"I don't know. I don't like the idea of the house being left entirely empty."
"The policeman will be round as usual on his beat. Anyhow, no one has even tried to do anything since the night they smashed our windows. It is only for tonight. Tomorrow we shall be home again."
"I know. But I don't much like it. Couldn't Stanley stay one more night? Until the case is over."
"If they want to wreck our windows again," Mrs. Sharpe said, "I don't suppose Stanley's being here will deter them."
"No, I suppose not. I'll remind Hallam, anyhow, that the house is empty tonight," Robert said, and left it there.
Marion locked the door behind them, and they walked to the gate, where Robert's car was waiting. At the gate Marion paused to look back at the house. "It's an ugly old place," she said, "but it has one virtue. It looks the same all the year round. At midsummer the grass gets a little burnt and tired-looking, but otherwise it doesn't change. Most houses have a 'best' time; rhododendrons, or herbaceous borders, or Virginia creeper, or almond blossom, or something. But The Franchise is always the same. It has no frills. What are you laughing at, Mother?"
"I was thinking how bedizened the poor thing looks with those tubs of wallflower."
They stood there for a moment, laughing at the forbidding, dirty-white house with its incongruous decoration of frivolity; and laughing, shut the gate on it.
But Robert did not forget; and before having dinner with Kevin at The Feathers in Norton he called the police station at Milford and reminded them that the Sharpes' house would be empty for that one night.
"All right, Mr. Blair," the sergeant said, "I'll tell the man on the beat to open the gate and look round. Yes, we still have a key. That'll be all right."