Ten PREPARATIONS FOR AN ACCIDENT
A week later Bobby had joined Badger¹ in London. He had received severalenigmatical communications from Frankie, most in such an illegiblescrawl that he was quite unable to do more than guess at their meaning.
However, their general purport² seemed to be that Frankie had a plan andthat he (Bobby) was to do nothing until he heard from her. This was aswell, for Bobby would certainly have had no leisure to do anything, sincethe unlucky Badger had already succeeded in embroiling³ himself and hisbusiness in every way ingenuity⁴ could suggest, and Bobby was kept busydisentangling the extraordinary mess his friend seemed to have got into.
Meanwhile, the young man remained very strictly⁵ on his guard. The ef-fect of eight grains of morphia was to render their taker extremely suspi-cious of food and drink and had also induced him to bring to London aService revolver, the possession of which was extremely irksome to him.
He was just beginning to feel that the whole thing had been an extravag-ant nightmare when Frankie’s Bentley roared down the Mews and drewup outside the garage. Bobby, in grease-stained overalls⁶, came out to re-ceive it. Frankie was at the wheel and beside her sat a rather gloomy-look-ing young man.
“Hullo, Bobby,” said Frankie. “This is George Arbuthnot. He’s a doctor,and we shall need him.”
Bobby winced⁷ slightly as he and George Arbuthnot made faint recogni-tions of each other’s presence.
“Are you sure we’re going to need a doctor?” he asked. “Aren’t you beinga bit pessimistic?”
“I didn’t mean we should need him in that way,” said Frankie. “I needhim for a scheme that I’ve got on. Look here, is there anywhere we can goand talk?”
Bobby looked round him.
“Well, there’s my bedroom,” he said doubtfully.
“Excellent,” said Frankie.

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