The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

"If we go on making progress at this rate," he said mor­bidly, "one of the stunt newspapers will be running us as modern reincarnations of Sherlock Holmes."

Cullis scowled.

"That doesn't get us much further. Even if someone in the Records Office was responsible, it might have been any one of a dozen men you could name."

Teal shrugged.

"And which?" he asked tersely.

"There'll be an inquiry, of course,"

"And what will that find out? We know the Angels had a lot of money, and I know the Saint still has. Sup­pose they've bought someone actually in the Yard, why should it be one man more than another?" Teal reached out a slothful arm and picked up one of the blank sheets. It was creased down the centre, as were the other sheets. Teal shuffled the pile together and folded them over the crease. "They'd go into a man's breast pocket," he said. "It's cheap and ordinary paper—the kind they use in a few hundred offices. We shan't find any clue there."

He picked up the note.

"What do you make of that?" asked Cullis.

"It's almost the same handwriting as the note they left on Essenden in Paris, isn't it?"

"Not exactly the same, though. But the writing was disguised, anyway. A man can't write a disguised hand as consistently as he writes his own natural fist."

"Man?" queried Cullis sharply.

"Simon Templar," said Teal sleepily. "I'll swear he wrote that note to Essenden in Paris, anyway."

"And this one?"

"Simon Templar," said Teal, somewhat inconsequent­ly, "is a very clever young man."

Cullis looked at him. He remembered that the feud between Chief Inspector Teal and the Saint was one of the epic legends of the force. There had been truces from time to time—truces and breezy interludes—but the fundamental feud had never finished. And if anything had been wanting to reawaken in Teal's expansive breast the ambition to be the first man to lag Simon Templar, it should have been supplied to him on the night in Lon­don, such a very short time ago, when the Saint had balked him of a coveted prey by a trick which a babe in arms should have spotted and which a middle-aged police constable had somehow failed to spot.

"A very clever young man," said Teal.

"Have you any idea where he is now?"

"He's in London, living in his own home. I saw him last night."

"You saw him?" exclaimed Cullis incredulously.-"But—"