How Simon Templar met Jill Trelawney,
and there were skylarking and
song in Belgrave street
1
THE big car had been sliding through the night like a great black slug with wide, flaming eyes that seared the road and carved a blazing tunnel of light through the darkness under the over-arching trees; and then the eyes were suddenly blinded, and the smooth pace of the slug grew slower and slower until it groped itself to a shadowy standstill under the hedge.
The man who had watched its approach, sitting under a tree, with the glowing end of his cigarette carefully shielded in his cupped hands, stretched silently to his feet. The car had stopped only a few yards from him, as he had expected. He stooped and trod his cigarette into the grass and came down to the road without a sound. There was no sound at all except the murmur of leaves in the night air, for the subdued hiss of the car's eight cylinders had ceased.
Momentarily, inside the car, a match flared up, revealing everything there with a startling clearness.
The rich crimson upholstery, the handful of perfect roses in the crystal bracket, the gleaming silver fittings — those might have been imagined from the exterior. So also, perhaps, might have been imagined the man with the battered face who wore a chauffeur's livery; or the rather vacantly good-looking man who sat alone in the back, with his light overcoat swept back from his spotless white shirt front, and his silk hat on the seat beside him. Or, perhaps, the girl…
Or perhaps not the girl.
The light of the match focussed the attention upon her particularly, for she was using it to light a cigarette. On the face of it, of course, she was exactly what one would have looked for. On the face of it, she was the kind of girl who goes very well with an expensive car, and there was really no reason why she should not be sitting at the wheel. On the face of it…
But there was something about her that put superficial judgments uneasily in the wrong. Tall she must have been, guessed the man who watched her from the shadows, and of a willowy slenderness that still left her a woman. And beautiful she was beyond dispute, with a perfectly natural beauty which yet had in it nothing of the commonplace. Her face was all her own, as was the cornfield gold of her hair. And no artifice known to the deceptions of women could have given her those tawny golden eyes…
"So you're Jill Trelawney!" thought the man in the shadows.
The light was extinguished as he thought it; but he carried every detail of the picture it had shown indelibly photographed on his brain. This was a living photograph. He had been given mere camera portraits of her before-some of them were in his pocket at that moment — but they were pale and insignificant things beside the memory of the reality, and he wondered dimly at the impertinence which presumed to try to capture such a face in dispassionate halftone.
"On the face of it — hell!" thought the man in the shadows.
But in the car, the man in evening dress said, more elegantly: "You're an extraordinary woman, Jill. Every time I see you—"
"You get more maudlin," the girl took him up calmly. "This is work — not a mothers' meeting."
The man in evening dress grunted querulously.
"I don't see why you have to be so snappy, Jill. We're all in the same boat—"
"I've yet to sail in a sauceboat, Weald."
The end of her cigarette glowed more brightly as she inhaled, and darkened again in an uncontested silence. Then the man with the battered face said, diffidently: "As long as Templar isn't around—"
"Templar!" The girl's voice cut in on the name like the crack of a whip. "Templar!" she said scathingly. "What are you trying to do, Pinky? Scare me? That man's a bee in your bonnet—"
"The Saint," said the man with the battered face diffidently, "would be a bee in anybody's bonnet what was up against him. See?"
If there had been a light, he would have been seen to be blushing. Mr. Budd always blushed when anyone spoke to him sharply. It was this weakness that had given him the nickname of "Pinky."
"There's a story—" ventured the man in evening dress; but he got no further.
"Isn't there always a story about any fancy dick?" demanded the girl scornfully. "I suppose you've never heard a story about Henderson — or Peters — or Teal — or Bill Kennedy? Who is this man Templar, anyway?"
"Ever seen a man pick up another man fifty pounds above his weight 'n' heave him over a six-foot wall like he was a sack of feathers?" asked Mr. Budd, in his diffident way. "Templar does that as a kind of warming-up exercise for a real fight. Ever seen a man stick a visiting card up edgeways 'n' cut it in half with a knife at fifteen paces? Templar does that standing on his head with his eyes shut. Ever seen a man take all the punishment six hoodlums can hand out to him 'n' come back smiling to qualify the whole half-dozen for an ambulance ride? Templar—"
"Frightened of him, Pinky?" inquired the girl quietly.
Mr. Budd sniffed.
"I been sparring partner — which is the same as saying human punchbag — to some of the best heavyweights what ever stepped into a ring," he answered, "but I always been paid handsome for the hidings I've took. I don't expect the Saint 'ud be ready to pay so much for the pleasure of beating me up. See?"
Mr. Budd did not add that since his sparring-partner days he had seen service in Chicago with "Blinder" Kellory and other gang leaders almost as notorious — men who shot on sight and asked questions at the inquest. He had acquitted himself with distinction in Kellory's "war" with "Scarface" Al Capone — and he said nothing about that, either. There was a peculiarly impressive quality about his reticence.
"Nobody's gonna say I'm frightened to fight anybody," said Mr. Budd pinkly, "but that don't stop me knowing when I'm gonna be licked. See?"
"If you take my advice, Jill," yapped the man in evening dress, "you'll settle with Templar before he gets the chance to do any mischief. It ought to be easy—"
The man in the shadows shook with a chuckle of pure amusement. It was a warm evening, and all the windows of the car were open. He could hear every word that was said. He was standing so near the car that he could have taken a pace forward, reached out a hand, and touched it. But he took two paces forward.
The girl said, with cool contempt, as though she were dealing with a sulky child: "If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed—"
"It would," said Stephen Weald shamelessly. "I know there are always stories, but the stories I've heard about the Saint don't make me happy. He's uncanny. They say—"
The words were strangled in his throat in a kind of sob, so that the other two looked at him quickly, though they could not have made out his face in the gloom. But the girl saw, in an instant, what Weald had seen — the deeper shadow that had blacked out the grey square of one window.
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 lip 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 hatreds 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 ideal"
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 realized 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 believed. 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'd like to come to 97, Belgrave Street, at three o'clock to-morrow 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 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 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 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 getaway 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 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 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 responsible 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 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 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 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?"
"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 improved 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 record. 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 apologize."
And he contrived to make a second insult of the apology.
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 discourtesy in all its branches to a fine art, and he ladled out his masterpieces with no uncertain enthusiasm.
"How are the Angels this afternoon?" he inquired.
"They are" — she waved a vague hand—"here and there."
"Nice for them. May I sit down?"
"I think—"
"Thanks." He sat down. "But don't let me stop you thinking."
She took a cigarette from the box beside her and fitted it into a long amber holder. Weald applied a match.
"You forgot to ask me if I minded," said the Saint reproachfully. "Where are your manners, Jill?"
She turned in her chair — a movement far more abrupt than she meant it to be.
"If the police have to pester me," she said, "I should have appreciated their consideration if they'd sent a gentleman to do it."
"Sorry," said Simon. "Our gentlemen are all out pestering ladies. The chief thought I'd be good enough for you. Backchat. However, I'll pass on your complaint when I get back."
"If you get back."
"This afternoon," said the Saint. "And I shan't worry if he takes me off the job. Man-size criminals are my mark, and footling around with silly little girls like you is just squandering my unique qualities as a detective. More backchat."
Weald butted in, from the other side of the room:
"Jill, why do you waste time—"
"It amuses her," said the Saint. "When she's finished amusing herself, she'll tell us why my time's being wasted here at all. I didn't fall through a trapdoor in the hall, I wasn't electrocuted when I touched the banister rail, no mechanical gadget shot out of the wall and hit me over the head when I trod on the thirteenth stair. I wasn't shot by a spring gun on the way up. Where's your ingenuity?"
"Saint—"
"Of course, your father was English. Did you get your accent from him or from the talkies?"
He was enjoying himself. She was forced to the exasperating realization that he was playing with her, as if he were making a game of the encounter for his own secret satisfaction. At the least sign of resentment she gave, he registered the scoring of a point to himself as unmistakably as if he had chalked it up on a board.
"By the way," Simon said, "you really must stop annoying Essenden. He came in to see us the other day, and he was most upset. Remember that his nerves aren't as strong as mine. If you murdered him, for instance, I couldn't promise you that he wouldn't be really seriously annoyed."
"Whether I'm responsible for any shocks that Essenden's had, or not," said the girl calmly, "is still waiting to be proved."
"I don't expect it will wait very long," said the Saint comfortably. "You amateur crooks are never very clever."
Jill Trelawney took from her bag a tiny mirror and a gold-cased lipstick. She attended to the shaping of her mouth unconcernedly.
"Templar, you gave me your word of honour you would come alone today."
"Fancy that! And did you believe it?"
"I was prepared to."
"Child," said the Saint, "you amaze me."
He stood up and walked to the window in long jerky strides.
From there he beckoned her, looking down to the street from behind the curtains.
"Come here."
She came, after a pause, with a bored languidness; but it was impossible to make him show the least impatience.
"See there!"
He pointed down with a challenging forefinger.
"See and hear that man singing 'Rose in the Bud' at the harmonium? He's just waiting for me to come out and tell him he can go home. And you see the man farther up with the ice-cream cart? He's standing by. And the man selling newspapers on this side? More of the posse. You credited me with the darn thing, so I thought I'd live up to it. There's ten of 'em spread around this block now!"
"I'm sorry. I thought even your word of honour might be worth something. But now—"
"You'll know better next time, won't you?" Little flinty jags of amusement twinkled in his eyes. "What was the joke I was supposed to buy? Pinky Budd waiting downstairs in the hall with a handful of Angels? Or just a button you press up here that starts off the trapdoor and the electric banister rail and the mechanical gadget in the thirteenth stair?"
She faced him, flaming now without the slightest attempt at concealment, suddenly transformed into a beautiful tigress.
"You think you're clever — Saint!"
"I'm darn sure of it," murmured the Saint, modestly.
"You think—"
"Often and brilliantly. I kicked up the rug before I stepped on it, and saw the edge of the trap. I'm always suspicious of iron banister rails on indoor staircases. And the thirteenth stair gave an inch under my weight, so I ducked. But nothing happened. Rather lucky for you the things weren't working — in the circumstances — isn't it?"
It was bewildering to think that the girl, according to official records, was only twenty-two. Simon Templar treated her like a petulant child because it pleased him to do so. But in that moment he recognized her anger as a grown reality with nothing childish in it. That he chose to keep the recognition to himself was nobody's business.
"No one will stop you going back to your posse, Templar."
"I didn't think anyone would."
He glanced at his watch.
"They'll be expecting me in another five minutes. I only came because I didn't want to disappoint you — and because I thought you might have something interesting to say."
"I've nothing more to — say."
"But lots of things to do?"
"Possibly."
That extraordinarily mocking smile bared his teeth.
"If only," he murmured softly — "if only your father could hear those sweet words fall from your gentle lips!"
"You'll leave my father out of it—"
"You'd like me to, wouldn't you? But that won't make me do it."
There was a renewed hardness in her eyes that had no right to be there.
"My father was framed," she said in a low voice.
"There was a proper inquiry. An assistant commissioner of police isn't dismissed in disgrace for nothing. And is that an excuse for anything you do, anyway?"
"It satisfies me."
Her voice held a depth of passion that for a moment turned even Simon Templar into a sober listener. She had never flinched from his sardonically bantering stare, and now she met it more defiantly than ever. She went on, in that low, passionate voice: "The shock killed him. You know it could have been nothing else but that. And he died denying the charge—"
"So you think you've a right to take vengeance on the department for him?"
"They condemned him for a thing he'd never done. And the mud sticks to me as well, still, a year after his death. So I'll give them something to condemn me for."
The Saint looked at her.
"And what about that boy over in the States?" he asked quietly, and saw her start.
"What do you know about him?" she asked.
The Saint shrugged.
"It's surprising what a lot of odd things I know," he answered. "I think we may talk some more on that subject one day — Jill. Some day when you've forgotten this nonsense, and the Angels of Doom have grown their tails."
For a span of silence he held her eyes steadily — the big golden eyes which, he knew by his own instinct, were made for such gentle things as the softness into which he had betrayed them for a moment. And then that instant's light died out of them again, and the tawny hardness returned. She laughed a little.
"I'll go back when the slate's clean," she said; and so the Saint slipped lightly back into the role he had chosen to play.
"You missed your vocation," he said sweetly. "You ought to have been writing detective stories. Vengeance — and the Angels of Doom! Joke!"
He swung round in his smooth sweeping way and picked his hat out of the chair. Weald seemed about to say something, and, meeting the Saint's suddenly direct and interrogative gaze, refrained. Simon looked at the girl again.
"I'm leaving," he said. "We shall meet again. Quite soon. I promised to get you in three weeks, and two and a half days of it have gone. But I'll do it, don't you worry!"
"I'm not worrying, Templar. And next time you give me your word of honour—"
"Be suspicious of everything I say," Simon advised. "I have moments of extreme cunning, as you'll get to know. Good-afternoon, sweetheart."
He went put, leaving the door open, and walked down the stairs. He saw Pinky Budd standing in the hall with six men drawn up impassively behind him; but it would have taken more than that, at any time, to make Simon Templar's steps falter.
The girl spoke from the top of the stairs.
"Mr. Templar is leaving, Pinky. His men are waiting for him outside."
"Now that," said the Saint, "is tough luck on you — isn't it, Pinky?"
He walked straight for the door, and the guard stood aside without a word to give him gangway. Only Budd stood his ground, and Simon halted in front of him.
"Getting in my way, Pinky?"
Budd looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes. They were of a height as they stood, but Budd would have been a couple of inches taller if he had straightened his huge hunched shoulders. His long arms hung loosely at his sides, and the ham-like fists at the end of them were clenched.
"Nope, I'm not getting in your way. But I'll come 'n' find you again soon, Templar. See?"
"Do."
The Saint's hand came flat in the middle of Budd's chest and overbalanced him out of the road. And Simon Templar went through to the door.
A few strides up the street he stopped and laid half a crown on a harmonium.
"Do you know a song called 'A Farewell'?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," said the serenader.
"Play it for me," said the Saint. "And miss out the middle verse."
He went on towards Buckingham Palace Road as soon as he had heard the introductory bars moaned out on the machine; and his departure was watched by vengeful eyes from the drawing-room window.
"You let him get clean away," snivelled Weald. "We had him—"
"Don't be an imbecile!" snapped the girl. "He only came to see if he could tempt us into doing anything foolish. And if we had, he'd have been tickled to death. And I just asked him to come so I could get to know a little more about him, for future reference. He's—"
"What's that bull with the organ singing?"
They listened. The words of the unmelodious performance came clearly to their ears. The troubadour, startled by the magnitude of the Saint's largesse, was putting his heart into the job.
"Maaaye fairest chiiild-da, I have no gift to giiive
theeee; No lark-ka could pipe-pa to skies sow dull and
gra-a-ay;
Yet-ta, ere I gow, one lesson I can leeeave theeee For every da-a-ay…"
"I saw Templar speak to him—"
"Shut up, you fool!"
"Be gooood-da, sweet maaid, and-da let who can-na
be cle-evah;
Do nowble things, not-ta dream them, awl daaay lawng…"
The telephone bell screamed.
"See who it is, Weald. No, give it to me."
She took the instrument out of his hands. There was no need to ask who was the owner of the silkily endearing voice that came over the wire.
"Hullo!"
"Yes, Mr. Templar?"
"Please don't let the Angels pester the innocent gentleman with the criminal voice. He doesn't know me from Adam, and probably never will. I warned you I had moments of extreme cunning, didn't I?"
She hung up the receiver thoughtfully, ignoring Weald's splutter of questions.
The musician below, a man inspired, was repeating the last verse with increased fervour — perhaps as a consolation to himself for having been deprived of the middle one.
"Bee goooooda-da, sweet maaid-da,
and-da let whoo caan-na be cle-e-e-ev-ah…"
The girl stood by the window, and something like a smile touched her lips. "A humorist!" she said. Then the smile was gone altogether. "Second round to Simon Templar," she said softly. "And now, I think, we start!"