The Saint Meets His Match by Leslie Charteris

ancient history in the
hope of building up a live case out
of dead material. Besides— which was
far more important—that procedure wouldn’t have fitted in at all with the real ambition that the story of the
Angels of Doom had brought into his young life. And to set Jill Trelawney
racing into Birmingham to the rescue of
Harry Donnell struck him as being a much more entertaining way of spending the day.
    In spite of the two
attempts which had already been made on his life, he bore
the girl no malice. Far from it. The Saint was used to that
kind of thing. In fact, he had already found more
amusement in the pursuit of Jill Trelawney than he had anticipated when he first
set forth to make her acquaintance, and he was now preparing to find some more—but this, however, he did not
confide to the commissioner.
    They talked for a while
longer, and the Saint left cer tain definite instructions
to be passed on to the appro priate quarter. And then, as the Saint rose to
go, the com missioner was moved to revert
to a thought suggested by the
original subject of the interview.
    “Isn’t it
curious,” said the commissioner, “that only the other night
you should have been asking whether there might
be a reason for the Angels to have a feud with Essenden?”
    “Isn’t it a scream?” agreed the
Saint.
    He set off for Belgrave
Street in one of his moods of Saintly optimism.
    It struck him that he was spending a great deal
of his time in Belgrave Street. This would
be his third visit that week.
    He had no illusions about
the possible outcome of it— the gun with which he had provided himself before
leav ing testified to that. A man cannot make himself as
consistently unpopular as, for his own inscrutable
reasons, it had in this case pleased the Saint
to make himself, without there growing up, sooner or later, a state of tension in which something has to break. The thing broken should, of course, have been Simon
Templar, but up to that time the
thing broken had somehow failed to, be Simon Templar. But this time …
    In the three days since
his last visit life had been allowed to deal peacefully with him. He had
used the milk from outside his front door with a sublime confidence in its
purity, and had not been disappointed. He had walked in and out of the house without any fear of being again enfiladed by
machine-gun fire; and in that again his judg ment had proved to be right. On the other hand, he had treated letters and parcels delivered to him, and
taxis which offered themselves for
his hire, with considerable suspicion.
He had as yet found no justification for this carefulness, but he realized that the calm could only be the herald of a storm. Possibly this third visit
to Belgrave Street would precipitate
the storm. He was prepared for it to
do so.
    He was kept waiting
outside for some time before his summons was answered. He
did not stand at the top of the stairs, however, while he was waiting, in a
position where sudden death might reach him through
the letter box, but placed himself on the pavement
behind the shelter of one of the pillars of the portico.
From behind this, with one eye looking round it, he was able to see the slight movement of a curtain in a ground-floor window as some one looked out to discover who the visitor was. Simon allowed his face to be seen, and then withdrew into cover until the door opened. Then he entered quickly.
    “Miss Trelawney is
expecting you,” said Wells as he closed the door.
    The Saint glanced
searchingly round the hall and up the stairs as far as he could see. There
was no one else about.
    He smiled seraphically.
    “You’re getting quite
truthful in your old age, Freddie,” he remarked, and went up the stairs.
    The girl met him on the
landing.
    “I got your message
to say you were coming.”
    “I hope it gave you a
thrill,” said the Saint earnestly.
    He looked past her into the
sitting room.
    “Are you staying to
tea again?” she asked sweetly.
    “Before I’ve
finished,”