The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Author:Josephine Tey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Chapter 13

I wonder if you would mind calling for the fish, dear,” Aunt Lin said on the telephone on Tuesday afternoon. “Nevil is coming to dinner, and so we are going to have an extra course of what we were going to have for breakfast. I really don’t see why we should have anything extra just for Nevil, but Christina says that it will keep him from making what she calls ‘inroads’ on the tart that is going to do again on her night-out tomorrow. So if you wouldn’t mind, dear.”

He was not looking forward greatly to an extra hour or two of Nevil’s society, but he was feeling so pleased with himself that he was in a better humour to support it than usual. He had arranged with a Larborough firm for the replacement of the Franchise windows; he had miraculously unearthed a key that fitted the Franchise gate—and there would be two duplicates in existence by tomorrow; and he had personally taken out the groceries—together with an offering of the best flowers that Milford could supply. His welcome at The Franchise had been such that he had almost ceased to regret the lack of light exchanges on Nevil lines. There were, after all, other things than getting to Christian-name terms in the first half-hour.

In the lunch hour he had rung up Kevin Macdermott, and arranged with his secretary that when Kevin was free in the evening he would call him at 10 High Street. Things were getting out of hand, and he wanted Kevin’s advice.

He had refused three invitations to golf, his excuse to his astounded cronies being that he had “no time to chase a piece of gutta-percha round a golf course.”

He had gone to see an important client who had been trying to interview him since the previous Friday and who had been provoked into asking him on the telephone if “he still worked for Blair, Hayward, and Bennet.”

He had got through his arrears of work with a mutely reproachful Mr. Heseltine; who, although he had allied himself on the Sharpe side, still obviously felt that the Franchise affair was not one for a firm like theirs to be mixed up in.

And he had been given tea by Miss Tuff out of the blue-patterned china on the lacquer tray covered by the fair white cloth and accompanied by two digestive biscuits on a plate.

It was lying on his desk now, the tea-tray; just as it had been a fortnight ago when the telephone had rung and he had lifted the receiver to hear Marion Sharpe’s voice for the first time. Two short weeks ago. He had sat looking at it in its patch of sunlight, feeling uneasy about his comfortable life and conscious of time slipping past him. But today, the digestive biscuits held no reproach for him because he had stepped outside the routine they typified. He was on calling terms with Scotland Yard; he was agent for a pair of scandalous women; he had become an amateur sleuth; and he had been witness to mob violence.

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