Tomorrow's ghost

She shook her head.

'No? Well, they say the eldest girl - the one that's at college now - they say she's the spitting image of her mother.' He drew a vast snowy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth with it. 'I couldn't see it at the time, I must say. Except for the colouring, of course...'

The one at college now. So he had already done some checking of his own. But naturally.

'The colouring?'

'Red hair.' He nodded. 'All of 'em had it - the Major, the wife, and the three little girls. Like peas out of the same pod, they were, the girls.'

'She had red hair?' Frances conjured up Colonel Butler's short-back-and-sides, which had been clipped so close that it was almost en brosse. Yet when she thought about it now it had been not so much red as grey-faded auburn.

'More like chestnut - what they call 'titian', I believe.' That candid look of his was back again as his eyes flicked briefly to the mouse-wig covering her blonde crowning glory. 'Very striking, it was.'

'But you never actually saw her, did you?'

'No, I never actually saw her. None of us did.' He paused. 'But there was this picture of her, colour picture.' He paused again. 'They say it didn't do her justice.'

'Who said?'

'The milkman. The postman.' He shrugged. 'The shopkeepers in the village ... the woman who cleaned the house and kept an eye on the little girls when she was out.'

She had been beautiful. He hadn't said it out loud, but he had shouted it nevertheless, more loudly than if he had actually said it. And she, Frances, had known it all along - the certainty had been there in her original question: not 'Was she pretty, Mr Hedges?' but 'Was she beautiful, Mr Hedges?' Not a four-out-of-ten certainty, but a ten-out-of-ten certainty.

But how?

The fire blazed up and she felt its heat on her face, and she shivered.

Wife to Colonel Butler: Madeleine Frangoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard, born La Roche Tourtenay, Indre-et-Loire, 4.8.28.

'She was forty-one years old,' said Frances.

He gazed at her impassively. 'Was she now? I suppose she would have been about that, yes ... But she didn't look it.' The light of the flames flickered over his face, emphasising its impassivity. 'You'll have to look at the eldest daughter - that's your best bet, Mrs Fisher, if you want to know what she looked like ... and add a few years.'

A few years. The eldest daughter - Diana, Sally or Jane? Diana for choice ... The eldest daughter would be 19 now, maybe 20, thought Frances irritably, struggling with the mathematics. Diana Butler, the Art student, but with the dominant de Latour d'Auray Boucard genes which made her the spitting image of her mother. It was hard to imagine the John (but always Jack) Butler genes not being the stronger ones.

'So if she's alive she'd be fifty now,' thought Frances aloud, the maths falling into place at last.

'If.'

Death and decay and dissolution coffined the if, buried it deep and erected a headstone over it.

'But she's not, you mean?'

'You've read the reports, Mrs Fisher.' Just a shade testy now, he sounded.

'Yes, Mr Hedges. And the Assistant Chief Constable's submission.' She was losing him, and she didn't know why. 'In effect - "missing". But you think she's dead?'

He drew a deep breath through his nose. 'There's no proof.'

'But you think she's dead, all the same.' 'What I think isn't proof.' He looked at her steadily. 'What do you want me to say, Mrs Fisher?'

Now she was fighting for an answer, and it was almost as important to know why she had to fight for it as to win the answer itself. So although it would be the easiest thing in the world to say, simply: 'I want you to say what you think, Mr Hedges', that wasn't good enough any more, because it would only win half the battle, and she needed to win both halves now.

So again it had to be instinct, the heart and not the head.

'Mr Hedges ... I've got a difficult job to do. I'm not sure that it isn't impossible - to be honest.'

Bad word - wrong word. She wasn't being honest.

'A dirty job.'

Better word. And ex-Detective Chief Inspector Hedges knew all about dirty jobs, too.

'She walked out of the front door. And she disappeared off the face of the earth - '

She could have put it better than that: the deadpan police reports, the dozens of minutes of inquiries by dozens of different policemen, all had the garlic smell of death on them, the smell of killing.

'Did he kill her, Mr Hedges? Could he have killed her?'

Even that wasn't enough. But did she have to give him everything, leaving herself nothing?

'He could have, Mrs Fisher. Physically, he could have.' He stared at her. 'Unless you have an alibi for him.'

'But you think he didn't?'

Still he wouldn't give her anything.

'Yet you treated it as murder from the start, Mr Hedges.'

'No.' He relaxed. 'We got to it quickly, that's all.'

She had made a mistake - she had let him get away from her.

He shook his head. 'Cases like this, Mrs Fisher - you have to bear in mind that a lot of murders start with missing persons. Or, to put it another way, every missing person is a potential murder victim. So every report, it's not just kicked under the carpet - it's taken seriously.

'On the other hand, having said that, it is a matter of the actual circumstances. With a young kid, for instance, even if there's a history of his running off, I used to get moving straight off. But with a woman ... saving your presence, Mrs Fisher ... you get quite a lot of women just sloping off, one way or another, and there are inquiries you've got to make first. Like, if there's been a row ... or if there's another man - you can't just jump straight in.'

'But this wasn't like that.'

'No, it wasn't - precisely. She just went off for a bit of a walk, and she said she wasn't going for long.' He paused, staring reflectively at a point just above Frances's head. 'She didn't even take her bag with her. ..'

'And it started to rain.'

'That's right ... It came on to rain quite heavily, and she only had a light coat with her.' Another reminiscent pause. 'It was the cleaning woman phoned us in the end -

she'd waited long past .her time, and she wanted to get home. But she couldn't leave the little one all by herself.'

Jane Butler, asked six. One of the identical peas. Not at school because she had flu.

Mother had sat up with her part of the night, which was why she had wanted a breath of fresh air...

He focused on her. 'But you know the details, of course.'

And there weren't really many details to know at that, thought Frances. In fact, that was the whole trouble, the beginning and the end of it: Mrs Madeleine-and-all-the-rest Butler, aged 41, had stepped out for a breath of air after having spent a disturbed night with a sick child, and it had started to rain, and she hadn't been seen again from that November day to this one, nine years later. And so far as the local CID and the Special Branch had been able to establish, she hadn't met anyone, or even been observed by anyone. She had taken nothing with her, no money, no cheque book, no means of identification; and she had left behind her no debts, no worries, no fears. She had turned a quiet piece of English countryside into a Bermuda Triangle.

'How did you get on to it so quickly, Mr Hedges?'

He half-shrugged, half shook his head. 'Routine, really. Like I said ... we don't take missing persons lightly.'

'Yes?'

'Well ... in a case like this it's usually the uniformed patrol officer who answers the call, and he's likely to be a sensible lad ... He'll talk to the person who called us, and have a bit of a quick scout-round, maybe. And if he doesn't like what he finds he'll phone his sergeant pretty sharpish - because if there is something badly wrong then time can be important - and he'll say "I don't like the look of this one, guv'nor", like as not.'

'And in this case he didn't like the look of it?'

'That's right.' He nodded. 'You see, he knew there hadn't been any local accidents that morning - road accidents involving personal injury - which was the most obvious answer. And she wasn't the sort of woman to just go off and not phone back, if she'd been delayed anywhere ... There was the kiddie in bed, see ... And although it had stopped raining by then there isn't much cover on those country roads at that time of year - it'd be about the same time as now, with most of the leaves off the trees. So she'd have likely got quite wet, with just a light coat and a head-scarf ... It just didn't smell right to him.'

'Yes?'

'What did it smell of, you mean? Well ... he thought it might be a hit-and-run, with her in a ditch somewhere maybe ...' He trailed off.

There was something else, something left unsaid or something not yet said. Frances waited.

'Or maybe worse...' He drank some more of his beer, and then wiped his mouth again with the table-cloth handkerchief. 'You see, usually, whether we're really worried or not, the first thing to do when a woman goes missing is to get on to the husband. If there's any trouble of any sort ... if he isn't part of the trouble himself, then nine times out of ten he knows what is, or he's got some idea of it. Or he knows where she'd go, anyway - to her mother, or her sister, or even to some friend of hers nearby...' He trailed off again.

There had been no mother, no sister and no nearby friend. But what was more interesting was that Hedges didn't like talking about Colonel - Major - Butler, so it seemed.

'But we had a bit of a problem there at first - or our lad did. Because the cleaning woman had told him the Major had gone up north on business - driven off at the crack of dawn, the wife had told her - but the woman didn't know where. And she didn't know what his business was, of course ... She thought he wasn't in the army any more, she said, and she thought he maybe worked for the Government in London. But she didn't know what at.' The cleaning woman had been a smart lady, thought Frances.

'Normally this isn't a problem.' Hedges shook his head. 'You just ask the neighbours.

But there weren't any neighbours, and they hadn't been living there long - not near neighbours, anyway. So the sergeant got the constable to find their address book, and told him to try the London numbers in it.' He gave Frances an old-fashioned look. 'There was one of them in the front with no name to it, so he tried that first.'

01-836 20066, thought Frances. Or its 1969 equivalent ... The cleaning lady and the constable had both been smart.

Hedges nodded at her. 'So that was when we really got our skates on - the CID and the Special Branch. But that's all on record, of course ... what we did, and what they did.

You probably know more about that than I do, Mrs Fisher.' The old-fashioned look had a sardonic cast to it now. 'Like what the Major's business up north was, that day. We never got a "Need to Know" clearance for that.'

'What were you told?'

'Verbally...' Hedges blinked and paused, as though for a moment the memory eluded him. 'I was told to discount him from my inquiries - that was at first. Then later on I was told that I must check for sightings of him, or of his car, in the vicinity at the material time. Which we would have done as a matter of routine by then if we hadn't been warned off in the first place, of course.'

Frances was tempted to ask him what he had deduced from that change of instructions, but then quickly rejected the temptation. He could only have made the wrong deduction, that the Major had provided an alibi which had not in the end seemed water-tight to the Special Branch; and by telling him how the actual facts had been so very curiously and inconclusively different she might colour his memory.

She waited.

His lips compressed into a tight line. 'There were no such sightings, Mrs Fisher.'

In that moment Frances decided that she would have to investigate the circumstances of Colonel Butler's not-alibi herself, and not merely ask for them to be re-checked as she had intended. It would mean another wearisome, time-consuming journey north, with little promise of further enlightenment because they had never seemed to have any rhyme or reason to them in the first place, let alone any connection with Mrs Butler's disappearance. But nevertheless, they remained as a small, strange inconsistency, like an irrelevant, but mysterious footnote at the bottom of the Special Branch report.

She pulled herself back to the more pressing problem. 'Is that what you meant by

"Could have", Mr Hedges? He could have been in ... the vicinity at the material time - in another car, say?'

'We never traced another car. He would have had to have hired one from somewhere, and left it somewhere.' Hedges paused. 'When he finally arrived that evening he was driving his own car, anyway. And we never turned up any unaccounted car hirings for that morning.' He stared into the fire for a second or two, and then glanced up sidelong at her. 'Assuming he couldn't prove his movements for that morning - where he was, or where he should have been ... if he didn't go north, as the cleaning woman said ... if he'd waited around somewhere until his wife came out ... if he knew where she was going...'

He was building up the 'its' deliberately, as though to demonstrate what a flimsy edifice they made.

'If he'd had a confederate, of course ... but then no one saw any strangers hanging around, and in a country district like that it's surprising what people notice ... it's possible, but the timing would have had to be good if they didn't want to risk being noticed .. . But it's possible - anything's possible.'

But not likely, he meant. For a moment Frances was reminded of her own dear old Constable Ellis, who prided himself on knowing everything that moved on his own rural area beat by day, and most things that moved by night. Though, of course, he was a very old-fashioned copper, altogether different from the wild boys of the Met. with whom she had worked in the spring, the new-fashioned coppers who had unashamedly fancied their chances of extending inter-departmental co-operation into the nearest convenient bed.

Well - sod it! - this was inter-departmental co-operation too, but at least he wasn't looking at her with that calculating, undressing stare which already had her on her back staring over her shoulder at the patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling.

Possible plus Unlikely equals Could Have.

They had given him a possible suspect in a possible murder case. But then, for security reasons, they had stopped him carrying through any investigation of Colonel -

Major - Butler's not-alibi, and had left him only with the suspicion that there might be something he'd missed somewhere; and although he was speaking now without any apparent rancour, nine years after the event, that rankled still.

Only it didn't rankle in the way she'd expected: whatever was in his mind now, it wasn't the nagging doubt that his Major had got away with murder in his patch.

Suddenly and vividly Constable Ellis came into her mind again: Constable Ellis sitting opposite her across her own fireplace, just as Hedges was sitting across from her now - Constable Ellis on one of his paternal visits to her, with a steaming mug of cocoa in his hands - she had heated the water for it on the primus stove: it had been during the power workers' strike, when he'd called on her every time it was the village's turn to be blacked-out . .. Constable Ellis telling her how -

God, but she'd been slow! He'd even told- her himself, had William Ewart Hedges -

once directly, and half-a-dozen times implicitly - and she'd failed to pick up the message.

What was worse, it had also been there between the lines of the report she'd read the night before. Hedges had merely confirmed it.

'Would you like another drink, Mrs Fisher?' Frances looked down at her empty glass with surprise. She had drunk the stuff without noticing it, and now the warm feeling deep inside her was indistinguishable from the excitement that tightened her muscles and made her throw out her chest almost as far as Marilyn had once done for Gary. Cool it! 'Good heavens!' Girlish smile. 'No, thank you, Mr Hedges.'

David Audley: The time to be extra careful is when you think you've won - when you think you know. 'I don't want to be breathalysed before midday.' Because she hadn't won.

There simply hadn't been a duel: the duel had been in her imagination, because of her own slowness and stupidity. Simply, because she hadn't known which side he was on, she hadn't understood that Mrs Fisher and ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges had been on the same side from the start.

So she had to get it exactly right now. 'But can I get you something?' She pointed to his empty tankard.

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. Although he hadn't admitted it, he knew, just as well as she did, that they'd moved on from Could have to Didn't.

Get it right. Chest in, extinguish girlish smile.

'Patrick Parker, Mr Hedges.' Patrick Raymond Parker, born Liverpool 11.7.41. s. Michael Aloysius Parker and Margaret Helen Mclntyre -

Again, he knew. And this time he knew if anything even better than she did: the print-out from the Police National Computer, the circular, the telex, laying it on the line that the North Mercian Police Force had turned a fatal crash on the motorway and six missing women into an Incident Room, complete with a possible murderer and victims, and even a hypothetical modus operand!.

'Uh-huh. Patrick Parker, of course.' This time he didn't nod, he merely acknowledged the fatal name with a single lift of his head, pointing his chin at her. 'But that was never proved.'

Never proved, like everything else, thought Frances bitterly.

Patrick Parker, born Liverpool 11.7.41. - a blitz baby, conceived in emergency, carried in fear and born twenty-eight years before to the sound of air raid warnings and bombs to Michael Aloysius Parker and Margaret Helen Mclntyre - Patrick Parker had slammed into the back of a lorry (which had braked to avoid a car, which had skidded to avoid another car, which had swerved to avoid another car which had overtaken another car without giving a signal - it happened all the time, but this time fatally) four weeks after Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Butler nee Boucard had said 'I won't be very long' to her cleaning woman. And although they'd never traced either the car that had given no signal (perhaps there were no such cars, anyway: there had only been the first car driver's word for that chain of events. But it didn't matter, anyway), they had found Stephanie Alice Cox, spinster aged 26, as well as Patrick Parker, bachelor aged 28, in the wreckage of the maroon Ford embedded in the back of the lorry.

Only, while Patrick had been where they expected him to be, safety-belted and transfixed by his last moment of agony in the driver's seat, Stephanie had not been found in the passenger's seat beside him; she had been travelling less conventionally and far more uncomfortably in the boot of the car; though not really uncomfortably, since she hadn't felt a thing, even at the moment of impact, because she'd been strangled ten hours before the lorry-driver jammed his foot on the air-brakes.

'I agree. It was never proved,' Frances nodded.

Madeleine Francoise Butler, not proved. And Julie Anne Hartford, not proved. And Jane Wentworth, not proved. And Patricia Mary Ronson, not proved. And, not quite proved, Jane Louise Smith - Only Stephanie Alice Cox, proved. (Stephanie Alice Cox hadn't even been reported missing when the car in front of the lorry had skidded, but then Stephanie Alice Cox's mother didn't count one night's absence as anything out of the ordinary for Stephanie Alice.)

'But she could have been one of them, couldn't she?'

Hedges rocked on his seat. 'Yes ... she just could have. He picked up one of them in the morning. Of the likely ones, that is.'

'And not all of them were scrubbers. Jane Wentworth wasn't.'

'She was the one whose car broke down? That's true. And she wasn't so young, either

- that's also true.' He had raised an eyebrow at 'scrubber', as though it wasn't a word he expected from her. But then he could hardly be expected to know that yesterday she - or at least Marilyn - had been a card-carrying member of the National Union of Scrubbers, thought Frances.

In fact, Marilyn would have fitted into that list of likely pick-ups for a free-spending psychopath, as to the manner born.

She shivered. He'd been good-looking, nicely-spoken with just a Beatles-touch of Liverpool, and - so his mates had recalled - surprisingly gentle for a skilled operator of such a big earth-moving machine. But also a murderer.

'And the date fits too, Mr Hedges. It was a Tuesday, and he wasn't back at work until the Wednesday.' The shiver remained with her as she thought of the long stretches of embankment on Patrick Parker's ten miles of motorway extension, now busy with the thunder of traffic, under which (if the North Mercian Police and the Police National Computer were to be believed) Julie Anne Hartford, Jane Wentworth and Patricia Mary Ronson would lie until Doomsday, and maybe Jane Louise Smith and Madeleine Francoise Butler as well.

He shook his head. 'The date helps, but it isn't conclusive. If he did kill them, he never killed to a recognisable cycle. And the distance is right on the very edge of his radius - maybe a little beyond it.'

'But you don't know how far he went. You never knew where he went.'

'North Mercia put him next to a couple of them - in the same pub as one of them on the night she disappeared.'

'He was an opportunity murderer. Lack of opportunity - say on the Monday night -

that might have pushed him further out.'

'Lack of opportunity?' His mouth twisted. 'You don't know modern girls.'

'I'm a modern girl, Mr Hedges.'

'Would you accept a lift from a stranger?'

'It was raining,' said Frances.

'She wasn't far from home.' He pressed his advantage. 'Would you have accepted a lift?'

'I'm not her.'

'She was a lady.'

A compliment. The blonde hair was forgotten.

'So was Jane Wentworth. Maybe you don't know modern ladies.'

He shrugged. 'Maybe.'

'But ... you don't think it was Parker, then?' He looked at her warily. 'I didn't say that at all.' Then he was playing devil's advocate. 'So you do think it was Parker?'

'I didn't say that either. It could have been Parker. But the circumstantial evidence wasn't strong - it was never strong enough for a coroner's inquest, not for her. And that's a fact.'

It was indeed a fact, thought Frances. And it was also a fact that Hedges was well-placed to state: no CID officer of all the forces liaising with the North Mercian Incident Room had worked harder than he had done to connect Patrick Parker with any of their missing women. He had really pulled out all the stops.

And in vain.

'But strong enough to write the case off, Mr Hedges.'

'It's still open, Mrs Fisher.' He spoke as though his mouth was full of liquid paraffin.

'Of course.' She smiled at him innocently. 'But Parker remains on your books as the strongest suspect ... particularly as you'd written Major Butler off the list long before - before Parker's name came over the telex.'

Something flickered in his eyes that wasn't a reflection of the flames in the grate.

'What makes you think that, Mrs Fisher?'

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

She put her empty glass carefully down on the hearth. It had been David Audley -

again, and always, David - who had said in his interrogation lectures that truth is the ultimate weapon. So it was time to pretend to drop her guard again. And this time it had to work.

'Of course, my name isn't really "Fisher", Mr Hedges - as I'm sure you will have guessed.'

His face blanked over with surprise.

'But the "Mrs" is genuine. My husband was killed in Ulster a few years back.'

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

'I'm sorry.'

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

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

His mother had thought that was a mistake, and that a flat in London, near her work, would be far more sensible, far less lonely. But she would have been just as lonely in London; or even more lonely, since the loneliness of the cottage had been - and still was

- something natural and inevitable which she could accept, and with which she could come to terms. And which, if she faced the truth (that ultimate weapon), was what she wanted. (Mother-in-law only wanted to get her married off again as soon as decently possible, anyway; gaining an unwanted daughter-in-law had been bad enough, but then losing a son and gaining only the responsibility of a young widow was unbearable - the more so when the widow had made it abundantly plain that once was enough.) Mustn't think of all that again though, sod it! ' - but I'm away a lot of the time, so the local police keep an eye on the place for me.'

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

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

Was that the right word?

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

It was the right word.

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

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

'So you should,' said William Ewart Hedges.

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

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

So the Fitzgibbon facade was on the top line today.

'But one night he was the one who needed cheering up.'

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

'Yes?' Hedges was looking at her with intense curiosity.

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

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

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

Frances nodded back. 'They never caught the thieves - the local police didn't.'

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

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

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

'The opposite?'

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

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

'It was something he said to me, Mr Hedges. They'd been leaning on the boy - '

'But if they can't prove he did it, Mr Ellis ... They can't arrest him if they can't prove it, can they?'

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

'Oh yes.' She nodded. 'I agree entirely with your assessment: of all the men I've ever met, the ... Major is - he seems to me - the least likely to commit a murder. But I have no new evidence to prove it, either.'

He frowned at her.

'Proving the negative case is one of the most difficult Intelligence exercises - it always has been,' said Frances.

This time he nodded his acceptance. 'That's true.'

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

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

'No. But I want to be sure. So you can tell me what you never put in any report -

which was what made you lay off the Major and concentrate on Patrick Parker before you'd ever heard of him.

That's what you can give me.'

He stared at her for a moment, then through her, and then at her again. 'All right...'

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

Frances waited.

'It was the little girls - him and the little girls, that night. The way he was.'

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

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

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

Unless he did know, exactly, thought Frances heretically.

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

'We had our Special Branch man there, of course. But on a "Need to Know" basis - he didn't do the talking, I did...

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

'Billy, didn't seem right.

'How much do I owe you, Isobel?'

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

'He didn't say anything, he just listened. And the questions I asked him, all I got was

"yes" or "no", nothing more. He didn't say a thing until I'd finished, and then he simply said "Where are my girls?"

'And I told him we had a policewoman with them... You see, Mrs Fisher, there wasn't anyone locally they knew, having moved in not long before. And the cleaning woman had her own family to look after - and there weren't any relatives, not on either side, that we could trace. So my WPC had given the kiddies their tea, and had looked after them -

she'd even helped the eldest one with her bit of homework from school -'

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

'- and then put them to bed -'

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

' - but she couldn't get the little one, that'd had the flu, to go to sleep - '

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

'Mrs Fisher?'

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

'Jane?' He frowned.

'The littlest one.' She must be more careful.

'Jane.'

'Yes.' He grudged her the knowledge of the smallest Butler's name. 'It was Jane -

that's right.'

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

'Yes?' She willed him back from the edge.

Where are my girls?

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

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

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

'Looking at himself?'

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

Frances blinked. 'Laughing?'

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

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

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

There was no answer to that.

'Perhaps you think I've got a remarkable memory - nine years ago?'

There was no answer to that either. 'No' would be a lie, and 'yes' would be a mistake.

'I haven't. Not more than the next man, anyway.'

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

'There are some things no one forgets,' said Frances.

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

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

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

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

'And that was the way it was with the Major - Major Butler. No expressions for me -

and then he went up and made his little 'un laugh ... and he read to the other two as well

... took about half an hour, thirty-five minutes - and then back to me. Like he was in shock, and the shock had burnt out the muscles ... Or as if he was holding himself steady, and if he didn't he'd burst into tears. And he wasn't going to do that in front of a stranger, not ever.

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

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

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

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

He shook his head at her. 'But we turned up nothing, of course - as you well know.

'But he was the same: not moving a muscle ... Except with the children, and then he didn't care who saw it. He never pretended for me, right from that first evening, only for them - and if one of them came in while I was with him it was like I wasn't there. I've never seen anything quite like it.'

'He switched on for them.'

'Yes. Switched on is right. He lighted up for them, like a Christmas tree. And each time he did, it damn near fused him.'

Character assessment, not proof. But then she'd never expected proof, thought Frances. And who better than Hedges to provide the assessment?

'Then he would have done anything for them - his girls?'

'Yes, Mrs Fisher. He would have done anything for them.' Hedges conceded the possibility with the air of a man who was ready for the question behind it. 'So long as it didn't hurt them.'

There it was, the built-in limitation: three little girls with no relatives, no matter how rich they were, couldn't afford to lose one parent, never mind two. And that had been the risk, if the deed was Butler's.

'He's a clever man, Mr Hedges.'

'Aye. And a hard man too, Mrs Fisher. And a trained man.'

One of us, he was saying.

'So?'

Hedges took a slow, deep breath. 'I was there. I talked to him, I watched him. And I listened to him, what little he said ... A very tough customer - and I've met some tough customers in my time, believe you me, Mrs Fisher. So if what you wanted to know is could he kill, then the answer is obviously yes. He's been a soldier, and he's trained to do it - and he's had enough opportunities, I don't doubt. All of which you probably know about already, anyway.'

True enough, thought Frances. In his time Butler had been nothing if not a fighting soldier, and there were graves in his record to prove it, all the way from Northern Europe in '45 to Korea, and back via Aden and Cyprus.

'But killing is one thing - killing under orders - and murder is another. What I saw of him... murder, even under orders...' His eyes hardened as he stared at her, the moralities of the police and the security service dividing them '... I'd say doubtful. Or even very doubtful.'

The eyes accused her.

'And when it comes to the murder of the mother of those little girls of his, no matter how he may have felt about her, then my answer is no, Mrs Fisher. Not him. Not in a thousand years.'

He paused.

'I can't prove that - I never could prove it. But even if you'd got proof that says otherwise, that you haven't told me about, my advice to you, Mrs Fisher, would be to go back and double-check it. And then check it again.

'And I'll give you three reasons for that, two other reasons.

'The first is that Patrick Parker did it. I couldn't prove that either, but for my money it was his work.

'And the second is ... if I'm wrong about everything else - about what sort of man he is, and about Parker ... then you and I wouldn't be here now, Mrs Fisher. If it had been premeditated murder - and for him to come back and do it three hours after he drove away it would have to be premeditated - then he'd have fixed it so there wouldn't be any doubt hanging over him then or now. I'd stake my pension on that. He didn't know about Parker, and he wouldn't have left it hanging in the air like that. He would have had an alibi.

'And the third reason ... the third reason, Mrs Fisher, is that the second reason is a load of nonsense - the third reason is the best one of all, to my way of thinking.

'I've known a lot of villains in my time, young woman. And one or two good men I'd stake more than my pension on. And the Major was one of them.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

Frances waited five minutes after William Ewart Hedges had gone before buying time on Isobel's private line.

01-836 20066.

'Whitehall Trust. Can I help you?'

The voice reminded her unbearably of Mrs Simmonds.

'Extension 223, please.'

Click. Scrambler on. Clickety-click-click. Wait.

'Extension 223.' The self-satisfied voice.

'This is Fisher. I've talked to Hedges. Have you arranged Brookside House for me?'

'Hullo Fisher. Of course. The Police are there now.'

'The Police?'

'Brookside House has had a break-in. Three houses in one morning in the same area -

shocking! Nothing valuable stolen, but as the Colonel is on the list we have to send someone down to liaise with the local Special Branch man. Just a simple matter of following the routine - they called us.' Smug chuckle. 'I'm afraid you'll have to be the one, Fisher dear. Sorry to disturb you, and all that ... but you're not busy at the moment, so it'll have to be you.'

'Why me?'

'I said - you're not busy. Officially you are still part of the Colonel's group. But as he packed you off home you're twiddling your thumbs. So you are the obvious choice - it stands to reason. Right?'

As a short-notice cover story it wasn't bad, but

the superiority of the voice roused forgotten memories within Frances - echoes from the past she had never remembered before -

* * *

'Frances Warren and Samantha Perring - fighting in the gym.' (Miss Widgery's voice had

been as sexlessly superior as Extension 223's.) '/ am aware that you did not strike the first blow,

Frances. But violence is always inadmissible. And in a young lady it is unpardonable.'

But Frances Warren had learnt differently since then.

'It doesn't sound simple to me.'

'Don't be awkward. Fisher. It's the best we can do in the time available, with the housekeeper there.'

'I want her out. I want the house first, and then the children. I want to be alone there.'

'Like Greta Garbo ... You know, you don't ask for easy things, Fisher. The housekeeper is like a limpet, she never leaves the children on their own except on her day off. And then the cleaning woman stays with them - stays the night, too.'

Frances waited.

'All right - so we've managed something ... just so you don't think it's easy, that's all.

And it will still require some ingenuity on your part. Or some respectability, I should say - you're not still blonde, are you?'

'No.'

'Thank God for that.' Extension 223 sniggered knowingly, as though he had the bikini snapshot of Marilyn before him. 'It's cost us a favour, too - quite a sizeable one.'

'Yes?' Frances just managed to take the waspish note out of her voice. There was no point in letting old angers betray her.

'All right.' He sounded disappointed at her subservience. 'You must be there shortly after 1400 hours, as our representative - the Police will meet you. Right?'

'Yes.' After the first time it was easy.

'At about 1430 the housekeeper will receive a phone-call - they call her "Nannie", by the way ... Butler striving for bourgeois respectability, I shouldn't wonder, eh?'

'Yes.' Now it was harder again.

' "Nannie" will receive a call from the Matron of the Charlotte Tyson Nursing Home, a Miss Prebble -'

'Who?'

'Miss Prebble. Just listen, Fisher. Matron Prebble is Nannie's best friend, they nursed together in the QARANCs years ago, when Nannie was an army wife. Prebble runs this nursing home, and on her day off Nannie takes over - it's on Nannie's day off too, and night off ... Just a small place, run on a shoestring. And at the moment it's badly understaffed, so Matron Prebble has no one she can hand over to except Nannie - at short notice. And that's what we've arranged: short notice. Nannie will have to take over tonight.'

'How?'

'The home is nearly bankrupt. We've arranged for the Ryle Foundation to offer Prebble a grant - they're an Anglo-Arab group, and they owe us a favour. And they've got money to burn.'

Frances had heard of the Ryle Foundation, it had been one of Hugh Roskill's responsibilities.

'Yes?'

'Prebble will phone Nannie. She's got to go to London, and there's no one else she can turn to at short notice, we've made sure of that, too. So that's where you come in.

Fisher - you have to convince Nannie you can baby-sit for her. You have to earn your keep, Fisher.'

The voice stung Frances. 'I've already earned my keep - ' she caught herself. 'I'm just afraid Butler will be suspicious, that's all.'

'Of course he'll be suspicious. It's his business to be suspicious. But he's got a lot on his plate with O'Leary at the moment, and it seems he approves of you. Fisher.' The voice was smugly approving. 'And I like that - I like that a lot, it's good for us. And I also like the sound of you earning your keep - I like that even more if it means you obtained something from that awkward policeman of yours.'

That was interesting. Whether Hedges had originally been awkward because he hadn't been allowed to do his job properly, or because he hadn't done his job properly anyway because he liked his Major Butler, she hadn't time to decide. Nor, for that matter, could she decide whether he hadn't been awkward with her because he liked her, or because he hadn't changed his mind about the Major in nine years.

But that was something she could think about. What mattered now was to sting Extension 223 into confirming her suspicions of him.

'He thinks Colonel Butler's clean.'

'Oh?' Extension 223 sounded sceptical. 'Indeed?'

'He liked him, too.'

'Don't we all! The Thin Red Line in person, of course! But what did he give you, the policeman?' Extension 223 didn't quite slaver over the inference that William Ewart Hedges had revealed something to Colonel Butler's disadvantage, but it was plain to Frances that whatever it might be, it would be received with intense satisfaction.

So Colonel Butler had an enemy where he ought to expect an impartial judge.

'I can't say for sure yet.' That was all the more reason why she must play hard to get: it was the least she could do for Colonel Butler, to offset Extension 223's bias against him, and it was also what she wanted to do.

'Not sure?' Now his voice was positively seductive.

'I gave him a dozen chances of saying one particular thing, and he never said it. And then, at the very end, he suggested it - by accident, I think. But I have to be sure, which is why I must get into the house ... and talk to the children without the housekeeper being there after that.'

'Now you're being oracular.'

'I could be mistaken, that's all.'

Silence at the other end. If she was right about him he'd be thinking now of a way of encouraging her to come back with Colonel Butler's scalp, or not at all.

Still more silence.

'I could be mistaken,' repeated Frances, rearranging the emphasis to suggest that she didn't think she was, nevertheless.

'Of course. And we must be absolutely fair - that's essential.' The voice changed. 'This isn't a witch-hunt. That's the very last thing it must be.'

Frances felt confused, even a little disappointed: it was as though another man had taken over, calm and businesslike, and quite unlike the first one.

'We also appreciate that any sort of truth will be difficult to establish now, Fisher,'

the Number Two voice continued. 'But what you in turn must appreciate is that you'll never have a more important assignment than this one. I'm sure you do understand that

- you must forgive me for sounding pompous after I may have seemed ... a little flippant, perhaps.'

'Not at all,' said Frances.

'And you're right - absolutely right. We cannot afford to make any mistake about Butler. If we do, we'll live to regret it. And some of us may not live to regret it, too. It's up to you - and I shall be at the end of this line twenty-four hours a day to help you. As of now, nothing's too big and nothing's too small if you want it. All you have to do is ask.'

The big league.

Sir Frederick had said as much the night before:

As of now you're a VIP, Frances.

'What's more, nothing goes on the record until you are ready to put it there. You are the boss, Fisher.'

Well, there was a Ring of Power, thought Frances. And it was on her finger, to use as she wished.

'You've already done well. To have picked up anything at all from that file ... and from that policeman. You're not the first one to have tried, believe me.'

Frances had the feeling that she'd been tested -

'You are the first one to succeed.' - and that she'd passed the test. No wonder she'd found Hedges so hard to thaw!

'But that's no accident. You were chosen for this. And what's more, I recommended you, Mrs Fisher - off the record.' He made the recommendation sound like an unpaid debt she had contracted, but which he expected to collect, with interest, soon enough.

'So ... what do you want us to set up for you next - after you've finished in the house, that is?'

He was already taking for granted that whatever it was she was looking for, it was there and she would find it. And she didn't know whether to be flattered or frightened by such confidence.

Also, in a strange way, there was something about this voice that she recognised.

Although she could still swear to herself that she had never heard it before - even allowing for the distortion of the telephone - there was something in it which jarred her memory. But how could she remember hearing something that she had never heard?

'Fisher?'

'Yes ...' Caution replaced her momentary euphoria. And in any case the prospect of after you've finished in the house had a sobering effect: if she found nothing then she was in trouble, yet if her one nagging suspicion was confirmed then Colonel Butler would be in trouble.

'Yes?' He prodded her gently.

'Yes. Well ...' Frances grasped the nettle. 'What is Colonel Butler doing at the moment?'

'Why ... he's still pursuing O'Leary, of course.' There was a frown in his tone, as though he was disappointed in her. 'Why do you wish to know, Fisher?'

'Up in Yorkshire?'

'Yes. That's where he thinks O'Leary is.'

'Where, exactly?'

'This morning I believe he is pursuing his inquiries in the town of Thirsk.' Extension 223 sounded as though he had no great confidence in the inquiries bearing fruit. 'Why do you have to know exactly where he is, may I ask?'

He was warning her off. They were keeping tabs on Butler now, naturally, but that was someone else's job, not hers - hers was Butler in '69, not Butler this morning, he was politely telling her.

And, for a guess, that might be Paul Mitchell's job, he would be good at that ... Paul Mitchell the watcher of Colonel Butler, the pursuer - Butler, in his turn, would be better at that, pursuing rather than waiting in ambushes festooned with computerised electronics. A hunter and a fighter, was Colonel Butler, not a trapper.

'Fisher?' Extension 223's patience was exemplary.

'I'd like to see the file on Trevor Anthony Bond.'

'Ah!'

Frances breathed a sigh of relief. There was a file on Trevor Anthony Bond, she knew that because it had been cross-referenced in the file on Colonel Butler. What she hadn't known was whether it was an active or a passive file - it might well have been passive with effect from 11.11.69, from . the afternoon when Butler had first and last quizzed Trevor Anthony on his KGB contacts. Indeed, it might very well have been passive from 11.11.69, but that Ah! told her it wasn't passive now; that it was - one will give you ten -

within reach of Extension 223's right hand on his desk, maybe.

'He's still alive, I take it?' 'Oh, yes - alive and kicking.' 'And living in Yorkshire?'

Pause.

'Yes.' Pause. Thornervaulx Abbey.'

'He's still there?' Frances shivered. Why had she assumed - why had she known before she asked - that Trevor Anthony Bond still worked for the Ministry of Public Building and Works at Thornervaulx?

'Yes.'

Fountains, Kirkstall, Jervaulx, Byland, Rievaulx, Thornervaulx - the great ruined abbeys of Yorkshire.

They were all a blur in her recollection of the things past in another life.

Fountains, Kirkstall, Jervaulx -

Fountains had been full of people picknicking on the grass, leaving their Coke cans and sweet papers and tinfoil...

* * *

She closed her eyes.

Frances Warren, aged 10, had had a green-flowered dress with a velvet bow for dinner - dinner with Uncle John in the immense Victorian vicarage - a dress which had flared out gloriously when she pirouetted in front of the mirror ... except that she had had no breasts at the time, when the unspeakable, rebarbative Samantha Perring had already owned a bra -

* * *

Kirkstall, with the marvellous museum across the road, with the Edwardian street and the penny-in-the-slot machine that reconstructed a murderer's last hours, right down to the six-foot hanging drop -

Frances! Stop working that gruesome machine!'

* * *

Kirkstall and the Hanged Man.

Jervaulx had been too ruined and dull, without the carefully manicured lawns of Byland, with its ruined pinnacle; and the wooded beauty of Rievaulx, where they had lunched on the hillside -

Chicken legs and white wine.

'John darling, don't give the child another glass - you'll make her quite tipsy!'

'Nonsense, m'dear. It's important for a girl to hold her liquor these days. Hold your glass steady, wench.'

And she had thought thereafter, and still half thought, that holding her liquor was really only a question of keeping her glass steady in her hand.

But Thornervaulx was still misty in her memory, mixed and confused with Fountains and Rievaulx ... in another wooded valley ("Dale, wench, dale - you're in Yorkshire now, not your muggy Midlands!') - in another wooded dale - hidden from the outside world of the flesh and the devil, as the old Cistercian monks planned it to be.

Perhaps that was the effect of that second glass of Uncle John's white wine, pale gold remembered through the sleepy warmth of a little girl's summer afternoon, already rich with the prospect of grown-up dinner and the wearing of the new dress - perhaps not surprisingly the old abbeys had become as jumbled in the little girl's recollections as their own tumbled stonework, while the taste of chicken legs and wine and the crisp feel of the dress were as well-remembered as yesterday -

* * *

'Mrs Fisher!'

Frances found herself staring fixedly at the whitewashed wall in front of her nose.

Thornervaulx Abbey, where Major Butler had questioned Trevor Anthony Bond on the afternoon (repeat afternoon) of 11.11.69 about his recent contacts with Leslie Pearson Cole (q.v. deceased, restricted) and Leonid T. Starinov (q.v. restricted).

'I'm sorry. I'm still here - I'm just thinking...'

'About Trevor Bond? There isn't much in the file, I can tell you. He didn't have much to say for himself.'

No, thought Frances. But what he had said had been distinctly odd.

'He gave Colonel Butler an alibi at first, though - didn't he?'

'Which Butler promptly contradicted. And when the Special Branch went back to him, Bond simply said he'd got it wrong - that he made a mistake. What's the point of double-checking that, may I ask?'

No point, of course, thought Frances.

And that was the point.

'It seems a funny sort of mistake - to say "morning" instead of "afternoon". It couldn't have been more than a week afterwards, when they came to check up on him again, probably not so long. He must have a very short memory.'

For a moment he said nothing. 'I don't think it was quite like that.'

He'd read the file quite recently, but the details-hadn't registered with him as being important. It had merely been a minor matter of routine for him, just as it had been for the Special Branch originally. So minor that now he couldn't recall the details precisely.

'What was it like?'

'Hmm ... Hold on a minute, and I'll tell you ...' His voice faded.

It wasn't quite fair to Colonel Butler to say that he'd contradicted Bond, reflected Frances. He would have put in his report independently, in which the afternoon interview with Bond had been recorded. And almost certainly the Special Branch men who had subsequently checked it out with Bond would never have seen that report, which must have had a security classification. The discrepancy between Butler's

'afternoon' and Bond's 'morning' would only have been spotted when the two reports reached the same desk.

And then, quite naturally, it would have been re-checked, because all discrepancies had to be resolved. But it would still have been only a minor matter of routine because it had been Butler himself who had established that he had no alibi for the material time of his wife's disappearance:

Although I had originally planned to interrogate Bond in the morning I decided on reflection that the afternoon might be more productive. Having approximately three hours on my hands, and there being no other duties scheduled for the day, I adjusted my route to take in my home town of Blackburn, arriving there at 1020

hours and departing at 1125. While in Blackburn I spoke to no one and recognised no one. I then proceeded to Thomervaulx, via Skipton and Blubberhouses, purchasing petrol at the Redbridge Garage, near Ripley (A61), at 1305 hours, arriving at 1425 after lunch at the Old Castle Hotel, Sutton-on-Swale.

As a not-alibi that could hardly be bettered, Frances concluded. If the Colonel had been trying to set himself up, that change of plan plus I spoke to no one and recognised no one had done the job perfectly. Trevor Bond's conflicting 'morning' stood no chance against such an admission, and once Bond had obligingly changed his tale to conform with it there had seemed no point in the Special Branch men treble-checking him any further. It was 9 o'clock in the morning that they were after, not 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 200 miles north.

* * *

'Hullo there, Mrs Fisher.'

'Yes?'

'You're quite right. He does seem to have a remarkably poor memory, does Master Bond. Even worse than you thought, actually.'

'Yes?'

'It was only two days. Butler visited him on the 11th - Tuesday the 11th. And the Special Branch checked him two days later, the first time, November 13th, when he said Butler was there in the morning ... And then they did the re-check on Monday the 17th, when he changed it to the afternoon ... So - only two days ... But they do appear to have been perfectly satisfied with his explanation.'

Yes, thought Frances, but it had just been routine for them. For Butler, on the 11th, Trevor Bond had been a suspect in a security matter. But on the 13th and the 17th, for the Special Branch, he had merely been an alibi witness in a missing persons case in which they were only indirectly involved - and in which Bond himself was also only indirectly involved, come to that.

'Is there a verbatim?'

'For the 13th? There's a statement for that ... a very brief statement. But to the point, nevertheless:

"A man came to see me on Tuesday morning, when I was having my tea at about 11 o'clock, and asked me a lot of silly questions about people talking to me. I never did understand what he was on about." And there's a note from the detective-sergeant to the effect that Bond couldn't actually remember Major Butler's name, but only that it had been a red-headed man in a brown check tweed suit with a red Remembrance Day poppy in his lapel who'd been a 'Major someone or other'. Which they took to be a positive ID in the circumstances.'

'What circumstances?'

Extension 223 coughed. 'The sergeant thought Bond was a near-idiot. "Apparently of low mentality", to be exact.' He paused. 'A judgement subsequently confirmed on the re-check. Do you want to hear it?'

Frances's heart sank. Low mentality's natural travelling companion was a bad memory.

'Yes.'

'Very well. I quote - or rather a certain Detective-Constable Smithers quotes: "In the morning - yes, as I was having my tea. Oh bugger, I tell a lie. It was in the afternoon I was having my tea, not the morning. I was sweeping up the leaves by the high altar, they blow in therefrom the trees at the back, where the wall's down at the comer there. In the morning I was repairing the wall of the infirmary cloister, I had my tea there in the morning. It was when I was having my tea in the afternoon when he comes up to me. I'd been sweeping the leaves round the altar. It's all these questions. Why are you asking all these questions? Haven't you got anything better to do? It was the afternoon, not the morning. But I put my name to that bit of paper. I was mixed up, that's all. I have a thermos in the morning, for my elevenses, and I make another thermos for the afternoon in the winter, when it's cold ..." Do you want me to go on, Mrs Fisher?'

'Oh bugger' was right, thought Frances. Her tentative theory on Trevor Anthony Bond looked to be as much in ruins as Thornervaulx Abbey, where the autumn leaves blew in over the site of the great golden altar under which the bones of St. Biddulph had once rested.

'No.' But there were still two questions to be asked, the answers to which had not been in Butler's file, and no matter how dusty the answers they still had to be asked.

'Was anything ever established against Bond?'

'You mean ... other than the fact that Pearson Cole and Starinov each spoke to him on consecutive days? Actually, it was Starinov who spoke to him first, then Pearson Cole ...

That was established, certainly. They were both being tailed.'

'Did they know they were being tailed?'

'That's anybody's guess.' He sniffed. 'Pearson Cole ... probably not ... Starinov was a pro of course. But then so was the man who set up the surveillance on him ... That makes it anybody's guess.'

'And they did make contact?'

'Pearson Cole took the high jump just as we were about to pick him up. Starinov was diplomatic - he took the next plane home. It's fair to assume those two events weren't unconnected, that was the official view.' Pause. 'But whether Bond was the link man ...

that was never proved, one way or the other. And he's never stepped out of line since, so far as we know. Nothing known before, nothing known since.'

The old Scottish 'non-proven': Trevor Anthony Bond, apparently of low intelligence, had been left pickled in doubt, innocent but unlucky, guilty but lucky, or guilty but too damn clever by half, and nobody knew which.

Just like Colonel Butler, in fact.

And, in the matter of Madeleine Butler's disappearance, just like Patrick Raymond Parker too.

Sod it!

Question Two, then.

'What did Colonel Butler have to say about him, Trevor Bond?'

'Ah ... now Butler was not entirely converted to the Special Branch view, you might say. Because, although he didn't get anything out of him, he didn't think the fellow was as stupid as he made out.'

Frances perked up. 'In what way?'

'In what way ... Well, reading between the lines say, perhaps not a traitor, but possibly an artful dodger. But he wasn't sure after only one stab at him.'

Only one stab at him. That had never occurred to her, and it was a bonus she hadn't expected. She ought to have thought of that before, but better late than never.

And the bonus gave her cash for another question.

'What was Pearson Cole doing?'

Pause.

'Sorry, Fisher. Classified.'

Frances frowned at the wall. ' "All I have to do is ask". I'm asking.'

'That means within the limits of the job.'

'Then - it's within the limits.'

'I'm afraid it isn't, Mrs Fisher. Colonel Butler is your concern - Colonel Butler and his lady - not Pearson Cole. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.'

His voice was very gently chiding, almost silky, so far as she could make out, and once again it struck a chord in her memory which she still couldn't identify. The telephone was worse than last night's darkness, in which she had at least been able to pick up Sir Frederick's tone without distortion, even with heightened perception.

'Unless I can prove otherwise, you mean?'

'That would change things, naturally.'

It was a Catch-22 situation, thought Frances bitterly. 'And Trevor Bond?'

'You can have his file, I'll have it sent to you - or a flimsy of it ... But you haven't really justified your obsession with him, either, you know.'

'It isn't an obsession.' Frances's resolve to keep her own counsel weakened: although he hadn't said as much he obviously didn't rate her chances. 'If he wasn't a contact, then of course it doesn't matter ... But if he was.. .'

'That's a very big if. Do go on though - if he was?'

'Then he wouldn't have made any mistake about the time of day. It would have been pointless. So on November 13 he lied - deliberately.'

She paused to give him time to work out the different interpretations of that: if it was a lie, then it hadn't done Butler any harm - on the contrary, if he had confirmed it, then it would have given him an alibi for the time of his wife's disappearance.

But in fact the Colonel had rejected any idea of an alibi with his own detailed - but unsubstantiated - account of his own movements that morning.

And yet, if it was a lie, then it also hadn't done Bond himself any good - on the contrary, it had put him at risk again by bringing the Special Branch back to him when he ought to have been keeping his head down; which would only have been justified if it had done Butler harm.

Which it hadn't... (Indeed, if Bond had actually stuck to his original lie, and had cast doubt on the Colonel's own account by insisting on giving him an alibi, that might have been more embarrassing. But he hadn't done that, either.) The possibilities went round in circles, but they always came back to the same point: not one of them made any sense.

* * *

Suddenly, a vivid memory of Dr David Audley surfaced in Frances's mind. David -

theorising on the pitfalls of action based on faulty intelligence in the lecture room of Walton

Hall-David - dear David, with his expensive suit typically in disarray, one fly-button undone ('Dishevilled urbanity', whispers Paul Mitchell, already star pupil in the awkward squad) -

Dear David - typically illustrating bitter experience from the advice of 'my old Latin master' on the hazards of translating the Orations of Cicero: Since Cicero can be relied on to make sense and your translation does not make sense, then it is prudent to assume that the error is yours, not Cicero's.

* * *

'Hmm ...' Extension 223 sounded sceptical, but cautious. 'So ... why should he do that, Mrs Fisher?'

In short, nonsense must be wrong ... And by the same token, even though our adversaries are rarely men of Cicero's calibre, when your interpretation of their actions does not make sense it is prudent to assume that the error is yours - and that you have been taken for a bloody ride according to plan. Until proved otherwise, therefore, nonsense must be wrong.

* * *

'I haven't the faintest idea - I don't know.' But what she did know, thought Frances, was that she missed David Audley's counsel now; and more, that in the matter of Colonel and Mrs Butler she missed it twice over. 'But I think that nonsense must be wrong until proved otherwise.' For a moment there was no sound from the telephone, and then it emitted an odd crackling growl, as though the source of the nonsense theory was known, and disliked.

'All right, Fisher - ' Extension 223's voice was strangely harsh: the growl had definitely been his, not the phone's ' - but I think that you're clutching at straws - '

'Straws are all I've got,' said Frances.

'Don't you believe it! Keep plugging at Mrs Butler, that's my advice. But I'll do what I can with Bond in the meantime.' The harshness was gone, like a distant rumble of summer thunder only half-heard and far away, and the voice was all velvet encouragement again. 'The flimsy of the Bond file I can get to you today ... and I think I'll run a quick present-whereabouts-and-status check on him too, just in case - so as not to risk wasting your time. The last one we've got is nearly three months old, I see.'

Frances felt complimented - so as not to risk wasting her valuable time, indeed! - and then the last words registered as significant.

They had never proved anything against Trevor Bond, but they had nevertheless run PWS checks on him for nine whole years - three-monthly checks for nine blameless years. And although PWS checks could safely be left to the local police that confirmed what she had already begun to suspect about Pearson Cole from Extension 223's reluctance to talk about him: that whatever he'd been up to once upon a time, all those years back, it must have been something red-hot - and so hot that it had even kept the dull Trevor Anthony Bond file warm, so it would seem.

And that was decidedly interesting - 'And Pearson Cole?' Nothing venture, nothing gain.

'I can't promise anything there. Fisher. The odds are against, but I'll pass the word on

... That's the most I can do, and the best ... just for you. Fisher, I'll do that.'

'Thank you,' said Frances meekly. David Audley would know because he knew almost everything, but David was out of bounds; and Paul Mitchell might know, because he often knew what he wasn't supposed to know, but he was out of reach, at least temporarily. And if Extension 223 really was doing his best for her such thoughts were treasonable, anyway.

'You just concentrate on Colonel Butler in the meantime. And on the wife.' Pause.

'On this hunch of yours, whatever it is.'

Promotion, riches and fame, the voice promised her: not a witch-hunt - perish the thought! - but if you bring Colonel Butler's head on a platter, Fisher, the world is at your feet.

'I'll do my best.' Frances felt seduced, on her back.

'That's fine, then. And now I have one little bit of good news for you: those expensive gloves of yours have been found.'

Gloves?

Those expensive gloves of yours?

Those expensive gloves of yours have been found?

'Oh - ' The white-washed wall blazed in front of her. 'Oh?'

Gloves? She had a pair of black gloves at home, bought for Robbie's funeral and never worn since; she could remember clenching ice-cold hands in them as the rifles fired over the grave. Once she had had a pair of grey woollen mittens, when mittens were all the rage in the Fifth Form ... And Robbie had bequeathed her a pair of dirty white-and-green cricket gloves and a well-worn Fives glove...

She never wore gloves.

'Yes?' She stared at her left hand, with its short life line on the palm. Mustn't be superstitious - and don't let him ask her to describe them until she knew more about them, these expensive gloves of hers which had been found, but never lost, never even possessed.

'Young Mitchell found them ... somewhere in the Library, in the Common Room, I think he said. Khaki-colour - are those the ones?'

Frances looked at her sleeve. Paul had seen this suit yesterday, and it would be like a man - and particularly like Paul - to describe this beautiful new Jaeger green so insultingly.

'Green - yes.' She committed herself to Paul and the gloves.

'Good. I'll get him to post them on to you - not to worry.'

Frances worried furiously. That couldn't be what Paul intended with the mythical gloves. But what the hell did he intend?

It could only be communication. Since he couldn't know where she was, he had to tell her where he was.

'Where are they?' Was that the right question?

'Where are they?' For a moment he was thrown by the sheer triviality of the present-whereabouts-and-status of Mrs Fitzgibbon-Fisher's expensive khaki-green leather gloves. 'They're in his hotel - the Royal Europa, Harrogate. But I'll get him to post them.'

'No. I can make time to pick them up tomorrow.' Frances curbed her excitement: if it wasn't the right question it had been near enough. But what she had to do now was to reinforce its triviality. 'Those are my very best gloves. They cost a fortune -' (That was safe. Anything made of leather cost a fortune) '- and the colour-match is perfect... I'm not trusting them to the Post Office. I shall pick them up myself.'

'All right. Fisher - if you must!' He chuckled. 'Mulier est hominis confusio. '

'What?' She pretended not to understand the chauvinist jibe.

'Nothing ... As I said, just so you concentrate your energies on Colonel Butler, m'dear. Because ... none of this has gone on record, but we're relying on you to come up with something, make no mistake about that. Understood?'

Promotion, riches and fame - or demotion, penury and oblivion.

'I understand.'

Click.

Wait ten seconds.

* * *

'Directory inquiries, please ... I'd like the number of the Royal Europa Hotel, Harrogate, please.'

She rummaged in her handbag for her wallet. With phone charges what they were at peak times, how much did she owe Isobel?

* * *

'Royal Europa Hotel.'

'May I speak to the Head Porter, please.' (For a guess, Paul would start at the top.)

'Head Porter. Can I help you?'

'My name is - ' (Frances experienced a moment of confusion: what was her name?)' -

Fitzgibbon. I believe you have a pair of gloves for me. Left by a Mr Paul Mitchell?'

'Ah... Miss Fitzgibbon - yes... And that would be Miss Frances Fitzgibbon, I take it?'

'Yes.' Frances licked her lips. 'You have my gloves?'

'Yes, madam. We have your... gloves.' He placed a curious emphasis on gloves, turning the word into a conspiracy between them, and a pass-word too. Suddenly Frances felt hand-in-glove with him, and part of all the rendezvous in which he had played the role of go-between - his discretion and loyalty bought for a blue fiver - for other Paul Mitchells and Frances Fitzgibbons over the years.

And, just as suddenly, the knowledge was painful to her, that there was no one now who would wish to buy that discretion for her and anyone else, for what Paul would have led this Head Porter to believe: a night in one of his double rooms - Where love throbs out in blissful sleep/Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath/Where hushed awakenings are dear...

If that had been the case, what would she say now?

'Was there a message... with the gloves?'

'Ah... Would you hold the line for a minute, madam?'

What was he doing? Turning on the tape? Putting the extension through? Or moving the Receptionist out of ear-shot?

'Thank you, madam... Now, if you please, on one side of your fireplace there is a book-shelf - am I right?'

'What?'

He cleared his throat. 'I am instructed to ask you, madam: on one side of your fireplace there is a book-shelf. What sort of books would there be on that shelf, now?'

Frances closed her eyes. The fireplace - to take precautions like this Paul had to be scared - the fireplace had books on each side of it, she'd made the bookcases herself during Robbie's second tour in Ulster ... Robbie's books on one side, hers on the other -

her Faulkner and Hardy and Fielding, and all her poetry anthologies -

God knows 'twere better to be deep/Pillowed in silk and scented down - but why was she thinking of those lines, from one of Robbie's favourite poems, and of all poems that one, the death one?

She opened her eyes. Paul had only noticed Robbie's books at his side when he had sat at that fireside, in the empty chair.

'Fairy stories and folk-lore.'

'Fairy tales - that's correct. Thank you, madam.' He drew a five-pound breath of relief. 'If you have a piece of paper and a pencil handy, I have a message for you, madam.'

There was a pad by the phone, with a biro on a string.

'Yes?'

'"Ring 0254-587142". Have you got that, madam?'

It may be he shall take my hand/And lead me into his dark land -

Damn! 'Yes. 0254-587142'.

'"Ask for the Adjutant".'

'Yes. Ask for the Adjutant.'

'"Exercise caution".'

Paul really was scared. And as of this moment, since Paul didn't scare easily - never had been scared in her experience - then Frances was frightened, thought Frances.

'Yes?'

'That's all, madam. Just that.'

'Thank you.' She waited, but he didn't seem inclined to hang up. 'Yes?'

'The gloves, madam. What shall I do with them?'

'Oh.' So there really was a pair of gloves. But of course there was: Paul wouldn't make that sort of error. And, by the same token, she must play her part in the charade.

'I'll be coming by to pick them up, probably tomorrow.'

'Then I'll leave them in Reception for you ... And ... good luck, madam.'

Click.

* * *

One good thing about being frightened, thought Frances analytically, was that it dissolved both poetry and feminine vapours - that would be Wing Commander Roskill's famous adrenalin overriding the central nervous system, making a superwoman of her.

0254-587142. Poor Isobel's phone bill!

'Guard Room.'

Frances frowned at the wall. 'I beg your pardon?'

'You've got the Guard Room, love.' The owner of the voice appeared resigned, though not unkindly, to explaining what was bound to be a wrong number. 'Queen's Lancashire Regiment, Blackburn Depot - Salamanca Barracks. Is that what you want?'

The adrenalin pumped. No need to wonder now what Paul was doing, of course; while she was excavating Colonel Butler's marriage, he was turning over Colonel Butler's military career, or some unresolved question mark in it - and who better than Paul Mitchell, the ex-military historian, to dig into that history?

(And who better than Widow Fitzgibbon, the ex-military wife, to dig into that marriage? Ugh!)

'I'd like to speak with the Adjutant, if you please.' Frances heard her most county voice take over, turning the request into an order. 'He is expecting a call from me.'

Haughty sniff. 'An urgent call.'

'Very good, madam.' The Guard Room came smartly to attention at the word of command.

The past flooded back painfully, surging over her and then carrying her forward before she could check it into the might-have-been present. Robbie would have made captain now, and if they'd still been together she'd have been an established regimental wife - even maybe a wife-and-mother, with a son down for Wellington -

If.

No!

Think of Colonel Butler - Major Butler, Captain Butler, Lieutenant Butler, Officer Cadet Butler ... even Private Butler.

Paul had been right: not quite out of the top drawer, our Jack - she ought to have noticed that, if not noted it (what did it matter where he came from?), because her ear was sharper than Paul's (but maybe it did matter now, remembering how Colonel Butler -

Captain Butler at the time, it had been - from the wrong side of the tracks had carried off Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard, of Chateau Chais d'Auray, which sounded a long way beyond the other side of those tracks).

(Because that had been as out-of-character for the dour Colonel Butler she knew, or thought she knew, as for the Private Butler who had risen from the ranks of his Lancashire regiment, out of the back streets of Blackburn ... somehow inheriting the fortune of General Sir Henry Chesney en route.)

(There was more in Colonel Butler than met the eye, much more and very different.

But how much more, and how different?)

* * *

'Miss Fitzgibbon?'

The Adjutant. Widow Fitzgibbon could tell an adjutant when she heard one.

Wellington and Sandhurst. Or any public school and Sandhurst; Johnnie Kinch, who had danced rather closely with not-yet-Widow Fitzgibbon, had been Eton and Sandhurst and Robbie's adjutant, and that could have been Johnnie Kinch's voice, down to the last inflection.

'Could I speak to Mr Mitchell, please?' said Frances cautiously.

'Ah ... jolly good!' Caution met caution. 'Would you hold the line for a tick?'

For a tick she would hold the line.

* * *

(But it wouldn't have been Private Butler, of course - his had been a rifle regiment, or was it a fusilier one? An Army wife ought to have made that important distinction - it would have been Rifleman Butler, or Fusilier Butler ... Except, the truth was, she had never been a very good Army wife, imbued with the proper attitudes, but just a very young one full of learning and politics out of step with her situation, in which there was also more than had met her eye - more and very different.)

* * *

'Princess?'

That was Paul - no doubt about that.

'Yes?'

'Where are you phoning from?'

'Does it matter?'

'Where-are-you-phoning-from?'

'A pub in the back of beyond.'

'The pay phone?'

'No. The publican's private line. What's your problem?'

'You got my message. Did Control phone you? Or did you phone Control?'

'What's the matter, Paul?'

'For Christ's sake. Princess - answer the question!'

'I phoned him. For Christ's sake - what's the matter?'

Silence. Clever Paul was assessing the chances of putting himself on someone else's record. Clever scared Paul.

'Okay then. Princess. We've got things to talk about.'

'Like what?'

'Like ... how you're going to smear Jack Butler, maybe?'

'What d'you mean - smear?'

'Have it your own way - "investigate", if you prefer. Just so you keep on digging until something starts to smell. Choose your own euphemism, I don't care.'

'I seem to recall, last time we met you weren't so pleased with him,' Frances snapped back defensively.

'Hah! Nor I was. But that was ... let's say professional disagreement, tinged with envy. This is different - and don't tell me you don't know it ... Come on, you tell me you're not digging dirt. If you can do that then okay. But if not...'

The challenge hit her squarely. That was the way it had seemed to her when Extension 223 had first talked to her, but somehow she'd forgotten her initial reaction.

And now that he wasn't talking to her - now that his voice wasn't seeping into her ear -

she could recall how she'd felt -

'Come on, Frances. Take me seriously just this once - is that what you're doing?'

Digging dirt - ? Well, crudely put, that was exactly what she was doing, even if she didn't want to find any.

The voice of Extension 223 had been the voice of Saruman, Tolkien's wicked wizard, who could always daunt or convince the little people.

'Yes.'

'Good girl. Because that's what I'm supposed to be doing too - digging dirt. My problem is your problem.'

A moral Paul? Frances didn't have to test the possibility in order to reject it. A delicate conscience had never hampered him in the past, and it wasn't likely to be spiking him on one of its horns now. Paul's dilemmas were always strictly practical ones.

'So what? It won't be the first time either of us has dug dirt, Paul.'

'Very true. That's where the gold is, in the dirt - I know.'

'Then what's so different now?'

'Hah! The difference. Princess, is that then we were digging in the national interest.

What old Jack would call "the defence of the Realm" ... not as part of a bloody palace revolution.'

'A - what?'

'You heard me. A bloody-palace-revolution. The Ides of March in the Forum. A quick twist of garrotting wire and a splash in the Golden Horn. The Night of the Long Knives.

And us in the middle of it, up to the elbows in gore.'

'Paul ... are you out of your mind?' Frances stared at the white wall in dismay.

For a moment the phone was silent. 'Paul?'

'All right ... so I'm exaggerating. We do these things in a more civilised manner, of course ... But if I'm crazy. Princess, then I'm being crazy like a fox, I tell you. And ... you start thinking for yourself, for God's sake. Have you ever taken part in anything as whacky as this before?'

Frances started thinking.

'Whacky' was a typical Paul word, but it wasn't too far off the mark. There had been something decidedly odd about this operation from the start, she had been telling herself that all along.

'Who briefed you, Frances?' He paused only for half a second. 'Top brass? And off the record?'

'Yes.' Exercise caution. And that applied to her dealings with Paul as well, because if there really was a major security shake-up in progress - 'palace revolution' was also typical Paul - then two things were certain: there would be rival factions jockeying for power, and Paul Mitchell intended to be on the winning side, regardless of the interests of Frances Fitzgibbon, never mind Colonel Butler. 'But I wasn't told to smear Colonel Butler, Paul.'

'Don't be naive, Princess. Whose side are you on?'

He was being unusually direct or exceptionally devious, decided Frances. But which?

'My side. Whose side are you on, Paul dear?'

'Hah! I deserved that!' He chuckled at his own self-knowledge. 'Okay, Frances dear -

Princess mine - my off-the-record top brass set me to inquire gently into two small areas of doubt about our Jack's warlike career ... gently and discreetly, but I'd better get the required answer if I value my civil service pension bien entendu. Namely, if he was so bloody good at his job, why was his promotion so slow? And was the late glamorous Madame Butler the pillar of wifely chastity - or wifely virtue - that the official records suggest? To which I strongly suspect the required answers are He wasn't really any good, so he wasn't promoted, and He wasn't really any good because Madame B wasn't so virtuous while he was away at the wars, and he found out and that screwed him up. Right?'

Frances stared at the white wall. 'Damn you, Paul -'

'I said required - hold on. Princess - I said required. I didn't say "correct". Those are the answers they want me to come up with, not the answers I may come up with.'

'Damn you! I haven't started yet!'

'Well, hard luck! You wanted to know which side I'm on, and I'm telling you.

Though it's not easy on this bloody instrument - David Audley's right: the telephone is the devil's device, and God rot Graham Alexander Bell or Thomas Alva Edison, or whoever. You may be a female Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, Princess, but I'm a Master of Arts in History, where facts still count for something ... and I'm not getting the right answers. Which worries me more than somewhat.'

'I'm sorry to hear that, Paul.' Beneath the froth he did sound worried, and that purged her anger. 'I really am.'

'So you should be. Because you should be worried for yourself too, my girl. And worried on two counts, also. Or at least two.'

'And what are they?'

'Oh, you can laugh.' He didn't sound his casual self, and that equally purged any shred of humour from their situation. 'It's Jack Butler's promotion we're supposed to be superintending. Has it occurred to you ... that might be true?'

'I assumed it was. Isn't that why it's important?'

'Too true. But I think I know what the promotion is.'

The Ring of Power, thought Frances - and then backed off from the image. Whatever power Colonel Butler was in line for, it had nothing to do with fairyland, or Middle Earth, or Cloudcuckooland; it was life-and-death power here on earth, her earth.

'And what promotion is that, then?'

'I'm not telling you - on this line. Four hours from now, where will you be, Frances?

We have to talk, you and I.'

He really believed his 'palace revolution' theory, she believed that now. And, allowing for paranoia being an occupational hazard of their profession, she was beginning to believe in his belief.

'I'll be at Colonel Butler's home this afternoon - and this evening, I hope.'

'Why there, for God's sake?'

'I have some answers to get, like you, Paul.'

'Christ! I'm dim, aren't I! Madame Butler, I presume?' He breathed out. 'They're really pushing it, aren't they!'

'Has it occurred to you that they could be right?' she pushed him deliberately, even though she knew the answer: Paul's distinction between right and wrong was always strictly factual, not ethical. Neither cheating nor any other morality came into it.

'You better believe that I have. Princess. That's the main thing that worries me. And that's why I need to see you. We have to talk!'

He wasn't going to go further on his own account. But he might go further on hers.

'So what's the second thing that should worry me? .You didn't actually get round to telling me.'

'Nor I did ...' He left the answer hanging in the air for a moment. 'They gave you carte blanche for the job, did they? They said you're the boss?'

'Yes.'

'Me too. So who was the first person you wanted to talk to about Jack Butler?'

David Audley -

Paul hardly waited for an answer. 'David Audley, of course. Because he's known Jack from way back - even before that file started, if my scuttlebut is correct ... Only carte blanche doesn't include David Audley, does it? Right? Or Hugh Roskill?'

Now he was pushing her.

'I'll bet you tried, Frances - because you've got some pull with Hugh Roskill from your happy little secretarial days ... And did they tell you that your handsome Wing Commander just happens to have winged off somewhere on business, where you can't pick his brains - did they tell you that?'

She hadn't even got as far as a refusal on Hugh, thought Frances: she hadn't even understood what she was into at that stage. 'So what?'

'Roskill doesn't matter much, but David Audley does - did you know that Jack Butler is godfather to David's daughter, the apple of his eye?'

'Yes - '

'Of course, David makes no secret of it. And I bet Jack Butler's a damn good godfather too. He's a great one for anniversaries, so he'd never forget a birthday - and he probably checks on the poor kid's catechism too, I shouldn't wonder.'

'Get to the point, Paul.'

'Don't be dim, Frances - that is the point. Among other things David Audley is almost certainly the greatest living authority on the life and times of Jack Butler.'

'But also a friend of his.'

'After a fashion. It's more of a love-hate relationship, actually - old Jack doesn't altogether approve of some of David's professional attitudes, David's too much of a maverick for him ... But even if I grant you friendship - and admiration - it wouldn't make a jot of difference if it came to a security crunch. Because under the skin our David is a real hard bastard - which you should know as well as anyone, Frances, having seen him in action.'

That, undeniably, was true, thought Frances. In professional matters David was not, decidedly not, a follower of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules.

'Hell, Princess - ' Paul's voice was suddenly edged with anger ' - doesn't it strike you as bad medicine that neither Hugh nor David are here just when we need them most?

And we can't even damn well talk to them either - and there are such things as communications satellites ... David's only in the embassy at Washington, not on Mars -

we could have him back here in the flesh by Concorde for tea-time, taxi-time included.

But... neither of them - you can call that bad management, if you like. Or bad luck. Or coincidence. But if you do, you'd better remember also what David taught us about them, Frances.'

Bad luck is what the Other Side wishes on you.

Coincidence is very often a damned liar.

And bad management -

Then Frances knew exactly what Paul was up to, why he was going to so much trouble to spell everything out, and - above all - what he intended her to do about it.

* * *

(She could recall not only the words, but the occasion; David, fairly tanked-up after dinner, and James Cable and Paul and herself, all relaxing after a hard day's work ... and Paul, very carefully not tanked-up at all, playing his favourite game of capping David's quotations, or anticipating them, and gently needling him.) ('And bad management,' David had said, 'is when you find yourself taking unnecessary risks.')

('And good management,' Paul had said, 'is presumably when you find someone else to take those risks?')

* * *

'All right, Paul, I take your point. We do have to talk.' She thought hard for a moment. 'You better make it after dark, quite late ... and by the back way, if there is one.

And if there are any complications I'll park my car pointing out of the driveway.'

'There's a careful princess, now! And just as well too, maybe ... if your friend Hugo is right.'

'My friend - who?'

'Hugo. Hugo Crowe.'

'Oh - Professor Crowe, you mean. He's not my friend, I've only met him once.'

'Well, he regards himself as your friend. He says you are a darling - even a Grace Darling, combining heroism with beauty. Just another passing conquest of yours.

Princess... but obviously you've stopped counting them - fairy princesses are traditionally cruel, of course.'

He was pleased with himself now that she had taken his point.

'If he's right? How should he be right?' Frances frowned. 'Right about what?'

'You told him a story - about a blind prince? A fairy story, presumably.'

The skin between her shoulder-blades crawled suddenly. 'Yes. Yes?'

'He says you shouldn't have told it. But particularly he says you mustn't point at anyone. And on no account must you kiss the third prince - you're to choose one of the other two. And don't ask me what all that means, because I don't know, and he wouldn't tell me. For my own good, that was, he said. A very superstitious fellow, your friend Hugo ... though no one has a better right to be, I suppose.'

Frances closed her eyes. 'I'm not with you at all, Paul. Why is - why has he the right to be superstitious?'

'You haven't done your homework. He's the author of The Psychology of Superstition...

why people won't walk under ladders, and all that stuff. Huh! But please don't worry about me, Frances dear - you can point at me any time, I'm not superstitious. And you can kiss me too, I'm not blind - it'll be a pleasure, I assure you... Maybe tonight, and make an honest princess of you.' A kiss sounded down the line. 'Watch out for yourself, Frances - save all your kisses for me.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

On the outskirts of Colonel Butler's village there was a big new garage, with a showroom full of gleaming Japanese cars and an unbeatable offer on its petrol.

Frances pulled on to the forecourt, just short of the pumps, and sat thinking for a moment, hypnotised by the empty phone box beyond the car-wash at the far end of the buildings.

All she had to do was to go to that box and lift the phone and dial the number and put the money in, and then say a few words. It would be just another phone call, and even if the Mossad line at the Saracen's Head was no longer secure it would be untraceable if she was quick.

Except it wouldn't be just another call, because once she'd made it she'd be more than halfway committed to one side of Paul's palace revolution and not to the side with the better odds at the moment. Not even, come to that, to the side that had the right on it for certain, notwithstanding her instinct - and William Ewart Hedges' blessing.

A tousle-headed young man came out of the petrol kiosk and stood staring towards her.

Paul, on the other hand, was hedging his bets with a vengeance. Though (to be fair to him) he'd gone a lot further than she might have expected him to go, with his ambitions, and with the promises of advancement they would have made to him, like those which had been made to her in return for results.

The young man pointed towards her, and then to the pumps.

Mustn't point at anyone.

What Paul hadn't done, and what he wasn't going to do (because of those ambitions), or at least not yet, until he was sure which way the tide was flowing (also because of those ambitions), was to risk disobeying a direct order.

(Good management is finding someone else to take the risks, namely, Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon.)

She rolled the car forward to the five-star pump.

The young man looked at her, and then the car, and then at the pump. And finally back at her. He was young and beautiful, and he wore an incredibly patched pair of jeans which appeared to have been poured on him, and a dark blue sweat-shirt bearing the legend 'Oxford University'.

Frances looked down at the fuel gauge: it had registered under half-full when Paul had turned over the car to her yesterday, a long way north, but it was still not quite on empty. It was that sort of car.

'Can I help you?' He smiled, and was more beautiful, and the accent went with the sweat-shirt.

'Do you take Barclaycards?'

'Barclay and Access - not American Express, for some obscure reason. But you won't get any Green Shield Stamps, they're only for hard cash, I'm afraid.' Still smiling, still looking down at her, he tossed his curls towards the great garish poster above his shoulder. 'It's all in the small print. Though actually our petrol is cheap at the moment -

you're supposed to come in for our extra special offer, plus quintuple stamps for cash, and then think better of it and buy a new car instead, with a full tank and a million stamps, or something.'

He really was lovely, thought Frances uncontrollably. But he was ten years too young for her - in another ten years she'd be old enough to have a son of his age - and as unattainable as a shaft of sunlight.

'Should I be tempted?' She knew that it was the temptation of make-believe, if only for a moment, to which she was surrendering.

The smile compressed itself with mischief. 'There's a couple of salesmen back there just waiting for me to give them the signal ... Actually, the cars aren't bad at the price, though the spares are a bit pricey. Myself, I'd rather have a Honda Four-hundred-four.'

'A motor-bike?'

'A bike, yes.' His eyes glazed at the thought, blotting her out, and when they saw her again they were no longer interested in her. 'Four star, you want?'

The gossamer moment was over. She was just a woman customer in a nondescript car and he was a young petrol pump attendant, a strange face glimpsed for an instant in passing, and then gone forever.

Yet, in a strange cold way, Frances had the feeling that she was the stranger, the unreality, not this boy. For he belonged to the warm-blooded world of friends and car salesmen, and pay on Friday, saved towards his Honda Four-hundred-four, which was a real world beside which hers was a shadow country of ghosts and memories. Simply, she had caught his warmth for an instant, as any ghost might warm its pale hands on the living, and that had made her substantial enough for him to see. But now she was fading again, and the sooner she faded away altogether, the better - the safer - for them both.

'Five star, please.' She reached decisively into her bag for the right Barclay card, neither Fitzgibbon nor Fisher, but her own very private untraceable Maiden Warren.

'Five star?' He controlled his surprise just short of disbelief. 'How many gallons?'

She no longer saw him. It was curious that she had pretended to herself for so long that she was in two minds about the phone call, even that she'd half-blamed Paul for setting her to it, when she'd intended all along to make it, since last night. Paul had merely added reason to her instinct for disobedience.

'Fill her up.' She passed the card across without looking at the boy, and opened the car door. 'I'm going to make a phone call.'

* * *

She pressed the button and the coins dropped.

'Saracen.'

It was a rough East End voice. But then, the Saracen's Head was a rough East End pub, David Audley had said, where the beer was as strong as the prejudices and it didn't pay to ask the wrong question or support any team except West Ham.

'I'd like a word with Mr Lee.' Out aloud 'Mr Lee' sounded rather Chinese, or even Romany, certainly not Israeli.

' 'Oo wants 'im?' the rough voice challenged her.

'A friend of a friend of his,' replied Frances obediently.

'Oh yus? Well, 'e ain't 'ere.'

Recognition sign.

'Mr Lee owes my friend six favours, for services rendered.' She wondered as she spoke whether that meant anything or nothing; with David's quirky sense of humour it might even be a genuine reminder.

'Is that a fact, now? 'Old on a mo', luv.'

Frances waited. Through the smudgy window of the phone box she saw the young man take the nozzle of the petrol hose out of the tank. He peered at the numbers registered on the pump, and then back at the car. Then he scratched his thatch with his free hand. Then he bent down and looked underneath the car. Then he straightened up and stared towards the phone box. Then he reinserted the nozzle into the tank again.

Frances cursed her carelessness, which had quite unnecessarily turned him from an uninterested, disinterested young man into an interested young man. And more, a sharp young man (as it was November, and term had started, for a guess a sharp young man serving out his free year before Oxford, earning enough on the pumps for that Honda of his dreams?). And, most of all, a young man who would remember her now, right down to the Warren Barclaycard, if anyone came to unlock his memory. Sod it!

"Ullo there?'

It was a different voice, but only marginally different, and not what she had expected even though she had never expected Colonel Shapiro himself.

'Mr Lee?'

'Naow, 'e ain't 'ere. I'm a friend of 'is. Do I know you, darlin'?'

'No - ' Frances floundered for a moment as she watched the young man filling the tank. When he had done that, if he was the young man she took him to be, he would look under the bonnet on the pretext of checking the oil. 'No. I'm a friend of a friend of his.

'Oh ah?'

The young man replaced the hose in the pump, taking a sidelong glance at the phone box as he did so. Then he walked round to the driver's window and leaned inside to release the bonnet catch.

'You still there, darlin'?'

'Yes.'

Sod it! He was lifting the bonnet now. She had never made stupid little mistakes like this before, never taken big risks like this before ... never disobeyed direct orders like this before, or almost never. And it was making mistakes, taking risks and disobeying orders which killed people, and more often than not other people too. That had been what David himself had said; and, in a very creepy way, that had been also what Professor Crowe had told Paul Mitchell - you shouldn't have told that story. And the queer thing was that she had always known there was something malevolent about Grandmother's fairy story, even before she'd told it to Robbie that last time, by the fireside, on his last leave.

'Come on, darlin' - spit it out, get it off yer chest.'

Superstition, sod it! 'Is this line secure?'

'You arskin'? It was until I 'eard your voice, ducks!'

Superstition: if she pointed her finger at the young man with his head under the bonnet of her car, then that would solve one of her problems. But that would be too cruel...

'My friend said ... if I ever needed to get a message to him, Mr Lee would do it. And Mr Lee owes him six favours, he said. But is this line secure?'

'Hah-hargh! If you ain't blabbed - if my pools comes up this Saturday ... an' if my old auntie 'ad two of 'em she'd be half-way to being my uncle - if you 'ain't blabbed, then you pays yer money an' you takes yer choice, darlin'. And I ain't promisin' nothin', mind you. But if you was to give me a message then I might pass it on to Mr Lee if I sees 'im.

'An then it'ud be up to 'im, like - wouldn't it, if 'e owes yer friend like you say 'e does.

Right?' The young man closed the bonnet, pressing it down to engage the lock and carefully wiping his paw-marks from the cellulose with a rag from his back pocket.

Beyond him, on the edge of the forecourt, there was an old break-down truck, looking rather broken-down itself, like a sick doctor waiting for emergency calls he couldn't attend; and beyond the truck a line of dead elms with the bark peeling from their diseased trunks; and beyond the elms a great bank of rainclouds from whose advance-guards above her the first spots of rain spattered on the dirty window, as she stared out of it, blurring the scene.

He was flannelling her, of course: he was Mr Lee, because there was always a Mr Lee in the Saracen's Head during opening hours, David had said - one Mr Lee or another, it didn't matter who - to take messages for Colonel Shapiro, that was Mr Lee's job.

And she, equally, was flannelling herself, still pretending up to the very last moment and beyond it that maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn't give Mr Lee her message.

'Right, darlin' - ' He knew it too ' - speak up, then.'

'All right. This message is for Mr Lee. He must contact our mutual friend, the one to whom he owes six favours -' Frances launched herself into space; time would tell if there were rocks far below, or too little water '- who is at present in our Washington Embassy.

The contact must be indirect, but soonest.'

'"Indirect, but soonest," I got that. And whose embassy would that be, now?'

'Mr Lee will know. The message then is "Return to U.K. immediately. I will contact you through Mr Lee". Have you got that?'

'Ah, I got it. But I ain't makin' no promises. If -

'If nothing. Do it now. Or find another pub.' She hung up before he could contest the threat, which was empty and childish and self-defeating, but the best she could manage in mid-air at short notice.

She reached up and swept the remains of her small change into her purse. One thing was for sure, anyway: she had burnt her boats with a vengeance. If Mossad's line into the Saracen's Head public house wasn't secure - David had thought it was okay, but David wasn't infallible; and the Israelis were damn good, but they weren't infallible either - then even if the eavesdroppers didn't manage to trace the call back to this forecourt (and they'd had enough time, it had lasted far too long for safety) there'd be enough on that tape to identify her, and David too, once the right people got round to listening to it.

The plus factor was that that would take time, because it would be a plain different section evaluating the tape, who certainly wouldn't be able to place her or her embassy straightaway, the more so as their heads would be full of their own Arab-Israeli hassles; it would have to travel through the proper channels, and because money and manpower were short some of those channels were so choked with material that it might take days

... even weeks. There was even just a chance that it would sink altogether in some backwater.

But that wouldn't do at all, she chided herself: putting a smile on the face of a risk was a bad habit, it was always safer to assume the worst. And the worst ... allowing for collation and transcription - and from her own typing pool days she could estimate that closely enough: as a semi-friendly, semi-civilised foreign agency Mossad wouldn't rate high on the pile at the moment - allowing for all that, the worst could be forty-eight hours before the balloon went up ... And then it would be back to that same ignominious typing pool, maybe.

She stared again through the window at the rain-distorted figure of the young man waiting for her under the canopy above his petrol pumps. She was deluding herself again, of course: breaking a direct instruction, and using a foreign intelligence service to do it, wasn't on a par with breaking school rules, as posted on the assembly hall notice-board for all to see. (Everyone must keep to the LEFT in corridors and on staircases, and Forms must move in single file.) It was big time stuff, like being caught with a boy in the shrubbery, deshabillee, which needed no written rules to indicate the likely punishment.

So, once they'd added two and two together it would be bread-and-water for some unspecified period, and then out on her shell-like ear, and back to her widow's pension with a framed copy of the Official Secrets Act, the relevant passages heavily underlined in red.

Unless, of course, it was Colonel Butler himself who was by then in charge of hiring and firing.

Irony, irony ... all she had to do was to give him a clean bill of health. And although she could argue - and it was true - that she was only making contact with David Audley because it was the truth she was after, it was also true that the truth she was very much predisposed to uncover would give Colonel Butler his promotion, his Ring of Power.

She snapped her bag shut and stepped out briskly into the rain.

* * *

The young man looked at her with undisguised curiosity now: he was bursting to ask her about the souped-up engine under the bonnet.

'I've checked the oil, it's okay.' He rubbed his hands on his bit of rag. 'And the tyres -

they're okay too...'

'Thank you.' Frances stared at him discouragingly. The final irony would be for the promoted Colonel Butler to decide - being the man he was - that however grateful he might be for her disobedience he couldn't possibly overlook such unstable behaviour, such unreliability, in one of his agents. And a female agent too, by God!

'I - I've filled her up, too.' He was nerving himself to pop some sort of question.

'Fourteen gallons - or just under fourteen and a quarter, actually.'

That was at least six gallons more than the normal tank of this make of small family car was designed to take, Frances computed. The only car they'd had spare when the Colonel had banished her from the university had been a tailing special, she'd known that the moment she put her foot down on the accelerator, though without any particular gratitude. But now it was certainly a convenient vehicle to possess.

'Thank you.' She looked through him as she felt in her purse for a tip. Twenty pence would be enough, but a Honda Four-hundred-four sounded expensive, and he'd remember her whatever she gave him, so ... say, fifty, because he was so beautiful.

'Could I have my receipt, please.'

'Oh ... yes, of course!' He blushed becomingly too. 'Thank you very much.'

'There's a Colonel Butler who lives just outside the village. Brookside House, I think the name is?'

'Brookside House ... ?' Either the fifty-pence piece, or the engine, or the foxy lady Fitzgibbon seemed to have dried up his mouth.

'Colonel Butler. Brookside House.'

'Yes.' He nodded quickly. 'Runs a Rover - a yellow Rover. And ... he's got a daughter

...' His eyes glazed again, exactly as they had done for the Honda Four-hundred-four. If that was for Diana Butler, she must be quite a dish, thought Frances.

'Three daughters.'

'Yes. Three daughters - Brookside House.' He focused on her briefly, and then pointed down the road towards the houses. 'You go straight through the village, and then bear left at the junction, down the Sandford road, towards the motorway. It's about half a mile on, all by itself, with a long drive to the house, on the edge of the woods - you can't miss it.'

'Thank you.'

She wanted to give him a smile, to leave him with something that was really hers, but her mouth wouldn't obey orders, and there was no more time. The wipers swept the screen clear, but when she looked back in the mirror the first of the dead elms had blanked him out of sight, and she was alone again in her shadow country.

CHAPTER NINE

Twenty-four hours earlier, before she had studied the edited highlights of the file on Colonel Butler, Brookside House would have ambushed Frances with surprise, even shock.

Now, of course, the opulent rhododendron tangles at its gateway and the manicured quarter-mile of gravel drive between trimly-fenced horse paddocks amounted to no more than a gloss on the file, computed at compound interest over the years since Captain Butler, sole beneficiary (no relative) of General Sir Henry Chesney, had capitalised on his inheritance.

The mathematics of the scene confirmed her previous estimate: Chesney and Rawle's had been an old-established, deeply-entrenched and almost disgracefully prosperous business, which had been sold when the pound was still something to conjure with (which was when little Frances Warren had been not long out of her push-chair). Even allowing for the depredations of a quarter of a century's taxation and inflation, and throwing in a full-time gardener and maybe a stableboy with nannie and the school fees of the last ten years, and adding them all to Brookside House, which had been purchased when the Colonel - then the Major - had finally quit his regiment...

subtracting all this (and the running costs of Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard) from the Chesney-Butler inheritance and there would hardly be a scratch in it, much less a dent.

The drive curved ahead, alongside a stable block. A horse poked its head out of a loose-box, returning her frown incuriously.

Add horses to the list ... although of all people Colonel Butler was no horseman, surely ... but add horses, nevertheless.

Still only a scratch, not a dent.

The daughters, then. Obviously the daughters. For girls the horse was as potent a symbol of power and glory as the motor-cycle was for boys - as the Honda Four-hundred-four was for that magnificent young man on the petrol pumps.

Quadruple garage ahead, beyond another great rhododendron jungle, and a collection of cars to be categorised: Nannie's Allegro in one open garage, under cover; a Police panda, white and pale blue; a gleaming Marina and another gleaming Marina, with close registration marks - both smelling of the Fuzz too, CID and Special Branch, for a guess ... by their cars shall ye know them!

In a way, it wasn't just a disappointment, it was a surprise, all this. And it wasn't simply that it was hard to adjust Colonel Butler to this state of wealth and comfort which had not come to him either by right of birth or as the spoils of success, but rather that the product of it all - this house, this property, that horse - was not Butler.

Simply, but inexplicably, they cast the wrong shadow from her sharp memory of the man.

Colonel Butler - her Colonel Butler - was not stockbroker mock-Tudor and horse-paddocks. He was solid Victorian red brick, gabled and respectable and rooted in all the lost certainties of the nineteenth century, when the sun never set on his flag. His house, his true house, would be a house with good bone structure and secrets of its own, not a thing like this, with no past and no future, but only an endless ephemeral present.

This wasn't his house, it was her house - Madeleine Francoise's house - out of which she had stepped, across this gravel, down that drive, on to that road, to nowhere, nine years ago, almost to the very day if not to the actual hour.

'Mrs ... Fisher?'

She had caught the footfall crunch on the gravel behind her. It had been more important to think that thought through than to turn towards the sound. Now she could come back to it later.

Fisher was careless of them. Here, where she could be remembered and described by Nannie, she could only be herself.

Nannie.

Mrs Elizabeth Mary Hooker, S.R.N., widow of Regimental Sergeant-Major Alfred Charles Hooker, Royal Mendip Borderers (killed in action, Korea 1951).

Nannie.

'Yes.' She felt inside her bag for the Fisher credentials.

He studied them only briefly, because he had already stared his fill at her, taking in face and colouring, height and weight.

'Geddes, Mrs Fisher. Detective-Sergeant, Special Branch.'

She took her details back from him, and his own. He was short for a copper, and long-haired, and swarthy enough to pass for a Pakistani. Which, all of it, might be not without its Special Branch uses, reasoned Frances.

Thank you, madam.' The dark eyes were bright with intelligence, assessing her but not stripping her. Storing her away for future references, too.

'But ... for today's purposes I shall be Mrs Fitzgibbon, Mr Geddes.' Because she liked the look of him, and also because she needed him on her side, she smiled at him carefully, without opening her lips. 'Colonel Butler already knows me as Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'Very good, Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'You've met Colonel Butler?'

'Yes, madam. In the way of routine, that is. Not today, of course.'

Like her own cottage, this was a house on the list. Which meant that the Special Branch would have checked out its security and the Uniform Branch would keep an eye on it, regularly but unobtrusively, day by day. In the way of routine.

She nodded. 'Tell me about the break-in.'

'Nothing to worry you.' He smiled white teeth at her. 'That's my guess, anyway ... for what it's worth.'

'Yes?'

'Small time job. No precise information - just looking for money and jewellery.' He nodded over his shoulder towards the house. 'This is the sort of place where it's usually lying around for the taking ... easy pickings nowadays. Except that the Colonel doesn't leave it lying around, except on the walls.'

'On the walls?'

'Some nice water-colours. Samuel Atkins, Copley Fielding, Paul Sandby ... a couple of William Callows ... a Labruzzi, rather a striking one. And the Turner, of course...'

'A Turner?' She was torn between surprise at his appreciation of art - a rather striking Labruzzi - and this new insight into Colonel Butler, whom she could no more place in an art gallery, catalogue in hand, than she could on a horse, bridle in hand. 'You mean, J. M.

W. Turner?'

'Only a minor drawing.' He bobbed his head. 'But very nice of its kind - the only thing of substantial value in the house. The only thing I'd take. Only not to get rid of.

Probably too difficult to hock anyway ... not rich enough for the hot market, but still easily traceable. Not worth the risk, in fact.'

Her surprise had adjusted itself. There was no reason why a copper shouldn't know his art, and no reason why Colonel Butler shouldn't collect, with his money. It was no more surprising - rather, much less surprising - than Robbie's obsession with fairy stories.

Her nails dug into her palms. Why, just since yesterday, was she continually thinking of Robbie?

'Was anything taken?'

'So far as we can make out ... three christening mugs - modern silver. One carriage clock, gilt. One transistor radio, plastic ... Just small stuff, like the other places.'

'The other places?'

'Didn't they tell you - no? This is one of three. The other two down the road, over Sandford way - ' He pointed ' - same sort of jobs: all done between eight and nine-thirty this morning, when the kids were being taken to school. Then the mothers went on to do a bit of shopping ... here it was the housekeeper ... and when they came home the back door had been forced. The other two places chummy found some cash - not much - and a bit of costume jewellery in one.9 He shook his head. 'He didn't do very well for himself at all.'

'I see.' Frances exhibited relief which was only partly feigned. In fact the department's resident break-in artist, if there was such a person, seemed to have done quite nicely at short notice. 'So it looks like a local job, then?'

He nodded. 'That's what the DI thinks, and I can see no reason to disagree.'

'Nobody saw anything?'

'Not a thing, so far. Each of the houses backs on to woods - he almost certainly came in that way, specially here, with the long drive. Plenty of cover at the back, and it's only half a mile from the side road to Winslow. Most likely a local boy with local knowledge.

So ... nothing to worry you, Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

She smiled at him. 'I think you're right, Mr Geddes.' To one smile add a small sigh and a pinch of resignation. 'But I shall have to go over the place all the same.'

He cocked his head interrogatively, not quite frowning. 'Is that really necessary, in the circumstances?'

'Probably not, in the circumstances. But Colonel Butler is engaged in extremely sensitive work and we haven't been able to contact him yet. So ... he's entitled to the full treatment.'

There wasn't much he could say to that, still less object to. Every service looked after its own vulnerable next-of-kin, and their service particularly, as a matter of security as well as routine commonsense enlightenment. And when something was actually amiss the job couldn't be skimped, he should know that.

All the same, there was no percentage in seeming to teach him to suck eggs, a woman who did that in a man's world only encouraged chauvinism. A little calculated femininity paid better dividends.

She spread the smile. 'Besides, the Colonel's by way of being my boss most of the time. When he sees my signature on the release he'll talk to his housekeeper, and if I haven't impressed her with my devotion to duty I shall be cast into the outer darkness.'

'Ah! That does make a difference - I take your point, of course.' The corner of his mouth twitched. 'I didn't know that you were ... acquainted with the lady.'

Frances regarded him curiously. 'I'm not.'

'You're not? Ah ... well, then - ' he gestured towards the house ' - I'd better not keep you from your duty, Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

He hadn't produced any of the reactions she'd expected, thought Frances as she walked beside him to the iron-studded mock-Tudor door in the mock-Tudor porch. In fact, except for the momentary twitch, he hadn't produced any reactions at all, expected or unexpected.

The heavy door was ajar, opening for her at the touch of his fingers on it. Beyond it, the entrance hall was high and spacious, with a great carved oak staircase dominating it, and gloomy in the November overcast except for the high-gloss polish of the parquet floor and the stair treads, which reflected a daylight hardly apparent outside. Frances corrected her first impression: not so much mock Tudor as Hollywood Tudor, art imitating art.

All it needed for an echo of Rebecca was the beautiful Mrs Butler on the staircase. But the woman on the staircase certainly wasn't the beautiful Mrs Butler.

Frances stood her ground as Nannie - it could only be Nannie - advanced toward her. It struck her as odd that she should feel she was holding her ground, but that was how she felt.

Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she knew that it wasn't odd at all, her instinct had simply been ten paces ahead of her eyesight.

Nannie wasn't much above average height, and she wasn't fat either, but she was ...

solid. Her battleship-grey twin-set matched the colour of her hair, and her hair matched the colour of her eyes. A large nose dominated her face: she levelled the nose at Frances and stared down it with all the friendliness of a gamekeeper come upon a poacher in the covert.

Frances opened her mouth in the hope that the right words would come out of it.

'I have absolutely nothing to say to you,' said Nannie pre-emptively. The grey eyes flicked up and down Frances once, then nose and eyes swung towards Detective-Sergeant Geddes. 'You gave me to understand, constable, that you would not tell the local newspaper anything about this.'

'Yes, Mrs Hooker -'

'Indeed, you promised. You gave a positive undertaking -'

'I'm not a reporter,' said Frances.

The nose came back to her. Nannie peered towards her, sighting her at point-blank range. 'No? Well, you are exactly like the young woman who misreported me at the last parish council meeting.' She scrutinised Frances's face again, then her suit. 'You still look like her ... but you are better dressed, it's true ... Hmm! Then if you are not a reporter -

what are you?'

'My name is Fitzgibbon -'

'You are not a policewoman. You are far too little to be a policewoman.'

Detective-Sergeant Geddes cleared his throat. 'Mrs Hooker -'

'You are not too young to be a policewoman - and you are not that girl who misreported me, I can see that now, she was much younger...' Nannie conceded the point on the basis other own scrutiny, not on their denials. 'You are older than you look too. It's in the eyes, your age is. Old eyes in a young face, that's what you've got. And also - ' She stopped suddenly.

'Mrs Hooker, this is Mrs Fitzgibbon, from London - from the Colonel's department.'

Geddes seized his chance. 'She's the person we've been waiting for, that I told you about.'

'What?' Nannie frowned at him, then at Frances.

'I'm a colleague of Colonel Butler's,' said Frances.

Disbelief supplanted the frown. 'A colleague?'

'A subordinate colleague,' Frances softened the claim.

Nannie transferred the disbelieving look to Geddes. 'You didn't say it would be a woman,' she accused him. 'I expected a man.'

Like master, like housekeeper, concluded Frances grimly: Colonel Butler and Mrs Hooker had the same ideas about the natural order of things. Perhaps that coincidence of prejudice had been an essential qualification for the job nine years ago, when he had been casting around for someone to take charge of his motherless girls.

So now, although Nannie obviously disliked having policemen tramp over her highly-polished floors almost as much as she hated thieves, she might just have tolerated one of her employer's colleagues - any of his colleagues except this one, who added insult to injury by being the wrong shape and size.

Hard luck, Nannie, thought Frances unsympathetically. But more to the point, hard luck, Frances. Because here was an unfair obstacle on the course, the only clue to which had been that twitch of the detective-sergeant's just half a minute before it had loomed up in front of her. And more than an obstacle, too, because obstacles could be removed, or climbed, or jumped, or avoided.

Nannie was watching her intently, no longer with naked hostility, but without either approval or deference. And that was the problem: somehow, and very quickly, Mrs Hooker must approve of and defer to Mrs Fitzgibbon.

Small smile.

'Sorry, Nannie. But I'm afraid I'm the best they could manage at short notice. You'll have to make do with me.' 'Nannie' was a risk, but she had to take a short cut to some degree of familiarity. And also, at the same time and without seeming too pushy - too unfeminine - she had to assert herself.

She turned to Geddes. 'Who else is here?'

'Inspector Turnbull and his DC, madam. And the uniform man.' Geddes gave her a glazed look. 'I think they are out the back somewhere, in the garden.'

She wanted them all out. She wanted Nannie to herself, without interruptions.

'Then would you be so good as to tell the Inspector that I'm here, please?' No smile for Detective-Sergeant Geddes. 'Don't let him stop what he's doing. I'd just like to have a word with him before he goes ... before you all go... will you tell him?'

'Very good, madam.' Geddes moved smartly towards the door.

'And wipe your feet when you come back in,' admonished Nannie to his back.

'Yes, madam.' He sounded happy to be getting out of her way. What was more important, however, was that the foot-wiping admonition offered one possible short-cut to Nannie's heart: the sooner Mrs Fitzgibbon got rid of the police, the better for Mrs Fitzgibbon.

'Now, Nannie... I take it the Colonel hasn't phoned, or anything like that?' She padded the question deliberately.

'No, Miss Fitzgibbon.' Nannie declared neutrality.

'Are you expecting a call from him? Does he call home regularly when he's away?'

Frances decided to let the 'Miss' go uncorrected for the time being.

'No, Miss Fitzgibbon.' Armed neutrality.

'I see... Well, we're doing our best to get in touch with him.' Not true. 'It's only a question of time.'

Nannie stiffened. There's no call to worry him.' Frances wondered how much Nannie knew about the nature of her employer's work. Probably not a lot, the Official Secrets Act being what it was, though enough to accept that a break-in at Brookside House could never be treated at its face value.

'I'm sure there isn't,' she agreed gently. 'But the rules say that we have to, for everyone's protection. So you must look on me as just part of the rules, Nannie.'

Nannie thawed by about one degree centigrade. 'Very good. Miss Fitzgibbon.'

It was going to be hard work.

'At least I can get rid of the police for you, anyway,' she offered her first olive branch with a conspiratorial grin. 'There's no need for them to hang around now that I'm here.'

As an olive branch it was not an overwhelming success: Nannie simply nodded her acceptance of the lesser of two evils.

More than hard work, decided Frances. 'In the meantime, perhaps we could go somewhere a little less ... public?' She looked at her watch: it was two o'clock already.

'Somewhere where there's a telephone?'

Nannie glanced at the telephone on the table at the foot of the staircase, then back at Frances.

'There is a telephone in the library,' she admitted grudgingly, indicating a door to Frances's right.

Frances followed her to the door. There had to be a bridge between them somewhere, or a place where the bank was firm enough to construct a bridge. Or even a ford where she could cross over to Nannie's side without drowning in the attempt.

The library really was a library: a long, high room entirely walled with books from floor to ceiling except for its two immense mullioned windows. The wooden floor shone with the same high gloss as that of the hall, but here there was no smell of polish, only the dry odour of accumulated knowledge on paper, compressed between old leather and matured over dozens of years. At the far end was an immense mahogany desk, in the direct light from one of the windows. All its drawers were open, one of the top ones pulled out so far that it rested at an angle on the one beneath it. A silver-framed photograph lay on the floor, face down.

Frances heard Nannie draw in her breath sharply beside her.

Suddenly Frances remembered how hot her own dear Constable Ellis had been on the subject of burglary -

* * *

'But I've nothing worth taking, Mr Ellis. I might just as well leave the cottage unlocked.

They wouldn't find anything, no matter how hard they looked.'

'Don't you believe it, Mrs Fitz. They'd take something you wouldn't want to lose, even if they left empty-handed.'

'Now you're being too clever for me, Mr Ellis. Shame on you!'

'Oh no. If it happens to you, you'll know sure enough. And it'll make you sick, too. Because breaking into a woman's house - goin' through her private things, like the flimsy things she wears next to her skin, if you'll pardon me, like her knickers and her silk slips an' suck-like -

that's almost like rape when a stranger does it. So ... breakin' into a house is like raping it.

Raping its privacy, you might say. It isn't changed, not really. But it isn't the same, even if they don't take a thing.'

* * *

Frances looked at Nannie. 'Have the Police been through here?'

'Yes.' Nannie continued to stare at the desk.

'Right, then.' Frances walked across the library to the desk. First she fitted the displaced drawer into its runners and pushed it back into its proper place, and then slid back the other drawers, one after another (very neat and tidy was Colonel Butler; his letters held together with elastic bands, still in their original envelopes; his receipted bills in their appropriate folders - School Fees was the topmost folder in one drawer.

Insurance in another; a place for everything, and everything in its place, that was Colonel Butler). Then she methodically straightened the desk diary and the pen-holder and the leather-bound calendar. And last of all she set the silver-framed picture in its proper place, on the left. The photograph was of Nannie herself and the three children at the seaside; judging by the size of the largest child it dated from the early 1970s.

'It's all right now - everything's all right. He - they were only looking for money, Nannie. The picture glass isn't broken.'

'There wasn't any money in the desk,' said Nannie, not to Frances but to the library itself, as though the thief was still hiding in it.

But then, of course, she was right: the thief was still hiding in it. A different thief, yet one who knew what she was after even if she didn't know what she might find. Not a conventional thief, who would take the water-colours off the walls and leave the drawers gaping, but certainly a thief within Constable Ellis's definition.

A thief, no doubt about that.

The thought was painful to Frances, but the pain helped to concentrate her mind on the job just when she'd been in danger of letting sympathy cloud her judgement.

'Don't worry, Nannie.' She touched Nannie's arm reassuringly. Just a touch - a Judas touch; a pat would have been too much. 'It won't happen again, we'll see to that.'

Nannie looked down at the slender hand, then up at Frances.

'You know, I think we probably have friends in common,' said Frances, testing the bridge cautiously. 'Isn't the Colonel one of Cathy Audley's godfathers - David Audley's little daughter?'

Nannie regarded her for the first time with something approaching recognition.

'David Audley is another of my bosses.' Frances smiled. 'And I know his wife too.

Have you met them - the Audleys?'

Nannie blinked, and her nose seemed less aggressive. 'You know Dr Audley, Miss Fitzgibbon?'

'One of my bosses - my first, actually ... Though I'm assigned to the Colonel at the moment. Which is why I'm here now, of course.' Frances nodded encouragingly. The bridge - a totally false structure, but built with convenient pieces of genuine truth - was beginning to feel solid beneath her. It even occurred to her that she was building better than she had intended: if Colonel Butler himself didn't altogether approve of David Audley - at least if Paul Mitchell was to be believed - it looked as though Nannie differed from that view; and that coincided with her own observation, that while Audley was generally rather rude to his equals, who were usually male, he was unfailingly courteous to women.

(The first time she'd encountered David Audley he'd been having a blazing row with Hugh Roskill, who hated his guts, when she'd been Hugh's secretary; and he - David -

had apologised to her next day (but not to Hugh!) with a big box of After Eights.) But she was losing momentum with Nannie now - and she only needed another few steps to be over the Bridge of Lies. Already she was so far over and committed to the crossing that the last worst lying truth, the truest lie, was no longer too outrageous to use.

'It's "Mrs", not "Miss", Nannie ... actually.'

'"Mrs"?' Nannie frowned, yet somehow more at herself than at Frances. 'Oh ... I'm sorry, Mrs Fitzgibbon...'

'Yes?' Frances hooked on to Nannie's uncertainty. One way or another she had to fish the right cue out of her. 'Yes?'

'I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch what the constable said when he introduced you...'

Nannie wriggled on the hook.

That wasn't the right cue. But it also wasn't what was really in Nannie's mind, Frances sensed. There was something else.

'Yes?' Frances jerked at the line. Given time she would have played Nannie gently, that was the whole essence of the art of interrogation, even with a hard-shell/soft-centre subject like this one. But time was what she hadn't been given, this time.

She looked down at her wrist-watch, and as she raised her eyes again she saw that Nannie was staring in the same direction.

She looked down again: Nannie couldn't be interested in the time; Colonel Butler's girls - my girls - didn't get home until 6.20, they did their two preps at school after tea, just as she had done once upon a time, a thousand years ago.

Nannie had looked down at the same angle - nose at the same angle - a few moments before, at the hand on her arm.

At the hand.

Frances looked at her hands. There was nothing to catch Nannie's interest, or her disapproval either (yesterday morning Marilyn's unspeakable Rose Glory red would have aroused that, but now the talons were trimmed and clear-varnished - now the hands were hers again).

Nothing - they were simply hands and fingers, unadorned.

Nothing!

Oh, beautiful! thought Frances - like the mention of David Audley, it was better than she had designed, the ultimate true-lie handed to her - handed indeed! - on a plate, steaming hot. and appetising!

She ought to have spotted it more quickly, the thing that she always looked for in other women. But now she mustn't spoil her good fortune by looking up from her third finger in triumph: and to get the right expression all she had to remember was what a dirty, despicable, millstone-round-the-neck unforgiveable lie she was about to tell.

The lie twisted under her breasts as she met Nannie's eyes.

'No wedding ring, you mean?' She spread the empty hand eloquently without looking down at it again. 'No wedding ring?'

She clenched the fingers into a small fist as soon as she was sure that Nannie was looking at them.

'The ring is with my husband. He was killed in Ulster three years ago. Three years and six months and a week. He was with the SAS at the time, but he was a Green jacket really. And we were married for seven months and four days.' Frances plucked all the years and months and days out of the air for effect: she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and lies that couldn't be checked ought always to be fully-grown and vigorous, and hard-working.

Now there was pain in Nannie's eyes, and that was good.

So ... it was time for a little more truth.

'I was a secretary in the department - ' Hugh was on good terms with Butler, as near a friend as the Colonel had among his colleagues ' - Group-Captain Roskill's secretary.

Do you know Group-Captain Roskill, Nannie?'

Nannie knew Hugh Roskill, she could see that. And since Hugh was also no slouch with women, young or old (though not in the David Audley class), that was good too.

In fact, she was home and dry now: Nannie knew enough to make all the necessary connections and deductions from the Fitzgibbon saga. Which was a merciful deliverance from the need to use the ultimate weapon, the last truth that was itself a deliverance of a sort; the little Robert, or little Frances, who hadn't made the grade, accident (or too much gin) cancelling out accident.

That wasn't even in the records, anyway, it was one of the few private things left, and she'd given enough by now to expect to collect on her investment.

'Your husband served with the Colonel, didn't he?' Frances changed the subject unashamedly, as of right. It was Army widow to Army widow now, sister to sister in misfortune although separated very nearly grand-daughter-grandmother in years.

Nannie nodded. 'Yes, he did.'

'I thought so.' Frances let the answer appear to confirm what might have been an intelligent guess, it would never do to reveal how much she knew about RSM Hooker and his lady, from the Butler file.

Unfortunately, Nannie didn't seem disposed to enlarge on the relationship. It was depressing to find that even the home-and-dry ground was still hard going.

'In the Lancashire Rifles?' There was no way Nannie could let that misapprehension go by, she had to correct it.

'No, dear -

No, dear! That 'dear' had been dearly bought, even haggled over, but she had it at last.

'No, dear. Mr Hooker was a Mendip - the Royal Mendip Borderers. The Colonel came to us in Korea, from the Rifles.' The nose moved elliptically between then, half correcting and half confirming. 'And he was a captain then, of course, when he came to us.'

(To us. It was still us after more than a quarter of a century, the family us of RSM

Hooker's long-time widow; it could have been us with the Widow Fitzgibbon just as easily, if she'd indicated the need; they would probably have found her another subaltern if she'd indicated the need - probably given the poor sod his courting orders, they were old-fashioned that way; even as it was there was often something waiting for her in the accumulated post at the cottage, like the regimental newsletter, and always a Christmas card.)

(Even Nannie here in front of her was a proof of the durability of the system: all those years after Korea - us in Korea, when Nannie had never been within five thousand miles of the place - Butler had remembered the widow of the RSM of his adopted regiment when he'd needed someone for his girls.)

'Of course - I understand now.' Frances nodded wisely, and decided to change the subject again. She had the vague memory, from one of Robbie's attempts to explain how the army had been reorganised - massacred - in 1970, that the Mendips had been swallowed up in the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry. But it really was a vague memory, and it wouldn't do at all to exhibit a lack of military knowledge in such an area, when there was nothing more to be gained there.

She glanced around her. She could ask about this library, which had more books in it than ever Colonel Butler could have read. But that question would sound too obviously chatty, even though she genuinely wanted a quick answer to it; and she could get the answer easily enough for herself, though not so quickly, simply by looking at those books - always providing she remembered how completely Paul had mis-read the ones by her own fireside.

Better to get down to business, that was something Nannie would accept without suspicion.

'Now, Nannie ... what I have to do - is to decide what sort of break-in this has been.

This is because ... of the kind of work the Colonel does.' She gave Nannie half a smile.

'It's a precaution, that's all - a sort of double protection, in addition to what the Police provide.'

As soon as she'd said it, she wished she hadn't, because in the circumstances of those open drawers and missing christening mugs it was gobbledygook, and from the slight lift of the eyebrows, over those grey eyes it was quite clear that Nannie knew it was, too.

Then the eyebrows went back to normal, and the half-smile was returned.

'Yes, dear - I understand that,' said Nannie. 'The Colonel has been through the routine with me. You don't need to explain. If it's all right you sign a form and give it to me, and the Police carry on a normal investigation.' She nodded helpfully.

It occurred to Frances that she hadn't got a release with her. Maybe Detective-Sergeant Geddes had one - maybe he had a whole pocket full of them. But it really didn't matter now that Nannie was on her side.

It didn't seem to matter much to Nannie either, suddenly; she had her sang-froid back, though it was a subtly-altered coolness, now a benevolent neutrality more concerned with Frances than herself, even to the extent of accepting that garbage about double-protection without irritation.

Just as suddenly Frances felt ashamed of what she'd done, what she'd had to do. It wasn't lying about Robbie - the ring, that little circle of white gold, wasn't with him, it was in the bag on her shoulder, to be used as necessary; she simply hadn't bothered to put it on today, it hadn't been important - if there was deceit there, it didn't matter because it betrayed nothing of value. But deceiving Nannie was something different.

'And it is all right, dear,' said Nannie solicitously. 'You don't need to worry. Because this is just ... an ordinary robbery, the constable said so.' She nodded. 'He said there have been two others just like it this morning.

'But of course ... of course, you have your job to do, and so you must talk to the constable for yourself, dear. But I've been all over the house with him - the constable thought the burglar didn't have very long in the house, because Mr Rodgers was cutting up the elm in the home pasture, and he came back to the workshop to get the bushman-saw at 9.15 - the constable thinks the burglar saw him coming, and that scared him off...'

Nannie piled non-event on non-event in an attempt to reassure the young Widow Fitzgibbon that there really was nothing to worry about in Brookside House, banking up the coals-of-fire on the widow's head.

'Thank you, Nannie.'

'The Colonel could come back tonight. He does try to be here as often as possible, you know ... though as tomorrow is the llth he'll be off early if he does come - '

The telephone on the desk pealed out, cutting her off in mid-flow to Frances's overwhelming relief.

'I'll take it - ' Frances was halfway to the desk before Nannie could react.

She lifted the receiver.

'Is that you, Bessie?' said a voice quickly.

Frances glanced down at the number. 'Wilton Green 326.'

'Sally?' The voice sounded surprised. 'Is that Sally?'

Sally?

Sally equals Sarah - equals Sarah Butler, bom 1961.

'Hold on a moment.' Frances looked at Nannie. 'I think it's for you, Nannie ... Who is that speaking, please?'

'Hullo?' The voice, which had been excited before it had become surprised, now became dauntingly well-bred. 'This is the Matron of the Charlotte Tyson Nursing Home.

If that is Wilton Green 326 - 3-2-6 - may I speak with Mrs Elizabeth Hooker, please?'

All that was a far cry from Is that you, Bessie? But it was the right cry, nevertheless.

'It's the Matron of the Charlotte Tyson Nursing Home, Nannie.'

'Oh ... yes.' Nannie took the receiver from her. 'Don't go, dear - it's a friend of mine.'

Frances estimated the distance between the desk and the door and the phone in the hall, and the time needed to get from one to the other.

'I'll wait outside, Nannie.'

As Nannie put the phone to her ear she stepped out smartly towards the door.

'Don't go - there's no need to go - '

She reached the door, and then turned back to Nannie. 'It's all right - I'll come back when you've finished.'

That was five seconds gained - and add another five seconds for Nannie's embarrassment. Then, close the door and subtract five seconds for the time it took to reach the table at the foot of the staircase.

Click.

Frances found herself looking at herself in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs as she lifted the phone.

Would Nannie know what that click signified?

'Are you there, Muriel - hullo?'

The mirror at the bottom of the stairs.

'Bessie - hullo, is that you, Bessie?'

* * *

I heard him stop at the bottom of the stairs, as though he was thinking - or as though he was

looking at himself in the mirror there -

* * *

'- quite awful. And the police traipsing round makes it worse, because I'm sure they'll never catch anyone -'

Sod it! She was missing the dialogue!

'How absolutely beastly for you, dear. And are they still there? The police, I mean?

Because that wasn't Sally who answered the phone, was it?'

'No, dear. Sally's still at school, she doesn't know anything about it yet, neither does Jane. It all happened after I took them to school this morning, while I was in the village.'

'I didn't think it was Sally ... Did they take anything?'

'The children's christening mugs, and the clock

in the lounge. And my radio from the kitchen ... nothing important... the police think Rodgers may have disturbed them.'

'Rodgers saw them?'

'No. Disturbed them. No one saw anything.'

'That wasn't Mrs Rodgers on the phone, was it?'

'No.'

'It wasn't Mrs Rodgers?'

'No. She's never here on a Thursday.'

'I didn't think it was Mrs Rodgers. Who was it?'

There was a pause while Nannie considered how to deal with her friend's curiosity.

'It was a policewoman. Why do you want to know, Muriel?'

'Oh...' Muriel sounded disappointed. Then she perked up. 'Is she staying with you, Bessie?'

'Staying with me?' Nannie was clearly mystified. 'Why should she stay with me?'

'Well... with the Colonel away...' Another thought occurred to Muriel. 'Or is he coming back now, after the robbery?'

'Is he -?' Nannie graduated from mystification to suspicion. 'Muriel, why are you phoning me? What's the matter?'

Now it was coming, thought Frances. The trouble was that Muriel - Matron Prebble -

was a lot less formidable than she'd bargained for.

'Look, Bessie - ' The voice hardened: it was less like Muriel and more like Matron Prebble, thank God! ' - something important has come up ... I hardly know how to put it to you, with what's happened, my dear, but it truly is important. In fact, it's a life-line, the one we've been praying for, Bessie.'

'What?'

'I've just had a call from Sir Archibald Havergal -'

'Who?'

'Sir-Archibald-Havergal. He's chairman of the grants committee of the Ryle Foundation, my dear - enormously rich - '

All the perfumes of Arabia - the Ryle millions and the smell of oil - were enough to sweeten almost any hand. But were they enough to sweeten Nannie's?

'We're in line for a grant, Bessie dear - a big one! We'd have to take some post-operative recuperation patients from the Middle East, of course ... but that would be no problem, we could have a new wing for them. And the work we could do for the elderly

- it's what we've prayed for.'

'That's wonderful news, Muriel!' exclaimed Nannie.

'I've got to go to London as soon as possible - this very afternoon. If I phone back directly they'll send a car for me. I'm to meet Sir Archibald and a representative of the United Gulf Emirates at a hotel - an hotel. And they want me to stay the night to sign the papers in the morning. They even want Mr Roynton of the solicitors to come up with me, he's to stay the night, too. All paid for by the Foundation.'

Nannie said nothing to that, even though Muriel waited desperately for her to react.

'I've tried everyone, Bessie. Mrs McGuffin can't. And Matron at St. Elfrida's can't.

And the Cottage Hospital can't supply anyone until tomorrow morning. You've just got to come, my dear - I can't leave everything to Gloria, she's not nearly up to it. She'd panic at the first emergency. You've got to come - at least until 9 o'clock tomorrow, when Sister Bellamy says she can be here.'

Nannie was thinking now - Frances could hear her thinking. And she was thinking

'no', and that had to be prevented from reaching her tongue, at all.

She ran back to the library door, tiptoe on tiptoe, skidding dangerously on the polish, grabbing the door-handle for safety.

'Finished, Nannie?' She just managed to catch her breath.

Nannie frowned at her distractedly.

'Er ... no, dear.'

'Trouble?' She didn't have to be the Department's hot little female property. Sir Frederick's Four-out-of-Ten girl, to chance that insight: it was written all over Nannie Hooker's face.

'What's the problem?' There was no time for delicacy. 'Can I help?'

Nannie held the receiver against her corseted chest. 'No, dear. A friend of mine wants me to ... to help her. But of course it's out of the question.'

'Help her how?' Frances advanced towards her, all interested innocence.

There was nowhere for Nannie to go: she was trapped at both ends of the telephone.

'She wants me to ... to look after her nursing home tonight. It's what I normally do for her one day every week, and one night. But I can't do it tonight - ' she started to lift the receiver to her mouth.

'Is it important?' Frances persisted.

Nannie nodded, suddenly irresolute. She knew what was coming, Frances sensed.

'Then of course you can help her. I can stay for the children - ' Frances sprang under her guard ' - I'd love to - and I can stay the night, too - no problem. I haven't got to be anywhere until midday tomorrow, no one's waiting for me ... And if the Colonel comes back I can report to him, it'll actually save me a lot of trouble - '

That was a mistake: Nannie wouldn't approve of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. She had to make it an appeal, not just a convenient duty offered, but also an act of kindness to her.

'Please. I'd much rather look after the children than go back home ... to a cold home.'

Good one, Frances! Lonely little Widow Fitzgibbon.

'And I do like children, Nannie - '

Another good one.

'I can even cook, you know. All you have to do is to tell me what their favourite supper is - I'd so enjoy cooking for someone again.'

She was even beginning to convince herself, even though she hated cooking. The phone in Nannie's hand chuntered impotently. Nannie raised it to her mouth without taking her eyes off Frances. 'Hold on a moment, Muriel.'

'It would be an adventure for them, too. Getting used to me, it would take their minds off the robbery, Nannie.' Frances nodded. 'What time do they get back from school?'

'A quarter past six,' replied Nannie automatically.

If they didn't like anything too elaborate that would still leave her enough time, thought Frances. And, for a guess, they probably preferred a quick fry-up anyway -

bangers and beans, or bacon and eggs - and she could manage that. 'What do they like?'

The corner of Nannie's mouth lifted. And pancakes to follow. The entire human race liked pancakes; and they were not only a treat, they were easy to produce - even Robbie had never faulted her pancakes.

Nannie was still observing her closely, and suddenly Frances knew that Nannie was almost listening in to the menus which were running through her brain.

'What do they like, Nannie?' The phone came up again. 'Muriel - '

* * *

Detective-Inspector Turnbull left at five to three.

(Detective-Inspector Turnbull had decided that it was a routine job, a quick in-andout semi-professionally executed by a borstal graduate with more technical skill than intelligence, whom they would pick up sooner or later asking for thirty-seven other offences to be taken into consideration, and who would be patted on the head by the judge, given five pounds out of the poor box and told not to be a naughty boy again, and who would promptly do it again since it was more fun than working and a useful addition to the unemployment benefit; but Detective-Inspector Turnbull was also relieved that Mrs Fitzgibbon agreed with him instantly, with no awkward questions and an equally quick signature on the release, and he was happy to leave Detective-Sergeant Geddes to deal with that and to do anything else Mrs Fitzgibbon required, no matter what.)

* * *

And Nannie left at ten past three in her uniform, half excited for the gold future of the Charlotte Tyson Nursing Home, but still half worried about leaving her charges to Widow Fitzgibbon, and consequently also leaving very precise instructions to the Widow -

('Jane can watch the Nine O'clock News on BBC-1, if she wishes to, in her dressing gown - the Colonel likes them both to keep up with world affairs. And Sally can watch the first half - the first half only - of the ITV news at ten o'clock ... And don't take any argument from either of them, dear. Tell them that you know the rules, they are good girls really, so you won't have any trouble with them, but they will argue - ')

- and a letter conferring her power-of-attorney on the Widow, pending her return or the return of their father, whichever might be the earlier.

('I'll mention the Colonel, dear, that will give them something to think about, so they won't play you up - they are good girls, but they are half-way between being girls and being young women, and that can be awkward, believe me.')

* * *

And Detective-Sergeant Geddes left at quarter past three, with his release signed and sealed in its envelope

(For the attention of the Chief Constable

ready-typed on the latter).

('Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs Fitzgibbon?') ('Yes, Mr Geddes. There's a Chinese take-away restaurant on the edge of town, a new one opened about two months ago.' The Widow Fitzgibbon consulted the price-card Nannie had given her. 'The Wango-Ho, in Botley Street...) ('Here's seven pounds, Mr Geddes. I'd like two sweet-and-sour pork, one chicken-and-almonds, and one beef-and-green-peppers. Plus three portions of rice - two fried and one boiled - and three spring rolls. And I would like it delivered here at 6.30 sharp this evening - if there's any change, put it in the police charities' box.')

* * *

Twenty past three.

The sound of Detective-Sergeant Geddes' car had faded away. Rodgers, the house-horse-and-garden handyman, who so fortunately hadn't seen anything this morning, had faded away too.

('Three o'clock is his time on a Thursday, dear. But if you'd rather not be alone I can ask him to stay on, and I'm sure he will - I can stop by Mrs Rodgers' cottage and leave a message to say that he'll be late home ... Thursday is her day at the Vicarage, but I can give the message to the woman next door.')

('No, Nannie, it's quite all right. I don't mind being alone, it doesn't worry me.')

* * *

It was still not absolutely quiet in Brookside House: she could hear the distant rumble of the central heating boiler.

That at least had been the truth: she didn't mind being alone - even if it hadn't been necessary she wouldn't have minded it, it wouldn't have worried her. Aloneness was now her natural habitat, whether she was by herself or in a crowd. Originally she had set herself to get used to it. Then she had become accustomed to it. And now she preferred it.

The boiler stopped, and its echoes quickly died away.

Frances stood in the middle of the empty hall and listened to the silence begin, waiting for it to reassure her.

She imagined it forming in the top of the house, where at the noisiest of times there would always be a secret yeast of it, ready to grow the moment the front door slammed shut. From there it would seep down, from floor to floor and room to room, until it had filled every last corner.

Roof space, carefully lagged (Colonel Butler's house would be carefully lagged); attics and box-rooms; bedrooms one by one, master bedroom (there would be one single bed), children's bedrooms, guest bedrooms, Nannie's self-contained flat; bathrooms and dressing rooms and lavatories; then down the staircase, tread by tread, into the hall, into the breakfast-room and the dining room, and the kitchen and the pantry and the laundry room; into the library, curling round the desk; into the playroom and the study room; into the television room, into the sitting room, into the conservatory (how a conservatory fitted into Hollywood mock-Tudor remained to be seen, but a conservatory there was, nevertheless).

Now she could hear it all around her. The house was ready for her at last.

CHAPTER TEN

'If I was your mother, Jane,' said Frances deliberately, coldly seizing her opportunity,

'I would say that you've just put a great deal too much in your mouth.'

Jane attempted for a moment to manipulate her spring roll, which was collapsing greasily down her chin.

'If ... if you were my mother - oops! - ' A tangle of bean sprouts dropped out of the roll on to the spectacular mound of sweet-and-sour-pork, chicken-and-almonds and beef-and-green-peppers which Jane had arranged in an enormous crater of rice ' - if you were my mother, then you would have been ten when Father married you - no, ten when you had me ... and eight when you had Sally, and six when you had Di. Which, according to the sex talks Baggers gives us at school, is just not on.'

'No.' Sally raised an elegant morsel on her chopsticks. 'She's about twenty-eight. She could just have had you - if she was exceptionally unlucky.'

Frances wondered whether that unlucky was a purely biological judgement, or whether Sally-was referring specifically to her sister. At the great age of seventeen Sally Butler handled her chopsticks like a Chinaman and was too clever by half, or maybe by three-quarters. Fortunately for the human race - the male half of it, anyway - she was also homely and horsey, apart from the superb hair; but to have been beautiful and that smart would have been unfair on both her and mankind, the contest would have been totally one-sided.

'Twenty-eight?' Jane examined Frances with the appraising eye of a second-hand car dealer. 'Yes, I suppose you could be right at that.'

Frances felt the need to keep her end up, to join them if she couldn't beat them. 'And that would make Sally your step-sister,' she observed. Mother would have to wait for another opportunity.

'And that wouldn't be bad, either,' said Jane, who was obviously accustomed both to her elder sister's accuracy in guessing ages and also to the need to keep her own end up also. 'Are you really as old as that? You don't look it, you know, Frances.'

'I don't think I could be your mother, quite,' Frances parried the question. Not that I wouldn't like to be, she thought quickly. At fifteen Jane was beginning to lose her puppy-fat and to exhibit the red-gold beauty of her eldest sister, if the portrait in the master-bedroom hadn't lied.

In fact, where Sally had diverged from the mould somewhere along the line to become a true Butler daughter, Jane might well end up more like Madeleine Francoise than the fabled Diana.

Sally stared at her for an instant, catching her in the act of projecting her sister's face into the future.

'You know about our mother, don't you?' Sally selected a sweet-and-sour pork ball from its fellows. 'It'll all be in Father's print-out, of course.'

God Almighty! thought Frances - Father's print-out!

'Twenty-eight is quite old,' said Jane, to no one in particular. 'Relatively old, anyway.

Not too young, anyway.'

Frances looked from one to the other. Jane munched complacently; Sally lifted the pork ball on her chopsticks and popped it into her mouth.

'Your Father's ... print-out?' Not too young for what?

'Computer print-out. Everything's on computer, obviously,' Sally informed her.

Jane stopped munching. 'What sort of computer?'

Sally ignored her sister. 'Isn't it?'

'Oh - I get you,' said Jane. She nodded to Frances. 'You know our mother's dead, that's what she means. Well ... not strictly speaking dead - strictly speaking she's missing. But after all these years it's like the war - like Nannie's husband. He's still missing, although they know he was killed, because Father was there. But they lost him after that.' She made it sound almost like carelessness. 'He wasn't there when they came back, anyway - there was just a shell-hole.'

On one level they were both being incredibly cold-blooded, almost to the point of childishness much younger than their actual years, even allowing for the retarding effect of an English private girls' school education; but they had been just as cool over the break-in - or, at least, Jane had been just as cool, and Sally had been cool once it had been established to her satisfaction that the thief had not put a sacrilegious hand on either of her horses.

However, that hadn't surprised Frances, from her own memories of a similar education. The order and discipline of their school lives, with its well-defined rules and regulations, emphasised the disorder and indiscipline of the jungle outside, so that they were able to take the break-in as something like a misfortune of war. Also, she recalled that petty theft was more or less endemic at school (Money must NEVER be left in the cloakrooms or in the desks'), and an endless subject for rumour and speculation. To have been burgled would provide them both with an exciting tale next day which would lose nothing in the telling.

What was disturbing all the same - or tantalising, anyway - was the suspicion (also out of her own memories) that they were also operating on another level, the nature of which she had not as yet fathomed. But children like this, who were immature in some areas, were apt to be precocious in others.

They were waiting for her to say something.

'Your Father is very much my senior.' That was a statement they could both understand. 'So I don't get to see his ... print-out ... any more than you see your reports.'

Jane swallowed her mouthful. 'We do see our reports,' she said. 'And I bet Father's seen your print-up - print-out, I mean.'

'I expect he has.' And now to business. 'I'm sorry to hear about your mother.'

'What does your husband do?' Sally's hitherto impeccable manners suddenly deserted her. 'Does he work for Father?'

'My husband is dead.'

'How?' said Jane.

Nannie was prettily revenged. 'He was a soldier.'

'A soldier - ?' Jane regarded her with interest. 'Like Father, was he?'

'Tais-toi!' snapped Sally. 'I'm awfully sorry, Frances.'

'So am I,' said Jane quickly. 'What rotten luck!'

'Shut up,' said Sally. 'Our mother died nine years ago, that's what the police think.

After seven years a missing person is presumed to be dead, anyway.'

Frances was beginning to feel out of her depth. 'Is that so?' she said inadequately.

'That's right,' agreed Jane in a totally matter-of-fact voice. 'Like in the war. There's

"Missing, believed killed in action", and there's "Missing, presumed killed in action", and there's just plain "Missing". Maman was "Missing", but after seven years it's the same as

"Missing, presumed killed in action'" She nodded at Frances. '"Presumed" is really when they don't actually know, but it's the most likely thing. When they've got some evidence

- like with Nannie's husband, Father was there in the trench with him when the Chinese attacked, and saw him get shot, but then he had to go to another bit of the trench, and then they were shelled, you see - ' she nodded again ' - our side shelled them. Father called them up on the wireless and said "There are hundreds and hundreds of Chinese here, and only a few of us, so if you shell us you're going to kill a lot more of them - "'

'He didn't say that at all,' cut in Sally. 'Father had built this sort of tunnel, and he retreated into it with his men. It was what they'd planned to do if things got really bad.

Father had it all planned, exactly what they were going to do, Frances.' '

'Well, it was still jolly brave - they gave him a medal for it,' said Jane.

'I didn't say it wasn't. I just said it was planned.'

'All right, all right! Anyway ... when they came out of the tunnel, and drove the Chinese off the hill - it was a hill they were on, just above a river - when they got back to the trench there was a shell-hole where Nannie's husband had been, so they had to make it "Missing, believed", that's all I'm saying.'

Frances groped for a suitable reaction. Jane was clearly determined to inform her, apart from the fine distinctions of the military casualty list, that her father was a gallant officer, while Sally, for her part, favoured intelligence above bravery, and was equally determined to establish that. Unfortunately it was not the information she required from them.

'I see.' Yet she didn't really see at all.

A hill in Korea, a quarter of a century or more ago: how many children - how many adults, for that matter - knew anything about that old war? How much did she herself know?

She shook herself free of it. She wasn't concerned with RSM Hooker, of the Mendip Borderers, or even with Captain Butler, Mendip Borderers (attached). She was concerned with Major and Mrs Butler.

But she still couldn't think of anything to say.

'So that was what happened to our mother,' said Jane.

'I'm sorry' would hardly do. And in any case, she'd already said it once. If anything, she was now further away from the vital question than before these unnerving children had re-opened the Korean War.

'But then, it was probably all for the best,' continued Jane philosophically. 'It probably wouldn't have lasted, the way it was going.'

It wouldn't have lasted. It was all for the best - the way it was going?

It wouldn't have lasted?

'Lots off the girls at school are in the same boat,' Jane nodded at her. 'Baggers says the one-parent family is going to be the big social problem of the 1980s, with the present rate of divorce.'

It wouldn't have lasted.

'But that doesn't take account of re-marriages.' Sally rested one elbow on the table and looked intensely at Frances. 'What do you think of second marriages, Frances?'

'I haven't really thought about them.' The question momentarily unbalanced Frances just as she was zeroing in on Jane. 'I don't know ... What do you mean, "it wouldn't have lasted", dear?'

'I think second marriages are a good thing,' said Jane. 'I mean, it stands to reason that you know better what to look for the second time round - "Marry in haste and repent at leisure" is what Baggers says, and she could be right for once. I think I shall almost certainly get married twice:

the first time will be a terrible mistake - it'll be a purely physical thing, an animal passion I won't be able to resist ... Or it may be plain lack of experience, like David Copperfield and Dora. I can never imagine David Copperfield in bed with Dora, it must have been an absolute disaster. The mind boggles - at least, my mind boggles. What d'you think, Frances?'

Frances's mind wasn't boggling, but it was hurting her more than she could tolerate.

Unlike Jane, she could imagine exactly what had happened in David Copperfield's bed, down to the last humiliating detail.

Jane didn't wait for an answer. 'So the first time will be a ghastly mistake - but the second time I shall get it right. And I'll be an absolutely super step-mother too. I shalln't try to be a mother, I'll be like an elder sister, only better ... And my step-children will be the most marvellous aunts to my children, if I decide to have any. It'll be an extended nuclear family - all for one, and one for all, like the Three Musketeers!'

It was fair enough for those who could identify themselves with the King's Musketeers, thought Frances - and the set books at school hadn't changed much, obviously. But Jane's sharp little sword was making her feel like one of the Cardinal's Guards.

'What did you mean, "It wouldn't have lasted"?' She hung on grimly to her original question.

'Oh ... they didn't get on. Father and Maman,' said Jane off-handedly. 'That's all.'

'You don't remember,' said Sally. 'You were only a baby.'

'I was six - '

'And a baby.'

'And you were an old-age pensioner, I suppose. I was there just as much as you - in fact more, because you and Di were at school. I can even remember the day Maman went - she was furious with Father, I can still remember that. Because he wanted to go early, while it was still dark, and she said he didn't have to. And he said he had to.'

'Had to do what?' Frances felt the old excitement, the old drug, heighten her perception: suddenly she was a fly on the wall in the past on that other November day nine years ago, because of this child's total recall; which, in spite of the boastful words, was the total recall of a deep wound still raw inside her, which wouldn't heal until somebody who understood its nature set about treating it; and Nannie could never do that, and her Father couldn't either, because he didn't know about it, because there was no way the child could tell him about it, not in a million years.

Well, that wasn't her job. Her job was to re-create that moment and to observe it - the moment which William Ewart Hedges had suspected - 'no matter what he thought of her'

he'd let slip - and which she had also suspected even before he'd let it slip.

Not Four-out-of-Ten, Frances - Frances Warren, Frances Fitzgibbon - and not Five-out-of-Ten, or Six, or Seven, or Eight, or Nine. This was the real thing, the Ten-out-ofTen monster inside her, which had no rational explanation, which was frightening when she thought about it.

'Had to do what?'

Jane's eyes clouded -

God! There was another Ten-out-of-Ten, except it should have been obvious to her long before, what they were about with their well-rehearsed dialogue, why they were at such pains to tell her such secrets!

No. She mustn't even think of that, it was ridiculous!

'Oh ... he had to get somewhere by 11 o'clock - he had an appointment, or something.

And he wasn't going to break it for anything, no matter what she said, he said - Maman shouted at him on the stairs, I heard her, I was sick in bed. He didn't shout, of course -

he never shouts. But he was quite loud for him.' She nodded. 'He said he had to go, and he jolly well went. It was duty, I expect.'

* * *

Having approximately three hours on my hands, and there being no other duties scheduled, I

adjusted my route to take in my home town of Blackburn, arriving there at 1020 hours and

departing at 1125 hours. While in Blackburn I spoke to no one -

* * *

No appointment ... which Major Butler wasn't going to break for anything. Or anyone - angry wife or sick child.

'Well, that was jolly unusual for them, they didn't row like that very often. It was mostly they were simply cold and uptight - or Maman was, anyway,' said Sally, conceding a trench she could not defend, but standing fast on her main position. 'I think the whole trouble was that they didn't shout at each other enough - Maman went one way, and Father went another, that was the trouble. She didn't like cricket, for example.'

'Cricket?' Frances tightened her jaw quickly, before it could fall off.

'Cricket is a very interesting game, you know,' said Sally. 'It isn't as exciting as show-jumping, but in some ways it is quite scientific. You ought to watch it, Frances. Father will explain it to you - he's terrific at explaining.'

'Cricket is a dull game,' said Jane.

'Don't be stupid. Jay.' Sally's voice slashed at her sister. 'Frances would enjoy cricket if Father explained it to her.'

Frances glanced side-long at Jane: she knew with a terrible certainty that the child was about to stand her opinion of cricket on its head.

'I don't mean dull - ' There was a slight flush to the peach cheeks ' - it only seems ... I mean, it only seems difficult if you don't understand it. Like ... like additional maths. But once you've got the hang of it ... then it has an inner poetry all of its own, cricket does.'

Another of the obiter dicta of the redoubtable Miss Baggers (or whatever her real name might be, Baggott, Bagnall or Bagley for choice) was being hurriedly conscripted for service outside its original context.

'It does?' Frances melted in the heat of the desperation the child was striving to hide under false enthusiasm. 'Yes, I'm sure it does.'

She could well afford to be merciful now; she had what she wanted out of them, they had given it to her without any effort on her part, freely out of their own need. And she could get more, anything she liked, for the asking simply by giving them the tiniest bit of encouragement.

'Our mother was foreign, of course - she was French. You can't expect a French person to understand cricket,' said Sally suddenly, as though prompted by a stirring of older loyalty. Then she frowned. 'Not that it really is difficult - Jane's quite wrong there.'

She was recalling herself to her duty, to the more important business in hand, which had to be done, thought Frances bleakly.

The business of imparting information about the virtues and interests of Colonel Jack Butler;

The business of discovering, at the same time, information about the background and character of Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon;

And, on the basis of the latter, and also on Mrs Fitzgibbon's reactions to the former, the business of deciding whether Mrs Fitzgibbon would be a suitable wife and step-mother for Brookside House.

'Have you ever watched cricket?' asked Jane. 'Or do you ride horses?'

Frances thought: The poor little things must be pretty hard-up for eligible females to grab me so quickly.

And then: They probably are hard-up. Mostly they'll only meet their friends' mothers (was that where the one-parent-family interest came in? Had they already looked over that field and found it wanting? Or didn't they fancy step-sisters as well as a step-mother?).

And then: Or their friends' elder sisters, who would be too young (and she herself was almost too young).

And then: Yet maybe not so unsuitable, at that: an army widow (one tick there), in the same line of work (so she'd know the score there - two ticks), who liked Chinese take-away meals and obviously didn't actively dislike cricket.

Poor little things indeed! Diana going off to University, the first bird to fly the nest, would have brought home to them that they were getting older and the world wouldn't stand still; and that Father was travelling a lonely road which could only become more lonely as they followed Diana - in their place would she have thought that far ahead, like this?

And then, brutally: Sod it! She wasn't in the business to solve teenage girls' family problems - her business wasn't to be either merciful or cruel.

'I've done both, as a matter of fact, Jane. And I wield a mean hockey stock, too.' And I play dirty, too, Jane dear. 'But I didn't know your mother was French. Tell me about her -

how did your father meet her, for a start - ?'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Paul Mitchell came to Brookside House like a thief, very quietly, after dark and by the back entrance, following her instructions to the letter, but arriving inconveniently nevertheless, just as Frances was demonstrating her pancake-tossing expertise to a devoted audience.

Because of that it was Jane who answered the knock on the door.

'There's a man for you, Frances.'

'A man?' The kitchen was separated from the back-door by a lobby, and the fizzling of the pancake mixture in the frying-pan had drowned the back-door dialogue. 'What sort of a man?'

Jane sniffed - not a pancake-sniffing sniff, a disapproving sniff. 'A young man. Not a policeman.'

'How d'you know he's not a policeman? Policemen can be young.'

'He smiled at me.' Jane didn't elaborate on the significance of that, but doubtless Baggers had warned her against smiling strangers. 'He wants to talk to you, he said.'

'Have you let him in?' Frances toyed with the notion of sending Paul - it had to be Paul - away until the girls had gone to bed. But there was always the possibility that Colonel Butler would come back later, and that might be why Paul had come earlier than she had bargained for.

'No fear! I didn't like the look of him, so I put the door on the chain.'

'We always put the door on the chain,' supplemented Sally. 'I think we ought to have dogs, myself. A pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks - "Lion-dogs" - and we'd be as safe as anything ... and we wouldn't have been burgled today, either. But Nannie doesn't like dogs, worse luck.'

'I bet you like dogs, Frances,' said Jane with perfect confidence. 'Of course, we'd look after them - and take them for walks, and everything, if you didn't want to.'

The chickens were already being counted, thought Frances sadly. The poor little things would probably spend half the night now planning how to sell the suitable Mrs Fitzgibbon to Father, that knight sans pew et sans raproche.

But Paul was in danger of being forgotten.

'Ask him what his name is, dear. If it's Paul, then let him in - he is a sort of policeman.'

Jane sniffed again. 'Okay - if you say so, Frances.' The desire to appear an obedient potential step-daughter/younger sister outweighed her disapproval.

Frances served Sally with the final pancake. It was (though she said it herself, as shouldn't) an absolutely perfect example of its species.

'That's gorgeous, Frances!' Sally rubbed her stomach guiltily. 'But you've made us eat too much, you know - we've got to watch our figures.' She looked down at a figure which, if it was going to be watched, would only be watched with approval.

'Nonsense. You're just right.' Irresistibly, Frances found herself slipping into her allotted role in response to their prompting. 'Eat it up.'

The sad truth was, of course, that she'd become such a chameleon that there wasn't a real Frances left to argue the toss, she cautioned herself. And when the role was as easy as this - when the other actors were determined to make her a success (for all she knew, they might both hate pancakes, but they would eat anything she cooked tonight until it came out of their ears, she knew that) - no other Frances had a chance.

* * *

'Hullo, Princess,' said Paul. 'Pancakes? Is there one for me by any chance?'

Sally looked up from her pancake with an expression of undisguised hostility.

'And who might you be?' The influence of Nannie at her frostiest was apparent.

'Paul Mitchell - at your service. Miss Butler.' Paul wasn't used to such immediate feminine disapproval, guessed Frances. But he rallied as gamely as any man might have done who encountered a barbed-wire fence in what he had assumed would be open country. 'At everyone's service, in fact.'

'Indeed?' As Sally considered him her sister circled round to stand behind her. For the first time Frances could see their father in both of them: when those stares had matured they would be able to stop a grown man in his tracks at twenty paces.

Even as it was their combined effect rocked Paul. He looked to Frances for support as much as for a pancake.

'I'm afraid not.' Frances was torn between conflicting loyalties, but for once her sympathy was marginally on Paul's side, with the odds he was up against. She tilted the empty mixing bowl for him to see. 'You're just too late.'

'My luck!' Paul didn't look at the Misses Butler. 'I hope I'm not disturbing you.

Princess?'

'Why do you call her "Princess"?' Curiosity got the better of Jane's disapproval.

'Because she is a princess.' Paul didn't smile this time. He was learning. 'Through how many mattresses could the true princess tell there was a pea under her?'

'How - ' Jane frowned at him. 'It was twelve, I think.'

'Twelve it was.' Paul nodded towards Frances. 'She can manage thirteen, no trouble

... Also, the last time I met her, she'd lost a shoe ... Also, she tells fairy stories, so I gather.

She's an expert on them.'

Jane looked at Frances. 'Are you really?'

Frances regretted her marginal sympathy. 'Mr Mitchell works with me - ' she embraced them both with the same look ' - so I have to talk to him on business now.

You'll have to start the washing up without me, I'm sorry to say.'

'But you won't be going?' asked Jane. 'Not tonight?'

'No.' Frances smiled, reassuring herself as much as the two girls. 'I will be staying.

And Mr Mitchell will be going.'

'Well ... that's all right,' said Sally.

'I could help with the washing up,' offered Paul.

'No,' said Sally. 'Thank you.'

'It wouldn't be fair,' said Jane. 'You haven't dirtied anything.'

'That's unfortunately true,' Paul turned his

charm on to full strength. 'But - '

'After we've finished washing up we'll go and watch TV, Frances,' said Sally. 'There's a programme we like at quarter to.'

'What about your prep?'

'We did that at school. First prep before tea, second prep after tea - that's why we stay till six,' said Jane. 'After we've watched our programme we shall read. I'm reading The Lord of the Flies - it's one of our set books.'

'I shall do some biology,' said Sally. 'I'll make some coffee after the Nine O'clock News. But if you'd like something to drink before, there's sherry and stuff in the cabinet in the sitting room - '

* * *

Paul followed Frances to the library.

Just as she had done, he looked round curiously. By the time she had finished drawing the curtains he was halfway along one section of shelving, running his eyes over the titles. He stopped suddenly, while she watched him, and drew a book from one of the shelves.

'Winged Victory - ' he opened the book ' - Ex libris Henricus Chesney ... so it has to be a first edition.' He flipped a page. 'And signed by the author, too! A nice little collector's piece ... and I'll bet there are a few more like it hereabouts.' He replaced the book. 'All the old General's books, of course.'

Frances waited. She knew he was going to say something more.

'You know, that was the only thing of the old man's that he kept,' said Paul. 'Sold up the house and contents. Gave the papers and the diaries to the Imperial War Museum -

matter of fact, I've actually read some of them ... when I was researching there. Beautiful copperplate hand, the old General had ... Not a bad commander, either, come to that -

kept his men well back when the Germans attacked in 1918 - not at all bad ... And the old man's medals and portrait to the Lancashire Rifles' Museum ... Just kept the books, that's all.'

And the money, he didn't bother to add. They both knew that, it didn't need to be said.

'You've been researching the General, then?' That didn't really need to be said either, but she didn't want to trade anything of value yet, before he'd offered her something worth having in exchange.

'Uh-huh. The General and the Colonel both.' He seemed engrossed in the titles of the books. 'Or the General and the Captain. And the General and the Rifleman - hard to think of Fighting Jack as an Other Rank, but that's how he started ... in the army, that is.