Tomorrow's ghost

TOMORROW'S GHOST

Anthony Price

CHAPTER ONE

After only a week of exposure to her, Gary the Messenger Boy was ready to die for Marilyn the Temporary Secretary, Frances judged. So it was his good fortune that the scenario did not envisage his role as being self-sacrificial.

'Any urgent letters. Miss?' he inquired, leaning hopefully over her desk as far as he dared. He had invented several extra collections a day since her arrival, and this was the first of them. The secretaries had never had better service.

Thank you, Gary.' Frances smiled at him and threw out Marilyn's chest for his entertainment as she sealed the first of Mr Cavendish's morning letters into their envelopes. The gratification of Gary's adolescent daydreams was not the worst thing she had ever done, if hardly the most admirable: it was simply the best and quickest way of doing what had to be done.

Thank you, Gary.' She offered him another smile with the sealed letters, leaning forward slightly as she did so. Although she lacked the measurements for a really spectacular view, the top three buttons had been carefully left undone to offer what there was.

'Thank you. Miss.' Gary wiped his sweaty paw on the seat of his jeans before accepting the gift. But then, instead of turning to Mrs Simmonds at the next desk, he lingered in front of her, rocking on his three-inch heels until she began to wonder if the lungful of over-applied April Violets which he had inhaled was about to knock him out.

'Yes, Gary?'

He summoned up his courage. 'Got another story for you. Miss - true story.'

Mrs Simmonds sniffed disapprovingly, though whether it was at Gary or the April Violets, Frances wasn't sure.

'Yes, Gary? A true story?'

'The letters, Gary!' snapped Mrs Simmonds.

Frances ran the tip of her tongue deliberately over Marilyn's Glory Rose lipstick and gazed expectantly at Gary. Mrs Simmonds rated nowhere, compared with Gary; she was just a secretary, and (which was more to the point) she didn't gossip round the office like Gary.

'I read it in this book,' began Gary breathlessly. 'There was this Indian uprising, see - '

It had been an Indian uprising last time. Gary's reading was either limited or highly specialised.

'Comanches, they were. In Texas - '

Perhaps Gary's mother had fancied the hero of High Noon so much that she had imprinted him with an obsession to go with his name.

'And there was this girl they took prisoner - a blonde like you. Miss - ' His eyes feasted on the dyed curls ' - and they started to take ... to take her clothes off. Miss - '

'Gary!' Mrs Simmonds fired his name like a warning shot.

'But she was wearing this - this thing - ' he floundered ' - it's all laced up, with bones in it - ?' He blinked desperately at Marilyn.

'Whalebone,' said Frances. 'A corset?'

'That's it. Miss - a corset!'

'Charming!' murmured Mrs Simmonds, her back now as rigid as if it was also whaleboned and laced-up, but interested in the Texan maiden's fate against her better judgement.

'And they couldn't get it off, see - the Comanches couldn't. So when they got her down they couldn't - '

'That's enough!' snapped Mrs Simmonds. 'Quite enough.'

Gary shook his head at her. 'But it's true, Mrs Simmonds - honestly it is. I can show it to you in this book.'

'I believe you,' said Marilyn encouragingly.

'But that isn't the end of it, Miss - ' the words rushed out ' - they shot arrows at her, only the arrows stuck in the - the - in the bones - an' she was saved by the Texas Rangers.'

Before Mrs Simmonds could draw a bead on him he snatched the letters from her hand and scuttled out of the door.

Mrs Simmonds traversed her sights on to Marilyn. 'Miss Francis ... I know you're only a temp ... and you won't be here with us very long ... But you really should know better - '

The door swung half open and Gary's grinning face appeared in the gap. 'If they'd caught you, Miss - the Comanches - you wouldn't 'uv stood a chance!' he delivered his punch-line.

'Don't be cheeky!' Mrs Simmonds' anger bounced off the closing door. She turned back to Marilyn. 'There! That's exactly what I mean. If you give the dirty little beast a chance - but you positively encourage him!'

Marilyn examined her Glory Rose nail polish critically. That was also exactly true, thought Frances, making a mental note to uproot any roses in her garden at home which might even remind her of this particular shade of red. And (looking down past her nails to what Gary had tried to see) Marilyn certainly wouldn't have stood a chance with the Comanches either, that was also true.

Marilyn shrugged. 'He's harmless.'

'Nothing in trousers is harmless.' Mrs Simmonds caught her tongue as she stared at Marilyn, and Frances knew what she was thinking: that anything in trousers was as much Target for Tonight to Marilyn Francis as Marilyn Francis was for anything in trousers.

Well, that was the trick - since there was no time for a more unobtrusive approach, in order not to be seen she had to be obvious. And there was nothing more unimaginably obvious that the pink, red, blonde, brazen and bra-less Marilyn, with her eyes on all men from sixteen to sixty.

'It's all very well for you - ' Mrs Simmonds began bitterly, and then brightened ' - you won't be here very long...'

'Oh, I don't know about that...' Frances toyed with the idea of touching up Marilyn's lipstick. The trouble was, it would mean looking at her face, and that was not something she particularly enjoyed. '... I quite like it here.'

Mrs Simmonds bristled. 'Mr Cavendish's proper secretary - ' there was a heavy emphasis on the adjective ' - will be back from hospital in a fortnight.'

'There are other jobs that come up. Girls are always leaving, as I should know ... I'm a bit cheesed off with this temping - I think it's time to dig in somewhere comfy, like here.'

The time was just about right to plant the shape of things to come, anyway. 'I hear there's a secretary leaving in Research and Development - ' she winked at Mrs Simmonds ' - where all those groovy scientists are.'

Mrs Simmonds regarded her incredulously. 'You're joking - ?'

Marilyn gazed into space. 'Some of them are quite young. There's one that's got a smashing sports car - I've seen him in the canteen. And he's seen me, too - '

That was true. She'd made sure of that. And groovy Dr Garfield also worked right alongside ungroovy Dr Harrison, who just might be selling out British-American's research and development to the Other Side, what was more.

'Hmm...' Mrs Simmonds' lips were compressed so tightly that she found it hard to speak. 'Well ... you may not find that so easy. They don't take just anyone in R and D, you know. You have to have a security clearance, for a start.'

Marilyn giggled. 'No problem, dearie. I'm absolutely secure.'

And that was also true. With the Security Officer already primed by the Special Branch, Marilyn's translation to the rich pastures of R and D was a fait accompli, whatever the opposition.

'No problem.' But that wasn't the reason which Gary would put into circulation.

'With my qualifications I can push 'em over any time - no problem.' Marilyn fluttered her false eyelashes and decided to examine her lipstick.

'Hmm...' What drove Mrs Simmonds beyond words was the knowledge that Marilyn's shorthand and typing speeds, not to mention her actual secretarial qualifications and efficiency, were as far above reproach as her morals were beneath it.

And it was nettling her more than somewhat, thought Frances, that she also suspected the unspeakable Marilyn was relying on her almost-see-through blouse and three undone buttons as much as 140 words a minute.

'Hmm...' Mrs Simmonds drew a shuddering breath. 'Well, if that's what you want, you won't help yourself by making up to young Gary, I can tell you. He's a proper little chatterbox, that one - and what he says doesn't lose in the telling, either. You know he's already going round, telling everyone that you are - ' Mrs Simmonds clenched her jaws '

- "hot stuff - do you know that?'

When it was all over, decided Frances, she would pad her expenses and buy Gary a copy of Jack Schaefer's The Canyon, and maybe Howard Fast's The Last Frontier too. Not even the KGB's disinformation experts could have done better.

'He can say what he likes, I don't care.' She rummaged in her bag for the tawdry compact and the Glory Rose lipstick.

'Well, you ought to.' The phone buzzed at Mrs Simmonds' elbow. 'He fancies you.

And you can't possibly fancy him.'

'That'll be the day! He should be so lucky...' Marilyn opened the compact, and Frances examined the ghastly little painted doll's face. There was no accounting for male taste, as she knew by bitter experience. She could only hope that the thing wouldn't drag on so long that Marilyn took over completely, because then she would only let her down in bed, as always.

The phone was still buzzing, unanswered. Which only went to prove that the prospect of a temporary Marilyn converted into a permanent one was as unnerving for Mrs Simmonds as it was for her.

Because it wasn't like Mrs Simmonds to ignore the phone.

'Hadn't you better see who it is?' said Frances without turning from Marilyn's reflection. The eerie fact about that little face was that it no longer belonged to a stranger, it was her face now. A week ago it had been an awful might-have-been; now it was a real face, on the way to becoming a should-have-been.

'The way he looks at you - and not just him, either. I think you're asking for trouble, young lady.'

'I can look after myself.' It's looking at myself that frightens me, thought Frances.

'I've heard that before.' Mrs Simmonds reached for the phone. 'All right, all right!'

She lifted the receiver. 'British-American Computers - ' she began with uncharacteristic abruptness, then caught her breath and shifted into her secretarial purr ' - Mr Henderson's personal assistant, can-I-help-you?'

Frances put the compact back into her bag and picked up her desk diary.

'No - ' said Mrs Simmonds in her severest voice, dropping the "sir", ' - no, it isn't. I'm afraid you've been put through to the wrong extension.'

Miss Francis relaxed. It was her contact, deliberately asking for Mrs Simmonds'

number in order to establish himself as one of the string of Marilyn Francis's boyfriends.

'Is this a business call?' Mrs Simmonds' voice was like a carving knife.

Frances concentrated on the schedule. Cavendish was actually interviewing two R & D men at 10.30, presumably to brief himself on the sales pitch for the Saudi Arabians at 11.15 tomorrow. It would be advisable to double-check the booking at the Royal County Hotel, and the menu there too -

Pink, red, blonde, brazen, bra-less, but also efficient.

The opportunity for demonstrating the last in front of the R & D men was not to be missed. Perhaps she might even purchase some real coffee out of the petty cash for that 11.15 meeting: the Saudis would not know much about advanced guidance systems, but they would certainly know their coffee . .. And after that it would be an easy day, with consequent opportunities for further voyages of discovery and Marilyn-flaunting within the British-American labyrinth.

Contact was taking rather a long time, but judging from the grave and serious expression on Mrs Simmonds' face he wasn't actually being offensive.

'Oh...' Mrs Simmonds gave her a strange look. 'Yes, of course I will ... It's for you, dear - that switchboard is hopeless... Yes, of course I will, don't worry. I'm putting you through now.' She punched the extension numbers and then turned again to Marilyn, still wearing the serious expression. 'It's your father, dear.'

'My father?' Miss Francis did not have to simulate surprise. It was contact's job to handle all routine communications up to and including Alerts. 'Father' himself would never intervene except in cases of emergency.

Emergency.

Frances grabbed her phone. 'Dad? Is that you?'

'Marilyn love?'

'It's me. Dad. What's the matter?'

'Marilyn love - '

The recognition sign was repetition.

'It's me, Dad. What's the matter? Are you all right?' For once the recognition jargon rang absolutely true.

Emergency.

'It's your mother, love - she's been taken very bad. You must come home at once.'

'What!' Frances piled shock on surprise.

'I'm sorry, love - springing this on you when you've just started your new job ... But she needs you, your mother does. We both need you. You must come home to look after her.'

Sod it! Sod it -

'Home - ?' Frances caught her anger just in time and transformed it into concern.

'Right now?'

'Yes, love. Right this minute. The doctor's coming again this afternoon, and you must be there for him.'

Frances looked at the clock. Home - right this minute was a categorical order which left no room for argument: after all the time and careful planning that had gone into Marilyn Francis, and just when things were shaping up nicely, they were pulling her out and aborting the operation.

'Yes, Dad - of course. I'll leave this minute.'

'There's a good girl. I knew you wouldn't let your old dad down.'

Sod it! thought Frances again. Something had gone wrong somewhere, but it couldn't be anything she'd done, or not done, because at this stage she'd done nothing except be Miss Marilyn Francis, and Miss Francis as yet hadn't gone anywhere near Research and Development.

'I'll get the bus to Morden, Dad. I can get a tube from there.'

'No need to, love. A friend of Tommy's is coming down to collect you - young Mitch.

You've met him, when he was in the army. He'll pick you up at that cafe where Tommy came that time, in about half an hour, say. Okay?'

'Okay, Dad. Don't worry. I'll be there.'

'Goodbye then, love.'

'Goodbye, Dad.'

She replaced the receiver automatically and sat staring at it for a moment. She had wasted a fortnight of her life as Marilyn, but now it was over and done with, and Marilyn was fading away, a gaudy little flower who had blushed unseen and wasted her April Violets and Faberge Babe on Gary's nose. It was enough to make her weep.

'Are you all right, dear?' asked Mrs Simmonds solicitously.

But there was no time for tears: Marilyn Francis could not die just yet. Or rather, she must die as she had lived.

'Yes ... I'm okay.'

Mrs Simmonds reached across and patted her arm. 'Of course you are, dear.'

So Control had already planted the information.

'But my Mum's very ill, my Dad says.'

'Yes, I know. Your father told me.' Mrs Simmonds nodded. 'But you mustn't worry.

There are these drugs they've got now ... and they're finding new ones all the time, you know.'

Plainly, he had gone even further: in order to remove the daughter convincingly and quickly he had made the illness terminal. Nothing less than such a confidence could have turned Mrs Simmonds' anger into sympathy.

But that was the last thing Marilyn Francis would have noticed at this moment, with a sick mum and an inadequate dad on her hands, and young Mitch to meet in half an hour.

She turned to Mrs Simmonds. 'I've got to go and look after her - my Mum. My Dad's dead useless.'

Mrs Simmonds winced at the adjective, but managed to keep the Awful Truth secret.

'Yes, dear - naturally.'

'I mean, I've got to go right now.' Miss Francis reached for her typewriter cover. 'The doctor's coming to see her this afternoon. So I haven't time to see Mr Cavendish. Will you tell him?'

'Of course I will. Don't you worry about that.' Mrs Simmonds frowned suddenly.

'Are you all right for money ... to tide you over, I mean?'

'Money?' Frances realised suddenly that tomorrow was pay day.

Go directly home. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £58.55.

Mrs Simmonds reached for her bag. 'I could let you have five pounds, dear.'

In the circumstances that was true sisterly generosity.

'And I'll phone up the Agency and tell them what's happened,' said Mrs Simmonds.

'So don't you worry about that either.'

It wasn't sisterly generosity at all; the old bitch had decided that the instant departure of Marilyn was cheap at £5, especially when the chance of ordering a better class of girl from the Agency was included in the price.

Frances wondered whether Sir Frederick Clinton had a better class of female operative to hand on his books, complete with 140 words a minute Pitman's.

But that was his problem now. More to the point, she wondered whether little Miss Marilyn Francis, painted and dyed, would have enough cash to tide her over at this stage of the week, and what she would do if she hadn't, and her mum was very ill and she was having to throw up her job.

Poor little Marilyn!

Marilyn burst into tears.

CHAPTER TWO

In fact, poor little Marilyn revenged herself twice over on Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon before Paul Mitchell arrived at the transport cafe, once in the person of an elderly lorry-driver who obviously feared that she was running away from home, and advised her against seeking her fortune in Central London, and the second time by a leather-jacketed youth of indeterminate age who obviously hoped she was running away from home, and offered to bear her to the bright lights on the back of his Kawasaki.

So she had been forced to re-animate Marilyn briefly, first to shake her head at the lorry-driver and then to send the Kawasaki owner about his business -

'Bug off! I'm waiting for someone.'

'Suit yourself, scrubber!'

* * *

'You're late.' The lorry-driver's concern and the youth's knowing contempt combined with the strains of the morning to fray Frances's nerves.

'Christ! You look awful!' Paul planted a kiss on her cheek before she could avoid him. 'And what's more - you smell awful too!'

'And you're still late. I thought there was an emergency of some sort?'

'There is. But I'm not James Hunt - and if I was it wouldn't have made any difference.

I've come all the way from Yorkshire this morning, non-stop except for the times the Police flagged me down for breaking the speed limit on the motorway - they should have sent a chopper for you, but all they had to spare was me. So get moving, Frances dear - ' Paul picked up her cup and finished off its contents ' - Ugh! Because there are leagues to be covered 'ere 14.30 hours.'

He held the door open for her. The lorry-driver frowned and the Kawasaki youth gave her a jeering look.

'Where are we going?'

Paul pointed to the yellow Rover directly ahead of them. 'Back to Yorkshire again double-quick, if Jack Butler's new car holds together so long. I would have preferred mine, but like you say - it's an emergency.'

She waited until he had settled down into the traffic. 'What's the emergency in Yorkshire?'

'Ah ... now there you've got me, sweetie. So far as I was concerned, everything was going according to plan. By now there's probably total confusion, without Mitchell to put things right. But when I left everything was A-Okay.'

Frances thought for a moment. 'You know they pulled me off a job?'

Mitchell shook his head and put his foot down.

'Nope. Or, at least, I didn't know you were working until I saw you just now ... and from our past acquaintance I'm assuming that you don't normally spend your free time dressed like a two-bit dolly-bird. Not that it doesn't suit you - '

'Don't be offensive.'

'I wasn't being offensive. I was just admiring the skilful way you have thrown yourself into your cover, whatever it may be, respectable Mrs Fitzgibbon. In fact, if I hadn't known you, I wouldn't have known you, if you see what I mean - even apart from the smell, that is.'

Frances took hold of her temper, recalling Paul's technique of old. Once upon a time he had fancied his chances, and this was his juvenile response to being brushed off; but she must not let it blind her to the knowledge that he was clever and efficient, and ambitious with it.

The effort of exercising will-power was steadying and soothing. They hadn't pulled her out of British-American because anything had gone wrong there, but because something more important had come up elsewhere. And, by the same logic, they wouldn't have wasted Paul on a chauffeur's job without good reason when he was involved in that same more important something.

'Are you supposed to be briefing me - is that the idea, Paul?'

He grinned at her. 'Good on you, Frances! That's Jack Butler's idea exactly.'

'Colonel Butler?'

'Colonel Butler as ever is, yes. Fighting Jack, no less - the Thin Red Line in person.'

'He asked for me?' Frances frowned at the road ahead. She knew Colonel Butler by sight, and a little by reputation, but had never worked under him.

'No-o-o. Fighting Jack did not ask for you.' This time he grinned privately. 'Not for this little lark, he wouldn't.'

'What lark?'

'What lark...' Paul tailed off as he waited to leave the slip-road for the motorway proper. The Rover coasted for a moment, then surged forward across the slow and fast lanes straight into the overtaking one. Frances watched the needle build up far beyond the speed limit.

'What lark.' Paul settled back comfortably. 'I take it you've heard of O'Leary, Frances?'

'Michael O'Leary?'

'The one and only. Ireland's answer to Carlos the Jackal.'

'The Irish Freedom Fighters, you mean?'

'Sure and begorrah, I do. De Oirish Fraydom Foighfers - yes.'

Frances swallowed. 'But I'm not cleared for Irish assignments, even in England.'

Paul nodded. 'So I gather. But apparently there's a Papal dispensation in the case of Michael O'Leary and his boyos. And on the very best of grounds, too, I'm telling you, to be sure.'

'On what grounds?'

There was a Jaguar ahead hogging the overtaking lane - far ahead a moment ago, but not far ahead now. Paul flashed his lights fiercely.

'Get over, you bastard! Make way for Her Majesty's Servants, by God!' Paul murmured. 'You're breaking the bloody law, that's what you're doing.'

The Jaguar moved over, and flashed back angrily as they swept past him.

'On what grounds? ... Well, for a guess, on the grounds that O'Leary is about as Irish as - say - the Russian ambassador in Dublin. Or if, by any remote chance, there is a drop or two of the old Emerald Isle stuff in his veins ... then because he's not really concerned with foightin' fer Oirish fraydom - at a guess, quite the reverse, if you take my point.'

Frances took his point. It was what her poor romantic Robbie had always maintained, she recalled with a dull ache of memory: to him the Irish had always been more victims than villains, even the psychos whom he hunted, and who had hunted him

- hog-tied by ancient history which was no longer relevant, financed by Irish Americans who had no idea what was really happening to their dollars, but ultimately manipulated by some of the very best trained KGB cover-men in the business. It didn't help the ache to recall that she hadn't believed him, because he found Reds under every bed; though at least she hadn't argued with him, because it helped him to fight more in sorrow than in anger, even after three beastly tours of duty; she'd even been oddly relieved, that last time, to learn that they hadn't been responsible, his victims - at least not directly - for what had happened to him.

'It's not surprising, really,' mused Paul, taking it for granted that she had taken his point. 'Whenever there's trouble in Ireland, someone else has to cash in - you can't blame the buggers. The Spaniards did, and then the French, and the Germans. The KGB's only bowing to history.'

Frances thrust Robbie back into his filing cabinet in the furthest corner of her memory, where he belonged. 'We know that for sure?'

'Not for sure. Nothing Irish is for sure. But it was the IRA that told us.'

Frances waited. Because she wasn't cleared for Ireland she didn't know much about the tangle of Irish security beyond what she had read in the weekly sheets in the department in her secretarial days, when she had had to type them out. But ion those days the IFF had amounted to little more than an abbreviation for Michael O'Leary's expertise with the booby-trap and the high-velocity rifle.

'They don't quite know what to make of O'Leary. They smell sulphur, if not Vodka -

though Vodka doesn't smell, does it! Say caviare, then...' He nodded to himself, watching the road. 'They've been prepared to take the credit for his hits - in Ulster.'

'But now he's come to England?'

'That's right. "To take the war into the enemy country", as he puts it. We think they think he may make the war a bit too hot for them - so they've dropped us the word.

Only they don't know where he is, and nor do we.'

'He's pretty elusive, then.'

'The Scarlet Pimpernel's got nothing on Michael O'Leary. But we do rather think he's using some of the KGB ultra-safe houses in Yorkshire, as a matter of fact. Just a hint we've picked up.'

Back to Yorkshire double-quick.

Frances nodded. 'And just what is his war, exactly?'

'Ah ... well, you see he's got a little list. Of Criminals Sentenced by Military Tribunal for Crimes Against Ireland, as he calls it.'

'But that's old hat.'

'Sure it is. So everything in Ireland is old hat - it's all just a re-run of the same old late-night films we've seen half a dozen times before. Only this time maybe the KGB has bought the natural breaks to advertise their product.'

And that did make a difference, thought Frances grimly. It might even change the end of the film itself.

'I see. And the top name on the list is to be found in Yorkshire, presumably - is that it?'

'Yes ... and no - ' Paul stopped as he glanced in his mirror.

'What does that mean - yes or no?'

'It means ... hold on to your seat-belt, Frances dear. We are about to be flagged down by the Police - ' Paul gave her a quick reassuring smile as he decelerated and began to pull across the lanes towards the hard shoulder ' - but nothing to worry about.'

The car crunched on loose gravel. The silence inside it was suddenly unnerving, punctuated as it was by the intermittent roar and shock-wave of passing lorries labouring their way to the industrial north. Frances watched the sleek police car pull in just ahead of them, a Rover identical to their own except that it was white and ornamented with a dashing blue-red-blue stripe along its flank.

A tall young constable got out cautiously and came back to them. Paul wound down his window and fumbled inside his jacket.

The policeman bent down and peered in at them. Frances saw his eyes widen and was instantly aware that Marilyn's split skirt had divided to an indecent level.

'Paul Mitchell,' said Paul, opening his identification folder. 'And I'm in an official hurry. Please check with your superiors as quickly as you can.'

The young policeman's eyes glazed over with the effort of not looking at what they were looking at, and then switched to Paul's identification.

'Mr Mitchell - yes, sir.' The young policeman swallowed bravely. 'We have been informed about you - '

A derisive hoot cut him off: the Jaguar they had elbowed out of the road flashed by triumphantly.

'If you would be so good as to follow us, we'll clear the way for you, sir. There's a hold-up about six miles ahead ... we'll get you past it.'

'Thank you very much, officer.' Paul's politeness to the Civil Power was impeccably according to the regulations. 'We've a scheduled stop just beyond Wetherby, at the Crossways Motel. We shall be there for fifteen minutes. If you can give us ten miles after that it will be sufficient, thank you.'

'Very good, sir.' The policeman saluted. 'Just follow us.'

Paul turned to Frances. 'Well, at least the system is working now. I was supposed to be cleared all the way down, but I nearly got arrested for reckless driving instead.' He glanced down. 'And if I'd had you with me I probably would have been arrested - the view isn't conducive to careful driving. Not that it isn't enchanting also ... though I thought suspender belts were strictly for the kinky trade.'

'Keep your eyes on the road.'

'Pull your skirt together and I'll try to.'

Frances draped her plastic raincoat across her knees. 'You said "yes and no".'

'Eh?'

'The top name on the list.'

'Oh, yes ... in Yorkshire. Well, it isn't normally,

but it is today.'

'Is where?'

'At the University of North Yorkshire, for the conferring of honorary degrees and the opening of the new English Faculty Library.'

'You mean ... he's receiving a degree?'

'That's right. A Doctorate of Civil Law, to be exact. For trying to make peace in Ireland, a doctorate in England ... and a death sentence in Ireland. He shouldn't have tried so hard.'

'The Minister?'

'Ex-minister ... no, the Minister, that's right. It's the ex-minister who's conferring the degree - he's the Chancellor of the University now. He tried hard too, so he's also on the list. A damned unforgiving lot, the IFF, putting him on the list is purely vindictive if you ask me. And the IRA's not much better - I can't help thinking that they leaked this to us in the first place just to screw us up in knots.' Paul shook his head. 'Which, of course, is what it's doing.'

He shook his head again, and Frances observed him with a mounting sense of disquiet. This wasn't the cool analysis that accompanied proper security, it was more like an acceptance of the inevitable, the sort of fatalism she imagined soldiers in the very front line must have on the eve of an enemy offensive.

But if that was so then the doubling of the targets

didn't make sense.

'But Paul - d'you mean to say we've let two people on the list get together in the same place?'

'Three, actually.'

'Three?' Frances heard her voice rise. 'You're joking!'

'No.' Paul appeared to concentrate on the police car ahead. 'The Lord-Lieutenant will be there, and he was General Officer Commanding in Ulster a few years back. Now he's one of the top advisers to the Minister's opposite number on the shadow cabinet - which puts him right at the head of the list, alongside the Minister himself in fact. Because he's a smart fellow.'

Frances found herself staring in the same direction, at the flashing hazard lights of the police car, as they overtook a clot of traffic which had formed behind two juggernaut lorries racing each other up the motorway. With Michael O'Leary on the loose it was nothing short of insanity to assemble three prime targets on one spot; or, at least, on one spot away from the maximum security zone of Westminster and Whitehall where such assemblies were acceptable.

'I know what you're thinking,' said Paul.

But Frances was by no means sure what she was thinking. There was obviously some sort of emergency, no matter what Paul had said to the contrary. It was difficult not to jump to the conclusion that it was directly related to the insanity - the irresistible bait which some fool had dangled in front of O'Leary. Perhaps they were panicking now because they'd only just realised what they'd done.

'Huh!' She simulated contempt. If Paul thought he knew what she was thinking she had to encourage him to think aloud.

He gave a quick nod. 'That's the way I feel, exactly. But then I thought - North Atlantic, '43-'44 - U-boats versus escorts - same problem, same answer.'

'North Atlantic - ?' Frances caught herself just in time. Not so very long before Paul Mitchell had been a budding young military historian, and one hangover from that lost career was his irritating habit of trying to reduce every situation to some obscure military analogy which could then be solved by the application of Clauswitz or Liddell-Heart. But this time, instead of deriding his theories, she could use them to establish what was really going on.

'I don't see how the North Atlantic comes into things, Paul. Enlighten me.'

'It's simple. The Atlantic is very big and a U-boat is very small.'

'And it spends most of its time underwater anyway.'

He looked at her quickly. 'You've got the point?' He sounded a little disappointed.

'No. But I thought that was how submarines behaved. Go on.'

'An ...' He brightened. 'So of course they're awfully difficult to find, unless you're lucky.'

'I thought we had radar for that.'

'Don't complicate matters. That isn't the point.'

'Sorry.' Frances curbed her impatience.

'The point is that you don't have to find a submarine. Because if it's any good it's going to find you - you being a convoy.' Again he glanced at her quickly. 'And don't start telling me it's the convoy's job to avoid the U-boat, I know that. I'm simplifying things, that's all.' He turned back to the road. 'There's no avoiding O'Leary, anyway.'

'I see. So O'Leary's a U-boat, and we're the convoy escorts - and we just sit around and wait for him to turn up?' Frances frowned at the banality of the image. 'That doesn't seem very profound, either as a metaphor or as a piece of naval tactics.'

'Uh-huh? Well, that's where you're wrong ... In fact, it's a typical armchair critic's mistake. Everything's simple when you know how to do it.'

His patronising tone galled Frances. 'Well, I don't pretend to be an expert on naval tactics, Paul.'

'You don't have to be. It's just elementary geometry: double the size of the convoy and you don't double its circumference - it took the admiralty years to discover that allegedly simple fact.'

'So what?'

He gave her a pitying look. 'So you haven't actually doubled the size of the target.

But you have doubled the number of escorts... We've trebled the target on the university campus this afternoon - but as they're in the same place we can concentrate three times as many counter-terrorism experts in the same place. The mathematics are more favourable for guarding human beings than they are for ships, so we can put more than half our people on the look-out for O'Leary. They're the equivalent of what the Navy used to call "hunter-killer groups" attached to the convoys - so instead of just guarding the bloody targets for once we've actually got the manpower to hunt the bastard as soon as he comes in range.'

'Always supposing that he chooses to oblige you by turning up.

This time it was a half-grin. 'Oh - he' s coming right enough.'

Frances started to add up the facts. If Paul was so sure that an attempt was going to be made then there was inside information, and it would probably have come from the IRA itself ... And it was undeniably true that there was always a chronic shortage of skilled manpower - and womanpower - because so much of it was needed for protection of high-risk targets that there was always too little left over to do the better job of eliminating the risk; that was the penalty which inflation imposed on internal security and law enforcement alike along with the stresses it inflicted on the mortgage repayments and the groceries bill. So there was a certain logic in the analogy of Paul's

'big convoy' theory, she could see that.

But it was also an appallingly cold-blooded logic,

because for all his high-flown naval history in reality they were doing no more than set an old-fashioned domestic mouse-trap, with three human beings as the piece of cheese.

'You're deliberately using them for bait, for God's sake!'

'Oh no we're not, Frances dear.' Paul shook his head decisively. 'The Chancellor wanted to give the Minister his degree, it wasn't our idea. And the Minister wanted to come - and the Lord-Lieutenant wanted to be there to talk to them both about the latest Government initiative in Ulster. We didn't set them up.' He shook his head again. 'The security hazards were pointed out to them too - in writing. I saw the departmental minute myself.'

There was a lump of ice in Frances's stomach: that was the absolute give-away, the written warning which the top security bureaucrats issued to protect themselves when they weren't sure they could protect anyone else. She could protest now until she was blue in the face that the ceremony should have been delayed, if not vetoed altogether, but it wouldn't do any good. What was more, Paul knew it, and had known it from the start.

This was the moment, ordinarily, when she might have been tempted to a small controlled explosion of anger, which Paul would shrug off as a piece of feminine temperament, male chauvinist pig that he always pretended to be in her presence. But she did not wish to give him that satisfaction; and besides, the lump of ice had a decidedly cooling effect on her responses.

'I see. So everything in the garden's lovely.'

'As much as it ever can be. At least we've got enough men and equipment for once, so we won't fail for lack of resources.'

Resignation again. Basically, Paul Mitchell was quite a cold fish under the boyish charm.

'And yet I'm required as a reinforcement? Doesn't that strike you as odd?'

He shrugged and grinned. 'The more, the merrier. Not that Fighting Jack is exactly merry at the moment. In fact, he's decidedly feisty at the moment, is our Jack.'

'Colonel Butler's in charge?' Frances had never operated under Colonel Butler's direction, and when she tried to conjure him up in her mind's eye all she could manage was the memory of two other very blue eyes registering disapproval. Either the Colonel didn't approve of young women in general, or (since he could hardly disapprove of her personally) he objected to women in this type of work in particular; neither of which conclusions suggested that he would welcome Mrs Fitzgibbon with open arms as a reinforcement.

She realised that Paul had nodded to the question.

'But he's not satisfied with things?' That would be an understatement, I suspect.'

'What things?' Frances remembered also that the formidable Dr Audley, who was one of the department's heavyweights, had a high opinion of Colonel Butler; and a choice between David Audley's opinion and Paul Mitchell's was no choice at all.

'Oh, he doesn't say - not in front of the hired help. Fighting Jack's a bit old-fashioned that way. Not quite "Damn your impertinence - do your duty, sir", but near enough.'

'He sounds rather admirable. A pleasant change, even,' said Frances tartly.

Paul thought about the Colonel for a moment. 'The funny thing is ... that he is rather admirable in many ways. He's got all the old pre-1914 virtues, you might say. Like ...

he'd never pass the buck to anyone else, it wouldn't even occur to him. And he'll ball you out to your face, and then defend you behind your back - real officer-and-gentleman stuff.' He smiled at her. 'Except I suspect he wasn't born to it.'

'What d'you mean?'

'Well, there's the faintest touch of broad Lancashire under his Sandhurst accent I rather think. Not quite out of the top drawer, is our Jack.'

Frances grimaced at him. 'I never knew you were a snob, Paul.'

'I'm not. Nothing wrong with dropping your aitches - Field Marshal Robertson 'adn't got a "haitch" in 'is vocabulary, and 'e was none the worse for it. It's the same with Fighting Jack, except that he's learnt the language better. But he does seem to be playing a part.'

'Aren't we all?' Frances looked down at Marilyn's platform shoes on her feet. Against all her expectations she'd found them easy to wear. Indeed, when she thought about it, she'd found everything about Marilyn disconcertingly easy, almost disturbingly easy.

'Oh, I know. "All the world's a stage" and all that. But just a minute or two back you were disapproving of this university lark of ours, and it's my belief that Fighting Jack feels the same way. Only the difference is that if he'd got really bolshie about it he might have scuppered the operation.' Paul kept his eyes on the road ahead, but he was no longer smiling, Frances noted. 'But he didn't,' he concluded grimly. 'He didn't.'

This was the true face concealed behind the front line fatalism and the naval tactics, thought Frances. With Colonel Butler playing a 1914 Colonel, Paul had naturally chosen a 1914 subaltern as his model. Yet beneath the role the real Paul didn't like the situation one bit either.

'Why didn't he?'

He shrugged. 'I suppose ... because his idea of Colonel Butler is of someone who obeys and gets on with the dirty jobs that other lesser breeds and bloody desk-wallahs wouldn't touch with a barge-pole. Which is a noble thought, but maybe not really what the late 1970s require.' As though he'd suddenly realised that he was giving himself away he glanced quickly at her and grinned his subaltern's grin at her. 'So instead he just exudes disgust and disapproval at the world, and bites my head off every time I open my mouth. I suppose I'm just not his type, really.'

If she'd ever had a chance of asking the real Paul what in particular scared him about the operation, other than the actual prospect of encountering Comrade O'Leary round some unexpected corner, she'd lost it now, realised Frances irritably. At the best of times he disliked admitting human weaknesses, and he certainly wasn't going to do so this time.

'But then neither are you, Frances dear.' The grin broadened. 'So it didn't exactly cheer him this morning when they told him you were coming, believe me...' He trailed off.

Whereas now... thought Frances, contemplating the plastic mac and the platform shoes... whereas now he'd probably burst a blood-vessel at the sight of her. The memory of the Colonel's reaction to her proper mousey self, casually encountered in the corridor, was vivid enough. She blanched at the prospect of his reaction to Marilyn.

'I can't possibly turn up like this at the University,' she snapped.

'Very true,' agreed Paul. 'Not that there aren't some proper little dollies among the students, and you could still pass for one, believe me, with your looks ... Except we're not infiltrating the delectable student body on this one - so your station this afternoon is inside the new Library, and that's out of bounds to students today. Which means we've got to do a quick respectability job on you at the Crossways Motel - a de-tarting process, one might call it in the circumstances.'

'What d'you mean?' The prospect of another cover identity alarmed Frances. Covers were not to be taken lightly, they required detailed and careful preparation. Even Marilyn, who had been a rush job, had been allowed a week's cramming.

'Oh, nothing elaborate,' Paul reassured her. 'Nothing you can't do with your eyes closed. And they've supplied me with a suitcase full of your own clothes - I picked it up twenty minutes before I picked you up. You'll be playing yourself, near enough.'

They had been to the cottage, thought Frances. Some stranger had gone to her wardrobe and the big old chest-of-drawers, and the dressing table, and had sifted through her belongings, choosing her own personal things. She shivered involuntarily at the thought.

You'll be playing yourself, near enough.

There was something creepy about that, too. After the last three years that was a role she was no longer sure she wanted to play ever again, always supposing she could recall the character and the lines clearly.

'You can wash that muck off your face at the motel,' went on Paul. 'We can't do anything about that ghastly hair-do except put a wig on it - there'll be a selection waiting at the motel by now. There isn't time to do anything else, but you'll be wearing an academic cap anyway - and a gown, because it's full academic battle-dress this afternoon. Perhaps a pair of spectacles to make you look a bit more scholarly, instead of your contact lenses. Then you'll pass all right.'

'Pass for what?'

'Post-graduate research fellow. There are a couple of dozen new ones in the English faculty, and as term's only just started they hardly know each other - and you are an English graduate yourself, Frances, aren't you? Bristol, was it? Or Durham?' Paul's Cambridge superiority surfaced momentarily. 'You should be able to speak the language.'

'That was seven years ago.' Frances ignored the gibe.

'So long? Well, your supervisor will vouch for you - Professor Crowe. He has full clearance and knows the score.' Paul gave her another reassuring look. 'Don't worry, Frances. All you're doing really is releasing one of Fighting Jack's blue-eyed boys for a more sensitive job. We're not expecting any trouble in the library.'

Famous last words, thought Frances. Apart from being male chauvinist pig patronising words. Obviously Colonel Butler and Paul Mitchell had mentally relegated her to Kirche, Kinder and Kuche, as being sexually equipped for nothing else.

But she would not give him the satisfaction of observing her anger. Not so long as there was a chance of catching him out.

'I see ... And might an English post-graduate research fellow know what she is supposed to be researching? That's the first thing she'll get asked.'

Paul nodded. 'Ah... now as it happens I had a hand in that little detail, as I've been a research fellow myself in my time, you see.'

There was nothing more insufferably pompous than an insufferably pompous young ex-Cambridge male pig, decided Frances.

'Indeed? And your research included me, did it?'

'Let's say, I know where your special interest lies in literature. That one time you invited me down to that little cottage of yours I took a look at your bookshelves, Frances.'

'My - bookshelves?'

'That's right. You can tell a lot about a person by the books on their shelves. Their books don't lie about them.'

'But - ' The words dried up on Frances's tongue.

'You've got all the books I'd expect an English graduate to have - Chaucer to Hemingway, by way of Fielding and Hardy. And the usual spread of poetry.' He paused. 'But you've also got three full shelves of folk-lore and fairy stories ... La Belle au Bois Dormant in the original French, and a nineteenth-century German copy of Domroschen... right down to The Lord of the Rings and a first edition of The Hobbit. All well-thumbed and dust-free - a dead give-away.'

All well-thumbed and dust-free. Frances stared at him helplessly.

Of course they were well-thumbed and dust-free. Dusting Robbie's favourite books was one of her compulsive habits. Once she'd decided not to throw them out it had seemed obscene to let them gather dust.

He took her silence for speechless admiration, or something like. 'So all I did was to tell Professor Crowe about your collection, and he jumped at. the idea. By now he'll have put it around that the title of your thesis is "The Land of Faerie: From Spenser to Tolkien". He's putting in Tolkien because with The Silmarillion just out, and the Carpenter biography, Tolkien-lore will be all the rage.'

She had read The Lord of the Rings, all three volumes of it, because Robbie had adored it, and was always quoting from it. Its awful poetry apart, it had seemed to her an absolutely marvellous adventure story for romantically-inclined 14-year-olds. But since Robbie had been a 24-year-old SAS lieutenant she had never said so aloud for fear of offending him. And if Professor Crowe thought otherwise perhaps Robbie had been right and she had been wrong, in this as in other matters.

Paul looked at her expectantly, with just the faintest touch of innocence waiting for approbation. But she couldn't think of anything to say. She had seen that look on Robbie's face.

He turned back to the road in disappointment. A big sign bearing the legend The North' flashed by.

'Well ... I thought you could probably have a ball in the new Library, talking Tolkien, while Fighting Jack and I sweated on the outside - that's all.' He sniffed.

Frances swallowed. 'Yes, I'm sure I shall, Paul.'

'That's the ticket.' He grinned at her, quickly reassured that he'd been right all the time. 'You can be our Sleeping Princess in the Library, and I shall come and wake you with a kiss when we've killed the wicked O'Leary.'

CHAPTER THREE

There was more than one faerie kingdom, Frances decided nervously as she followed Professor Crowe up the main staircase of the new English Library: hardly ten minutes before, she had left Colonel Butler in one such kingdom of magic and illusion, and she had been profoundly sorry for him; now she herself was entering another, and she would need all her wits about her to play her part in it.

* * *

'Frankly, Mrs Fitzgibbon, I don't know why you are here.'

To which she had wanted for a moment to reply Well, that makes two of us. Colonel, except the way he had said it had somehow suggested to her that he really wished they were both somewhere else, and that had been the beginning of sympathy.

Or perhaps the sympathy had already germinated as she passed through the banks of chattering, flickering surveillance equipment which had been established on the top floor of the half-occupied Science Tower of the new - or fairly new - University of North Yorkshire, and which reminded her of nothing so much as a television studio girding itself to provide live coverage of a Third World War.

In the midst of which sat Colonel Butler.

He wasn't exactly brooding over it all, if anything he seemed to have its operators rather well under his control, from what Frances could observe. But his face, as he glanced past her at them from time to time, bore the same expression of heavily-censored contempt which she had noticed on the face of the American air force general who had once lectured her on the development of one-way remotely-controlled pilotless vehicles (he, who had three times brought back a damaged Phantom from the Hanoi bridges) and the psychological hang-ups of the 'pilots' who 'flew' the RPVs from the depths of their concrete bunkers ('Those goddamn pinball wizards get to like being briefed by computers...').

* * *

'But since you are here I'm putting you into the library, to take James Cable's place.'

No, it wasn't quite contempt. (She had studied the Colonel's face carefully. All the features which had gone to make Charlton Heston a box office idol - the forehead, and the bone structure of cheek and jaw, and the artfully broken nose - added up on his face to ugliness, like a miss that was as good as a mile; yet, at the same time, it was an oddly reassuring ugliness, without any hint of cruelty or brutality.) Not contempt, but rather resigned acceptance of another inevitable change for the worse. So might the 1914

Colonel Butler of Paul's imagination have contemplated a war of machine-guns and trenches, so unpleasantly different from the jolly manoeuvres of Salisbury Plain, but which had to be accepted and mastered nevertheless, and that was that, damn and blast it, with no time for tears.

He was watching her, too - a little warily, as though he was half expecting her to complain about taking over from James at such short notice, or simply because she was a woman, and women tended to be troublesome.

'Very good, sir,' said Frances.

* * *

'Ah-urrumph ... The Library has been designated a safe and secure area. Which means, as a

result of action already initiated, that the probability of an attempt there is ... statistically low.'

Frances remembered what Paul had said, which Colonel Butler was now repeating in the approved jargon as though the words hurt his mouth. And recalling her own first reaction to it she wondered if he was waiting for her to make a liberated protest at being fobbed off, as a mere woman, with a dull job while lucky James was given an opportunity to distinguish himself.

'Yes, sir,' said Frances.

* * *

'Detective-Sergeant Bollard is in charge of the practical arrangements there, and he will

report to you. Your function is ... to assess behavioural deviations - '

The machines hummed and hiccupped and whirred and bleeped at Frances's back, and she knew exactly how Colonel Butler felt as they computed their probabilities and behavioural deviations: the more godlike the technology made him, the more powerless he felt.

* * *

'Do you think I'm talking tommy-rot, Mrs Fitzgibbon?'

Frances realised that she had raised an eyebrow at 'behavioural deviations'.

'No, sir. It just sounds that way.' He had enough troubles without a tantrum from Mrs Fitzgibbon. 'I can translate it.'

'Quite right.' He would have smiled, she felt, if it hadn't been a frowning matter. 'The experts say the library is clear. I say that's the time to start worrying. I have to act on what they tell me, but you mustn't - is that understood?'

'Yes, sir.' Frances decided that she approved of

Colonel Butler.

'Any questions, then?'

* * *

Yes, Colonel Butler, thought Frances.

You don't know why I'm here, and neither do I. And it doesn't make sense to pull me off one operation, where I was halfway to becoming useful, in order to waste me on another.

So what am I really doing here. Colonel Butler?

'No, sir,' said Frances.

* * *

Professor Crowe opened the Common Room door for her.

An immensely tall young man with a shock of uncombed fair hair and an Oxford D.Phil, gown did a double-take on her, coffee cup halfway to his lips, and then pointed at her.

'Good God, Hugo - is this your Amazonian blue-stocking?' he said.

'Another of your false assumptions, dear boy,' said the Professor. 'I said no such thing.'

The fair hair was shaken vigorously. 'Not an assumption at all - an incorrect assertion perhaps, predicated on criminally misleading information. I merely extrapolated "Amazonian" from "formidable", I admit no more than that.' The coffee cup wobbled dangerously on its saucer as he thrust out his free hand. 'Miss Fitzgibbon, I presume? That is, if a presumption may be allowed in place of an assertion.'

For one fleeting second Frances was reminded of Gary's undressing stare, but in her best Jaeger suit, and with the support beneath it which Marilyn had scorned, she was armoured against such stares. And besides, she was even more strongly reminded of other far-off days by the young man.

'How do you do?' The same strong memory cautioned her against smiling at him.

Robbie had always maintained that her gap-toothed smile, which she had first smiled at him on just such another occasion as this - or superficially just such an occasion anyway

- was the most promisingly bedroom invitation he had ever encountered, and she had never smiled so readily thereafter; at least, not until just recently for Marilyn's advancement, and this was certainly no place for Marilyn's tricks.

'How do I do?' The young man examined her face intently, almost as though he sensed the smile's absence. 'I think I do not so well - thanks to Hugo ... Thank you, Hugo

... But you know. Miss Fitzgibbon, he said you were formidable, and I think perhaps he was right. You might even be perilous.'

'Perilous?' It was an oddly archaic word, even allowing for the fact that he was striving for effect.

'Of course. "Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold" - isn't that right?'

She couldn't place the quotation, though it sounded like one which any formidable research graduate ought to have cut her milk-teeth on.

Damn!

'And no one could accuse you of not being overbold, dear boy,' cut in Crowe drily, rescuing her. 'Trying to catch an expert out in her own field - and with one of his books too...'

His books?

'And a thoroughly unreadable little book at that - based on a lecture he gave at St.

Andrews before the war, wasn't it?' Crowe looked to her for confirmation, but then did not wait for an answer. 'In fact, if I remember rightly, it first turned up in a collection of essays - about ten years after - and not as a book at all. It was an indifferent essay, and it must have been an appallingly dull lecture.'

Whose lecture? She had admitted to Crowe that she might be rusty, but she hadn't expected to be put to the test so quickly.

'Not that I ever heard him lecture,' concluded Crowe.

Frances felt that she had to say something. 'But you knew him?' she asked radiating proper interest.

'Ronald? Ah ... well, of course. But chiefly through my supervisor - '

Ronald?

' - who didn't wholly approve of him.'

'Sour grapes,' said the fair-haired young man. 'The favourite food of the only mythical monster commonly found in Senior Common Rooms - the one with green eyes.'

'No, I think not.' Crowe shook his head. 'This was well before he became a cult figure

- before even the first volume was published.'

Idiot, Frances admonished herself. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

'Ah - but he'd already done well with The Hobbit, hadn't he?' the young man countered. 'That was republished directly after the war - ' He looked at Frances, then over her shoulder. "Ullo, 'ullo, 'ullo. Someone's wanted by the Law.'

Frances turned towards the door. The Law was grizzled and stocky, but unmistakable. And it was trying to catch her eye.

'I think he's looking at you. Miss Fitzgibbon,' said the young man. 'He probably wants to frisk you for infernal devices.'

Frances looked at him questioningly. 'For what?'

'But don't worry,' the young man reassured her. 'We've all been through the process, and it's surprisingly painless. The whole place is absolutely crawling with security types

- it's getting more like Colditz University every day.'

'Oh?' said Frances.

'The Minister for Ulster is collecting his honorary degree today.' The young man shrugged. 'Presumably they do this wherever he goes, poor devil. He must lead a dog's life - no wonder our revered Chancellor retired from the fray.'

'Oh...' Frances trailed off nervously. 'Well, I suppose I'd better go and see what he wants. Excuse me.'

The Law held the door open for her, and then followed her into the ante-room.

'Mrs Fitzgibbon?'

'Sergeant ... Ballard?'

They examined each other's warrant cards.

'I am just about to make my final check before the count-down, madam.'

I am in charge. In theory anyway, and because of the unit's place in the hierarchy, I am in charge.

'Very good, Mr Ballard.'

There was no need to panic. The building was a detached one; it had been thoroughly searched several times over a forty-eight hour period; there were two men and a woman officer on the main door, and two men on the back door, with scanners.

There were two men on the roof; there was Sergeant Ballard himself; the outside approaches to the building were covered by four monitors. There was no need to panic.

As a result of a sequence of events which neither she nor Colonel Butler understood, there was Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon in charge of all this - the late Marilyn Francis, vice ex-Lieutenant James Cable, R.N., who had expressed himself satisfied with it. There was absolutely no need to panic, therefore.

Sergeant Ballard was looking at her, and Frances realised how young officers felt when put in command of old soldiers vastly senior to them in years and experience.

'Very good, madam.' Sergeant Ballard paused. 'Then I shall report back to you when the check is completed.'

Simple routine. And if the Sergeant felt any distaste at being subjugated to a woman half his age who was drinking coffee socially while he was doing all the work, he didn't show it.

'Thank you, Mr Ballard.'

She watched the broad back disappear, knowing that she hadn't asked the crucial question - Are you satisfied with the precautions? - because it was also meaningless. No precautions could ever be foolproof. It all depended on whether Colonel Butler's computer could out-think O'Leary.

* * *

'... he was a philologist really, and a very fine one. And he had a good ear, too - he could place a man by his accent with uncommon accuracy. Almost as good as Higgins in Pygmalion.'

Frances's heart sank: they were still discussing John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

'Is it true he was obsessed by the '14-'18 war?' The fair-haired young man's voice was no longer bantering. 'Are the Dead Marshes in volume two - and the whole of Mordor, for that matter - are they based on his experiences in the trenches?'

'Hmm... I don't know about that. But he was fascinated by trenches, certainly ... I can remember meeting him in the High once - at Oxford. He was standing in the rain watching workmen digging a trench in the road, absolutely transfixed by them - ' Crowe broke off as he saw Frances. 'Ah, my dear! We have obtained a cup of coffee for you, even though it is almost time for tea, I shouldn't wonder.' Crowe looked at his watch.

'The Chancellor's party is evidently running behind schedule.'

'Thank you. Professor.' Frances accepted the cup. There were, of course, two schedules: the official one, and the actual one which fluctuated according to predetermined times and deviations required by security to dislocate any plans O'Leary might have. But then no doubt O'Leary would have allowed for that in his planning.

The young man grinned at her. 'It's Hugo's theory that Tolkien didn't really know his fairy stories. Miss Fitzgibbon. According to Hugo he was a philologist who made up languages before lunch by way of relaxation, the way Hugo does The Times crossword.

What do you think of that?'

But the computer would have allowed for O'Leary's allowance for a security schedule, decided Frances. It was really a question of how much information the computer had on O'Leary's mind and methods.

There are a great many fairy stories - thousands of them,' she said cautiously. 'And you find the same theme turning up independently in different countries.'

Robbie had said that, anyway.

'But what is the essence of a fairy story? What makes it different from the folk-tale?'

The young man pursued her mercilessly.

'The happy ending,' said Crowe. 'What Ronald called - typically - "the eucatastrophic ending". There's no such word, of course ... In real life the rainbow has no end. In a fairy story the rainbow is not an optical phenomenon, scientifically explainable: it has a real end, complete with a pot of gold.'

'Fairy gold.'

'Which is not the same as human gold? I agree.' Crowe nodded. 'Fairy gold turns to dust in mortal hands. But so does happiness turn to dust in mortal hands - it's only fairy stories which end with the protagonists living happily ever after. Ever after, with no winged chariot at their backs.'

It all depended on the extent and accuracy of the information in the computer, thought Frances. No wonder Colonel Butler was worried sick.

'Ah .. . now I see what you're driving at! If a happy ending is essential to a fairy story then Tolkien's Lord of the Rings isn't a fairy story, because it has an unhappy ending. Or at least a bitter-sweet ending.'

'Exactly.' Crowe beamed at the young man.

'Exactly nothing! What about Oscar Wilde's fairy stories - The Happy Prince, for instance? Or The Birthday of the Infanta - that's pure unrelieved tragedy.'

'And not a fairy story at all. Fantasy is not faerie. Allegory is not faerie. Unreason is not faerie. Other reason is faerie, and comparisons are meaningless, dear boy.'

The young man glanced at Frances. 'He always wins by sleight of hand, you know.

What do you think. Miss Fitzgibbon? Are the contents of women's magazines fairy stories?'

Frances shook herself free of Colonel Butler's worries. If the computer had figured all the possibilities then she might be here longer than today. So far she had done very little to build up her credibility, or even to establish it. That must now be her priority.

But what the hell did she know about fairy stories? Other than Tolkien - and there seemed to be some doubt about him - she hadn't read a fairy story since childhood. Or listened to one -

Or listened to one.

'My grandmother once told me a story which frightened me - ' The memory came back to her unbidden, from a dark corner of her mind suddenly illuminated so that she could even recall the place and the occasion, with the wind through the trees stirring the curtains to reveal a cold, high moon sailing through the sky outside. 'In fact it haunted me for months afterwards...'

She was aware of the hubbub of conversation around them, and also of the last time she had remembered the story.

'She said she'd had it from her grandmother. I've never been able to trace it in any book.'

That was, Robbie had not been able to find it in any of his books, when she had told it to him that last evening.

She shivered. 'There was this princess of a far country - very young, very beautiful of course...' she smiled carefully, deprecating the story in advance'... most of it is really quite traditional - the spell and the three princes.'

They were both looking at her intently; somehow, she didn't know how, she had caught them.

'She was magicked into the body of an ugly and misshapen old woman - '

That had been the beginning of the childhood nightmare: to be imprisoned in another body, seamed and scrawny. Slender feet deformed, talons for fingers, hooked nose and jutting chin, dribbling mouth.

'- and she could only be released from the spell by a kiss from a handsome prince who truly loved her.'

A life sentence. It had been bad enough kissing Granny, who smelt of old age as well as Chanel No. 5, even though she was by no means ugly and misshapen. But no prince in his right mind was going to kiss those lips willingly.

Except in a fairy story, of course -

'Well, the first prince who kissed her was consumed by fire and burnt to a crisp the moment he touched her lips, because he was only after her father's kingdom.

'And the second prince was frozen into a solid block of ice, because he didn't love her, he was just sorry for her.'

The fair-haired young man grunted derisively. 'That's a bit rough. But I suppose he should have known that the first two princes never win the coconut. It's amazing how stupid princes are.'

'Do be quiet, dear boy - otherwise I shall magic you into the sociology department of a certain London polytechnic for a hundred years.' Crowe raised a warning hand. 'Do go on. Miss Fitzgibbon. The hot kiss of greed and cold kiss of pity. And now the third kiss?'

He was doing his best to repair the damage done by the young man's interruption, Frances realised. But the spell was broken.

'I'm sorry,' said the young man contritely, as though he'd caught a sudden glimpse of her embarrassment. 'I didn't mean to spoil the story - please go on.'

Frances was momentarily aware of the hubbub of conversation and the clink of coffee cups eddying around them.

'...an altogether tedious man, without the least pretension...'

'...so I told him to read Henry Esmond instead. A far more impressive novel than Vanity Fair, and just right for television...'

'...first he put his hand on her knee. And then...'

'Please go on,' repeated the young man.

At least they weren't asking her awkward questions about Ronald, anyway.

She took a deep breath. 'The third prince ... he'd been on the road for years, ever since he'd first heard how beautiful the princess was - he didn't know anything about the spell. And when he reached the castle where she lived he asked to be taken straight to her. And he kissed her, and she was instantly transformed back to her true self again.

And they lived happily ever after.'

The young man frowned at her. 'Yes ... but I don't quite see how...?' he trailed off.

She smiled her careful tight-lipped smile at him.

But Granny, I don't quite see...

'Neither did he, of course,' she said. 'Because - can't you guess?'

'He was blind,' said Professor Crowe.

Frances looked at him in surprise. 'You know the story?'

'No.' Crowe shook his head. 'And you say your grandmother told you the story? And she'd had it from her grandmother?'

'Yes. Why d'you ask? Is it important?'

'No. But it is significant, I fancy.' He nodded thoughtfully at her. 'I rather think it isn't a true fairy story, though. It has elements of the traditional folk-tale, of course - the original enchantment sounds typical enough. And the test-kiss, or kiss-test, is straight out of Perrault, so you'll probably find it classified in Thompson's Folk Motif Index. But I suspect they've all been grafted on to a very much darker superstition - a pagan-Christian tradition, possibly ...'

The young man laughed. 'Oh - come on, Hugo - '

'It's no laughing matter, dear boy. In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as one of the superstitions associated with the Madonna del Carmine at Naples - or with the Madonna della Colera herself even...' He nodded again at Frances. 'In which case you were quite right to be scared, my dear - which is itself an interesting example of a child sensing the truth of something she didn't understand and couldn't know. Because even the telling of the Neopolitan story is considered to be unlucky except under special circumstances, and if I were a Neapolitan and a good catholic I should be crossing myself now, I can tell you.'

Frances stared at him. She had always felt there was something in Granny's tale of the blind prince and the ugly princess which had eluded her, and Robbie too. Yet now she felt an irrational reluctance to collect the answer simply by asking the Professor to retell the Madonna's story. She knew that she still wanted to know, but that she didn't want to find out.

The young man experienced no such qualms. 'Your grandmother wasn't from Naples by any remote chance, I take it?'

'No.' Frances, still staring at Crowe, caught the hint of a reluctance similar to her own.

'A pity! Well ... tell us about the Madonna del Carmine, Hugo. Or, better still, the Madonna della Colera - she sounds positively fascinating!'

Crowe regarded the young man distantly. 'That, my dear Julian, you must find out for yourself. Those are two ladies whose acquaintance I have not the slightest desire to make at present. You may inquire of Professore Amedeo in the Languages Faculty, though I doubt that he will choose to enlighten you, prudent fellow that he is.'

The hint of reluctance was overlaid by the donnish repartee, so that Frances was no longer sure that Crowe had ever been serious, or whether he had merely been fencing with a favourite young colleague - and 'Julian' was almost too good to be true, anyway.

Yet she could have sworn that there had been something there more than mere erudition in that withdrawn look, a touch of an older and humbler instinct, a different wisdom.

Julian gaped at the Professor. 'Good God, Hugo! Are you asking for cold iron and holy water and the

Lord's Prayer?'

'Or bread and salt, and rowan berries ... and if you must resort to the Lord's Prayer - '

Professor Crowe craned his neck and gazed around him as though he had just remembered an important message as yet undelivered to someone who ought to be in the room ' - don't forget to pray aloud, dear boy...'

That, at least, was one allusion Frances could place accurately: Robbie himself had once explained to her, at a Stratford-upon-Avon Macbeth, how both spells and counter-spells only worked when spoken out loud or traced in blood because the Devil could never see into a human soul and consequently required verbal or written undertakings, like those she had given at the marriage ceremony.

'I see that the long arm of the law is back,' murmured Crowe to Frances. 'And I rather think it is reaching out towards you again. Miss Fitzgibbon.'

And not a moment too soon, decided Frances as she smiled at them both. 'I don't think I'm on their list, or something like that,' she said vaguely.

'Really...' Julian grimaced at the Professor. 'You know, Hugo, if we had a proper trade union this sort of thing wouldn't happen, you realise that?'

'Dear boy - if we had a proper union we should probably be out of a job by now. Or reduced to time-serving impotence by the National Union of Students under a closed shop agreement, which would be well enough for me, at my age, but which you would find altogether insupportable - off you go, my dear.'

'Well, I think that's damned unchivalrous of you, Hugo - '

Frances ducked away from them as they started to chase this new hare.

As before. Sergeant Ballard held the door open for her.

'Yes, Mr Ballard?' As he squared up to her she sensed that the civilian 'mister' was no more to his liking than his formal 'madam' was to her. So they were both equally disadvantaged by protocol.

'Madam...' The Sergeant focused on her. 'Two faculty members have left the building in the last half hour. Dr Penrose and Mr Brunton.'

The names meant nothing to her, so that when he showed no sign of elaborating on this information she was unable to decide whether Messrs Penrose and Brunton were exhibiting behavioural deviations, or whether Sergeant Ballard was a .man of few words.

'You were expecting them to stay?'

'They were both on the invitation list for the unveiling, madam.'

The unveiling. At her back Frances could hear the noise of scrambled conversation in the crowded Common Room. In a few minutes' time they would all troop down dutifully to witness the Minister unveil the marble plaque in the foyer which declared the building open; that ceremony, together with his acceptance of the honorary degree, was the main event of his visit. But as the building had actually been in use for more than a month this hardly rated as an earth-shaking occasion in the brief annals of North Yorks University; so that, short of Comrade O'Leary adding his own brand of excitement, Messrs Penrose and Brunton were not passing up anything interesting by absenting themselves.

On the other hand, if O'Leary had somehow managed to outsmart the computer then any departures from potential target areas were highly suspicious.

'Anything else of significance?'

'One of the university staff on the desk in the foyer received a rather curious phone call, madam.'

He was overdoing the 'madam' bit. 'What sort of phone call, Mr Ballard? How was it curious?'

'It was on the pay box in the foyer, not to the desk. But that's happened several times before - the numbers are similar. Only, when he took the call he was cut off before the caller could say anything.'

'You mean he never established the origin of the call?'

'That's correct, madam. The telephonist at the other end said "I have a call for you, Mr Dickson - I'm trying to connect you". So he waited, and the telephonist repeated that she was trying to connect him. And then finally the line went dead.'

'He wasn't expecting a call - this Mr Dickson?'

'No, madam. He phoned his wife to check, but she said she hadn't phoned him.'

Frances bit her lip. Knowing the Post Office, she could not see anything particularly curious in an abortive phone call. But it would be better to be safe than sorry.

'How many university staff are there on the desk?'

'Two madam. Mr Dickson and Mr Collins.'

'What's their job - today?'

'They are checking coats and belongings into the cloakroom, madam. No coats, or briefcases and hand-luggage is allowed beyond the foyer today - it's all being checked into the cloakroom.' The Sergeant spoke as though he was reciting a brief he had learnt by heart. 'And of course they're also doing their usual duties, running the information desk and working the switchboard.'

'You mean - they are searching people?'

He gave her a long-suffering look. 'No, madam. All the search procedures are being carried out by our personnel at the entrances.' He paused. 'But the advantage of having university staff on the foyer desk is that between them they know everyone on the invitation list personally, by sight and voice. And they also know the building - Mr Collins has accompanied me on each of my security checks. If there had been anything odd, he'd have spotted it.'

That made sense, thought Frances. But she had to do something.

'Well ... we'd better inform Control about Penrose and Brunton.' If there was a behavioural deviation there, maybe the computer could spot it. 'Did they have any hand-luggage?'

'One briefcase each.' Sergeant Ballard forgot the 'madam' for once. 'Searched at the door, checked in by Mr Collins and Mr Dickson respectively. Checked out by Mr Dickson, searched at the door again on leaving.'

Everything would have been listed, naturally.

Today no absentminded professors were permitted in the new English Faculty Library Building, searched and scanned and sniffed as they had been by the Special Branch, and booked in and out by Mr Dickson and Mr Collins, vigilant of eye and ear-Respectively. Respectively? 'But if Mr Collins was doing the rounds with you, Mr Ballard - 'Yes, madam?' '- then Mr Dickson was on the desk alone for a time.'

'Yes, madam.' Sergeant Ballard looked down on her as from a great height.

Frances stared at him.

'I'll have everything in the cloakroom checked again, madam,' said Sergeant Ballard heavily. 'And we'll have a word with the exchange about that call to Mr Dickson.'

'Thank you, Mr Ballard.' Frances looked at her wristwatch. 'Then we shall be joining you in about ... ten minutes?'

The Sergeant checked his own watch. 'Fifteen minutes exactly, madam.'

It was almost a relief to return to the Common Room, where she was hardly less inadequate as an expert on Faerie than she was as the nominal madam-in-charge of a Special Branch anti-terrorist section which clearly functioned just as well, or better, without her, thought Frances miserably. Because when ex-Royal Navy Lieutenant Cable had no doubt quickly established a working man-to-man relationship with the world-weary Sergeant Ballard, she had just as quickly revealed herself as a Girl Guide amateur.

The Equal Opportunities Act to the contrary, it was still a man's world, that was for sure.

She caught Professor Crowe's eye directly.

'Dr Brunton and Mr Penrose - I mean, Dr Penrose and Mr Brunton ... Who are they?'

Crowe looked round the room. 'I don't see them here - '

'They aren't here.'

Crowe gave her a quick glance. 'Penrose's a crafty fellow from Cambridge who knows a little about the Romantic Poets and a great deal about student psychology. He should make professor in about ten years' time ... Brunton is a dark horse from McGill University, allegedly pursuing the Great American Novel, there being no Great Canadian Novelists - '

'Did I hear the ill-omened name of Brunton?' cut in a short dark man with pebble-thick spectacles.

'You heard the ill-omened name of McGill,' said Julian.

'Your insular prejudices are showing, Julian, dear boy,' said Crowe. 'If Dr Pifer hears you he will simply roll on you, and that will be the end of you, I fear.'

A man's world, thought Frances. But today was the man going to be the Minister, or Professor Crowe, or the handsome Julian - or Colonel Butler, or Comrade O'Leary?

'Whatever the ample Dr Pifer may do to me does not alter the sum of what McGill has given to the world,' said Julian.

'Stephen Leacock?' suggested the pebble-spectacled man.

'Stephen Leacock and the geodesic dome,' said Julian with an arrogantly dismissive gesture. 'Why are you pulling that hideous face, Tom? Or should I say that more hideous face?'

Tom peered at him seriously through the thick lenses. 'Eh? Oh... I was pondering why "geodesic" with an "s", that's all.'

'It's the science of geodesy with an "s", that's why.'

'Ah... but those imaginary lines which the geodisists draw - or perhaps they are properly geodesians - those are geodetic lines, with a "t". So why not "geodetic domes"?'

Tom frowned at Julian as though the fate of the English Faculty, if not the nation itself, hung upon the answer to his question.

'Well, Tom, you'll just have to look it up in your Shorter Oxford.' Julian shrugged and grinned mischievously at Frances. 'Did you know. Miss Fitzgibbon, that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary weighs thirteen pounds - six-and-a-half pounds a volume? That is, Tom's 1950 edition does. He had occasion to carry them from one set of lodgings to another recently, and when he arrived in an exhausted state the first thing he did was to weigh them on the kitchen scales.' He looked down at Tom benevolently.

Tom blinked, found himself looking at Frances, and flushed with embarrassment.

'More to the point -' Professor Crowe intervened quickly '- has the egregious Brunton discovered the Great American Novel yet?'

More to the point, thought Frances, has the egregious Brunton exhibited behavioural deviations recognised by Colonel Butler's computer, always supposing they had any data on him at all?

'Perhaps he ought to borrow Tom's scales and judge them by weight, like vegetable marrows at a horticultural show,' murmured Julian. 'Eh, Tom?'

'Well...' Tom ignored Julian '... he does show signs of appreciating William Faulkner.'

'Faulkner?' Julian refused to be ignored. 'I find him unreadable. That convoluted style - sentences going on for pages, and then ending with a semi-colon! Quite unreadable!'

'Oh - nonsense,' said Frances involuntarily.

'Indeed?' Julian regarded her with a mixture of interest and surprise, as Doctor Johnson might have viewed a dog walking on its hind legs, thought Frances angrily.

'Nonsense?'

All three of them were looking at her now, and she was aware of the chasm at her feet. Her preoccupation with O'Leary had finally betrayed her into expressing a genuine literary opinion.

But it was nonsense all the same. If fairy tales were about unreality, or other reality, or God only knew what, then her beloved Faulkner was about the problems of living in a real world and somehow making it work, even when it was unbearable.

Suddenly all Frances's fear evaporated: where Frances Fitzgibbon was out of her depth, young Frances Warren was in her element: as always, the secret of a good cover was self-discovery.

'Utter nonsense.' She smiled up at Julian. 'Can you find a contemporary English novelist - British novelist - to put in the same class as Faulkner?'

'John Fowles.' The light of battle flared in Julian's eye.

'The Magus?' The last vestige of Miss Fitzgibbon fell away from Frances: Miss Warren was in charge, and she was as arrogant as Julian. 'Daniel Martin? You dare put them up against Sanctuary? Or The Bear?'

'Hah!' said Tom. 'Hah!'

'Not that Fowles isn't good,' said Miss Warren magnanimously. 'Some of the so-called critics need their heads examining. But to compare Faulkner with Fowles ... Do me a favour!'

'Do us all a favour,' said Tom. 'Start with The Bear, Julian.'

He smiled at Frances, cowlike eyes swimming joyfully behind the thick lenses. Gary had smiled at Marilyn like that, ready and hoping to die for her.

Forget Marilyn. Marilyn was with her useless father and her dying mother, somewhere in South-East London.

Detective-Sergeant Ballard was standing in the doorway.

'Well ... I'm not an expert in the hunting of bears with mongrel dogs in Yoknapatawpha County,' said Julian.

'It isn't about hunting bears,' said Tom.

'It's about slavery,' said Frances. 'Faulkner's got more to say about the negro problem in the South than all other American writers put together.'

'He has? I've always thought his approach was a bit Schweitzerish myself,' Julian prodded her gently. 'But then perhaps you have insights into slavery denied me?'

It was a pity that they were settling down to a good argument just when the expression on Sergeant Ballard's face suggested that the computer had choked on one of the names fed into it, thought Frances.

'No more so than any woman. We have some of the same problems the freed slaves had in searching for an identity...' But she could no longer ignore the Sergeant's signals.

'I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me...'

'An identity -?' Julian turned as she pushed past him. 'Oh, for God's sake - not again!

Hugo, do be a good chap and tell the fuzz either to arrest her or let her alone-

* * *

'Yes, Mr Ballard?'

'We have a suspicious object, madam.'

'Suspicious?' Frances repeated the word stupidly.

We're not expecting any trouble in the library!

'Yes, madam.'

'Where?'

'In the cloakroom. Almost directly under where we are standing.'

Frances looked at her wristwatch. Damn Paul Mitchell! And Colonel Butler. And the computer. She had six minutes.

CHAPTER FOUR

The click-clack of Frances's high heels echoed in the high open space of the entrance foyer as she descended the stairway alongside Sergeant Ballard. 'I have informed Colonel Butler, madam,' said Ballard.

Except for the two civilians on the desk, Dickson and Collins, the foyer was still empty. The three Special Branch officers were still in position outside the glass doors, but through the expanse of glass wall on the other side of the doors she could see that a large crowd of students and hangers-on had now assembled outside the entrance.

God! There was altogether too much glass, thought Frances with a swirl of fear.

'We'll have to get those people away from the front of the building. Sergeant,' she said.

Ballard cleared his throat. 'Instructions are to stand fast, madam.'

'Instructions?' Frances frowned at him.

'The moment we start clearing them away they'll know we're on to them,' said Ballard. 'Otherwise ... the odds are they won't detonate until they've got the targets into the blast zone.'

Frances realised that she had been foolish. If the suspicious object really was a bomb then detonation would be by remote signal, activated from some visual vantage-point in the surrounding campus, and not by any old-fashioned time mechanism. So long as the crowd didn't scatter they were theoretically safe until the Chancellor's party came through the doors.

Above the heads of the crowd and away across the open space between the new Library and the nearest great white tower she caught a momentary flash of academic scarlet.

'Colonel Butler will have to hold the Chancellor's party. Sergeant.' With an effort she kept her voice steady.

'He's doing that, madam.'

'And the people upstairs must stay where they are.'

Ballard nodded. 'Mr Collins, sir! I wonder if you would be so good as to go to the Common Room and prevent the ladies and gentlemen there from leaving? You can tell them there's been a slight delay in the schedule.'

Collins and Dickson exchanged glances.

'Perhaps they'd both better go,' said Frances.

Ballard cleared his throat again. 'Mr Dickson found the - ah - object, madam,' he said.

'I thought you might want to have a quick word with him.'

Frances could feel the seconds ticking away from her life.

'Of course ... Thank you, Mr Collins ... Mr Dickson?' Frances attempted to exude confidence. 'I won't keep you a moment, Mr Dickson.'

Dickson nodded to his friend. 'Off you go, Harry.'

They both looked old enough to have seen war service, thought Frances gratefully.

Certainly they were behaving like veterans.

Collins bobbed his head. 'See you upstairs then, Bob.'

Frances watched him depart for five heart-beats before turning back to Dickson. 'You found this thing, Mr Dickson?'

'Briefcase, madam. Dr Penrose's briefcase.'

'Briefcase?' Frances looked at Ballard. 'But all the briefcases were checked.'

'This one was checked,' said Dickson quickly. 'I saw it checked myself.' He pointed to the glass doors. 'Then I took it off of Dr Penrose, and labelled it up like the rest, and took it into the cloakroom.' He indicated the door on his left with a nod of the head.

'Yes?'

'Officer there asked me to check out the cloakroom again, just now - ' another nod, this time to Ballard ' - so I reaches up to the top shelf, to make sure there's nothing else there but the cases, just to make doubly sure, like. And Dr Penrose's case - I can't hardly move it. 'Fact, it took me all my time to lift it down.'

'To - lift it down?'

Dickson sniffed. 'I put the heavy cases on the lower shelves, and the light ones up top. Dr Penrose's was light as a feather, like there was nothing in it. Now it's heavy ...

And, what's more, it's locked. And it wasn't locked when I put it in - because I saw Dr Penrose close it up right here, on this desk-top.'

Frances found herself staring at the door towards which Dickson had nodded, which bore the legend GENTLEMEN.

Heavy - but still on the top shelf - and locked, when it should have been light and unlocked. Those plain facts disposed of the faint hope that Dickson and Ballard had raised a false alarm with good intent, it didn't take a computer to produce that unpalatable print-out of the statistical probabilities for her. But how -

'Madam!' said Sergeant Ballard sharply. Someone who was certainly no gentleman had somehow got into the cloakroom, so that now there was only one adequate thickness of brick between whatever he had left behind him and her own shrinking flesh and blood. But Ballard was right:

this was not the time to inquire further into that particular mystery.

'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 then 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?'

The hand was on her shoulder now - her left shoulder. The right shoulder was beginning to ache.

'Mitchell?' hazarded Frances.

'No-o ... That name doesn't ring a bell...' He shook his head. 'Big fellow - played rugger, but for some reason never got his blue. History scholar - medievalist - clever fellow, but eccentric - '

David Audley, thought Frances with absolute certainty. The specification fitted like a glove.

It was no business of Professor Crowe's to know the names of her senior colleagues, nevertheless. Paul Mitchell, by any other name, was fair enough, since he was here on the ground. But David Audley, somewhere else, was another matter.

'I think you must have him mixed up with somebody else,' she smiled back at him.

'Very probably - very probably!' He returned the smile with another smile. 'Well, Frances my dear - here we are, then.'

They had passed the corner of the building long since, following the curve of a gravel path into an open parkland thick with fallen beech leaves. Directly ahead of her she could hear the subdued conversational quacking of ducks undisturbed by human beings and the need to compete for free handouts of bread.

Crowe squeezed her arm gently. 'I must get back to my dull duties now, my dear.

And you must complete yours. But you've only a yard or two to go.'

He had talked her far beyond any possible requirement of Colonel Butler's, Frances realised as she looked around her. And he had also talked her out of remembering to be terrified until this moment.

Even now he wasn't in any hurry to leave her.

'Thank you. Professor.' In other circumstances he deserved to have a kiss planted on his cheek, but in these ones she could only give him every last extra second back in return for the minutes he had freely given her.

It really was only a few yards: the pond was in a natural hollow in the parkland, and she could already see the far side of it, with the near side, hidden by the slope just ahead, no more than a dozen strides away.

Which was just as well, for her last shreds of nerve were running out with time and distance.

One step after another - three, four, five, six -

Now the convenient path she'd been following obstinately refused to take her any closer, dividing to sweep round on each side of it. But that no longer mattered -

But it did matter.

As she stepped off the path on to the carpet of leaves her high heels sank through into the soggy ground beneath. The fall of the slope made the going even more treacherous, and she teetered wildly as first one foot and then the other became trapped, unbalanced equally by the weight of the briefcase and the fear of what might happen if she dropped it.

The cruising ducks on the pond caught sight of her and instantly changed course, quacking loudly in anticipation of food. Their cries awakened other ducks ashore on the far bank, which at once threw themselves into the water, hydroplaning towards her across it on beating wings and feet. The whole pond exploded into a frenzy of greed.

Frances lost contact with one of her shoes. The English Novel slipped out of her grasp and slithered down the slope, followed by the rest of Dr Penrose's possessions.

The ducks hurled themselves towards the scattered papers.

With a convulsive effort Frances freed her other shoe. But as she did so her foot came out of it and her already shoeless foot slid out from under her. She sat down heavily on her bottom, just managing to clasp the briefcase to her breast before she hit the ground.

Both her stockinged feet rose in the air as the weight of the case pushed her on to her back and she instantly started to toboggan down the slope towards the chaos of squabbling ducks and mud-stained papers.

She cried out in terror, but the sound was lost in a crescendo of panic-stricken quacking and wing-beating as she crashed into the ducks.

For a moment there were ducks everywhere: ducks running over her legs, ducks clumsily trying to climb the slope beside her, ducks attempting impossible vertical take-offs, ducks colliding and snapping and splashing in the shallows.

Their panic infected her. She thrust the case away from her, down between her legs into the filthy duck feathered water in which her own feet were immersed ankle-deep.

Then she was scrabbling feverishly back up the slope on her hands and knees -

Her shoes - she must have her shoes - even if there was no time to put them on.

She was running in her stockinged feet - free from the briefcase at last - sobbing and running as lightly as a deer -

Paul Mitchell appeared from behind a beech tree in her path.

'Hold on there, Frances!'

She swerved to avoid him, but he caught the flying edge of her gown and swung her round.

'No - damn you - ' she struggled instinctively, gasping for breath, but he caught her wrist.

'Hold on there!' Now the other wrist was caught. 'It's all right. Princess - it's all right.

We're far enough away if it goes bang ... and it probably won't go bang anyway. But we don't want to create a disturbance, so just calm down - okay?'

Far enough away?

Frances looked back.

She hadn't run away in the same direction by which she had reached the pond; somehow she had veered to the right, away from the main buildings.

And she had also run much further than she had imagined: she couldn't even see the pond now, and the unspeakable quacking was muted.

Paul released her wrists. 'Better put your shoes on. Princess. The ball's not over yet.'

Frances looked down at her feet. Her tights were soaking and muddy. There was a duck-feather - several duck-feathers - stuck to her ankle. Her knees were muddy too.

And her hands.

She caught her breath. 'Sod it!' she said feelingly.

'That's better,' murmured Paul.

By the grace of God she still had her handbag - somehow its strap had never left the crook of her arm. She extracted a handful of tissues from it and tried to wipe her hands.

'Here - ' Paul knelt down and wiped the worst of the mud from her feet with a large handkerchief. 'Now give me the shoes.'

Her relief began to evaporate. She still had her handbag, but she had left her self-respect behind her by the duck-pond, together with the briefcase.

'Foot, please,' said Paul.

Humiliation choked her. She had panicked, and what was worse, she had panicked in front of Paul Mitchell.

'It fits! It fits!' He grinned up at her. 'You are the true princess, and I claim your hand in marriage - '

There was a rustle of leaves beside them. Balancing on one stockinged foot, Frances turned towards the sound.

'Hullo, Frances,' said James Cable.

And in front of James Cable, she thought desolately. And there was someone else with him too; and beyond them both lay the prospect of reporting to Colonel Butler in the control centre.

'Too late, old man,' said Paul from ground level. 'Cinderella is mine.'

'Sorry you had to carry my can, Frances.' Cable ignored him. 'But the library was supposed to be clean.'

'Clean!' Paul grunted contemptuously. 'Fighting Jack is going to have your guts for garters, James - to use his own inimitable phrase .. . Give us the other shoe. Princess.'

Frances looked down at him. She was never going to be able to outlive that nickname now, not in a thousand years. Even when the exact details of her disgrace had been forgotten she would still be 'princess', Paul would see to that.

'I can do it, thank you.' She slipped her cold, wet foot into the other shoe.

'Suit yourself. One glass slipper is enough.' Paul returned the ruined handkerchief to his pocket and rose to his feet. He looked at the man who had accompanied Cable.

'You've got your chaps out round the pond, Jock?'

Frances put a name to the face.

Maitland.

'Aye.' Maitland considered Frances shrewdly. 'A black briefcase, Mrs Fitzgibbon.

Approximate weight?'

Maitland, Technical Section. Late Royal Engineers.

Weight?

A million tons, the ache in her shoulder advised her. Or was the pain in her imagination?

'About ten pounds - I don't know exactly. Maybe more.' She looked at him helplessly. 'It was heavy.'

'Not the way you were throwing it around,' said Paul. 'I thought you were going to heave it in, the way you were swinging it about ... I tell you, Jock - whatever there is in the case, it's certainly shockproof.'

'Oh, aye?' The shrewd eyes settled on Paul momentarily. 'Well, that's something then. And you just be glad it wasn't you that found it out the hard way, laddie.'

'Oh, I am, believe me.' Paul was unabashed by the jibe; it would take a lot more than anything Maitland could say to dampen him, thought Frances enviously. He wore his self-confidence like a wet-suit.

He winked at her. 'I've much too much imagination for a nasty job like that. In your shoes - or out of them - I'd have been running long before you. Princess.'

'Aye,' agreed Maitland. 'You might have been at that.'

'But that still wouldn't make it the real thing.'

'No, it would not.' Maitland eyed Paul thoughtfully for a couple of seconds before turning back to Frances. 'Ten pounds, you say. And the case would be three ... maybe three and a half pounds.'

'It could have been more.'

'It would be enough. And you left it by the water's edge as instructed?'

Frances's toes squelched inside her shoes. 'Half in the water, actually.'

'No matter.' He came close to smiling. 'It'll do no harm where it is for the time being, thanks to you. It will bide its time, and so shall we.' He nodded to her. 'Thank you, Mrs Fitzgibbon, for your help.'

'Aye,' murmured Paul as Maitland moved away. 'But Fighting Jack will no' bide his time for us - and especially for you, Frances. You remember where to find him?' He glanced at Cable. 'Or are you here on escort duties, James?'

'Me? No - I'm carrying the glad tidings to the library.' Cable gave Frances a lop-sided grin. 'I just came this way round to apologise to you, Frances.'

'It wasn't your fault.' She frowned suddenly. 'What glad tidings?'

'Ask Paul. I've got to go - ask him - ' he pointed at Paul as he started to turn away ' -

he's been in with the Colonel.'

Frances transferred the frown to Paul. 'What glad tidings?'

He shrugged. 'Oh ... owing to unforseen circumstances there will be no Sarajevo this afternoon. All assassinations have been postponed indefinitely, by order of Colonel Butler.'

'What d'you mean?'

He pulled his don't-blame-me face. 'I mean, dear Princess, that if James has overlooked any more infernal devices in the privies there, only innocent bystanders are now available to act as casualties.'

'Don't be - ' she bit off the word as she saw his face change.

'Flippant? I'm not being flippant. The Chancellor and the Lord-Lieutenant are already off the premises - in different directions. And I - I am on my way to the playing fields to check in the RAF chopper Fighting Jack has summoned for the Minister. "Called away on urgent state business" - that's the official word.'

'You mean ... there's no opening ceremony?'

'Correct. No opening - no ceremony. No VIPs - no big bangs. No O'Leary. Operation aborted, and that makes two for you in one day. If I didn't know better I'd think you were jinxed, Fitzgibbon.'

He'd been listening in to her dialogue with Butler, Frances realised. But then Cable had said as much with his parting words. So the powers above were evidently breaking in Paul early to the control of the latest surveillance technology. There were to be no psychological RPV hang-ups allowed to develop in him.

'But ... you know better?' At the last moment she converted the opening words of an angry jibe into a respectful question. Of course, he habitually cloaked his true feelings under flippancy and irreverent chatter about his superiors. But this time it was a thermal covering for anger, and the temptation to throw We're not expecting anything to happen in the library at him was outweighed by her curiosity about that anger.

'Oh, I do - yes.' He glanced at his watch.

'Tell me.' It was no good turning on the charm, he'd never fall for that from her. But just the faintest suggestion of professional admiration might serve. 'Tell me, Paul.'

He looked down at her. Quite deliberately she rubbed the end of her nose with a muddy finger.

He grinned at her. 'Now you've got mud on your nose ... Hell! I guess you're owed it, at that.'

'Oh...' She removed the mud with her handkerchief. 'Yes?'

'Well, I told you he didn't like things - '

'Colonel Butler?'

'Fighting Jack, so-called - yes. Only it seems I made a mistake about his methods of fighting.'

'What methods?'

'That's right ... He hated the whole operation, but he didn't turn it over to anyone else

- '

'So you said on the way up.' She nodded.. 'A matter of duty.'

'So I had the wrong answer.'

It was anger which was making him talk. Being wrong didn't sit well with his ambition. All she needed to do was to keep him burning.

'And what is the right answer?'

'Huh! The right answer ... is that he had to stay in charge of it so he could screw it up at the one time when nobody could stop him - when it was actually in progress.'

If he was right that was shrewd thinking on Butler's part, thought Frances. An operation like this was like an old bombing mission in World War Two: up to the moment of take-off the pilot could always be replaced, but not when he was half-way to the target.

Only it also entailed the same risk too: he had to come home with his bombs wasted or still on board, and with an explanation.

'All he needed was an opportunity. And you gave it to him with your briefcase.

Princess - "The Princess and the Wicked Briefcase", by Jack Butler. The ultimate fairy story!'

'But -'

'He had this chopper on stand-by at Driffield, and nobody even knew about it! He was just waiting for one thing to go wrong - that's all he wanted, just one deviation.'

Behavioural deviation? Even now, after everything that had happened to her, she couldn't trust herself to echo the jargon out loud.

'The briefcase -?'

'The Library was a designated safe area.' Suddenly the shape of his mouth changed, both corners drawn down. '"If a designated safe area isn't safe, Mitchell, then the basic assumptions of this operation are equally unsafe. And that changes our parameters."'

Parameters? One thing was for sure: Colonel Butler knew how to fight technology with its own jargon.

'What does that mean?' She watched him consult the time on his wrist. 'Or what did it mean?'

'"I don't mind risking Fitzgibbon, that's what she's paid for - " That's you dealt with, Frances. "But a Minister of the Crown is entitled to adequate protection" - it meant he didn't even phone London. He aborted on his own authority, that's what it meant.'

Frances found herself on Colonel Butler's side. Or at least partially so: he had done her the compliment of treating her like anyone else, uncomfortable though the treatment had been. She owed him something for that.

'Well, it wasn't a safe area, Paul.' And I've got the wet feet, ruined tights, muddy suit and damaged self-respect to prove it, she thought miserably.

In the distance the ducks quacked their agreement.

'It wasn't?' For a second he looked through her. Then he focused on her. 'You know, you were never in any danger. Princess. He just let you sweat to prove a point.'

'He - what? '

'That's right. Just to prove a point. You were his grandstand play.'

Frances clenched her teeth. 'You mean - there was no bomb? How d'you know that?'

'For sure, we don't know. But I'll give you ten to one against. Or twenty to one, if you like.'

She remembered the look Maitland had given him when he implied almost as explicitly that the bomb was imaginary. 'You know something that I don't know.'

Her anger was defusing his. 'I know we picked up those two chaps of yours -

Brunton and Penrose.

Brunton was all set to score with a Moral Philosophy student in his rooms - a female student, nothing queer about Brunton ... And Dr Penrose was on his way back to the Library. He'd been posting a letter. He didn't need his briefcase for that.'

Frances swallowed. 'Someone else could have tampered with it. The cloakroom wasn't out of bounds, damn it.'

'With those two old watchdogs looking on? And they were watching for anything suspicious - and since they would have caught the first blast you can bet your sweet life they were watching.'

'But somebody did tamper with it all the same,' Frances persisted.

'So what if they did?' His lip twisted. 'The only person who was ever at risk was whichever of those two picked it up first ... that's what Brunton's girlfriend would call empirical verification.'

She had to stop being angry. 'If there was a bomb it would be remotely-controlled -

Butler said as much.'

'Is, not was. We know that - he couldn't say anything else. All the O'Leary bombings in Ulster have been copy-book remote-controlled jobs, it's his speciality. The whole operation was based on that, for God's sake, Frances - ' his voice sharpened ' - this whole aborted operation, that is.' He consulted his watch again. 'Over which obsequies I must now go and preside, while you go to receive your accolade from the butcher.'

Accolade?

She had never been in any danger - ?

'No - wait, Paul!' She reached out a dirty hand to stop him. 'I still don't understand.'

He grimaced at her. 'Christ, Frances! Don't you ever read any of the technical handouts? Or the daily papers, come to that?'

'What d'you mean?'

'Didn't you read about the local radio-taximen screwing up the Delta rockets on Cape Canaveral?'

'Yes. But -' Frances stopped. Any radio-controlled device could be set off by any signal on the right frequency. But that was old hat. 'You can jam the signal -'

Again she stopped. It wasn't good enough... They had brought three of O'Leary's prime targets together not simply to save them, and certainly not to ensure that she would never be in any danger, but to ambush O'Leary.

'Of course we can jam it.' He swung half round and pointed towards the university buildings through the trees away to his right. 'With what we've got up there we can jam half of Europe - the cream of Signals Intelligence raring to go, all the. latest West German-American equipment the SIGINT boys have been begging to use - Top Secret U

equipment.'

Frances stared past the finger at the high rise concrete towers. Top Secret U put her way out of her league.

'We can not only jam it, we can trace it.' The finger was part of the hand again, and the hand was an exasperated fist six inches from her face. 'A ten-second trace within ten feet over a one mile radius, and enough manpower to hit the source of the signal within half a minute on the campus - '

For a moment she thought he was going to hit her too.

'- and that bloody stupid old woman up there backs his prejudice against that certainty -'

In that second, when Frances was just beginning to object to the term 'bloody stupid old woman', when 'bloody stupid old man' would have served just as well, the briefcase exploded.

CHAPTER FIVE

The fifth successive match flared, licked the already-charred edge of the newspaper but failed once again to ignite it, and went out, leaving Frances in darkness.

She prodded blindly through the wire mesh of the incinerator, cursing her own irrationality. The matches were damp and the paper was damper, and it would have been far easier and much more sensible simply to have dropped the whole pathetic bundle into the dustbin to await the next garbage collection; and even if she could induce the newspaper to smoulder it probably wouldn't generate enough heat to burn up Marilyn's suspender belt and almost-see-through blouse and plastic raincoat; and even if they did catch fire then the flames would fail to consume the bits and pieces in the cheap handbag, the Rose Glory and Babe containers, which would survive to clog the bars at the bottom of the incinerator, to the annoyance of old Mr Snow when he burnt the next lot of garden rubbish unsuitable for his beloved compost heap.

And now she had dropped the sodding matches...

Yet even as she groped for the torch which was also somewhere at her feet, she recognised the necessity of Marilyn's destruction.

Marilyn was dead and gone - her fingers touched the cold metal of the torch - and Marilyn had never been alive anyway. But there was something about Marilyn which frightened her nevertheless.

She clicked the torch button.

In the beam of light she saw clearly for the first time the stick of wood with which she had been poking the incinerator. Only, it wasn't a stick of wood, it was a cricket stump.

It had been the first thing that had come to her hand in the garden shed, she hadn't bothered to look at it, it was just a stick to push down the bundle into the incinerator. It hadn't been a cricket stump then, because there was no way a cricket stump could have got into the garden shed.

And yet now it was unquestionably a cricket stump.

There had been a bag, an ancient scuffed leather bag, full of cricketing gear which she had inherited with the rest of his worldly goods -

With all my worldly goods I thee endow -

In fact, there had been a weird and wonderful collection of sporting equipment scattered through the tin trunks of clothes dating back to his prep school days. In his short life Robbie seemed to have tried his hand at everything from fives to fencing by way of boxing and badminton.

All of which she had given outright to the Village Sports Club.

Not, repeat not ... not with the intention of eliminating him from the reckoning, as she now purposed to obliterate Marilyn. She had known from the start that there was no way of doing that - had known it instinctively, and because of that instinct had set out to embrace the inevitable by accepting it and making use of it.

Making use of it -

That was why his dressing gown, which was good and warm and only needed its sleeves turned back, enfolded her now.

That was why, although she had given away all his adult clothes to Oxfam, she had kept the orange-and-black striped rugger shirts and white sweaters he had worn as a fifteen-year-old, which fitted her perfectly; all of which, with the Cash's name tapes identifying them as the property of R. G. FITZGIBBON, could hardly be more explicitly memorable every time she touched them -

Robbie, not in the morning and at the going down of the sun shall I remember you, but beside the washing machine, and on the clothes-line, and at the ironing board, and in the airing cupboard, where I shall he expecting you and you cannot take me by surprise.

She stared down at the cricket stump in her hand.

Marilyn and Robbie.

But Robbie wouldn't have fancied Marilyn at all, she wouldn't have been his type -

Or would she?

Or would he?

* * *

The snap of a twig underfoot and the polite warning cough and the powerful beam of another torch caught Frances almost simultaneously, crouched over the incinerator like a murderess disposing of her victim's belongings, clad in nothing but her underwear and a dressing gown which obviously did not belong to her.

She turned quickly, swinging the feebler beam of her own torch to challenge the intruder, but his light blinded her.

'Mrs Fitzgibbon?' There was only half a question mark after the name; it was as though he was as much concerned to reassure her that he was not a night prowler as to confirm her identity to his own satisfaction.

'Yes - ' She realised that she knew the voice, but there was something which prevented her from bridging the gap between that knowledge and full recognition; also, in the same instant, a breath of cooler air on her body warned her that the treacherous dressing gown was gaping open in the light. She dropped the stump hurriedly and pulled the folds together at her throat.

'Who - ' She managed at last to direct her own beam on his face. 'Oh!'

She knew why she had not been able to put a name to the voice.

Messenger: The king comes here tonight.

Lady Macbeth .... Frances Warren (Upper Sixth) Lady Macbeth: Thou'rt mad to say it!

Except there had been no messenger to warn her of his coming, so that he had caught her in total disarray, with no words - without even any coherent thoughts - to conceal her surprise.

'My dear -' He snapped off his torch, leaving only hers to illuminate him' - I do apologise for appearing like this, without warning ... and at this time of night too.'

Without warning, and at this time of night: the politeness rang hollow inside Frances's mind. With or without warning, more like, and at any time of the day or night

- here - for God's sake, here - that required more than an apology.

'And I'm afraid I startled you ... But I was walking up the path to your front door, and I saw your torch, you see...'

He was talking like a casual caller, or as a friendly neighbour might have done if she had had any friendly neighbours, or even as dear Constable Ellis would have done on one of his fatherly don't-worry-I'm-keeping-an-eye-on-the-place visits, which invariably occurred within twenty-four hours of her return from whatever she'd been doing if she was away more than a week - it had even been in the back of her mind before he had spoken that it might be Constable Ellis behind the light.

All of which somehow made it worse, because of all people he was furthest away from being a casual caller or a friendly neighbour or a fatherly policeman, and the comparisons only emphasised that infinite distance.

That's quite all right. Sir Frederick.' But that was a lie, and a palpable lie too, in spite of the cool voice she could hear like an answering tape played back to her: if he knew anything he must know that she was surprised half out of her wits at his sudden appearance out of the dark in her back garden, away from his own proper setting which was as much part of him as was the heavy gilded frame a part of the portrait which hung above the fireplace in his office. And, Christ! If it had been old Admiral Hall himself who had stepped out of the darkness with a polite 'Mrs Fitzgibbon' on his lips she would have been hardly more disconcerted!

A lie, then - to be qualified into a half-truth at the least.

'I didn't recognise your voice for a moment, though,' said the coolly taped voice, her own voice.

Well, that was closer to the truth, because in the four years - or nearly four years -

that she had worked for him he had hardly spoken to her four times directly; when she had been Group Captain Roskill's secretary the year before those nearly-four-years, carrying and fetching between them, he had talked to her more often than that, and smiled at her too.

As he was smiling at her now, if she was reading the shadow-lines on his face correctly in the feeble light of her own torch; but this time the smile frightened her, shaking her torch-hand so that the other shadows danced and crowded round behind him, like the uninvited ghosts from her own past whom he had disturbed - Robbie and Mrs Robert Fitzgibbon, and Frances Warren (Upper Sixth), and even the new half-ghost of Marilyn Francis which she had been trying to exorcise in the incinerator.

She didn't want him to smile at her, because whatever had brought him here could not be a smiling matter, but she couldn't turn off the smile.

'In the circumstances that's hardly surprising.' He chuckled briefly, and the sound seemed to her as far from amusement as the shadow-smile had been. 'For a moment I hardly recognised you, my dear Frances. They've made you blonde again - and frizzed your hair. And you're wearing those contact lenses, of course.' He nodded as though he could still see her clearly. 'Well ... I wouldn't quarrel with the lenses, but I can't say I like your hair that way.'

'No?' She put her hand involuntarily to her head,

which she had forgotten was still outwardly Marilyn's. 'Well, I can't say that I like it much either. Sir Frederick, to be honest.'

Or not to be honest, as the case might be, the still-unexorcised Marilyn whispered in her inner ear; and that involuntary gesture had been pure Marilyn, too. A dead give-away, in spite of the cool Frances-voice.

She switched off her own torch, enveloping them both in total darkness, and for a moment total silence also.

'Ye-es ... But it was entirely right for British-American at the time, nevertheless, as I recall now. And as I'm sure you appreciated very well. That is to say, you understood...'

He trailed off, as though the related subjects of her appearance and her assignment in British-American were of no great interest to him any more. 'What an absolutely marvellous night-sky you have out here in the country! You know, we have nothing like this in central London, or very rarely - galaxies like grains of sand - and I cannot help thinking that it's a bad thing for us Londoners ... The stars ... without them one is inclined to lose one's sense of ... not proportion so much as insignificance, I suspect -

wouldn't you say?'

Insignificance?

Was entirely right for British-American at the time.

A statement of fact - was: with that he eliminated the possibility that she had been taken off British-American because of some mere administrative stupidity. He knew all about that, just as he knew all about her, and all this was as near to an apology for seeming to push her around as he could bring himself to make.

Away in the far distance, beyond the immediate circles of darkness and silence which surrounded them both, she could hear the faint drone and snarl of cars jockeying for position on the long pull up Hammond's Hill on the motorway. And she fancied that if she listened carefully enough she ought to be able to hear the computer-whine of her own brain merging the non-information she possessed already with the non-information he had just given her, and, more than that, adding to it his presence here now - a very large and significant mountain come uninvited to a very small and insignificant Mohammed.

* * *

After the bomb there had been Colonel Butler -

'Thank you, Mrs Fitzgibbon ... Well, there's nothing more you can usefully do here, so you'd best go home, and I'll call you if I need you ... When Mitchell has seen the Minister off he'll give you one of the cars.'

* * *

He was good, was Colonel Butler, she had decided at that point, observing him control the ant-heap confusion without fuss, without raising his voice, without a nuance of I-told-you-so: it had been like watching a re-enactment of Kipling's

If

by one quiet, ugly-handsome, totally decisive man who somehow made the time and had exactly the right word of reassurance or encouragement or command for everyone, from the slightly panicky ministerial security officer, whose minister had been whisked away from him by Paul Mitchell, to a Jock Maitland drenched with muddy water and plastered with feathers and flying duck entrails but still - or even more - dourly and gloriously Scottish -

* * *

'- ye wain night, sairr - and a lateral charge too, of aboot six poounds ... But that doesna'

make a nothing of the otherr - he's a trricky one, this fella'...'

'Happen you're right too, major - ' Colonel Butler had smiled at him, and it was that rare and private change in his own expression which purged his ugliness; and at the same time the Lancashire which Paul had noticed peeped through the Sandhurst accent, so that for a moment it was like speaking with like ' - so you get yoursel' over to t'other, an'

doan't let that young chap Pirie lay a finger on it. He wants t'be a hero. I rely on you not to let him make his wife a widow -'

* * *

The other

and

t'other

had confused her for a moment, but then she had disentangled them:

There had been a second bomb.

* * *

'Oh sure. Princess, there were two of them ... hold on a sec while I fix the seat for you... James's legs aren't as pretty as yours, but they are somewhat longer... Because that's Comrade O'Leary's

modus operand!

when he's expected. And the trick is... There! I think that will do nicely... the trick is to distinguish which is the diversion and which is the real killer. Is A intended to set you up for B? Or is

B

intended to divert you from

A

?'

(Under his Chobham-armoured assurance Paul was still angry, but there was something odd about that anger after Colonel Butler had made such a fool of him; and therefore, while one part of her wanted to slip away in the car's nicely-adjusted seat, as far and as fast and as quickly as possible from the University of North Yorkshire, there was another part which wanted to stay and find out why Paul was still angry when he should be humiliated; because, to give him his due, Paul was usually ready to admit when he was wrong.)

'Well, I suppose I should be glad that Colonel Butler got it right.' (She had to find the chink in the armour to make him say more.)

'Well ... that we don't really know, do we? And now we'll never know, because he changed the rules.' (He had looked at her curiously then, and she knew she had found the chink: there was always something which Paul knew that no one else knew, and which he shouldn't have known.) 'But I tell you this. Princess - there's something very odd going on, and that's a fact.'

'I wouldn't dispute that.' (After swapping British-American for the new Library, and Mr Cavendish's letters for O'Leary and The Land of Faerie that was an understatement of the truth.)

'I don't mean your little bomb, duckie -'

'It wasn't little.' (She had shivered at the memory; even duckie was a painful reminder of things best forgotten.) ('And don't call me... that.'

'Okay, Princess. But I mean ... they hauled you off a job to come up here, didn't they?'

'So what?'

'So I've got news for you. They took me off a job too.'

'I thought you were Colonel Butler's Number Two?'

'His Number Two? That's a laugh.' (But he hadn't laughed.) 'More like his errand boy. He didn't know what to do with me - he didn't want me under his feet, but he didn't trust me out of his sight either.'

'He sent you to collect me.'

'Oh sure. And to brief you. So I was safely away from the stake-out here, and he knew exactly what I was doing. An errand boy's job ... And when you got here he didn't know what to do with you either - right?'

(She had had no answer to that: it had been no less than the truth.)

'Come on, Frances - don't be dim! This isn't our scene - you weren't selected and trained at great expense to carry bombs from one place to another, and I'm not a glorified taxi-driver-cum-public-relations-man. Forty-eight hours ago I was all packed for Washington, to be David Audley's Number Two - packed and briefed. And I don't know what you were tarted up for, but I'll bet it wasn't for a fancy-dress ball. But whatever it was, it was bugging you when I picked you up, so it has to be bugging you a lot more now - what the hell we're supposed to be doing here?'

(Of course, it had been bugging her. So now it was all the more important to find out what he made of the nonsense.)

'I thought we were here to catch O'Leary, Paul.'

'Is that what you've been doing? All I've been doing is watch how Fighting Jack does his thing - I know a lot more about him than Comrade O'Leary, as of now, Princess.

Which may be highly educational, but hardly makes up for not being in Washington, I tell you.'

'Well, don't look at me, I don't know - ' (He had been doing just that: looking at her narrowly, really looking at her, not so much to check whether she was saying less than she knew but rather as though by adding her to himself, like two individually meaningless jigsaw pieces, he might catch a glimpse of the whole design.) ' - and anyway I'm going home, thank God!'

'Oh, no! He's sending you home - Fighting Jack is. And that's a very different thing ...

You're missing the point, Princess. And that's not like you.'

'Flattery will get you nowhere.'

'Not flattery. It's just that I need straw to make my bricks.'

'And I don't?'

'Sometimes you don't, I've noticed. I was hoping this might be one of those times.'

'Not this time. Why don't you ask Colonel Butler?'

'Ask Fighting Jack? You're kidding!'

'No, I'm not ... kidding.' (She had heard the anger in her voice under the weariness, but had no longer cared to conceal it.) ('You seem to have some sort of bee in your bonnet about him, but I think he's pretty damn good, what I've seen of him. So why don't you stop bitching - ' (Sod it! She had used that word again!) ' - stop complaining and just ask him straight out?'

(He had laughed then.) 'Oh, Princess - you are under par! That's the whole point -

that's what is really odd about us being here, and we don't know why - that's bad enough. It doesn't seem to make sense, but it has to somehow, that's all ... we just can't work it out.'

'Yes?' (She had shivered again: the aftermath of fear was this bone-deep chill, a deja-vu of the grave.) 'So what?'

'Christ, Frances! He doesn't know the answer either - like, he's a convoy commander, and they've sent him a couple of battle-cruisers - '

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Paul ... spare me the naval history.'

'What?'

'I don't even know what a battle-cruiser is - and I don't want to know.'

'Oh - sorry. Princess. But what I mean is - '

* * *

'Marvellous!' said Sir Frederick Clinton. 'That must be Orion - the belt with the little dagger ... and that reddish star in Taurus - '

* * *

' - what I mean is. Butler doesn't know why we're here either. As if he hasn't got enough to worry about as it is ... But then he's a crafty old devil - which is why he's packing you off home,

Frances dear.'

'What d'you mean, Paul?'

'Top brass sends you up - he sends you packing. If we're meant to be a team he's splitting us up before we've got started. So if they send you back again they're going to have to do some explaining. I tell you, he may look like the very model of an old-time major-general, but he's one smart operator, believe me. I've been watching him - I haven't had anything else to do but watch him - and I've changed my mind about him.

He's bloody smart.'

* * *

'- and that reddish star in Taurus must be Aldebaran. And there's the Plough, bright as anything - quite splendid! Do you know about stars, Frances?'

Butler, thought Frances. She had learnt precious little about Comrade O'Leary (in fact, she had learnt more about John Ronald Reuel Tolkien than about Comrade O'Leary), and even less about surveillance technology, but she had had a grandstand view of Colonel Butler in action, and so had Paul Mitchell.

'No, Sir Frederick.'

It was no longer totally black. Her eyes had become used to the darkness, so that she could make out the loom of him against the darker mass of shrubbery.

'A pity, with this sky of yours.'

Butler. But why Butler? It didn't make sense.

The darkness which remained was a comfort to her: it not only equalised Robbie's old dressing 99 gown with what would surely be an immaculate overcoat, but it also concealed her bewilderment.

'Yes. But do you know about battle-cruisers?'

'Battle-cruisers?' She could hear his surprise, the darkness seemed to magnify it.

'Battle-cruisers?'

She had the initiative now, but she would have to work hard to keep it.

'They're no good for convoy work, I believe.'

'Yes .. . that is to say, no ... unless the enemy was using some powerful surface ships as commerce raiders, I suppose...' He trailed off uncertainly.

'So what were battle-cruisers used for?'

'What were they used for?' He paused for a moment. 'Well, if I remember correctly, the theory behind them was big guns plus high speed, but not much armour. So they could catch anything, and run away from anything they couldn't sink ... Though I don't think it worked out quite like that in practice ...' He paused again. 'But I thought you were an expert in fairy stories - I didn't know you were interested in naval matters.'

'I'm not.' Frances decided to let the negative serve for both subjects; it would be too exhausting to explain away the first misapprehension, and it really didn't matter any more, anyway.

'No?' The single word was heavy with curiosity and caution, carefully packed in his habitual politeness. He had decided to concede the initiative, and was waiting to see what she would do with it.

'But Paul Mitchell is.'

'Paul Mitchell? I thought military history was his special subject. In fact, I'm sure it is.'

'Well, he's into naval history now. Sir Frederick.'

'Is he now? With a particular emphasis on battle-cruisers?'

'Not particularly. He has some extremely complicated theories - mathematical theories - about the size of convoys in the last war.'

'Indeed?' He was smiling at her again. She couldn't see the smile, but she could sense it. 'That would be like him, of course - he has an insatiable appetite for facts and figures

... and for facts in general. It's the historian in him ... And you get on well with Paul, do you, Frances?'

If we're meant to be a team he's splitting us up before we've got started, thought Frances.

He meaning Butler -

It was time to stop sparring.

'So where did the battle-cruisers come in?' Sir Frederick jogged her obligingly.

'Yes. Well - ' Frances drew a long careful breath ' - he was wondering - Paul was wondering ... and so am I, Sir Frederick ... what a pair of battle-cruisers were doing in Colonel Butler's convoy, where they were absolutely useless - where they weren't needed and they weren't even wanted.'

'Ah - I see...' For a moment there was silence between them. 'Yes ... and where one of the battle-cruisers was very nearly sunk without a trace this afternoon, to no very good purpose too - so it seemed to you, eh?'

There was no answer to that, only a memory which would have been ridiculous if it had not been still so terrifying: sunk without a trace in a duck-pond, H.M.S. Fitzgibbon.

'And did you come to any conclusion about this ... incomprehensible piece of naval strategy, Frances?'

Frances swallowed. 'Not at the time. I think Paul was close, but he didn't have enough to go on.'

I need straw to make my bricks.

'But now you have enough to go on?'

He was here, standing in the darkness of her garden, that was all she had to go on, thought Frances. And if that was enough to make her reach for a conclusion, that certainty, it was still not enough to make the conclusion a believable one.

'I require an answer to that question, Frances.'

That was a direct order, as direct and explicit as he could make it short of grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking an answer out of her; require - she could remember David Audley defining the difference between 'request'

and 'require' in a way which made time stand still over two centuries of military and diplomatic semantics - require left a subordinate not a millimetre of choice, one way or another.

'Yes, sir.'

'Then why do you think you and Paul were sent to Yorkshire?'

'To watch Colonel Butler.'

'What makes you think that?'

Require was still in force.

'Because that's what we did, in effect.'

'Yes?'

'Because nothing else makes sense.'

'Go on.'

'And you are here now.'

'Which you think makes it a matter of internal security. Go on.'

She was tired, and the thick serge material of the old dressing gown no longer kept the night chill from her shoulders.

'Which still doesn't make much sense ... sir.'

'And do you think Colonel Butler could reach the same conclusion - that you were sent to watch him?'

'I don't know Colonel Butler well enough to answer that. I didn't have long enough to watch him.'

'But I require your opinion.'

Require.

'I think ... no, I don't think so. I think - Paul thought - that he wanted to know why we'd been sent to him, and that was why he sent me back home. If you want me to go back again to watch him I'll have to have a much better cover story.'

'He smelt a rat, then?'

'I wouldn't put it as strongly as that.' Frances thought hard for a moment. It occurred to her that Butler would have to be damn good to have worked out what they had been doing, since they hadn't known themselves what they were doing.

But then Butler was damn good.

'Yes?'

'I think he simply didn't know what to make of us ... I suppose it depends whether or not he's expecting to be watched. If he is, then ... yes. If he isn't ... then I don't think so.

He had a lot of other matters on his hands.'

Silence.

'Good.'

More silence. It was almost like being blind: she could sense the presence of the things she knew were around her. Sir Frederick two yards in front of her, the incinerator on her right, the cricket stump at her feet, and on her left the scatter of Marilyn's proofs of identity bulging out of the plastic handbag - Birth Certificate and National Insurance card. Post Office Savings book and Agency references ... even the misspelt letter from

'Dad' and the holiday snapshot of Marilyn in her bikini, posed self-consciously against the alleged beach umbrellas of Torremolinos. So much effort for nothing!

'What is your opinion of Colonel Butler?'

It was a logical question after her last answer. And it required - required - the truth.

Nothing else would do.

'I think he's good.'

Well, that was nothing more than the truth, anyway. If she was expected to have noticed more than that it was their hard luck, they'd have to go to Paul for that.

'But you said you didn't see very much of him really, did you?'

'No, I suppose not.' The truth requirement roused her obstinacy. 'But I liked what I saw.'

'Yes. But that wasn't a great deal, was it?' He pressed the point again, like a man committed to pushing a door marked 'Pull'. 'I'm afraid things didn't go quite according to plan there. We were expecting him to keep you alongside him a little longer - as he did with Paul.'

If by 'things' he was referring to a certain briefcase, then things had certainly not gone quite according to plan, thought Frances. Yet she had never observed such insensitivity in him before, and he wasn't the sort of man who pushed 'Pull' doors. So he was after something else.

'I think he sent me to the Library because it was supposed to be safe. Sir Frederick.'

'Because you were a woman, d'you mean?'

He was goading her, quite deliberately.

'Possibly. I gather he doesn't altogether approve of women, that's true ... But I'd guess it was also because I'd never worked for him before, so he didn't want to have to worry about how I'd perform.'

'Yes?' He'd wanted more, and now he knew it was coming.

'You can check with Paul - as you say, he saw more than I did...' And what would Paul say? she wondered. Well, Paul was no fool, and even with no straw for his bricks he'd been way ahead of her this time. In fact, he'd had the answer in the palm of his hand - he'd grasped it, but he simply hadn't recognised it. Which wasn't really surprising, because it was an almost unbelievable answer.

The enormity of it - her answer, her conclusion - hit her again.

They had been watching Colonel Butler.

And it was a matter of internal security.

She knew she was right. Even if Sir Frederick hadn't yet confirmed it in so many direct words, she knew she was right, just as she knew that Colonel Butler was formidably good at his job even though she had observed him directly for only a few minutes. But she also knew that there was something not right - something not wrong, but nevertheless not right either - with her conclusion.

And part of that not-rightness lay in the way Sir Frederick was waiting so patiently for her to put her thoughts together, too patiently for the circumstances, as though she had all the time in the world; time which he couldn't have, otherwise he wouldn't be here, in the dark of her garden.

'I don't know ...' What he wanted her to explain couldn't rationally be explained; even in the dark it would be like taking her clothes off in public before an eager and critical crowd. Yet his patience hemmed her in on all sides. 'I suppose you could say I saw him when he was up against it - first on a job he hated and then when everything was going wrong ... and you can't measure time in minutes at times like that.'

'So you had enough ... of that sort of time to observe Colonel Butler to your satisfaction?' He sounded unsatisfied.

'I thought so, yes.' She knew it wasn't going to be enough.

Thought?'

'After what you've said - '

'Forget what I've said.' He cut her off quickly. 'I haven't said anything.'

'But you have.'

'Then you must consider the possibility that you may have misinterpreted it.' He paused. 'You were very impressed with Colonel Butler's performance under stress.

That's understandable - he's an extremely competent man. He wouldn't be where he is, doing what he's doing, if he wasn't. You're only telling me what I already know, Frances.'

'What else do you want?' She heard her voice sharpen defensively. 'What else do you expect?'

'From you - I don't want sentences beginning "I suppose you could say". I know what I'd say. I want to know what you can say. I want to know what you felt.'

Now he was spelling it out, what she had already sensed. And now she could also sense the urgency beneath his patience, like blast-furnace heat through thick asbestos.

But how did he know that she had felt anything about Colonel Butler? And even if he thought he knew - he couldn't know a thing like that, it wasn't possible to do more than think it - why did he want to know what she felt? Of what conceivable value would that be to him?

'Come on, Frances - ' the voice out of the dark was gentle, but inexorable ' - just tell me what you felt about him. It's quite simple.'

'It isn't simple - ' Her own voice sounded harsh and uncertain by comparison. 'No, I don't mean that - it's very simple. But it isn't rational. I mean, I can't explain it rationally.'

'Then don't explain it. Just describe it.'

'But it's too fanciful.'

'So ... you wouldn't put it in a report to Brigadier Stocker - I accept that. But you are not reporting to Stocker now, you are reporting to me. And I want an answer.'

Frances felt a stirring of fear again, but this time it was a fear she could handle.

Indeed, it was almost - or not almost, but actually - a sensation she found pleasing: if fear was a habit-forming drug then there were some varieties of it to which she was immune, like the briefcase fear; but this variety was indistinguishable from pure excitement, like the recurrent dream of bird-flight she had had in the old days - in Robbie's days - when she had not understood how she could fly, or why she was flying, but only that the ground was falling away from her and she was free of it.

So now she was in the middle of something she didn't understand, something which was very perilous - to be off the record with Sir Frederick must be altogether perilous: if she was flying, then it was as Icarus had flown, towards the sun - but at least for a moment she was free of restraint, and of the shyness which always clogged her opinions. 'You want me to be - you require me - to be fanciful?'

'Require? Oh yes, I see - "require" according to David Audley - is that it?' The smile was there in the darkness again. 'Well, then -

yes. I require it, Frances.'

'All right. Then I had a feeling - a fancy - about Colonel Butler. If you like ... an instinct.'

'An instinct ... Yes?' 'I said I thought he was good.' She hesitated.

'So you did.' 'It was a Freudian choice of words. I didn't mean simply good at his job

- efficient, formidable - I meant good.'

This time she understood his silence. It was an awkward word to digest, even an anaconda might think twice before trying to swallow it whole.

'Good .. . meaning virtuous?' He surprised her by not even attempting to belittle the word down to manageable size with an easier one.

'Yes.'

'I see. Which accounts for your disquiet - whatever side a virtuous man is on, that's the right side. Do you think that is invariably the case?'

'Of course not.' 'But in this case you hope so - even if it makes your other guess wrong?'

'Is it wrong?' 'A good question. Do you often have instincts like this about people?'

He was playing with her, thought Frances bitterly. And yet she could have sworn that a moment before, when he had required her to tell him what he felt about Colonel Butler, he had been deadly serious.

But that moment was over. 'Why are you so interested in my so-called instinct. Sir Frederick?'

'Not only yours, my dear.'

'But mine in this instance.'

'True ... Then for two reasons.' He paused. 'You see, everyone has the faculty of instinct, more or less - it's a survival from our animal past. Our pre-prehistoric legacy, if you like.'

'And I have a special legacy, do I?'

'As it happens, we think you do, Frances. Unfortunately, however, it's a legacy in a very doubtful currency. Because in modern human beings it is heavily devalued -

grossly distorted, more accurately ... by reason in the first place - the Darwinian essential of instinct is independence from reason - and by emotion in the second. In the male of the species reason is the main problem, and in the female it is emotion - generally speaking, of course.'

Chauvinist! thought Frances.

'Is that so?' she said coldly.

'Now in your case, Frances, reason and emotion are probably both problems.

Whereas in Paul's case reason is undoubtedly by far the larger problem - '

They had probably been unable to find any emotions at all in Paul, except possibly anger and pride, decided Frances.

' - so much so that he'll probably have to make do without instinct altogether, and manage with experience and knowledge. But then fortunately he has an exceptional memory, and very considerable powers of observation ... But that's beside the point. In your case, Frances, it's almost as though reason and emotion sometimes cancel each other out, and you are left ... as it were ... with pure instinct.'

'Sometimes?'

'Yes. In the controlled tests we gave you a few years ago - and as confirmed by subsequent field observations - we gave you a score of four out of ten on a notional scale.'

'Four?' Frances felt deflated. If she was a pre-prehistoric female animal under the skin, she wasn't a very efficient one, clearly. 'Four?'

'Four out of ten.'

'So I can't rely on my instinct, then.'

'You certainly cannot. If you could you'd be an animal, my dear - you wouldn't be talking to me here in the dark, you'd be hunting me for supper. There's a million years of evolution, not to mention a few thousand years of civilisation, between nine-point-nine out of ten and four out of ten.'

She stared at him. Four-out-of-ten lacked night-vision too. And four-out-of-ten was cold and confused.

'Then ... if my score is so low ... why -'

'Low? My dear Frances, it isn't low. The consistent mark for instinct - among experienced officers - is two. And anything near three is exceptional.'

The chilly fingers between her shoulder blades were not those of the night. 'And four?'

'Four is phenomenal. Literally ... because we've never had a four. Which means sometimes - no, I'm not going into the details. One day I'll arrange a meeting between you and our psychological people. Only you'll have to be careful with them - four years ago they wanted to keep you and take you to pieces to see how you worked. Huh!'

Frances frowned into the darkness between them. Four years before there had been a lot of tests - everything from conventional I.Q. papers and ink blots to weird guessing games and an elaborate version of hunt-the-thimble. They had seemed to go on for an unconscionable time; in fact, hers had gone on longer than anyone else's, which she had assumed was either because she was a woman or because she was a borderline candidate. But she had nevertheless taken them all for granted.

Well, her phenomenal four-out-of-ten instinct hadn't worked then, that was for sure!

she decided grimly.

'The fact was - and is - that you are more valuable to us, my dear,' concluded Sir Frederick. 'But let's go inside - you must be perished with cold. It was altogether thoughtless of me to keep you out here in the dark, beautiful though it is, your night sky.'

In the dark, thought Frances. She had been in the dark and she was still in the dark.

'No - wait. You said there were two reasons. Sir Frederick.' In the light she would be over-awed by him: out here the odds were evened up.

'So I did. Very well ... you had never served under Butler before. If we'd told you to go and observe him then I believe your instinct would have been distorted. You would never have had that one clear vision you had today. And that was what I wanted you to have, Frances. It was the first thing you had to have.'

The first thing?

'But I was wrong. It wasn't a clear vision.'

'Have I said that?'

'You've implied it. Sir Frederick.'

'I've implied no such thing. You've doubted your instinct, and that's good. You must never rate it higher than a suspicion - but that's a very different thing.'

'Are you telling me I'm right about Colonel Butler?'

'No, Frances. I'm telling you I think you're right.

I think - and I rate two-point-five - I think that in a few minutes ... a few of your out-of-time minutes, Frances ... in a few minutes you came up with an instinctive certainty which our top personnel selection experts couldn't give me in a year. Because they'd be afraid to - they don't have the equipment to do it, the equipment doesn't exist - so I couldn't require them to do so. Do you understand now?'

Top personnel selection experts.

Personnel selection.

Selection.

They had been watching Colonel Butler.

And it was a matter of internal security -

She had had the right answer, almost. Prompted by Paul, and spurred on by Sir Frederick's presence, she had had the right answer, only she had got it back to front.

'You're going to promote him.'

'Not quite. We may promote him. We are contemplating his promotion. But there are questions to be answered first.' Sir Frederick emitted a sound which she couldn't identify in the dark. Perhaps it was a back-to-front laugh. 'My dear Frances, you are doing something now which the workers of the world want to do ... and what the democratic principle is supposed to do ... although looking at the back benches of the Commons - and the front benches too in places - I have my doubts about that. The only thing you can say for it is that it works better than behind the Iron Curtain, a lot better ...

You are participating in the election of your boss. Indeed, you have the veto.'

'The veto?'

'In effect - very possibly.' The back-to-front sound reached her again. She decided that it wasn't a laugh: whatever he was doing, he wasn't laughing. 'And you'd better get it right, for everyone's sake, including your own.'

'But I don't know - ' Frances was suddenly aware that she was hugging the dressing gown to herself so fiercely that the torch was digging painfully into her left breast ' - I don't know enough about him to make that sort of decision.'

'You haven't finished yet. You've only just started, in fact.'

No, thought Frances. No.

'Sir Frederick...' She had to get it right. 'I don't have the experience - I don't have the qualifications. And sod the instinct.'

'Excellent!'

That wasn't right, then. 'Paul would do it better. He'd enjoy doing it.'

'Enjoying it isn't a qualification. Not enjoying it - that's a qualification. That happens to be one of Jack Butler's best qualifications for the job we may give him, in my opinion: he'll hate doing it,, but he'll do it all the same. And so will you, Frances'. So will you.'

The torch was hurting her again.

'What will I do?'

Acceptance was painful too. It even hurt to know that he was right - that he had been right all along.

How did he know more about her than she knew herself? Was that two-point-five?

And if it was, then what use was four-out-of-ten?

'First you'll read a special report on him. Then you'll decide what you wish to do -

who you wish to see, where you wish to go. All that will be arranged for you. All you have to do is to ring a number which I shall give you.' He paused. 'As of now you're a VIP, Frances.'

Dry mouth, fast pulse, cold back. What clinical symptoms were they?

'To whom do I report?'

'The same number.'

'Can I ask for advice?'

'Whom have you in mind?'

'David Audley.' No question about that. In fact, now she thought about it, it was a mystery why they weren't giving this job to David, rather than to her, because David knew Colonel Butler better than anyone else.

'David's in Washington. He's busy.'

'But I'd like his advice.'

'No. Not David.'

Categorical negative. There was information there, of a sort. She would need to think about that.

'Group Captain Roskill, then.'

No back-to-front sound this time. Just nothing.

'I think you'd better read the report first.'

I don't feel like a VIP, thought Frances. But there was no percentage in asking that question. Come to that, she wished now that she hadn't asked the question about David Audley...

She'd have to be more careful about asking questions in future.

There was one question which couldn't be avoided, though.

'What job is Colonel Butler in line for?'

'Don't you know?' He seemed almost surprised. 'As yet you don't really need to know, anyway.'

So she ought to know. So Paul Mitchell, if he thought about it, was bound to know -

and the sooner she extricated herself from the question, the better, before he embargoed Paul too. She hadn't taken her own advice quickly enough.

'It doesn't matter,' she shrugged the words at him.

'No. But I tell you what I'll do.' He paused. 'What was that thesis you were allegedly writing at North Yorkshire University? Something about Tolkien - ?'

'It doesn't matter.' She switched on the torch. 'Let's go inside.'

He ignored the light. 'Fairyland - that's it. It was Fairyland: From Spenser to Tolkien.'

'"Faerie" actually - "The Land of Faerie", not "Fairyland". There's a considerable difference,' she said pedantically, directing the beam into his eyes and wishing it was brighter.

'Of course - I beg your pardon! You know your Tolkien backwards?' He blinked at her. 'Naturally.'

'Naturally.' She could hardly deny that now.

'Good. Then I can perhaps let Tolkien explain for me much better than I could.' He lifted his hand up into the light, so that for a moment she thought he was shielding his eyes from it. 'The Lord of the Rings, he called his book, didn't he? "Rings" in the plural.'

A flash of gold caught her eye as he lifted one finger from the others. There was a signet ring on it.

'Rings of power, Frances. The Seven, the Nine, the Three ... and of course the One.

Right?'

She could just about remember that, but obviously he had read the book - the three volumes of it - more carefully than she had, so she'd better keep quiet.

'An interesting concept - rings of power.

Fortunately we don't have to contend with the One ... or at least not in the way the other side has to. Because we do still have machinery for changing the hand that wears it... But we do have other rings, Frances. And like Tolkien's rings they confer great power, and not least the power to bring out either the best or the worst in the wearer.'

The gold glinted as he moved his hand in the torchlight.

'So before we give Jack Butler a ring of power we have to know as much about his worst as about his best, that's what it amounts to, my dear.'

'His worst?' The question came out before she could stop it.

'That's right. You see ... we know his best - which is very good, no doubt about that, no doubt at all ... But there is - how shall I put it? - a loose end which does worry us a bit.' He paused, as though 'loose end' was not quite how he wanted to put it. 'It's nothing to do with security, really.'

No more questions. At least, not until she'd read that report, and maybe not even then, decided

Frances.

'A ghost - we want you to lay a ghost from the past, Frances.' He nodded, to himself as well as at her. 'Can you lay a ghost, do you think?'

'I don't believe in ghosts. Sir Frederick.' And in this garden that was just as well, she thought. 'So they don't frighten me.'

'Very sensible. That is, so far as the ghosts of the past are concerned.'

'Are there ghosts of the future?' Damn! 'Oh yes - they are the frightening ones, my dear. When you get to my age you see tomorrow's ghost in the mirror. Tomorrow's ghosts are still alive, but on borrowed time - your job will be to lay those ghosts too, before it's too late. Let's go inside.'

* * *

After he had gone, which was after she had read and re-read the report, and he had taken it away with him, Frances sat in front of the electric fire, which warmed the sitting room but did not warm her.

There is a loose end which does worry us a bit.

Well, there was a loose end, of course. But there was more to it than that - the very fact that it had been Sir Frederick himself who had come to her, and that he had briefed her in such an eccentric way, so very differently from Brigadier Stocker, aroused her deepest suspicions (the more so as David Audley had always maintained that 'Fred' was the most devious old sod of them all; though, again, since she had never been briefed by him before she had no previous experience there to judge by).

We want you to lay a ghost.

Well, there were ghosts enough in Colonel Butler's file, and not merely his hecatomb of the Queen's enemies either.

General Sir Henry Chesney was an old ghost, rich and benevolent.

And Leslie Pearson Cole was a classified ghost, probably off limits now for ordinary mortals, even temporary VIPs.

But Patrick Raymond Parker was a very public ghost, with a whole string of his own ghosts in attendance; any newspaper morgue would deliver them up to her.

And there were tomorrow's ghosts there too - Trevor Anthony Bond was still alive somewhere. And Major Starinov of the KGB was also probably still alive, though for her purposes he might just as well be dead for all the information he could give her.

But the little Misses Butler would be very much alive, though not so little now. Very much alive, and very promising too.

Sir Frederick hadn't told her everything, they never did. And the file hadn't told her what she most wanted to know about the most important ghost of all.

Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Butler, nee Boucard.

Frances stared into the uninspiring glow of the electric fire.

Madeleine Francoise had not originally been a loose end - if she had been then Colonel Butler would never have got this far in the promotion stakes. Madeleine Francoise had been tied up to everyone's sufficient satisfaction, and now something (or someone) had untied her - had raised her ghost, which had not walked for nine years...

(A devious old sod, so she had to think deviously too.) (An old man near retirement; but it couldn't be his job Colonel Butler was lined up for, that was out of the Colonel's league, she was sure of that.) (Whatever job it was. Sir Frederick wanted him to get it too, but obviously wasn't prepared to fight openly for the Colonel, to risk trouble for him. Was it Paul who had said the Old Sod was sitting tight for his pension and his life peerage? It was certainly Paul who had hinted that the Old Sod was losing his grip, no longer holding off the Minister and the politicians and the Civil Servants as he had once done.) (She must talk to Paul as soon as possible. Short of talking to David Audley ... short of disobeying orders ... Paul was her best bet. Paul wouldn't be frightened of tomorrow's ghosts.)

* * *

She was tired, but she didn't want to go to bed.

She got up and crossed to Robbie's side of the fireplace, where Sir Frederick had sat while she read the report, and lifted the three Tolkien volumes out of Robbie's bookshelf.

Then she went back to her own side and sat down again, and started reading at random, flipping from place to place, picking out the names from the past of her original reading.

Rings of Power...

It was dead quiet in the cottage, as always.

There was a letter from her Robbie between the pages of the first volume. She felt no curiosity about its contents, they wouldn't be interesting. She wasn't even very surprised that it was still there; she had dusted the book a dozen times, but she hadn't opened it.

Bits of the old days like this were always turning up, she had long since ceased trying to look for them, they didn't matter.

She screwed the letter up into a tight ball and dropped it into the wastepaper basket, and went on reading.

The men of Cam Dum came on us at night, and we

were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!

Well, it was still a fairy story - it hadn't changed, and neither had she. There was no spear in her heart for Robbie.

Wizards and trolls and elves with bright eyes and sharp swords, and rings of power...

She knew she wasn't really concentrating. Rather, she was wondering how it was she already knew that Colonel Butler hadn't murdered his wife on the morning of November 11, 1969.

CHAPTER SIX

As promised, the side-door of the publican's snug of the Bear and Ragged Staff public house was unlocked one hour before licensed opening time, and ex-Detective Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges was waiting for her on the other side of it, sitting comfortably beside a newly-lit fire with a copy of the Daily Telegraph and a pint of mild.

Telephone Number 01-836-20066, Extension 223, might have the sort of fat, self-satisfied, establishment voice she always found most off-putting, but at least he knew how to deliver the right man to the right place at the right time at short notice, thought Frances.

Predictably, the right man wasn't quite as quick to recognise her, though his double-take as she entered was so fleeting that she wouldn't have noticed it if she hadn't been half expecting it, and his moment of surprise when she dropped the catch behind her was so well camouflaged that it was hardly noticeable at all except as a cautious nod of greeting.

'Mrs Fisher?' He rose to his feet with the characteristic stoop of a tall man accustomed to low beams in old pubs.

'Mr Hedges?' The question was altogether superfluous after he had doubly identified himself by knowing her latest identity, but good manners and a modest demeanour was what the occasion demanded. 'It's very good of you to see me, to give me your time like this.'

He studied her in silence for a moment, as though taking her to pieces and then reassembling her to see how the parts fitted together.

'That's all right, Mrs Fisher. I've got all the time in the world.'

And so he had, thought Frances, and that was the trouble: if he'd still been a serving policeman it would have been in his best interest to co-operate with her to the full, and she could lean on him if he didn't. But a retired man was beyond her reach, he could keep his mouth shut and there was nothing she could do about it.

She smiled.

No smile in return: Ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges was a man's man, not a ladies' man, that litmus paper test indicated.

'May I see your warrant card, Mrs Fisher, please?' said ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges.

And a cautious man.

'Of course.' Frances opened her bag. For an instant she couldn't remember which compartment held which identity. It would never do to give him Marilyn in her bikini.

Thank you.'

He took his time comparing the Fitzgibbon photograph with the Fisher illusion. And at the end of his time he frowned at her.

'Yes, Mr Hedges?'

'Why the wig, Mrs Fisher?'

Frances blinked at him. 'Is it so obvious?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'It's very professional.'

He was making a point: he was informing her that ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges wasn't to be trifled with. But if he wasn't already a hostile witness, why did he have to make that point?

Hostile as well as cautious?

'Then - why the question, Mr Hedges?'

He nodded. 'You're not wearing a wig in your photograph. But it's the same style, and the same colour, your hair. Young ladies don't usually wear mouse-brown wigs ...

But perhaps I shouldn't ask?'

Frances made the connection. The implication of her presence was the re-opening of a nine-year-old case which had never been solved. And that could either mean that there was new evidence, or that Inspector William Ewart Hedges hadn't done his job properly nine years before.

Hostile, then. So at least she knew where she was.

She smiled again. 'That's all right ... As it happens, I'm blonde underneath.'

'Blonde? Good gracious!'

'Why "Good gracious", Mr Hedges?'

He pursed his lips disapprovingly. 'You haven't got the face for it, if I, may say so ...

without wishing to be personal - the figure, but not the face, Mrs Fisher.'

He was telling her that blonde, on her, would be vulgar. (Which, of course, was the exact truth: Marilyn had been nothing if not vulgar.) He was also establishing his superiority, and that would never do.

She took the warrant card from him, and as she did so Mrs Fisher was born. Marilyn Francis would have laughed, and would have given him something to look at. Mrs Fitzgibbon would have been embarrassed, and might have blushed. But the arrogant Miss Warren would have been angry, and Mrs Fisher and Miss Warren were sisters under the skin.

'I have my job to do, Mr Hedges.' She put the card into her bag and snapped the bag shut. 'The Assistant Chief Constable has told you why I'm here, I take it?'

He started to nod, but Mrs Fisher didn't give him time to admit that the ACC (Crime)

- or maybe it was the ACC (Operations) - had indeed disturbed his leisurely retired breakfast with a phone call.

'What did he tell you?' asked the frowning Mrs Fisher.

'Not a lot,' said Hedges defensively.

Attack, attack, attack!

'Nine years ago. You were in charge of the case.'

'Yes.'

'Do you recall it?' Mrs Fisher pressed her point.

'Yes.'

'You recall it? After nine years?'

'Yes - ' His eyes clouded momentarily ' - I remember it.'

Sod Mrs Fisher, decided Frances instinctively. After a very short acquaintance she didn't like Mrs Fisher. What was more important, this man would remember nine years ago and Colonel Butler for his own reasons, and not because Mrs Fisher was a hard little bitch with a wig and a warrant card and the ACC's blessing. It would be Frances, not Mrs Fisher, who made William Ewart Hedges talk.

'It's a long time, Mr Hedges,' said Frances. 'But it's important that you do remember.'

He looked at her strangely, as though he was seeing her for the first time - and seeing Frances, and not Mrs Fisher, or anyone else out of her bag.

The fine art of interrogation David Audley had always maintained. It's a game, and it's a duel, and it's a discipline, and it's a job like any other. But in the end it's an art. And that means, in the end - or it may be the very beginning - you may have to risk losing in order to win.

'It's important for Colonel Butler,' said Frances.

Hedges frowned at her. 'Colonel - ?'

Nine years ago, thought Frances. It had been Major Butler then, and although the ranks hadn't mattered after that, it would be Major Butler that Inspector Hedges remembered.

'Major Butler,' corrected Frances.

* * *

'Would you like something to drink, Mrs Fisher?' Hedges gestured to the chair on the other side of the fire. 'I'm sorry - I'm forgetting my manners.' She needed a drink. 'A whisky - would that be possible?'

Why had she said that?-'Any particular brand?' He smiled at her. 'They have some very fine malt here.'

Frances sat down, and without waiting for an answer he swung round to the empty bar counter behind him. 'Isobel! One large Glenlivet, if you please!'

He turned back to her. 'Nine years ago...'

Malt whisky. Nine years ago she had never even heard of malt whisky, thought Frances. Nine years ago she had never tasted whisky in her life, in her nineteen sheltered years. And now she didn't know (except that it was a cold day, and she was colder still) why she had asked for whisky - or why he had offered, of all whiskies, the one she knew how to drink, from the years between.

He nodded at her, a nod for each year. 'A year or two back - maybe not ... Or not so well. But now ... yes, I can remember it.'

Was that how it was? thought Frances bleakly. In the end, was it the ones that got away that came back to mind, yesterday's ghosts?

'I'm glad to hear it,' she lied. Or, at least for the time being, didn't lie. 'This one bugged you, did it?'

'Bugged?' He winced slightly at the slang. 'No - ' He cut off as Frances stared past him, and then turned towards the bar. 'Ah ... thank you, Isobel.' It was the publican's lady - and she was looking at Frances with considerable surprise. 'Thank you, Isobel,'

repeated Hedges. Isobel looked from Frances to the tumbler in her hand, and Frances understood the raised eyebrows.

It was not a ladylike measure.

'Would you like some water, madam?'

As Frances estimated the tumbler's contents - more like three fingers' generous measure than two - memory twisted inside her. Robbie had taught her to drink malt, but she had also learnt bitterly what his own measures signified: one for pleasure and relaxation over his books and his music, two for sleep and forgetfulness, and three to nerve him again to fumbling passion with his unresponsive partner. And for all the good it did him, he might have doubled the dose.

'No, thank you.' She smiled mechanically. Perhaps he'd have done better to have doubled hers, three had only tightened every nerve in her to do what he had wanted, but hadn't helped her to deceive him in the doing; and that had been a disaster out of which not even Marshal Foch could have attacked his way.

Isobel gave her one last, very old-fashioned, glance, and ducked back into the depths of the pub;

Hedges swept the glass off the bar and presented it to her.

'Thank you, Mr Hedges.'

She sipped the fiery stuff, and thought as she did so how very strange it was that the spirit itself - this ardent spirit which had always failed to arouse any ardour in her - the thing itself hadn't instantly reminded her of Robbie, but only the quantity of it which had been poured into the tumbler, a purely visual memory. But then ever since Marilyn had been terminated - or perhaps it was ever since the bomb, as though its concussion had shaken loose some defensive shield in her head - her memory had been playing tricks on her, reminding her of what she didn't want, and didn't need, to remember.

Hedges was staring at her, and with a start she realised that she had been staring at him across the rim of the tumbler, and not seeing him at all.

'Do you want to know about her ... or him, Mrs Fisher?' Being looked through seemed to have disconcerted him slightly, the tone of his voice told her. 'The wife or the Major?'

The Major.

The nine years fell away from Frances at last. Nine years ago (she had been a student nine years ago, and a spinster, and a virgin, and the secretary of the University Labour Club, and an admirer of Anthony Wedgwood Benn; and now she was none of those things and nine years might have been nine million) ... and nine years ago Colonel Butler had been a major, and before that a captain, and before that a lieutenant, and before that an officer-cadet, and before that a corporal, and before that a private, and before that a schoolboy, and before that a child and a baby and a glint in his father's eye in a backstreet house on the wrong side of the tracks (Paul had been right there - right as usual); but for her he would always have been Colonel Butler if it hadn't been for ex-Detective Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges (who, nine years ago had been Detective Inspector Hedges), who had suddenly put Major Butler in another perspective of time, his own perspective - with Butler pickled forever in the aspic of a police report as Major - but one which opened all the other perspectives to her ... even the perspective of the future, in which (although rank didn't really matter in the department, and she didn't even understand what her own grade of assistant-principal meant) - in which they would surely promote him to Brigadier if ... if she, Mrs Fisher, Mrs Fitzgibbon and Miss (nine years ago) Frances Warren, the student-spinster-virgin-admirer, gave him a clean bill of health, pronouncing him fit to wear one of Sir Frederick's Rings of Power for better and not for worse, whatever that might mean.

The Major -

Even the deferential way he had pronounced the rank told her something: Et tu, William Ewart Hedges, and she must make an allowance for that.

But there was no more time to think of that now. There would be time for that later.

At least it had all flashed through her mind quickly: after he had said The wife or the Major? he had reached for his pint of mild, hitherto untouched, and now he was just setting it back on the table, two inches down from the brim.

The wife or the Major?

Major and Mrs Butler.

Major John (but always Jack) Butler, MC (General list).

Mrs Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Butler, nee Boucard.

Lord! thought Frances, still staring at Hedges but thinking a carbon copy of the thought she had had the night before when she had first encountered the name - Lord! If there was a story in the losing of her more than that in Sir Frederick's file there must also be a story (which the file had totally omitted) in the winning of her, if she was anything like her name. The very idea of Butler married was hard to swallow, but Butler carrying off a Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard took her breath away before she could swallow the idea. It sounded altogether too much like a romance from a woman's magazine, and even if the truth would surely be prosaic and dull she could no longer resist the temptation of asking the question she hadn't dared to put to Sir Frederick the night before:

'Was she beautiful, Mr Hedges?'

It wasn't the answer, or the form of the answer anyway, he had been expecting.

'Didn't they show you a picture, then? There was a lot of 'em about at the time, as I remember. Hundreds.'

Of course there would have been, thought Frances.

'No.'

'I expect they could find one for you.'

'Was she?'

'Beautiful?' He took another pull of his beer, but more slowly, as though he had decided that just as she had made him wait while she surfaced from her own deep thoughts, so he had a right to make her wait for his own to come up from the past. 'Have you seen the daughters?'