The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

No crime is ever committed but every member of the underworld knows definitely who did it; but the task of the Criminal Investigation Department is not made any easier by the fact that six different sources of information will point with equal definiteness to six different persons. In this case, however, there was a certain amount of una­nimity; but the C.I.D., who had never heard of the Angels of Doom before, shrugged their shoulders and wondered how Ferdinand had worked it.

Three weeks later, George Gallon, motor bandit, shot a policeman in Regent Street in the course of the get­away from a smash-and-grab raid at three o'clock of a stormy morning, and successfully disappeared. But about Gallon the police had certain information up their sleeves, and three armed men went cautiously to a little cottage on the Yorkshire moors to take him while he slept. The next day, a letter signed with the name of the Angels of Doom came to Scotland Yard and told a story, and the three men were found and released. But Gallon was not found; and the tale of the three men, that the room in which they found him must have been saturated with some odourless soporific gas, made the commission­er's lip curl. Nor was he amused when Gallon wrote later from some obscure South American republic to say that he was quite well, thanks.

More than three months passed, during which the name of the Angels of Doom grew more menacing every week, and so it came about that amongst the extensive and really rather prosaic and monotonous files of the Records Office at Scotland Yard there arrived one dossier of a totally different type from its companions. The out­side cover was labelled in a commonplace manner enough, like all the other dossiers, with a simple name; and this name was Jill Trelawney. Inside, however, was to be found a very large section occupying nearly three hun­dred closely written pages, under a subheading which was anything but commonplace. Indeed, that subheading must have caused many searchings of heart to the staid member of the clerical department who had had to type it out, and must similarly have bothered the man responsi­ble for the cross-indexing of the records, when he had had to print it neatly on one of his respectable little cards for the files. For that subheading was "The Angels of Doom," which Records Office must have felt was a heading far more suitable for inclusion in a library of sensational fiction than for a collection of data dealing solely with sober fact.