The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

He carried in his mind a vivid recollection of tawny golden eyes darkened with anger, of a golden head tilted in inimitable defiance, of an implacable hatred flaming in as lovely a face as he had ever seen. Jill Trelawney. She should have been some palely savage Scandinavian goddess, he thought, riding before the Valkyries with her golden hair wild in the wind.

As it was, she rode before what it pleased his own sense of humour to call the "Lady's maids"—and that, he ad­mitted, was a very practical substitute.   

 

2

 

The first mention of the Angels of Doom had filtered through the underworld some four or five months previously. It was no more than a rumour, a whispered story passed from mouth to mouth, of the sort that an un-romantic Criminal Investigation Department is taught to take with many grains of salt. The mind of the criminal runs to nicknames; and "Angels of Doom" was a fairly typical specimen. It was also the one and only thing about Jill Trelawney which conformed to any of the precedents of crime known to New Scotland Yard.

There was a certain Ferdinand Dipper, well known to the police under a variety of names, who made much money by dancing. That is to say, certain strenuous middle-aged ladies paid him a quite reasonable fee for his services as a professional partner, and later found them­selves paying him quite unreasonable fees for holding his tongue about the equivocal situations into which they had somehow been engineered. Dipper was clever, and his victims were foolish, and therefore for a long time the community had to surfer him in silence; but one day a woman less foolish than the rest repented of her folly the day after she had given Ferdinand an open check for two thousand pounds, and a detective tapped him on the shoulder as he put his foot on the gangway of the Maid of Thanet at Dover. They travelled back to London to­gether by the next train; but the detective, who was human, accepted a cigarette from an exotically beautiful woman who entered their compartment to ask for a match. A porter woke him at Victoria, and a week later Ferdinand sent him a picture postcard and his love from Algeciras. And in due course information trickled in to headquarters through the devious channels by which such information ordinarily arrives.

"The Angels of Doom," said the information.