Stone of Destiny by Ian Hamilton

business could bring yet another caller to the hotel at this hour of the morning. Truly, we thought, this was not at all the type of hotel for a lady to stay in.
    Meanwhile, in the hotel, Kay had left her door slightly ajar. Suddenly she heard downstairs the soft single ring as a telephone receiver was lifted. The voice of the hotel manager was so faint that she could make out only a word or two, but it was enough to convince her that he was telephoning the police.
    She dressed hurriedly, not knowing what was amiss, but fearful that something had happened to put us in danger. Before she was able to warn us, the front door opened and the man we had already seen passed in.
    She listened intently, and was able to piece together what was going on. The landlord, suspicious of us and of the telephone call at 3 a.m., had telephoned the police, since he believed that we had put Kay into the hotel while we went to commit some crime. He was not an unobservant man.
    Outside, we continued to laugh and joke rather uneasily. Then the door opened and the stranger came straight down the steps towards us. He flashed a Metropolitan Police warrant card under my nose.
    ‘I’m a detective,’ he said.
    My stomach convulsed and my palms sweated. There is nothing like a guilty conscience for giving you a feeling of guilt.
    ‘Do you mind if I take some details?’ he continued, going to the top of his list of rhetorical questions.
    ‘Of course,’ I said, meaning the opposite. ‘Is there anything wrong?’
    ‘Only routine,’ he replied. ‘Can I see your driving licence?’
    I fished it out and gave it to him. He took down my name and address.
    ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked, rather testily. The jemmy in my pocket seemed as big as a tree trunk.
    ‘You realise,’ he said, ‘that this is Christmas Eve, and thousands of people are in the West End with no transport to take them home?’
    ‘I dare say,’ I said. ‘But I’m not lending them my car.’
    ‘As it is, several hundred cars have already been stolen.’ He looked at me. I stared back coldly.
    ‘What is the number of your car?’
    He emphasised the words ‘is’ and ‘your’ just sufficiently to let me see that he thought I had stolen the car.
    Like a fool I had forgotten to memorise the number. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I hired it.’
    His questions got more and more difficult, as I could give him neither the name nor the address of the garage it came from. That had been Gavin’s part of the preparations, and although he sat just round the corner I did not want to refer the detective to him, lest he should take Gavin’s name and the number of the Anglia also.
    The detective was not impressed. He turned from me and blew a short blast on his whistle, and waved to someone unseen up the road. As though it had come straight out of an American film, a large police car appeared from nowhere and drew up diagonally across my bonnet.
    I turned on the righteous indignation of the innocent citizen whose liberty is being infringed by the state.
    ‘I’ve read Dicey,’ I said. ‘I’ve read Bagehot. I’ve even read Blackstone and the Road Traffic Acts. And not one of them says that the citizen must know the number of the car he’s driving.’
    At this recital of the English classicists the policeman became more polite and more insistent. Kay at this moment came out ofthe hotel, and began confirming everything I said. She looked as though she were ready to leap forward and bite the detective on the leg if he were not very careful.
    At last I saw that our arguments were making him exasperated. We wanted at all costs to avoid being run in on suspicion of car theft. Even if we could prove our innocence of that charge, there was the jemmy in my pocket, and a torn padlock at Westminster that would set people thinking.
    ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘There’s a man sitting round the corner in a Ford Anglia car who can prove everything I’m saying. He’s got the car hire receipt.