The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

proceeded from some muddle unworthy of him – and get to work upon the details of his new and entirely rational proposal. For there could be no doubt as to the necessity of the thing. Sonia’s present conduct was incompatible with anything other than some plan for his utter exposure and confusion.
    He had no time, in fact, to spare. And there was just a possibility, he thought, that Sonia, who like himself would be travelling first-class, might be discovered in a compartment by herself. Perhaps, having located her, he could simply rush in, hurl open the door at the farther end of the compartment, and pitch her through it – That would almost certainly do the trick, since they must be travelling at over sixty miles an hour.
    It was an excellent plan, because an utterly simple one. Then he realized, with a shock of dismay, that it had been conceived by a mind fatally behind the times. Railway coaches such as these no longer had doors at the farther side; their only mode of egress was through the corridor. And unless, as was most unlikely, Sonia had a whole coach to herself, bundling her first into the corridor and then through another door on to the permanent way would simply not be feasible.
    Petticate sat down – it was again a disagreeable thing to do – and reviewed other methods of killing a vigorous woman such as Sonia. The one course he must avoid – and he saw this with perfect clarity – was that of relying upon any of those methods which were peculiarly within the scope of his own profession. It must not – decidedly it must not – be anything that could be called a doctor’s murder.
    Surprisingly in one whose mental processes were normally so acute, Colonel Petticate spent a good fifteen minutes in these lethal reveries. In fact the train was already running into Reading before it dawned on him that all these drastic thoughts were needless. Why ever should he murder poor old Sonia? Surely all that was necessary was to insist that she was off her head? For he had himself, so far, said and done nothing at all which could be taken to bear out the unlikely story she would have to tell.
    It was true that he had arrived back in port without her and said nothing. But if she had been, say, in some state of evident emotional disturbance, and had insisted on being somewhere set quietly ashore, his subsequent conduct could only be read as having been thoroughly discreet. Of course there would be difficulties. It was going to be embarrassing to have Sonia running round with such an extraordinary yarn. And if she persisted in it, and he found it necessary to have the poor soul confined in a mental hospital, it would scarcely be possible to carry out his engaging plan of writing all the new Sonia Waywards himself. If, on the other hand, Sonia thought better of her plan of public denunciation, it was unlikely that she would be willing to have much to do with him in future – or even to support him in the station of life to which he was accustomed.
    So perhaps, after all, and despite the fact that there could be no legal case against him, he had better proceed as planned. A fire? A car accident? He could not be certain that Sonia had not already told her story to someone. It was a possibility that made his task a peculiarly delicate one.
    The people on that yacht . Suddenly, and with a fresh chill of dismay, Petticate realized that he had been leaving them fatally out of account. Whatever story he told must be made to square with the fact that they had veritably fished Sonia out of the sea. And this, when he came to ponder it, just couldn’t be done. Accident might have taken Sonia overboard. Or she might have jumped into the sea as a first expression of the lunacy which subsequently prompted her to a baseless charge against her husband. But nothing could account for that husband’s keeping quiet about it and giving out that his wife had simply departed on some sort of holiday. Nothing whatever.
    Petticate saw that he