It further upset Aunt Lin that Robert should have breakfast next morning at 7.45 so that he could go early to the office. It was another sign of the degeneration that the Franchise affair was responsible for. To have early breakfast so that he might catch a train, or set out for a distant meet, or attend a client’s funeral, was one thing. But to have early breakfast just so that he could arrive at work at an office-boy hour was a very odd proceeding, and unbefitting a Blair.
Robert smiled, walking up the sunny High Street still shuttered and quiet. He had always liked the early morning hours, and it was at this hour that Milford looked its best; its pinks and sepias and creams as delicate in the sunlight as a tinted drawing. Spring was merging into summer, and already the warmth of the pavement radiated into the cool air; the pollarded limes were full out. That would mean shorter nights for the lonely women at The Franchise, he remembered thankfully. But perhaps — with any luck — by the time the summer was actually here their vindication would be complete and their home no longer a beleaguered fortress.
Propped against the still closed door of the office was a long thin grey man who seemed to be all bones and to have no stomach at all.
“Good-morning,” Robert said. “Did you want to see me?”
“No,” said the grey man. “You wanted to see me.”
“I did?”
“At least so your telegram said. I take it you’re Mr. Blair?”
“But you can’t be here already!” Robert said.
“It’s not far,” the man said laconically.
“Come in,” said Robert trying to live up to Mr. Ramsden’s standard of economy in comment.
In the office he asked as he unlocked his desk: “Have you had breakfast?”
“Yes, I had bacon and eggs at the White Hart.”
“I am wonderfully relieved that you could come yourself.”
“I had just finished a case. And Kevin Macdermott has done a lot for me.”
Yes; Kevin, for all his surface malice and his overcrowded life, found the will and the time to help those who deserved help. In which he differed markedly from the Bishop of Larborough, who preferred the undeserving.
“Perhaps the best way would be for you to read this statement,” he said, handing Ramsden the copy of Betty Kane’s statement to the police, “and then we can go on with the story from there.”
Ramsden took the typescript, sat down in the visitors’ chair — folded up would be a more accurate description of his action — and withdrew himself from Robert’s presence very much as Kevin had done in the room in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Robert, taking out his own work, envied them their power of concentration.
“Yes, Mr. Blair?” he said presently; and Robert gave him the rest of the story: the girl’s identification of the house and its inmates, Robert’s own entrance into the affair, the police decision that they would not proceed on the available evidence, Leslie Wynn’s resentment and its result in the Ack–Emma publicity, his own interviews with the girl’s relations and what they revealed, his discovery that she went bus-riding and that a double-decker did run on the Milford bus-route during the relevant weeks, and his unearthing of X.
“To find out more about X is your job, Mr. Ramsden. The lounge waiter, Albert, knows what he looked like, and this is a list of residents for the period in question. It would be too great luck that he should be staying at the Midland, but one never knows. After that you’re on your own. Tell Albert I sent you, by the way. I’ve known him a long time.”
“Very good. I’ll get over to Larborough now. I’ll have a photograph of the girl by tomorrow, but perhaps you could lend me your Ack–Emma one for today.”
“Certainly. How are you going to get a proper photograph of her?”
“Oh. Ways.”
Robert deduced that Scotland Yard had been given one when the girl was reported missing, and that his old colleagues at Headquarters would not be too reluctant to give him a copy; so he left it at that.
“There’s just a chance that the conductor of one of those double-decker buses may remember her,” he said as Ramsden was going. “They are Larborough And District Motor Services buses. The garage is in Victoria Street.”
At half-past nine the staff arrived — one of the first being Nevil; a change in routine which surprised Robert: Nevil was usually the last to arrive and the last to settle down. He would wander in, divest himself of his wrappings in his own small room at the back, wander into “the office” to say good morning, wander into the “waiting-room” at the back to say hello to Miss Tuff, and finally wander into Robert’s room and stand there thumbing open the bound roll of one of the esoteric periodicals that came for him by post and commenting on the permanently deplorable state of affairs in England. Robert had grown quite used to running through his morning post to a Nevil obbligato. But today Nevil came in at the appointed time, went into his own room, shut the door firmly after him, and, if the pulling in and out of drawers was any evidence, settled down to work at once.
Miss Tuff came in with her notebook and her dazzling white peter-pan collar, and Robert’s normal day had begun. Miss Tuff had worn peter-pan collars over her dark frock for twenty years, and would have looked undressed, almost indecent, without them now. A fresh one went on every morning; the previous day’s having been laundered the night before and laid ready for putting on tomorrow. The only break in the routine was on Sundays. Robert had once met Miss Tuff on a Sunday and entirely failed to recognise her because she was wearing a jabot.
Until half-past ten Robert worked, and then realised that he had had breakfast at an abnormally early hour and was now in need of more sustenance than an office cup of tea. He would go out and have coffee and a sandwich at the Rose and Crown. You got the best coffee in Milford at the Anne Boleyn, but it was always full of shopping females (“How nice to see you, my dear! We did miss you so at Ronnie’s party! And have you heard. . . . ”) and that was an atmosphere he would not face for all the coffee in Brazil. He would go across to the Rose and Crown, and afterwards he would shop a little on behalf of the Franchise people, and after lunch he would go out and break to them gently the bad news about the Watchman. He could not do it on the telephone because they had no telephone now. The Larborough firm had come out with ladders and putty and recalcitrant sheets of glass and had replaced the windows without fuss or mess. But they, of course, were Private Enterprise. The Post Office, being a Government department, had taken the matter of the telephone into avizandum and would move in their own elephantine good time. So Robert planned to spend part of his afternoon telling the Sharpes the news he could not tell them by telephone.
It was still early for mid-morning snacks and the chintz and old oak of the Rose and Crown lounge was deserted except for Ben Carley, who was sitting by the gate-legged table at the window reading the Ack–Emma. Carley had never been Robert’s cup-of-tea — any more than, he suspected, he was Carley’s — but they had the bond of their profession (one of the strongest in human nature) and in a small place like Milford that made them very nearly bosom friends. So Robert sat down as a matter of course at Carley’s table; remembering as he did so that he still owed Carley gratitude for that unheeded warning of his about the feeling in the countryside.
Carley lowered the Ack–Emma and regarded him with the too-lively dark eyes that were so alien in this English Midland serenity. “It seems to be dying down,” he said. “Only one letter today; just to keep something in the kitty.”
“The Ack–Emma, yes. But the Watchman is beginning a campaign of its own on Friday.”
“The Watchman! What’s it doing climbing into the Ack–Emma’s bed?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Robert said.
“No, I suppose not,” Carley said, considering it. “Two sides of the same penny, when you come to think of it. Oh, well. That needn’t worry you. The total circulation of the Watchman is about twenty thousand. If that.”
“Perhaps. But practically every one of those twenty thousand has a second cousin in the permanent Civil Service in this country.”
“So what? Has anyone ever known the permanent Civil Service to move a finger in any cause whatever outside their normal routine?”
“No, but they pass the buck. And sooner or later the buck drops into — into a — a ——”
“A fertile spot,” Carley offered, mixing the metaphor deliberately.
“Yes. Sooner or later some busybody or sentimentalist or egotist, with not enough to do, thinks that something should be done about this and begins to pull strings. And a string pulled in the Civil Service has the same effect as a string pulled in a peep-show. A whole series of figures is yanked into action, willy-nilly. Gerald obliges Tony, and Reggie obliges Gerald, and so on, to incalculable ends.”
Carley was silent a moment. “It’s a pity,” he said. “Just when the Ack–Emma was losing way. Another two days and they would have dropped it for good. In fact they’re two days over their normal schedule, as it is. I have never known them carry a subject longer than three issues. The response must have been terrific to warrant that amount of space.”
“Yes,” Robert agreed, gloomily.
“Of course, it was a gift for them. The beating of kidnapped girls is growing very rare. As a change of fare it was beyond price. When you have only three or four dishes, like the Ack–Emma, it’s difficult to keep the customers’ palates properly tickled. A tit-bit like the Franchise affair must have put up their circulation by thousands in the Larborough district alone.”
“Their circulation will slack off. It’s just a tide. But what I have to deal with is what’s left on the beach.”
“A particularly smelly beach, let me say,” Carley observed. “Do you know that fat blonde with the mauve powder and the uplift brassiere who runs that Sports Wear shop next the Anne Boleyn? She’s one of the things on your beach.”
“How?”
“She lived at the same boarding-house in London as the Sharpes, it seems; and she has a lovely story as to how Marion Sharpe once beat a dog half to death in a rage. Her clients loved that story. So did the Anne Boleyn customers. She goes there for her morning coffee.” He glanced wryly at the angry flush on Robert’s face. “I needn’t tell you that she has a dog of her own. It has never been corrected in its spoiled life, but it is rapidly dying of fatty degeneration through the indiscriminate feeding of morsels whenever the fat blonde is feeling gooey.”
There were moments, Robert thought, when he could very nearly hug Ben Carley, striped suits and all.
“Ah, well, it will blow over,” said Carley, with the pliant philosophy of a race long used to lying low and letting the storm blow past.
Robert looked surprised. Forty generations of protesting ancestors were surprised in his sole person. “I don’t see that blowing over is any advantage,” he said. “It won’t help my clients at all.”
“What can you do?”
“Fight, of course.”
“Fight what? You wouldn’t get a slander verdict, if that’s what you’re thinking of.”
“No. I hadn’t thought of slander. I propose to find out what the girl was really doing during those weeks.”
Carley looked amused. “Just like that,” he said, commenting on this simple statement of a tall order.
“It won’t be easy and it will probably cost them all they have, but there is no alternative.”
“They could go away from here. Sell the house and settle down somewhere else. A year from now no one outside the Milford district will remember anything about this affair.”
“They would never do that; and I shouldn’t advise them to, even if they would. You can’t have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn’t there. Besides, it is quite unthinkable that that girl should be allowed to get away with her tale. It’s a matter of principle.”
“You can pay too high a price for your damned principles. But I wish you luck, anyhow. Are you considering a private inquiry agent? Because if you are I know a very good ——”
Robert said that he had got an agent and that he was already at work.
Carley’s expressive face conveyed his amused congratulation at this swift action on the part of the conservative Blair, Hayward, and Bennet.
“The Yard had better look to its laurels,” he said. His eyes went to the street beyond the leaded panes of the window, and the amusement in them faded to a fixed attention. He stared for a moment or two and then said softly: “Well! of all the nerve!”
It was an admiring phrase, not an indignant one; and Robert turned to see what was occasioning his admiration.
On the opposite side of the street was the Sharpes’ battered old car; its odd front wheel well in evidence. And in the back, enthroned in her usual place and with her usual air of faint protest at this means of transport, was Mrs. Sharpe. The car was pu............