Tomorrow's ghost Read online

  ‘Thank you, Mr Dickson.’ Frances swallowed a quick lungful of air. ‘You’d better go and help Mr—Mr—‘

  ‘Collins,’ supplied Ballard, stepping towards the cloakroom.

  * * *

  Francis had never in her life been inside a gentleman’s cloakroom.

  Once, by accident and in semi-darkness, she had taken the first few steps down towards a men’s lavatory in London, at which point the atrocious smell had warned her of the error she was making.

  She had never expected to have the door of a gentleman’s cloakroom held open for her.

  * * *

  There was a strong smell in the new English Faculty Library gentleman’s cloakroom—a smell so cloying that it rasped on Frances’s dry throat.

  But its dominant ingredient was lavender, not ammonia.

  And there was also a large, ruddy-faced man clutching a walkie-talkie to his cheek and sweating profusely.

  As well he might sweat, decided Frances with a sudden sense of detachment which surprised her as her eyes were drawn instantly to the briefcase at his feet. It was enough to make anyone sweat.

  ‘Mrs Fitzgibbon is here now, sir,’ said the sweating man in an unnaturally steady voice.

  He had never set eyes on her before, thought Frances, but it was an entirely reasonable deduction in the circumstances.

  The man offered her the little walkie-talkie.

  ‘Colonel Butler for you, Mrs Fitzgibbon,’ he said in the same matter-of-fact tone.

  It was curious how fear took different people in different ways, thought Frances analytically.

  ‘Fitzgibbon here, sir—‘

  Her knees were trembling, and the Special Branch man was sweating, but they both had their voices under control. It was only their bodies which reacted to the imminent threat of dissolution.

  ‘Hullo there, Mrs Fitzgibbon. Over.’ Colonel Butler sounded positively casual, almost sociable.

  Frances frowned at the row of innocent briefcases, each neatly labelled, on the shelf directly in front of her. This wasn’t the harsh-voiced Colonel Butler she had last met, who had no time for women and even less for pleasantries, beyond the bare necessities of good manners. From another man. Hullo there! would have meant nothing. From Colonel Butler it was practically an improper suggestion.

  What did he want her to say in reply? ‘Meet me tonight behind the ruins of the library?’

  Suddenly she knew exactly why he’d said Hullo, there: he was scared witless—and with good reason—that at any moment she was going to let the side down by slumping to the floor of the gentleman’s lavatory in a dead faint.

  ‘Sir—‘ She looked from the briefcases to the sweating man, and then to Sergeant Ballard. The Sergeant regarded her with fatherly concern, and he wasn’t sweating. ‘Sir, I have Sergeant Ballard and one of his men with me. And one highly suspect briefcase. I suggest that there are too many men in the gents’ at the moment. Over.’

  Her knees were still trembling, and what she’d just said did not at all reflect how she felt—the sense of it, if not the actual words, had a curiously Marilynish cheeky ring about it, not like Frances at all. (Marilyn would have made a joke of going into the gents’; she wished Marilyn was here now, and not Frances!’)

  ‘Hah! Hmm…’ After a brief silence the voice crackled in her ear. ‘Ballard’s man came off the back door. Send him back there. Over.’

  Frances nodded the reprieve at the sweating man.

  ‘I’ve done that. Over.’

  ‘Good. Now give me Ballard for a moment. Over.’

  Frances handed the radio to the Sergeant.

  ‘Sir?’ Ballard barked. ‘Over!’

  Frances didn’t want to listen. The silent majority of her wanted to be treated like a weak and feeble woman, and sent to a place of safety to sniff sal volatile. But there was a small vociferous Liberated minority which was outraged at the prospect of being passed over—so much so that it made her stare quite deliberately again at the briefcase, which was something she’d been trying very hard not to do.

  It sat there, black and bulging and malevolent, four feet away from her on the brown quarry-tile floor. It seemed to get blacker and to bulge more as she watched it. The silent majority insisted on exercising its democratic rights, and for a fraction of a second the quarry tiles swam alarmingly.

  ‘Madam!’ Ballard handed her the radio. ‘I have my instructions. The Colonel is transmitting to you now.’

  He was going. She was about to be left alone with the briefcase. She wished Sergeant Ballard hadn’t looked at her so sympathetically.

  ‘Fitzgibbon?’ Pause. ‘Over.’

  Now she really was alone with the sodding thing.

  ‘Sir.’ Pause. ‘Over.’

  Ridiculous jargon. But he had said Fitzgibbon as he might have done to his poor bloody second-lieutenants in battle, and somehow that was enormously gratifying to the idiotic Liberated minority.

  ‘Listen to me, Fitzgibbon. I’ve got people here with me who press buttons, and they tell me that that briefcase of yours is the decoy they’ve been waiting for—don’t worry about this transmission being picked up, they’ve got a black box that scrambles it … that’s one thing they can do, by God!’

  And they’d be listening to him too, and he didn’t give a damn. Against the run of play her heart warmed to him.

  ‘They say it’s a brick, or a book, or a couple of telephone directories, to make us look the wrong way. And I should tell you that—‘

  They sounded eminently sensible, thought Frances.

  ‘—and we should ignore it, and wait for the right one.’

  Frances looked at the briefcase again, and her knees advised her that the button-pushers were not themselves in the gentleman’s lavatory.

  ‘But I say it’s the real thing—d’you hear, Fitzgibbon? Over.’

  There wasn’t a clever answer to that. ‘Yes, sir. Over.’

  ‘Good.’

  Not good. Bad.

  ‘They also say the moment we start clearing people from outside the Library, we start playing O’Leary’s game. And I agree with them there. But by the grace of God, because that fool of a porter moved it, we know there isn’t a trembler in it. So pick it up, Fitzgibbon.” Pause. ‘Over.’

  She knew she had to do it at once, or she would never do it. That was what he intended, too.

  Two steps.

  She picked it up.

  It was heavy.

  ‘I’ve picked it up—sir. Over.’

  ‘Good. Now put it down again—gently.’ Pause. ‘Over.’

  Ming vases. Dresden china. Nitro-glycerine.

  ‘Sir.’ Croak. ‘Over.’

  ‘That’s very good, Fitzgibbon. Now you know you can pick it up. Because we can’t move a bomb-handling team in there—if I’m right he’ll be watching that place like a hawk, and he can blow it any time he likes. But we can do what he won’t be expecting: in a few minutes from now, when I’m good and ready, you’re going to carry that briefcase out of there, Fitzgibbon.’

  Frances closed her eyes.

  ‘We can’t move the people. I can only delay the Chancellor’s party so long—are you listening, Fitzgibbon? Over!’

  The sodding briefcase was imprinted on her retina. She opened her eyes and looked at all the other cases.

  ‘Spare me the details.’ Jargon. ‘Over.’

  ‘I want you to understand what you’re doing.

  You’ve got the best chance of carrying it out. You’re new here , they haven’t had time to spot you—you’ve never been on an Irish job. You’re wearing an academic gown, and you have a perfect right to carry a briefcase. Take some of the papers out of one of the other cases—and some books, and carry them too. Look like a student.’

  It was beginning to make some sort of sense, she just wished someone else was going to do it. But, undeniably. Sergeant Ballard did not look like a student.

  ‘Professor Crowe will be waiting for you at the door, Ballard’s getting him. By th
en he will know what’s happening. Let him see you off the premises. Don’t hurry—gawp around like the rest of them out there … then walk to your right, and bear right as you reach the corner of the building—Crowe will direct you. There’s a wide open space, with a few trees and shrubs in it, and then there’s a big pond in the hollow—it’s a duck-pond, you’ll hear the ducks quacking … Put it down on the edge of the pond and leave it—that’s all you have to do.’

  All?

  ‘Have you got that? Just talk to Professor Crowe—as though you were one of his students. Act naturally.’

  Act naturally—don’t scream and run. Just talk to Professor Crowe about Ronald and the eucatastrophic endings of fairy stories.

  ‘Colonel Crowe will be waiting for you—Professor Crowe. Over.’

  Colonel Crowe? Well, there was a once-upon-a-time, thought Frances.

  ‘I repeat. Professor Crowe will be waiting for you. Have you got that, Mrs Fitzgibbon? Over.’

  There was a suggestion of steel in that last Have you got that^ which in turn suggested to Frances that the soldier inside Colonel Butler would not have thought twice about giving James Cable or Paul Mitchell the same orders, but was still only half convinced that Mrs Fitzgibbon could be trusted with a bag of laundry, never mind a briefcase. But that he was giving her the benefit of the doubt because he had no other choice.

  ‘Loud and clear, Colonel Butler. Over.’ Grunt. ‘Leave the button on receive. Out.’

  * * *

  Silence.

  But they must surely be running out of time now, with the original six minutes long gone. And the longer they waited, the more likely it was that O’Leary would smell a rat.

  She looked down at the briefcase.

  How heavy was heavy?

  Five pounds? Ten pounds? Twenty pounds?

  Not that it would matter to her because, at the range of one yard, half a pound would be sufficient to spread her all over the cloakroom.

  But it would be more than that: it would be calculated to blow the brick wall against which it had been placed into ten thousand lethal fragments in the entrance foyer on the other side of it. By which time, of course, she would already have been dissolved into unidentifiable fragments herself.

  The silence began to ring in her ears. There were small sounds in the distance beyond the ringing, but she couldn’t distinguish them. It almost seemed to her that the very sight of the briefcase had a muffling effect on her hearing; that somehow, just as noise spread out from an exploding bomb, so silence was spread by a bomb before it exploded.

  And yet when it did explode she wouldn’t hear it: she would be dead before the sound reached her brain. There would be no brain to receive the message. No brain, no ears, no Frances.

  She looked at her wristwatch, and was astonished at the short space of time which had elapsed since she had last looked at it, outside the Common Room upstairs.

  Julian would still be arguing the toss with the short swarthy don, Tom.

  Professor Crowe ought to be downstairs by now.

  Mrs Simmonds would be typing Mr Henderson’s afternoon letters—and probably Mr Cavendish’s letters too, in gratitude for her deliverance from the unspeakable Marilyn.

  Gary would be dreaming of rescuing Marilyn from the Comanches.

  O’Leary would be—

  Mustn’t think of O’Leary.

  * * *

  On the wall in front of her there were three shelves.

  On the shelves there were eighteen briefcases, an untidy little pile of type-written papers, a copy of the Guardian, and a solitary book. The English Novel: A Critical Study.

  Eighteen briefcases plus one—

  And, for a bet, those papers, that Guardian and that fat volume were the original contents of Dr Penrose’s case, which had made room for whatever was in there now—

  Everything brought her back to that sodding briefcase—

  Why didn’t Colonel Butler give the word? What was delaying him?

  She must think of something else. Anything else.

  The short wall on her left was made up mostly of frosted glass through which she could see only vague shapes and colours—that was bad, all that glass—

  The wall on her right was even more alarming: between two vending machines there was a full-length mirror in which a young woman wearing an MA gown and her best Jaeger suit was staring transfixed at her, white-faced and frightened out of her wits—

  She turned away hastily from the image before it had time to scream at her.

  Behind her was a double line of coat-hooks and a scatter of coats, ending in an open doorway through which she could see a gleaming white tile wall. That was obviously the source of the lavendery smell which had hit her as she entered the cloakroom: if she had ever had any curiosity about the furniture of a men’s lavatory she now had the chance of satisfying it in perfect safety.

  Except that she didn’t have any curiosity left about anything, least of all about men’s lavatories, even when they smelt of lavender—

  Perfect safety?

  The perfect inaccuracy of the words struck her: they were so perfectly and utterly ridiculous that she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at them.

  It would be more appropriate to laugh. After all, not even the three old ladies in the rugby club song could rival her predicament—they hadn’t been trapped in a gentleman’s lavatory—

  Only she was desperately afraid that once she had started to laugh she would never be able to stop. ‘Fitzgibbon—are you receiving me? Over.’ Now she had missed her chance: there was no time now either to laugh or to cry, or to see the rest of the gents’.

  ‘Loud—‘ The word again came out as a husky croak ‘—Loud and clear. Over.’

  ‘We’re ready to go. Over.’

  A moment ago she had been begging him to give the word, but she felt differently now. Being left alone suddenly seemed preferable.

  ‘I repeat—we’re ready to go. Do you read me? Over.’

  Well, at least he sounded a bit more like his old irascible self.

  ‘I read you loud and clear—‘ In fact he was probably thinking Bloody women! under his breath. So this reply she had to get right, even though the cloakroom floor heaved under her feet. And to get it right she could not do better than to resurrect Marilyn again.

  ‘—I thought you’d never ask, that’s all. Over.’

  Pause. Evidently Colonel Butler wasn’t accustomed to cheek from flibbertygibbet young girls.

  ‘Right…’ The distortion cheated her of any absolute certainty that Marilyn had scored a point. ‘Off you go then. And good luck. Over and out.’

  Just like that: Off you go then, and good luck!

  But he was right all the same, thought Frances: there was no point in thinking about it—thinking would just make it more difficult. The only way to do it was not to think about it, simply to do it.

  * * *

  She settled the strap of her handbag comfortably in the crook of her left arm, put down the walkie-talkie on the shelf beside the type-written papers, scooped up the same papers and the Guardian and the critical study of the English Novel and tucked them under her left arm above the handbag strap, and picked up the briefcase.

  It was heavy—

  She tensed her arm against its weight as the muscles of her right breast pulled tight against it.

  It mustn’t look heavy—

  The white-faced young woman in the mirror walked towards her, and then turned outwards into the doorway without giving any sign of recognition.

  The entrance foyer was huge and empty, and the click of her high heels echoed off the polished floor.

  Detective-Sergeant Ballard and Professor Crowe were waiting for her just inside the glass doors.

  Crowe smiled at her.

  In fact, he positively beamed at her—

  ‘There you are, my dear! We’ve been wondering where you’d got to -‘

  So they hadn’t told him what she was carrying, thought Frances,
undecided as to whether that omission was kind or unfair. And yet he hadn’t raised his eyebrows as she had shouldered her way out of the gentleman’s cloakroom, so maybe—

  Ballard moved in front of her, blocking her path. And also blocking any view of their encounter which an observer might have from any distant vantage point across the campus outside.

  ‘If you would be so good as to have a brief word with Colonel Butler, madam, after…’

  Ballard searched comically for a suitable description of what was coming before the brief word ‘after…’

  ‘After wards’, said Crowe, still smiling. ‘And after that, my dear Frances—it is Frances, isn’t it?—come and have tea—or maybe something stronger, eh?—in my rooms in the old Dower House … If you have time, of course.’

  He did know?

  But if he did know, how could he smile at her like that?

  Ballard opened one of the glass doors for her.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ said Crowe reaching above her head to steady the door.

  Cold autumnal air enveloped her. There were lots of people round about, but a clear path stretched out ahead of her.

  Turn to the right.

  Crowe was still beside her, one hand on her elbow gently steering her in the right direction. Out of the corner of her eye, away to the left over the heads of the crowd standing on the slight slope in front of the new building, she caught another flash of the same colour she had seen earlier, of scarlet doctoral robes.

  ‘There they are now,’ murmured Crowe in her ear. ‘So they did go into the Student Union after all—if it had been the Minister of Education that would have been a place to steer clear of, even though our present young things are rather more … motivated—is that the word?—motivated … than some I have encountered. Hah!’

  The crowd was thinning around them. It wasn’t fair that she should carry him along with her a yard more than necessary.

  ‘I—I can find my own way now, I think,’ said Frances.

  ‘Of course you can!’ Crowe nodded, but continued to walk by her side. ‘But … I was wondering, now, whether you knew an acquaintance of mine—a Cambridge man—in your line of work. The name eludes me—now what was it?’