you believe the girl’s story when you read it?” Robert asked.
“I don’t see how she could have made it up,” Mr. Heseltine said simply. “It is such a very circumstantial story, isn’t it?”
“It is, indeed. But I saw the girl when she was brought to The Franchise to identify it last week – that was the day I went out so hurriedly just after tea – and I don’t believe a word she says. Not a word,” he added, glad to be able to say it loudly and distinctly to himself and to be sure at last that he believed it.
“But how could she have thought of The Franchise at all, or known all those things, if she wasn’t there?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea.”
“It is a most unlikely place to pick on, surely; a remote, invisible house like that, on a lonely road, in country that people don’t visit very much.”
“I know. I don’t know how the job was worked, but that it is a job I am certain. It is a choice not between stories, but between human beings. I am quite certain that the two Sharpes are incapable of insane conduct like that. Whereas I don’t believe the girl incapable of telling a story like that. That is what it amounts to.” He paused a moment. “And you’ll just have to trust my judgment about it, Timmy,” he added, using his childhood’s name for the old clerk.
Whether it was the “Timmy” or the argument, it was apparent that Mr. Heseltine had no further protest to make.
“You’ll be able to see the criminals for yourself,” Robert said, “because I hear their voices in the hall now. You might bring them in, will you.”
Mr. Heseltine went dumbly out on his mission, and Robert turned the newspaper over so that the comparatively innocuous GIRL SMUGGLED ABOARD was all that would meet the visitors’ eye.
Mrs. Sharpe, moved by some belated instinct for convention, had donned a hat in honour of the occasion. It was a flattish affair of black satin, and the general effect was that of a doctor of learning. That the effect had not been wasted was obvious by the relieved look on Mr. Heseltine’s face. This was quite obviously not the kind of client he had expected; it was, on the other hand, the kind of client he was used to.
“Don’t go away,” Robert said to him, as he greeted the visitors; and to the others: “I want you to meet the oldest member of the firm, Mr. Heseltine.”
It suited Mrs. Sharpe to be gracious; and exceedingly Victoria Regina was old Mrs. Sharpe when she was being gracious. Mr. Heseltine was more than relieved; he capitulated. Robert’s first battle was over.
When they were alone Robert noticed that Marion had been waiting to say something.
“An odd thing happened this morning,” she said. “We went to the Ann Boleyn place to have coffee – we quite often do – and there were two vacant tables, but when Miss Truelove saw us coming she very hastily tilted the chairs against the tables and said they were reserved. I might have believed her if she hadn’t looked so embarrassed. You don’t think that rumour has begun to get busy already, do you? That she did that because she has heard some gossip?”
“No,” Robert said, sadly, “because she has read this morning’s Ack-Emma.” He turned the newspaper front side up. “I am sorry to have such bad news for you. You’ll just have to shut your teeth and take it, as small boys say. I don’t suppose you have ever seen this poisonous rag at close quarters. It’s a pity that the acquaintance should begin on so personal a basis.”
“Oh, no!” Marion said, in passionate protest as her eye fell on the picture of The Franchise.
And then there was unbroken silence while the two women absorbed the contents of the inner page.
“I take it,” Mrs. Sharpe said at last, “that we have no redress against this sort of thing?”
“None,” Robert said. “All the statements are perfectly true. And it is all statement and not comment. Even if it were comment – and I’ve no doubt the comment will come – there has been no charge so the case is not sub judice. They are free to comment if they please.”
“The whole thing is one huge implied comment,” Marion said. “That the police failed to do their duty. What do they think we did? Bribed them?”
“I think the suggestion is that the humble victim has less pull with the police than the wicked rich.”
“Rich,” repeated Marion, her voice curdling with bitterness.
“Anyone who has more than six chimneys is rich. Now. If you are not too shocked to think, consider. We know that the girl was never at The Franchise, that she could not—” But Marion interrupted him.
“Do you know it?” she asked.
“Yes,” Robert said.
Her challenging eyes lost their challenge, and her glance dropped.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“If the girl was never there, how could she have seen the house!.. She did see it somehow. It is too unlikely for belief that she could be merely repeating a description that someone else gave her…. How could she see it? Naturally, I mean.”
“You could see it, I suppose, from the top deck of a bus,” Marion said. “But there are no double-decker buses on the Milford route. Or from on top of a load of hay. But it is the wrong time of year for hay.”
“It may be the wrong time for hay,” croaked Mrs. Sharpe, “but there is no season for lorry-loads. I have seen lorries loaded with goods as high as any hay waggon.”
“Yes,” Marion said. “Suppose the lift the girl got was not in a car, but on a lorry.”
“There is only one thing against that. If a girl was given a lift on a lorry she would be in the cabin, even if it meant sitting on someone’s knee. They wouldn’t perch her up on top of the load. Especially as it was a rainy evening, you may remember…. No one ever came to The Franchise to ask the way, or to sell something, or to mend something – someone that the girl could have been with, even in the background?”
But no; they were both sure that no one had come, within the time the girl had been on holiday.
“Then we take it for granted that what she learned about The Franchise she learned from being high enough on one occasion to see over the wall. We shall probably never know when or how, and we probably could not prove it if we did know. So our whole efforts will have to be devoted, not to proving that she wasn’t at The Franchise, but that she was somewhere else!”
“And what chance is there of that?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.
“A better chance than before this was published,” Robert said, indicating the front page of the Ack-Emma. “Indeed it is the one bright spot in the bad business. We could not have published the girl’s photograph in the hope of information about her whereabouts during that month. But now that they have published it – her own people, I mean – the same benefit should come to us. They have broadcast the story – and that is our bad luck; but they have also broadcast the photograph – and if we have any good luck at all someone, somewhere, will observe that the story and the photograph do not fit. That at the material time, as given in the story, the subject of the photograph could not possibly have been in the stated place,
