The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  ‘Ah, good evening,’ he said, in a cordial but officer-to-man voice. ‘Have we much of a drive in front of us?’

  ‘Nothing very out of the way, sir. Would that be your gear?’ The chauffeur indicated Honeybath’s suitcase and artist’s paraphernalia on the floor of the studio. ‘They’ll go very well in the boot, sir, and be quite safe there.’

  ‘Excellent. Do please bring them out. And the door simply closes behind you.’ Honeybath had been visited by a brilliant idea, and one making evident how promisingly there lurked in him the spirit of private detection. He would nip out before this fellow, appear to take an aimless half a dozen paces up and down the pavement, and thereby contrive to acquaint himself with the registration number of the waiting car.

  ‘Thank you, sir. But I’ll make you comfortable first.’ The chauffeur stood aside for Honeybath and then – as it were shoulder to shoulder – conducted him to a rear door of the vehicle. ‘If you will be so good, sir,’ he said as he opened it. He might have been a barber of the superior sort, inviting a customer to his seat.

  With automatic docility, Honeybath climbed in. The evening was mild, but he hadn’t sat down before the chauffeur was enveloping him in a large and opulent fur rug. Then he shut the door and turned back for the luggage. Honeybath, with a feeling which was for the moment almost one of good-natured amusement, realized that he had lost that trick. The chauffeur commanded confidence – at least to the extent that, unlike Mr Peach, he appeared to be exactly what he was. But it was clear enough that he, too, had his instructions. And he had been much too smart for that one about the registration number.

  The car, although not of the kind paraded in the interest of prestige and conspicuous expenditure, was large and of the formally conceived sort. The passengers, that is to say, sat in a big glass box and the driver in a little glass box, and communication between the two was by means of some acoustic device which a more rational disposition of things would have rendered unnecessary. Honeybath realized that the prospects of informative chat were not too good.

  He could, on the other hand, at least look around undisturbed. The chauffeur could scarcely suggest blindfolding him, or throw a blanket over his head in the manner favoured by the police when conducting hither or thither some unfortunate individual who has been helping them with their inquiries. Nor did the car have blinds all round, since that was an amenity which had gone out more or less with dear old Queen Mary. Honeybath, who knew his London very well, had little doubt that he could retain a pretty sound knowledge of where this wild-goose affair was taking him. He settled himself comfortably in his seat. The chauffeur was stowing his stuff in the back. It was observable that he took even more care of Honeybath’s professional equipment than of his merely diurnal baggage. This showed tact. It even showed something like refined feeling. A slight sense of personal importance stole over Honeybath. He was glad that it had occurred to him to pack his dinner-jacket. Odd as this affair was, it might nevertheless be bringing him into the company of people with civilized habits.

  The chauffeur took his seat, and the car moved off. Nothing could be easier, Honeybath told himself, than to keep an eye on the route. At the moment it looked very much as if the fellow was making for Millbank. This was something which Honeybath himself, when setting out from his studio, would do only if he was proposing to cross Lambeth Bridge. There was the possibility, however, that the car was going to proceed very deviously to its destination, and eventually plunge into some obscure quarter which there was almost no chance of his knowing about. But this, on the whole, seemed unlikely; they could scarcely be proposing to put him up for a fortnight (and even supply the services of quite a good cook) in a South or East London slum. And if he did lose his bearings for a time, couldn’t he simply command the chauffeur to stop at a tobacconist’s, or something of that kind? He could then manage a swift reconnaissance, or at least ask the man in the shop for his bearings. The chauffeur, presumably, would hardly risk disobeying so small an injunction; to do so would be to be putting his passenger too nakedly under duress.

  But how, in the first instance, did one communicate with the chauffeur? The answer seemed to lie in a microphone-like contraption which depended from a bracket on Honeybath’s right hand. He picked it up, and at once a small informative light went on at the top of it.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked of this thing.

  ‘Yes, sir – for so long as you hold the instrument. Can I be of any assistance to you?’

  ‘No, no – nothing of the kind. It has just occurred to me to ask you whether you happen to know if Chelsea won their match.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Two-Nil.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Honeybath replaced the microphone, and reflected with satisfaction that he had extracted at least some information from the fellow. Not precisely relevant information. But it was a start. He sank back again on his seat, and as he did so he pushed away the fur rug. It was a good deal too hot in the car, and he must by no means turn drowsy. He decided to lower a window and let in some fresh air. But the windows appeared to be unprovided with the ordinary sort of crank for this purpose. Probably the job was done by some totally unnecessary electrical push-button affair. It was with the irritation of the artist in the face of pretentious and trivial technology that Honeybath again picked up the microphone. ‘These windows,’ he demanded, ‘–how do they open and shut?’

  ‘Full air-conditioning in the interior, sir. Do you require a little more warmth?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. It’s much too hot as it is.’

  ‘The small red illuminated arrow in front of you, sir. Turn it to point at the small blue light, and you will get cooler air at once.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Honeybath once more replaced the microphone, and then located the red illuminated arrow. He rotated the switch within which it glowed until it duly pointed at the small blue light. It was an idiotic performance, he reflected, and one could only be alarmed that the sort of people who bought this kind of car must be of a mental age of round about twelve. Fantasies of space travel were what such gimmicks catered for.

  But at least the affair was efficient. Cool air blew in at once – so that Honeybath fleetingly registered the thought that he was going to be much more alert to his situation than he had been moments before. But the cool air had two odd properties. It had a faint smell. And it seemed to turn cold, not cool, as it touched his face.

  And this was Charles Honeybath’s last discovery about the limousine (as it was probably called) transporting him to the residence (as it had been styled) of Mr X. He was comfortably unconscious for the rest of the journey.

  ‘Enjoyed your nap, sir?’ the chauffeur asked solicitously. He was assisting Honeybath up a flight of steps. The last thing of which Honeybath had been aware was a smell – and very far down in him now was an unslumbering intelligence which again made an appeal to his nose. Here, briefly, was open air again. Town air, or country air? The question itself was an achievement. Unfortunately Honeybath’s nose returned no answer at all. He was feeling relaxed, confused, and ever so slightly sick. ‘This door, sir,’ he heard the chauffeur say.

  ‘Odd little room.’ Honeybath made this comment without displeasure, and as the most simple observation upon his immediate surroundings.

  ‘Not a room, sir. An elevator.’ The chauffeur spoke kindly, without the faintest hint of mockery. ‘I believe you’ll find your quarters very comfortable. And I’ll see to it they have up your gear in no time.’ And the chauffeur, whose peaked cap was respectfully in his hand, touched a button – one more button – and sliding doors smoothly closed on Charles Honeybath. It was the kind of lift which harbours no chink to peer through, and the acceleration and de-acceleration of which is so exquisitely controlled that gravity, baffled, delivers no message at all. Honeybath might have been ascending to the top of a skyscraper. Or he might simply have been going up one storey.

  Thus for some moments in solitude and unobserved, he had one of his brilliant ideas. He
didn’t know where he’d been brought, but he could at least work out how long the drive had taken. He glanced swiftly at his watch. Its hands pointed to seven o’clock. He knew perfectly well that he couldn’t have been asleep or unconscious for nearly ten hours. The watch had been monkeyed with – and presumably while still on his wrist. He felt a novel sensation which he was constrained to identify as fear. His life had been sheltered; it is probable that he hadn’t been thus visited since his first week at private school. The feeling passed.

  The doors of the lift opened upon what polite writers used to call an impassive manservant. He might have been the chauffeur’s elder brother. His clothes were inky (but the word invites misunderstanding; rather, they were inken), and he conveyed the semi-obliterated effect, the air of preserving inviolable at some remote depth everything not required of him as a consequence of his menial employment, which is the special quality of superior domestics.

  ‘May I show you to your room, sir?’ The man accompanied this question with a bow so restrained that it might have been offered by one diplomat to another on the most frigid of international occasions. It seemed to Honeybath that one thing was clear: whatever he was involved in was genuinely a high-life affair. The theory of the practical joke or wager briefly recurred to him. He had become the pawn of people so incredibly self-confident and arrogant and wealthy that they thought nothing of chucking away a very large sum of money in the interest of a tiresome and perhaps humiliating jape. And ‘jape’ was precisely the word: it had the right Edwardian ring.

  This thought, although not agreeable, at least offered a measure of reassurance. By plunging in rather than backing out he had at least not put himself to any major hazard – as he might have done, for example, had he with a similar regardlessness placed himself within the power of a solitary madman. Apart from Mr X himself, there could be no question of serious madness, whether harmless or otherwise, significantly involved. Even if Peach and the chauffeur and this suave major-domo were all crooks (which was a most extravagant supposition), they could scarcely have bound themselves to the service of a wealthy maniac. The practical joke might, of course, later reveal itself as having some thoroughly nasty edge; in (again) the Edwardian era, as during the Regency, such things used sometimes to take a sadistic rather than a merely malicious turn. But this was surely an unnecessarily alarmist view. He might be put in a reputedly haunted room and harried by bogus ghosts: something of that kind. He was unlikely to be beaten senseless, or hunted by savage dogs, or chucked into a bottomless well.

  Whether these were comforting reflections or not, they didn’t remain with Honeybath for long. The manservant had opened a door, and was standing aside for him to enter. Here was his room.

  He didn’t much take to it. It was large, and in several ways hinted itself to his experienced eye as belonging to a substantial mansion of the Georgian period. The décor was expensive, and the furniture – bedroom-like at one end and with a lavish effect of sitting-around ease at the other – was expensive too. It would have been unjust to say that, either as a whole or in its parts, anything but good taste was evident. But it was impersonal good taste – which is almost a contradiction in terms. It had all been put together by somebody who made his living that way. And Honeybath had seen it – had seen the identical kind of thing, that is – before. It was what you found in a country house which has been taken over by some great industrial corporation and refurbished regardless of cost for the lavish entertainment of top-ranking foreign customers. If it was really something of this kind that he had stumbled upon – he reflected without much satisfaction – then Peach’s ‘quite a good cook’ was likely to prove a considerable understatement.

  ‘May I ask, sir, whether you have already dined?’

  ‘Yes, certainly I have.’ Honeybath had emerged from his perplexed cogitations with a start.

  ‘Would you care to have a light supper served here in your room?’

  ‘Thank you, no – nothing of the kind.’ Honeybath had now spotted, on a table at the far end of the room, an array of bottles and decanters which were too numerous to look quite in place, but which suggested comfort, all the same.

  ‘Your bathroom, sir.’ The man had discreetly opened a farther door. His tone politely deprecated the tenuousness of Honeybath’s material needs. ‘Mr Arbuthnot has asked me to say that he will look in during the next quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Mr Arbuthnot?’ No doubt absurdly, Honeybath was almost startled at hearing a proper name thus enunciated. He would have expected ‘Mr Y’ or ‘Mr Z’.

  ‘Yes, sir. He will wish to assure himself that you have had a comfortable journey. And I will myself wish you good night.’

  The manservant withdrew, closing the door with professional noiselessness behind him. Honeybath wondered whether he had locked it as well. But he didn’t, for the moment, try to find out. Instead, he walked over to the drinks and grabbed the brandy. It was certainly an occasion for that.

  4

  The brandy was not of the sort into which ice should be chucked and soda water splashed, but Honeybath nevertheless performed these actions. It comforted him to behave as one might behave in a hotel at the end of a tiresome day. He even frowned in displeasure that the brandy and everything else was not – as one expects it to be in a high-category hotel nowadays – neatly stored in one’s private refrigerator.

  He turned, glass in hand, to take a better look at his room, and his first discovery was a Monet hanging opposite the bed. He was in a good deal startled. Claude Monet lived for eighty-six years, and during seventy of them he painted like mad. The world’s Monets are therefore very numerous indeed. But even more numerous are those individuals and institutions eager to have top Impressionists on their walls (or in their yachts). Monets are thus extremely costly. Honeybath was confirmed in the persuasion that he had mysteriously become the prisoner of some vast corporation: Shell, perhaps, or ICI, or General Motors – something like that. The Monet represented nebulous water-lilies in an indeterminate pool. Honeybath contemplated it in some gloom. Here he was, fixated for good in mid-career with disgusting fleshy objects – of which Mr X would presently prove to be a banal example. Young Monet had broken away from all that – or, rather, he had just refused to take up with it. Finally, he had simply cultivated his garden – his own water-garden, in the most literal sense – and there was nothing wrong with his lilies except that they were a good deal larger than life. To refuse to be more than an eye or to paint anything except light: these have been the inspired means of becoming a swell in the 1870s. Some equivalent inspiration was doubtless just round the corner a hundred years later. But it wouldn’t be Charles Honeybath who would discover it.

  These were reflections irrelevant to his present situation, and it struck him he would be better employed looking not at the Monet but out of the window. Or out of either of the windows, since the room had two of these in one of its longer walls. Curtains falling from ceiling to floor were now drawn across them, and probably concealed embrasures of some depth. He crossed the room to the nearer window and slipped behind the curtain. He could now just distinguish a lowered blind. Groping for its cord, he let the blind up gently. He was gazing into darkness. Unless what was before him was the well of an unlit building, it seemed certain that he was in the depth of the countryside. He looked upward. A few stars were visible, but nothing of the glow which London projects upon the night sky. But nearer what must be the line of the horizon he could distinguish, as his vision accommodated itself to the nocturnal scene, dim masses of deeper darkness which he knew could only be trees. it seemed probable that, from the elevation of at least a second storey, he was looking out over a park. And there wasn’t a sound. With traffic as it was nowadays, it seemed improbable that there could be a main road within miles.

  Then suddenly there was a sound, although it didn’t come from a car or lorry. What Honeybath heard was the characteristic racket, not easy to describe, of a fast-moving train: a muted clatter as of innu
merable far-away doors rattling in a wind. The sound increased, and now – straight ahead – there appeared a streak of light like a fiery spear skimming the ground. The sound grew louder still and the stream of light grew brighter: against it could be seen in silhouette the trunks of trees hurtling by. A moment more, and the whole phenomenon had faded – but there could be no doubt that a railway-line ran surprisingly close to what Peach had liked to call Mr X’s residence.

  There was again complete silence outside. Honeybath decided if possible to open the window in front of him – this in order to peer out and determine his height above the ground. But to manage this he had to see what he was about, and it thus became necessary to turn round, draw back the curtain, and admit adequate light to the restricted area within which he stood. The action, when achieved, was of unexpected effect. He found himself face to face with an elderly man in evening-dress, who had apparently been about to perform the same operation on the curtain from its other side. What is called in stage parlance a discovery had thus been achieved simultaneously by both parties.

  ‘My dear Mr Honeybath, how do you do?’ The stranger had extended a cordial but not over-eager hand. ‘I am Basil Arbuthnot. How good of you to have fallen in with our plans so handsomely. And to have come straight away! You must have had to drop all sorts of important things. It has really been quite beyond our expectation. We are most grateful.’

  Mr Arbuthnot delivered himself of all this without the least effect of haste or of the garrulous. He had a small pointed beard turning grey; his smoking-jacket was an affair of faded maroon velvet and dim maroon silk; he would have looked very well if posed against a baronial background in the interest of one of the more expensive brands of malt whisky.