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
'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?'
