The Saint Meets His Match (2 page)

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 sec
ond
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 flick
ered 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 con
descending 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 auto
matic and seemed to see something humorous
there.

He looked perfectly
steadily into her eyes, and with per
fect 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 con
fidence 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 be
lieved. 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 wait
ing 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 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.