The Franchise Affair ag-3 Page 6

  "No, of course you can't. How would it do if we came in on Friday morning? That is our weekly shopping day. Or is Friday a busy day for you?"

  "No, Friday would be quite convenient," Robert said, swallowing down his disappointment. "About noon?"

  "Yes, that would do very well. Twelve o'clock the day after tomorrow, at your office. Goodbye, and thank you again for your support and help."

  She rang off, firmly and cleanly, without all the usual preliminary twitterings that Robert had come to expect from women.

  "Shall I run her out for you," Bill Brough asked as he came out into the dim daylight of the garage.

  "What? Oh, the car. No, I shan't need it tonight, thanks."

  He set off on his normal evening walk down the High Street, trying hard not to feel snubbed. He had not been anxious to go to The Franchise in the first instance, and had made his reluctance pretty plain; she was quite naturally avoiding a repetition of the circumstances. That he had identified himself with their interests was a mere business affair, to be resolved in an office, impersonally. They would not again involve him further than that.

  Ah, well, he thought, flinging himself down in his favourite chair by the wood fire in the sitting-room and opening the evening paper (printed that morning in London), when they came to the office on Friday he could do something to put the affair on a more personal basis. To wipe out the memory of that first unhappy refusal.

  The quiet of the old house soothed him. Christina had been closeted in her room for two days, in prayer and meditation, and Aunt Lin was in the kitchen preparing dinner. There was a gay letter from Lettice, his only sister, who had driven a truck for several years of a bloody war, fallen in love with a tall silent Canadian, and was now raising five blond brats in Saskatchewan. "Come out soon, Robin dear," she finished, "before the brats grow up and before the moss grows right round you. You know how bad Aunt Lin is for you!" He could hear her saying it. She and Aunt Lin had never seen eye to eye.

  He was smiling, relaxed and reminiscent, when both his quiet and his peace were shattered by the irruption of Nevil.

  "Why didn't you tell me she was like that!" Nevil demanded.

  "Who?"

  "The Sharpe woman! Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I didn't expect you would meet her," Robert said. "All you had to do was drop the letter through the door."

  "There was nothing in the door to drop it through, so I rang, and they had just come back from wherever they were. Anyhow, she answered it."

  "I thought she slept in the afternoons."

  "I don't believe she ever sleeps. She doesn't belong to the human family at all. She is all compact of fire and metal."

  "I know she's a very rude old woman but you have to make allowances. She has had a very hard—"

  "Old? Who are you talking about?"

  "Old Mrs. Sharpe, of course."

  "I didn't even see old Mrs. Sharpe. I'm talking about Marion."

  "Marion Sharpe? And how did you know her name was Marion?"

  "She told me. It does suit her, doesn't it? She couldn't be anything but Marion."

  "You seem to have become remarkably intimate for a doorstep acquaintance."

  "Oh, she gave me tea."

  "Tea! I thought you were in a desperate hurry to see a French film."

  "I'm never in a desperate hurry to do anything when a woman like Marion Sharpe invites me to tea. Have you noticed her eyes? But of course you have. You're her lawyer. That wonderful shading of grey into hazel. And the way her eyebrows lie above them, like the brush-mark of a painter genius. Winged eyebrows, they are. I made a poem about them on the way home. Do you want to hear it?"

  "No," Robert said firmly. "Did you enjoy your film?"

  "Oh, I didn't go."

  "You didn't go!"

  "I told you I had tea with Marion instead."

  "You mean you have been at The Franchise the whole afternoon!"

  "I suppose I have," Nevil said dreamily, "but, by God, it didn't seem more than seven minutes."

  "And what happened to your thirst for French cinema?"

  "But Marion is French film. Even you must see that!" Robert winced at the "even you." "Why bother with the shadow, when you can be with the reality? Reality. That is her great quality, isn't it? I've never met anyone as real as Marion is."

  "Not even Rosemary?" Robert was in the state known to Aunt Lin as "put out."

  "Oh, Rosemary is a darling, and I'm going to marry her, but that is quite a different thing."

  "Is it?" said Robert, with deceptive meekness.

  "Of course. People don't marry women like Marion Sharpe, any more than they marry winds and clouds. Any more than they marry Joan of Arc. It's positively blasphemous to consider marriage in relation to a woman like that. She spoke very nicely of you, by the way."

  "That was kind of her."

  The tone was so dry that even Nevil caught the flavour of it.

  "Don't you like her?" he asked, pausing to look at his cousin in surprised disbelief.

  Robert had ceased for the moment to be kind, lazy, tolerant Robert Blair; he was just a tired man who hadn't yet had his dinner and was suffering from the memory of a frustration and a snubbing.

  "As far as I am concerned," he said, "Marion Sharpe is just a skinny woman of forty who lives with a rude old mother in an ugly old house, and needs legal advice on occasion like anyone else."

  But even as the words came out he wanted to stop them, as if they were a betrayal of a friend.

  "No, probably she isn't your cup of tea," Nevil said tolerantly. "You have always preferred them a little stupid, and blond, haven't you." This was said without malice, as one stating a dullish fact.

  "I can't imagine why you should think that."

  "All the women you nearly married were that type."

  "I have never 'nearly married' anyone," Robert said stiffly.

  "That's what you think. You'll never know how nearly Molly Manders landed you."

  "Molly Manders?" Aunt Lin said, coming in flushed from her cooking and bearing the tray with the sherry. "Such a silly girl. Imagined that you used a baking-board for pancakes. And was always looking at herself in that little pocket mirror of hers."

  "Aunt Lin saved you that time, didn't you, Aunt Lin?"

  "I don't know what you are talking about, Nevil dear. Do stop prancing about the hearthrug, and put a log on the fire. Did you like your French film, dear?"

  "I didn't go. I had tea at The Franchise instead." He shot a glance at Robert, having learned by now that there was more in Robert's reaction than met the eye.

  "With those strange people? What did you talk about?"

  "Mountains-Maupassant-hens—"

  "Hens, dear?"

  "Yes; the concentrated evil of a hen's face in a close-up."

  Aunt Lin looked vague. She turned to Robert, as to terra firma.

  "Had I better call, dear, if you are going to know them? Or ask the vicar's wife to call?"

  "I don't think I would commit the vicar's wife to anything so irrevocable," Robert said, dryly.

  She looked doubtful for a moment, but household cares obliterated the question in her mind. "Don't dawdle too long over your sherry or what I have in the oven will be spoiled. Thank goodness, Christina will be down again tomorrow. At least I hope so; I have never known her salvation take more than two days. And I don't really think that I will call on those Franchise people, dear, if it is all the same to you. Apart from being strangers and very odd, they quite frankly terrify me."

  Yes; that was a sample of the reaction he might expect where the Sharpes were concerned. Ben Carley had gone out of his way today to let him know that, if there was police trouble at The Franchise, he wouldn't be able to count on an unprejudiced jury. He must take measures for the protection of the Sharpes. When he saw them on Friday he would suggest a private investigation by a paid agent. The police were overworked-had been overworked for a decade and more-and there was just a chance that one man working at h
is leisure on one trail might be more successful than the orthodox and official investigation had been.

  6

  But by Friday morning it was too late to take measures for the safety of The Franchise.

  Robert had reckoned with the diligence of the police; he had reckoned with the slow spread of whispers; but he had reckoned without the Ack-Emma.

  The Ack-Emma was the latest representative of the tabloid newspaper to enter British journalism from the West. It was run on the principle that two thousand pounds for damages is a cheap price to pay for sales worth half a million. It had blacker headlines, more sensational pictures, and more indiscreet letterpress than any paper printed so far by British presses. Fleet Street had its own name for it-monosyllabic and unprintable-but no protection against it. The press had always been its own censor, deciding what was and what was not permissible by the principles of its own good sense and good taste. If a «rogue» publication decided not to conform to those principles then there was no power that could make it conform. In ten years the Ack-Emma had passed by half a million the daily net sales of the best selling newspaper in the country to date. In any suburban railway carriage seven out of ten people bound for work in the morning were reading an Ack-Emma.

  And it was the Ack-Emma that blew the Franchise affair wide open.

  Robert had been out early into the country on that Friday morning to see an old woman who was dying and wanted to alter her will. This was a performance she repeated on an average once every three months and her doctor made no secret of the fact that in his opinion she "would blow out a hundred candles one day without a second puff." But of course a lawyer cannot tell a client who summons him urgently at eight-thirty in the morning not to be silly. So Robert had taken some new will forms, fetched his car from the garage, and driven into the country. In spite of his usual tussle with the old tyrant among the pillows-who could never be brought to understand the elementary fact that you cannot give away four shares amounting to one third each-he enjoyed the spring countryside. And he hummed to himself on the way home, looking forward to seeing Marion Sharpe in less than an hour.

  He had decided to forgive her for liking Nevil. After all, Nevil had never tried to palm her off on Carley. One must be fair.

  He ran the car into the garage, under the noses of the morning lot going out from the livery stable, parked it, and then, remembering that it was past the first of the month, strolled over to the office to pay his bill to Brough, who ran the office side. But it was Stanley who was in the office; thumbing over dockets and invoices with the strong hands that so surprisingly finished off his thin forearms.

  "When I was in the Signals," Stanley said, casting him an absent-minded glance, "I used to believe that the Quarter-bloke was a crook, but now I'm not so sure."

  "Something missing?" said Robert. "I just looked in to pay my bill. Bill usually has it ready."

  "I expect it's somewhere around," Stanley said, still thumbing. "Have a look."

  Robert, used to the ways of the office, picked up the loose papers discarded by Stanley, so as to come on the normal tidy strata of Bill's arrangement below. As he lifted the untidy pile he uncovered a girl's face; a newspaper picture of a girl's face. He did not recognise it at once but it reminded him of someone and he paused to look at it.

  "Got it!" said Stanley in triumph, extracting a sheet of paper from a clip. He swept the remaining loose papers on the desk into a pile and so laid bare to Robert's gaze the whole front page of that morning's Ack-Emma.

  Cold with shock, Robert stared at it.

  Stanley, turning to take the papers he was holding from his grasp, noticed his absorption and approved it.

  "Nice little number, that," he said. "Reminds me of a bint I had in Egypt. Same far-apart eyes. Nice kid she was. Told the most original lies."

  He went back to his paper-arranging, and Robert went on staring.

  THIS IS THE GIRL

  said the paper in enormous black letters across the top of the page; and below it, occupying two-thirds of the page, was the girl's photograph. And then, in smaller but still obtrusive type, below:

  IS THIS THE HOUSE?

  and below it a photograph of The Franchise.

  Across the bottom of the page was the legend:

  THE GIRL SAYS YES: WHAT DO THE POLICE SAY?

  See inside for the story.

  He put out his hand and turned over the page.

  Yes; it was all there, except for the Sharpes' name.

  He dropped the page, and looked again at that shocking frontispiece. Yesterday The Franchise was a house protected by four high walls; so unobtrusive, so sufficient unto itself, that even Milford did not know what it looked like. Now it was there to be stared at on every bookstall; on every newsagent's counter from Penzance to Pentland. Its flat, forbidding front a foil for the innocence of the face above it.

  The girl's photograph was a head-and-shoulders affair, and appeared to be a studio portrait. Her hair had an arranged-for-an-occasion look, and she was wearing what looked like a party frock. Without her school coat she looked-not less innocent, nor older; no. He sought for the word that would express it. She looked less-tabu, was it? The school coat had stopped one thinking of her as a woman, just as a nun's habit would. A whole treatise could probably be written, now he came to think of it, on the protective quality of school coats. Protective in both senses: armour and camouflage. Now that the coat was no longer there, she was feminine instead of merely female.

  But it was still a pathetically young face, immature and appealing. The candid brow, the wide-set eyes, the bee-stung lip that gave her mouth the expression of a disappointed child-it made a formidable whole. It would not be only the Bishop of Larborough who would believe a story told by that face.

  "May I borrow this paper?" he asked Stanley.

  "Take it," Stanley said. "We had it for our elevenses. There's nothing in it."

  Robert was surprised. "Didn't you find this interesting?" he asked, indicating the front page.

  Stanley cast a glance at the pictured face. "Not except that she reminded me of that bint in Egypt, lies and all."

  "So you didn't believe that story she told?"

  "What do you think!" Stanley said, contemptuous.

  "Where do you think the girl was, then, all that time?"

  "If I remember what I think I remember about the Red Sea sadie, I'd say very definitely-oh, but definitely-on the tiles," Stanley said, and went out to attend to a customer.

  Robert picked up the paper and went soberly away. At least one man-in-the-street had not believed the story; but that seemed to be due as much to an old memory as to present cynicism.

  And although Stanley had quite obviously read the story without reading the names of the characters concerned, or even the place-names, only ten per cent of readers did that (according to the best Mass Observation); the other ninety per cent would have read every word, and would now be discussing the affair with varying degrees of relish.

  At his own office he found that Hallam had been trying to reach him by telephone.

  "Shut the door and come in, will you," he said to old Mr. Heseltine, who had caught him with the news on his arrival and was now standing in the door of his room. "And have a look at that."

  He reached for the receiver with one hand, and laid the paper under Mr. Heseltine's nose with the other.

  The old man touched it with his small-boned fastidious hand, as one seeing a strange exhibit for the first time. "This is the publication one hears so much about," he said. And gave his attention to it, as he would to any strange document.

  "We are both in a spot, aren't we!" Hallam said, when they were connected. And raked his vocabulary for some epithets suitable to the Ack-Emma. "As if the police hadn't enough to do without having that rag on their tails!" he finished, being naturally absorbed in the police point of view.

  "Have you heard from the Yard?"

  "Grant was burning the wires at nine this morning. But there's nothing t
hey can do. Just grin and bear it. The police are always fair game. Nothing you can do, either, if it comes to that."

  "Not a thing," Robert said. "We have a fine free press."

  Hallam said a few more things about the press. "Do your people know?" he asked.

  "I shouldn't think so. I'm quite sure they would never normally see the Ack-Emma, and there hasn't been time for some kind soul to send it to them. But they are due here in about ten minutes, and I'll show it to them then."

  "If it was ever possible for me to be sorry for that old battle-axe," Hallam said, "it would be at this minute."

  "How did the Ack-Emma get the story? I thought the parents-the girl's guardians, I mean-were very strongly against that kind of publicity."

  "Grant says the girl's brother went off the deep end about the police taking no action and went to the Ack-Emma off his own bat. They are strong on the champion act. 'The Ack-Emma will see right done! I once knew one of their crusades run into a third day."

  When he hung up Robert thought that if it was a bad break for both sides, it was at least an even break. The police would without doubt redouble their efforts to find corroborative evidence; on the other hand the publication of the girl's photograph meant for the Sharpes a faint hope that somebody, somewhere, would recognise it and say: "This girl could not have been in The Franchise on the date in question because she was at such-and-such a place."

  "A shocking story, Mr. Robert," Mr. Heseltine said. "And if I may say so a quite shocking publication. Most offensive."

  "That house," Robert said, "is The Franchise, where old Mrs. Sharpe and her daughter live; and where I went the other day, if you remember, to give them some legal advice."

  "You mean that these people are our clients?"

  "Yes."

  "But, Mr. Robert, that is not at all in our line." Robert winced at the dismay in his voice. "That is quite outside our usual-indeed quite beyond our normal-we are not competent—"

  "We are competent, I hope, to defend any client against a publication like the Ack-Emma," Robert said, coldly.

  Mr. Heseltine eyed the screaming rag on the table. He was obviously facing the difficult choice between a criminal clientele and a disgraceful journal.