The Franchise Affair (6 page)

“We had just begun to feel settled down, and at home, and safe, when this happened.”

For the first time since she had asked his help Robert felt the stirring of partisanship. “And all because a slip of a girl needs an alibi,” he said. “We must find out more about Betty Kane.”

“I can tell you one thing about her. She is over-sexed.”

“Is that just feminine intuition?”

“No. I am not very feminine and I have no intuition. But I have never known anyone—man or woman—with that colour of
eye who wasn't. That opaque dark blue, like a very faded navy—it's infallible.”

Robert smiled at her indulgently. She was very feminine after all.

“And don't feel superior because it happens not to be lawyers' logic,” she added. “Have a look round at your own friends, and see.”

Before he could stop himself he thought of Gerald Blunt, the Milford scandal. Assuredly Gerald had slate-blue eyes. So had Arthur Wallis, the potman at The White Hart, who was paying three different monetary levies weekly. So had—Damn the woman, she had no right to make a silly generalisation like that and be right about it.

“It is fascinating to speculate on what she really did during that month,” Marion said. “It affords me intense satisfaction that someone beat her black and blue. At least there is one person in this world who has arrived at a correct estimate of her. I hope I meet him someday, so that I may shake his hand.”

“Him?”

“With those eyes it is bound to be a ‘him.' ”

“Well,” Robert said, preparing to go, “I doubt very much whether Grant has a case that he will want to present in court. It would be the girl's word against yours, with no other backing on either side. Against
you
would be her statement: so detailed, so circumstantial. Against
her
would be the inherent unlikeliness of the story. I don't think he could hope to get a verdict.”

“But the thing is there, whether he brings it into court or not. And not only in the files of Scotland Yard. Sooner or later a thing like that begins to be whispered about. It would be no comfort to us not to have the thing cleared up.”

“Oh, it will be cleared up, if I have anything to do with it. But I think we wait for a day or two to see what the Yard mean to do about it. They have far better facilities for arriving at the truth than we are ever likely to have.”

“Coming from a lawyer, that is a touching tribute to the honesty of the police.”

“Believe me, truth may be a virtue, but Scotland Yard discovered long ago that it is a business asset. It doesn't pay them to be satisfied with anything less.”

“If he
did
bring it to court,” she said, coming to the door with him, “and
did
get a verdict, what would that mean for us?”

“I'm not sure whether it would be two years' imprisonment or seven years' penal servitude. I told you I was a broken reed where criminal procedure is concerned. But I shall look it up.”

“Yes, do,” she said. “There's quite a difference.”

He decided that he liked her habit of mockery. Especially in the face of a criminal charge.

“Goodbye,” she said. “It was kind of you to come. You have been a great comfort to me.”

And Robert, remembering how nearly he had thrown her to Ben Carley, blushed to himself as he walked to the gate.

H
ave you had a busy day, dear?” Aunt Lin asked, opening her table napkin and arranging it across her plump lap.

This was a sentence that made sense but had no meaning. It was as much an overture to dinner as the spreading of her napkin, and the exploratory movement of her right foot as she located the footstool which compensated for her short legs. She expected no answer; or rather, being unaware that she had asked the question, she did not listen to his answer.

Robert looked up the table at her with a more conscious benevolence than usual. After his uncharted step-picking at The Franchise, the serenity of Aunt Lin's presence was very comforting, and he looked with a new awareness at the solid little figure with the short neck and the round pink face and the iron-grey hair that frizzed out from its large hairpins. Linda Bennet led a life of recipes, film stars, god-children, and church bazaars, and found it perfect. Well-being and contentment enveloped her like a cloak. She read the Women's Page of the daily paper (How To Make A Boutonnière From Old Kid Gloves) and nothing else as far as Robert was aware. Occasionally when she tidied away the paper that Robert had left lying about, she would pause to read the headlines and comment on them. (“MAN ENDS EIGHTY-TWO DAY FAST”—Silly creature! “OIL DISCOVERY IN BAHAMAS”—Did I tell you that paraffin is up a penny, dear?)
But she gave the impression of never really believing that the world the papers reported did in fact exist. The world for Aunt Lin began with Robert Blair and ended within a ten-mile radius of him.

“What kept you so late tonight, dear?” she asked, having finished her soup.

From long experience Robert recognised this as being in a different category from: “Have you had a busy day, dear?”

“I had to go out to The Franchise—that house on the Larborough road. They wanted some legal advice.”

“Those odd people? I didn't know you knew them.”

“I didn't. They just wanted my advice.”

“I hope they pay you for it, dear. They have no money at all, you know. The father was in some kind of importing business—monkey-nuts or something—and drank himself to death. Left them without a penny, poor things. Old Mrs. Sharpe ran a boarding-house in London to make ends meet, and the daughter was maid-of-all-work. They were just going to be turned into the street with their furniture, when the old man at The Franchise died. So providential!”

“Aunt Lin! Where do you get those stories?”

“But it's true, dear. Perfectly true. I forget who told me—someone who had stayed in the same street in London—but it was first-hand, anyhow. I am not one to pass on idle gossip, as you know. Is it a nice house? I always wondered what was inside that iron gate.”

“No, rather ugly. But they have some nice pieces of furniture.”

“Not as well kept as ours, I'll be bound,” she said, looking complacently at the perfect sideboard and the beautiful chairs ranged against the wall. “The vicar said yesterday that if this house were not so obviously a home it would be a show place.” Mention of the clergy seemed to remind her of something. “By
the way, will you be extra patient with Christina for the next few days. I think she is going to be ‘saved' again.”

“Oh, poor Aunt Lin, what a bore for you. But I was afraid of it. There was a ‘text' in the saucer of my early-morning tea today. ‘Thou God seest me' on a pink scroll, with a tasteful design of Easter lilies in the background. Is she changing her church again, then?”

“Yes. She has discovered that the Methodists are ‘whited sepulchres,' it seems, so she is going to those ‘Bethel' people above Benson's bakery, and is due to be ‘saved' any day now. She has been shouting hymns all the morning.”

“But she always does.”

“Not ‘sword of the Lord' ones. As long as she sticks to ‘pearly crowns' or ‘streets of gold' I know it is all right. But once she begins on the ‘sword of the Lord' I know that it will be my turn to do the baking presently.”

“Well, darling, you bake just as well as Christina.”

“Oh, no, she doesn't,” said Christina, coming in with the meat course. A big soft creature with untidy straight hair and a vague eye. “Only one thing your Aunt Lin makes better than me, Mr. Robert, and that's hot cross buns, and that's only once a year. So there! And if I'm not appreciated in this house, I'll go where I will be.”

“Christina, my love!” Robert said, “you know very well that no one could imagine this house without you, and if you left I should follow you to the world's end. For your butter tarts, if for nothing else. Can we have butter tarts tomorrow, by the way?”

“Butter tarts are no food for unrepentant sinners. Besides I don't think I have the butter. But we'll see. Meanwhile, Mr. Robert, you examine your soul and stop casting stones.”

Aunt Lin sighed gently as the door closed behind her. “Twenty years,” she said meditatively. “You won't remember her when she first came from the orphanage. Fifteen, and so skinny,
poor little brat. She ate a whole loaf for her tea, and said she would pray for me all her life. I think she has, you know.”

Something like a tear glistened in Miss Bennet's blue eye.

“I hope she postpones the salvation until she has made those butter tarts,” said Robert, brutally materialistic. “Did you enjoy your picture?”

“Well, dear, I couldn't forget that he had five wives.”

“Who has?”

“Had, dear. One at a time. Gene Darrow. I must say, those little programmes they give away are very informative but a little disillusioning. He was a student, you see. In the picture, I mean. Very young and romantic. But I kept remembering those five wives, and it spoiled the afternoon for me. So charming to look at too. They say he dangled his third wife out of a fifth-story window by the wrists, but I don't really believe that. He doesn't look strong enough, for one thing. Looks as if he had chest trouble as a child. That peaky look, and thin wrists. Not strong enough to dangle anyone. Certainly not out of a fifth-storey . . .”

The gentle monologue went on, all through the pudding course; and Robert withdrew his attention and thought about The Franchise. He came to the surface as they rose from table and moved into the sitting-room for coffee.

“It is the most becoming garment, if maids would only realise it,” she was saying.

“What is?”

“An apron. She was a maid in the palace, you know, and wore one of those silly little bits of muslin. So becoming. Did those people at The Franchise have a maid, by the way? No? Well, I am not surprised. They starved the last one, you know. Gave her—”

“Oh, Aunt
Lin
!”

“I assure you. For breakfast she got the crusts they cut off the roast. And when they had milk pudding . . . ”

Robert did not hear what enormity was born of the milk pudding. In spite of his good dinner he was suddenly tired and depressed. If kind silly Aunt Lin saw no harm in repeating those absurd stories, what would the real gossips of Milford achieve with the stuff of a real scandal?

“And talking of maids—the brown sugar is finished, dear, so you will have to have lump for tonight—talking of maids, the Carleys' little maid has got herself into trouble.”

“You mean someone else has got her into trouble.”

“Yes. Arthur Wallis, the potman at The White Hart.”

“What, Wallis
again
!”

“Yes, it really is getting past a joke, isn't it. I can't think why the man doesn't get married. It would be much cheaper.”

But Robert was not listening. He was back in the drawing-room at The Franchise, being gently mocked for his legal intolerance of a generalisation. Back in the shabby room with the unpolished furniture, where things lay about on chairs and no one bothered to tidy them away.

And where, now he came to think of it, no one ran around after him with an ash-tray.

I
t was more than a week later that Mr. Heseltine put his thin small grey head round Robert's door to say that Inspector Hallam was in the office and would like to see him for a moment.

The room on the opposite side of the hall where Mr. Heseltine lorded it over the clerks was always referred to as “the office,” although both Robert's room and the little one behind it used by Nevil Bennet were, in spite of their carpets and their mahogany, plainly offices too. There was an official waiting-room behind “the office,” a small room corresponding to young Bennet's, but it had never been popular with the Blair, Hayward, and Bennet clients. Callers stepped into the office to announce themselves and usually stayed there gossiping until such time as Robert was free to see them. The little “waiting-room” had long ago been appropriated by Miss Tuff for writing Robert's letters in, away from the distraction of visitors and from the office-boy's sniffings.

When Mr. Heseltine had gone away to fetch the Inspector, Robert noticed with surprise that he was apprehensive as he had not been apprehensive since in the days of his youth he approached a list of Examination Results pinned on a board. Was his life so placid that a stranger's dilemma should stir it to that extent? Or was it that the Sharpes had been so constantly in
his thoughts for the last week that they had ceased to be strangers?

He braced himself for whatever Hallam was going to say; but what emerged from Hallam's careful phrases was that Scotland Yard had let them understand that no proceedings would be taken on the present evidence. Blair noticed the “present evidence” and gauged its meaning accurately. They were not dropping the case—did the Yard ever drop a case?—they were merely sitting quiet.

The thought of Scotland Yard sitting quiet was not a particularly reassuring one in the circumstances.

“I take it that they lacked corroborative evidence,” he said.

“They couldn't trace the lorry driver who gave her the lift,” Hallam said.

“That wouldn't surprise them.”

“No,” Hallam agreed, “no driver is going to risk the sack by confessing he gave anyone a lift. Especially a girl. Transport bosses are strict about that. And when it is a case of a girl in trouble of some kind, and when it's the police that are doing the asking, no man in his senses is going to own up to even having seen her.” He took the cigarette that Robert offered him. “They needed that lorry driver,” he said. “Or something like him,” he added.

“Yes,” Robert said, reflectively. “What did you make of her, Hallam?”