The Franchise Affair Read online

  The Bishop of Larborough had long ago extended the Christian philosophy to include the belief that the underdog is always right. He was wildly popular with Balkan revolutionaries, British strike committees, and all the old lags in the local penal establishment. (The sole exception to this last being that chronic recidivist, Bandy Brayne, who held the good bishop in vast contempt, and reserved his affection for the Governor; to whom a tear in the eye was just a drop of H20, and who unpicked his most heartbreaking tales with a swift, unemotional accuracy.) There was nothing, said the old lags affectionately, that the old boy would not believe; you could lay it on with a trowel.

  Normally Robert found the Bishop mildly amusing, but today he was merely irritated. He tried two poems, neither of which made sense to him, and flung the thing back on the table.

  “England in the wrong again?” asked Ben Carley, pausing by his chair and jerking a head at The Watchman.

  “Hullo, Carley.”

  “A Marble Arch for the well-to-do,” the little lawyer said, flicking the paper scornfully with a nicotine-stained finger. “Have a drink?”

  “Thanks, but I’m waiting for old Mr. Wynyard. He doesn’t move a step more than he need, nowadays.”

  “No, poor old boy. The sins of the fathers. Awful to be suffering for the port you never drank! I saw your car outside The Franchise the other day.”

  “Yes,” said Robert, and wondered a little. It was unlike Ben Carley to be blunt. And if he had seen Robert’s car he had also seen the police cars.

  “If you know them you’ll be able to tell me something. I always wanted to know about them. Is the rumour true?”

  “Rumour?”

  “Are they witches?”

  “Are they supposed to be?” said Robert lightly.

  “There’s a strong support for the belief in the countryside, I understand,” Carley said, his bright black eyes resting for a moment on Robert’s with intention, and then going on to wander over the lounge with their habitual quick interrogation.

  Robert understood that the little man was offering him, tacitly, information that he thought ought to be useful to him.

  “Ah well,” Robert said, “since entertainment came into the country with the cinema, God bless it, an end has been put to witch-hunting.”

  “Don’t you believe it. Give these midland morons a good excuse and they’ll witch-hunt with the best. An inbred crowd of degenerates, if you ask me. Here’s your old boy. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

  It was one of Robert’s chief attractions that he was genuinely interested in people and in their troubles, and he listened to old Mr. Wynyard’s rambling story with a kindness that won the old man’s gratitude—and added, although he was unaware of it, a hundred to the sum that stood against his name in the old farmer’s will—but as soon as their business was over he made straight for the hotel telephone.

  There were far too many people about, and he decided to use the one in the garage over in Sin Lane. The office would be shut by now, and anyhow it was further away. And if he telephoned from the garage, so his thoughts went as he strode across the street, he would have his car at hand if she—if they asked him to come out and discuss the business further, as they very well might, as they almost certainly would—yes, of course they would want to discuss what they could do to discredit the girl’s story, whether there was to be a case or not—he had been so relieved over Hallam’s news that he had not yet come round in his mind to considering what—

  “Evening, Mr. Blair,” Bill Brough said, oozing his large person out of the narrow office door, his round calm face bland and welcoming. “Want your car?”

  “No, I want to use your telephone first, if I may.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Stanley, who was under a car, poked his fawn’s face out and asked:

  “Know anything?”

  “Not a thing, Stan. Haven’t had a bet for months.”

  “I’m two pounds down on a cow called Bright Promise. That’s what comes of putting your faith in horseflesh. Next time you’ll know something—”

  “Next time I have a bet I’ll tell you. But it will still be horseflesh.”

  “As long as it’s not a cow—” Stanley said, disappearing under the car again; and Robert moved into the hot bright little office and picked up the receiver.

  It was Marion who answered, and her voice sounded warm and glad.

  “You can’t imagine what a relief your note was to us. Both my mother and I have been picking oakum for the last week. Do they still pick oakum, by the way?”

  “I think not. It is something more constructive nowadays, I understand.”

  “Occupational therapy.”

  “More or less.”

  “I can’t think of any compulsory sewing that would improve my character.”

  “They would probably find you something more congenial. It is against modern thought to compel a prisoner to do anything that he doesn’t want to.”

  “That is the first time I have heard you sound tart.”

  “Was I tart?”

  “Pure angostura.”

  Well, she had reached the subject of drink; perhaps now she would suggest his coming out for sherry before dinner.

  “What a charming nephew you have, by the way.”

  “Nephew?”

  “The one who brought the note.”

  “He is not my nephew,” Robert said coldly. Why was it so ageing to be avuncular? “He is my first cousin once removed. But I am glad you liked him.” This would not do; he would have to take the bull by the horns. “I should like to see you sometime to discuss what we can do to straighten things out. To make things safer—” He waited.

  “Yes, of course. Perhaps we could look in at your office one morning when we are shopping? What kind of thing could we do, do you think?”

  “Some kind of private inquiry, perhaps. I can’t very well discuss it over the telephone.”

  “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.

  All, 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 brushmark 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, my 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 closeup.”

  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 his leisure on one trail might be more successful than the orthodox and official investigation had been.

  Chapter 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.