Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair. Джозефина Тэй
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even more unorthodox. Far from being impressed or agitated by the presence of Scotland Yard in her drawing-room of a spring afternoon, she merely said in her dry voice: “You should not be sitting in that chair; you are much too heavy for it.”
When her daughter introduced the local Inspector she cast one glance at him, moved her head an inch, and quite obviously dismissed him from further consideration. This, Hallam, to judge by his expression, found peculiarly shattering.
Grant looked inquiringly at Miss Sharpe.
“I’ll tell her,” she said. “Mother, the Inspector wants us to see a young girl who is waiting in a car outside the gate. She was missing from her home near Aylesbury for a month, and when she turned up again – in a distressed condition – she said that she had been detained by people who wanted to make a servant of her. They kept her locked up when she refused, and beat and starved her. She described the place and the people minutely, and it so happens that you and I fit the description admirably. So does our house. The suggestion is that she was detained up in our attic with the round window.”
“Remarkably interesting,” said the old lady, seating herself with deliberation on an Empire sofa. “What did we beat her with?”
“A dog whip, I understand.”
“Have we got a dog whip?”
“We have one of those ‘lead’ things, I think. They make a whip if necessary. But the point is, the Inspector would like us to meet this girl, so that she can say if we are the people who detained her or not.”
“Have you any objections, Mrs. Sharpe?” Grant asked.
“On the contrary, Inspector. I look forward to the meeting with impatience. It is not every afternoon, I assure you, that I go to my rest a dull old woman and rise a potential monster.”
“Then if you will excuse me, I shall bring—”
Hallam made a motion, offering himself as messenger, but Grant shook his head. It was obvious that he wanted to be present when the girl first saw what was beyond the gate.
As the Inspector went out Marion Sharpe explained Blair’s presence to her mother. “It was extraordinarily kind of him to come at such short notice and so quickly,” she added, and Robert felt again the impact of that bright pale old eye. For his money, old Mrs. Sharpe was quite capable of beating seven different people between breakfast and lunch, any day of the week.
“You have my sympathy, Mr. Blair,” she said, unsympathetically.
“Why, Mrs. Sharpe?”
“I take it that Broadmoor is a little out of your line.”
“Broadmoor!”
“Criminal lunacy.”
“I find it extraordinarily stimulating,” Robert said, refusing to be bullied by her.
This drew a flash of appreciation from her; something that was like the shadow of a smile. Robert had the odd feeling that she suddenly liked him; but if so she was making no verbal confession of it. Her dry voice said tartly: “Yes, I expect the distractions of Milford are scarce and mild. My daughter pursues a piece of gutta-percha round the golf course—”
“It is not gutta-percha any more, Mother,” her daughter put in.
“But at my age Milford does not provide even that distraction. I am reduced to pouring weedkiller on weeds – a legitimate form of sadism on a par with drowning fleas. Do you drown your fleas, Mr. Blair?”
“No, I squash them. But I have a sister who used to pursue them with a cake of soap.”
“Soap?” said Mrs. Sharpe, with genuine interest.
“I understand that she hit them with the soft side and they stuck to it.”
“How very interesting. A technique I have not met before. I must try that next time.”
With his other ear he heard that Marion was being nice to the snubbed Inspector. “You play a very good game, Inspector,” she was saying.
He was conscious of the feeling you get near the end of a dream, when waking is just round the corner, that none of the inconsequence really matters because presently you’ll be back in the real world.
This was misleading because the real world came through the door with the return of Inspector Grant. Grant came in first, so that he was in a position to see the expressions on all the faces concerned, and held the door open for a police matron and a girl.
Marion Sharpe stood up slowly, as if the better to face anything that might be coming to her, but her mother remained seated on the sofa as one giving an audience, her Victorian back as flat as it had been as a young girl, her hands lying composedly in her lap. Even her wild hair could not detract from the impression that she was mistress of the situation.
The girl was wearing her school coat, and childish low-heeled clumpish black school shoes; and consequently looked younger than Blair had anticipated. She was not very tall, and certainly not pretty. But she had – what was the word? – appeal. Her eyes, a darkish blue, were set wide apart in a face of the type popularly referred to as heart-shaped. Her hair was mouse-coloured, but grew off her forehead in a good line. Below each cheek-bone a slight hollow, a miracle of delicate modelling, gave the face charm and pathos. Her lower lip was full, but the mouth was too small. So were her ears. Too small and too close to her head.
An ordinary sort of girl, after all. Not the sort you would notice in a crowd. Not at all the type to be the heroine of a sensation. Robert wondered what she would look like in other clothes.
The girl’s glance rested first on the old woman, and then went on to Marion. The glance held neither surprise nor triumph, and not much interest.
“Yes, these are the women,” she said.
“You have no doubt about it?” Grant asked her, and added: “It is a very grave accusation, you know.”
“No, I have no doubt. How could I?”
“These two ladies are the women who detained you, took your clothes from you, forced you to mend linen, and whipped you?”
“Yes, these are the women.”
“A remarkable liar,” said old Mrs. Sharpe, in the tone in which one says: “A remarkable likeness.”
“You say that we took you into the kitchen for coffee,” Marion said.
“Yes, you did.”
“Can you describe the kitchen?”
“I didn’t pay much attention. It was a big one – with a stone floor, I think – and a row of bells.”
“What kind of stove?”
“I didn’t notice the stove, but the pan the old woman heated the coffee in was a pale blue enamel one with a dark blue edge and a lot of chips off round the bottom edge.”
“I doubt if there is any kitchen in England that hasn’t a pan exactly like that,” Marion said. “We have three of them.”
“Is the girl a virgin?” asked Mrs. Sharpe, in the mildly interested tone of a person inquiring: “Is it a Chanel?”
In the startled pause that this produced Robert was aware of Hallam’s scandalised face, the hot blood running up into the girl’s, and the fact that there was no protesting “Mother!” from the daughter as he unconsciously, but confidently, expected. He wondered whether her silence was tacit approval, or whether after a lifetime with Mrs. Sharpe she was shock-proof.
Grant said in cold reproof that the matter was irrelevant.
“You think so?” said the old lady. “If I had been missing for a month from my home it is the first thing that my mother would have wanted to know about me. However. Now that the girl has identified us, what do you propose to do? Arrest us?”
“Oh, no. Things are a long way from that at the moment. I want to take Miss Kane to the kitchen and the attic, so that her descriptions of them can be verified. If they are, I report on the case to