The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes

harder part of the job: the working out of what remained obscure in the basic plot. While accepting Wedge’s moral criteria, he was becoming extremely doubtful about the effectiveness of that whole business of the rowing shorts. Sonia, he felt, hadn’t been quite up to her usual mark there. Perhaps he had better turn back over that first thirty thousand words and do a little revising for her. Wouldn’t it be better, for instance, if the occasion of Claire’s apparent discovery of Timmy in a guilty relationship was in some thematic correspondence with her first vision of him? That meant getting him stripped to the buff again. So what about a midnight bathing party – with just a little more suggestion of not wholly decorous elements than Sonia commonly ran to? One must, after all, move with the times. And it was clear enough where they were moving to, so far as the traditional decencies of life and art’s mirror of life were concerned… Petticate chuckled to himself. Yes, perhaps Wedge, in the new Sonia Wayward, should be presented with something just a titillating shade new .
    Petticate, sitting in the pleasant bay window of his own small study, was happily and profitably engaged in these activities and speculations when, happening to glance up and along the garden path, he observed the approach of Sergeant Bradnack.
    He was being called on by the police.
    The front door bell rang. And a minute later Hennwife entered the study silently and with a long face.
    ‘Sergeant Bradnack, sir. A summons, I’m sorry to say.’
    Petticate stared at his butler.
    ‘Don’t you mean a warrant?’ he rather rashly asked. He regarded Hennwife as an idiot, and was always quick to correct him.
    ‘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