The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes Page B

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 .

 
     
2
    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