The Franchise Affair Page 2

  “No, but you would be much better served by a firm who were used to police cases. A firm that—”

  “What you are trying to tell me is that this is not ‘your cup of tea’; that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “No, of course not,” Robert said hastily. “I quite honestly feel that you would be wiser—”

  “You know what I feel like?” she broke in. “I feel like someone drowning in a river because she can’t drag herself up the bank, and instead of giving me a hand you point out that the other bank is much better to crawl out on.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “But on the contrary,” Robert said, “I can provide you with an expert puller-out-of-rivers; a great improvement on my amateur self, I assure you. Benjamin Carley knows more about defending accused persons than anyone between here and—”

  “What! That awful little man with the striped suits!” Her deep voice ran up and cracked, and there was another momentary silence. “I am sorry,” she said presently in her normal voice. “That was silly. But you see, when I rang you up just now it wasn’t because I thought you would be clever about things” (” Warn’t it, indeed,” thought Robert) “but because I was in trouble and wanted the advice of someone of my own sort. And you looked my sort. Mr. Blair, do please come. I need you now. There are people from Scotland Yard here in the house. And if you feel that it isn’t something you want to be mixed up in you could always pass it on to someone else afterwards; couldn’t you? But there may be nothing after all to be mixed up in. If you would just come out here and ‘watch my interests’ or whatever you call it, for an hour, it may all pass over. I’m sure there is a mistake somewhere. Couldn’t you please do that for me?”

  On the whole Robert Blair thought that he could. He was too good-natured to refuse any reasonable appeal—and she had given him a loophole if things grew difficult. And he did not, after all, now he came to think of it, want to throw her to Ben Carley. In spite of her bêtise about striped suits he saw her point of view. If you had done something you wanted to get away with, Carley was no doubt God’s gift to you; but if you were bewildered and in trouble and innocent, perhaps Carley’s brash personality was not likely to be a very present help.

  All the same, he wished as he laid down the receiver that the front he presented to the world was a more forbidding one—Calvin or Caliban, he did not care, so long as strange females were discouraged from flinging themselves on his protection when they were in trouble.

  What possible kind of trouble could “kidnapping” be, he wondered as he walked round to the garage in Sin Lane for his car? Was there such an offence in English law? And whom could she possibly be interested in kidnapping? A child? Some child with “expectations”? In spite of the large house out on the Larborough road they gave the impression of having very little money. Or some child that they considered “ill-used” by its natural guardians? That was possible. The old woman had a fanatic’s face, if ever he saw one; and Marion Sharpe herself looked as if the stake would be her natural prop if stakes were not out of fashion. Yes, it was probably some ill-judged piece of philanthropy. Detention “with intent to deprive parent, guardian, etc., of its possession.” He wished he remembered more of his Harris and Wilshere. He could not remember off-hand whether that was a felony, with penal servitude in the offing, or a mere misdemeanour. “Abduction and Detention” had not sullied the Blair, Hayward, and Bennet files since December 1798, when the squire of Lessows, much flown with seasonable claret, had taken the young Miss Gretton across his saddle-bow from a ball at the Gretton home and ridden away with her through the floods; and there was no doubt at all, of course, as to the squire’s motive on that occasion.

  Ah, well; they would no doubt be open to reason now that they had been startled by the irruption of Scotland Yard into their plans. He was a little startled by Scotland Yard himself. Was the child so important that it was a matter for Headquarters?

  Round in Sin Lane he ran into the usual war but extricated himself. (Etymologists, in case you are interested, say that the “Sin” is merely a corruption of “sand,” but the inhabitants of Milford of course know better; before those council houses were built on the low meadows behind the town the lane led direct to the lovers’ walk in High Wood.) Across the narrow lane, face to face in perpetual enmity, stood the local livery stable and the town’s newest garage. The garage frightened the horses (so said the livery stable), and the livery stable blocked up the lane continually with delivery loads of straw and fodder and what not (so said the garage). Moreover the garage was run by Bill Brough, ex-R.E.M.E., and Stanley Peters, ex-Royal Corps of Signals; and old Matt Ellis, ex-King’s Dragoon Guards, looked on them as representatives of a generation which had destroyed the cavalry and an offence to civilisation.

  In winter, when he hunted, Robert heard the cavalry side of the story; for the rest of the year he listened to the Royal Corps of Signals while his car was being wiped, oiled, filled, or fetched. Today the Signals wanted to know the difference between libel and slander, and what exactly constituted defamation of character. Was it defamation of character to say that a man was “a tinkerer with tin cans who wouldn’t know a nut from an acorn”?

  “Don’t know, Stan. Have to think it over,” Robert said hastily, pressing the starter. He waited while three tired hacks brought back two fat children and a groom from their afternoon ride (“See what I mean?” said Stanley in the background) and then swung the car into the High Street.

  Down at the south end of the High Street the shops faded gradually into dwelling houses with doorsteps on the pavement, then to houses set back a pace and with porticos to their doors, and then to villas with trees in their gardens, and then, quite suddenly, to fields and open country.

  It was farming country; a land of endless hedged fields and few houses. A rich country, but lonely; one could travel mile after mile without meeting another human being. Quiet and confident and unchanged since the Wars of the Roses, hedged field succeeded hedged field, and skyline faded into skyline, without any break in the pattern. Only the telegraph posts betrayed the century.

  Away beyond the horizon was Larborough. Larborough was bicycles, small arms, tin-tacks, Cowan’s Cranberry Sauce, and a million human souls living cheek by jowl in dirty red brick; and periodically it broke bounds in an atavistic longing for grass and earth. But there was nothing in the Milford country to attract a race who demanded with their grass and earth both views and teahouses; when Larborough went on holiday it went as one man west to the hills and the sea, and the great stretch of country north and east of it stayed lonely and quiet and unlittered as it had been in the days of the Sun in Splendour. It was “dull”; and by that damnation was saved.

  Two miles out on the Larborough road stood the house known as The Franchise; set down by the roadside with the inconsequence of a telephone kiosk. In the last days of the Regency someone had bought the field known as The Franchise, built in the middle of it a flat white house, and then surrounded the whole with a high solid wall of brick with a large double gate, of wall height, in the middle of the road frontage. It had no relation with anything in the countryside. No farm buildings in the background; no side-gates, even, into the surrounding fields. Stables were built in accordance with the period at the back of the house, but they were inside the wall. The place was as irrelevant, as isolated, as a child’s toy dropped by the wayside. It had been occupied as long as Robert could remember by an old man; presumably the same old man, but since The Franchise people had always shopped at Ham Green, the village on the Larborough side of them, they had never been seen in Milford. And then Marion Sharpe and her mother had begun to be part of the morning shopping scene in Milford, and it was understood that they had inherited The Franchise when the old man died.

  How long had they been there, Robert wondered. Three years? Four years?

  That they had not entered Milford socially was nothing to reckon by. Old Mrs. Warren, who had bought the last of the elm-shaded villas at the en
d of the High Street a small matter of twenty-five years ago in the hope that midland air would be better for her rheumatism than the sea, was still referred to as “that lady from Weymouth.” (It was Swanage, incidentally.)

  The Sharpes, moreover, might not have sought social contacts. They had an odd air of being self-sufficient. He had seen the daughter once or twice on the golf-course, playing (presumably as a guest) with Dr. Borthwick. She drove a long ball like a man, and used her thin brown wrists like a professional. And that was all Robert knew about her.

  As he brought the car to a stop in front of the tall iron gates, he found that two other cars were already there. It needed only one glance at the nearer—so inconspicuous, so well-groomed, so discreet—to identify it. In what other country in this world, he wondered as he got out of his own car, does the police force take pains to be well-mannered and quiet?

  His eye lighted on the further car and he saw that it was Hallam’s; the local Inspector who played such a steady game on the golf course.

  There were three people in the police car: the driver, and, in the back, a middle-aged woman and what seemed to be either a child or a young girl. The driver regarded him with that mild, absent-minded, all-observing police eye, and then withdrew his gaze, but the faces in the back he could not see.

  The tall iron gates were shut—Robert could not remember ever seeing them open—and Robert pushed open one heavy half with frank curiosity. The iron lace of the original gates had been lined, in some Victorian desire for privacy, by flat sheets of cast iron; and the wall was too high for anything inside to be visible; so that, except for a distant view of its roof and chimneys, he had never seen The Franchise.

  His first feeling was disappointment. It was not the fallen-on-evil-times look of the house—although that was evident; it was the sheer ugliness of it. Either it had been built too late to share in the grace of a graceful period, or the builder had lacked an architect’s eye. He had used the idiom of the time, but it had apparently not been native to him. Everything was just a little wrong: the windows the wrong size by half a foot, wrongly placed by not much more; the doorway the wrong width, and the flight of steps the wrong height. The total result was that instead of the bland contentment of its period the house had a hard stare. An antagonistic, questioning stare. As he walked across the courtyard to the unwelcoming door Robert knew what it reminded him of: a dog that has been suddenly wakened from sleep by the advent of a stranger, propped on his forelegs, uncertain for a moment whether to attack or merely bark. It had the same what-are-you-doing-here? expression.

  Before he could ring the bell the door was opened; not by a maid but by Marion Sharpe.

  “I saw you coming,” she said, putting out her hand. “I didn’t want you to ring because my mother lies down in the afternoons, and I am hoping that we can get this business over before she wakes up. Then she need never know anything about it. I am more grateful than I can say to you for coming.”

  Robert murmured something, and noticed that her eyes, which he had expected to be a bright gipsy brown, were actually a grey hazel. She drew him into the hall, and he noticed as he put his hat down on a chest that the rug on the floor was threadbare.

  “The Law is in here,” she said, pushing open a door and ushering him into a drawing-room. Robert would have liked to talk to her alone for a moment, to orientate himself; but it was too late now to suggest that. This was evidently the way she wanted it.

  Sitting on the edge of a bead-work chair was Hallam, looking sheepish. And by the window, entirely at his ease in a very nice piece of Hepplewhite, was Scotland Yard in the person of a youngish spare man in a well-tailored suit.

  As they got up, Hallam and Robert nodded to each other.

  “You know Inspector Hallam, then?” Marion Sharpe said. “And this is Detective-Inspector Grant from Headquarters.”

  Robert noticed the “Headquarters,” and wondered. Had she already at some time had dealings with the police, or was it that she just didn’t like the slightly sensational sound of “the Yard”?

  Grant shook hands, and said:

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Blair. Not only for Miss Sharpe’s sake but for my own.”

  “Yours?”

  “I couldn’t very well proceed until Miss Sharpe had some kind of support; friendly support if not legal, but if legal so much the better.”

  “I see. And what are you charging her with?”

  “We are not charging her with anything—” Grant began, but Marion interrupted him.

  “I am supposed to have kidnapped and beaten up someone.”

  “Beaten up?” Robert said, staggered.

  “Yes,” she said, with a kind of relish in enormity. “Beaten her black and blue.”

  “Her?”

  “A girl. She is outside the gate in a car now.”

  “I think we had better begin at the beginning,” Robert said, clutching after the normal.

  “Perhaps I had better do the explaining,” Grant said, mildly.

  “Yes,” said Miss Sharpe, “do. After all it is your story.”

  Robert wondered if Grant were aware of the mockery. He wondered a little, too, at the coolness that could afford mockery with Scotland Yard sitting in one of her best chairs. She had not sounded cool over the telephone; she had sounded driven, half-desperate. Perhaps it was the presence of an ally that had heartened her; or perhaps she had just got her second wind.

  “Just before Easter,” Grant began, in succinct police-fashion, “a girl called Elisabeth Kane, who lived with her guardians near Aylesbury, went to spend a short holiday with a married aunt in Mainshill, the suburb of Larborough. She went by coach, because the London-Larborough coaches pass through Aylesbury, and also pass through Mainshill before reaching Larborough; so that she could get off the coach in Mainshill and be within a three-minute walk of her aunt’s house, instead of having to go into Larborough and come all the way out again as she would have to if she travelled by train. At the end of a week her guardians—a Mr. and Mrs. Wynn—had a postcard from her saying that she was enjoying herself very much and was staying on. They took this to mean staying on for the duration of her school holiday, which would mean another three weeks. When she didn’t turn up on the day before she was supposed to go back to school, they took it for granted that she was merely playing truant and wrote to her aunt to send her back. The aunt, instead of going to the nearest call-box or telegraph office, broke it to the Wynns in a letter, that her niece had left on her way back to Aylesbury a fortnight previously. The exchange of letters had taken the best part of another week, so that by the time the guardians went to the police about it the girl had been missing for four weeks. The police took all the usual measures but before they could really get going the girl turned up. She walked into her home near Aylesbury late one night wearing only a dress and shoes, and in a state of complete exhaustion.”

  “How old is the girl?” Robert asked.

  “Fifteen. Nearly sixteen.” He waited a moment to see if Robert had further questions, and then went on. (As one counsel to another, thought Robert appreciatively; a manner to match the car that stood so unobtrusively at the gate.) “She said she had been ‘kidnapped’ in a car, but that was all the information anyone got from her for two days. She lapsed into a semi-conscious condition. When she recovered, about forty-eight hours later, they began to get her story from her.”

  “They?”

  “The Wynns. The police wanted it, of course, but she grew hysterical at any mention of police, so they had to acquire it second-hand. She said that while she was waiting for her return coach at the cross-roads in Mainshill, a car pulled up at the kerb with two women in it. The younger woman, who was driving, asked her if she was waiting for a bus and if they could give her a lift.”

  “Was the girl alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t anyone go to see her off?”

  “Her uncle was working, and her aunt had gone to be godmother at a christening.”
Again he paused to let Robert put further questions if he was so minded. “The girl said that she was waiting for the London coach, and they told her that it had already gone by. Since she had arrived at the cross-roads with very little time to spare, and her watch was not a particularly accurate one, she believed this. Indeed, she had begun to be afraid, even before the car stopped, that she had missed the coach. She was distressed about it because it was by then four o’clock, beginning to rain, and growing dark. They were very sympathetic, and suggested that they should give her a lift to a place whose name she did not catch, where she could get a different coach to London in half an hour’s time. She accepted this gratefully and got in beside the elder woman in the back of the car.”

  A picture swam into Robert’s mind of old Mrs. Sharpe, upright and intimidating, in her usual place in the back of the car. He glanced at Marion Sharpe, but her face was calm. This was a story she had heard already.

  “The rain blurred the windows, and she talked to the older woman about herself as they went along, so that she paid little attention to where they were going. When she at last took notice of her surroundings the evening outside the windows had become quite dark and it seemed to her that they had been travelling for a long time. She said something about its being extraordinarily kind of them to take her so far out of their way, and the younger woman, speaking for the first time, said that as it happened it was not out of their way, and that, on the contrary, she would have time to come in and have a cup of something hot with them before they took her on to her new cross-roads. She was doubtful about this, but the younger woman said it would be of no advantage to wait for twenty minutes in the rain when she could be warm and dry and fed in those same twenty minutes; and she agreed that this seemed sensible. Eventually the younger woman got out, opened what appeared to the girl to be drive gates, and the car was driven up to a house which it was too dark to see. She was taken into a large kitchen—”