Read Online The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

This woman was not, like Sonia and Mrs Gotlop, a lady. On the other hand she was not hopelessly plebeian. She had been, perhaps, in some position which had enabled her to draw profit from the observation of her betters and could no doubt cut a genteel figure for a time if she tried – which, for the present, she was too excited to do.
    Petticate felt a returning flicker of confidence. It was no doubt the result of this perception of his own superior social station. And the woman’s words, he suddenly saw, were susceptible of a harmless, a merely vulgar, interpretation. She had been insinuating that his sitting down beside her on the excuse of a mistaken identification had been a subterfuge for the purpose of making some improper proposal. She thought that he had been ‘picking her up’.
    Most naturally, the delicacy of Colonel Petticate was outraged by such an imputation. But at the same time, of course, he was vastly relieved. For a moment, he had believed that he was hearing something with a decidedly sinister ring. That had been nonsense. The extraordinary circumstance of the woman’s close likeness to Sonia had disturbed his judgement. All that was now needed was a display of dignity.
    ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I regret this incident, which is doubtless liable to misconstruction. I renew my apologies. And now you will permit me to withdraw.’
    The woman was not impressed.
    ‘Your wife’s dead,’ she said. ‘And well you know it.’
    Petticate perceived – rather as drowning men are said to perceive irrelevant things – that an attendant of whose existence he had been unaware had set before him a pot of tea, a tea-cake, a slice of buttered toast, a piece of white bread and butter, a piece of brown bread and butter, and a large cream bun. The man was now officiously pushing towards him a contraption filled with miniature pots of jam. Petticate looked at this coarse abundance rather as the condemned murderer must look at his boiled egg. Fantastic speculations flitted uselessly through his head. Perhaps Sonia had a younger sister of whom he had never heard. Perhaps that younger sister had happened to be on board that second yacht. And perhaps this was she – armed with Sonia’s story, and subjecting him to fiendish torture. Or perhaps…
    ‘Your wife’s dead,’ the woman was repeating. ‘And it’s my belief you drowned her.’
    Instinct prompted Petticate to pour himself out a cup of tea. He took a scalding gulp of it.
    ‘You had better be careful what you’re saying,’ he managed to articulate. And he added: ‘Talk of that sort is best conducted in private.’ He had seized upon the wild thought that this woman with her fiend-like knowledge could perhaps be bought off.
    ‘We’ve heard of that sort of heart attack before, haven’t we? And it’s meant the rope for some of them that said they found the body.’
    Petticate took a second gulp of tea. Inevitably, it scalded worse than the first.
    ‘I didn’t drown my wife,’ he said – and reflected that never could a true statement have sounded so like a miserable lie. ‘I swear I didn’t.’
    ‘Grabbed her by the ankles,’ the woman said. ‘You read about these things in the Sundays, don’t you? No end of times. And tipped her up in the bath.’
    For a moment Petticate supposed this last astounding word to represent a piece of slang – as when the sea is sometimes referred to as the big drink. But the invoking of the Sunday newspapers was definitive. He gave a long painful gasp.
    ‘You think,’ he asked, ‘that I drowned my wife in her bath?’
    ‘Oh, I know it’s not what they said at the inquest–’Enry ’Iggins.’ The woman looked abashed. ‘Henry Higgins, I mean.’
    Once more the train did its derailment act.
    ‘What did you call me?’ he gasped.
    ‘Never mind what I called you. I’m not ashamed of coming from a humble home, I can tell you. There are worse things to be ashamed of than that, aren’t there? You ought to know.