The Franchise Affair (12 page)

The little pink man sucked his teeth with a derisive sound.

“Jerry-built. That's what it was. Just jerry-built. The bomb fell in the area there—that's how the Kanes were killed, and they were down in their basement feeling fairly safe—and the whole thing just settled down like a house of cards. Shocking.” He straightened the edge of a pile of evening papers. “It was just her bad luck that the only evening in weeks that she was at home with her husband, a bomb had to come.” He seemed to find a sardonic pleasure in the thought.

“Where was she usually, then?” Robert asked. “Did she work somewhere in the evenings?”

“Work!” said the little man, with vast scorn. “Her!” And then, recollecting: “Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sure. I forgot for the minute that they might be friends of—”

Robert hastened to assure him that his interest in the Kanes was purely academic. Someone had remembered them as caretakers of the block of flats, that was all. If Mrs. Kane was not out working in the evenings what was she out doing?

“Having a good time, of course. Oh, yes, people managed to have a good time even then—if they wanted it enough and looked hard enough for it. Kane, he wanted her to go away to the country with that little girl of theirs, but would she? Not her! Three days of the country would kill her she said. She didn't even go to see the little thing when they evacuated her. The authorities, that is. With the rest of the children. It's my opinion she was tickled to death to have the child off her hands so that she could go dancing at nights.”

“Whom did she go dancing with?”

“Officers,” the little man said succinctly. “A lot more exciting than watching the grass grow. I don't say there was any actual harm in it, mind you,” he said hastily. “She's dead, and I wouldn't like to pin anything on her that she isn't here to unpin, if you take my meaning. But she was a bad mother and a bad wife, that's flat and no one ever said anything to the contrary.”

“Was she pretty?” Robert asked, thinking of the good emotion he had wasted on Betty's mother.

“In a sulky sort of way, yes. She sort of smouldered. You wondered what she would be like when she was lit up. Excited, I mean; not tight. I never saw her tight. She didn't get her excitement that way.”

“And her husband?”

“Ah, he was all right, Bert Kane was. Deserved better luck than that woman. One of the best, Bert was. Terribly fond of the little girl. Spoiled her, of course. She had only to want something and he got it for her; but she was a nice kid, for all that. Demure. Butter wouldn't melt in her little mouth. Yes, Bert deserved better out of life than a goodtime wife and a cupboard-love kid. One of the best, Bert was. . . . ” He looked over the roadway at the empty space, reflectively. “It took them the best part of a week to find him,” he said.

Robert paid for his cigarettes and went out into the street both saddened and relieved. Sad for Bert Kane, who had deserved better; but glad that Betty Kane's mother was not the woman he had pictured. All the way to London his mind had grieved for that dead woman; the woman who had broken her heart for her child's good. It had seemed to him unbearable that the child she had so greatly loved should be Betty Kane. But now he was free of that grief. Betty Kane's mother was exactly the mother he would have chosen for her if he were God. And she on her part looked very like being her mother's daughter.

“A cupboard-love kid.” Well, well. And what was it Mrs. Wynn had said? “She cried because she didn't like the food, but I don't remember her crying for her mother.”

Nor for that father who so devotedly spoiled her, apparently.

When he got back to the hotel he took his copy of the
Ack-Emma
from his despatch case, and over his solitary dinner at the Fortescue considered at his leisure the story on Page Two. From its poster-simplicity opening—

“On a night in April a girl came back to her home clad in nothing but a frock and shoes. She had left home, a bright happy schoolgirl with not a . . . ”

to its final fanfare of sobs, it was of its kind a small masterpiece. It did perfectly what it set out to do. And that was to appeal to the greatest number of readers with one and the same story. To those who wanted sex-interest it offered the girl's lack of clothes, to the sentimentalist her youth and charm, to the partisan her helpless condition, to the sadist the details of her beatings, to the sufferer from class-hatred a description of the big white house behind its high walls, and to the warm-hearted British public in general the impression that the police had been, if not “nobbled,” then at least lax, and that Right had not been Done.

• • •

Yes. It was clever.

Of course the story was a gift for them—which is why they had sent a man back immediately with young Leslie Wynn. But Robert felt that, when really on their mettle, the
Ack-Emma
could probably make a good story of a broken connecting-rod.

It must be a dreary business catering exclusively for the human failings. He turned the pages over, observing how consistently each story was used to appeal to the regrettable in the reader. Even GAVE AWAY A MILLION, he noticed, was the story of a disgraceful old man unloading on his income-tax and not of a boy
who had climbed out of a slum by his own courage and enterprise.

With a slight nausea he put the thing back in his case, and took the case with him to St. Paul's Churchyard. There he found the “daily” woman waiting for him with her hat on. Mr. Macdermott's secretary had telephoned to say that a friend of his was coming and that he was to be given the run of the house and left alone in it without scruple; she had stayed merely to let him in; she would now leave him to it; there was whisky on the little table by the fire, and there was another bottle in the cupboard, but it might, if you asked her, be wise not to remind Mr. Macdermott about it or he would stay up too late and she had great trouble getting him up in the morning.

“It's not the whisky,” Blair said, smiling at her, “it's the Irish in him. All the Irish hate getting up.”

This gave her pause on the doorstep; evidently struck by this new idea.

“I wouldn't wonder,” she said. “My old man's the same, and he's Irish. It's not whisky with him, just original sin. At least that's what I always thought. But perhaps it's just his misfortune in being a Murphy.”

It was a pleasant little place; warm and friendly, and peaceful now that the roar of the city traffic was still. He poured himself a drink, went to the window to look down on Queen Anne, paused a moment to note once more how lightly the great bulk of the church floated on its base; so proportioned, so balanced, that it looked as if one could take it up on a palm and dandle it there; and then sat down and, for the first time since he had gone out that morning to see a maddening old woman who was changing her will again, relaxed.

He was half asleep when he heard Kevin's key in the lock, and his host was in the room before he could move.

Macdermott tweaked his neck in an evil pinch as he passed
behind him to the decanters on the table. “It's beginning, old boy,” he said, “it's beginning.”

“What is?” Robert asked.

“The thickening of that handsome neck of yours.”

Robert rubbed his neck lazily where it stung. “I do begin to notice draughts on the back of it, now you come to mention it,” he said.

“Christ, Robert! does nothing distress you,” Kevin said, his eye pale and bright and mocking under their black brows, “even the imminent prospect of losing those good looks of yours?”

“I'm a little distressed at the moment but it isn't my looks.”

“Well, what with Blair, Hayward, and Bennet it can't be bankruptcy; so I suppose it's a woman.”

“Yes, but not the way you mean.”

“Thinking of getting married? You ought to, Rob.”

“You said that before.”

“You want an heir for Blair, Hayward, and Bennet, don't you?” The calm certainty of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet had always pricked Kevin into small gibes, Robert remembered.

“There is no guarantee that it wouldn't be a girl. Anyhow, Nevil is taking care of that.”

“The only thing that young woman of Nevil's will ever give birth to is a gramophone record. She was gracing a platform again the other day, I hear. If she had to earn the money for her train fares she mightn't be so willing to dash about the country being the Vocal Minority.” He sat down with his drink. “I needn't ask if you are up on business. Sometime you really ought to come up and see this town. I suppose you dash off again tomorrow after a 10 a.m. interview with someone's solicitors.”

“No,” Robert said. “With Scotland Yard.”

Kevin paused with his glass half-way to his mouth. “Robert you're slipping,” he said. “What has the Yard to do with your Ivory Tower?”

“That's just it,” Robert said equably, ignoring this additional
flick at his Milford security. “It's there on the doorstep and I don't quite know how to deal with it. I want to listen to someone being intelligent about the situation. I don't know why I should unload it on you. You must be sick of problems. But you always did do my algebra for me.”

“And you always reckoned the stocks and shares ones, if I remember rightly. I was always a fool about stocks. I still owe you something for saving me from a bad investment. Two bad investments,” he added.

“Two?”

“Tamara, and Topeka Tin.”

“I remember saving you from Topeka Tin, but I had nothing whatever to do with your breaking with Tamara.”

“Oh, hadn't you, indeed! My good Robert, if you could have seen your face when I introduced you to her. Oh, no, not that way. Quite the contrary. The instantaneous
kindness
of your expression, that blasted English mask of courtesy and good breeding—it said everything. I saw myself going through life introducing Tamara to people and watching their faces being well-bred about it. It cured me of her in record time. I have never ceased to be grateful to you. So produce what is in the despatch case.”

Nothing escaped Kevin, Robert thought, taking out his own copy of Betty Kane's statement to the police.

“This is a very short statement. I wish you would read it and tell me how it strikes you.”

He wanted the impact on Kevin, without preliminaries to dull the edge of it.

Macdermott took it, read the first paragraph in one swift eye movement and said: “This is the
Ack-Emma's
protégée, I take it.”

“I had no idea that you ever saw the
Ack-Emma,”
Robert said, surprised.

“God love you, I feed on the
Ack-Emma
. No crime, no
causes célèbres
. No
causes célèbres
, no Kevin Macdermott. Or only a piece of him.” He lapsed into utter silence. For four minutes his
absorption was so complete that Robert felt alone in the room, as if his host had gone away. “Humph!” he said, coming out of it.

“Well?”

“I take it that your clients are the two women in the case, and not this girl?”

“Of course.”

“Now you tell me your end,” Kevin said, and listened.

Robert gave him the whole story. His reluctant visit, his growing partisanship as it became clear that it was a choice between Betty Kane and the two women, Scotland Yard's decision not to move on the available evidence, and Leslie Wynn's rash visit to the offices of the
Ack-Emma
.

“So tonight,” Macdermott said, “the Yard is moving heaven and earth to find corroborative evidence that will back up the girl's story.”

“I suppose so,” said Robert, depressed. “But what I want to know is: Do you or do you not believe the girl's story?”

“I never believe anyone's story,” Kevin pointed out with gentle malice. “What you want to know is: Do I find the girl's story believable? And of course I do.”

“You do!”

“I do. Why not?”

“But it's an absurd story,” Robert said, more hotly than he had intended.

“There is nothing absurd about it. Women who live lonely lives do insane things—especially if they are poor gentlewomen. Only the other day an elderly woman was found to have kept her sister chained up to a bed in a room no bigger than a good-sized cupboard. She had kept her like that for three years, and had fed her on the crusts and potato skins and the other scraps that she didn't want herself. She said, when it was discovered, that their money was going down too fast and this was her way of making ends meet. She had quite a good bank balance actually,
but it was the fear induced by insecurity that had sent her crazy. That is a much more unbelievable—and from your point of view absurd—story than the girl's.”

“Is it? It seems to me just an ordinary tale of insanity.”

“Only because you know it happened. I mean, that someone had actually seen the thing. Suppose, on the contrary, that the rumour had merely gone round; that the crazy sister had heard it and released her victim before any investigation could be made; that the investigators found only two old ladies living an apparently normal life except for the invalidish nature of one of them. What then? Would you have believed the ‘chained-up' tale? Or would you, more likely, have called it an ‘absurd story'?”

Robert sank a little deeper into his depression.

“Here are two lonely and badly-dowered women saddled with a big house in the country; one of them too old to do much household work and the other loathing it. What is the most likely form for their mild insanity to take? The capture of a girl to be a servant to them, of course.”

Damn. Kevin and his counsel's mind. He had thought that he had wanted Kevin's opinion, but what he had wanted was Kevin's backing for his own opinion.

“The girl they capture happens to be a blameless schoolgirl, conveniently far from her home. It is their bad luck that she is so blameless, because since she has never been caught out in a lie to date, everyone is going to take her word against theirs. If I were the police I would have risked it. It seems to me they are losing their nerve.”