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-storey 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 toast. 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 round after him with an ash-tray.
Chapter 5
It 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 times 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.”
