And thus, after one searching glance round, she went out in quest of her share of the adventure.
The only thrill she felt was not due to anything like nerves. It was only a vast relief to be clear of the studio, in which she had been practically a prisoner for the last ten days, and to be out again on an active enterprise instead of merely sitting at home and having enigmatic information, which was really worse than no information at all, brought to her by the Saint.
The Saint, at any rate, had told her enough about Mr Assistant Commissioner Cullis to decide her that Simon Templar’s simple plan, whatever it was, could not be good enough.
It wasn’t for Jill Trelawney to sit tight and wait for Cullis to come out of his hole and fight. Far from that—she was going out to meet Mr Cullis.
A faint tingle of unleashed delight vibrated through her as she walked. She hummed a little tune, and the melancholy droop of the unlighted cigarette attached to the corner of her mouth had no counterpart in her spirits. The cool freshness of the night air went to her head; after the wearisome atmosphere of the studio, it came like a draught of wine to a parched man. Respectable restraint and Jill Trelawney definitely failed to blend. For days past she had been feeling that the enforced idleness had been crushing her into an intolerable groove, even sapping from her the very personality without which she would become nothing but an ordinary unadventurous woman—a ridiculous idea to anyone who had ever known her, and most intolerable of all to herself.
In her elation she hardly noticed the passage of time or distance, and picked her route almost by instinct. Almost before she realised how far she had travelled, she had passed Belsize Park Underground Station; she paused there a moment to pick up her bearings, and then, a hundred yards farther on, she struck away down a dark side street within measurable distance of her goal.
She rounded first one corner and then another, and paused under a lamp-post to light her cigarette. The action was more instinctive than necessary: in the whole of her body there was not a nerve quivering for need of the sedative, but the draught of velvety smoke helped to collect her thoughts and lent balance to her impetuosity, and she felt, in a moment’s touch of self-mockery, that it was a debonair thing to do. It was the sort of thing the Saint would have done…
From where she stood she surveyed the lie of the land.
It was simple enough. The house stood away from the road, exactly as the Saint had described it, in its own rather spacious grounds, and there was not a light showing anywhere. To find it almost without hesitation had been easy enough. The studio in Chelsea had been amply equipped for the simple preparation of any such excursion. There had been a telephone directory from which to discover Cullis’s address, a street directory in which to find the exact location of his house, and a large-scale map from which to read the most straightforward approach. These three references alone would have been material enough even for anyone less accustomed to rapid and concise thinking than Jill Trelawney, and the investigation had not taken her more than three minutes. After which she had a faultlessly photographic memory in which to hold the results of that investigation in their place. She remembered that at the back of the house there was a bit of land on which no buildings were marked on the map, but under the faint light of a half-fledged moon she could see the dark masses of scaffolding and unfinished walls in the background, and marked down that terrain as a convenient avenue of escape in case of need.
In her own way, she had had her fair share of luck. The last patrolling policeman she had seen had been near Baker Street, and the road on which she now stood was deserted. Knowing the habits of policemen on night patrol, her keen eyes probed deep into every patch of shadow around her, but there was no one there.
She turned off the road and slipped noiselessly over the low gate into the front garden.
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 book-case 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 ingenious flooring arrangements cannot be installed without structural alterations that involve too much curiosity 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 tell-tale discrepancy, and she found none. But she did decide that there was a rather curious thickness of wood in the construction of the writing surface. She went over it inquisitively, tapping it with her finger-nails: 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 pen-knife 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 suddenly flew back with a click, and she found herself looking 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 recognised her, but an intuitive idea seemed to flash into his brain. She could almost read its arrival in h
is 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 urgency in her voice as she saw the stirring of his index finger 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 automatic unerringly and touch the trigger…The roar of the explosion battered against the walls, drowning the metallic smack of her bullet finding its mark. But she never missed. Cullis’s right hand went strangely limp; his revolver flopped dully into the carpet, and he stood staring stupidly at the pulped wreckage of his thumb.
“Don’t move.” She stepped back towards the curtains, and the weapon in her hand never wavered from its mark by one millimetre. Gently she edged herself between the hangings, and stopped there a moment to speak her farewell.
“I might have finished the job with that shot,” she said, “but I still want you alive…I expect you’ll be hearing from me again.”
At that very moment she heard a heavy footfall behind her, but she could not wait. Whoever it might be, she must take her chance—that single shot she had fired, ringing through the open window, must have thundered over the half of Hampstead, and her luck could not be expected to hold out till the end of the world.
Her deduction was right: she heard a shrill scream of a police whistle as she leapt swiftly backwards and spun round. 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 unmistakeable shape at the gate by which she had entered, and without hesitation she turned towards the back of the house and went racing over the lawn.
Running footsteps sounded distinctly on the gravel behind her, and then there was a shot, and a bullet sang past her head, but it was too dark for Cullis to take a good aim, and with his right hand incapacitated he would be lucky to touch her. And at that moment she felt, for some reason, supremely confident in the efficacy of her own luck against his.
At the end of the lawn her feet sank into the soft earth of flower-beds; beyond, she saw a low wall. She tumbled over it anyhow, picked herself up, and stumbled over the deserted ground ahead.
She could hear voices behind her, and once when she glanced back she saw the light of a bull’s-eye lantern bobbing about in the dark behind.
The going was treacherous and uneven, but she hurried along as swiftly as she could. Her luck held. Once a loose scaffold pole caught her feet 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 without 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 apparently deserted, except for a small two-seater drawn up by the kerb 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 TWELVE:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT HOME AND CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL DID
1
There 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.
“I wasn’t even trying to,” she said mildly. “I probably shall one day, but that’ll keep. Did you see much?”
“Only the exteriors.”
“Then you must have seen the police,” she said. “But you didn’t offer to lend a hand.”
He smiled.
“I was minding my own business,” he said. “Your way out was easy enough, and I’d never heard you wanted chaperoning on these parties. If I’d thought you were likely to get in a jam, I’d have horned in, but since I saw a policeman waddling along a hundred yards astern with his suspenders bursting under the strain, and you skipping away like a young gazelle, I didn’t see anything to get excited about. I’ve run too many races against the police myself, in my younger days, to get seriously worried about any policeman who’s less than three miles in the lead when he starts chasing me. But it does them good to run, Jill—it shakes up their livers and stops their kidneys congealing.”
“Did you mean to do the same thing as I did?”
“Something like. I’ve been over that room with a small-toothed comb myself more than once, and plenty more of the house likewise, but it was only tonight I got your inspiration about the desk, and I was meaning to try your very own experiment on it.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t see anything inside the room?”
“Did I really?”
She looked at him with something like a grimace.
“Are you still being difficult?”
“Oh, no…But let’s revert for a moment to the absorbing subject of supralapsarianists. Do you really believe they wear barbed-wire underwear and take off their socks when they pass an infralapsarianist in the street?”
She pouted.
“If you don’t mean to talk turkey,” she said, “you don’t have to give me apple-sauce. I’m not a fish.”
“O.K., baby. But how much of that cache did you get through before Cullis butted in?”
She was lighting a cigarette from the case he handed her, and she shook her
head ruefully over the match.
“I didn’t get through any of it,” she said. “It was just a waste of time finding it. The door behind me and the false top in the desk must have opened just about simultaneously. There was a despatch box, and I think there were one or two odd papers underneath; that’s all I saw before the fun started. It was hearing you outside that beat me. If that hadn’t made me decide that the tall timber was the best next stop for Little Girl, I’d probably have lifted anything I could see and hoped I’d get something good.”
“It wouldn’t have helped you much,” said the Saint, “There can’t be many documents in existence that would incriminate Cullis, and it would have been a thousand to one against your collecting the right ones in your handful.”
“And now,” said the girl bitterly, “if there ever were any incriminating papers in that cache, he’ll have them out and burn them before he goes to bed tonight. He won’t take a second chance with me.”
Simon shrugged.
“Why should he ever have taken a chance at all?”
“It’s the way of a man like that,” said Jill. “He may have wanted to gloat over them in private. Or he may have just kept them for curiosities.”
Simon was steering the two-seater round the big one-way triangle at Hyde Park Corner, and he did not answer at once.
Then he said, “I wonder what incriminating papers there might have been.”
“So do I…But tonight’s work may put the wind up him a bit more, which is something.”
The Saint drove on in silence for a while, and his next remark came as a bolt from the blue.
“Would you object to being arrested?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“I think I should be inclined to object,” she said. “Why?”
“Just part of that idea I mentioned recently,” said the Saint. “I’ll think it out more elaborately overnight, and tell you the whole scheme tomorrow if I think there’s anything in it.”
The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series) Page 20
