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.