Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair. Джозефина Тэй
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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.”
“No,” Hallam agreed, “no driver is going to risk the sack by confessing he gave anyone a lift. Especially a girl. Transport bosses are strict about that. And when it is a case of a girl in trouble of some kind, and when it’s the police that are doing the asking, no man in his senses is going to own up to even having seen her.” He took the cigarette that Robert offered him. “They needed that lorry driver,” he said. “Or someone like him,” he added.
“Yes,” Robert said, reflectively. “What did you make of her, Hallam?”
“The girl? I don’t know. Nice kid. Seemed quite genuine. Might have been one of my own.”
This, Blair realised, was a very good sample of what they would be up against if it ever came to a case. To every man of good feeling the girl in the witness box would look like his own daughter. Not because she was a waif, but for the very good reason that she wasn’t. The decent school coat, the mousy hair, the unmadeup young face with its appealing hollow below the cheek-bone, the wide-set candid eyes – it was a prosecuting counsel’s dream of a victim.
“Just like any other girl of her age,” Hallam said, still considering it. “Nothing against her.”
“So you don’t judge people by the colour of their eyes,” Robert said idly, his mind still on the girl.
“Ho! Don’t I!” said Hallam surprisingly. “Believe me, there’s a particular shade of baby blue that condemns a man, as far as I’m concerned, before he has opened his mouth. Plausible liars every one of them.” He paused to pull on his cigarette. “Given to murder, too, come to think of it – though I haven’t met many killers.”
“You alarm me,” Robert said. “In the future I shall give baby-blue eyes a wide berth.”
Hallam grinned. “As long as you keep your pocket book shut you needn’t worry. All Baby-Blue’s lies are for money. He only murders when he gets too entangled in his lies. The real murderer’s mark is not the colour of the eyes but their setting.”
“Setting?”
“Yes. They are set differently. The two eyes, I mean. They look as if they belonged to different faces.”
“I thought you hadn’t met many.”
“No, but I’ve read all the case histories and studied the photographs. I’ve always been surprised that no book on murder mentions it, it happens so often. The inequality of setting, I mean.”
“So it’s entirely your own theory.”
“The result of my own observation, yes. You ought to have a go at it sometime. Fascinating. I’ve got to the stage where I look for it now.”
“In the street, you mean?”
“No, not quite as bad as that. But in each new murder case. I wait for the photograph, and when it comes I think: ‘There! What did I tell you!’”
“And when the photograph comes and the eyes are of a mathematical identity?”
“Then it is nearly always what one might call an accidental murder. The kind of murder that might happen to anyone given the circumstances.”
“And when you turn up a photograph of the revered vicar of Nether Dumbleton who is being given a presentation by his grateful parishioners to mark his fiftieth year of devoted service, and you note that the setting of his eyes is wildly unequal, what conclusion do you come to?”
“That his wife satisfies him, his children obey him, his stipend is sufficient for his needs, he has no politics, he gets on with the local big-wigs, and he is allowed to have the kind of services he wants. In fact, he has never had the slightest need to murder anyone.”
“It seems to me that you are having your cake and eating it very nicely.”
“Huh!” Hallam said disgustedly. “Just wasting good police observation on a legal mind. I’d have thought,” he added, moving to go, “that a lawyer would be glad of some free tips about judging perfect strangers.”
“All you are doing,” Robert pointed out, “is corrupting an innocent mind. I shall never be able to inspect a new client from now on without my subconscious registering the colour of his eyes and the symmetry of their setting.”
“Well, that’s something. It’s about time you knew some of the facts of life.”
“Thank you for coming to tell me about the ‘Franchise’ affair,” Robert said, returning to sobriety.
“The telephone in this town,” Hallam said, “is about as private as the radio.”
“Anyhow, thank you. I must let the Sharpes know at once.”
As Hallam took his leave, Robert lifted the telephone receiver.
He could not, as Hallam said, talk freely over the telephone, but he would say that he was coming out to see them immediately and that the news was good. That would take the present weight off their minds. It would also – he glanced at his watch – be time for Mrs. Sharpe’s daily rest, so perhaps he would have a hope of avoiding the old dragon. And also a hope of a tête-à-tête with Marion Sharpe, of course; though he left that thought unformulated at the back of his mind.
But there was no answer to his call.
With the bored and reluctant aid of the Exchange he rang the number for a solid five minutes, without result. The Sharpes were not at home.
While he was still engaged with the Exchange, Nevil Bennet strolled in clad in his usual outrageous tweed, a pinkish shirt, and a purple tie. Robert, eyeing him over the receiver, wondered for the hundredth time what was going to become of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet when it at last slipped from his good Blair grasp into the hands of this young sprig of the Bennets. That the boy had brains he knew, but brains wouldn’t take him far in Milford. Milford expected a man to stop being undergraduate when he reached graduate age. But there was no sign of Nevil’s acceptance of the world outside his coterie. He was still actively, if unconsciously, épaté-ing that world. As his clothes bore witness.
It was not that Robert had any desire to see the boy in customary suits of solemn black. His own suit was a grey tweed; and his country clientèle would look doubtfully on “town” clothes. (“That awful little man with the striped suits,” Marion Sharpe had said of a town-clad lawyer, in that unguarded moment on the telephone.) But there were tweeds and tweeds, and Nevil Bennet’s were the second kind. Quite outrageously the second kind.
“Robert,” Nevil said, as Robert gave it up and laid down the receiver, “I’ve finished the papers on the Calthorpe transfer, and I thought I would run into Larborough this afternoon, if you haven’t anything you want me to do.”
“Can’t