nightingale has been picking up all your winged words and relaying them, if not to all stations, at least to one—with a sergeant sitting on his Pitman diploma at the other end and taking them all down. Another connection upstairs gave up the personal lowdown on every word of your recent backchat with Duodecimo—which would have been enough to hang you by itself. But we are thorough. We didn't even stop there. Half a minute after you heard the front door slam behind the chief commissioner just now, he was creeping in through the back door and sprinting up the back stairs to hear some more of the story from his private broadcasting station. No, I shouldn't even shoot now, Cullis, because I think I heard Auntie Ethel coming back——'
Cullis heard the rattle of the door behind him, and spun round.
The chief commissioner stood on the threshold. And now he showed no signs of the injury which had at first impressed his assistant. His bearing was erect, he no longer clutched his shoulder, and there was a glitter in his eyes which had nothing to do with anything he had said to Cullis before he left.
Also, there was an automatic in his hand.
'I heard you,' he said; and Cullis stepped back a pace.
Cullis still held a gun in his hand, but it hung loose at his side, and he knew that the least movement would be fatal. He stood quite still, and the chief commissioner went on speaking.
'You ought to know,' he said, 'that I've been watching you for some time. I think I first had my suspicions when those papers were taken from the Records Office; and then the Saint came to me with a story which I couldn't ignore, fantastic though it was.'
'You believed a crook?' said Cullis scornfully.
'For my own reasons,' said the commissioner. 'He was, perhaps, something more than an ordinary crook when he came to me, and I was able to believe him when I shouldn't have believed anyone else in his place. Even you should admit that the Saint has a certain reputation. There was a warrant out for his arrest at the time.' The commissioner's lips twitched. 'It was one of many that have been wasted on him. But he placed himself unreservedly in my hands, and it seems as if the result has justified us.'
Cullis looked around him, and saw that Simon Templar also held a gun; and Jill Trelawney was sitting up on the sofa, mopping at her blouse with a handkerchief.
'Only red ink,' explained the Saint sweetly.
Cullis stood like a man carved in stone.
And then he nodded slowly, and the ghost of a smile twitched at his mouth.
'I needn't bother to deny anything,' he said quietly. 'It's all quite clear. But it was a clever piece of work on your part to get the story from my own mouth as you have done.'
He looked the chief commissioner in the eyes.
'You may as well hear it in full,' he said. 'I framed Sir Francis Trelawney under your very nose. Waldstein and Essenden were the leaders of the combine that Trelawney was out to smash, and I was strapped at the time. They offered big money, and I came in with them. Trelawney was dangerous. In another month or so he'd probably have had them, if he'd been able to keep on. The only thing to do was to get him out of the way, and we fixed that up between us. It wasn't so difficult as it might have been, because he was always a man who worked on his own. We knew that if once he was discredited, no one else would be able to take up his work at the point where he left off. I paved the way by writing that warning about the raid on his typewriter. Then I telephoned the message which was supposed to have come from you, which sent him over to Paris and helped us to catch him out at Waldstein's hotel. After that, the rest was easy. I had Waldstein's money in my pocket when I opened his strong box in front of you, and I'd practised that little conjuring trick for weeks. It wasn't very difficult. The notes came out of his box in front of your very eyes, and there was nothing he could say about that. Later on, Waldstein, under one of his aliases, joined up with the girl to keep her out of mischief. He called himself lucky when he met her on the boat coming over from New York to start the work of the Angels. . . . The trouble
