The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

straightforward approach. These three reference alone would have been material enough even for anyone less accustomed to rapid and concise thinking than Jill Trelawney, and the investigation had not taken her more than three minutes. After which she had a faultlessly photographic memory in which to hold the results of that investigation in their place. She remembered that at the back of the house there was a piece of land on which no buildings were marked on the map; but under the faint light of a half-fledged moon she could see the dark masses of scaffolding and unfinished walls in the background, and marked down that terrain as a con­ venient avenue of escape in case of need.

In her own way she had had her fair share of luck. The last patrolling policeman she had seen had been near Baker Street, and the road in which she now stood was deserted. Knowing the habits of policemen on night patrol, her keen eyes probed deep into every patch of shadow around her; but there was no one there.

She turned off the road and slipped noiselessly over the low gate into the front garden.

The Saint had kindly warned her about the alarms on the ground-floor windows. He had also been good enough to explain his method of approach by way of the drain pipe. But she did not feel confident to cope with drain pipes. Ivy was easier, if more risky and more noisy and at the back of the house there was a patch of ivy running to a very convenient window on the first floor.

She went up as if she had been born in a circus.

The ledge of the window came easily under her feet, and she found that the latch was not even fastened. She slid up the lower sash with the merest rustle of sound, and lowered herself warily over the sill.

The darkness inside was impenetrable, but that meant nothing to her. She moved through the room inch by inch, with her fingers weaving sensitively in front of her, and reached the door in utter silence after several seconds. Not until she was out on the landing, with the door closed again behind her, did she dare to switch on her tiny electric torch.

By its light she found the stairs and went down them into the hall. Crossing the hall, she opened a door on the far side and cautiously closed it again behind her. Then she went over to a window, located the alarms with her torch, disconnected them, and opened the window wide, drawing the heavy curtains again when she had finished.

The beam of her torch filtered through the darkness, flickering over every part of the room. A massive safe that stood in one corner she ignored without a moment's hesitation—Cullis would never have taken the risk of keeping anything incriminating in a place which would be the obvious objective of any chance intruder. She went over the bookcase shelf by shelf, shifting the books one by one and searching expertly for a dummy row or a panel concealed in the back of the case, but she found nothing The pictures on the walls detained her for very little longer: there was nothing concealed behind any of them. And then she lighted another cigarette and looked around her with a rather rueful frown.

In any modern house, she knew, the range of possible secret hiding places was limited. Secret panels and in­genious flooring arrangements cannot be installed with­out structural alterations that involve too much curiosi­ty to be effective. And yet, somehow, that was the room in which she had expected to find something—if there was anything to find. In Cullis's own bedroom, on the other hand . . . possibly. But not probably. Thus her intuition answered her, and she returned to a second search of the study with a little tightening of determination on her lips. Eventually the search narrowed itself down to an ornate Chippendale bureau which stood between the windows. She went over it patiently. None of the drawers was locked, and for that very reason she spared herself the trouble of investigating their contents. But she pulled each one out and measured it against its fellows and against the desk itself in the hope of finding some telltale discrepancy; and she found none. But she did decide that there was a rather curious thickness of wood in the con­ struction of the writing surface. She went over it inquis­itively, tapping it with her fingernails: it seemed to give back a hollow sound, and her heart beat a little faster. Then she observed a slight gap between two of the pieces of wood of which it was composed.

She slid the blade of a penknife into the gap; but it must have been one of her elbows which touched the necessary control, for part of the back of the desk seemed to give way under.her unconscious pressure, and the two pieces of wood between which her knife was moving sud­denly flew back with a click, and she found herself look­ing down at a thin, flat, japanned deed box.

And at that moment she heard the creak of a hinge behind her, and spun round with her gun in her hand as the lights went on.

There was a silence.

Then——

'Good-morning, Mr. Cullis,' said Jill.