The Saint Meets His Match (3 page)

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 them
selves 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 to
gether 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 w
ill
point with equal definiteness to six different persons.
In this case, however, there was a certain amount of una
nimity; 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 get
away 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 commission
er’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 out
side 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 hun
dred
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 responsi
ble
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 Eus
tace, 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 unani
mously agreed on
was what exactly was to be done.

The days had been when, to quote one flippant
com
mentary, 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 photo
graphs 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 im
proved 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 rec
ord. 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 apolo
gize.”

And he contrived to make
a second insult of the apol
ogy.

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 discour
tesy in all its branches
to a fine art, and he ladled out his
masterpieces with no
uncertain enthusiasm.