Загадочные события во Франчесе

Josephine TEY

THE FRANCHISE  

AFFAIR

DETECTIVE STORY

УДК 821.111
ББК 81.2 Англ-93 
 
Т96

ISBN 978-5-9925-1494-0

Тэй, Джозефина.

Т96        Загадочные события во Франчесе : Книга для чте
ния на английском языке / Д. Тэй. — Санкт-Петербург : 
КАРО, 2020. — 352 с. — (Detective Story).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1494-0.

Джозефина Тэй — псевдоним, под которым ра
ботала шотландская писательница Элизабет Макинтош, признанный мастер классического британского 
детектива.

Роман «Загадочные события во Франчесе» (также 

известный в другом переводе под названием «Дело 
о похищении Бетти Кейн») был опубликован в 1948 
году, а в 1990 занял 11 строчку перечня «100 лучших 
детективных романов всех времен» по версии британской Ассоциации писателей-криминалистов. Сюжет детектива строится вокруг похищения молодой 
девушки, в котором обвиняются Марион Шарп и ее 
мать. Дело расследует детектив Алан Грант, сквозной 
герой цикла из шести романов Джозефины Тэй.

В книге представлен полный неадаптирован
ный текст произведения на языке оригинала.

УДК 821.111 

ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© Каро, 2020
Все права защищены

Chapter 1

It was four o’clock of a spring evening; and Robert Blair 

was thinking of going home.

The office would not shut until five, of course. But when 

you are the only Blair, of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet, you 
go home when you think you will. And when your business is mostly wills, conveyancing, and investments your 
services are in small demand in the late afternoon. And 
when you live in Milford, where the last post goes out at 
3.45, the day loses whatever momentum it ever had long 
before four o’clock.

It was not even likely that his telephone would ring. 

His golfing cronies would by now be somewhere between 
the fourteenth and the sixteenth hole. No one would ask 
him to dinner, because in Milford invitations to dinner are 
still written by hand and sent through the post. And Aunt 
Lin would not ring up and ask him to call for the fish on 
his way home, because this was her bi-weekly afternoon at 
the cinema, and she would at the moment be only twenty 
minutes gone with feature, so to speak.

So he sat there, in the lazy atmosphere of a spring 

evening in a little market town, staring at the last patch 
of sunlight on his desk (the mahogany desk with the 
brass inlay that his grandfather had scandalised the 

family by bringing home from Paris) and thought about 
going home. In the patch of sunlight was his tea-tray; 
and it was typical of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet that tea 
was no affair of a japanned tin tray and a kitchen cup. At 
3.50 exactly on every working day Miss Tuff bore into 
his office a lacquer tray covered with a fair white cloth 
and bearing a cup of tea in blue-patterned china, and, 
on a plate to match, two biscuits; petit-beurre Mondays, 
Wednesdays and Fridays, digestive Tuesdays, Thursdays 
and Saturdays.

Looking at it now, idly, he thought how much it repre
sented the continuity of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet. The 
china he could remember as long as he could remember 
anything. The tray had been used when he was very small 
by the cook at home to take the bread in from the baker, 
and had been rescued by his young mother and brought 
to the office to bear the blue-patterned cups. The cloth 
had come years later with the advent of Miss Tuff. Miss 
Tuff was a war-time product; the first woman who had 
ever sat at a desk in a respectable solicitor’s in Milford. A 
whole revolution Miss Tuff was in her single gawky thin 
earnest person. But the firm had survived the revolution 
with hardly a jolt, and now, nearly a quarter of a century 
later, it was inconceivable that thin grey dignified Miss 
Tuff had ever been a sensation. Indeed her only disturbance of the immemorial routine was the introduction of 
the tray-cloth. In Miss Tuff’s home no meal was ever put 
straight on to a tray; if it comes to that, no cakes were ever 
put straight on to a plate; a tray-cloth or a doyley must 
intervene. So Miss Tuff had looked askance at the bare 

tray. She had, moreover, considered the lacquered pattern 
distracting, unappetising, and “queer.” So one day she had 
brought a cloth from home; decent, plain, and white, as 
befitted something that was to be eaten off. And Robert’s 
father, who had liked the lacquer tray, looked at the clean 
white cloth and was touched by young Miss Tuff’s identification of herself with the firm’s interests, and the cloth 
had stayed, and was now as much a part of the firm’s life 
as the deed-boxes, and the brass plate, and Mr. Heseltine’s 
annual cold.

It was when his eyes rested on the blue plate where 

the biscuits had been that Robert experienced that odd 
sensation in his chest again. The sensation had nothing to 
do with the two digestive biscuits; at least, not physically. 
It had to do with the inevitability of the biscuit routine; the 
placid certainty that it would be digestive on a Thursday 
and petit-beurre on a Monday. Until the last year or so, 
he had found no fault with certainty or placidity. He had 
never wanted any other life but this: this quiet friendly life 
in the place where he had grown up. He still did not want 
any other. But once or twice lately an odd, alien thought 
had crossed his mind; irrelevant and unbidden. As nearly 
as it could be put into words it was: “This is all you are 
ever going to have.” And with the thought would come that  
moment’s constriction in his chest. Almost a panic reaction; like the heart-squeezing that remembering a dentist 
appointment would cause in his ten-year-old breast.

This annoyed and puzzled Robert; who considered 

himself a happy and fortunate person, and adult at that. 
Why should this foreign thought thrust itself on him and 

cause that dismayed tightening under his ribs? What had 
his life lacked that a man might be supposed to miss?

A wife?
But he could have married if he had wanted to. At least 

he supposed he could; there were a great many unattached 
females in the district, and they showed no signs of disliking him.

A devoted mother?
But what greater devotion could a mother have given 

him than Aunt Lin provided; dear doting Aunt Lin.

Riches?
What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And 

if that wasn’t riches he didn’t know what was.

An exciting life?
But he had never wanted excitement. No greater excite
ment, that is, than was provided by a day’s hunting or being 
all-square at the sixteenth.

Then what?
Why the “This is all you are ever going to have” 

thought?

Perhaps, he thought, sitting staring at the blue plate 

where the biscuits had been, it was just that Childhood’s 
attitude of something-wonderful-tomorrow persisted subconsciously in a man as long as it was capable of realisation, and it was only after forty, when it became unlikely of 
fulfilment, that it obtruded itself into conscious thought; a 
lost piece of childhood crying for attention.

Certainly he, Robert Blair, hoped very heartily that his 

life would go on being what it was until he died. He had 
known since his schooldays that he would go into the firm 

and one day succeed his father; and he had looked with 
good-natured pity on boys who had no niche in life readymade for them; who had no Milford, full of friends and 
memories, waiting for them; no part in English continuity 
as was provided by Blair, Hayward, and Bennet.

There was no Hayward in the firm nowadays; there had 

not been one since 1843; but a young sprig of the Bennets 
was occupying the back room at this moment. Occupying 
was the operative word, since it was very unlikely that he 
was doing any work; his chief interest in life being to write 
poems of an originality so pristine that only Nevil himself 
could understand them. Robert deplored the poems but 
condoned the idleness, since he could not forget that when 
he had occupied that same room he had spent his time 
practising mashie shots into the leather arm-chair.

The sunlight slipped off the edge of the tray and Robert 

decided it was time to go. If he went now he could walk 
home down the High Street before the sunlight was off 
the east-side pavement; and walking down Milford High 
Street was still one of the things that gave him conscious 
pleasure. Not that Milford was a show-place. It could be 
duplicated a hundred times anywhere south of Trent. But 
in its unselfconscious fashion it typified the goodness of life 
in England for the last three hundred years. From the old 
dwelling-house flush with the pavement that housed Blair, 
Hayward, and Bennet and had been built in the last years 
of Charles the Second’s reign, the High Street flowed south 
in a gentle slope—Georgian brick, Elizabethan timber-andplaster, Victorian stone, Regency stucco—to the Edwardian 
villas behind their elm trees at the other end. Here and 

there, among the rose and white and brown, appeared a 
front of black glass, brazening it out like an overdressed 
parvenu at a party; but the good manners of the other 
buildings discounted them. Even the multiple businesses 
had dealt leniently with Milford. True, the scarlet and gold 
of an American bazaar flaunted its bright promise down at 
the south end, and daily offended Miss Truelove who ran 
the Elizabethan relic opposite as a tea-shop with the aid 
of her sister’s baking and Ann Boleyn’s reputation. But the 
Westminster Bank, with a humility rare since the days of 
usury, had adapted the Weavers Hall to their needs without so much as a hint of marble; and Soles, the wholesale 
chemists, had taken the old Wisdom residence and kept its 
tall surprised-looking front intact.

It was a fine, gay, busy little street, punctuated with pol
larded lime trees growing out of the pavement; and Robert 
Blair loved it.

He had gathered his feet under him preparatory to 

getting up, when his telephone rang. In other places in the 
world, one understands, telephones are made to ring in 
outer offices, where a minion answers the thing and asks 
your business and says that if you will be good enough to 
wait just a moment she will “put you thrrrough” and you 
are then connected with the person you want to speak 
to. But not in Milford. Nothing like that would be tolerated in Milford. In Milford if you call John Smith on the 
telephone you expect John Smith to answer in person. 
So when the telephone rang on that spring evening in 
Blair, Hayward, and Bennet’s it rang on Robert’s brassand-mahogany desk.

Always, afterwards, Robert was to wonder what would 

have happened if that telephone call had been one minute 
later. In one minute, sixty worthless seconds, he would 
have taken his coat from the peg in the hall, popped his 
head into the opposite room to tell Mr. Heseltine that he 
was departing for the day stepped out into the pale sunlight and been away down the street. Mr. Heseltine would 
have answered his telephone when it rang and told the 
woman that he had gone. And she would have hung up and 
tried someone else. And all that followed would have had 
only academic interest for him.

But the telephone rang in time; and Robert put out his 

hand and picked up the receiver.

“Is that Mr. Blair?” a woman’s voice asked; a contralto 

voice that would normally be a confident one, he felt, but 
now sounded breathless or hurried. “Oh, I am so glad to 
have caught you. I was afraid you would have gone for 
the day. Mr. Blair, you don’t know me. My name is Sharpe, 
Marion Sharpe. I live with my mother at The Franchise. The 
house out on the Larborough road, you know.”

“Yes, I know it,” Blair said. He knew Marion Sharpe 

by sight, as he knew everyone in Milford and the district. A tall, lean, dark woman of forty or so; much given 
to bright silk kerchiefs which accentuated her gipsy 
swarthiness. She drove a battered old car, from which 
she shopped in the mornings while her white-haired old 
mother sat in the back, upright and delicate and incongruous and somehow silently protesting. In profile old 
Mrs. Sharpe looked like Whistler’s mother; when she 
turned full-face and you got the impact of her bright, 

pale, cold, seagull’s eye, she looked like a sibyl. An uncomfortable old person.

“You don’t know me,” the voice went on, “but I have 

seen you in Milford, and you look a kind person, and I 
need a lawyer. I mean, I need one now, this minute. The 
only lawyer we ever have business with is in London—a  
London firm, I mean—and they are not actually ours. We 
just inherited them with a legacy. But now I am in trouble and I need legal backing, and I remembered you and 
thought that you would—”

“If it is your car—” Robert began. “In trouble” in Milford  

meant one of two things; an affiliation order, or an offence 
against the traffic laws. Since the case involved Marion 
Sharpe, it would be the latter; but it made no difference 
because in neither case was Blair, Hayward, and Bennet 
likely to be interested. He would pass her on to Carley, the 
bright lad at the other end of the street, who revelled in 
court cases and was popularly credited with the capacity 
to bail the Devil out of hell. (“Bail him out!” someone said, 
one night at the Rose and Crown. “He’d do more than that. 
He’d get all our signatures to a guinea testimonial to the 
Old Sinner.”)

“If it is your car—”
“Car?” she said, vaguely; as if in her present world it 

was difficult to remember what a car was. “Oh, I see. No. 
Oh, no, it isn’t anything like that. It is something much more 
serious. It’s Scotland Yard.”

“Scotland Yard!”
To that douce country lawyer and gentleman, Robert 

Blair, Scotland Yard was as exotic as Xanadu, Hollywood,