The Mysterious Commission by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

themselves as to whether he was actually already dead or not. That’s their charming way, no doubt. And he wasn’t dead.’
    ‘He unburied himself?’
    ‘The job was done for him by a pack of jackals, or hyenas, or obliging creatures of that sort. And then he crawled for hundreds of miles. Finally–’
    ‘You can spare me the finality, Mr Arbuthnot.’ Honeybath was rather pleased with this. ‘It became expedient that dead it should continue to be?’
    ‘Just so. You are admirably quick, my dear Honeybath.’
    ‘And he is admirably dead to this moment?’
    ‘Alas, yes. It had to be so. There were considerations of high policy, of very high policy. And remember that his mind was irrevocably darkened. It was obvious that the remainder of his days must be passed in total seclusion. So the course adopted was really the most humane thing. Inevitably, however, his nearest and dearest had to know – and to arrange for caring for him. But it’s really no burden. You’ll find him a most charming old man.’ Arbuthnot paused. He evidently felt that he was concluding on a truly sunny note. ‘By the way, would you care for a hot-water bottle? There is, of course, an electric blanket of the thermostatic kind. But some prefer the old-fashioned thing. I confess I do myself.’ Arbuthnot rose gracefully to his feet. ‘And I’ve kept you up far too long. Believe me, I do apologize.’
     
    Honeybath hadn’t needed a hot-water bottle. He didn’t need the thermostatic blanket either. The whole bedroom was a damned sight too thermostatic. It was like an excessively well-appointed madhouse cell. Lying in its darkness, he came to wonder whether, when they buried him, they might not be a shade careless as to his being already dead too. More temperately, he realized that, at the end of an excessively trying day, he had been subjected for half an hour to the play of an alarmingly insolent and morbid sense of humour. He tried to persuade himself that he at least retained a certain intellectual curiosity as to what sort of person Mr X would really turn out to be. But he had to acknowledge that, through what would certainly prove to be a sleepless night, there wasn’t going to be much room in his consciousness for anything except humiliating apprehensiveness over his mere personal safety. He’d been chucked into something like an idiotic tale of terror by Edgar Allan Poe.
    Somewhere out in the night, a clock struck eleven. It might be a church clock, a stable clock: impossible to tell. There was a hitch, a muted effect – he mechanically noted – on the ninth stroke. A little later, and again with that effect of being surprisingly near at hand, a railway engine produced a rising and then swiftly declining wail. It was a Diesel engine – the sound from which is even eerier and more discomfiting in the night than used to be that from the steam engines of an earlier day. Then midnight struck, and with the same odd acoustic effect as before.
    Very unexpectedly, Charles Honeybath went to sleep after all.

 
     
5
     
    Artists tell us – or at least some artists do – that painting absolutely anything is like performing the act of love. One’s subject may be a heap of turnips or a pair of old boots, but with these one is interfusing one’s own deepest being as one works. This is perhaps a highly coloured view of the matter, and one which chiefly reflects the curiously pan-sexual slant of our modern thinking. But be this as it may, it is certainly possible for a painter, qua painter, to fall in love at first sight. That Honeybath did so – of course in a loose and figurative sense – with the strange old creature Mr X proved to be must be held to account for the fact that, after all, he settled in with tolerable satisfaction to the assignment which had so bizarrely and uncomfortably come to him.
    But even before he glimpsed Mr X, his sense of personal peril had abated. It scarcely survived, indeed, the manservant – a younger and