“I suppose you know what you’re doing, dear,” Aunt Lin said, “but I can’t help thinking it’s very odd of you to defend people like that.”

“I am not ‘defending’ them,” Robert said patiently, “I am representing them. And there is no evidence whatever that they are ‘people like that’.”

“There is the girl’s statement, Robert. She couldn’t just have made all that up.”

“Oh, couldn’t she!”

“What advantage would it be to her to tell a lot of lies!” She was standing in his doorway passing her prayer-book from one hand to the other as she put on her white gloves. “What else could she have been doing if she wasn’t at The Franchise?”

Robert bit back a “You’d be surprised!” It was always best with Aunt Lin to take the line of least resistance.

She smoothed her gloves into place. “If it’s just that you’re being noble, Robert dear, I must say you are just being wrong-headed. And do you have to go out to the house! Surely they could come to the office tomorrow. There’s no hurry is there? It isn’t as if someone was going to arrest them on the spot.”

“It was my suggestion that I should go out to The Franchise. If someone accused you of stealing things off Woolworth’s counter and you couldn’t disprove it, I don’t suppose you would enjoy walking down Milford High Street in broad daylight.”

“I mightn’t like it but I should most certainly do it, and give Mr. Hensell a piece of my mind.”

“Who is Mr. Hensell?”

“The manager. Couldn’t you come to church with me first and then go out to The Franchise; it’s such a long time since you’ve been, dear.”

“If you stand there much longer you’ll be late for the first time in ten years. You go and pray that my judgment may be perfected.”

“I shall most certainly pray for you, dear. I always do. I shall also put up a little one for myself. All this is going to be very difficult for me.”

“For you?”

“Now that you’re acting for those people I shan’t be able to talk about it to anyone. It is quite maddening, dear, to sit silent and hear everyone telling for gospel truth things you know for a fact are wrong. It’s like wanting to be sick and having to postpone it. Oh, dear, the bells have stopped, haven’t they? I’ll just have to slip into the Bracketts’ pew. They won’t mind. You won’t stay to lunch at that place, will you, dear.”

“I don’t suppose that I shall be invited.”

But his welcome at The Franchise was so warm that he felt that he might very well be invited after all. He would say no, of course; not because Aunt Lin’s chicken was waiting but because Marion Sharpe would have to do the washing up afterwards. When there was no one there they probably ate off trays. Or in the kitchen, for all anyone knew.

“I am sorry we refused to answer the telephone last night,” Marion said, apologising again. “But after the fourth or fifth time it really was too much. And we didn’t expect you to have news so soon. After all you had only set out on Friday afternoon.”

“Your telephone callers: were they male or female?”

“One male, and four female, as far as I remember. When you rang this morning I thought it was beginning again, but they seem to be late-sleepers. Or perhaps they don’t really get evil-minded much before evening. We certainly provided the Saturday evening’s entertainment for the country youths. They congregated in a group inside the gate and cat-called. Then Nevil found a bar of wood in the out-house ——”

“Nevil?”

“Yes, your nephew. I mean, your cousin. He came to pay what he called a visit of condolence, which was very nice of him. And he found a bar that could be wedged in the gateway to keep the thing shut; we have no key for it, you see. But of course that didn’t stop them for long. They hoisted each other up on the wall, and sat there in a row being offensive until it was time for them to go to their beds.”

“Lack of education,” old Mrs. Sharpe said thoughtfully, “is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive. They had no resource at all.”

“Neither have parrots,” Robert said. “But they can be provocative enough. We must see what police protection we can claim. Meanwhile I can tell you something pleasanter about that wall. I know how the girl saw over it.”

He told them about his visit to Mrs. Tilsit and his discovery that the girl amused herself by bus-riding (or said she did) and his subsequent visit to the Larborough And District Motor Services garage.

“In the fortnight that the girl was at Mainshill there were two breakdowns of single-deck buses due to go out on the Milford run; and each time a double-decker had to be substituted. There are only three services each way daily, you know. And each time the breakdown happened to the bus due to go out on the mid-day service. So there were at least two occasions in that fortnight when she could have seen the house, the courtyard, you two, and the car, all together.”

“But could anyone passing on top of a bus take in so much?”

“Have you ever travelled on the upper deck of a country bus? Even when the bus is going at a steady thirty-five, the pace seems funeral. What you can see is so much further away, and you can see it so much longer. Down below, the hedges brush the window and the pace seems good because things are closer. That is one thing. The other is that she has a photographic memory.” And he told them what Mrs. Wynn had said.

“Do we tell the police this?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“No. It doesn’t prove anything; just solves the problem of how she knew about you. When she needed an alibi she remembered you, and risked your not being able to prove that you were somewhere else. When you bring your car to the door, by the way, which side of the car is nearest the door?”

“Whether I bring it round from the garage or in from the road the off side is next the door, because it’s easier to get out of.”

“Yes; so that the near side, with the darker paint on the front wheel, would be facing the gate,” Robert said conclusively. “That is the picture she saw. The grass and the divided path, the car at the door with the odd wheel, two women — both individual — the round attic window in the roof. She had only to look at the picture in her mind and describe it. The day she was using the picture for — the day she was supposed to have been kidnapped — was more than a month away and it was a thousand to one against your being able to say what you had done or where you had been on that day.”

“And I take it,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “that the odds are very much greater against our being able to say what she has done or where she has been in that month.”

“The odds are against us, yes. As my friend Kevin Macdermott pointed out last night, there is nothing to hinder her having been in Sydney, N.S.W. But somehow I am far more hopeful today than I was on Friday morning. We know so much more about the girl now.” He told them of his interviews in Aylesbury and Mainshill.

“But if the police inquiries didn’t unearth what she was doing that month ——”

“The police inquiries were devoted to checking her statement. They didn’t start, as we do, with the premise that her statement is untrue from beginning to end. They checked it and it checked. They had no particular reason to doubt it. She had a blameless reputation, and when they inquired from her aunt how she had spent her holiday time they found that it had consisted of innocent visits to the cinema and country bus-rides.”

“And what do you think it consisted of?” Mrs. Sharpe asked.

“I think she met someone in Larborough. That, anyhow, is the obvious explanation. It’s from that supposition that I think any inquiry of ours should start.”

“And what do we do about engaging an agent?” asked Mrs. Sharpe. “Do you know of one?”

“Well,” Robert said, hesitating, “it had crossed my mind that you might let me pursue my own inquiries a little further before we engage a professional. I know that ——”

“Mr. Blair,” the old woman said, interrupting him, “you have been called into this unpleasant case without warning, and it cannot have been very willingly; and you have been very kind in doing your best for us. But we cannot expect you to turn yourself into a private inquiry agent on our behalf. We are not rich — indeed we have very little to live on — but as long as we have any money at all we shall pay for what services are proper. And it is not proper that you should turn yourself into a — what is it? — a Sexton Blake for our benefit.”

“It may not be proper but it is very much to my taste. Believe me, Mrs. Sharpe, I hadn’t planned it with any conscious thought of saving your pocket. Coming home in the car last night, very pleased with what I had done so far, I realised how much I should hate giving up the search to someone else. It had become a personal hunt. Please don’t discourage me from ——”

“If Mr. Blair is willing to carry on a little longer,” Marion interrupted, “I think we should thank him heartily and accept. I know just how he feels. I wish I could go hunting myself.”

“There will no doubt come a time when I shall have to turn it over to a proper inquiry agent whether I want to or not. If the trail leads far from Larborough, for instance. I have too many other commitments to follow it far. But as long as the search is on our doorsteps I do want to be the one to pursue it.”

“How had you planned to pursue it?” Marion asked, interested.

“Well, I had thought of beginning with the coffee-lunch places. In Larborough, I mean. For one thing, there can’t be so very many of them. And for another, we do know that, at any rate at the beginning, that was the kind of lunch she had.”

“Why do you say ‘at the beginning’?” Marion asked.

“Once she had met the hypothetical X, she may have lunched anywhere. But up till then she paid for her own lunches, and they were ‘coffee’ ones. A girl of that age prefers a bun lunch anyhow, even if she has money for a two-course meal. So I concentrate on the coffee-places. I flourish the Ack–Emma at the waitresses and find out as tactfully as a country lawyer knows how whether they have ever seen the girl in their place. Does that sound like sense to you?”

“Very good sense,” Marion said.

Robert turned to Mrs. Sharpe. “But if you think you will be better served by a professional — and that is more than possible — then I shall bow out with ——”

“I don’t think we could be better served by anyone,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “I have expressed my appreciation already of the trouble you have gone to on our behalf. If it would really please you to run down this — this ——”

“Moppet,” supplied Robert happily.

“Mopsy,” Mrs. Sharpe amended, “then we can only agree and be grateful. But it seems to me likely to be a very long run.”

“Why long?”

“There is a big gap, it seems to me, between meeting a hypothetical X in Larborough, and walking into a house near Aylesbury wearing nothing but a frock and shoes and well and truly beaten. Marion, there is still some of the Amontillado, I think.”

In the silence that succeeded Marion’s departure to............