Free The Saint Meets His Match by Leslie Charteris

like
that would dream of using one. He’s got too darn good an opinion of
himself. Don’t you see that it amuses him to
go about alone like this and get away
with it? He gets twice as much kudos for the job as he would if he went round with a bodyguard. But
this time he isn’t going to get away
with it. That’s my answer. If you know
anything better I’ll hear it.”
    Weald said nothing. The
train ran on.
    He avoided her eyes.
Picking up his cup to drink mechanically, he spilt tea over the tablecloth.
But that might have been the jolting of the train. He
hoped she would think it was. He knew she was
watching him.
    What little colour there
could be in his face had not come back since he saw
the Saint, for Stephen Weald had seen the jaws of
destruction yawning at him at the same time.         
    It had all happened so
quietly and gently up to that point that he had never seen the danger until
it was upon him. There had been nothing
concrete in the mere knowledge that
the Saint was after the Angels of Doom, imposing as the Saint’s reputation
was. And though each of Simon Templar’s
visits to Belgrave Street had been both
an insult and a threat, none of them had been suf ficiently terrifying to rouse an alarm which could not be dissipated with a drink after he had left. And now
it seemed as if all that had changed as suddenly as if a charge of
dynamite had been detonated under the whole situation.
And all through such a simple thing. Before that there had been no evidence against any of them. But now there was. Simon Templar had been held up
and bound and locked in a cellar, and
now he was free to tell the tale, with Dyson’s evidence to support it.
    That might well be the
beginning of the end. Weald had always had a
wholesome respect for the tenacity of the police
when once they got hold of a solid bone to chew. Throughout
his career he had made a point of keeping away from any material contact with
them. As long as they were working in the dark against him he could feel
safe, but once they could make any definite accusation, and thus get a hold on
him, there was no knowing where it might
end.
    But in Jill Trelawney
there was no sign of weakening.
    “We can still pull through,”
she said.
    Weald’s thin fingers twitched his tie
nervously.
    “How can you say that
after what we know now?”
    “We’re not dead yet.
In your way, you’re right, of course. We’ve tripped over
about the most ridiculous little thing that we could
have tripped over, and if we aren’t careful we’ll go stumbling over the edge
of the precipice. But I’m not giving an
imitation of a jelly in an earthquake.”
    “Nor am I,” said Weald angrily.
    The mocking contempt
remained in her eyes, and he knew that he was not believed.
    With a certain grim
concession to her sense of humour she remembered the
Saint’s warning before they left Belgrave Street. The Saint
had certainly been right. In the circumstances, Weald
was likely to be very much less use than a tin tombstone. She saw the way he
put a hand to cover the twitching of his weak
mouth, and realized that Stephen
Weald was going to pieces rapidly.

Chapter IV
    HOW JILL TRELAWNEY TOLD A LIE, AND
    SIMON TEMPLAR SPOKE NOTHING BUT
    THE TRUTH
     
    H ARRY D ONNELL lived in a house in a
mean street on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was a curious house, but as soon as he had seen it he knew that few other
houses could have fulfilled his
requirements so completely, for he had always boasted that if necessary
he would resist arrest to the death.
    This house had grown up,
somehow, in the very inside of a block. Being
completely surrounded by the other houses of the
block necessarily deprived its rooms of most of
the light of day, but Donnell could not see this as a disadvantage.
The same fact made the house very difficult to
attack, and this to his mind was compensation enough. In fact, the building
could only be approached directly through a
straight and narrow alleyway between two of the