The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

was it Sonia’s ghost? – was within a few yards of him now. Still with his eyes closed, Petticate set his mind painfully to work. Not a ghost – because there is no such thing. And not a hallucination. He could give himself no reason for knowing this – but he did know it, all the same. There had been real flesh and blood in the corridor. It was the real Sonia. She was on her way home.
    But it was impossible, he told himself. And then, in an instantaneous flash that brought simultaneously a rush of horror and of relief, he saw the entirely naturalistic, the perfectly rational truth of the matter. The Sonia who had seemed to sink forever beneath the waters of the English Channel had not been dead but alive. He had been too cocksure, too confident of his sadly rusty medical expertness. Almost, he had been aware of that at the time. And now real professional knowledge came back to him. He remembered cases of trance, of suddenly induced coma, of which he had read. When that sort of thing happened – and it did happen, although admittedly it was rare – only tests far more searching than he had applied could distinguish between the resulting suspended animation and actual death. That was it!
    But, even so…? And then he recalled the other yacht. He had been very shaky, and the sight of that unexpected yacht so close at hand had pretty well finished him for the time. He had staggered into the cabin, and anything might have happened after that. Probably the shock of her sudden immersion had brought Sonia back to consciousness. And, knowing what he had done, she had managed to attract the attention of that other craft, and had been taken on board it. Then she had persuaded its owners to sail straight on. She had done that because she was already nursing some diabolical scheme of revenge.
    The sudden glimpse of this extreme wickedness in Sonia upset Petticate even more violently than the first shock of her return had done. From head to foot, he suddenly discovered himself to be bathed in an icy sweat. And Gregrory was looking at him in that queer way again. He found he couldn’t stand it. He staggered to his feet.
    ‘Just going along the corridor,’ he muttered almost incoherently. And then he escaped from the compartment.
    Petticate stumbled down the corridor with his senses in considerable disorder. Far on his left hand, he was perfectly aware of the silhouette of Windsor Castle against the skyline. But on the persons seated immediately behind the plate-glass on his right, his vision refused to give him any intelligible report. He was clearly too apprehensive of what he might glimpse there. Probably he had been rash to emerge from his own compartment. If Sonia saw him – as, almost certainly, she had not done when she tumbled into the train – it might precipitate a crisis. It might bring about at once an appalling public exposure, which otherwise he might yet find some means of avoiding. His best plan would be to lock himself into the nearest lavatory and think .
    Petticate did this. It was a resource altogether distasteful to his refined sensibilities – the more so when people came and rattled at the door. Such behaviour in first-class passengers – if they were first-class passengers – struck him as unseemly if not positively immoral. He stood by the window and peered through the little oval of clear glass, set high in the pane, which was all that the modesty of this apartment permitted by way of glimpse of the outer world.
    He had better, he thought, murder Sonia.
    The abrupt emergence of this idea occasioned Petticate great dismay. Here was the logical course to pursue – and yet only a few minutes ago the emotion which knowledge of his wife’s continued existence prompted in him had been one of vast relief! It was evident that he was in some state of intellectual confusion. There was, of course, nothing that he more disliked. He had better forget about that feeling of relief – which had demonstrably