Honeybath's Haven by Michael Innes

man actually produced was an innocuous silk handkerchief. With this he dabbed in a ritual manner at his brow.
    â€˜Warm day,’ he said. ‘How do you do? My name is Brown.’ He was keeping a careful eye on Honeybath’s hands. ‘Brown,’ he repeated a little more loudly – much as if prompted to refute a false persuasion on Honeybath’s part that his name was in fact Green or Gray. ‘Seen you here before, I think?’ Mr Brown said. ‘Just calling in? No more than that?’
    â€˜Precisely so. My name is Honeybath, and I am merely visiting afriend.’ Honeybath glanced at the aviary, which at least suggested a conversational resource. ‘Are you fond of birds?’ he asked.
    â€˜Never see one now.’ Mr Brown spoke with sudden gloom. ‘Or not under sixty or thereabout.’
    â€˜Ah, is that so?’ For a moment Honeybath was a little at sea, and he even reflected that members of the parrot family are notably long-lived. When the force of Mr Brown’s colloquialism came home to him, however, he recalled the gardener’s informing him that the man with the Panama hat was one of the shy ones. Presumably Brown had been explaining that this disability lay particularly heavily upon him in regard to young female persons. But since this appeared not a suitable subject for discussion with an acquaintance of only a couple of minutes’ standing Honeybath became more explicit. ‘You must have got to know those parakeets quite well,” he said. ‘If, as I imagine, this is a favourite haunt of yours.’
    â€˜Quite right,’ Mr Brown said emphatically. ‘Peaceful creatures, aren’t they? Birds of a feather, you might say. And yet never so much as a peck or a scratch between them.’
    â€˜Is that so?’ It might have been said that Honeybath hadn’t quite followed that argument here. ‘They look well cared for and comfortable,’ he offered vaguely.
    â€˜Just that.’ Mr Brown was emphatic once more. ‘Just like they’d been nicked, in a manner of speaking. Not that all them that are inside are that. Comfortable, perhaps – although the food is cruelly uninteresting at times. But no security that would set a man’s mind at rest. Believe you me, anything can happen at any time, once a man’s inside. You needn’t even have grassed – or nothing to speak of.’
    â€˜Most interesting.’ Honeybath, a man of acute perception, realized that Mr Brown must be commenting on conditions obtaining in Her Majesty’s prisons. It was again a peculiar topic of conversation, and the more so because of a certain air with which Mr Brown delivered himself of it. He spoke with entire ease, and as one perfectly conversant with the canons observed in what might be called upper-class chitchat. But there was undeniably something socially anomalous in Mr Brown. Was he one who had risen from below the middle station of life to sudden affluence, perhaps by winning an enormous ‘dividend’ on the pools? Had he done this, opted for the genteel idleness of Hanwell Court, and taken some random and uncertain steps (such as buying a supply of Panama hats) in living up to his new station? But if this was so, why was he drawn to topics unlikely to be of much concern to the law-abiding sections of society? And why was his idiom almost obtrusively that of the imperfectly educated? He undoubtedly counted as an inmate, since Honeybath had once or twice glimpsed him in the interior of the house when making previous visits to Lightfoot. Was it possible – this really brilliant idea came to Honeybath like a flash – that Brown was another sufferer from Flannel Foot disease, a perfectly respectable citizen gaining some perverse satisfaction from hinting a background in low life and criminal practice? Was it even conceivable that Edwin had put him up to it, had passed on the Flannel Foot game to a new