The Mysterious Commission Read Online Free PDF Page B

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