The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

It was simple enough. The house stood away from the road, exactly as the Saint had described it, in its own rather spacious grounds, and there was not a light show­ing anywhere. To find it almost without hesitation had been easy enough. The studio in Chelsea had been amply equipped for the simple preparation of any such excur­sion. There had been a telephone directory from which to discover Cullis's address, a street directory in which to find the exact location of his house, and a large-scale map from which to read the most 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 con­venient 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.