Josephine Tey - Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair

“You alarm me,” Robert said. “In the future I shall give baby-blue eyes a wide berth.”

Hallam grinned. “As long as you keep your pocket book shut you needn’t worry. All Baby-Blue’s lies are for money. He only murders when he gets too entangled in his lies. The real murderer’s mark is not the colour of the eyes but their setting.”

“Setting?”

“Yes. They are set differently. The two eyes, I mean. They look as if they belonged to different faces.”

“I thought you hadn’t met many.”

“No, but I’ve read all the case histories and studied the photographs. I’ve always been surprised that no book on murder mentions it, it happens so often. The inequality of setting, I mean.”

“So it’s entirely your own theory.”

“The result of my own observation, yes. You ought to have a go at it sometime. Fascinating. I’ve got to the stage where I look for it now.”

“In the street, you mean?”

“No, not quite as bad as that. But in each new murder case. I wait for the photograph, and when it comes I think: ‘There! What did I tell you!’”

“And when the photograph comes and the eyes are of a mathematical identity?”

“Then it is nearly always what one might call an accidental murder. The kind of murder that might happen to anyone given the circumstances.”

“And when you turn up a photograph of the revered vicar of Nether Dumbleton who is being given a presentation by his grateful parishioners to mark his fiftieth year of devoted service, and you note that the setting of his eyes is wildly unequal, what conclusion do you come to?”

“That his wife satisfies him, his children obey him, his stipend is sufficient for his needs, he has no politics, he gets on with the local big-wigs, and he is allowed to have the kind of services he wants. In fact, he has never had the slightest need to murder anyone.”

“It seems to me that you are having your cake and eating it very nicely.”

“Huh!” Hallam said disgustedly. “Just wasting good police observation on a legal mind. I’d have thought,” he added, moving to go, “that a lawyer would be glad of some free tips about judging perfect strangers.”

“All you are doing,” Robert pointed out, “is corrupting an innocent mind. I shall never be able to inspect a new client from now on without my subconscious registering the colour of his eyes and the symmetry of their setting.”

“Well, that’s something. It’s about time you knew some of the facts of life.”

“Thank you for coming to tell me about the ‘Franchise’ affair,” Robert said, returning to sobriety.

“The telephone in this town,” Hallam said, “is about as private as the radio.”

“Anyhow, thank you. I must let the Sharpes know at once.”

As Hallam took his leave, Robert lifted the telephone receiver.

He could not, as Hallam said, talk freely over the telephone, but he would say that he was coming out to see them immediately and that the news was good. That would take the present weight off their minds. It would also – he glanced at his watch – be time for Mrs. Sharpe’s daily rest, so perhaps he would have a hope of avoiding the old dragon. And also a hope of a tête-à-tête with Marion Sharpe, of course; though he left that thought unformulated at the back of his mind.

But there was no answer to his call.

With the bored and reluctant aid of the Exchange he rang the number for a solid five minutes, without result. The Sharpes were not at home.

While he was still engaged with the Exchange, Nevil Bennet strolled in clad in his usual outrageous tweed, a pinkish shirt, and a purple tie. Robert, eyeing him over the receiver, wondered for the hundredth time what was going to become of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet when it at last slipped from his good Blair grasp into the hands of this young sprig of the Bennets. That the boy had brains he knew, but brains wouldn’t take him far in Milford. Milford expected a man to stop being undergraduate when he reached graduate age. But there was no sign of Nevil’s acceptance of the world outside his coterie. He was still actively, if unconsciously, épaté-ing that world. As his clothes bore witness.

It was not that Robert had any desire to see the boy in customary suits of solemn black. His own suit was a grey tweed; and his country clientèle would look doubtfully on “town” clothes. (“That awful little man with the striped suits,” Marion Sharpe had said of a town-clad lawyer, in that unguarded moment on the telephone.) But there were tweeds and tweeds, and Nevil Bennet’s were the second kind. Quite outrageously the second kind.

“Robert,” Nevil said, as Robert gave it up and laid down the receiver, “I’ve finished the papers on the Calthorpe transfer, and I thought I would run into Larborough this afternoon, if you haven’t anything you want me to do.”

“Can’t you talk to her on the telephone?” Robert asked; Nevil being engaged, in the casual modern fashion, to the Bishop of Larborough’s third daughter.

“Oh, it isn’t Rosemary. She is in London for a week.”

“A protest meeting at the Albert Hall, I suppose,” said Robert, who was feeling disgruntled because of his failure to speak to the Sharpes when he was primed with good news for them.

“No, at the Guildhall,” Nevil said.

“What is it this time? Vivisection?”

“You are frightfully last-century now and then, Robert,” Nevil said, with his air of solemn patience. “No one objects to vivisection nowadays except a few cranks. The protest is against this country’s refusal to give shelter to the patriot Kotovich.”

“The said patriot is very badly ‘wanted’ in his own country, I understand.”

“By his enemies; yes.”

“By the police; for two murders.”

“Executions.”

“You a disciple of John Knox, Nevil?”

“Good God, no. What has that to do with it?”

“ He believed in self-appointed executioners. The idea has a little ‘gone out’ in this country, I understand. Anyhow, if it’s a choice between Rosemary’s opinion of Kotovich and the opinion of the Special Branch, I’ll take the Special Branch.”

“The Special Branch only do what the Foreign Office tells them. Everyone knows that. But if I stay and explain the ramifications of the Kotovich affair to you, I shall be late for the film.”

“What film?”

“The French film I am going into Larborough to see.”

“I suppose you know that most of those French trifles that the British intelligentsia bate their breath about are considered very so-so in their own country? However. Do you think you could pause long enough to drop a note into the letter-box of The Franchise as you go by?”

“I might. I always wanted to see what was inside that wall. Who lives there now?”

“An old woman and her daughter.”

“Daughter?” repeated Nevil, automatically pricking his ears.

“Middle-aged daughter.”

“Oh. All right, I’ll just get my coat.”

Robert wrote merely that he had tried to talk to them, that he had to go out on business for an hour or so, but that he would ring them up again when he was free, and that Scotland Yard had no case, as the case stood, and acknowledged the fact.

Nevil swept in with a dreadful raglan affair over his arm, snatched up the letter and disappeared with a “Tell Aunt Lin I may be late. She asked me over to dinner.”

Robert donned his own sober grey hat and walked over to the Rose and Crown to meet his client – an old farmer, and the last man in England to suffer from chronic gout. The old man was not yet there, and Robert, usually so placid, so lazily good-natured, was conscious of impatience. The pattern of his life had changed. Up to now it had been an even succession of equal attractions; he had gone from one thing to another without hurry and without emotion. Now there was a focus of interest, and the rest revolved round it.