The Mysterious Commission by Michael Innes

approaching from that direction too. But the sound didn’t increase. It rapidly faded. He turned round. Mr Arbuthnot’s car and Mr Arbuthnot’s chauffeur, together with the personal and professional effects of Charles Honeybath RA, were vanishing into distance, swallowed up by the night.

 
     
PART TWO
    KEYBIRD INVESTIGATES
     

 
     
8
     
    Honeybath decided to contact the police. It wasn’t a necessary decision; it mayn’t even have been a wise one. He was in no sense badly stuck or stranded. There really was a main road close by; and anybody prepared to stop and take him to a police station would presumably have been equally willing to take him to a garage. He had money in his pocket (an embarrassingly large amount of it, although he didn’t think of this), and in no time he could have hired himself a Rolls Royce had he a mind to it. The truth is that he chose to search out the local police because he was feeling uncommonly vindictive.
    He had been dismissed from his recent employment, it appeared to him, with precisely the equivalent of a mocking guffaw and a contemptuous kick in the pants. He told himself (but he was wrong in this) that there was no reason at all why those people, without the slightest risk to themselves, should not have returned him to his studio exactly as they had brought him away from it. Playing this final trick on him was a gratuitous impertinence. The fact that they had handed him the balance of his promised fee, when they could perfectly well have cheated him of it, was a consideration which somehow merely added to his sense of insult. He waved quite furiously at one or two disregarding and obviously unsuitable vehicles.
    And then a police car actually came along. It wasn’t an imposing affair; in fact it was no more than a small dun-coloured van. But it did have on its roof one of those reassuring revolving blue lights. It drew to a halt at once upon Honeybath’s waving at it.
    ‘Yes, sir. Can I be of any help to you?’ The constable at the wheel was reassuring too. Spend a fortnight in irregular and outrageous captivity, and any policeman will probably strike you like that.
    ‘I want to be taken to the nearest police station. I have something serious to report. Is it far away?’
    ‘Only a couple of miles, sir, and I’m on the way there now.’ The constable politely opened a door, saw Honeybath seated beside him, and drove on. ‘Becoming quite chilly,’ he said. He didn’t seem particularly impressed or curious.
    ‘It’s to be expected at this time of year.’ Honeybath had decided against immediately pouring out his story to this rather stolid-seeming officer. Come to think of it, it was rather an odd and complex story – if indeed it was a story at all. What you reported to the police were burglaries, assaults, public nuisances, stolen cars, missing persons. Honeybath didn’t really have anything in these categories to complain about. Nothing at all had really happened to him – he suddenly saw – that the law would be prepared to take an interest in. He was making a fool of himself. And his only grievance was that he himself had lately been made a fool of.
    But he could hardly tell this fellow that he had changed his mind, and that all he wanted was useful advice on how to get himself back to London in comfort. He sat back in the little van to consider his problem. The result was immediately alarming: nothing less than something warm and wet curling itself round his throat. He produced a yell – a half-strangled yell, because of the nature of this embrace – and managed to turn round a little in his seat. An enormous and slavering Alsatian dog was gazing at him reproachfully – clearly hurt in its mind that a demonstration of affection had been misinterpreted.
    ‘Don’t mind Radar, sir,’ the constable said soothingly. ‘It’s only villains Radar has it in for. He won’t harm you .’
    ‘Radar?’ Honeybath said stupidly. He had been absurdly discomposed.