The Franchise Affair (14 page)

Mrs. Tilsit came back in what seemed like two minutes, bearing a tray with tea. Robert wondered a little at this promptness of action until he saw the tray's contents. Mrs. Tilsit had not wanted to make a decision; she had brought them both; Thin Wine and Sweet Shortbread. At least, he thought, watching her pour, this woman explained one of the oddities in the affair: the fact that when the Wynns had written to have Betty sent home at once, her aunt had not flown to a telegraph office to break the news that Betty had left for home nearly a fortnight ago. The Betty who had gone a fortnight previously would be much less real in Mrs. Tilsit's mind than the jelly that was cooling on the back window-sill.

“I wasn't worried about her,” Mrs. Tilsit said, as if in echo to his thoughts. “When they wrote from Aylesbury about her, I knew she would turn up. When Mr. Tilsit came home he was quite upset about it; he goes away for a week or ten days at a time you know; he's agent for Weekses; carried on like a mad thing, he did; but I just said you wait and she'll turn up all right, and she did. Well, nearly all right.”

“She said she enjoyed her holiday here enormously.”

“I suppose she did,” she said vaguely, not looking gratified as Robert had expected. He glanced at her and realised that her mind was already on something else. The strength of his tea, if one was to judge by the direction of her eye.

“How did she pass her time? Did she make friends?”

“Oh, no, she was in Larborough most of the time.”

“Larborough!”

“Oh well, when I say most of the time, I do her an injustice. She helped with the house in the mornings, but in a house this size and me used to doing everything myself there isn't much to do. And she was here on holiday, wasn't she, poor thing, after all that school work. What good all that book work is to a young girl I don't know. Mrs. Harrap's daughter over the way could hardly write her name but she married the third son of a lord. Or perhaps it was the son of a third son,” she said, looking doubtful. “I forget for the minute. She—”

“How did she spend her time in Larborough? Betty, I mean.”

“Pictures, mostly.”

“Pictures? Oh the cinema, I see.”

“You can do that from morning till night if you're given that way, in Larborough. The big ones open at half-past ten and they mostly change mid-week and there's about forty of them, so you can just go from one to another till it's time to go home.”

“Is that what Betty did?”

“Oh, no. She's quite sensible, Betty is. She used to go in to the morning round because you get it cheaper before noon, and then she'd go bus-riding.”

“Bus-riding. Where?”

“Oh, anywhere the fancy took her. Have another of these biscuits, Mr. Bain; they're fresh from the tin. She went to see the castle at Norton one day. Norton's the county town you know. Everyone imagines Larborough is because it's so big, but Norton's always been—”

“Did she not come home to lunch, then?”

“What? Oh, Betty. No, she'd have coffee lunch somewhere. We always have our real meal at night anyway, you see, with Mr. Tilsit being out all day, so there was always a meal waiting when
she came home. It's always been my pride to have a good nourishing sit-down meal ready for my—”

“What time would that be? Six?”

“No, Mr. Tilsit doesn't usually manage home before half-past seven.”

“And I suppose Betty was home long before then?”

“Mostly she was. She was late once because she went to an afternoon show at the pictures, but Mr. Tilsit he created about it—though I'm sure he had no need to, what harm can you come to at the pictures?—and after that she was always home before him. When he was here, that is. She wasn't so careful when he was away.”

So the girl had been her own mistress for a good fortnight. Free to come and go without question, and limited only by the amount of holiday money in her pocket. It was an innocent-sounding fortnight; and in the case of most girls of her age it undoubtedly would have been that. The cinema in the morning, or window gazing; a coffee lunch; a bus-ride into the country in the afternoon. A blissful holiday for an adolescent; the first taste of unsupervised freedom.

But Betty Kane was no normal adolescent. She was the girl who had told that long and circumstantial story to the police without a tremor. The girl with four weeks of her life unaccounted for. The girl that someone had ended by beating unmercifully. How, then, had Betty Kane spent her unsupervised freedom?

“Did she go to Milford on the bus, do you know?”

“No,
they
asked me that, of course, but I couldn't say yes or no.”

“They?”

“The police.”

Yes, of course; he had forgotten for the moment that the police would have checked Betty Kane's every sentence to the limit of their power.

“You're not police, I think you said.”

“No,” Robert said yet once again. “I'm a lawyer. I represent the two women who are supposed to have detained Betty.”

“Oh, yes. You told me. I suppose they have to have a lawyer like anyone else, poor things. To ask questions for them. I hope I'm telling you the things you want to know, Mr. Blayne.”

He had another cup of tea in the hope that sooner or later she would tell him something he wanted to know. But it was mere repetition now.

“Did the police know that Betty was away on her own all day?” he asked.

She really thought about that. “That I can't remember,” she said. “They asked me how she passed her time and I said that mostly she went to pictures or bus-riding, and they said did I go with her and I said—well, I'll have to admit I told a white lie about it and said I did now and then. I didn't want them to think that Betty went to places alone. Though of course there was no harm in it.”

What a mind!

“Did she have letters while she was here?” he asked as he was taking his leave.

“Just from home. Oh, yes, I would know. I always took the letters in. In any case they wouldn't have written to her, would they?”

“Who?”

“Those women who kidnapped her.”

It was with a feeling of escape that Robert drove in to Larborough. He wondered if Mr. Tilsit had always been away “ten days at a time” from his home, or if he had got the travelling job as an alternative to flight or suicide.

In Larborough, Blair sought out the main garage of the Larborough and District Motor Services. He knocked at the door of the small office that guarded one side of the entrance, and went
in. A man in a bus inspector's uniform was going through papers on the desk. He glanced up at Robert and without asking his business continued his own affairs.

Robert said that he wanted to see someone who would know about the Milford bus service.

“Time table on the wall outside,” the man said without looking up.

“I don't want to know about times. I know them. I live in Milford. I want to know if you ever run a double-decker bus on that route.”

There was silence for a long time; a silence expertly calculated to end at the point where Robert was about to open his mouth again.

“No,” said the man.

“Never?” Robert asked.

This time there was no answer at all. The inspector made it plain that he was finished with him.

“Listen,” Robert said, “this is important. I am a partner in a firm of solicitors in Milford, and I—”

The man turned on him, “I don't care if you are the Shah of Persia; there are
no double-decker buses on the Milford run!
And what do
you
want?” he added as a small mechanic appeared behind Robert in the doorway.

The mechanic hesitated, as if the business he had come on had been upset by a newer interest. But he pulled himself together and began to state his business. “It's about those spares for Norton. Shall I—”

As Robert was edging past him out of the office he felt a tug on his coat and realised that the little mechanic wanted him to linger until he could talk to him. Robert went out and bent over his own car, and presently the mechanic appeared at his elbow.

“You asking about double-decker buses? I couldn't contradict him straight out, you know; in the mood he's in now it'd be as
much as my job's worth. You want to
use
a double-decker, or just to know if they ever run at all? Because you can't
get
a double-decker on that route, not to travel in, because the buses on that run are all—”

“I know, I know. They are single-decks. What I wanted to know was whether there
ever
are two-deck buses on the Milford route.”

“Well, there are not supposed to be, you understand, but once or twice this year we've had to use a double-decker when one of the old single ones broke down unexpected. Sooner or later they'll be all double-deck, but there isn't enough traffic on the Milford run to justify a double, so all the old crocks of singles eventually land on that route and a few more like it. And so—”

“You're a great help. Would it be possible to find out exactly when a double-decker did run on that route?”

“Oh, certainly,” the mechanic said, with a shade of bitterness. “In this firm it's recorded every time you spit. But the records are in there,” he tilted back his head to indicate the office, “and as long as
he's
there there's nothing doing.”

Robert asked at what hour there would be something doing.

“Well: he goes off at the same time as me: six. But I could wait a few minutes and look up the schedules when he's gone if it's very important to you.”

Robert did not know how he was going to wait through the hours till six o'clock, but six o'clock it would have to be.

“Righto. I'll meet you in the Bell, that's the pub at the end of the street, about a quarter past six. That do?”

That would do perfectly, Robert said. Perfectly.

And he went away to see what he could bribe the lounge waiter at the Midland into giving him out of hours.

I
suppose you know what you're doing, dear,” Aunt Lin said, “but I can't help thinking it's very odd of you to defend people like that.”

“I am not ‘defending' them,” Robert said patiently, “I am representing them. And there is no evidence whatever that they are ‘people like that.' ”

“There is the girl's statement, Robert. She couldn't just have made all that up.”

“Oh, couldn't she!”

“What advantage would it be to her to tell a lot of lies!” She was standing in his doorway passing her prayerbook from one hand to the other as she put on her white gloves. “What else could she have been doing if she wasn't at The Franchise?”

Robert bit back a “You'd be surprised!” It was always best with Aunt Lin to take the line of least resistance.

She smoothed her gloves into place. “If it's just that you're being noble, Robert dear, I must say you are just being wrong-headed. And do you have to go out to the
house!
Surely they could come to the office tomorrow. There's no hurry is there? It isn't as if someone was going to arrest them on the spot.”

“It was my suggestion that I should go out to The Franchise. If someone accused
you
of stealing things off Woolworth's counter and you couldn't disprove it, I don't suppose you would enjoy walking down Milford High Street in broad daylight.”

“I mightn't like it but I should most certainly do it and give Mr. Hensell a piece of my mind.”

“Who is Mr. Hensell?”

“The manager. Couldn't you come to church with me first and then go out to The Franchise; it's such a long time since you've been, dear.”

“If you stand there much longer you'll be late for the first time in ten years. You go and pray that my judgment may be perfected.”

“I shall most certainly pray for you, dear. I always do. I shall also put up a little one for myself. All this is going to be very difficult for me.”

“For you?”

“Now that you're acting for those people I shan't be able to talk about it to anyone. It is quite maddening, dear, to sit silent and hear everyone telling for gospel truth things you know for a fact are wrong. It's like wanting to be sick and having to postpone it. Oh, dear, the bells have stopped, haven't they? I'll just have to slip into the Bracketts' pew. They won't mind. You won't stay to lunch at that place, will you, dear.”

“I don't suppose that I shall be invited.”

But his welcome at The Franchise was so warm that he felt that he might very well be invited after all. He would say no, of course; not because Aunt Lin's chicken was waiting but because Marion Sharpe would have to do the washing up afterwards. When there was no one there they probably ate off trays. Or in the kitchen, for all anyone knew.

“I am sorry we refused to answer the telephone last night,” Marion said, apologising again. “But after the fourth or fifth time it really was too much. And we didn't expect you to have news so soon. After all you had only set out on Friday afternoon.”

“Your telephone callers: were they male or female?”

“One male, and four female, as far as I remember. When you
rang this morning I thought it was beginning again, but they seem to be late-sleepers. Or perhaps they don't really get evil-minded much before evening. We certainly provided the Saturday evening's entertainment for the country youths. They congregated in a group inside the gate and cat-called. Then Nevil found a bar of wood in the out-house—”

“Nevil?”

“Yes, your nephew. I mean, your cousin. He came to pay what he called a visit of condolence, which was very nice of him. And he found a bar that could be wedged in the gateway to keep the thing shut; we have no key for it, you see. But of course that didn't stop them for long. They hoisted each other up on the wall, and sat there in a row being offensive until it was time for them to go to their beds.”