The Mysterious Commission Read Online Free PDF

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