When Robert went out to The Franchise, three days later, to drive the Sharpes over to Norton for the Assizes on the morrow, he found an almost bridal atmosphere about the place. Two absurd tubs of yellow wallflowers stood at the top of the steps; and the dark hall gleamed with flowers like a church decorated for a wedding.

“Nevil!” Marion said, with an explanatory wave of her hand to the massed glory. “He said the house should be en fête.”

“I wish that I had thought of it,” Robert said.

“After the last few days, it surprises me that you can think at all. If it were not for you, it is not rejoicing we should be today!”

“If it weren’t for a man called Bell, you mean.”

“Bell?”

“Alexander Bell. He invented the telephone. If it weren’t for that invention we should still be groping in the dark. It will be months before I can look at a telephone without blenching.”

“Did you take turn about?”

“Oh, no. We each had our own. Kevin and his clerk at his chambers, me at his little place in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Alec Ramsden and three of his men at his office and wherever they could find a telephone that they could use uninterruptedly.”

“That was six of you.”

“Seven of us with six telephones. And we needed them!”

“Poor Robert!”

“At first it was fun. We were filled with the exhilaration of the hunt, of knowing that we were on the right track. Success was practically in our laps. But by the time we had made sure that none of the Chadwicks in the London telephone book had any connection with a Chadwick who had flown to Copenhagen on the 29th of March, and that all the Air line knew about him was that two seats had been booked from Larborough on the 27th, we had lost any feeling of fun we had started with. The Larborough information cheered us, of course. But after that it was pure slog. We found out what we sold to Denmark and what she bought from us, and we divided them up between us.”

“The merchandise?”

“No, the buyers and sellers. The Danish tourist office was a god-send. They just poured information at us. Kevin, his clerk, and I took the exports, and Ramsden and his men took the imports. From then on it was a tedious business of being put through to managers and asking: ‘Have you a man called Bernard Chadwick working for you?’ The number of firms who haven’t got a Bernard Chadwick working for them is unbelievable. But I know a lot more about our exports to Denmark than I did before.”

“I have no doubt of it!”

“I was so sick of the telephone that when it rang at my end I nearly didn’t pick it up. I had almost forgotten that telephones were two-way. A telephone was just a sort of quiz instrument that I could plug into offices all over the country. I stared at it for quite a while before I realised that it was after all a mutual affair and that someone was trying to call me for a change.”

“And it was Ramsden.”

“Yes, it was Alec Ramsden. He said: ‘We’ve got him. He buys porcelain and stuff for Brayne, Havard and Co.’”

“I am glad it was Ramsden who unearthed him. It will comfort him for his failure to run down the girl.”

“Yes, he’s feeling better about it now. After that it was a rush to interview the people we needed and to obtain subpoenas and what not. But the whole lovely result will be waiting for us in the court at Norton tomorrow. Kevin can hardly wait. His mouth waters at the prospect.”

“If it was ever in my power to be sorry for that girl,” Mrs. Sharpe said, coming in with an over-night bag and dumping it on a mahogany wall-table in a way that would have turned Aunt Lin faint, “it would be in a witness-box facing a hostile Kevin Macdermott.” Robert noticed that the bag, which had originally been a very elegant and expensive one — a relic of her prosperous early married life, perhaps — was now deplorably shabby. He decided that when he married Marion his present to the bride’s mother would be a dressing-case; small, light, elegant and expensive.

“It will never be in my power,” Marion said, “to have even a passing sensation of sorrow for that girl. I would swat her off the earth’s face as I would swat a moth in a cupboard — except that I am always sorry about the moth.”

“What had the girl intended to do?” Mrs. Sharpe asked. “Had she intended to go back to her people at all?”

“I don’t think so,” Robert said. “I think she was still filled with rage and resentment at ceasing to be the centre of interest at 39 Meadowside Lane. It is as Kevin said long ago: crime begins in egotism; inordinate vanity. A normal girl, even an emotional adolescent, might be heart-broken that her adopted brother no longer considered her the most important thing in his life; but she would work it out in sobs, or sulks, or being difficult, or deciding that she was going to renounce the world and go into a convent, or half a dozen other methods that the adolescent uses in the process of adjustment. But with an egotism like Betty Kane’s there is no adjustment. She expects the world to adjust itself to her. The criminal always does, by the way. There was never a criminal who didn’t consider himself ill-done-by.”

“A charming creature,” Mrs. Sharpe said.

“Yes. Even the Bishop of Larborough would find some difficulty in thinking up a case for her. His usual ‘environment’ hobby-horse is no good this time. Betty Kane had everything that he recommends for the cure of the criminal: love, freedom to develop her talents, education, security. It’s quite a poser for his lordship when you come to consider it, because he doesn’t believe in heredity. He thinks that criminals are made, and therefore can be unmade. ‘Bad blood’ is just an old superstition, in the Bishop’s estimation.”

“Toby Byrne,” Mrs. Sharpe said with a snort. “You should have heard Charles’s stable lads on him.”

“I’ve heard Nevil,” Robert said. “I doubt if anyone could improve on Nevil’s version of the subject.”

“Is the engagement definitely broken, then?” Marion asked.

“Definitely. Aunt Lin has hopes of the eldest Whittaker girl. She is a niece of Lady Mountleven, and a grand-daughter of Karr’s Krisps.”

Marion laughed with him. “Is she nice, the Whittaker girl?” she asked.

“Yes. Fair, pretty, well-brought-up, musical but doesn’t sing.”

“I should like Nevil to get a nice wife. All he needs is some permanent interest of his own. A focus for his energies and his emotions.”

“At the moment the focus for both is The Franchise.”

“I know. He has been a dear to us. Well, I suppose it is time that we were going. If anyone had told me last week that I should be leaving The Franchise to go to a triumph at Norton I wouldn’t have believed it. Poor Stanley can sleep in his own bed from now on, instead of guarding a couple of hags in a lonely house.”

“Isn’t he sleeping here tonight?” Robert asked.

“No. Why should he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of the house being left entirely empty.”

“The policeman will be round as usual on his beat. Anyhow, no one has even tried to do anything since the night they smashed our windows. It is only for tonight. Tomorrow we shall be home again.”

“I know. But I don’t much like it. Couldn’t Stanley stay one more night? Until the case is over.”

“If they want to wreck our windows again,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “I don’t suppose Stanley’s being here will deter them.”

“No, I suppose not. I’ll remind Hallam, anyhow, that the house is empty tonight,” Robert said, and left it there.

Marion locked the door behind them, and they walked to the gate, where Robert’s car was waiting. At the gate Marion paused to look back at the house. “It’s an ugly old place,” she said, “but it has one virtue. It looks the same all the year round. At midsummer the grass gets a little burnt and tired-looking, but otherwise it doesn’t change. Most houses have a ‘best’ time; rhododendrons, or herbaceous borders, or Virginia creeper, or almond blossom, or something. But The Franchise is always the same. It has no frills. What are you laughing at, Mother?”

“I was thinking how bedizened the poor thing looks with those tubs of wallflower.”

They stood there for a moment, laughing at the forbiddin............