Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair

My daughter pursues a piece of gutta-percha round the golf course—”

“It is not gutta-percha any more, Mother,” her daughter put in.

“But at my age Milford does not provide even that distraction. I am reduced to pouring weedkiller on weeds – a legitimate form of sadism on a par with drowning fleas. Do you drown your fleas, Mr. Blair?”

“No, I squash them. But I have a sister who used to pursue them with a cake of soap.”

“Soap?” said Mrs. Sharpe, with genuine interest.

“I understand that she hit them with the soft side and they stuck to it.

”

“How very interesting. A technique I have not met before. I must try that next time.”

With his other ear he heard that Marion was being nice to the snubbed Inspector. “You play a very good game, Inspector,” she was saying.

He was conscious of the feeling you get near the end of a dream, when waking is just round the corner, that none of the inconsequence really matters because presently you’ll be back in the real world.

This was misleading because the real world came through the door with the return of Inspector Grant. Grant came in first, so that he was in a position to see the expressions on all the faces concerned, and held the door open for a police matron and a girl.

Marion Sharpe stood up slowly, as if the better to face anything that might be coming to her, but her mother remained seated on the sofa as one giving an audience, her Victorian back as flat as it had been as a young girl, her hands lying composedly in her lap.

Even her wild hair could not detract from the impression that she was mistress of the situation.

The girl was wearing her school coat, and childish low-heeled clumpish black school shoes; and consequently looked younger than Blair had anticipated. She was not very tall, and certainly not pretty. But she had – what was the word? – appeal. Her eyes, a darkish blue, were set wide apart in a face of the type popularly referred to as heart-shaped. Her hair was mouse-coloured, but grew off her forehead in a good line.

Below each cheek-bone a slight hollow, a miracle of delicate modelling, gave the face charm and pathos. Her lower lip was full, but the mouth was too small. So were her ears. Too small and too close to her head.

An ordinary sort of girl, after all. Not the sort you would notice in a crowd. Not at all the type to be the heroine of a sensation. Robert wondered what she would look like in other clothes.