The New Sonia Wayward (9 page)

‘I judge that there is no question of an arrest, sir. A motoring offence, sir. You will please excuse the sergeant for having divulged of it to me. But he hastens, he says, to cause no unnecessary apprehension.’

Hennwife’s employer had slumped back oddly in his chair. But now – rather unsteadily – he got to his feet.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘No doubt Bradnack must come in and serve the thing. But it is most vexatious. I’m quite unaware of having broken any of their silly regulations. It is entirely wrong, simply to lurk and pick up one’s registration. I might well have a question asked in the House. In fact, I most certainly shall.’

‘Yes, sir. It would be my own inclination, sir, decidedly. Shall I show the sergeant in?’

Petticate nodded gloomily.

‘Yes, show him in.’

Hennwife withdrew. Petticate deftly gathered up the litter of paper on the floor. If Bradnack were a detective officer of superb acumen – which he certainly was not – he might be surprised to find Colonel Petticate producing reams of dialogue. It was as well to take no risks. And he must take no risks with Hennwife and Mrs Hennwife, either.

Bradnack came in, carrying his helmet respectfully in the crook of his arm. He was a lumbering man, and his feet were large, clumsy in movement, and heavily shod. He thus carried about with him a certain theatrical suggestion; he might have been the local grocer undertaking the part of a member of the rural constabulary in some popular diversion in the village hall.

Petticate – who had inevitably suffered, during the past few minutes, one of these exhausting alarms to which his new situation exposed him – assumed the whimsical expression and unconcerned air proper in members of the respectable classes momentarily placed in some invidious relationship with those officers of the law whom they are accustomed to regard as their hired servants.

‘Good morning to you, Bradnack,’ he said with charitable geniality. ‘On the track of a crime, eh? Well, well!’

‘Very sorry to disturb you, Colonel, I’m sure. And only a matter of civil misdemeanour, I need hardly say.’ Sergeant Bradnack, as he spoke, gazed laboriously round the study. He mightn’t be looking for the traces of a crime, but he was certainly looking for something.

Petticate found himself irrationally wondering whether there was anything that he ought to have hidden away. This indiscipline of his own mind annoyed him, so that he spoke more briskly than before.

‘Well, hand it over. No need to beat about the bush. And drop in on Hennwife as you go out. He’ll be anxious to offer you a glass of beer.’

‘Much obliged, Colonel, I’m sure. But it wouldn’t be regular to serve the summons on you, sir. The lady must have it herself. Apologizing for troubling her, I need hardly say.’

‘You mean it’s for my wife?’

Bradnack at this produced a blue envelope from his pocket and studied it with care – for about the length of time, Petticate thought, in which a man might read a page of small print.

‘Mrs Ffolliot Petticate,’ Bradnack pronounced presently. And again he looked earnestly round the room, rather as if he supposed that Sonia might be lurking in a cupboard or behind a settee.

‘My wife is not at home,’ Petticate said. ‘You had better leave the thing with me. I can give you a receipt, I suppose.’

Bradnack shook his head.

‘It wouldn’t be regular, Colonel. We can use the registered post now, you know. But personal service can’t be by deputy. I must just trouble you for Mrs Petticate’s present address.’

‘I’ve no idea of it, I’m afraid. My wife is on holiday, and moving about from one place to another. I’m quite out of contact with her.’

For a moment Bradnack considered this seriously. Then an indulgent smile spread itself over his large face.

‘Come, Colonel. No call to make a little game of it. The summons is nothing serious, you understand. Unnecessary obstruction. The beaks never take a severe view of that. A civil letter to their clerk, Colonel, and it won’t go beyond ten bob. No call for foxing.’

Petticate did not feel inclined to accept this imbecility with much tolerance.

‘My good fellow, there is no question of trying to avoid the summons. I am telling you the simple truth. Mrs Petticate is abroad, and I have no means of communicating with her. I don’t know when I shall have. Her plans are quite indefinite.’

‘Oh, abroad!’ Bradnack’s face cleared. ‘In that case, of course, it ceases to be my responsibility, in a manner of speaking.’

‘I’ve no doubt there is a regular procedure in such cases.’ Petticate was again rather impatient. Bradnack had spoken with a gloomy solemnity, rather as if the tracking down of Sonia would now pass automatically to Interpol. ‘Your Inspector will know about it.’

‘Yes, sir. Come to think of it, he may want a few particulars.’ With maddening deliberation Bradnack now produced a notebook. It was of the portentous kind that is secured by a broad black elastic band, and with this Bradnack fiddled for some seconds before bringing out a pencil. ‘Might I just know,’ he asked, ‘the date on which Mrs Petticate left the country?’

Petticate was dismayed. The whole thing was, no doubt, merely tiresome and absurd. But being thus asked by the police – even in this most harmless of contexts – to account for Sonia’s recent movements had its insidiously frightening side. Besides, he didn’t
know
on what date Sonia had left the country. It was a detail he hadn’t yet filled in.
What Youth Desires
had been too seductive. He had been inventing stuff about Claire and Timmy when he ought to have been inventing stuff about his wife.

‘Only a few days ago,’ he said. ‘We had a sailing holiday together, and towards the end of it my wife decided on a trip abroad.’ That, he thought, was just right – neither prematurely precise nor unaccountably vague.

Sergeant Bradnack appeared much interested in this information. But his interest didn’t seem to be professional in character, since he had now closed his notebook.

‘That’s something I’ve always had a fancy for,’ he said. ‘A bit of sailing. Gets you right away from it all, as a man might say. And very popular, these days, by all accounts. Dangerous, though – distinctly dangerous. Bathing too.’

‘No doubt,’ Petticate said. The moment had come, he felt, at which it would be proper for Bradnack to withdraw.

‘I’ve always taken an interest, now, in the bathing figures.’

‘Have you, indeed?’ Petticate supposed, for a moment, that Bradnack was referring to those exiguously clad beauties who posture so insistently on the covers of vulgar magazines.

‘Very shocking, they are. Very shocking, indeed.’

‘There’s something to be said for your point of view, Sergeant, no doubt.’ Petticate was still astray.

‘Take the South Coast alone, this season. Drowning fatalities. Boating fatalities. Very high, the figures are. And it’s my belief that some of them are foul play.’

Petticate felt a now familiar sensation of slight chill.

‘It’s very possible,’ he said.

Bradnack nodded weightily.

‘That, Colonel, is just the word. It’s very very possible. It’s too easy. The wickedness of human nature being what it is. Mark my words, sir, there’s murder in some of them boats and on some of them beaches. And sometimes there’ll be no suspicion attaching. But at other times it will be otherwise. Would you happen to have seen this morning’s paper, sir?’

‘Not the part of it with – um – intelligence of that sort.’ This was true. Petticate, curiously enough, had not thought to scan those obscurer corners of his newspaper in which the discovery of drowned bodies and the like might be recorded.

‘A most suspicious case, and intensive inquiries being conducted. The body washed up in nothing but bathers, Colonel, and yet the doctor’s certain, it seems, that it was dead before it entered the water.’

Petticate’s head swam, so that Bradnack swayed before him like some vast blue weed anchored to the floor of the ocean.

‘Do they think,’ he heard himself ask hoarsely, ‘that the woman is identifiable?’

‘Not a woman, sir.’ Bradnack looked momentarily puzzled. ‘Body of a well-nourished man in middle life. Not but what that there was a woman’s body no more than ten days ago. Nibbled, it had been.’

But Petticate took no interest in a ten-day-old mortality. Indeed he took no interest in anything at the moment except his own distressing visceral sensations. He looked bemusedly round his study, until his glance fell on a side table on which stood his tantalus and glasses.

‘A whisky, Sergeant, before you go?’ He moved unsteadily in the direction of salvation, and a minute later was sitting in a deep armchair, gulping neat spirit. Sergeant Bradnack consumed his unexpected refreshment standing respectfully in the middle of the room. He was perhaps wondering whether the suggestion that he should consume a glass of beer with Hennwife still held good.

And at last he went away. Petticate sat for a long time, simply staring at his glass. Then he transferred his gaze to the tantalus, and stared at that. Presently he got up, walked over to the window, and raised a lower sash. He looked out. He was quite unobserved.

Petticate tipped the remaining contents of his glass into a flowerbed. He brought each of the three decanters from the tantalus, and did the same with them. Hennwife might suppose that he had been going it rather heavily. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he shouldn’t have recourse to the bottle whenever an awkward moment came along. Whisky, he remembered, hadn’t really helped him on board that yacht. It would help him less and less if he continued on over-familiar terms with it.

His life, he clearly saw, must now be dedicated to sober purposes. He locked up the empty decanters in their container and returned to
What Youth Desires
.

It was Mrs Hennwife who brought in Petticate’s chop at luncheon. She lingered after she had ceremoniously removed its little silver cover.

‘Excuse me, sir – but has the mistress said what she will want to have forwarded?’

‘She said that she might mention anything of the sort, Mrs Hennwife, if she happened to write.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ If Mrs Hennwife was surprised at the prospect of Mrs Petticate’s communicating with her husband being thus casually relegated to a conditional clause – and it was with the most casual ease that Petticate had expressed it that way – she didn’t show it. She did, however, a little persist. ‘I should hardly have thought that what she took with her for a sailing holiday would be enough, sir. Not for the continent and going out.’

The Hennwifes, Petticate reflected, would have to go. They hadn’t been with him very long, and they were probably reasonably indifferent to his affairs. Nevertheless trouble might lurk in their continued presence in the house. Only it wouldn’t do, of course, to fire them out now, or even to give them a month’s notice straight away. A husband who came home without his wife and then made it his first business to pack off the servants was like one heading for a principal role in some chronicle of crime. The Hennwifes must be fitted into their due place in the phased withdrawal. The phased withdrawal was a conception in which Petticate was coming to take considerable satisfaction. It suggested so reassuringly a military commander in full control of his situation.

Or did it? Petticate bit into a morsel of his chop and frowned. There was a whole military terminology devoted to covering up disaster and dismay. And words, as Hobbes said, although wise men’s counters, are the money of fools. He mustn’t let a comforting phrase take the place of hard thinking.

‘I quite agree with you,’ he said to Mrs Hennwife good- humouredly. ‘Mrs Petticate’s present outfit will take her nowhere. But I suspect her of planning to make Paris an early port of call. It is where ladies have some fondness for buying clothes, I believe.’ He laughed carelessly. ‘We shall see her coming back in great style, if you ask me. An excellent chop, by the way. But this peppermill appears to be empty.’

Mrs Hennwife, thus mildly and justly rebuked, withdrew to replenish the offending utensil with peppercorns. Petticate chuckled to himself. That had been an excellent notion about Paris. Paris, Brazil, the Bermudas, the Bahamas: he was spreading these vague and reasonable suggestions around easily and well. And the Hennwifes, although they couldn’t be got rid of as quickly as he should have liked, were really no sort of menace. Hennwife himself was extremely stupid, and Mrs Hennwife was the estimable sort of menial who appeared to have no lively interests apart from the efficient discharge of her duties.

Petticate found the peppermill set down in front of him. But once more Mrs Hennwife failed to withdraw.

‘Excuse me, sir, but I have thought it best to tidy up a little in the mistress’ room.’

‘Quite right, Mrs Hennwife. I knew I had no need to suggest it.’ For some reason Petticate’s prescient heart had sunk as he made this gracious speech. He knew instinctively that he was in trouble again. It was really astonishing how a situation like his – a situation undeniably of some little delicacy – sharpened the wits. With deliberate care, he gave a half-turn to the top of the peppermill.

‘The mistress’ passport, sir. I noticed it lying on her bedroom bureau. I had wondered if it shouldn’t be forwarded, sir.’

‘Ah yes. Just put it on my desk, will you?’ Petticate quickly took a larger chunk of chop. It would serve to occupy him until he decided what next to say – or whether to say anything.

He and Sonia had gone off without any intention of crossing the Channel or putting in at French ports. She had no doubt meant to take her passport, just in case. That, in fact, was precisely what he himself had done. But at the last moment, she must have forgotten hers. The crucial question was simple. Did Mrs Hennwife – or her husband, since she would presumably hand on this information to him – understand the full significance of the forgotten document? He had been representing Sonia to everybody – vaguely but at the same time definitely – as being already abroad. And she couldn’t be abroad. Her passport was still here at home.

‘I think, Mrs Hennwife, that I’ll have my coffee in the study, if you don’t mind. And remind me at tea-time – will you? – about that passport. I might as well catch the post with it.’