style="font-size:15px;"> “Is it?” said Robert, with deceptive meekness.
“Of course. People don’t marry women like Marion Sharpe, any more than they marry winds and clouds. Any more than they marry Joan of Arc. It’s positively blasphemous to consider marriage in relation to a woman like that. She spoke very nicely of you, by the way.”
“That was kind of her.”
The tone was so dry that even Nevil caught the flavour of it.
“Don’t you like her?” he asked, pausing to look at his cousin in surprised disbelief.
Robert had ceased for the moment to be kind, lazy, tolerant Robert Blair; he was just a tired man who hadn’t yet had his dinner and was suffering from the memory of a frustration and a snubbing.
“As far as I am concerned,” he said, “Marion Sharpe is just a skinny woman of forty who lives with a rude old mother in an ugly old house, and needs legal advice on occasion like anyone else.”
But even as the words came out he wanted to stop them, as if they were a betrayal of a friend.
“No, probably she isn’t your cup of tea,” Nevil said tolerantly. “You have always preferred them a little stupid, and blond, haven’t you.” This was said without malice, as one stating a dullish fact.
“I can’t imagine why you should think that.”
“All the women you nearly married were that type.”
“I have never ‘nearly married’ anyone,” Robert said stiffly.
“That’s what you think. You’ll never know how nearly Molly Manders landed you.”
“Molly Manders?” Aunt Lin said, coming in flushed from her cooking and bearing the tray with the sherry. “Such a silly girl. Imagined that you used a baking-board for pancakes. And was always looking at herself in that little pocket mirror of hers.”
“Aunt Lin saved you that time, didn’t you, Aunt Lin?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Nevil dear. Do stop prancing about the hearthrug, and put a log on the fire. Did you like your French film, dear?”
“I didn’t go. I had tea at The Franchise instead.” He shot a glance at Robert, having learned by now that there was more in Robert’s reaction than met the eye.
“With those strange people? What did you talk about?”
“Mountains – Maupassant – hens—”
“Hens, dear?”
“Yes; the concentrated evil of a hen’s face in a close-up.”
Aunt Lin looked vague. She turned to Robert, as to terra firma.
“Had I better call, dear, if you are going to know them? Or ask the vicar’s wife to call?”
“I don’t think I would commit the vicar’s wife to anything so irrevocable,” Robert said, dryly.
She looked doubtful for a moment, but household cares obliterated the question in her mind. “Don’t dawdle too long over your sherry or what I have in the oven will be spoiled. Thank goodness, Christina will be down again tomorrow. At least I hope so; I have never known her salvation take more than two days. And I don’t really think that I will call on those Franchise people, dear, if it is all the same to you. Apart from being strangers and very odd, they quite frankly terrify me.”
Yes; that was a sample of the reaction he might expect where the Sharpes were concerned. Ben Carley had gone out of his way today to let him know that, if there was police trouble at The Franchise, he wouldn’t be able to count on an unprejudiced jury. He must take measures for the protection of the Sharpes. When he saw them on Friday he would suggest a private investigation by a paid agent. The police were overworked – had been overworked for a decade and more – and there was just a chance that one man working at his leisure on one trail might be more successful than the orthodox and official investigation had been.
Chapter 6
But by Friday morning it was too late to take measures for the safety of The Franchise.
Robert had reckoned with the diligence of the police; he had reckoned with the slow spread of whispers; but he had reckoned without the Ack-Emma.
The Ack-Emma was the latest representative of the tabloid newspaper to enter British journalism from the West. It was run on the principle that two thousand pounds for damages is a cheap price to pay for sales worth half a million. It had blacker headlines, more sensational pictures, and more indiscreet letterpress than any paper printed so far by British presses. Fleet Street had its own name for it – monosyllabic and unprintable – but no protection against it. The press had always been its own censor, deciding what was and what was not permissible by the principles of its own good sense and good taste. If a “rogue” publication decided not to conform to those principles then there was no power that could make it conform. In ten years the Ack-Emma had passed by half a million the daily net sales of the best selling newspaper in the country to date. In any suburban railway carriage seven out of ten people bound for work in the morning were reading an Ack-Emma.
And it was the Ack-Emma that blew the Franchise affair wide open.
Robert had been out early into the country on that Friday morning to see an old woman who was dying and wanted to alter her will. This was a performance she repeated on an average once every three months and her doctor made no secret of the fact that in his opinion she “would blow out a hundred candles one day without a second puff.” But of course a lawyer cannot tell a client who summons him urgently at eight-thirty in the morning not to be silly. So Robert had taken some new will forms, fetched his car from the garage, and driven into the country. In spite of his usual tussle with the old tyrant among the pillows – who could never be brought to understand the elementary fact that you cannot give away four shares amounting to one third each – he enjoyed the spring countryside. And he hummed to himself on the way home, looking forward to seeing Marion Sharpe in less than an hour.
He had decided to forgive her for liking Nevil. After all, Nevil had never tried to palm her off on Carley. One must be fair.
He ran the car into the garage, under the noses of the morning lot going out from the livery stable, parked it, and then, remembering that it was past the first of the month, strolled over to the office to pay his bill to Brough, who ran the office side. But it was Stanley who was in the office; thumbing over dockets and invoices with the strong hands that so surprisingly finished off his thin forearms.
“When I was in the Signals,” Stanley said, casting him an absent-minded glance, “I used to believe that the Quarter-bloke was a crook, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Something missing?” said Robert. “I just looked in to pay my bill. Bill usually has it ready.”
“I expect it’s somewhere around,” Stanley said, still thumbing. “Have a look.”
Robert, used to the ways of the office, picked up the loose papers discarded by Stanley, so as to come on the normal tidy strata of Bill’s arrangement below. As he lifted the untidy pile he uncovered a girl’s face; a newspaper picture of a girl’s face. He did not recognise it at once but it reminded him of someone and he paused to look at it.
“Got
