The London–Larborough road was a black straight ribbon in the sunshine, giving off diamond sparks as the crowded traffic caught the light and lost it again. Pretty soon both the air and the roads would be so full that no one could move in comfort and everyone would have to go back to the railways for quick travel. Progress, that was.
Kevin had pointed out last night that, what with present ease of communications, it was quite on the cards that Betty Kane had spent her month’s vacation in Sydney, N.S.W. It was a daunting thought. She could be anywhere from Kamchatka to Peru, and all he, Blair, had to do was a little thing like proving she wasn’t in a house on the Larborough–Milford road. If it were not a sunny morning, and if he were not sorry for Scotland Yard, and if he didn’t have Kevin to hold his hand, and if he were not doing pretty well on his own so far, he might have felt depressed.
Feeling sorry for Scotland Yard was the last thing he had anticipated. But sorry he was. All Scotland Yard’s energies were devoted to proving the Sharpes guilty and Betty Kane’s story true; for the very good reason that they believed the Sharpes to be guilty. But what each one of them ached in his private soul to do was to push Betty Kane down the Ack–Emma’s throat; and they could only do that by proving her story nonsense. Yes, a really prize state of frustration existed in those large calm bodies at the Yard.
Grant had been charming in his quiet reasonable way — it had been rather like going to see a doctor, now he came to think of it — and had quite willingly agreed that Robert should be told about any letters that the Ack–Emma might provoke.
“Don’t pin your hopes too firmly to that, will you,” he had said, in friendly warning. “For one letter that the Yard gets that has any worth it gets five thousand that are nonsense. Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the ‘odds.’ The busybodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ——”
“‘Pro Bono Publico’——”
“Him and ‘Civis’,” Grant said with a smile. “Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It’s their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea’d, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!”
“But there is a chance ——”
“Oh, yes. There is a chance. And all these letters will have to be weeded out, however silly they are. Anything of importance will be passed on to you, I promise. But I do remind you that the ordinary intelligent citizen writes only one time in five thousand. He doesn’t like what he thinks of as ‘poking his nose in’— which is why he sits silent in a railway carriage and scandalises the Americans, who still have a hick interest in other folk — and anyhow he’s a busy man, full of his own affairs, and sitting down to a letter to the police about something that doesn’t concern him is against all his instincts.”
So Robert had come away pleased with the Yard, and sorry for them. At least he, Robert, had a straight row to hoe. He wouldn’t be glancing aside every now and then and wishing it was the next row he was hoeing. And moreover he had Kevin’s approval of the row he had chosen.
“I mean it,” Kevin had said, “when I say that if I were the police I should almost have risked it. They have a good enough case. And a nice little conviction is always a hitch up the ladder of promotion for someone. Unfortunately — or fortunately for the citizen — the man who decides whether there is a case or not is the chap higher up, and he’s not interested in any subordinate’s speedy promotion. Amazing that wisdom should be the by-product of office procedure.”
Robert, mellow with whisky, had let the cynicism flow past him.
“But let them just get one spot of corroboration, and they’ll have a warrant at the door of The Franchise quicker than you can lift a telephone receiver.”
“They won’t get any corroboration,” said the mellow Robert. “Why should they? How could they? What we want to do is to disprove the girl’s story ourselves, so that it doesn’t damn the Sharpes’ lives for as long as they live. Once I have seen the aunt and uncle tomorrow we may have enough general knowledge about the girl to justify a start on our own investigation.”
Now he was speeding down the black shining Larborough road on the way to seeing Betty’s relations in Mainshill; the people she had stayed with on the memorable holiday. A Mr. and Mrs. Tilsit, they were. Tilsit, 93 Cherrill Street, Mainshill, Larborough — and the husband was travelling agent for a firm of brush-makers in Larborough and they had no children. That was all Robert knew about them.
He paused for a moment as he turned off the main road in Mainshill. This was the corner where Betty Kane waited for her bus. Or said she waited. Over there on the other side, it must have been. There was no side turning on that side; nothing but the long stretch of unbroken pavement as far as one could see in either direction. A busy enough road at this time of day; but empty enough, Robert supposed, in the doldrum hour of the late afternoon.
Cherrill Street was one long series of angular bay windows in dirty red brick, their forward surface almost scraping the low red-brick wall that hemmed them in from the pavement. The sour soil on either side of the window that did duty for a garden had none of the virtues of the new-turned earth of Meadowside Lane, Aylesbury; it grew only thin London Pride, weedy wallflowers, and moth-eaten forget-me-not. The same housewife’s pride obtained in Cherrill Street as in Aylesbury, of course, and the same crisp curtains hung at the windows; but if there were poets in Cherrill Street they found other outlets for their soul than gardens.
When he had rung unavailingly, and then knocked, at 93 — indistinguishable from the others as far as he could see except by its painted numerals — a woman flung up the bedroom window next door, leaned out and said:
“You looking for Mrs. Tilsit?”
Robert said that he was.
“She’s gone to get her groceries. The shop at the corner.”
“Oh, thanks. If that’s all, I’ll wait.”
“Shouldn’t wait if you want to see her soon. Should go and fetch her.”
“Oh. Is she going somewhere else?”
“No, just the grocer’s; it’s the only shop round here. But she takes half a morning deciding between two brands of wheat flakes. You take one packet up right firm and put it in her bag and she’ll be quite pleased.”
Robert thanked her and began to walk away to the end of the street, when she hailed him again.
“Shouldn’t leave your car. Take it with you.”
“But it’s quite a little way, isn’t it?”
“Maybe, but it’s Saturday.”
“Saturday?”
“School’s out.”
“Oh, I see. But there’s nothing in it ——” “to steal,” he was going to say but amended it to “Nothing in it that’s movable.”
“Movable! Huh! That’s good. We had window-boxes once. Mrs. Laverty over the way had a gate. Mrs. Biddows had two fine wooden clothes posts and eighteen yards of clothes rope. They all thought they weren’t movable. You leave your car there for ten minutes you’ll be lucky to find the chassis!”
So Robert got obediently into the car, and drove down to the grocer’s. And as he drove he remembered something, and the memory puzzled him. This was where Betty Kane had been so happy. This rather dreary, rather grimy street; one of a warren of streets very like itself. So happy that she had written to say that she was staying on for the rest of her holidays.
What had she found here that was so desirable?
He was still wondering as he walked into the grocer’s and prepared to spot Mrs. Tilsit among the morning customers. But there was no need for any guesswork. There was only one woman in the shop, and one glance at the grocer’s patient face and the cardboard packet in the woman’s either hand, made it plain that she was Mrs. Tilsit.
“Can I get you something, sir,” the grocer said detaching himself for a moment from the woman’s ponderings — it wasn’t wheat flakes this morning, it was powdered soap — and moving towards Robert.
“No, thank you,” Robert said. “I am just waiting for this lady.”
“For me?” the woman said. “If it’s the gas, then ——”
Robert said hastily that he wasn’t the gas.
“I have a vacuum cleaner, and it’s going fine,” she offered, and prepared to go back to her problem.
Robert said that he had his car outside and would wait until she had finished, and was beating a hasty retreat; but she said: “A car! Oh. Well, you can drive me back, can’t you, and save me carrying all those things. How much, Mr. Carr, please?”
Mr. Carr, who had taken a packet of soap-flakes from her during her interest in Robert and wedged it into her shopping-bag, took her money, gave her change, wished her a thankful good-day, and cast a pitiful glance at Robert as he followed the woman out to his car.
Robert had known that it was too much to hope for another woman with Mrs. Wynn’s detachment and intelligence, but his heart sank as he considered Mrs. Tilsit. Mrs. Tilsit was one of those women whose minds are always on something else. They chat brightly with you, they agree with you, they admire what you are wearing, and they offer advice, but their real attention is concentrated on what to do with the fish, or what Florrie told them about Minnie’s eldest, or where they have left the laundry book, or even just what a bad filling that is in your right front tooth; anything, everything, except the subject in hand.
She seemed impressed with the appearance of Robert’s car, and asked him in to have a cup of tea — there being apparently no hour of the day when a cup of tea was not a possible article of diet. Robert felt that he could not drink with her — even a cup of tea — without making plain his position of opposing counsel, so to speak. He did his best, but it was doubtful if she understood; her mind was so plainly already deciding whether to offer him the Rich Tea or the Mixed Fancy biscuits with his tea. Mention of her niece made none of the expected stir in her emotions.
“A most extraordinary thing, that was, wasn’t it?” she said. “Taking her away and beating her. What good did they think that was going to do them? Sit down, Mr. Blayne, come in and sit down. I’ll just ——”
A bloodcurdling scream echoed through the house. An urgent, high-pitched, desperate screaming that went on and on, without even a pause for breath.
Mrs. Tilsit humped her parcels in a movement of exasperation. She leaned near enough to Robert to put her mouth within shouting distance of his ear. “My kettle,” sh............