Tomorrow's ghost Read online

  Frances checked herself just in time. It was as if the ground had trembled beneath her, warning her of a hidden pit in front of her. Another step—another word, another sentence or two—and she would be over the edge: she would be telling him how clever she was, she would be patronising him, and that would close his mouth just when she needed him to tell her not what he thought about Major Butler, but why he thought it.

  She put her empty glass carefully down on the hearth. It had been David Audley—again, and always, David—who had said in his interrogation lectures that truth is the ultimate weapon. So it was time to pretend to drop her guard again. And this time it had to work.

  ‘Of course, my name isn’t really “Fisher”, Mr Hedges—as I’m sure you will have guessed.’

  His face blanked over with surprise.

  ‘But the “Mrs” is genuine. My husband was killed in Ulster a few years back.’

  It was more than a few now, strictly speaking. How time accelerated with its own passage! In a year or two Robbie would be ancient history. But in the meantime he surely wouldn’t mind helping her, anyway.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to be. It was an accident, actually—not the IRA. He was on foot patrol one day, and he slipped on the edge of a pavement just as an armoured personnel carrier was passing. It was a road accident, I always think of it as that, now.’ Was that how Major—Colonel—Butler remembered his Madeleine Francoise? If it had been Patrick Parker cruising by … she might just as easily have been knocked down by his car on that country road as by the unknowable madness that had driven him.

  ‘We had bought a cottage on the edge of a village, about an hour’s run from here. I still live there.’

  His mother had thought that was a mistake, and that a flat in London, near her work, would be far more sensible, far less lonely. But she would have been just as lonely in London; or even more lonely, since the loneliness of the cottage had been—and still was—something natural and inevitable which she could accept, and with which she could come to terms. And which, if she faced the truth (that ultimate weapon), was what she wanted. (Mother-in-law only wanted to get her married off again as soon as decently possible, anyway; gaining an unwanted daughter-in-law had been bad enough, but then losing a son and gaining only the responsibility of a young widow was unbearable—the more so when the widow had made it abundantly plain that once was enough.) Mustn’t think of all that again though, sod it! ‘—but I’m away a lot of the time, so the local police keep an eye on the place for me.’

  He nodded to that. Keeping an eye on places was also something he understood; and since there was more that he had to understand that was encouraging.

  ‘There’s a policeman who comes to see me regularly. He’s an old chap, and he’s pretty close to retirement—he’s very nice and kind, and he knows everything that goes on in the village … Like, an old-fashioned bobby.’

  Was that the right word?

  ‘A dying breed,’ said ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges.

  It was the right word.

  ‘Yes … well, it’s got so he’s keeping an eye on me as well as the cottage. We drink cocoa together, because he doesn’t like coffee. And he tells me I should get married again and have a houseful of babies.’

  Constable Ellis and Mother-in-law were strange allies, when she thought about them.

  ‘So you should,’ said William Ewart Hedges.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’ A maidenly blush would have been useful, but that wasn’t within her histrionic range. ‘Anyway, he came to see me regularly during the power workers’ strike last year, every time it was our turn for a black-out—he’d drop in of an evening to see how I was coping … To chat me up, or to cheer me up.’

  He seemed for an instant to be on the edge of saying something, but then to have thought better of it, closing his mouth on the unspoken words. Perhaps he had felt the ground tremble under him too, thought Frances; perhaps he had been about to say You seem to be coping well enough, Mrs Not-Fisher. Well enough with power cuts ‘and widowhood both—perhaps too well for your own good, Mrs not-Fisher.

  So the Fitzgibbon facade was on the top line today.

  ‘But one night he was the one who needed cheering up.’

  (More and more it had been Mrs Fitz who had been cheering up Mr Ellis, and not vice-versa; because Mr Ellis could remember an older world in which he lived, and which he liked very much better; whereas Mrs Fitz didn’t know any better, so that for her the worse was only a small decline from the bad, and the better was just a legend.)

  ‘Yes?’ Hedges was looking at her with intense curiosity.

  ‘Sorry.’ Frances concentrated her mind again. There really was something wrong with her today, the way her thoughts were wandering into irrelevances. It must be post-Clinton (and post-Marilyn) shock, if not post-bomb malaise.

  ‘There was a break-in at the church … Well, not really a break-in, because it wasn’t locked properly. The thieves got away with some rather beautiful seventeenth-century silver.’

  ‘Yes…’ Hedges nodded reminiscently. ‘We’ve had the same thing hereabouts. It’s like taking chocolate from a baby.’

  Frances nodded back. ‘They never caught the thieves—the local police didn’t.’

  ‘Never caught ours either. Long gone, they were. It was four days before we even knew they’d lifted the stuff, and—‘ He stopped abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. Go on, Mrs … Fisher.

  Not coppin ‘em was putting him down, your old chap, was it?’

  ‘No, Mr Hedges, it wasn’t that at all. Quite the opposite, almost.’ She paused deliberately.

  ‘The opposite?’

  She had him now. ‘Yes. The local CID thought it was one of his local tearaways—a boy they’d had their eye on already. But they couldn’t prove it, you see.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ And he did see too—she could see the seeing of it in his eye. ‘But he didn’t go along with them, eh?’

  ‘It was something he said to me, Mr Hedges. They’d been leaning on the boy—‘

  ‘But if they can’t prove he did it, Mr Ellis … They can’t arrest him if they can’t prove it, can they?’

  ‘Nor they can, Mrs Fitz. But ‘tisn’t the point, that isn’t. Point is, I can’t prove he didn’t, neither.’

  ‘—and he said that it was just as much a policeman’s job to prove innocence as to prove guilt, and that sometimes the innocence was more important than the guilt—the more difficult it was, the more important it was likely to be.’

  ‘It’s like the Parson says, Mrs Fitz—“Number Nine: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, and that’s easy to know when you’re doing it. But what price “Thou shall bear true witness for thy neighbour”? That’s not so easy, I can tell you. Because half the time you don’t know what the true witness is—an’ the other half, you can’t prove it.’

  (She remembered, as she spoke, that it had struck her as incongruous—not funny, certainly not funny; but incongruous—that her fatherly Constable Ellis should see young Mickey Murphy as his neighbour; Mickey Murphy who might not have lifted the church silver, but who looked at her as though given half a chance he would lift her skirt; but then that was before she herself had declared Colonel Jack Butler to be her neighbour, which was equally incongruous.)

  * * *

  ‘I see.’ Hedges sat back in silence for a moment. ‘You think … you believe … that for some reason I never really rated the Major as a suspect. Is that it?’

  ‘No, Mr Hedges—I don’t mean that.’ She smiled at him. ‘I think you came round to it quite quickly. But that wasn’t quite what I meant, not really.’

  ‘Came round to it?’ He seized on the phrase as though determined not to let its meaning escape.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She nodded. ‘I agree entirely with your assessment: of all the men I’ve ever met, the … Major is—he seems to me—the least likely to commit a murder. But I have no new evidence to prove it, either.’
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br />   He frowned at her.

  ‘Proving the negative case is one of the most difficult Intelligence exercises—it always has been,’ said Frances.

  This time he nodded his acceptance. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So I know why I don’t think he did it, Mr Hedges. But I can’t put what I think—what my instinct tells me—in a negative report. If I write “Major Butler seems to me to be of all men the least likely to murder his wife” they’ll just laugh at me. They want facts, Mr Hedges—not fancies.’

  The corners of his mouth drooped. ‘But I can’t give you any facts, Mrs Fisher.’

  ‘No. But I want to be sure. So you can tell me what you never put in any report—which was what made you lay off the Major and concentrate on Patrick Parker before you’d ever heard of him.

  That’s what you can give me.’

  He stared at her for a moment, then through her, and then at her again. ‘All right…’

  Then he looked at his watch, and then he put his glass back on the bar counter. ‘Isobel!’

  Frances waited.

  ‘It was the little girls—him and the little girls, that night. The way he was.’

  Isobel appeared, took the glass, and looked expectantly at Frances. ‘Madam?’

  ‘No thank you.’ Frances hated to look away from him, even for a second.

  ‘I was there when he came back. He didn’t know anything—he saw the police vehicles, of course, so he’d have known something was up, but he couldn’t have known what, exactly…’

  Unless he did know, exactly, thought Frances heretically.

  ‘At that stage I’d been told to count him out. Otherwise I’d maybe have been suspicious—with a wife missing, and you don’t like the look of it, it’s the husband you look at first…’ He tightened his lips ‘… I still looked at him pretty sharp, but more out of curiosity than suspicion. Because by that time I knew he was Military Intelligence, and I wasn’t sure that his wife going missing might not have something to do with that … even though your people said that it didn’t, and it was a CID job, not a Special Branch one.

  ‘We had our Special Branch man there, of course. But on a “Need to Know” basis—he didn’t do the talking, I did…

  ‘So I gave it to the Major straight, all the details. And why we were worried—we’d already had the dogs out, in the late afternoon, while there was a bit of daylight, and they hadn’t found anything.’ Isobel appeared at his shoulder. ‘Here you are, Billy.’

  ‘Billy, didn’t seem right.

  ‘How much do I owe you, Isobel?’

  ‘Get away!’ She disappeared before he could argue. He took a long pull of the beer, produced the huge handkerchief again, and went through the mouth-wiping ritual.

  ‘He didn’t say anything, he just listened. And the questions I asked him, all I got was “yes” or “no”, nothing more. He didn’t say a thing until I’d finished, and then he simply said “Where are my girls?”

  ‘And I told him we had a policewoman with them… You see, Mrs Fisher, there wasn’t anyone locally they knew, having moved in not long before. And the cleaning woman had her own family to look after—and there weren’t any relatives, not on either side, that we could trace. So my WPC had given the kiddies their tea, and had looked after them—she’d even helped the eldest one with her bit of homework from school -‘

  Diana. Now at university, and beautiful like her mother. But then ten or eleven years, and with her bit of homework to do.

  ‘—and then put them to bed -‘

  That ‘bit of homework’ at ten years of age was a reminder that they’d all been privately educated from the start, Diana and Sally and Jane, the three peas in the pod.

  ‘—but she couldn’t get the little one, that’d had the flu, to go to sleep—‘

  * * *

  Jane. Aged fifteen now, but only six then … Jane, then at St. Bede’s junior preparatory house and now at famous and exclusive St. Bede’s School five miles down the road, with her sister Sally (eight then; now seventeen and coming up to her A-levels).

  Mathematics. Even as day-girls they’d leave no change from £1,000 a year each at St.

  Bede’s, plus taxi fares if there weren’t any buses, which there probably weren’t. Plus university keep for Diana. Plus wages for a full-time housekeeper … All that drove home, as nothing else could, the curious fact from the record that Major (then Captain) Butler had been the sole beneficiary of the late General Sir Henry Chesney, sometime owner of Chesney and Rawle Printing & Publishing; and that whatever problems Colonel Butler had (and Major Butler had had, and Captain Butler might have had), they hadn’t been—and weren’t—money problems.

  Sole beneficiary of General Sir Henry Chesney (no relative) equals private means.

  Private means equals girls’ public school education multiplied by twelve years multiplied by three (plus housekeeper multiplied by nine years).

  ‘No relative’ made all that worthy of closer scrutiny. And the more so because although the young (and newly-rich) Captain Butler had sold up Chesney and Rawle’s for blue chips—ICI and Marks and Spencer’s, but not Rolls-Royce (someone had advised young Captain Butler well)—and had shaken the dust of Blackburn (or the dirt and the grime), which Chesney and Rawle had turned to gold, from his feet… nevertheless he had been in Blackburn that November morning, when his wife had disappeared, and not in Harrogate, across the Pennines, where he should have been.

  It might be nothing, it might be something. And it might be everything.

  * * *

  ‘Mrs Fisher?’

  ‘She couldn’t get Jane to go to sleep. I’m listening, Mr Hedges.’ Frances amended her expression to one of close attention.

  ‘Jane?’ He frowned.

  ‘The littlest one.’ She must be more careful.

  ‘Jane.’

  ‘Yes.’ He grudged her the knowledge of the smallest Butler’s name. ‘It was Jane—that’s right.’

  Frances kicked herself. He’d been ready to tell her what he’d never told anyone else, and now she was on the cliff-edge of losing him because of her own stupid inattention.

  ‘Yes?’ She willed him back from the edge.

  Where are my girls?

  ‘He said “I must go and see them”. And I said “Is there anything you can tell us, that may be of assistance?” But he didn’t seem to hear—he just went to the door, and then he turned back and said “Do they know that she’s missing? What do they know?” like it was something he’d just thought of.

  ‘And I said we couldn’t very well keep it from them, but we’d said she’d had to go away. So he looked at me for a moment, and then he went out. And I heard him pause at the bottom of the stairs, as though he was thinking—or as though he was looking at himself in the mirror there, for a moment. And then he went up.’

  Not looking at himself, that didn’t ring true, thought Frances. Of all men. Colonel Butler would be the least likely to need to straighten his regimental tie or smooth his regimental hair, which was too short to need smoothing, before going up to his girls.

  ‘Looking at himself?’

  Hedges ignored the question. ‘A little while after that I heard her laughing.’

  Frances blinked. ‘Laughing?’

  ‘I went to the foot of the stairs and called the WPC down. I asked her what they were doing up there.

  ‘She said he’d looked into the elder girls’ bedroom, just for a second or two, then he’d gone into the little one’s. “He’s reading to her”, she said. “He’s got this book, her favourite book. I was reading it to her—it’s called Felicity Face-maker. I think he’s making faces at her.”’

  Hedges stared at her, as though he expected her to make a face at him. ‘Do you know why I’m telling you this?’

  There was no answer to that.

  ‘Perhaps you think I’ve got a remarkable memory—nine years ago?’

  There was no answer to that either. ‘No’ would be a lie, and ‘yes’ would be a mistake.<
br />
  ‘I haven’t. Not more than the next man, anyway.’

  That wasn’t a question, it was a challenge.

  ‘There are some things no one forgets,’ said Frances.

  Hedges nodded. ‘So … when I told him how she’d gone missing—his wife—he knew what I was telling him. He knew what I thought, it was in his face. I suppose it must have been in mine, come to that.

  ‘Except there wasn’t anything in his face. Not a thing.

  ‘We had a man once—a constable on point duty who went to pull a woman out of a car that’d run into the back of a petrol tanker. It went up just as he was trying to get the door open.

  ‘He didn’t get her out. A nice-looking boy he was, too—‘ he looked away from her for a moment, into the heart of the fire which was burning up nicely in the grate ‘—and they did remarkably well with him, the surgeons in the hospital. What they couldn’t give him back was the muscles, in his face. He had his face back, more or less, but not any expressions to go with it.

  ‘And that was the way it was with the Major—Major Butler. No expressions for me—and then he went up and made his little ‘un laugh … and he read to the other two as well … took about half an hour, thirty-five minutes—and then back to me. Like he was in shock, and the shock had burnt out the muscles … Or as if he was holding himself steady, and if he didn’t he’d burst into tears. And he wasn’t going to do that in front of a stranger, not ever.

  ‘I had him for about an hour, too. He went through her clothes, just to make sure what she’d been wearing. Or that she hadn’t taken anything else to wear.’

  At that stage he still hadn’t been quite convinced: it might have been foul play or it might have been deep design.

  ‘And a couple of days later, after they’d told us we could check on his movements locally, I went through the house with him from top to bottom—because there’ve been cases we’ve looked everywhere, and then the missing person’s been found dead up in the loft, and been there all the time…

  ‘Her private affairs as well—the money and the cheque-book and suchlike; and the passport too—I went through all that with him as well. That’s where something turns up, if they’ve gone off of their own free will, because they’ve got to live somehow … and that way we’ve traced them sometimes, the wives, but they don’t want the husbands to know where they are. And we don’t tell on them either, except that they’re alive. It’s not our job, that.’