The Saint Meets His Match Read Online Free PDF Page A

is,
Weald. No, give it to me.”
    She took the instrument out
of his hands. There was no need to ask who was the
owner of the silkily endearing voice that came over the
wire.
    “Hullo!”
    “Yes, Mr.
Templar?”
    “Please don’t let the
Angels pester the innocent gentle man with the
criminal voice. He doesn’t know me from Adam,
and probably never will. I warned you I had mo ments
of extreme cunning, didn’t I?”
    She hung up the receiver
thoughtfully, ignoring Weald’s splutter of
questions.
    The musician below, a man
inspired, was repeating the last verse with increased fervour—perhaps as a
consolation to himself for having been
deprived of the middle one.
     
    “Bee
goooooda-da, sweet maaid-da,
    and-da
let whoo caan-na be cle-e-e-ev-ah… .”
     
    The girl stood by the
window, and something like a smile touched her lips. “A humorist!” she said. Then the smile was gone altogether. “Second round to Simon Templar,” she said softly. “And now, I think, we start!”

Chapter II
    HOW SIMON TEMPLAR   WAS DISTURBED,
    AND THERE WAS FURTHER BADINAGE IN
    BELGRAVE STREET
     
    I F IT had been possible to prepare a place-time chart of the activities of the Angels of Doom, it would have shown, during the eighteen hours following Simon Templar’s departure from the house in Belgrave Street, a distinct concentration of interest in the region of Upper Berkeley Mews, where the Saint had converted a couple of garages, with the rooms above, into the most ingeniously com fortable fortress in London. Also, like other concentra tions of the Angels of Doom, it appeared to be conducted with considerable labour and expense for no prospect of immediate
profit.
    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 serene ly
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, seem ing to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate sup ply 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 recrea tion.
At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street,
for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, hap pily
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.
    With a sigh he climbed
out and pulled on his dressing gown. One glance at the
line between the star-shaped