The Saint Meets His Match Read Free

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 god dess, 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 ad mitted, 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
un- romantic 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 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