The Franchise Affair (32 page)

“Young. Dark. Good-looking. A little—now, what is the word? Too-bright. Gaudy? No.”

“Flashy?”

“Ah. There is it. Flashy. A little flashy, I think. I observe that he was not greatly approved of by the other Englishmen who came and went.”

“Was he just on holiday?”

“No, oh, no. He was in Copenhagen on business.”

“What kind of business?”

“That I do not know, I regret.”

“Can't you even make a guess? What would he be most likely to be interested in in Copenhagen?”

“That depends, Mr. Blair, on whether he was interested in buying or selling.”

“What was his address in England?”

“London.”

“Beautifully explicit. Will you forgive me a moment while I telephone? Do you smoke?” He opened the cigarette box and pushed it towards Mr. Lange.

“Milford 195. You will do me the honour of having lunch with me, Mr. Lange, won't you? Aunt Lin? I have to go to London directly after lunch . . . . Yes, for the night. Will you be an angel and pack a small bag for me? . . . Thank you, darling. And would it be all right if I brought someone back to take pot-luck for lunch today? . . . Oh, good . . . . Yes, I'll ask him.” He covered
the mouthpiece, and said: “My aunt, who is actually my cousin, wants to know if you eat pastry?”

“Mr. Blair!” Mr. Lange said, with a wide smile and a wide gesture for his girth. “And you ask a Dane?”

“He loves it,” Robert said into the telephone. “And I say, Aunt Lin. Were you doing anything important this afternoon? . . . Because what I think you ought to do is to go to St. Matthew's and give thanks . . . Your angel of the Lord has arrived.”

Even Mr. Lange could hear Aunt Lin's delighted:
“Robert!
No, not really!”

“In the flesh . . . . No, not a bit scruffy . . . Very tall and beautiful and altogether perfect for the part . . . . You'll give him a good lunch, won't you? . . . Yes, that's who is coming to lunch. An angel of the Lord.”

He put down the telephone and looked up at the amused Mr. Lange.

“And now, Mr. Lange, let us go over to the Rose and Crown and have some bad beer.”

W
hen Robert went out to The Franchise, three days later, to drive the Sharpes over to Norton for the Assizes on the morrow, he found an almost bridal atmosphere about the place. Two absurd tubs of yellow wallflowers stood at the top of the steps; and the dark hall gleamed with flowers like a church decorated for a wedding.

“Nevil!” Marion said, with an explanatory wave of her hand to the massed glory. “He said the house should be
en fête.”

“I wish that I had thought of it,” Robert said.

“After the last few days, it surprises me that you can think at all. If it were not for you, it is not rejoicing we should be today!”

“If it weren't for a man called Bell, you mean.”

“Bell?”

“Alexander Bell. He invented the telephone. If it weren't for that invention we should still be groping in the dark. It will be months before I can look at a telephone without blenching.”

“Did you take turn about?”

“Oh, no. We each had our own. Kevin and his clerk at his chambers, me at his little place in St. Paul's Churchyard, Alec Ramsden and three of his men at his office and wherever they could find a telephone that they could use uninterruptedly.”

“That was six of you.”

“Seven of us with six telephones. And we needed them!”

“Poor Robert!”

“At first it was fun. We were filled with the exhilaration of the hunt, of knowing that we were on the right track. Success was practically in our laps. But by the time we had made sure that none of the Chadwicks in the London telephone book had any connection with a Chadwick who had flown to Copenhagen on the 29th of March, and that all the air line knew about him was that two seats had been booked from Larborough on the 27th, we had lost any feeling of fun we had started with. The Larborough information cheered us, of course. But after that it was pure slog. We found out what we sold to Denmark and what she bought from us, and we divided them up between us.”

“The merchandise?”

“No, the buyers and sellers. The Danish tourist office was a god-send. They just poured information at us. Kevin, his clerk, and I took the exports, and Ramsden and his men took the imports. From then on it was a tedious business of being put through to managers and asking: ‘Have you a man called Bernard Chadwick working for you?' The number of firms who
haven't
got a Bernard Chadwick working for them is unbelievable. But I know a lot more about our exports to Denmark than I did before.”

“I have no doubt of it!”

“I was so sick of the telephone that when it rang at my end I nearly didn't pick it up. I had almost forgotten that telephones were two-way. A telephone was just a sort of quiz instrument that I could plug into offices all over the country. I stared at it for a while before I realised that it was after all a mutual affair and that someone was trying to call me for a change.”

“And it was Ramsden.”

“Yes, it was Alec Ramsden. He said: ‘We've got him. He buys porcelain and stuff for Brayne, Havard and Co.' ”

“I am glad it was Ramsden who unearthed him. It will comfort him for his failure to run down the girl.”

“Yes, he's feeling better about it now. After that it was a rush to interview the people we needed and to obtain subpoenas and what not. But the whole lovely result will be waiting for us in the court at Norton tomorrow. Kevin can hardly wait. His mouth waters at the prospect.”

“If it was ever in my power to be sorry for that girl,” Mrs. Sharpe said, coming in with an over-night bag and dumping it on a mahogany wall-table in a way that would have turned Aunt Lin faint, “it would be in a witness-box facing a hostile Kevin Macdermott.” Robert noticed that the bag, which had originally been a very elegant and expensive one—a relic of her prosperous early married life, perhaps—was now deplorably shabby. He decided that when he married Marion his present to the bride's mother would be a dressing-case; small, light, elegant and expensive.

“It will never be in my power,” Marion said, “to have even a passing sensation of sorrow for that girl. I would swat her off the earth's face as I would swat a moth in a cupboard—except that I am always sorry about the moth.”

“What had the girl intended to do?” Mrs. Sharpe asked. “Had she intended to go back to her people at all?”

“I don't think so,” Robert said. “I think she was still filled with rage and resentment at ceasing to be the centre of interest at 39 Meadowside Lane. It is as Kevin said long ago: crime begins in egotism; inordinate vanity. A normal girl, even an emotional adolescent, might be heartbroken that her adopted brother no longer considered her the most important thing in his life; but she would work it out in sobs, or sulks, or being difficult, or deciding that she was going to renounce the world and go into a convent, or half a dozen other methods that the adolescent uses in the process of adjustment. But with an egotism like Betty
Kane's there is no adjustment. She expects the world to adjust itself to her. The criminal always does, by the way. There was never a criminal who didn't consider himself ill-done-by.”

“A charming creature,” Mrs. Sharpe said.

“Yes. Even the Bishop of Larborough would find some difficulty in thinking up a case for her. His usual ‘environment' hobby-horse is no good this time. Betty Kane had everything that he recommends for the cure of the criminal: love, freedom to develop her talents, education, security. It's quite a poser for his lordship when you come to consider it, because he doesn't believe in heredity. He thinks that criminals are made, and therefore can be unmade. ‘Bad blood' is just an old superstition, in the Bishop's estimation.”

“Toby Bryne,” Mrs. Sharpe said with a snort. “You should have heard Charles's stable lads on him.”

“I've heard Nevil,” Robert said. “I doubt if anyone could improve on Nevil's version of the subject.”

“Is the engagement definitely broken, then?” Marion asked.

“Definitely. Aunt Lin has hopes of the eldest Whittaker girl. She is a niece of Lady Mountleven, and a grand-daughter of Karr's Krisps.”

Marion laughed with him. “Is she nice, the Whittaker girl?” she asked.

“Yes. Fair, pretty, well-brought-up, musical but doesn't sing.”

“I should like Nevil to get a nice wife. All he needs is some permanent interest of his own. A focus for his energies and his emotions.”

“At the moment the focus for both is The Franchise.”

“I know. He has been a dear to us. Well, I suppose it is time that we were going. If anyone had told me last week that I should be leaving The Franchise to go to a triumph at Norton I wouldn't have believed it. Poor Stanley can sleep in his own bed from now on, instead of guarding a couple of hags in a lonely house.”

“Isn't he sleeping here tonight?” Robert asked.

“No. Why should he?”

“I don't know. I don't like the idea of the house being left entirely empty.”

“The policeman will be round as usual on his beat. Anyhow, no one has even tried to do anything since the night they smashed our windows. It is only for tonight. Tomorrow we shall be home again.”

“I know. But I don't much like it. Couldn't Stanley stay one more night? Until the case is over.”

“If they want to wreck our windows again,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “I don't suppose Stanley's being here will deter them.”

“No, I suppose not. I'll remind Hallam, anyhow, that the house is empty tonight,” Robert said, and left it there.

Marion locked the door behind them, and they walked to the gate, where Robert's car was waiting. At the gate Marion paused to look back at the house. “It's an ugly old place,” she said, “but it has one virtue. It looks the same all the year round. At midsummer the grass gets a little burnt and tired-looking, but otherwise it doesn't change. Most houses have a ‘best' time; rhododendrons, or herbaceous borders, or virginia creeper, or almond blossom, or something. But The Franchise is always the same. It has no frills. What are you laughing at, Mother?”

“I was thinking how
bedizened
the poor thing looks with those tubs of wallflower.”

They stood there for a moment, laughing at the forbidding, dirty-white house with its incongruous decoration of frivolity; and laughing, shut the gate on it.

But Robert did not forget; and before having dinner with Kevin at The Feathers in Norton he called the police station at Milford and reminded them that the Sharpes' house would be empty for that one night.

“All right, Mr. Blair,” the sergeant said, “I'll tell the man on the beat to open the gate and look round. Yes, we still have a key. That'll be all right.”

Robert did not quite see what that would achieve; but then he did not see what protection could be afforded in any case. Mrs. Sharpe had said, if anyone was minded to break windows then the windows would inevitably be broken. He decided that he was being fussy, and joined Kevin and his law friends with relief.

The Law talks well, and it was late before Robert went to bed in one of the dark panelled rooms that made The Feathers famous. The Feathers—one of the “must” of American visitors to Britain—was not only famous but up to date. Pipes had been led through the linen-fold oak, wires through the beamed ceilings, and a telephone line through the oak planks of the floor. The Feathers had been providing comfort for the travelling public since 1480 and saw no reason why it should stop.

Robert fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow and the telephone at his ear had been ringing for some moments before he became aware of it.

“Well?” he said, still half-asleep. And became instantly wide awake.

It was Stanley. Could he come back to Milford? The Franchise was on fire.

“Badly?”

“It's got a good hold, but they think they can save it.”

“I'll be over as soon as I can make it.”

He made the twenty miles in a door-to-door time that the Robert Blair of a month ago would have considered reprehensible in the achievement of another, and quite inconceivable as an achievement of his own. As he tore past his own home at the lower end of Milford High Street and out into the country beyond, he saw the glow against the horizon, like the rising of a full moon. But the moon hung in the sky, a young silver moon in the pale summer night. And the glow of the burning Franchise wavered in sickening gusts that tightened Robert's heart with remembered horror.

At least there was no one in the building. He wondered if
anyone had been there in time to rescue what was valuable from the house. Would there be anyone there who could distinguish what was valuable from what was worthless?

The gates were wide open and the courtyard—bright in the flames—was crowded with the men and machines of the Fire Service. The first thing he saw, incongruous on the grass, was the bead-work chair from the drawing-room; and a wave of hysteria rose in him. Someone had saved that, anyhow.

An almost unrecognisable Stanley grabbed his sleeve and said: “There you are. I thought you ought to know, somehow.” Sweat trickled down his blackened face, leaving clear rivulets behind them, so that his young face looked seamed and old. “There isn't enough water. We've got quite a lot of the stuff out. All the drawing-room stuff that they used every day. I thought that's what they'd want, if it had to be a choice. And we flung out some of the upstairs stuff but all the heavy stuff has gone up.”

Mattresses and bed-linen were piled on the grass out of the way of the firemen's boots. The furniture stood about the grass as it had been set down, looking surprised and lost.