"Our season of summer music next week will feature--"
John Steed reached down and twisted the frequency knob on the car radio, cutting off the announcer in mid flow and searching out another station. Then he quickly decided he'd actually prefer some silence - to gather his thoughts as he drove - so stabbed the off button. He had caught the last ten minutes of the classical music hour - a show that he listened to quite regularly - and had quite enjoyed it; it had calmed him, helped him to relax.
But now the silence was, indeed, most welcome.
Steed eased off the accelerator just a touch, suddenly aware that he was driving a little bit faster than he need, and eased the Jaguar around a bend in the country road. There were still a few remaining damp patches on the windscreen and bonnet from the earlier summer downpour, but most of it had now evaporated or been blown away by the movement of the car. But he could feel the heat intensifying inside the vehicle, just as the temperature was rising slowly but surely outside: there was no doubt it was going to be quite a scorcher of a summer's day and he was thankful for the cool breeze that flushed the interior of the car now from the open driver's window; he knew that when he stopped and got out, there would be very little if any welcome breeze - it was still and hot out there.
Hopefully, he'd managed to distract and pre-occupy Gambit and Purdey on what was, to all intents and purposes, a decoy mission. Though they had no idea, of course. He would apologise when all this was over. A bonus distraction was the fact that Purdey was still raw and hurting from the death of Larry Doomer, and Gambit was suffering guilt pangs for being the one who'd actually pulled the trigger and killed Purdey's ex-lover. So, in addition to the wild goose chase he'd sent them on, the two would also - he was confident knowing what the pair were like - be pre-occupied with bathing and nursing each other's wounds. Most convenient right now.
Arriving at his destination, Steed slowed the car to a halt and turned off the ignition, pushing the automatic stick into PARK and yanking on the handbrake,
He threw open the driver's door and eased himself out of the Big Cat. He reached back inside and snatched up his umbrella from where it rested on the passenger seat. He had chosen it from his umbrella rack before leaving his stud, using his years of experience and instinct to decide which of the several specially adapted accessories it might be best to take. He'd often hoped that Q branch would come up with an "all-in-one" brolly, thereby removing the dilemma of which one to choose, but technology hadn't quite advanced so far as to enable everything he might need to be crammed into a single slender casing. So it was a case of pot luck or instinct in choosing. Or a little bit of both. It was however remarkably uncanny how - over his years with The Department - he almost always seemed to have made the right choice when it came to the crunch and the item was required for either attack, defence or some other task such as providing the housing for a microfilm camera. The same went for his bowler hats, although the choice there was, if anything, all the more wide.
Steed eased the driver's door to, instinctively reached up to adjust his bowler, then turned and headed off towards his destination.
He would be there in less than a minute.
He just hoped the meeting went according to plan, and without any nasty complications.