The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

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.