The Franchise Affair (22 page)

“Did you bribe them?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“No. I just mentioned that it was the work of hooligans. If your missing windows had been the result of blast you would no doubt still be living with the elements. Blast ranks as misfortune, and therefore a thing to be put up with. But hooliganism is one of those things that Something Must Be Done About. Hence your new windows. I wish that it was all as easy as replacing windows.”

He was unaware that there had been any change in his voice, but Marion searched his face and said: “Some new development?”

“I'm afraid there is. I was coming out this afternoon to tell you about it. It appears that just when the
Ack-Emma
is dropping the subject—there is only one letter today and that a mild one—just when the
Ack-Emma
has grown tired of Betty Kane's cause the
Watchman
is going to take it up.”

“Excelsior!” said Marion. “The
Watchman
snatching the torch from the failing hands of the
Ack-Emma
is a charming picture.”

“Climbing into the
Ack-Emma's
bed,” Ben Carley had called it; but the sentiment was the same.

“Have you spies in the
Watchman
office, Mr. Blair?”

Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“No; it was Nevil who got wind of it. They are going to print a letter from his future father-in-law, the Bishop of Larborough.”

“Hah!” said Mrs. Sharpe. “Toby Byrne.”

“You know him?” asked Robert, thinking that the quality of her tone would peel the varnish off wood if spilt on it.

“He went to school with my nephew. The son of the horseleech brother. Toby Byrne, indeed. He doesn't change.”

“I gather that you didn't like him.”

“I never knew him. He went home for the holidays once with my nephew but was never asked back.”

“Oh?”

“He discovered for the first time that stable lads got up at the crack of dawn, and he was horrified. It was slavery, he said; and he went round the lads urging them to stand up for their rights. If they combined, he said, not a horse would go out of the stable before nine o'clock in the morning. The lads used to mimic him for years afterwards; but he was not asked back.”

“Yes; he doesn't change,” agreed Robert. “He has been using the same technique ever since, on everything from Kaffirs to Crèches. The less he knows about a thing the more strongly he feels about it. Nevil was of the opinion that nothing could be done about the proposed letter, since the Bishop had already written it and what the Bishop has written is not to be contemplated as waste-paper. But I couldn't just sit and do nothing about it; so I rang him up after dinner and pointed out as tactfully as I could that he was embracing a very doubtful cause, and
at the same time doing harm to two possibly innocent people. But I might have saved my breath. He pointed out that the
Watchman
existed for the free expression of opinion, and inferred that I was trying to prevent such freedom. I ended up by asking him if he approved of lynching, because he was doing his best to bring one about. That was after I saw it was hopeless and had stopped being tactful.” He took the cup of coffee that Mrs. Sharpe had put out for him. “He's a sad come-down after his predecessor in the See who was the terror of every evil-doer in five counties, and a scholar to boot.”

“How did Toby Byrne achieve gaiters?” Mrs. Sharpe wondered.

“I assume that Cowan's Cranberry Sauce had no inconsiderable part in his translation.”

“Ah, yes. His wife. I forgot. Sugar, Mr. Blair?”

“By the way, here are the two duplicate keys to the Franchise gate. I take it that I may keep one. The other you had better give to the police, I think, so that they can look round as they please. I also have to inform you that you now have a private agent in your employ.” And he told them about Alec Ramsden, who appeared on doorsteps at half-past eight in the morning.

“No word of anyone recognising the
Ack-Emma
photograph and writing to Scotland Yard?” Marion asked. “I had pinned my faith to that.”

“Not so far. But there is still hope.”

“It is five days since the
Ack-Emma
printed it. If anyone was ever going to recognise it they would have by now.”

“You don't make allowances for the discards. That is nearly always the way it happens. Someone spreads open their parcel of chips and says: ‘Dear me, where did I see that face?' Or someone is using a bundle of newspapers to line drawers in a hotel. Or something like that. Don't lose hope, Miss Sharpe. Between the good Lord and Alec Ramsden, we'll triumph in the end.”

She looked at him soberly. “You really believe that don't you,” she said as one noting a phenomenon.

“I do,” he said.

“You believe in the ultimate triumph of Good.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I suppose because the other thing is unthinkable. Nothing more positive or more commendable than that.”

“I should have a greater faith in a God who hadn't given Toby Byrne a bishopric,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “When does Toby's letter appear, by the way?”

“On Friday morning.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Mrs. Sharpe.

R
obert was less sure about the ultimate triumph of good by Friday afternoon.

It was not the Bishop's letter which shook his faith. Indeed the events of Friday did much to take the wind out of the Bishop's sails; and if Robert had been told on Wednesday morning that he would bitterly regret anything that served to deflate the Bishop he would not have believed it.

His Lordship's letter had run very true to form. The
Watchman
, he said, had always set its face against violence and was not now, of course, proposing to condone it, but there were occasions when violence was but a symptom of a deep social unrest, resentment, and insecurity. As in the recent Nullahbad case, for instance. (The “unrest, resentment, and insecurity” in the Nullahbad case lay entirely in the bosoms of two thieves who could not find the opal bracelet they had come to steal and by way of reprisal killed the seven sleeping occupants of the bungalow in their beds.) There were undoubtedly times when the proletariat felt themselves helpless to redress a patent wrong, and it was not to be marvelled at that some of the more passionate spirits were moved to personal protest. (Robert thought that Bill and Stanley would hardly recognise the louts of Monday night under the guise of “passionate spirits”; and he held that “personal protest”
was a slight understatement for the entire wrecking of the ground floor windows of The Franchise.) The people to be blamed for the unrest (the
Watchman
had a passion for euphemism: unrest, underprivileged, backward, unfortunate; where the rest of the world talked about violence, the poor, mentally deficient, and prostitutes; and one of the things that the
Ack-Emma
and the
Watchman
had in common, now he thought about it, was the belief that all prostitutes were hearts-of-gold who had taken the wrong turning)—the people to be blamed for the unrest were not those perhaps misguided persons who had demonstrated their resentment so unmistakably, but the powers whose weakness, ineptitude and lack of zeal had led to the injustice of a dropped case. It was part of the English heritage that justice should not only be done but that it should be shown to be done; and the place for that was in open court.

“What good does he think it would do anyone for the police to waste time preparing a case that they were foreordained to lose?” Robert asked Nevil, who was reading the letter over his shoulder.

“It would have done
us
a power of good,” Nevil said. “He doesn't seem to have thought of that. If the Magistrate dismissed the case the suggestion that his poor bruised darling was telling fibs could hardly be avoided, could it! Have you come to the bruises?”

“No.”

The bruises came near the end. The “poor bruised body” of this young and blameless girl, his lordship said, was a crying indictment of a law that had failed to protect her and now failed to vindicate her. The whole conduct of this case was one that demanded the most searching scrutiny.

“That must be making the Yard very happy this morning,” Robert said.

“This afternoon,” amended Nevil.

“Why this afternoon?”

“No one at the Yard would read a bogus publication like the
Watchman
. They won't see it until someone sends it to them this afternoon.”

But they had seen it, as it turned out. Grant had read it in the train. He had picked it off the bookstall with three others; not because it was his choice but because it was a choice between that and coloured publications with bathing-belle covers.

Robert deserted the office and took the copy of the
Watchman
out to The Franchise together with that morning's
Ack-Emma
, which had quite definitely no further interest in the Franchise affair. Since the final, subdued letter on Wednesday it had ceased to mention the matter. It was a lovely day; the grass in the Franchise courtyard absurdly green, the dirty-white front of the house glorified by the sun into a semblance of grace, the reflected light from the rosy brick wall flooding the shabby drawing-room and giving it a smiling warmth. They had sat there, the three of them, in great contentment. The
Ack-Emma
had finished its undressing of them in public; the Bishop's letter was not after all as bad as it might have been; Alec Ramsden was busy on their behalf in Larborough and would without doubt unearth facts sooner or later that would be their salvation; the summer was here with its bright short nights; Stanley was proving himself “a great dear”; they had paid a second short visit to Milford yesterday in pursuance of their design to become part of the scenery, and nothing untoward had happened to them beyond stares, black looks, and a few audible remarks. Altogether, the feeling of the meeting was that it all might be worse.

“How much ice will this cut?” Mrs. Sharpe asked Robert, stabbing her skinny index finger at the correspondence page of the
Watchman
.

“Not much, I think. Even among the
Watchman
clique the
Bishop is looked at slightly sideways nowadays, I understand. His championship of Mahoney didn't do him any good.”

“Who was Mahoney?” Marion asked.

“Have you forgotten Mahoney? He was the Irish ‘patriot' who put a bomb in a woman's bicycle basket in a busy English street and blew four people to pieces, including the woman, who was later identified by her wedding ring. The Bishop held that Mahoney was merely misguided, not a murderer; that he was fighting on behalf of a repressed minority—the Irish, believe it or not—and that we should not make him into a martyr. That was a little too much for even
Watchman
stomachs, and since then the Bishop's prestige is not what it was, I hear.”

“Isn't it shocking how one forgets when it doesn't concern oneself,” Marion said. “Did they hang Mahoney?”

“They did, I am glad to say—much to his own pained surprise. So many of his predecessors had benefited from the plea that we should not make martyrs, that murder had ceased to be reckoned in their minds as one of the dangerous trades. It was rapidly becoming as safe as banking.”

“Talking of banking,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “I think it would be best if our financial position were made clear to you, and for that you should get in touch with old Mr. Crowle's solicitors in London, who manage our affairs. I shall write to them explaining that you are to be given full details, so that you may know how much we have to come and go on, and can make corresponding arrangements for the spending of it in defence of our good name. It is not exactly the way we had planned to spend it.”

“Let us be thankful we have it to spend,” Marion said. “What does a penniless person do in a case like this?”

Robert quite frankly did not know.

He took the address of the Crowle solicitors and went home to lunch with Aunt Lin, feeling happier than he had at any time since he had first caught sight of the
Ack-Emma's
front page on
Bill's desk last Friday. He felt as one feels in a bad thunderstorm when the noise ceases to be directly overhead; it will still continue, and probably still be very unpleasant, but one can see a future through it whereas but a moment ago there was nothing but the dreadful “now.”

Even Aunt Lin seemed to have forgotten The Franchise for a spell and was at her woolly and endearing best—full of the birthday presents she was buying for Lettice's twins in Saskatchewan. She had provided his favourite lunch—cold ham, boiled potatoes, and brown betty with thick cream—and moment by moment he was finding it more difficult to realise that this was the Friday morning he had dreaded because it would see the beginning of a
Watchman
campaign against them. It seemed to him that the Bishop of Larborough was very much what Lettice's husband used to call “a busted flush.” He couldn't imagine now why he had wasted a thought on him.

It was in this mood that he went back to the office. And it was in this mood that he picked up the receiver to answer Hallam's call.

“Mr. Blair?” Hallam said. “I'm at the Rose and Crown. I'm afraid I've got bad news for you. Inspector Grant's here.”

“At the Rose and Crown?”

“Yes. And he's got a warrant.”

Robert's brain stopped functioning. “A search warrant?” he asked stupidly.

“No; a warrant to arrest.”

“No!”

“I'm afraid so.”

“But he
can't
have!”

“I expect it's a bit of a shock for you. I admit I hadn't anticipated it myself.”

“You mean he has managed to get a witness—a corroborative witness?”