The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  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 lips 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 hatred 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 idea!”

  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 realised 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 bel
ieved. 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 like to come to 97 Belgrave Street at three o’clock tomorrow 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 suffer 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 cheque 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 CID, 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 on 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 sub-heading which was anything but commonplace. Indeed, that sub-heading 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 to print it neatly on one of his respectable little cards for the files. For that sub-heading was “The Angels of Doom,” which the 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 hell out of it. Teal, wouldn’t you like to call me ‘Sir’?”

  “I should hate it,” said Teal.

  But t
here were others in Scotland Yard who thought differently.

  For it had long since been agreed, among the heads of that gloomy organisation of salaried killjoys which exists for the purposes of causing traffic jams, suppressing riotous living and friendly wassail, and discouraging the noble sport of socking 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?”