The Franchise Affair (33 page)

“Let's take the furniture further away,” Stanley said. “It's not safe where it is. Either some lighted bits will fall on it or one of those bastards will use it to stand on.” The bastards were the Fire Service, doing their sweating and efficient best.

So Robert found himself prosaically carting furniture through a fantastic scene; miserably identifying pieces that he had known in their proper sphere. The chair that Mrs. Sharpe had considered Inspector Grant too heavy for; the cherry-wood table they had given Kevin luncheon at; the wall-table that Mrs. Sharpe had dumped her bag down on only a few hours ago. The roar and crackle of the flames, the shoutings of the firemen, the odd mixture of moonlight, head-lights, and wavering flame, the mad juxtaposition and irrelevance of the bits of furniture, reminded him of how it felt to be coming round from an anaesthetic.

And then two things happened together. The first floor fell in
with a crash. And as the new spout of flame lit the faces round him he saw two youths alongside whose countenances were alive with gloating. At the same moment he became aware that Stanley had seen them too. He saw Stanley's fist catch the further one under the chin with a crack that could be heard even over the noise of the flames, and the gloating face disappeared into the darkness of the trampled grass.

Robert had not hit anyone since he gave up boxing when he left school, and he had no intention of hitting anyone now. His left arm seemed to do all that was necessary of its own accord. And the second leering face went down into obscurity.

“Neat,” remarked Stanley, sucking his broken knuckles. And then, “Look!” he said.

The roof crumpled like a child's face when it is beginning to cry; like a melting negative. The little round window, so famous and so ill-reputed, leaned forward a little and sank slowly inwards. A tongue of flame leapt up and fell again. Then the whole roof collapsed into the seething mass below, falling two floors to join the red wreck of the rest of the interior. The men moved back from the furnace heat. The fire roared in unrestricted triumph into the summer night.

When at last it died away Robert noticed with a vague surprise that the dawn had come. A calm, grey dawn, full of promise. Quiet had come too; the roar and the shoutings had faded to the soft hiss of water on the smoking skeleton. Only the four walls stood, blurred and grimy, in the middle of the trampled grass. The four walls and the flight of steps with their warped iron railing. On either side of the doorway stood what remained of Nevil's gay little tubs, the soaked and blackened flowers hanging in unrecognisable shreds over their edges. Between them the square opening yawned into a black emptiness.

“Well,” said Stanley, standing beside him, “that seems to be that.”

“How did it begin?” asked Bill, who had arrived too late to see anything but the wreck that was left.

“No one knows. It was well alight when P.C. Newsam arrived on his beat,” Robert said. “What became of those two chaps, by the way?”

“The two we corrected?” Stanley said. “They went home.”

“It's a pity that expression is no evidence.”

“Yes,” Stanley said. “They won't get anyone for this any more than they got anyone for the window-breaking. And I still owe someone for a crack on the head.”

“You nearly broke that creature's neck tonight. That ought to be some kind of compensation to you.”

“How are you going to tell them?” Stanley said. This obviously referred to the Sharpes.

“God knows,” Robert said. “Am I to tell them first and let it spoil their triumph in court for them; or am I to let them have their triumph and face the awful come-down afterwards?”

“Let them have their triumph,” Stanley said. “Nothing that happens afterwards can take that away from them. Don't mess it up.”

“Perhaps you are right, Stan. I wish I knew. I had better book rooms at the Rose and Crown for them.”

“They wouldn't like that,” Stan said.

“Perhaps not,” Robert said, a shade impatiently. “But they have no choice. Whatever they decide to do they will want to stay here a night or two to arrange about things, I expect. And the Rose and Crown is the best available.”

“Well,” Stanley said, “I've been thinking. And I'm sure my landlady would be glad to have them. She's always been on their side, and she has a spare room, and they could have that sitting-room in front that she never uses, and it's very quiet down there, that last row of Council houses facing on the Meadows. I'm sure they'd rather have that than a hotel where they would be stared at.”

“They would indeed, Stan. I should never have thought of it. You think your landlady would be willing?”

“I don't think; I'm sure. They're her greatest interest in life at the moment. It would be like royalty coming to stay.”

“Well, find out definitely, would you, and telephone me a message to Norton. To The Feathers at Norton.”

I
t seemed to Robert at least half Milford had managed to pack itself into the Court at Norton. Certainly a great many citizens of Norton were milling round the outer doors, vocal and frustrated; furious that when a case of national interest was being decided at “their” Assizes they should be done out of their right to witness it by an influx of foreigners from Milford. Wily and deceitful foreigners, too, who had suborned the Norton youth to keep places in the queue for them; a piece of forethought which had not occurred to Norton adults.

It was very warm, and the packed court stirred uneasily throughout the preliminaries and through most of Miles Allison's account of the crime. Allison was the antithesis of Kevin Macdermott; his fair, delicate face that of a type rather than a person. His light dry voice was unemotional, his method matter-of-fact. And since the story he was telling was one which they had all read about and discussed until it was threadbare, they withheld their attention from him and amused themselves by identifying friends in court.

Robert sat turning over and over in his pocket the little oblong of pasteboard that Christina had pressed into his hand on his departure yesterday, and rehearsing phrases for afterwards. The pasteboard was a bright Reckitt's blue and bore in
gold letters the words: NOT A SPARROW SHALL FALL, and a picture in the right upper corner of a robin with an out-size red breast. How, wondered Robert, turning the little text over and over in his fingers, did you tell someone that they had no home any more?

The sudden movement of a hundred bodies and the subsequent silence brought him back to the court-room, and he realised that Betty Kane was taking the oath preparatory to giving evidence. “Never kissed anything but the book,” Ben Carley had said of her appearance on a similar occasion. And that is what she looked like today. The blue outfit still made one think of youth and innocence; speedwell, and camp-fire smoke, and harebells in the grass. The tilted-back brim of her hat still showed the childish forehead with its charming hair line. And Robert, who knew now all about her life in the weeks she was missing, found himself being surprised all over again at sight of her. Plausibility was one of the first endowments of the criminal; but up to now such plausibility as he had had to deal with was of the old-soldier-ten-bob-note kind. Easily recognised for what it was. The work of amateurs at the job. It occurred to him that for the first time he was seeing the real thing at work.

Once again she gave her evidence in model fashion; her clear young voice audible to everyone in court. Once again she had her audience breathless and motionless. The only difference this time was that the Bench was not doting. The Bench, indeed, if one was to judge by the expression on the face of Mr. Justice Saye, was very far from doting. And Robert wondered how much the judge's critical gaze was due to natural distaste for the subject, and how much to the conclusion that Kevin Macdermott would not be sitting there ready to defend the two women in the dock unless they had a thundering good defence.

The girl's own account of her sufferings did what her counsel's had not done: roused the audience to an emotional reaction.
More than once they had given vent to a united sigh, a murmur of indignation; never overt enough to rank as a demonstration, and so bring down the Court's rebuke, but audible enough to show which way their sympathies lay. So that it was in a charged atmosphere that Kevin rose to cross-examine.

“Miss Kane,” began Kevin in his gentlest drawl, “you say that it was dark when you arrived at The Franchise. Was it
really
so dark?”

This question, with its coaxing tone, made her think that he did not want it to be dark, and she reacted as he intended.

“Yes. Quite dark,” she said.

“Too dark to see the outside of the house?”

“Yes, much too dark.”

He appeared to give that up and try a new tack.

“Then the night you escaped. Perhaps that was not quite dark?”

“Oh, yes. That was even darker, if possible.”

“So that you could not possibly have seen the outside of the house on some occasion?”

“Never.”

“Never. Well, having settled that point, let us consider what you say you could see from the window of your prison in the attic. You said in your statement to the police, when you were describing this unknown place where you were imprisoned, that the carriage-way from the gate to the door Vent straight for a little and then divided in two into a circle up to the door.' ”

“Yes.”

“How did you know it did that?”

“How did I know it? I could see it.”

“From where?”

“From the window in the attic. It looked out on the courtyard in front of the house.”

“But from the window in the attic it is possible to see only the
straight part of the carriage-way. The edge of the roof cuts off the rest. How did you know that the carriageway divided in two and made a circle up to the door?”

“I saw it!”

“How?”

“From that window.”

“You want us to understand that you see on a different principle from ordinary beings? On the principle of the Irishman's gun that shoots round corners. Or is it all done by mirrors?”

“It is the way I described!”

“Certainly it is the way you described; but what you described was the view of the courtyard as seen by, let us say, someone looking over the wall at it; not by someone looking at it from the window in the attic. Which you assure us was your only view of it.”

“I take it,” said the Court, “that you have a witness to the extent of the view from the window.”

“Two, my lord.”

“One with normal vision will be sufficient,” said the Court dryly.

“So you cannot explain how, speaking to the police that day in Aylesbury, you described a peculiarity that you could not possibly have known about, if your story was true. Have you ever been abroad, Miss Kane?”

“Abroad?” she said surprised by the change of subject. “No.”

“Never?”

“No, never.”

“You have not, for instance, been to Denmark lately? To Copenhagen, for instance.”

“No.” There was no change in her expression but Robert thought that there was the faintest uncertainty in her voice.

“Do you know a man called Bernard Chadwick?”

She was suddenly wary. Robert was reminded of the subtle
change in an animal that has been relaxed and becomes attentive. There is no alteration in pose; no actual physical change. On the contrary, there is only an added stillness; an awareness.

“No.” The tone was colourless; uninterested.

“He is not a friend of yours.”

“No.”

“You did not for instance, stay with him at a hotel in Copenhagen?”

“No.”

“Have you stayed with anyone in Copenhagen?”

“No, I have never been abroad at all.”

“So that if I were to suggest that you spent those missing weeks in a hotel in Copenhagen, and not in an attic at The Franchise, I should be mistaken.”

“Quite mistaken.”

“Thank you.”

Miles Allison, as Kevin had anticipated, rose to retrieve the situation.

“Miss Kane,” he said, “you arrived at The Franchise by car.”

“Yes.”

“And that car, you say in your statement, was driven up to the door of the house. Now, if it was dark, as you say, there must have been side-lights on the car, if not headlights; which would illuminate not only the carriage-way but most of the courtyard.”

“Yes,” she broke in, before he could put it to her, “yes, of course I must have seen the circle then. I knew I had seen it. I knew it.” She glanced at Kevin for a moment, and Robert was reminded of her face when she saw that she had guessed correctly about the suitcases in the cupboard, that first day at The Franchise. If she knew what Kevin had waiting for her, Robert thought, she would have no spare thought for a passing triumph.

She was succeeded in the witness-box by Carley's “oleograph”; who had bought both a new frock and a new hat for her appearance at Norton—a tomato-red frock and a puce hat with a cobalt ribbon and a pink rose—and looked more luscious and more revolting than ever. Again Robert was interested to note how her relish of her part discounted, even with this more emotional audience, the effect of what she said. They didn't like her, and in spite of their
parti pris
attitude their English distrust of malice cooled their minds towards her. When Kevin, cross-examining, suggested that she had in fact been dismissed and had not “given in her notice” at all, there was a So-that's-it! expression on every second face in court. Apart from an attempt to shake her credit, there was not much that Kevin could do with her, and he let her go. He was waiting for her poor stooge.

The stooge, when she arrived, looked even less happy than she had looked in the police court at Milford. The much more impressive array of robes and wigs clearly shook her. Police uniforms were bad enough, but in retrospect they seemed positively home-like compared with this solemn atmosphere, this ritual. If she was out of her depth in Milford, she was obviously drowning here. Robert saw Kevin's considering eye on her, analysing and understanding; deciding on his approach. She had been scared stiff by Miles Allison, in spite of his patient quietness; evidently regarding anything in a wig and gown as hostile and a potential dispenser of penalties. So Kevin became her wooer and protector.