The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

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 you took from the Records Office."

"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.