The Franchise Affair (26 page)

“Yes, this is The Franchise.”

“A perfect ‘mystery house.' ”

“It wasn't a mystery house when it was built. The gates, as you can see, were scroll work—rather nice work, too—so that the whole place was visible from the road. It was the simple operation of backing the gate with the iron sheeting that converted the house from something quite ordinary to something rather secret.”

“A perfect house for Betty Kane's purpose anyhow. What a piece of luck for her that she remembered it.”

Robert was to feel guilty afterwards that he had not had greater faith in Marion; both over the matter of Betty Kane's statement and over the lunch. He should have remembered how cool-minded she was, how analytic; and he should have remembered
the Sharpe gift for taking people as they found them and its soothing effect on the persons concerned. The Sharpes had made no effort to live up to Aunt Lin's standards of hospitality; no effort to provide a formal dining-room lunch. They had set a table for four in the window of the drawing-room where the sun fell on it. It was a cherrywood table, very pleasant in grain but sadly needing polishing. The wine glasses, on the other hand, were polished to a diamond brilliance. (How like Marion, he thought, to concentrate on the thing that mattered and to ignore mere appearance.)

“The dining-room is an incredibly gloomy place,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “Come and see it, Mr. Macdermott.”

That too was typical. No sitting round with their sherry making small talk. Come and see our horrible dining-room. And the visitor was part of the household before he knew it.

“Tell me,” Robert said to Marion as they were left alone, “what is this about the—”

“No, I am not going to talk about it until after lunch. It is to be your liqueur. It is a piece of the most astonishing luck that I should have thought of it last night, when Mr. Macdermott was coming to lunch today. It makes everything quite different. It won't stop the case, I suppose, but it does make everything different for us. It is the ‘small thing' that I was praying for to be evidence for
us
. Have you told Mr. Macdermott?”

“About your message. No, I haven't said anything. I thought it better—not to.”

“Robert!” she said looking at him with a quizzical amusement. “You didn't trust me. You were afraid I was havering.”

“I was afraid you might be building more on a small foundation than—than it would hold. I—”

“Don't be afraid,” she said, reassuringly. “It will hold. Would you like to come to the kitchen and carry the tray of soup for me?”

They had even managed the service without fuss or flurry. Robert carried the tray with four flat bowls of soup, and Marion came after him with a large dish under a Sheffield plate cover, and that seemed to be all. When they had drunk their soup, Marion put the large dish in front of her mother, and a bottle of wine in front of Kevin. The dish was a pot-au-feu chicken with all its vegetables round it; and the wine was a Montrachet.

“A Montrachet!” Kevin said. “You wonderful woman.”

“Robert told us you were a claret lover,” Marion said, “but what is left in old Mr. Crowle's cellar is long past its best. So it was a choice between that and a very heavy red burgundy that is wonderful on winter evenings but not so good with one of the Staples' fowls on a summer day.”

Kevin said something about how seldom it was that women were interested in anything that did not bubble, or alternatively explode.

“To be frank,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “if these parcels had been saleable we should probably have sold them, but we were exceedingly glad that they were too scrappy and varied for that. I was brought up to appreciate wine. My husband had a fairly good cellar, though his palate was not as good as mine. But my brother at Lessways had a better one, and a fine palate to match.”

“Lessways?” Kevin said, and looked at her as if searching for a resemblance. “You're not Charlie Meredith's sister, are you?”

“I am. Did you know Charles? But you couldn't. You are too young.”

“The first pony I ever had of my own was bred by Charlie Meredith,” Kevin said. “I had him for seven years and he never put a foot wrong.”

And after that, of course, both of them ceased to take any further interest in the others, and not over-much in the food.

Robert caught Marion's amused and congratulatory glance at him, and said: “You did yourself grave injustice when you said you couldn't cook.”

“If you were a woman you would observe that I have not cooked anything. The soup I emptied out of a can, heated it, and added some sherry and flavouring; the fowl I put into a pot just as it came from Staples, poured some boiling water over it, added everything I could think of and left it on the stove with a prayer; the cream cheese also came from the farm.”

“And the wonderful rolls to go with the cream cheese?”

“Stanley's landlady made those.”

They laughed a little together, quietly.

Tomorrow she was going into the dock. Tomorrow she was going to be a public spectacle for the delight of Milford. But today her life was still her own, and she could share amusement with him; could be content with the hour. Or so it seemed if her shining eyes were any evidence.

They took the cheese plates from under the noses of the other two, who did not even pause in their conversation to remark the action, carried the trays of dirty dishes away to the kitchen and made the coffee there. It was a great gloomy place with a floor of stone slabs, and an old-fashioned sink that depressed him at sight.

“We put the range on only on Mondays when the scrubbing is done,” Marion said, seeing his interest in the place. “Otherwise we cook on the little oil stove.”

He thought of the hot water that ran so instantly into the shining bath when he turned the tap this morning, and was ashamed. He could hardly visualise, after his long years of soft living, an existence where one's bathing was done in water that was heated over an oil burner.

“Your friend is a charmer, isn't he,” she said, pouring the hot coffee into its jug. “A little Mephistophelian—one would be terribly afraid of him as opposing counsel—but a charmer.”

“It's the Irish,” Robert said, gloomily. “It comes as natural to them as breathing. Us poor Saxons plod along our brutish way and wonder how they do it.”

She had turned to give him the tray to carry, and so was facing him with their hands almost touching. “The Saxons have the two qualities that I value most in this world. Two qualities that explain why they have inherited the earth. Kindness and dependability—or tolerance and responsibility, if you prefer the terms. Two qualities the Celt never had; which is why the Irish have inherited nothing but squabbles. Oh damn, I forgot the cream. Wait a moment. It's keeping cold in the wash-house.” She came back with the cream and said, mock rustic: “I have heard tell as how there's things called refrigerators in some folks' houses now, but we don't need none.”

And as he carried the coffee to the sunlight of the drawing-room he visualised the bone-chilling cold of those kitchen quarters in winter with no roaring range as there had been in the palmy days of the house when a cook had lorded it over half a dozen servants and you ordered coal by the wagon load. He longed to take Marion away from the place. Where he would take her he did not quite know—his own home was filled with the aura of Aunt Lin. It would have to be a place where there was nothing to polish and nothing to carry and practically everything was done by pressing a button. He could not see Marion spending her old age in service to some pieces of mahogany.

As they drank their coffee he brought the conversation gently round to the possibility of their selling The Franchise at some time or other and buying a cottage somewhere.

“No one would buy the place,” Marion said. “It is a white elephant. Not big enough for a school, too remote for flats, and too big for a family these days. It might make a good madhouse,” she added, thoughtfully, her eyes on the high pink wall beyond the window; and Robert saw Kevin's glance flash over her and run away again. “It is quiet, at least. No trees to creak, or ivy to tap at the window-panes, or birds to go yap-yap-yap until you want to scream. It is a very peaceful place for tired nerves. Perhaps someone would consider it for that.”

So she liked the silence; the stillness that had seemed to him so dead. It was perhaps what she had longed for in her London life of noise and elbowing and demands; her life of fret and cramped quarters. The big quiet ugly house had been a haven.

And now it was a haven no longer.

Some day—Oh-please-God-let-it-happen—some day he would strip Betty Kane for ever of credit and love.

“And now,” Marion said, “you are invited to inspect the ‘fatal attic.

“Yes,” Kevin said, “I should be greatly interested to see the things that the girl professed to identify. All her statements seemed to me the result of logical guesses. Like the harder carpet on the second flight of stairs. Or the wooden commode—something that you would almost certainly find in a country house. Or the flat-topped trunk.”

“Yes, it was rather terrifying at the time, the way she kept hitting on things we had—and I hadn't had time to gather my wits—it was only afterwards I saw how little she really had identified in her statement. And she did make one complete bloomer, only no one thought of it until last night. Have you got the statement, Robert?”

“Yes.” He took it out of his pocket.

They had climbed, she and Robert and Macdermott, the last bare flight of stairs and she led them into the attic. “I came up here last night on my usual Saturday tour round the house with a mop. That is our solution to the housekeeping problem, in case you are interested. A good large mop well soaked in absorbent polish-stuff run over every floor once a week. It takes five minutes per room and keeps the dust at bay.”

Kevin was poking round the room and inspecting the view from the window. “So this is the view she described,” he said.

“Yes,” Marion said, “that is the view she described. And if I remember the words of her statement, as I remembered them last night, correctly, then she said something that she can't—Robert,
would you read the bit where she describes the view from the window?”

Robert looked up the relevant passage, and began to read. Kevin was bending slightly forward staring out of the little round window, and Marion was standing behind him, smiling faintly like a sibyl.

“ ‘From the window of the attic,' ” read Robert, “ ‘I could see a high brick wall with a big iron gate in the middle of it. There was a road on the farther side of the wall, because I could see the telegraph posts. No, I couldn't see the traffic on it because the wall was too high. Just the tops of lorry loads sometimes. You couldn't see through the gate because it had sheets of iron on the inside. Inside the gate the carriage-way went straight for a little and then divided in two into a circle up to the door. No, it wasn't a garden, just—' ”

“What!” yelled Kevin, straightening himself abruptly.

“What what?” Robert asked, startled.

“Read that last bit again, that bit about the carriage-way.”

“ ‘Inside the gate the carriage-way went straight for a little and then divided in two into a circle up to the—' ”

Kevin's shout of laughter stopped him. It was an abrupt monosyllable of amused triumph.

“You see?” Marion said into the sudden silence.

“Yes,” Kevin said softly, his pale bright eyes gloating on the view. “That was something she didn't reckon with.”

Robert moved over as Marion gave way to let him have her place, and so saw what they were talking about. The edge of the roof with its small parapet cut off the view of the courtyard before the carriage-way branched at all. No one imprisoned in that room would know about the two half circles up to the doorway.

“You see,” Marion said, “the Inspector read that description when we were all in the drawing-room. And all of us knew that the description was accurate. I mean, an accurate picture of what
the courtyard is like; so we unconsciously treated it as something that was finished with. Even the Inspector. I remember his looking at the view from the window but it was quite an automatic gesture. It didn't occur to any of us that it would not have been as described. Indeed, except for one tiny detail it was as described.”

“Except for one tiny detail,” Kevin said. “She arrived in darkness and fled in darkness, and she says she was locked in the room all the time, so she could have known nothing of that branching drive. What does she say, again, about her arrival, Rob?”

Robert looked it up and read:

“ ‘The car stopped at last and the younger woman, the one with the black hair, got out and pushed open big double gates on to a drive. Then she got back in and drove the car up to a house. No, it was too dark to see what kind of a house, except that it had steps up to the door. No, I don't remember how many steps; four or five, I think. Yes, definitely a small flight of them.' And then she goes on about being taken to the kitchen for coffee.”

“So,” Kevin said. “And her account of her flight? What time of night was that?”

“Sometime after supper if I remember rightly,” Robert said shuffling through the pages. “After dark, anyhow. Here it is.” And he read:

“ ‘When I got to the first landing, the one above the hall, I could hear them talking in the kitchen. There was no light in the hall. I went on down the last flight, expecting every moment that one of them would come out and catch me, and then made a dash for the door. It wasn't locked and I ran straight out and down the steps to the gate and out to the road. I ran along the road—yes, it was hard like a highroad—until I couldn't run any longer and I lay in the grass till I was feeling able to go on.' ”

“ ‘It was hard, like a highroad,' ” Kevin quoted. “The inference being that it was too dark to see the surface she was running on.”