The Franchise Affair ag-3 Page 7

  "Did you believe the girl's story when you read it?" Robert asked.

  "I don't see how she could have made it up," Mr. Heseltine said simply. "It is such a very circumstantial story, isn't it?"

  "It is, indeed. But I saw the girl when she was brought to The Franchise to identify it last week-that was the day I went out so hurriedly just after tea-and I don't believe a word she says. Not a word," he added, glad to be able to say it loudly and distinctly to himself and to be sure at last that he believed it.

  "But how could she have thought of The Franchise at all, or known all those things, if she wasn't there?"

  "I don't know. I haven't the least idea."

  "It is a most unlikely place to pick on, surely; a remote, invisible house like that, on a lonely road, in country that people don't visit very much."

  "I know. I don't know how the job was worked, but that it is a job I am certain. It is a choice not between stories, but between human beings. I am quite certain that the two Sharpes are incapable of insane conduct like that. Whereas I don't believe the girl incapable of telling a story like that. That is what it amounts to." He paused a moment. "And you'll just have to trust my judgment about it, Timmy," he added, using his childhood's name for the old clerk.

  Whether it was the «Timmy» or the argument, it was apparent that Mr. Heseltine had no further protest to make.

  "You'll be able to see the criminals for yourself," Robert said, "because I hear their voices in the hall now. You might bring them in, will you."

  Mr. Heseltine went dumbly out on his mission, and Robert turned the newspaper over so that the comparatively innocuous GIRL SMUGGLED ABOARD was all that would meet the visitors' eye.

  Mrs. Sharpe, moved by some belated instinct for convention, had donned a hat in honour of the occasion. It was a flattish affair of black satin, and the general effect was that of a doctor of learning. That the effect had not been wasted was obvious by the relieved look on Mr. Heseltine's face. This was quite obviously not the kind of client he had expected; it was, on the other hand, the kind of client he was used to.

  "Don't go away," Robert said to him, as he greeted the visitors; and to the others: "I want you to meet the oldest member of the firm, Mr. Heseltine."

  It suited Mrs. Sharpe to be gracious; and exceedingly Victoria Regina was old Mrs. Sharpe when she was being gracious. Mr. Heseltine was more than relieved; he capitulated. Robert's first battle was over.

  When they were alone Robert noticed that Marion had been waiting to say something.

  "An odd thing happened this morning," she said. "We went to the Ann Boleyn place to have coffee-we quite often do-and there were two vacant tables, but when Miss Truelove saw us coming she very hastily tilted the chairs against the tables and said they were reserved. I might have believed her if she hadn't looked so embarrassed. You don't think that rumour has begun to get busy already, do you? That she did that because she has heard some gossip?"

  "No," Robert said, sadly, "because she has read this morning's Ack-Emma." He turned the newspaper front side up. "I am sorry to have such bad news for you. You'll just have to shut your teeth and take it, as small boys say. I don't suppose you have ever seen this poisonous rag at close quarters. It's a pity that the acquaintance should begin on so personal a basis."

  "Oh, no!" Marion said, in passionate protest as her eye fell on the picture of The Franchise.

  And then there was unbroken silence while the two women absorbed the contents of the inner page.

  "I take it," Mrs. Sharpe said at last, "that we have no redress against this sort of thing?"

  "None," Robert said. "All the statements are perfectly true. And it is all statement and not comment. Even if it were comment-and I've no doubt the comment will come-there has been no charge so the case is not sub judice. They are free to comment if they please."

  "The whole thing is one huge implied comment," Marion said. "That the police failed to do their duty. What do they think we did? Bribed them?"

  "I think the suggestion is that the humble victim has less pull with the police than the wicked rich."

  "Rich," repeated Marion, her voice curdling with bitterness.

  "Anyone who has more than six chimneys is rich. Now. If you are not too shocked to think, consider. We know that the girl was never at The Franchise, that she could not—" But Marion interrupted him.

  "Do you know it?" she asked.

  "Yes," Robert said.

  Her challenging eyes lost their challenge, and her glance dropped.

  "Thank you," she said quietly.

  "If the girl was never there, how could she have seen the house!… She did see it somehow. It is too unlikely for belief that she could be merely repeating a description that someone else gave her…. How could she see it? Naturally, I mean."

  "You could see it, I suppose, from the top deck of a bus," Marion said. "But there are no double-decker buses on the Milford route. Or from on top of a load of hay. But it is the wrong time of year for hay."

  "It may be the wrong time for hay," croaked Mrs. Sharpe, "but there is no season for lorry-loads. I have seen lorries loaded with goods as high as any hay waggon."

  "Yes," Marion said. "Suppose the lift the girl got was not in a car, but on a lorry."

  "There is only one thing against that. If a girl was given a lift on a lorry she would be in the cabin, even if it meant sitting on someone's knee. They wouldn't perch her up on top of the load. Especially as it was a rainy evening, you may remember…. No one ever came to The Franchise to ask the way, or to sell something, or to mend something-someone that the girl could have been with, even in the background?"

  But no; they were both sure that no one had come, within the time the girl had been on holiday.

  "Then we take it for granted that what she learned about The Franchise she learned from being high enough on one occasion to see over the wall. We shall probably never know when or how, and we probably could not prove it if we did know. So our whole efforts will have to be devoted, not to proving that she wasn't at The Franchise, but that she was somewhere else!"

  "And what chance is there of that?" Mrs. Sharpe asked.

  "A better chance than before this was published," Robert said, indicating the front page of the Ack-Emma. "Indeed it is the one bright spot in the bad business. We could not have published the girl's photograph in the hope of information about her whereabouts during that month. But now that they have published it-her own people, I mean-the same benefit should come to us. They have broadcast the story-and that is our bad luck; but they have also broadcast the photograph-and if we have any good luck at all someone, somewhere, will observe that the story and the photograph do not fit. That at the material time, as given in the story, the subject of the photograph could not possibly have been in the stated place, because they, personally, know her to have been elsewhere."

  Marion's face lost a little of its bleak look, and even Mrs. Sharpe's thin back looked less rigid. What had seemed a disaster might be, after all, the means of their salvation.

  "And what can we do in the way of private investigation?" Mrs. Sharpe asked. "You realise, I expect, that we have very little money; and I take it that a private inquiry is a spendthrift business."

  "It does usually run away with more than one had bargained for, because it is difficult to budget for. But to begin with I am going, myself, to see the various people involved, and find out, if possible, on what lines any inquiry should be based. Find out what she was likely to do."

  "Will they tell you that?"

  "Oh, no. They are probably unaware themselves of her tendencies. But if they talk about her at all a picture must emerge. At least I hope so."

  There was a few moments' silence.

  "You are extraordinarily kind, Mr. Blair."

  Victoria Regina had come back to Mrs. Sharpe's manner, but there was a hint of something else. Almost of surprise; as if kindness was not one of the things she had normally met with in life; nor expected. Her stiffly gracio
us acknowledgement was as eloquent as if she had said: "You know that we are poor, and that we may never be able to pay you adequately, and we are not at all the kind of people that you would choose to represent, but you are going out of your way to do us the best service in your power, and we are grateful."

  "When do you go?" Marion asked.

  "Directly after lunch."

  "Today!"

  "The sooner the better."

  "Then we won't keep you," Mrs. Sharpe said, rising. She stood for a moment looking down at the paper where it lay spread on the table. "We enjoyed the privacy of The Franchise a great deal," she said.

  When he had seen them out of the door and into their car, he called Nevil into his room and picked up the receiver to talk to Aunt Lin about packing a bag.

  "I suppose you don't see the Ack-Emma ever?" he asked Nevil.

  "I take it that the question is rhetoric," Nevil said.

  "Have a look at this morning's. Hullo, Aunt Lin."

  "Does someone want to sue them for something? It will be sound money for us, if so. They practically always settle out of court. They have a special fund for the—" Nevil's voice died away. He had seen the front page that was staring up at him from the table.

  Robert stole a look at him over the telephone, and observed with satisfaction the naked shock on his cousin's bright young features. The youth of today, he understood, considered themselves shock-proof; it was good to know that, faced with an ordinary slab of real life, they reacted like any other human being.

  "Be an angel, Aunt Lin, and pack a bag for me, will you? Just for over-night…."

  Nevil had torn the paper open and was now reading the story.

  "Just London and back, I expect, but I'm not sure. Anyhow, just the little case; and just the minimum. Not all the things I might need, if you love me. Last time there was a bottle of digestive powder weighing nearly a pound, and when in heck did I ever need a digestive powder!… All right, then I will have ulcers…. Yes, I'll be in to lunch in about ten minutes."

  "The blasted swine!" said the poet and intellectual, falling back in his need on the vernacular.

  "Well, what do you make of it?"

  "Make of it! Of what?"

  "The girl's story."

  "Does one have to make anything of it? An obvious piece of sensationalism by an unbalanced adolescent?"

  "And if I told you that the said adolescent is a very calm, ordinary, well-spoken-of schoolgirl who is anything but sensational?"

  "Have you seen her?"

  "Yes. That was why I first went to The Franchise last week, to be there when Scotland Yard brought the girl to confront them." Put that in your pipe and smoke it, young Nevil. She may talk hens and Maupassant with you, but it is me she turns to in trouble.

  "To be there on their behalf?"

  "Certainly."

  Nevil relaxed suddenly. "Oh, well; that's all right. For a moment I thought you were against her. Against them. But that's all right. We can join forces to put a spoke in the wheel of this-" he flicked the paper-"this moppet." Robert laughed at this typically Nevil choice of epithet. "What are you going to do about it, Robert?"

  Robert told him. "And you will hold the fort while I am gone." He saw that Nevil's attention had gone back to the "moppet." He moved over to join him and together they considered the young face looking so calmly up at them.

  "An attractive face, on the whole," Robert said. "What do you make of it?"

  "What I should like to make of it," said the aesthete, with slow venom, "would be a very nasty mess."

  7

  The Wynns' home outside Aylesbury was in a countrified suburb; the kind of district where rows of semi-detached houses creep along the edge of the still unspoiled fields; selfconscious and aware that they are intruders, or smug and not caring, according to the character their builders have given them. The Wynns lived in one of the apologetic rows; a red-brick string of ramshackle dwellings that set Robert's teeth on edge; so raw they were, so crude, so hang-dog. But as he drove slowly up the road, looking for the appropriate number, he was won over by the love that had gone to the decoration of these regrettable objects. No love had gone to their building; only a reckoning. But to each owner, as he took over, the bare little house had represented his "sufficient beauty," and having found it he served it. The gardens were small miracles of loveliness; each succeeding one a fresh revelation of some unsuspected poet's heart.

  Nevil really ought to be here to see, Robert thought, slowing down yet once more as a new perfection caught his eye; there was more poetry here than in a whole twelve months of his beloved Watchman. All his cliches were here: form, rhythm, colour, total gesture, design, impact….

  Or would Nevil see only a row of suburban gardens? Only Meadowside Lane, Aylesbury, with some Woolworth plants in the gardens?

  Probably.

  Number 39 was the one with the plain green grass bordered by a rockery. It was also distinguished by the fact that its curtains were invisible. No genteel net was stretched across the windowpane, no cream casement cloth hung at the sides. The windows were bare to the sun, the air, and the human gaze. This surprised Robert as much as it probably surprised the neighbours. It augured a nonconformity that he had not expected.

  He rang the bell, wishing that he did not feel like a bagman. He was a suppliant; and that was a new role for Robert Blair.

  Mrs. Wynn surprised him even more than her windows did. It was only when he had met her that he realised how complete a picture he had built in his mind of the woman who had adopted and mothered the child Betty Kane: the grey hair, the solid matronly comfortable figure, the plain broad sensible face; perhaps, even, an apron, or one of those flowered overalls that housewives wear. But Mrs. Wynn was not at all like that. She was slight and neat and young and modern and dark and pink-cheeked and still pretty, and had a pair of the most intelligent bright brown eyes Robert had ever seen.

  When she saw a stranger she looked defensive, and made an involuntary closing movement with the door she was holding; but a second glance seemed to reassure her. Robert explained who he was, and she listened without interrupting him in a way he found quite admirable. Very few of his own clients listened without interrupting; male or female.

  "You are under no obligation to talk to me," he finished, having explained his presence. "But I hope very much that you won't refuse. I have told Inspector Grant that I was going to see you this afternoon, on my clients' behalf."

  "Oh, if the police know about it and don't mind—" She stepped back to let him come past her. "I expect you have to do your best for those people if you are their lawyer. And we have nothing to hide. But if it is really Betty you want to interview I'm afraid you can't. We have sent her into the country to friends for the day, to avoid all the fuss. Leslie meant well, but it was a stupid thing to do."

  "Leslie?"

  "My son. Sit down, won't you." She offered him one of the easy chairs in a pleasant, uncluttered sitting-room. "He was too angry about the police to think clearly-angry about their failure to do anything when it seemed so proved, I mean. He has always been devoted to Betty. Indeed until he got engaged they were inseparable."

  Robert's ears pricked. This was the kind of thing he had come to hear.

  "Engaged?"

  "Yes. He got engaged just after the New Year to a very nice girl. We are all delighted."

  "Was Betty delighted?"

  "She wasn't jealous, if that is what you mean," she said, looking at him with her intelligent eyes. "I expect she missed not coming first with him as she used to, but she was very nice about it. She is a nice girl, Mr. Blair. Believe me. I was a schoolmistress before I married-not a very good one, that is why I got married at the first opportunity-and I know a lot about girls. Betty has never given me a moment's anxiety."

  "Yes. I know. Everyone reports excellently of her. Is your son's fiancee a schoolfellow of hers?"

  "No, she is a stranger. Her people have come to live near here and he met her at a dance."


  "Does Betty go to dances?"

  "Not grown-up dances. She is too young yet."

  "So she had not met the fiancee?"

  "To be honest, none of us had. He rather sprang her on us. But we liked her so much we didn't mind."

  "He must be very young to be settling down?"

  "Oh, the whole thing is absurd, of course. He is twenty and she is eighteen. But they are very sweet together. And I was very young myself when I married and I have been very happy. The only thing I lacked was a daughter, and Betty filled that gap."

  "What does she want to do when she leaves school?"

  "She doesn't know. She has no special talent for anything as far as I can see. I have a notion that she will marry early."

  "Because of her attractiveness?"

  "No, because—" she paused and apparently changed what she had been going to say. "Girls who have no particular bent fall easily into matrimony."

  He wondered if what she had been going to say had any remote connection with slate-blue eyes.

  "When Betty failed to turn up in time to go back to school, you thought she was just playing truant? Although she was a well-behaved child."

  "Yes; she was growing bored with school; and she had always said-which is quite true-that the first day back at school is a wasted one. So we thought she was just 'taking advantage' for once, as they say. 'Trying it on' as Leslie said, when he heard that she hadn't turned up."

  "I see. Was she wearing school clothes on her holiday?"

  For the first time Mrs. Wynn looked doubtfully at him; uncertain of his motive in asking.

  "No. No, she was wearing her week-end clothes…. You know that when she came back she was wearing only a frock and shoes?"

  Robert nodded.

  "I find it difficult to imagine women so depraved that they would treat a helpless child like that."

  "If you could meet the women, Mrs. Wynn, you would find it still more difficult to imagine."

  "But all the worst criminals look innocent and harmless, don't they?"

  Robert let that pass. He wanted to know about the bruises on the girl's body. Were they fresh bruises?