Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair

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.

He sat down on one of the chintz-covered chairs in the lounge and looked at the dog-eared journals lying on the adjacent coffee table. The only current number was the Watchman, the weekly review, and he picked it up reluctantly, thinking yet once more how the dry feel of the paper offended his finger tips and its serrated edges set his own teeth on edge.