or even cramped his style to any noticeable extent; but he was starting to find it somewhat tiresome to have to shake off a couple of inquisitive shadowers every time he wanted to go about any really private business. If he made a private appoint­ment for midday, for instance, at a point ten minutes away from home, he had to set out to keep it half an hour earlier than he need have done, simply to give himself time to ditch a couple of doggedly unsuccessful blood­hounds; and this waste of time pained his efficient soul. More than once he had contemplated addressing a com­plaint to the Chief Commissioner of Police for the Me­tropolis on the subject.

  That day, he had a private appointment at noon; and, as has been explained, he allowed himself half an hour to dispose of the watchers. He disposed of them as a matter of fact, in twenty minutes, which was good going. He did not dispose of Duodecimo Gugliemi—partly because Gug­liemi was rather more supple of intuition than the two detectives, and partly because he was unaware of Gug­liemi's existence. So soon as he found that the two large men had fallen out of the procession, he went on to his appointment by a direct and normal route, in ignorance of the fact that Duodecimo was still on his heels.

  The return from Reading had presented no serious difficulty to a man of the Saint's ingenuity and brass neck, although he had known quite well that by the following morning there would be patrols of hawk-eyed men watch ing for him at every entrance to London. In a suit which had not been improved by the previous night's soaking, and which he had deliberately made no effort to smarten up, he had interviewed the proprietor of a garage and spun his yarn. He was an ex-serviceman down on his luck; he had been a haulage contractor, and a run of unsuccess­ful speculations had forced him to sell up his business; now a windfall had come his way in the shape of a trans­port job t
hat was worth twenty-five pounds to him if he could only find the means to carry it out. And he secured the truck that he wanted, and the loan of a suit of overalls as well, and so drove boldly into London under the very noses of the men who were waiting for him at the Chis­wick end of the Great West Road, with Jill Trelawney under a tarpaulin in the back. And after that, it had been a childishly simple matter to smuggle her stealthily into the studio at dead of night; where he had indicated a cupboard plentifully stocked with unperishable foods, and marooned her. There he visited her frequently, to report news and replenish the larder—that morning, as a matter of fact, he carried a dozen kippers, a loaf of bread, half a pound of butter, and two dozen eggs with him in an attache case.

  She met him at the door.

  "Bless you," she said. "If you hadn't come to-day, I think I should have blown up in hysterics. You've no idea what it is to be stuck indoors with nothing to do but read and eat for twenty-four hours a day."

  Simon set up the attache case on an easel which had never carried a canvas.

  "And I've only been away since the night before last," he said. "The girl's starting to love me, that's what it is."

  She offered him a cigarette, and took one herself.

  "What's been happening?"

  "Nothing much. Teal's been in again. Started by threat­ening, got the bird, tried to be cunning, got the bird, tried to be friendly, got the bird, tried to bribe me, got the bird, and went home. Now he's going to retire and start a poultry farm on that capital. Policemen disguised as gentlemen still follow me everywhere——"

  "How can you be certain you've shaken them off?"

  "When I can't hear their boots squeaking. I know I'm at least three blocks in the lead. Oh, and Records Office has been burgled."

  She looked down at him in his chair.

  "What's that?"

  "Burgled. Feloniously entered, and important secret papers unlawfully abstracted from. Jill Trelawney, dossier of, subsection M 3879 xxi (b).... Incidentally, that's an exaggeration. Give the police some credit. The bur­glary theory was discarded after the first five minutes, as a matter of fact, and the crime is now held to have been an inside job, carried out by some corrupt official in the pay of the Saint."

  "When was this?"

  "Night before last."

  "When you were here?"

  "Exactly. My alibi is perfect."

  "You left at midnight?"

  "Not of my own free will."

  She smiled.

  "But you said you had an appointment?"

  "I did."

  "Did you have an appointment?"

  "Did I say I had? Jill, I won't be cross-examined. You must keep that for your American boy friend, when you've hooked him. I had to see a man in Camden Town about a second-hand Pomeranian, and he sold me a pup. How's that?"

  Jill smiled again. Then she pointed to a litter of news­papers on a side table.

  "This is the first I've heard about that Records Office affair," she said, "and I'll swear the rest of the world is as much in the dark as I am."

  "It is—mostly."

  "Then how do you know anything about it?"

  "I have secret sources of information," said the Saint.

  He yawned monstrously. His head settled lazily back against a cushion, and his eyes closed.

  Jill looked at him for a few seconds. Then—

  "Simon!"

  "Hullo," sighed the Saint, starting up.

  "What's the matter with you?" she demanded.

  "Sorry," said the Saint. "I've had hardly any sleep for the last couple of nights, and I'm dead tired."

  "What have you been doing?"

  Simon stretched himself.

  "Jill," he said, "you ought to have more faith in me. I haven't been on the tiles. I've been darn near them, though—there was a nasty bit of drain-pipe work on the way, and one hideous moment when I thought the gutter was going to come to pieces in me 'and. But it turned out all right, though I did some damage to the ivy—"

  "You didn't break into Scotland Yard?"

  "Who said I did?" asked the Saint, opening wide, child­like eyes of innocent astonishment.

  The girl came over and sat on the arm of his chair. In her plain blue frock, with her lovely face innocent of the make-up which it never needed, she might have posed for a picture that would have made that studio famous, if Simon Templar had been an artist; and the Saint admired her frankly.

  "That American boy is going to have a busy life bump­ing off aspiring co-respondents some day," he murmured idly.

  "What were you doing—on drain pipes?"

  "Birds-nestin'."

  "Simon!"

  "All right, teacher. If you want to know, I'm going into the plumbing trade, and I wanted to do my studies on the cheap."

  She stood up impatiently; and Simon laughed, and pulled her down again by a hand which he had not released.

  Absent-mindedly, he kissed the hand.

  "Thank you."

  "Not at all," said the Saint politely. "Look here, will you believe me if I swear that Scotland Yard was robbed the night before last, and I didn't do my drain-piping till last night—or rather the small hours of this morning?"

  She looked him puzzledly in the eyes.

  "Yes," she said, "I will. But what are you getting at?"

  The Saint grinned.

  "Then hold on," he said, "because your faith in my word is going to get a shock."

  He slipped a hand into his breast pocket and brought it out with a heavy envelope.

  "Take a look. No charge for inspection."

  She turned the envelope over. It was not sealed. Turn­ing back the flap, she drew out a thick bundle of papers and unfolded them.

  At the sight of the first one, her face changed. Then she glanced rapidly through the rest. She turned to the Saint with a frown on her eyebrows and a half-smile on her lips.

  "You—blighter!"

  "I told you your faith would take a toss."

  "But why not tell me right away?"

  "Tell you what?"

  The innocence of the Saint's wide blue eyes was blind­ing.

  "Why not tell me at once that you'd bust the Records Office?" she said.

  "Because," said the Saint blandly, "it wouldn't have been precisely true. I'm always very particular about telling the precise truth," he said virtuously.

  "It's either true, or it isn't——"

  "Talking of macaroons," said the Saint hurriedly, "have you noticed the last sheet?"

  She looked.

  "It's blank."

  "A valuable curiosity. Once upon a time some person or persons whom we will call unknown unlawfully obtained private papers from the files of Scotland Yard. In place of said papers, the said person or persons left an equivalent number of blank sheets. The blank sheet you hold in your hand is a specimen of the same. Very interesting."

  She stared.

  "One of the sheets that were left in the file?"

  "No. An identical sheet, out of the block from which the sheets left at the Yard were taken. Now here"—the Saint dived into another pocket—"is one of the sheets that were left at the Yard. If you compare the two—"

  Jill Trelawney took the second sheet in her hand.

  She said breathlessly: "But how the——"

  Simon Templar smiled seraphically.

  "My spies are everywhere," he said. "I have resources at which you cannot even guess. Excuse me."

  He took all the papers out of her hand, restored them to the envelope, and replaced the envelope in his pocket.

  The girl put a hand on his shoulder.

  "You're playing some clever game," she said. "I want to know what it is."

  The Saint tapped his pocket.

  "There are papers here," he said, "which cannot be duplicated. They are the only genuine dromedary's drawers. There is, for instance, the original letter giving warning of an impending raid, written on Scotland Yard notepaper on the typewriter which was in your father's office, whic
h went part of the way towards substantiating the charges against your father. There is evidence which cannot be taken again. And there are details of the case which, without these papers, nobody might remember, after all this time. Small details, but important to some people. If, for instance, the chief commissioner should for any reason decide to set up a fresh inquiry into the circumstances of your father's dismissal ——"

  "Why should he do that?"

  "Isn't that what you want?"

  She did not answer.

  "Isn't that what the Angels of Doom were for?"

  "Yes," said Jill, almost in a whisper, "that's what they were for—originally."

  "To wipe the noses of the guys who framed Papa be­cause they couldn't buy him. Exactly."

  "And that's all," said Jill huskily. "That's all they ever did. There was Waldstein and Essenden. Essenden made some sort of confession—but Essenden's dead, and no one would credit my evidence and yours. And it was the same with Waldstein. I'm beginning to think that there's no chance of doing anything but take revenge."

  "Waldstein and Essenden," said the Saint—''Numbers One and Two. There's still Number Three; it's always third time lucky, lass."

  "Are we going to do any better there?"

  "We ought to, after all the practice we've had. If you keep your heart up, old girl——"

  She raised her head.

  "I still don't know," she said, "why you should be in this with me."