How Simon Templar interrupted a party,
and Mr. Cullis was at home
1
GUGLIEMI must have thought that it was his friend returning, for his dark eyes opened wide when he saw Simon Templar.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"Who are you?" inquired the Saint, inspecting him from crown to toe with a disparaging eye.
"I am the caretaker."
"Then I hope you will take great care," said the Saint.
The Italian was starting to push the door in his face, but Simon pushed harder, and walked in.
"What do you want?" asked Gugliemi again, and this time he asked it more dangerously.
Simon carefully detached a fragment of cobweb from his sleeve. He was in his dinner jacket, without hat or overcoat, and his shirt gleamed snowy white in the dim light.
"I really don't want you to think me interfering, Signor Oleaqua," said the Saint diffidently. "But don't you think it's time you let Miss Trelawney go home?"
"I know nothing about Mees Trelawney."
"But, my dear Signor Gazebo," protested the Saint, in accents of shocked innocence, "think of the proprieties! Think of what the bishop would say if he knew that you were alone with a fair lady at this hour!"
"I do not understand," said Gugliemi stubbornly. "I know no Mees Trelawney, I tell you."
The Saint's eyebrows lifted half an inch.
"Really?" he said. "But a friend of yours has just told me that he brought her here with you."
Gugliemi shrugged eloquent shoulders.
"Perhaps you make the fairy tale?" he said.
"Perhaps," agreed the Saint, "But of course you'll let me have a look round, just to make sure, won't you?"
"I shall not." Gugliemi straightened up. "You have forced your way in here, and if you do not go quickly I will call for the police."
Simon straightened up also.
"Your ideas of hospitality are deplorable," he remarked genially. "But I'm sure you don't mean it. You're just one of these strong men with no trimmings, and you wouldn't be really troublesome for the world, would you?"
A shining automatic had appeared from nowhere in his hand. He flourished it airily, and Gugliemi became aware of an unpleasant sinking feeling.
"I'm not very used to these little toys," said the Saint mildly, as the gun flourished round and settled down directly opposite the sinking feeling. "I am a man of peace, though nobody ever seems to believe it. But I understand that if you squeeze these gadgets in the wrong place they go bang and make holes in things. I should be frightfully interested to see if that's true. Do you happen to know, by any chance?" His fingers flickered carelessly over the trigger, and Gugliemi went pale. "But what's the idea, my little andante capriccioso? A spot of kidnaping? Some of this heavy desert love stuff you've seen on the cinematografo?"
He waggled his automatic perilously with every question.
Gugliemi reached behind him, but the Saint was a little quicker. He reached out and caught the Italian's wrist in time, and Gugliemi dropped his gun with a yelp of pain. Simon pushed him away and picked it up.
"And what are your views," asked the Saint conversationally, "on the subject of supralapsarianism? They should be valuable. Only a few hours ago—"
"All right," snarled Gugliemi. "I find you Mees Trelawney. Only put that gun away."
"Not till I know you aren't going to pull any more slapstick comedy, sweetheart," said the Saint. "Where is she?"
"Upstairs."
"Dear — me!" The automatic nuzzled again into Gugliemi's fancy waistcoat. "I hope you haven't been forgetting your manners?"
"I will show you."
"You certainly will," said the Saint pleasantly. "But I'm afraid that if you have been forgetting your manners, I shall be forced to do things to you which will be not only painful, but permanently discouraging. Lead on, Rudolph."
Gugliemi led on, and the Saint followed him into the upper room. He saw the light that came to the girl's eyes as he entered, and bowed to her with a laugh — the entrance happened too obviously upon its cue, and anything like that was bliss and beauty for the Saint, who was nothing if not melodramatic. And he turned again to the Italian.
"Remove the whatnots," he ordered operatically.
Gugliemi bent shakily to obey. The straps fell from the girl's wrists, then from her ankles.
"And now, Jill, has the specimen behind this tie pin been getting what you might call uppish?"
"He was—"
"Ah-ha!" The Saint revolved his automatic. "I don't. want to be premature, Antonio, but this looks bad for your matrimonial prospects. If you remember what I was saying just now—"
"But you got here in time," Jill protested. "What are you going to do?"
"Oh!" said the Saint, almost reluctantly. "Hasn't he been really nasty?"
"Not really."
The Saint sighed.
"The old story book again," he murmured unhappily. "You know, I've always wondered what would happen if the hero missed his train and blew in half an hour too late. And I suppose we shall never know… But what was the idea?"
She told him, exactly as Gugliemi had told her, while the Italian stood pallidly silent under the continued menace of the Saint's automatic. And when, at the end of the story, Simon turned suddenly on him, Gugliemi almost jumped out of his skin.
"You really mean to tell me the police passed you that yarn?" demanded the Saint. "And you expect me to believe it?"
"But it is true, sair."
"Which policeman?" inquired the Saint skeptically.
"A big man — with a moustache — like this—"
Gugliemi frowned down his eyebrows, twisted his mouth, and thrust out his jaw in a caricature which the Saint recognized at once. So did Jill.
"Cullis!"
Simon sat down on the bed, regarding the Italian with a thoughtful air.
"But how did you get here?" Jill was asking.
"Oh, I breezed along," said the Saint. "As a matter of fact, I was coming round to see you. My respectable friend thought he'd like to meet you, so I was sent off to bring you along. Just as I turned the corner by the studio I saw you get into a car and drive away. There wasn't a taxi in sight to give chase in, and in the circumstances I couldn't raise happy hell in the street. But I nailed down the number of the decamping dimbox, and then it was easy enough to find out who the owner was."
"But how did you do that?"
"I consulted a clairvoyant," said the Saint, "and he told me at once. It took a bit of time, though. However, I got the man just as he was putting the car away in the garage. He was persuaded to talk—"
"You made him talk?"
"I hypnotized him," said the Saint blandly, "and he talked. Then I came right along here."
The girl shook her head ruefully.
"I'm luckier than I deserve to be. If I'd thought I should ever live to fall for a gag like that—"
"It's an old gag because it's a good one, darling. Given the right staging, it never fails. So I shouldn't take it too much to heart. And now let's go home, shall we?"
He stood up, and Jill Trelawney was at a loss for anything more to say at that moment. She could only think of one feeble remark.
"But what are we going to do with — this?"
She indicated Gugliemi, and Simon looked at the man as if he had never seen him before.
"I'll take him back to Upper Berkeley Mews," he said. "I think I'd like to have a little private talk with him; that break of yours might turn out to be the most useful thing you ever did."
And take Gugliemi he did, with one hand holding the man's arm and another jamming the muzzle of the automatic into his ribs, all the way from Lambeth to the studio in Chelsea, in a taxicab which they were lucky enough to find as soon as they emerged onto the main road. He left Jill at the studio, saying that he would return in an hour; and he himself went on in the taxi with Gugliemi to Upper Berkeley Mews.
He was as good as his word. It was almost exactly an hour later when she heard his key in the lock, and the next moment he walked in, as calm and unperturbed as if nothing of any interest whatever had happened that evening.
By that time she had collected her wits, and she was ready for him.
"Did you have a good talk?" she inquired.
"Charming," said the Saint, stretching himself out on the sofa and lighting a cigarette. "What about a brace of those kippers I brought in this morning? My respectable friend gave me a slap-up dinner, but I've still got room for some good plain food."
"What did you talk to Gugliemi about?" she persisted.
"About Judas Iscariot."
"Don't be funny."
"But I'm dead serious, Jill. In that famous name you have the whole conversation in a nutshell. He didn't take much persuading, either, and we parted bosom friends."
"Do you mind giving me some straight talk? What's this game you're playing now?"
Simon grinned.
"That," he said, "must still be one of my own particular secrets. But I can satisfy you about Gugliemi, who has a very kind heart when you dig down to it, although his methods are rather low. In fact, I gather that he was really getting quite fond of you before I arrived and spoilt his evening."
"I quite believe that," said the girl grimly.
"Joking apart," said the Saint, "he's an interesting psychological specimen: I'd figured that in the first few minutes. He was quite ready to put you out of the way in his own fashion — for a fee — since he had been told that you were a political nuisance. But I had a much better story to tell him. I didn't even have to beat him up, which I was quite prepared to do. I took him into my confidence. I dosed him with a bottle of Chianti I found lying around. I told him he'd been humbugged all the way down the line, and I was able to produce a bit of evidence to convince him."
"What evidence was that?"
"Never mind. But he was really quite ready to be convinced, because, as I said, you'd made a great impression on him. And when he saw what the game was, what with his native chivalry and another litre of Chianti and my persuasive tongue, he switched right round the other way. And now I believe he'd go out after Cullis with a gun in each hand and a stiletto behind his ear if you asked him to. Did you know his first name was Duodecimo? That's a jolly sort of name, that is. We were getting as matey as that before the end… The really interesting point is our assistant commissioner's psychology."
The girl was lighting a cigarette.
"Go on," she said.
"You see his point," said the Saint. "You're getting troublesome, so Cullis employs Gugliemi to bump you off. If Gugliemi doesn't get caught, so much the better. If he does get caught, and tries to tell anyone that the assistant commissioner employed him to take you for a ride, they'd just think he was raving. It was really beautifully simple. My respectable friend will just love that story."
The girl looked at him curiously.
"Who is this respectable friend you keep talking about?"
"Auntie Ethel," said the Saint lucidly. "She has a very fine sense of humour. For instance, she simply roared over the story of those papers that were taken from the Records Office."
Jill Trelawney watched him with narrowed eyes. She had not seen him in this mood before, and it annoyed her. When they had joined forces in Birmingham, and throughout the adventures which followed — even in the earlier days of bitter warfare — everything had been perfectly straight and above-board. But now the Saint was starting to collect an aura of mystery about him, and she realized, almost with a shock, that in spite of the fantastic manner in which he played his part there was something very solid behind his fooling.
She had always been used to being in the lead. The Angels of Doom had followed her blindly. But Simon Templar had challenged her from the very beginning, and from the very moment when he had elected to catapult them into a preposterous partnership he had been quietly but steadily usurping her place. And now, when he calmly produced a dark secret which he would not allow her to share, while he knew everything that he needed to know about her, she felt that she had fallen into a definitely subordinate position. And the bullet was a tough one for her to chew.
But the Saint's manner indicated no feelings of triumph, or even of self-satisfaction, which was really so surprising that it made the situation still more irritating to her. If he had been ordinarily smug about it she could have dealt with him. But he had a copyright kind of smugness that was unanswerable…
"The papers," said Jill deliberately, taking up his remark after it had hung in the air for some seconds, "which you took from the Records Office."
"Oh, no," said the Saint. "The papers which Cullis took from the Records Office!"
She was startled into an incredulous exclamation.
"Cullis?" she repeated.
Simon nodded.
"Yes. The night before last I was up all night watching his house. He lives in Hampstead, which is a dangerous thing for a man like that to do, in a house which stands all by itself with a garden all round. French windows to his study, too. I sat shivering in the dew behind a bush, and watched him when he came in. I didn't know then what the papers were, of course, but I gathered from his expression that they were something pretty big. Next morning I heard about Records Office being robbed, and I guessed what it was."
"You never told me how you learnt that."
"Through the clairvoyant I mentioned before," said the Saint fluently. "A very useful man. You ought to meet him… Last night I went down and did my burglary. I had to do the drain-pipe work I mentioned and get in on the first floor, because there were some very useful burglar alarms all over the downstairs window — a new kind that you can't disconnect; and I duly collected the papers, as you saw. You see, Cullis is getting the wind up."
Jill Trelawney gazed at him without speaking.
"Cullis is getting the wind up," repeated the Saint comfortably. "Our blithe and burbling Mr. Cullis is feeling the draught in the most southerly quarter of his B.V.D.'s. He's already afraid of the inquiry on your father being reopened, so he abstracted certain important papers from your dossier. And he knows you're dangerous, so he employed Duodecimo to move you off the map. Yes, I think we could say poetically that our Mr. Cullis is soaring rapidly aloft on the wings of an upward gale."
"I see," said Jill softly.
"But you didn't see before?" asked the Saint. "Didn't you realize that there were really only two men concerned in catching your father — the chief commissioner himself, and Superintendent Cullis as was. Putting the chief commissioner above suspicion, we're left with Cullis. He could have written the raid letter on your father's typewriter. He could have telephoned the fake message which sent your father to Paris, and then taken the chief commissioner along to see the fun. And he was the man who took your father's strong box out of the safe deposit and opened it in the Yard. If Cullis was in league with Waldstein, what could have been easier than for him to pretend to discover notes which could be traced back to Waldstein in your father's box?"
The girl had been gazing intently at nothing in particular while the Saint released that brief theory. But now she turned suddenly with an extraordinarily keen query in her eyes.
"When did you figure all this out?" she asked.
"In my spare time," said the Saint airily. "But that doesn't matter. The thing that matters is that Assistant Commissioner Cullis has put himself in the cart. He has pulled his flivver, and you and I are the souls who are going to take the buggy ride. Partly by luck, and partly by our own good judgment, we've got the bulge on him — for the moment. And the letter I'm going to write to him tonight will let him know it. I'll put it in his letter box myself, and sit in the garden and watch him read it — it'll be worth the rheumatism. And when he's thoroughly digested that letter, I'm going to have an encore entertainment figured out for him that will make him feel like a small balloon that's floated in between an infuriated porcupine and a bent pin by the time the curtain comes down!"
2
He left soon afterwards, without elucidating his riddle, and she was alone with her perplexity.
She tried to compose herself for a night's rest, but sleep would not come. She was too preoccupied with other things, and she was not a girl who could be satisfied to remain in a state of mystified expectancy. She had to take every bull by the horns. And while inactivity would have irked her no less at any other time, that vexation was now made a thousand times worse by the feeling that it implied her own retirement from a sphere of active usefulness.
For an hour she tossed about in her bed. Sleep lay heavy on her eyes, but her brain was too restless to let her relapse info that void of contented lassitude which merges into dreams. And when, presently, she heard the chimes of a neighbouring clock striking the halfhour after midnight, she rose with a sigh, lighted a cigarette, pulled on her kimono, and went back into the studio.
The embers of the fire still glowed in the grate; she raked them over, put on some more coal, and watched the flames lick up again into a blaze. And then she began to pace the room restlessly.
There was a big cupboard in one corner. She saw it every time she passed in her restless pacing. It fascinated her, caught her eye from every angle, until she was forced to stop and stare at it. Perhaps even then the germ of what she wanted to do was budding in her brain. The cupboard was locked — she had tried the door before, when she had been looking for a place to hang her clothes. What could there be inside it? She found her mind reaching out covetously towards the obvious answer. That studio was admittedly the Saint's most secret bolt hole. And how could a man of such flamboyantly distinctive personality and appearance be sure of keeping even the most cautious bolt hole indefinitely secret? Only by one means…
And almost without her conscious volition, she found herself digging a plain household screwdriver out of a drawer in the kitchen.
The cupboard was locked, certainly, but it was the kind of lock that exists for the purpose of discouragement rather than actual hindrance. She slid the blade of the screwdriver into the gap between the two doors, and levered with a gently increasing pressure… The lock burst away from the flimsy screws that held it with less noise than the sound of a book dropped on a bare floor.
Jill Trelawney lighted another cigarette and inspected her find.
She knew she could only make one find that would be of any use to her. Reckless as she might be, and thoughtlessly as she might have dashed off to the rescue of an arrested Saint without a moment's heed for the risk to herself, in any enterprise such as she was meditating then there were sober and practical considerations to be reckoned with. She would gain nothing by throwing a single point in the game away. But if that locked cupboard provided the means of saving that single point, just in case of accidents.
And it did.
As the doors flew open, she looked at three complete outfits hung in a little row — a set of workman's overalls, a suit of violently purple check and a Shaftesbury Avenue nattiness, and a filthy and ragged costume such as a down-at-heels sandwichman might wear. And neatly arranged on adjacent shelves were the shirts, socks, ties, mufflers, overcoats, hats, and shoes to complete the disguises down to the last minute detail.
For a few seconds she surveyed the treasure trove; and then, with slow deliberation, she crushed out her cigarette…
The outfit she contrived for herself from the materials at her disposal was a heterogeneous affair, but it was the best she could do. A shabby pair of trousers, with the ends tucked up inside the legs and secured with safety pins, fitted her passably well; but tall as she was, there was no coat in the collection that she could wear. A stained and tattered mackintosh, however, could be made to pass, with the sleeves treated in a similar manner to the legs of the trousers; and a gaudy scarf knotted about her neck would conceal the deficiencies of her costume in other respects. She pulled a tweed cap well down onto her head, tucking her hair away out of sight beneath it. From the kitchen she was able to grub out enough grime to disguise her face and hands against any casual scrutiny; her own low-heeled walking shoes were heavy enough to pass muster. And then she inspected the completed work of art in a full-length mirror, and found that it was good…
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 simply 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 realized 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 lamppost 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 reference 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 piece 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 in 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 bookcase 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 telltale 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 fingernails: 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 penknife 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 recognized her, but an intuitive idea seemed to flash into his brain. She could almost read its arrival in his 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 around. 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 unmistakable 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 foot 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 curb 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.