The Franchise Affair Read online

  “What kept you so late tonight, dear?” she asked, having finished her soup.

  From long experience Robert recognised this as being in a different category from: “Have you had a busy day, dear?”

  “I had to go out to The Franchise—that house on the Larborough road. They wanted some legal advice.”

  “Those odd people? I didn’t know you knew them.”

  “I didn’t. They just wanted my advice.”

  “I hope they pay you for it, dear. They have no money at all, you know. The father was in some kind of importing business—monkey-nuts or something—and drank himself to death. Left them without a penny, poor things. Old Mrs. Sharpe ran a boarding-house in London to make ends meet, and the daughter was maid-of-all-work. They were just going to be turned into the street with their furniture, when the old man at The Franchise died. So providential!”

  “Aunt Lin! Where do you get those stories?”

  “But it’s true, dear. Perfectly true. I forget who told me—someone who had stayed in the same street in London—but it was first-hand, anyhow. I am not one to pass on idle gossip, as you know. Is it a nice house? I always wondered what was inside that iron gate.”

  “No, rather ugly. But they have some nice pieces of furniture.”

  “Not as well kept as ours, I’ll be bound,” she said, looking complacently at the perfect sideboard and the beautiful chairs ranged against the wall. “The vicar said yesterday that if this house were not so obviously a home it would be a show place.” Mention of the clergy seemed to remind her of something. “By the way, will you be extra patient with Christina for the next few days. I think she is going to be ‘saved’ again.”

  “Oh, poor Aunt Lin, what a bore for you. But I was afraid of it. There was a ‘text’ in the saucer of my early-morning tea today. ‘Thou God seest me’ on a pink scroll, with a tasteful design of Easter lilies in the background. Is she changing her church again, then?”

  “Yes. She has discovered that the Methodists are ‘whited sepulchres,’ it seems, so she is going to those ‘Bethel’ people above Benson’s bakery, and is due to be ‘saved’ any day now. She has been shouting hymns all the morning.”

  “But she always does.”

  “Not ‘sword of the Lord’ ones. As long as she sticks to ‘pearly crowns’ or ‘streets of gold’ I know it is all right. But once she begins on the ‘sword of the Lord’ I know that it will be my turn to do the baking presently.”

  “Well, darling, you bake just as well as Christina.”

  “Oh, no, she doesn’t,” said Christina, coming in with the meat course. A big soft creature with untidy straight hair and a vague eye. “Only one thing your Aunt Lin makes better than me, Mr. Robert, and that’s hot cross buns, and that’s only once a year. So there! And if I’m not appreciated in this house, I’ll go where I will be.”

  “Christina, my love!” Robert said, “you know very well that no one could imagine this house without you, and if you left I should follow you to the world’s end. For your butter tarts, if for nothing else. Can we have butter tarts tomorrow, by the way?”

  “Butter tarts are no food for unrepentant sinners. Besides I don’t think I have the butter. But we’ll see. Meanwhile, Mr. Robert, you examine your soul and stop casting stones.”

  Aunt Lin sighed gently as the door closed behind her. “Twenty years,” she said meditatively. “You won’t remember her when she first came from the orphanage. Fifteen, and so skinny, poor little brat. She ate a whole loaf for her tea, and said she would pray for me all her life. I think she has, you know.”

  Something like a tear glistened in Miss Bennet’s blue eye.

  “I hope she postpones the salvation until she has made those butter tarts,” said Robert, brutally materialistic. “Did you enjoy your picture?”

  “Well, dear, I couldn’t forget that he had five wives.”

  “Who has?”

  “Had, dear. One at a time. Gene Darrow. I must say, those little programmes they give away are very informative but a little disillusioning. He was a student, you see. In the picture, I mean. Very young and romantic. But I kept remembering those five wives, and it spoiled the afternoon for me. So charming to look at too. They say he dangled his third wife out of a fifth-story window by the wrists, but I don’t really believe that. He doesn’t look strong enough, for one thing. Looks as if he had chest trouble as a child. That peaky look, and thin wrists. Not strong enough to dangle anyone. Certainly not out of a fifth-storey . . .”

  The gentle monologue went on, all through the pudding course; and Robert withdrew his attention and thought about The Franchise. He came to the surface as they rose from table and moved into the sitting-room for coffee.

  “It is the most becoming garment, if maids would only realise it,” she was saying.

  “What is?”

  “An apron. She was a maid in the palace, you know, and wore one of those silly little bits of muslin. So becoming. Did those people at The Franchise have a maid, by the way? No? Well, I am not surprised. They starved the last one, you know. Gave her—”

  “Oh, Aunt Lin!”

  “I assure you. For breakfast she got the crusts they cut off the roast. And when they had milk pudding . . . ”

  Robert did not hear what enormity was born of the milk pudding. In spite of his good dinner he was suddenly tired and depressed. If kind silly Aunt Lin saw no harm in repeating those absurd stories, what would the real gossips of Milford achieve with the stuff of a real scandal?

  “And talking of maids—the brown sugar is finished, dear, so you will have to have lump for tonight—talking of maids, the Carleys’ little maid has got herself into trouble.”

  “You mean someone else has got her into trouble.”

  “Yes. Arthur Wallis, the potman at The White Hart.”

  “What, Wallis again!”

  “Yes, it really is getting past a joke, isn’t it. I can’t think why the man doesn’t get married. It would be much cheaper.”

  But Robert was not listening. He was back in the drawing-room at The Franchise, being gently mocked for his legal intolerance of a generalisation. Back in the shabby room with the unpolished furniture, where things lay about on chairs and no one bothered to tidy them away.

  And where, now he came to think of it, no one ran around after him with an ash-tray.

  Chapter 5

  It was more than a week later that Mr. Heseltine put his thin small grey head round Robert’s door to say that Inspector Hallam was in the office and would like to see him for a moment.

  The room on the opposite side of the hall where Mr. Heseltine lorded it over the clerks was always referred to as “the office,” although both Robert’s room and the little one behind it used by Nevil Bennet were, in spite of their carpets and their mahogany, plainly offices too. There was an official waiting-room behind “the office,” a small room corresponding to young Bennet’s, but it had never been popular with the Blair, Hayward, and Bennet clients. Callers stepped into the office to announce themselves and usually stayed there gossiping until such time as Robert was free to see them. The little “waiting-room” had long ago been appropriated by Miss Tuff for writing Robert’s letters in, away from the distraction of visitors and from the office-boy’s sniffings.

  When Mr. Heseltine had gone away to fetch the Inspector, Robert noticed with surprise that he was apprehensive as he had not been apprehensive since in the days of his youth he approached a list of Examination Results pinned on a board. Was his life so placid that a stranger’s dilemma should stir it to that extent? Or was it that the Sharpes had been so constantly in his thoughts for the last week that they had ceased to be strangers?

  He braced himself for whatever Hallam was going to say; but what emerged from Hallam’s careful phrases was that Scotland Yard had let them understand that no proceedings would be taken on the present evidence. Blair noticed the “present evidence” and gauged its meaning accurately. They were not dropping the case—did the Yard ever dr
op a case?—they were merely sitting quiet.

  The thought of Scotland Yard sitting quiet was not a particularly reassuring one in the circumstances.

  “I take it that they lacked corroborative evidence,” he said.

  “They couldn’t trace the lorry driver who gave her the lift,” Hallam said.

  “That wouldn’t surprise them.”

  “No,” Hallam agreed, “no driver is going to risk the sack by confessing he gave anyone a lift. Especially a girl. Transport bosses are strict about that. And when it is a case of a girl in trouble of some kind, and when it’s the police that are doing the asking, no man in his senses is going to own up to even having seen her.” He took the cigarette that Robert offered him. “They needed that lorry driver,” he said. “Or something like him,” he added.

  “Yes,” Robert said, reflectively. “What did you make of her, Hallam?”

  “The girl? I don’t know. Nice kid. Seemed quite genuine. Might have been one of my own.”

  This, Blair realised, was a very good sample of what they would be up against if it ever came to a case. To every man of good feeling the girl in the witness box would look like his own daughter. Not because she was a waif, but for the very good reason that she wasn’t. The decent school coat, the mousy hair, the unmade-up young face with its appealing hollow below the cheek-bone, the wide-set candid eyes—it was a prosecuting counsel’s dream of a victim.

  “Just like any other girl of her age,” Hallam said, still considering it. “Nothing against her.”

  “So you don’t judge people by the colour of their eyes,” Robert said idly, his mind still on the girl.

  “Ho! Don’t I!” said Hallam surprisingly. “Believe me, there’s a particular shade of baby blue that condemns a man, as far as I’m concerned, before he has opened his mouth. Plausible liars every one of them.” He paused to pull on his cigarette. “Given to murder, too, come to think of it—though I haven’t met many killers.”

  “You alarm me,” Robert said. “In the future I shall give baby-blue eyes a wide berth.”

  Hallam grinned. “As long as you keep your pocket book shut you needn’t worry. All Baby-Blue’s lies are for money. He only murders when he gets too entangled in his lies. The real murderer’s mark is not the colour of the eyes but their setting.”

  “Setting?”

  “Yes. They are set differently. The two eyes, I mean. They look as if they belonged to different faces.”

  “I thought you hadn’t met many.”

  “No, but I’ve read all the case histories and studied the photographs. I’ve always been surprised that no book on murder mentions it, it happens so often. The inequality of setting, I mean.”

  “So it’s entirely your own theory.”

  “The result of my own observation, yes. You ought to have a go at it sometime. Fascinating. I’ve got to the stage where I look for it now.”

  “In the street, you mean?”

  “No, not quite as bad as that. But in each new murder case. I wait for the photograph, and when it comes I think: ‘There! What did I tell you!’”

  “And when the photograph comes and the eyes are of a mathematical identity?”

  “Then it is nearly always what one might call an accidental murder. The kind of murder that might happen to anyone given the circumstances.”

  “And when you turn up a photograph of the revered vicar of Nethar Dumbleton who is being given a presentation by his grateful parishioners to mark his fiftieth year of devoted service, and you note that the setting of his eyes is widely unequal, what conclusion do you come to?”

  “That his wife satisfies him, his children obey him, his stipend is sufficient for his needs, he has no politics, he gets on with the local big-wigs, and he is allowed to have the kind of services he wants. In fact, he has never had the slightest need to murder anyone.”

  “It seems to me that you are having your cake and eating it very nicely.”

  “Huh!” Hallam said disgustedly. “Just wasting good police observation on a legal mind. I’d have thought,” he added, moving to go, “that a lawyer would be glad of some free tips about judging perfect strangers.”

  “All you are doing,” Robert pointed out, “is corrupting an innocent mind. I shall never be able to inspect a new client from now on without my subconscious registering the colour of his eyes and the symmetry of their setting.”

  “Well, that’s something. It’s about time you knew some of the facts of life.”

  “Thank you for coming to tell me about the ‘Franchise’ affair,” Robert said, returning to sobriety.

  “The telephone in this town,” Hallam said, “is about as private as the radio.”

  “Anyhow, thank you. I must let the Sharpes know at once.”

  As Hallam took his leave, Robert lifted the telephone receiver.

  He could not, as Hallam said, talk freely over the telephone, but he would say that he was coming out to see them immediately and that the news was good. That would take the present weight off their minds. It would also—he glanced at his watch—be time for Mrs. Sharpe’s daily rest, so perhaps he would have a hope of avoiding the old dragon. And also a hope of a tête-à-tête with Marion Sharpe, of course; though he left that thought unformulated at the back of his mind.

  But there was no answer to his call.

  With the bored and reluctant aid of the Exchange he rang the number for a solid five minutes, without result. The Sharpes were not at home.

  While he was still engaged with the Exchange, Nevil Bennet strolled in clad in his usual outrageous tweed, a pinkish shirt, and a purple tie. Robert, eyeing him over the receiver, wondered for the hundredth time what was going to become of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet when it at last slipped from his good Blair grasp into the hands of this young sprig of the Bennets. That the boy had brains he knew, but brains wouldn’t take him far in Milford. Milford expected a man to stop being undergraduate when he reached graduate age. But there was no sign of Nevil’s acceptance of the world outside his coterie. He was still actively, if unconsciously, épatéing that world. As his clothes bore witness.

  It was not that Robert had any desire to see the boy in customary suits of solemn black. His own suit was a grey tweed; and his country clientèle would look doubtfully on “town” clothes. (“That awful little man with the striped suits,” Marion Sharpe had said of the town-clad lawyer, in that unguarded moment on the telephone.) But there were tweeds and tweeds, and Nevil Bennet’s were the second kind. Quite outrageously the second kind.

  “Robert,” Nevil said, as Robert gave it up and laid down the receiver, “I’ve finished the papers on the Calthorpe transfer, and I thought I would run into Larborough this afternoon, if you haven’t anything you want me to do.”

  “Can’t you talk to her on the telephone?” Robert asked; Nevil being engaged, in the casual modern fashion, to the Bishop of Larborough’s third daughter.

  “Oh, it isn’t Rosemary. She is in London for a week.”

  “A protest meeting at the Albert Hall, I suppose,” said Robert, who was feeling disgruntled because of his failure to speak to the Sharpes when he was primed with good news for them.

  “No, at the Guildhall,” Nevil said.

  “What is it this time? Vivisection?”

  “You are frightfully last-century now and then, Robert,” Nevil said, with his air of solemn patience. “No one objects to vivisection nowadays except a few cranks. The protest is against this country’s refusal to give shelter to the patriot Kotovich.”

  “The said patriot is very badly ‘wanted’ in his own country, I understand.”

  “By his enemies; yes.”

  “By the police; for two murders.”

  “Executions.”

  “You a disciple of John Knox, Nevil?”

  “Good God, no. What has that to do with it?”

  “He believed in self-appointed executioners. The idea has a little ‘gone out’ in this country, I understand. Anyhow, if it’s a choice be
tween Rosemary’s opinion of Kotovich and the opinion of the Special Branch, I’ll take the Special Branch.”

  “The Special Branch only do what the Foreign Office tells them. Everyone knows that. But if I stay and explain the ramifications of the Kotovich affair to you, I shall be late for the film.”

  “What film?”

  “The French film I am going into Larborough to see.”

  “I suppose you know that most of those French trifles that the British intelligentsia bate their breath about are considered very so-so in their own country? However. Do you think you could pause long enough to drop a note into the letter-box of The Franchise as you go by?”

  “I might. I always wanted to see what was inside that wall. Who lives there now?”

  “An old woman and her daughter.”

  “Daughter?” repeated Nevil, automatically pricking his ears.

  “Middle-aged daughter.”

  “Oh. All right, I’ll just get my coat.”

  Robert wrote merely that he had tried to talk to them, that he had to go out on business for an hour or so, but that he would ring them up again when he was free, and that Scotland Yard had no case, as the case stood, and acknowledged the fact.

  Nevil swept in with a dreadful raglan affair over his arm, snatched up the letter and disappeared with a “Tell Aunt Lin I may be late. She asked me over to dinner.”

  Robert donned his own sober grey hat and walked over to the Rose and Crown to meet his client—an old farmer, and the last man in England to suffer from chronic gout. The old man was not yet there, and Robert, usually so placid, so lazily good-natured, was conscious of impatience. The pattern of his life had changed. Up to now it had been an even succession of equal attractions; he had gone from one thing to another without hurry and without emotion. Now there was a focus of interest, and the rest revolved round it.

  He sat down on one of the chintz-covered chairs in the lounge and looked at the dog-eared journals lying on the adjacent coffee table. The only current number was The Watchman, the weekly review, and he picked it up reluctantly, thinking yet once more how the dry feel of the paper offended his finger tips and its serrated edges set his own teeth on edge. It was the usual collection of protests, poems, and pedantry; the place of honour among the protests being accorded to Nevil’s future father-in-law, who spread himself for three-quarters of a column on England’s shame in that she refused sanctuary to a fugitive patriot.