The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

It may be suggested that the district of Mayfair was an eccentric situation for the home of a policeman; but Simon Templar thanked God he wasn't a real policeman. In fact, he must have been the weirdest kind of policeman that ever claimed to be attached to Scotland Yard. But attached he indisputably was, and could claim his official salutes from some of the men who would once have given their ears to arrest him. "Thus are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of walloping perished," he said to Teal at another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a respectable citizen, seemed much too good to be true—much too good. . . . Teal had an uneasy feeling that no bad man who had sud­denly reformed would have been quite so overpoweringly sanctimonious about it. All that he had ever seen of the Saint, all that he had ever known of him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing the law by strictly legal methods, and wondered. . . .

Not that anyone's mystification would have worried Simon Templar in the least. If he had thought about it at all, he would have been impishly amused, in his serene­ly contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life, and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seem­ing to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate sup­ply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.

One thing, however, could disturb his tranquillity, and that was to have business troubles intruded upon the hours which he had allotted to himself for rest or recrea­tion. At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street, for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, happily engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new song dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours List, and a bullet smacked through the window behind him and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling, he was distinctly bored.