The Franchise Affair (24 page)

“Yes, Miss Sharpe.”

“But how? Why now?” She turned to Robert.

“The police think they have the corroborative evidence they needed,” Robert said.

“What evidence?” Mrs. Sharpe asked, reacting for the first time.

“I think the best plan would be for Inspector Hallam to serve you both with the summonses, and we can discuss the situation at greater length when he has gone.”

“You mean, we have to accept them?” Marion said. “To
appear in the public court—my mother too—to answer a—to be accused of a thing like that?”

“I'm afraid there is no alternative.”

She seemed half intimidated by his shortness, half resentful at his lack of championship. And Hallam, as he handed the document to her, seemed to be aware of this last and to resent it in his turn.

“And I think I ought to tell you, in case he doesn't, that but for Mr. Blair here it wouldn't be a mere summons, it would be a warrant; and you would be sleeping tonight in a cell instead of in your own beds. Don't bother, Miss Sharpe: I'll let myself out.”

And Robert, watching him go and remembering how Mrs. Sharpe had snubbed him on his first appearance in that room, thought that the score was now game all.

“Is that true?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“Perfectly true,” Robert said; and told them about Grant's arrival to arrest them. “But it isn't me you have to thank for your escape: it is old Mr. Heseltine in the office.” And he described how the old clerk's mind reacted automatically to stimulus of a legal sort.

“And what is this new evidence they think they have?”

“They have it all right,” Robert said dryly. “There is no thinking about it.” He told them about the girl being picked up on the London road through Mainshill. “That merely corroborates what we have always suspected: that when she left Cherrill Street, ostensibly on her way home, she was keeping an appointment. But the other piece of evidence is much more serious. You told me once that you had a woman—a girl—from the farm, who came in one day a week and cleaned for you.”

“Rose Glyn, yes.”

“I understand that since the gossip got round she doesn't come anymore.”

“Since the gossip—? You mean, the Betty Kane story? Oh, she was sacked before that ever came to light.”

“Sacked?”
Robert said sharply.

“Yes. Why do you look so surprised? In our experience of domestic workers sacking is not an unexpected occurrence.”

“No, but in this case it might explain a lot. What did you sack her for?”

“Stealing,” said old Mrs. Sharpe.

“She had always lifted a shilling or two from a purse if it was left round,” supplemented Marion, “but because we needed help so badly we turned a blind eye and kept purses out of her way. Also any small liftable articles, like stockings. And then she took the watch I'd had for twenty years. I had taken it off to wash some things—the soap-suds rise up one's arms, you know—and when I went back to look for it it had gone. I asked her about it, but of course she ‘hadn't seen it.' That was too much. That watch was part of me, as much a part of me as my hair or my fingernails. There was no recovering it, because we had no evidence at all that she had taken it. But after she had gone we talked it over and next morning we walked over to the farm, and just mentioned that we would not be needing her any more. That was a Tuesday—she always came on Mondays—and that afternoon after my mother had gone up to rest Inspector Grant arrived, with Betty Kane in the car.”

“I see. Was anyone else there when you told the girl at the farm that she was sacked?”

“I don't remember. I don't think so. She doesn't belong to the farm—to Staples, I mean; they are delightful people. She is one of the labourer's daughters. And as far as I remember we met her outside their cottage and just mentioned the thing in passing.”

“How did she take it?”

“She got very pink and flounced a bit.”

“She grew beetroot red and bridled like a turkeycock,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because she will say on oath that when she was working here she heard screams coming from your attic.”

“Will she indeed,” said Mrs. Sharpe, contemplatively.

“What is much worse, there is evidence that she mentioned the screams before there was any rumour of the Betty Kane trouble.”

This produced a complete silence. Once more Robert was aware how noiseless the house was, how dead. Even the French clock on the mantelpiece was silent. The curtain at the window moved inwards on a gust of air and fell back to its place as soundlessly as if it were moving in a film.

“That,” said Marion at last, “is what is known as a facer.”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“A facer for you, too.”

“For us, yes.”

“I don't mean professionally.”

“No? How then?”

“You are faced with the possibility that we have been lying.”

“Really, Marion!” he said impatiently, using her name for the first time and not noticing that he had used it. “What I am faced with, if anything, is the choice between your word and the word of Rose Glyn's friends.”

But she did not appear to be listening. “I wish,” she said passionately, “oh, how I wish that we had one small, just one small piece of evidence on our side! She gets away—that girl gets away with everything, everything. We keep on saying ‘It is not true,' but we have no way of
showing
that it is not true. It is all negative. All inconclusive. All feeble denial. Things combine to back up her lies, but nothing happens to help prove that we are telling the truth. Nothing!”

“Sit down, Marion,” her mother said. “A tantrum won't improve the situation.”

“I could kill that girl; I could kill her. My God, I could torture her twice a day for a year and then begin again on New Year's day. When I think what she had done to us I—”

“Don't think,” Robert interrupted. “Think instead of the day when she is discredited in open court. If I know anything of
human nature that will hurt Miss Kane a great deal worse than the beating someone gave her.”

“You still believe that that is possible?” Marion said, incredulous.

“Yes. I don't quite know how we shall bring it about. But that we shall bring it about I do believe.”

“With not one tiny piece of evidence for us, not one; and evidence just—just
blossoming
for her?”

“Yes. Even then.”

“Is that just native optimism, Mr. Blair,” Mrs. Sharpe asked, “or your innate belief in the triumph of Good, or what?”

“I don't know. I think Truth has a validity of its own.”

“Dreyfus didn't find it very valid; nor Slater; nor some others of whom there is record,” she said dryly.

“They did in the end.”

“Well, frankly, I don't look forward to a life in prison waiting for Truth to demonstrate its validity.”

“I don't believe that it will come to that. Prison, I mean. You will have to appear on Monday, and since we have no adequate defence you will no doubt be sent for trial. But we shall ask for bail, and that means that you can go on staying here until the Assizes at Norton. And before that I hope that Alec Ramsden will have picked up the girl's trail. Remember we don't even have to know what she was doing for the rest of the month. All we have to show is that she did something else on the day she says you picked her up. Take away that first bit and her whole story collapses. And it is my ambition to take it away in public.”

“To undress her in public the way the
Ack-Emma
has undressed us? Do you think she would mind?” Marion said. “Mind as we minded?”

“To have been the heroine of a newspaper sensation, to say nothing of the adored centre of a loving and sympathetic family, and then to be uncovered to the public gaze as a liar, a cheat and
a wanton? I think she would mind. And there is one thing she would mind particularly. One result of her escapade was that she got back Leslie Wynn's attention; the attention she had lost when he became engaged. As long as she is a wronged heroine she is assured of that attention; once we show her up she has lost it for good.”

“I never thought to see the milk of human kindness so curdled in your gentle veins, Mr. Blair,” Mrs. Sharpe remarked.

“If she had broken out as a result of the boy's engagement—as she very well might—I should have nothing but pity for her. She is at an unstable age, and his engagement must have been a shock. But I don't think that had very much to do with it. I think she is her mother's daughter; and was merely setting out a little early on the road her mother took. As selfish, as self-indulgent, as greedy, as plausible as the blood she came of. Now I must go. I said that I would be at home after five o'clock if Ramsden wanted to ring up to report. And I want to ring Kevin Macdermott and get his help about counsel and things.”

“I'm afraid that we—that I, rather—have been rather ungracious about this,” Marion said. “You have done, and are doing, so much for us. But it was such a shock. So entirely unexpected and out of the blue. You must forgive me if—”

“There is nothing to forgive. I think you have both taken it very well. Have you got someone in the place of the dishonest and about-to-commit-perjury Rose? You can't have this huge place entirely on your hands.”

“Well, no one in the locality would come, of course. But Stanley—what would we do without Stanley?—Stanley knows a woman in Larborough who might be interested to come out by bus once a week. You know, when the thought of that girl becomes too much for me, I think of Stanley.”

“Yes,” Robert said, smiling. “The salt of the earth.”

“He is even teaching me how to cook. I know how to turn
eggs in the frying-pan without breaking them now. ‘D'you have to go at them as if you were conducting the Philharmonic?' he asked me. And when I asked him how he got so neat-handed he said it was with ‘cooking in a bivvy two feet square.' ”

“How are you going to get back to Milford?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“The afternoon bus from Larborough will pick me up. No word of your telephone being repaired, I suppose?”

Both women took the question as comment not interrogation. Mrs. Sharpe took leave of him in the drawing-room, but Marion walked to the gate with him. As they crossed the circle of grass enclosed by the branching driveway, he remarked: “It's a good thing you haven't a large family or there would be a worn track across the grass to the door.”

“There is that as it is,” she said, looking at the darker line in the rough grass. “It is more than human nature could bear to walk round that unnecessary curve.”

Small talk, he was thinking; small talk. Idle words to cover up a stark situation. He had sounded very brave and fine about the validity of Truth, but how much was mere sound? What were the odds on Ramsden's turning up evidence in time for the court on Monday? In time for the Assizes? Long odds against, wasn't it? And he had better grow used to the thought.

At half-past five Ramsden rang up to give him the promised report; and it was one of unqualified failure. It was the girl he was looking for, of course; having failed to identify the man as a resident at the Midland, and having therefore no information at all about him. But nowhere had he found even a trace of her. His own men had been given duplicates of the photograph and with them had made inquiries at the airports, the railway termini, travel agencies, and the more likely hotels. No one claimed to have seen her. He himself had combed Larborough, and was slightly cheered to find that the photograph he had been given was at least easily recognisable, since it had been ready identified
at the places where Betty Kane had actually been. At the two main picture houses, for instance—where, according to the box-office girls' information, she had always been alone—and at the ladies' cloakroom of the bus-station. He had tried the garages, but had drawn blank.

“Yes,” Robert said. “He picked her up at the bus-stop on the London road through Mainshill. Where she would normally have gone to catch her coach home.” And he told Ramsden of the new developments. “So things really are urgent now. They are being brought up on Monday. If only we could prove what she did that first evening. That would bring her whole story crashing down.”

“What kind of car was it?” Ramsden asked.

Robert described it, and Ramsden sighed audibly over the telephone.

“Yes,” Robert agreed. “A rough ten thousand of them between London and Carlisle. Well, I'll leave you to it. I want to ring up Kevin Macdermott and tell him our woes.”

Kevin was not in chambers, nor yet at the flat in St. Paul's Churchyard, and Robert eventually ran him to earth at his home near Weybridge. He sounded relaxed and amiable, and was instantly attentive when he heard the news that the police had got their evidence. He listened without remark while Robert poured out the story to him.

“So you see, Kevin,” Robert finished, “we're in a frightful jam.

“A schoolboy description,” Kevin said, “but exquisitely accurate. My advice to you is to ‘give' them the police court, and concentrate on the Assizes.”

“Kevin, couldn't you come down for the week-end, and let me talk about it to you? It's six years, Aunt Lin was saying yesterday, since you spent a night with us so you're overdue anyhow. Couldn't you?”

“I promised Sean I'd take him over to Newbury on Sunday to choose a pony.”

“But couldn't you postpone it? I'm sure Sean wouldn't mind if he knew it was in a good cause.”

“Sean,” said his doting parent, “has never taken the slightest interest in any cause that was not to his own immediate advantage. Being a chip off the old block. If I came would you introduce me to your witches?”

“But of course.”

“And would Christina make me some butter tarts?”