"Now," I went on, "here's the plan. I'll go over it until we both know it word for word."
I sketched it out as it had come to me in this strange night of lengthy explanation. Then I repeated it, and re-repeated it, until I thought it would bubble out of our ears.
And when the clock rang five, we were nearly ready to begin. But first we laid ourselves down to sleep for a few hours, till the pubs had opened again; when we arose, and put on our coats, and sallied out together to commit a murder ... a most unpleasant but most necessary murder.
CHAPTER XII
I walked out of Birmingham alone, just before noon, heading for the bombed-out old building in which I had left the Jaguar, with my Gladstone bag locked in her dickey, or rumble seat. I had not carried any baggage with me into the city except my razor, toothbrush, knife and automatic, and my pipe.
It occurs to me that, since she played nearly as useful a part in my adventures as did my human colleagues, I should perhaps devote a moment to describing my black Jaguar. I had bought her late in 1937 for a matter of some four hundred pounds, and except for the war years, which she waited out in a barn near my home in Coventry, we had been inseparable ever since. She was one of the mighty Standard Swallow 100s, with a wonderfully reliable three-and-a-half-liter engine, and as I've said, I once clocked her at a hundred and fourteen m.p.h. and believed she could do more. She would go from a standstill to eighty m.p.h. in a matter of twenty-seconds, for her acceleration was ferocious. Yet she was the smoothest-riding jade I ever owned. Her brown leather upholstery had faded through the years to a rich old tan, but her heart was as young as ever. I had lavished on her the affection that might more properly have gone to a wife or a kennel of hounds; in my lonely careering about the countryside in these last days she had amply repaid me. She had been companion and steed and confidante to a very homesick man.
It was a clear day, with a promise of sultry heat to come that prickled my body with sweat under the old tweed suit. I tramped briskly along, thinking of Marion—I thought of her whenever I could, for her sweet face shut out the menacing usurpers from my mind—until I came in sight of the wrecked building. As I swung down the hill toward it, I heard voices raised in argument.
Cautiously I slowed a little, looking nonchalant and disinterested. I walked past the ruin and from the corner of my eye saw a number of men (and monsters) clustered around the Jaguar looking at her curiously. "Aye," said one of them, "that's his, right enough. Black Jaggiar, it says here on the prints." Two of them were constables. I ambled over.