Tomorrow's ghost

With the General he started out even lower down the scale. The social scale.'

'Yes?'

'Yes. He was odd-job boy to the General's gardener in his school holidays - did you know that, Princess?'

'Wasn't his father the General's sergeant-major in the First World War?' Frances encouraged him.

'That's right. Regimental Sergeant-Major. And RSM Butler was ... "a proper tartar", so I am reliably informed. Like the General, in fact - both hard as diamonds, one with a bit more polish than the other. But both hard as diamonds.'

'Reliably informed by whom?'

'One Who Should Know: the old General's gardener, ex-batman. One Private Albert Sands - Rifleman Sands, I beg his pardon!' Paul looked at her - through her - suddenly, smiling to himself, his face quite transformed by his memory. 'Rifleman Sands, aged 84 -

a jolly old boy who has all the nurses eating out of his hand. They say he pinches their bottoms if they don't watch out - Rifleman Sands, sans teeth, almost sans eyes, but not sans memory, fortunately ... He sits there like a little old wizened monkey, a bit vague about the last twenty years, but before that he's practically got total recall. Just a little old man - but he and Butler's father pulled the old General off the barbed wire at Beaumont Hamel in 1916.' Paul's eyes flickered. 'Pulled him off the wire - the old General was only a young Colonel then - pulled him off the wire under machine-gun fire in full view of the Germans, and dragged him into a shell-hole.' The eyes focused on her. 'And you know what Rifleman Sands said. Princess? He said "It was a bloody silly thing to do, we should have known better - we could have got ourselves killed".'

Frances held her tongue. This was another Paul, a different Paul whom she had only very rarely glimpsed.

'The irony is that after the war they both went in opposite directions, the General and the RSM, and on opposites sides - the RSM was a printer, and' he organised the Union in the General's printing works, Chesney and Rawle's. Come the General Strike in 1926 and they fought each other, in fact. Tooth and nail.'

He looked at Frances, and Frances began at last to see the direction in which he was heading.

'The General was a pillar of the Conservative Party - a Tory alderman on the council, and he could have had the Parliamentary seat if he'd wanted it, too ... And ex-RSM

Butler was the heart and soul of the local Labour Party.'

And little Jack Butler caught in the middle, caught between two men who were both as hard as diamonds, old comrades implacably opposed to each other.

'Rifleman Sands reckoned that if it had been a marginal Parliamentary seat they would both have stood for it, and made a real fight of it. But it was a safe Tory seat, and neither of them reckoned to waste their time in London when they could be pitching into each other where they were. Beautiful!'

But maybe not so beautiful for little Jack, though?

Paul turned back to the books again.

'What about ... Colonel Butler ...' She couldn't call him 'little Jack' out aloud '... when he was a boy?'

'Ah .. . You mean, what did Rifleman Sands have to say about Rifleman-Colonel Jack?' He reached out for another book, and Frances noted the care with which he extracted it from the shelf, how he pressed the top of its spine inwards first so that he could lift it out from the bottom without straining the binding. 'Yes ... another Ex libris Henricus Chesney - but the one next to it - ' he exchanged one book for another ' - that can't be, because I remember when it first came out. The Debateable Land ... that would be about '69 ... J. Butler 1970, there you are! And the old General died way back in '53 ... so -

quite a lot of these must be J. Butler's, actually. But that figures, as they say ... that figures.'

'Who say?' Frances inquired gently. So far he hadn't given her anything, and now he was teasing her.

'"Always had his nose in a book, young Jack" - Rifleman Sands.' Paul nodded at the shelves. 'Thought he was going to be a schoolmaster, young Jack, did Rifleman Sands ...

scholarship boy at the grammar school, with his nose always in some book or other when he wasn't working at his odd jobs. And that's really how it happened, I suppose: the General kept an eye on him because he was RSM Butler's son - gave him the job because he was RSM Butler's son. Sands was there when he gave it to him. And then saw how much he read, and gave him the run of the library too ... One lonely old man and one lonely small boy - no mother, and Father Butler busy with his politics and his trade unionism when he wasn't working ... and the old General's only son had been killed by the Afridis ten years before, up in Waziristan somewhere, and his wife had died of 'flu donkey's years earlier, just after the '14 - '18 War. One plus one equals two ...

I guess young Jack must have aroused the old man's interest first, because he was his father's son. Then the interest became a sort of hobby, because the boy was intelligent...'

More than that under the surface, Frances suspected. There was a familiar enough pattern here: the age gap was such that the two of them would probably have been able to talk to each other in a way that they could never have talked to anyone else. She could remember the confidences she exchanged with Grannie, which went far beyond anything either of them had told Mother. And, for a guess, unspoken love would have followed spoken confidences.

As always, she was surprised how the memory of Grannie still ached. Or not the memory, but the loss.

'And then the interest - the hobby - became an obsession.' Paul gazed into space for a moment. 'You know, they wrote to each other once a fortnight. Butler and the General -

never failed. Sometimes it was only a note from Butler. And sometimes, when he was away at the war, and when he was in the thick of it in Korea, the letters would bunch up and arrive together. But the General would give Rifleman Sands a letter to post every other Monday, rain or shine, every one numbered in sequence. And he'd report to Sands how Butler was getting on - the day Butler's Military Cross was gazetted they both got stoned out of their minds, Sands says. Started with champagne, which neither of them liked, and finished up on 40-year-old malt whisky, and Sands sprained his ankle trying to get on his bicycle afterwards, and was off work for a week.' Paul grinned at her suddenly. 'Got his money's worth out of our Jack, the General did, in Rifleman Sands'

opinion - or value for money, anyway. And so did Sands himself, he was quite frank about it: nice little private nursing home, with pinchable bottoms - not a lot of change out of £100 a week, I should think - all at Rifleman-Colonel Butler's expense. And not in the General's will, either - the General took it for granted that Butler would do it, and Butler did it.'

'Does that make Sands a reliable witness?'

Paul laughed. 'The old bugger doesn't give a damn. With his pension and his investments - he's been a bachelor all his life, and the General made his investments for him - he's got enough to see himself out, no problem. He said so himself.'

'Then why does he accept money from Butler?'

'Ah - now that's interesting. He does it to please Butler.'

'To ... please - ?'

Paul nodded. 'That's got you, hasn't it! Autres temps, autres maeurs, Princess ... You see, the way Rifleman Sands was brought up - and the way Rifleman-Colonel Butler, our Jack, was also brought up, just one street away in the same district, also on the wrong side of the tracks, but in the same world as the General - was that if a man did his duty to the best of his ability, then everything would be all right, come what may. You can laugh - '

'I'm not laughing.'

'Then bully for you. That makes you a very old-fashioned girl, I can tell you ... But I've talked to a lot of these old boys, when I was pretending to be an historian, and trying to find out how they stood it in the trenches. And it all comes back to the same thing: they didn't think it was religious, but they were all brought up on the Bible and it's straight out of St. Paul to the Colossians, chapter three: And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not to men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve the Lord Christ.'

Good God! thought Frances involuntarily: Paul Mitchell quoting the Scriptures - it wasn't so much surprising that he could recall the words accurately, because his amazing capacity for recall was well-known, as that he accepted their importance in preference for more cynical interpretations.

'So Rifleman Sands considers it his duty to let Butler do his duty. Which in turn allows Sands to leave his money to Army charities - mostly the British Legion - which Butler himself knows perfectly well, because he's an executor of the will ... I tell you.

Princess, it's all absolutely incredible. And at the same time it's beautiful as well, the way both of them have it worked out between them - where their obligations lie.'

He was telling her something now. Maybe he didn't think he was - maybe he was simply blinding her with what he took to be irrelevant facts, however academically interesting - but he was, nevertheless. He was telling her something of enormous significance.

'What about those letters? The General would have kept them - did they go to the Imperial War Museum?'

Paul shook his head. 'No way we're going to get a look at them. They're safe in the bosom of the regimental archives somewhere - he didn't include them with the papers he gave to the museum. And I mean safe. Because when he handed them over he slapped a 50-year embargo on them, and only he can unslap it ... the adjutant made that crystal clear.'

He paused for a moment or two, ran his finger over some of the books casually, and then glanced sidelong at her. 'A decent fellow, the adjutant ... didn't know Butler himself, too young, but he produced a couple of old sweats who knew him pretty well, and put me on to a retired half-colonel

of the Mendips who was one of his subalterns in Korea ... Lives not far from here, the half-colonel, so I took him in en route. And there was another chap I talked to this morning, ex-Rifles ... I've covered one hell of a lot of ground since last night, and that's the truth.'

He was impressing her with how much he knew, and how much he had to offer.

And also that he was nearly ready to start trading.

'But he didn't tell me about the letters, the adjutant - I heard about them from Rifleman Sands. And when I phoned the adjutant back he said - ever so politely - that if Her Majesty wanted to see them it'd be a case of hard luck. Your Majesty. ,'

'That's a pity,' said Frances.

'I agree. Except they would only have given us the beginning of the story, and it's the end of it we really need ...' He watched her. 'That is ... if we're looking for the same thing, Princess.'

'True.' The trading had started. 'You said Sands thought he was going to be a schoolmaster, not a soldier? Did he really mean that?'

Paul half-smiled. 'Takes a bit of effort to see Fighting Jack as Mr Chips, not Colonel Blimp, doesn't it!'

'Did he?'

'I doubt it. I think Rifleman Sands simply thinks that any poor boy who won a scholarship to- the Grammar and liked reading books ought to be a schoolmaster, that's all. Just the old class prejudice against the Red Coat ... plus his own memories of the trenches, I suspect.'

'And what did Butler's father make of it?'

'Well, I think . ..' He broke off. 'I think ... that it's about time you stopped asking questions and answered one or two for a change. Princess. Like, for instance, what this sudden interest in Fighting Jack's academic progress means?'

Frances shrugged. 'I think he's a complex man.'

'Aren't we all?' He gestured towards the shelves of books. 'But he carried on the family tradition - adopted family anyway. They're all military, or military-political. Or political ... Ex libris Butler is the same as Ex libris Chesney.'

'Not upstairs.'

'Upstairs?'

'In his bedroom.'

'Indeed? Books in his bedroom? Well, well!' He was interested in spite of himself.

'What dark secret have you uncovered there, then?'

Frances thought of the hard, narrow bed and the carefully adjusted reading lamp, as well as the well-thumbed books. And also what the children had said.

'No dark secret, Paul. Just Hardy and Dickens and Thackeray ... he's re-reading Henry Esmond at the moment.'

'Re-reading?'

'And Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. And Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

And Hemingway and Stephen Crane. And Jack London's Martin Eden.'

'That would be rather suitable,' murmured Paul. 'But Hemingway - that's a turn-up, I must say!'

'And John DOS Passes ... Thoreau, Mark Twain ... and Faulkner - every bit of Faulkner

...' She trailed off.

'Hmm . ..' There was a frown on his face now. 'Not a simple soldier, you mean? But maybe a man after your own heart, perhaps?'

He had seen her books, Frances remembered, even though he had also confused Robbie's with hers to her discomfort.

And then ... after her own heart?

Well, they both had the same Yoknapatawpha County tales, except that his had been bought new in '55 - J. Butler 1955 - and hers picked up, dog-eared, in the Charing Cross Road fifteen years later.

Heart -

And except his had an underlining in it (and it was his underlining too, in the same coal-black ink of J. Butler 7955), and as he had never underlined anything in any other of his books, so far as she could discover, that passage from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech had to be strong magic for him:

... the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths ... love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice...

'You favour the psychological approach this time, then? "Know the man, and you'll know where to find the facts everyone else has missed"?' At least he was deadly serious and not making fun of her.

'Are there any facts everyone else has missed?'

He didn't reply at once; he was still adding the unsuspected literary Butler to his Fighting Jack, and getting no sort of answer.

At length he nodded. 'I think there are, somewhere - yes.'

'Why?'

'Because of us, Frances. You and me.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I mean ... I don't believe they would have detached us without a reason - I don't think it can be just because someone high up hopes to block Butler's promotion. I think that a word has been dropped somewhere that there is something. And if they put the same people on it who checked him out before, they think those people will find the same things, which will amount to nothing. But you and I - we start out fresh. That's what I think, Frances.'

And we're the best too, he left unsaid.

'Which leaves us with the old "means, motive and opportunity" - if he killed her, then how did he, and why did he, and when did he?' He paused fractionally. 'Only we already know that there could have been a "when", because he never produced an alibi.

And the "how" hardly matters, because when it comes to killing he's got more notches on his belt than Billy the Kid.'

'But only in war.'

'But he enjoyed it. That's what the chap who was with him on the Imjin in Korea said. They were in trenches-trenches and dug-outs and wire, and it was bloody cold, and they were overrun by rats. Rats don't like cold, they like nice warm dug-outs. And you can't poison them because they go home to die, and then they smell. And there were plenty of dead bodies to smell, too ... In fact, it was like the '14-'18 War - in some ways it was even worse, because there weren't any billets behind the lines, or if there were they were full of rats and lice - and the rats and lice were full of scrub typhus and Songo fever, neither of which Butler senior had to contend with on the Somme. Apart from which there was foot-rot and ring-worm and malaria. And, of course, there were a million Chinese who were quite prepared to swop casualties at ten to one - '

This, again, was the other Paul: a Paul transformed by his private military obsession, convoys and battle-cruisers forgotten now.

'Butler admired the Chinese - wouldn't let anyone despise them, said they were damn good soldiers who deserved to be better supported. Said it was unlucky for them they were up against the British Army, who couldn't be beaten in defence if they were properly led, and he intended to see that they were. Absolutely mad on weapon training and leadership and physical fitness - no one in his company was allowed to get sick, he'd have a chap's boots off and examine his feet as soon as look at him, he said he could tell when a man had bad feet just by looking at him ... Absolutely revelled in it - ' he stopped short as he caught sight of Frances's expression. 'What's that look supposed to mean?'

'You haven't said anything about killing, Paul.'

'No. But -

'You've described the General and the father in their trenches, maybe. You haven't described a professional killer,' said Frances.

Paul's jaw set hard: he didn't like to be caught out on his own battleground. 'There was Cyprus, Princess - his first bit of Military Intelligence. That shoot-out in the Troodos Mountains in '56 wasn't trench warfare. And the I-Corps sergeant's automatic jammed, so those were all his kills.'

He was into the small print now. And obviously he knew a great deal about the military Butler - more than she did. But he hadn't mentioned Trevor Anthony Bond and Leslie Pearson Cole, and that could mean that they hadn't exposed that chapter of the Butler file to him, although he'd had the military chapter in greater detail.

'All right, Frances. We've both been digging, and we both know something we didn't know before ... I know he was a damn good soldier in the trenches. And that he was a one-man execution squad in the mountains. And you know his taste in literature -

would that qualify as an old-fashioned hunger for self-improvement, now?'

'Self-improvement?'

'That's right. An old northern working-class passion that's gone out of fashion with the coming of the welfare state.' He paused. 'I agree he's a complex character. A working-class boy who struck it rich. Maybe a schoolmaster manque ... a self-made officer and gentleman of the old school, anyway - self-made in someone else's image, or his version of someone, that was maybe two wars out-of-date. Perhaps that was why his face never quite fitted in his regiment: he thought he was conforming, but he was conforming to the wrong pattern.' He paused again. 'And then out of the blue, in the sort of dirty fighting he'd never prepared himself for, he finds he has a natural talent for counter-intelligence work - unregimental work, just when his regimental career is beginning to go sour on him ... and also just when they're beginning to cut the army down, and amalgamate the famous regiments out of existence. And he really hated that, I can tell you. No Lancashire Rifles any more, no Mendip Borderers. No family to belong to - or pretend to belong to. Just duty. And Madame Butler.'

He stared at her. 'We have to put it together and get an answer to our question, one way or another, Frances.'

Frances knew that she couldn't put it off any longer. If she did she'd merely delay him, he'd come to it himself eventually.

'He hated her too.'

Somewhere deep in the house behind and above her she could just distinguish the thump of pop music.

The means and the opportunity had always been there as a possibility; they had been so obviously there that they'd never really mattered.

Either the girls' TV programme was a Pick of the Pops variant, or they required a background of noise for the assimilation of their set-books.

But no one had ever produced a motive.

'You're sure?' He had been expecting something like it; it was just as well she hadn't flannelled him.

'Yes.'

'From the children?'

'Indirectly.' It had been close to directly, but the circumstances in which the information had been given made that admission stick in her throat. 'They confirmed it indirectly.'

'You knew already?'

'By the time I ... talked with them ... yes.'

'How?'

'This house.' Now she wanted to get it over. 'There isn't a thing of hers in it. Not an object, not a piece of clothing - not a handkerchief, not a book. Not even a picture. Not a single thing.'

He looked around him.

'This was always his room. His books and his desk - they are the same. But the curtains are different. He replaced them.'

He wrinkled his nose. 'Not in very good taste.'

Frances swallowed. 'He hasn't got very good taste. She furnished the whole house when they moved in.'

'Elegantly, I presume?'

She looked at him interrogatively. 'You presume?'

'She was French, wasn't she?'

Deep breath. 'Yes. And yes, I think. From what the middle daughter remembers.'

'But he chucked it all out?'

'He sold it. The daughters - the two elder ones - are just starting to get him to re-furnish again. The eldest girl has made him sell all the pictures he bought - the paintings

- and has replaced them with ones she likes. She's studying Art at college.'

'He does what he's told, does he? Well, I suppose he can afford to indulge them, anyway ... But how d'you know all this? Did they tell you?'

'Some of it. But he keeps very careful accounts - ' she nodded towards the desk ' - it's all neatly filed in there.'

Paul stared at the desk for a moment. 'So ... he blotted her out.' He turned back to her. 'You knew this before you talked to the girls - that he hated her?'

'Yes.'

He frowned. 'But couldn't it have meant great love - la grande passion, possibly? All reminders unbearable?'

'Possibly.'

'But not likely?' The frown became perplexed. 'He met her at the end of the war, just before or after ... the file doesn't say which. But he didn't marry her then - he didn't marry her until he came back from Korea in '53 ... So ... he -

she was very young when he first met her. And she waited eight whole years for him.

That doesn't sound like a passing fancy to me. Princess, you know.'

'Or alternatively, she waited until he was rich,' said Frances brutally.

'Hmm ... ye-ess.' He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

'You know something?' She could hear a slight rasping of stubble.

'Maybe.' He stopped rubbing. 'I haven't picked up the least suggestion that she ever played around.'

'No?' There was more to come.

'If anything she was ... rather un-French.'

'Un-French?'

'Rather cold. Say, beautiful but unapproachable.'

That was a typical chauvinist judgement: if Madeleine Francoise had been English her coldness would have been unremarked (or not even noticed, as her own had never been noticed). But as a Frenchwoman Mrs Butler was expected to be sexy and available, as well as having good taste in house-furnishing.

'She wasn't affectionate, in fact?'

'Yes. That's about it.' The chauvinism had restored some of his confidence. 'Is that what you wanted to hear?'

At the same time he didn't sound wholly convinced, and Frances could understand why. That first meeting, in the excitement of the war or the chaos of its aftermath, touched a chord of romance in him. Men, even men like Paul with his calculating-machine passion for facts, very often had foolish romantic streaks in them somewhere which the right stimuli activated. And in his case, with his passionate interest in things military, the imagined picture of the young British soldier meeting the young French girl might just do that trick.

Come to that, it might also have done the trick with Madeleine Francoise, she thought with a sharp spasm of memory. In his old pullover and cavalry twill trousers Robbie had been just a very ordinary boy, just another young man, if a little shorter-haired and better-mannered than average. But in his uniform, very straight and very young, he had been something else ... The old song was right - there was something about a soldier .. . something enough to delude clever little Frances Warren anyway, once upon a time, so maybe enough for Madeleine Francoise too.

But that didn't really fit this case, because it hadn't been a wartime romance. There were those eight years to swallow: had Butler waited until he could afford to marry, or had Madeleine Francoise waited until he was worth marrying?

'Or is that what you expected to hear?' Paul pressed her. 'The daughters told you as much - how the devil did you get them to tell you a thing like that?'

That was one thing she wasn't going to tell him. 'They had their reasons ... and I said

"indirectly".'

'And this house.' He looked around him again, then back at her. 'You're still not levelling with me, Princess.'

'Not levelling? What d'you mean?'

'I mean ... you came here, and you talked to them - and you somehow got them to talk to you,

God knows how. But you couldn't have known what they were going to say, or what you were going to find. But you came.'

It would be easy to say 'Where else could I start?' It would even be logical, so that he couldn't argue with it.

But it wouldn't be the truth, or the most important part of the truth, and he would know that too. Because there were rare moments when Paul's instinct also operated independently from the data in his memory store, and this was one of them.

All the same, if she could avoid admitting the whole truth -

'It was in the report ... Or rather, it wasn't in the report, Paul.'

'What wasn't?'

'It never stated that they were a devoted couple.'

'Would you have expected it to?' He regarded her incredulously. 'Hell, Princess -

those Special Branch chaps of ours are bright coppers, but they haven't exactly been raised on Shakespeare's sonnets.'

'I've talked to the inspector who was on the case at the time...'

'Yes?'

'He was quite sharp too. And he liked Butler. I was waiting for him to say it - there were half a dozen times when he could have said it - "It was a happy marriage". Or even

"There was nothing wrong with the marriage" - anything like that - '

'Or "It was a bad marriage"? He didn't say that either?'

'He didn't say anything at all, not deliberately.'

'So it didn't stick out enough to seem important to him.'

'But in this case it was important. Because there was no circumstantial evidence either way, so the motive had to be twice as important.'

'Okay, Princess.' Paul conceded the point gracefully. 'Then he liked Butler - so he didn't push it, you may be right. But, a bit of cold fish is our Jack. And cold fish plus stiff upper lip plus duty - it doesn't make for demonstrations of affection.'

'No! That's just where you're wrong, Paul. Colonel Butler isn't really a cold fish at all.

He's terrifically affectionate with his daughters.' Frances swallowed. 'And I mean, physically affectionate. I mean ... for example, every night he was home - right up until they started to develop, anyway - he'd insist on bathing them. And they loved it. In fact

... they still don't mind if he sees them naked - they actually tell him their measurements

- '

* * *

' - and Father always has to have the scores when he gets home, Frances. Like "Australia 356

all out, England 129 for two, and Jane 31-23-31 - "

* * *

'Good God!' Paul sounded not so much surprised as slightly shocked at her intimate revelation of Butler family life. (But then, of course, Paul was an only son of a widowed mother, and a boarding school boy too, so under the Cavalier exterior there was probably a Puritan hang-up or two about adolescent girls, thought Frances nastily.)

'They adore him.' She struck at his embarrassment. 'They'd do anything for him.'

The blow rebounded instantly: anything even included attempting to conscript the wholly unsuitable Mrs Fitzgibbon as a potential Second Mrs Butler. And how many others before her? she wondered, remembering the eager, scheming little Butler faces.

'Uh-huh?' Paul quickly had his hang-up under control. 'But mightn't that make them perhaps not so reliable witnesses to the marriage?'

'No, I don't think so.' Frances shook her head. He still wasn't totally convinced, and she couldn't blame him. The omission of any judgement of the quality of the Butler marriage, either in the report or in William Ewart Hedges' recollections, was negative evidence, and her own investigation of the house was hardly less subjective, even when added to his own findings. But she could hardly admit to him that all this, plus what the girls had told her, were merely corroborative to the instinct she'd had from the beginning about Butler. How could she ever tell anyone that she knew what she was going to find before she had found it? That the knowledge was like a scent on the wind which she alone could smell? That this house itself still smelt of that old hatred?

* * *

'One thing about Maman, though - she always smelt beautiful, I do remember that.'

Jane had closed her eyes

. 'Lancome "Magie", I think it was - '

'It wasn't Lancome "Magie",' Sally had said professionally . 'It was Worth "Je Reviens".'

* * *

In the circumstances of a nine-year-missing mother, that wasn't funny, Frances had thought - and still thought: Je Reviens was a promise too horrible to think about nine years after a possible encounter with Patrick Raymond Parker, 'The Motorway Murderer' of the headlines which suddenly came back to her. The women who met Patrick Raymond Parker didn't ever come back: they were planted deep - Julie Anne Hartford, Jane Wentworth, Patricia Mary Ronson, Jane Louise Smith ... and Madeleine Frangoise de Latour d'Auray Butler, nee Boucard - they were planted deep under his stretch of motorway, compacted by his great earth-moving machines and held down by the thickness of hardcore and concrete and tarmac, and millions of speeding vehicles, until doomsday; and even if the world ended tomorrow, and it took another thousand years for green-growing things to push up through that hard surface, they wouldn't come back.

And yet ... in another way and in her own sweet vengeful time, she had come back, had Madeleine Francoise. And even now she was reaching out to catch her husband's heel from behind, when he least expected her touch.

* * *

She shook her head again, decisively. 'No.'

'No?' He was no longer searching for doubt in her. Instead he was superimposing her conclusion on top of his own knowledge in the last hope that they wouldn't coincide.

Finally he sighed: one thing Paul never did was to argue with inconvenient facts, or not for long.

'Okay. So they adore him, he adores them. And he hated her.9 The corner of his mouth drooped. 'So you've got the one bit of dirt no one else came up with - the Reason Why. And they're really going to adore you for that. Or he is.'

'He? Who?'

'Our Control. Our esteemed Control. He who will give us anything we want, everything we want, provided we will give him exactly what he wants. Namely, the dirt on Jack Butler - a dirty knife in the back for Fighting Jack: the Thin Red Line attacked a tergo, with no time to turn the rear rank back to back, like the 28th at Alexandria - '

'What d'you mean?' Frances quailed before his summer-storm anger.

'Battle of Alexandria, March 21st 1801. French dragoons caught the 28th - the Glosters - in the rear when their infantry was attacking from the front. So their colonel turned the rear rank round and fought 'em off back-to-back - I know you don't go much for the military. Princess, but you ought to remember that from your Arthur Bryant - '

He swung away suddenly, towards the bookshelves, scanning the titles ' - and he'll be here somewhere, Sir Arthur will be, you can bet your life - '

Frances took a step towards him, but he -was already moving down the long shelving. 'I didn't mean that, Paul.'

'No? The Years of Endurance - it has to be here, the old General would never have missed it ... No? Well, perhaps you ought to have meant it - there's something in it you ought to see, by God!'

'Paul - '

But he ignored her, pouncing on a maroon-coloured volume and thumbing through the pages without looking up as he swung back towards her. 'Yes - '

'Paul - listen to me, please.'

'No. You shut up, Princess, and listen to me. Listen to this, in fact - '

Frances opened her mouth, and then shut it again as he looked for a moment at her.

'1801. We beat the French in Egypt. Everyone knows about Nelson sinking their fleet at the Nile, but that was no contest - no one remembers we beat their army, Bonaparte's veterans of Lodi. No one ever gives a stuff for the British Army, they just take it for granted - and pay it wages that would make your average car worker go screaming mad with rage, and rightly so - ' His eyes dropped to the page ' - now, listen - '

This was the obsessive Paul again, the military historian who had never worn a uniform. But there was something more to it than that obsession this time, thought Frances: something in his mind had connected now with 1801, which she could only discover by holding her tongue.

'Abercromby - General Sir Ralph Abercromby, commanding the army that beat the French. Died of wounds a week after - gangrene from a sword-cut - 67 years old, but he wouldn't give up until the French retreated from the battlefield ... they put him in a soldier's blanket and he insisted on knowing the name of the soldier, because the man needed his blanket ... Here it is: when he died there was a General Order of the Day published:

"His steady observance of discipline, his ever-watchful attention to the health and wants of his troops, the persevering and unconquerable spirit which marked his military career, the splendour of his actions in the field and the heroism of his death are worthy the imitation of all who desire, like him, a life of honour and a death of glory!"

He didn't look up when he'd finished reading the passage: he was re-reading it, memorising the words for himself, for his own purposes, for the secret Paul, to make sure he was word-perfect.

But where was the connection?

He looked up at last. 'Well ... at least he's not quite dead yet. Princess - our General Abercromby.'

So that was the connection: somewhere along the line during the past twenty-four hours Paul Mitchell had finally changed his mind about Colonel Butler, from anger to approval, to admiration. And if it didn't quite make sense to Frances - computers like Paul shouldn't have emotions - it was altogether fascinating that he should in the end have come to the same conclusion as the irrational one she'd had at the beginning.

'I haven't killed him off.'

'You're going to give them a motive.'

'But no proof.'

'They don't need proof. Control doesn't need proof.' He shook his head. 'They're never going to hang anything on him - even if they could that would be bad publicity.

All they want is enough to put the big question mark on him, and means and opportunity never were enough for that. But if you can add a motive to it ... that'll be enough to swing it.'

He was right, of course. If the marriage was on the rocks ... and nothing could be proved against her ... then Butler wouldn't have got the children - my girls. And that, in the whole wide world, was the one thing he might have killed for out of the line of duty, they could argue.

And that would be enough to swing it.

What have I done? thought Frances. I don't for one moment think that Colonel Butler killed his wife - but if I put in a true report of my conclusions I shall suggest that he did.

'You agree that there is a motive?' The cold, pragmatic half of her still wanted to know why Paul was so emotional about the job of excavating Colonel Butler's past.

Because it couldn't be that Paul simply admired Butler's Abercromby performance in the Korean trenches and the Cypriot mountains - not enough to hazard his own career, anyway.

'A motive?' Paul's voice was suddenly casual - as casual as a subaltern of the 28th echoing the command Rear rank - Right about - Prepare to repel cavalry! 'Frankly, Princess. I don't give a fuck about motives. Or wives. Or murder - '

That was David Audley speaking: David never swore, except very deliberately to shock, or to emphasise a point by speaking out of character ... And Paul was a chameleon like herself, taking his colour from those he observed about him.

' - Or anything else, but what matters - what really matters.'

'What really matters?'

'What matters is - we don't kill off Fighting Jack. That's what matters.'

'Kill off?'

'We don't block his promotion. All we have to do is disobey orders - give him a clean bill of health - lie through our teeth: happy marriage, tragic disappearance, "Motorway Murderer".'

So Paul had done his homework - naturally. Paul knew reporters and news editors.

Like David Audley, Paul was owed favours and collected on them, promising future favours. Paul was born knowing the score, down to the last figure beyond the decimal point.

But did Paul know about Trevor Anthony Bond, and Leslie Pearson Cole (deceased, restricted) and Leonid T. Starinov (restricted)? And the curious not-alibi which lay between grimy Blackburn in the morning and medieval Thornervaulx in the afternoon -

did he know about that too?

At the moment he didn't care, anyway: he was bending all his will on bending her will.

Make me an offer, thought Frances cynically. It would have to be either an offer she couldn't refuse or a threat she couldn't ignore, nothing else would serve - that must be what he was thinking, not knowing what she had already done for his Fighting Jack.

'Can you give me one good reason why I should do that, Paul? Why I should risk my neck?'

'Why?' He snapped The Years of Endurance shut and reached up to slot it back into its space in the shelf. 'Say ... the best interests of our country - ' He glanced sidelong at her, and then straightened the books casually ' - would that do?'

That was the offer: the National Interest, with no direct benefit attached for her.

Quite a subtle offer.

He faced her. 'And in our best interests too, as it happens, Frances.'

She had been too quick off the mark:

Self-interest as well as National Interest - that was more like Paul.

'Our best interests? How?'

He grinned. 'Didn't I tell you? Nor I did!'

I think I know what his promotion is, Frances remembered. She had been staring at Isobel's white wall when he had said that, deliberately tantalising her.

'You didn't quite get round to that, no.'

The grin vanished. 'You've been playing pretty hard to get. Princess. It's been all give and no take, don't you think?'

The threat was coming.

'I wouldn't exactly say that.' But it was true nevertheless, she decided. She had been a pretty fair bitch to Paul, matching his hang-ups with her own.

'Okay - have it your way ... I'll tell you.' He nodded slowly. 'But first I'll tell you something else: if you tell Control that Butler had a motive for chilling his missus ... then I'm going to phone the Grand Hotel in Blackburn - '

'Blackburn - ?'

'That's where Jack is tonight - and I'm going to tell him the score. At least he'll have the chance to face the enemy at his back then - '

'What's he doing in Blackburn?'

He did a double-take on her. 'How the hell do I know? I don't know - Jim Cable said he'd be there tonight, until about midday tomorrow - what the devil has that got to do with it? It's his home town, isn't it?'

'You were in Blackburn today.'

'Ah ... Yes. But he's not on my trail, if that's what you mean.'

'How d'you know he isn't?'

'Because Jim Cable booked the hotel for him the first day they went up to Yorkshire, more than a week ago. Which was at the start of the O'Leary hunt - long before the Butler hunt started, Princess.'

'He's on O'Leary's trail, then?'

'Yes, he is - and very hot too, Jim says.' He nodded.

'In Blackburn?' Frances persisted.

Paul frowned. 'No, not in Blackburn. What's so all-fired important about Blackburn?'

'You said you didn't know what he's doing there. But you know what he isn't doing.'

He shook his head. 'I meant that literally. He told Jim he was taking a half-day off on the Friday week ahead, and he'd be spending the night before in his home town, that's all. He'll be back on the job by 1.30 tomorrow, anyway - you can pick him up at the University then if you want him.' He continued to frown at her, half puzzled, half suspicious. 'We seem to have lost the thread rather, Princess. And you haven't yet revealed what you intend to do.'

The heavy door-knocker on the mock-Tudor door boomed out, echoing in the empty hall outside the library.

'Are you expecting callers?' asked Paul quickly.

Frances shook her head, listening intently. Even before the echoes had died away she could hear other sounds mingling with them inside the house.

'Then who - ?'

She raised a finger to cut off his question. That first sound had been the clatter of the latch on the TV room door. Then there had been a burst of unmuffled pop music - at that volume it was amazing that the girls had heard anything else, even that thunderous door-knocker - but the music had been quickly muffled again as the door was closed on it. Now there came the distinctive clackety-click of Sally's fashion clogs crossing the parquet floor of the hall, ending with the thud and rattle of mock-Tudor bolt and safety chain on the door itself.

At least it couldn't be Colonel Butler himself, because Colonel Butler was in the Grand Hotel, Blackburn, this night - this Thursday night (that other November night, nine years ago, had been a Monday night).

What was strange was that she wasn't as relieved as she should be that it couldn't be Colonel Butler. Indeed, analysing the strangeness, she came upon the beginning of a day-dream that he had come back, very late, after the girls were safely tucked up and asleep, and she herself was comfortably curled up (in Diana's exotic nightie and warm dressing gown, which Jane had found for her), reading his Tales of Yoknapatawpha County

- reading in it maybe 'As I Lay Dying', or 'A Rose for Emily', or perhaps 'The Bear', which she had first encountered so unforgettably at college - young Frances Warren as excited as John Keats On First Looking into Chapman's Homer - in 'Go Down Moses' -

* * *

'I

hope you don't mind me reading your Faulkner.'

(One hand clasping the book to her breast, the other modestly joining the edges of the gown together at her throat.)

Wo? at all, Mrs Fitzgibbon.' (Very formal, he would be.) 'You like Faulkner, do you, Mrs Fitzgibbon?'

'Very much! ('The old verities and truths of the heart,' Colonel Butler.) I think we've both read him in the same way, you know.' (Deduction: From the dates on the fly-leaves, each meticulously recording the book's date of acquisition. Butler had read his way through Faulkner at break-neck speed, book after book, in the midst of his duel with the EOKA terrorists in the Troodos Mountains, beginning with Intruder in the Dust, and then Absalom! Absalom! He must have had them flown in, money no object by then, for by then he was a rich man, the ex-poor boy from Blackburn, self-made officer-and-gentleman... Maybe lying in ambush all day on those rocky hillsides with his sub-machine gun and his newest Faulkner?)

(Well, in the same way, if not in the same circumstances exactly. Except that it was all in her imagination, every word, every picture. All a dream.)

* * *

'Frances,' said Sally. 'Frances - there's a policeman at the door, for you, he says. Not the one who brought the Chinese grub - food, I mean.'

Frances smiled at her, sisterly-step-motherly. 'Yes, dear?'

'He says he's a policeman, anyway. He says he'll show you his ... his warrant card.

But he's not in uniform, so I haven't let him in. But he says he knows you.'

So it would be Detective-Sergeant Geddes. The delivery of the Chinese take-away had been a constable's chore. But what would Geddes want?

'All right, dear. I'll see him.'

'Okay. I'll tell him you're just coming.' Sally ducked out obediently, sisterly-step-daughterly.

Frances looked at Paul. 'I'll take him into the sitting room.'

'Don't take long.' From his expression Paul's patience with the hard-to-get Fitzgibbon was close to exhaustion. 'I'd like to know what you're intending to do, Frances.'

What she intended to do.

What she was doing was also all a dream, thought Frances. Ever since the bomb everything had had an insubstantial quality, fuzzed at the edges, as though she was living out an alternative version of a life which had actually ended beside the duck-pond in a spray of blood and muddy water and feathers.

'I shall be here tonight and in Blackburn tomorrow ' she said.

* * *

The door was open, but on the chain. She could smell the wet November darkness through the gap, beyond the area of the porch light.

Through the side window of the mock-Tudor porch she saw a long strip of light where the curtains in one of the mullioned windows of the library hadn't quite met. As she watched, the light went out and a second or two later the curtains moved: Paul was observing her policeman.

'Yes?' she addressed the gap.

'Mrs Fitzgibbon?'

'Yes.' She peered through the gap. Whoever it was, it wasn't Detective-Sergeant Geddes. The moustache was there, and the rather swarthy complexion too; but this was a stockier and an older man.

'Special Branch, madam. My warrant card.'

Frances accepted the card - Detective-Superintendent Samuel Leigh-Hunter. That certainly made him top brass, on a level with their own formidable D. S. Cox in the department; and he had the same heavy-lidded seen-it-all-but-still-learning-from-it look which the best of them had, and which was frightening and reassuring at the same time

- that much one glimpse through the gap registered.

Caution, though: she still didn't know him.

'Yes, Superintendent?' The chain remained in position under her hand.

'I'd like a word with you, madam. Inside the house, if you don't mind.' The eyes were opaque. 'With reference to Dr David Audley.'

Frances's legs weakened at the knees. 'I beg your pardon?' she heard herself say, in Mrs Fitzgibbon's haughtiest voice.

'Let the man in, Frances,' said Paul from behind her.

'What?' she swung round.

'Let him in, you crafty little bitch - or I should say something complimentary really, I suppose!' Paul grinned broadly at her.

'What?'

'Then I'll let him in.' He reached past her towards the chain, lifting the knob out of the slot. 'Come in. Colonel Shapiro - join the club!'

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Israeli wasn't pleased. Frances sensed his displeasure the moment he stepped inside, it was like a tiny movement of air setting one leaf quivering on a still day.

'Captain Mitchell.' The leaf no longer moved, but it had told its tale: Paul had touched it with his unexpected presence.

'Not "Captain".' Paul's grin faded to a self-deprecating smile. 'The highest rank I ever aspired to was lance-corporal in the Cambridge University OTC, I'm afraid. Colonel.'

'Of course. But the first picture we ever took of you was as a captain - France in '74.

In an RTR black beret. And first impressions last longest.' Shapiro traded smile for smile.

'And you are something of a tank expert, 1918 and all that, I believe?'

'But not on your level - 1967 and all that ... the Jebl Libni counter-attack, was it?'

They were crossing swords as well as smiles, and asserting themselves and exchanging professional credentials at the same time.

'And that gives us something in common with David Audley,' Paul moved forward smoothly, choosing his ground. 'Wessex Dragoons, wasn't he - '43-'44?'

'Well, well!' Shapiro conceded a point. '"Not a lot of people know that.'"

Paul accepted the Michael Caine claim. 'He doesn't dine out on it - 80 per cent casualties in Normandy, maybe. But then, David plays a lot of things close to his chest...' He turned towards Frances. 'Like you, Frances. Though the chest is much more worth playing close to, I must admit.'

'Mrs Fitzgibbon - ' The smile vanished from Colonel Shapiro's face: he came from a race and a generation less crude, far less prone to such juvenile familiarity ' - forgive me my deplorable manners. I am sorry to disturb you with not a word of warning, but your phone here isn't secure.'

This was the grey country again: that was exactly - almost word for word exactly -

what Sir Frederick had said to her twenty-four hours before, to the minute; the old-fashioned courtesy giving her an apology which Paul Mitchell would never have rated, but the new-fashioned equality of the sexes putting her in the front line of necessity, in which a woman could do a man's job to the death.

'That was your man in the woods behind the house, I take it?' said Paul conversationally, but pleased with himself.

'Yes.' This time Shapiro's irritation was plain. The poor devil in the woods would soon find himself somewhere even less pleasant than England on a dripping November night after this, said the irritation.

'I thought he might be one of ours. Or just a copper.' Paul was merciless: he had been too good for the man in the woods, and he liked being better than Mossad, who were good - and they were good because Shapiro was here now, within hours of one phone call; and that could be either because they were technologically good, or because they had an inside man somewhere; but however good they'd been, Paul had been too good for them, his sight-and-sound in the wet darkness had been better; if it had been a killing matter, he would have killed, and that would have been an end of it, not to be boasted about; but it had only been a passing in the dark, and he couldn't resist exulting in it -

None has ever caught him yet, for Paul, he is the master: His songs are stronger songs, and his feet faster.

His confidence offended her. If Paul died before his time, it would not be because he wasn't good enough; it would be because he chose to test his excellence to an impossible invulnerability, giving the enemy the first shot because he had to believe no bullet had his name on it. He would die uselessly then, simply to test a theory, not by accident, like Robbie.

She felt the iron in her soul again. She had nothing to lose.

'Have you contacted David, Colonel Shapiro?'

'Yes.' The deplorable manners were forgotten now, thank God: now they were on equal terms. 'Not personally. But ... yes, Mrs Fitzgibbon, we have spoken with him.'

Our Man in Washington. The Israelis had Washington sewn up tight as a drum when it came to contacts, even if they no longer called the tune in the Administration and Congress.

'And he's coming back?'

Shapiro nodded. 'The ClA's bringing him in.' Then he smiled, a touch of wolf under the sheep-dog. 'They owe him one.'

Everybody owed David one: David was both a Godfather and a Godson. Half his strength lay in those unpaid debts.

'He's made a proper bog-up of this one, all the same,' said Paul, dryly superior.

Shapiro nodded again, to Paul this time. 'Ye-ess ... I'm afraid that with this one ...

desire has finally out-run performance.' Another nod. 'As you say - a bog-up. A proper bog-up.'

He sounded as though he'd never heard of a bog-up before, but that the onomatopoeic meaning of it appealed to him as being self-explanatory.

Frances was aware simultaneously that she was being ignored and that she didn't know what they were talking about. She scowled at Paul. 'What d'you mean - David has made a ... bog-up?'

Paul looked over his shoulder at the door to the TV room.

'Let's go back into the library. Princess.'

* * *

'A bog-up?' repeated Frances.

Colonel Shapiro looked around him, just as Paul had done - just as she had done.

Then he looked at Paul.

Damn them all! thought Frances. The great male conspiracy of knowing too much was in that look.

'David thought he had it all cut-and-dried before he went to Washington?' Paul nodded at the Israeli. 'Right?'

Slow nod. 'That's about the size of it. Yes.'

'Had what cut-and-dried?' snapped Frances at both of them.

Paul thought for a moment before replying. 'You drew the top brass last night. Who was it?'

Frances kept her mouth shut. He'd fished for that name once already. He certainly wasn't going to catch anything now.

'All right. Let's put it another way. Who wasn't it?'

Who wasn't it?

Frances saw her error of the night before. She had been so overwhelmed by Sir Frederick's arrival, and then by her own cleverness in connecting it with Colonel Butler, that she'd clean forgotten to ask herself one very important question, even though it had been half-formulated in her mind after he had said You are not reporting to Brigadier Stocker.

'It wasn't Tom Stocker, was it?' The question mark at the end wasn't a question mark: it was Paul's way of emphasising a statement of fact.

'It wasn't Tom Stocker because Tom Stocker is in an oxygen tent at King George's,'

said Paul. 'And his job's up for grabs.'

So that was the Ring of Power waiting for a new finger.

And it was very surely a Ring of Power, no doubt about that: Sir Frederick's Number Two ... chief-of-staff, deputy managing director, first understudy - first lieutenant - and confidant. And more than that, too ... All the doors opened to Brigadier Stocker, and all the files unlocked themselves for him. Liaison with other departments and other agencies passed through him, on his signature. He had the day-to-day patronage of hiring and firing and promoting.

He did all the work, including the dirty work.

It should have been Brigadier Stocker's voice out of the darkness in her garden.

'He failed his physical four months ago,' said Colonel Shapiro.

God! thought Frances: the Israelis always knew everything. No wonder the Russians were so suspicious of their Jews; and that was more than half the reason why David Audley had given her his homily on cultivating them - why he had openly boasted to her of co-operating with Mossad unofficially. It had even sparked one of his rare moments of crudity: I'd rather have them inside the tent, pissing out, than the other way round!

'He should have resigned straight away,' said Shapiro. 'He already had bad chest pains, even before the physical... But the man they had lined up for the job wouldn't take it. Turned it down flat on them.'

'David Audley,' said Paul. He glanced quickly at Shapiro for confirmation. 'It was David, wasn't it?'

'Correct.' Shapiro didn't take his eyes off Frances. 'We have a copy of his refusal telegram - he'd just started his tour in Washington. Clinton was dining with the Provost of St. Barnabas at Cambridge that night, David's old college. And David actually sent the telegram en clair just to let Clinton know he didn't give a damn - typical David. But he also recommended Butler for the job while he was about it.'

Paul gave a half-laugh. 'Typical David indeed! But he was quite right, of course - on both counts. He'd be an absolute disaster in that job, would David. An absolute disaster!'

Shapiro gave him a sharp look. 'Why d'you think that, Mitchell?'

'Paper-work and public relations? Talking to Ministers of the Crown? Ex-trade union bosses? David has a streak of mischief a mile wide at the best of times. He'd talk down to them quite deliberately - he'd try to make fools of them, and he'd end up making a fool of himself.'

He was wrong, thought Frances. Or at least half wrong. David didn't suffer fools gladly, but he had learnt to suffer them. The private fight which he waged endlessly -

and lost endlessly - was between duty and selfishness. He had refused the job simply because it was no fun.

'He was right about Butler, though,' said Paul dogmatically. 'One hundred and one per cent right.'

Shapiro lifted one bushy eyebrow interrogatively, silently repeating his previous question.

Paul nodded. 'Oh - he's not a genius, is Fighting Jack - our Thin Red Line... He's damn good, but he isn't a genius.'

'But he knows his duty?'

'That's one strike for him, certainly. He doesn't want the job, but he'll do it.' He bobbed his head. 'And he'll do it well - and he'll win his coronary ten years from now like poor old Stocker. The crowning glory of a life spent above and beyond the call of duty: one oxygen tent in King George's, with a pretty little nurse to special him on his way out.'

Shapiro nodded.

'But that isn't the real qualification,' said Paul. 'I mean, it is the real qualification from our point of view - ' He nodded to Frances ' - General Sir Ralph Abercromby and all that

... ever-watchful to the health and wants of his troops. Princess: when he sends us over the top, the wire will be cut ahead of us, and the reserves will be ready just behind - you better believe it!

'But no... His real qualification is that the bloody politicians won't be able to resist him.

Ex-grammar school scholarship boy, risen from the ranks by merit - son of a prominent trade unionist, a friend of Ernie Bevin's - still with a touch of Lancashire in his accent, too. Which he can turn on when he wants, when he needs to ... no Labour minister can resist that. Not for the power behind the throne in Intelligence, by golly!

'And if the Tories have a hand in it ... by God! all he'll have to do is grunt at them, and all the other qualifications work for them too. They'll see him as a true-blue Tory, risen from the ranks - the very best sort of salt-of-the-earth Tory. Even the fact that his Dad was one of Ernie Bevin's friends will count for him - the Tories dine out on Ernie Bevin's famous last words - The Buggers won't work! - epitaph on the Welfare State! A perfect Intelligence profile, either way, for the late seventies - a man for all seasons!'

He nodded again at Shapiro. 'But you're right really, in the end ... about Duty. So they'll all take one look at him, and they'll trust him on sight.' He shrugged and grinned at them both, almost as though embarrassed. 'Bloody hell! Come to that, / trust him -

even though he hates my guts - I trust him!'

Well, well! thought Frances, in astonishment. Well, well, well, well, well\ And yet -

well again! - all that made the whole thing even more inexplicable.

'But if that's the case, Paul - if that's what everyone thinks of Colonel Butler - how have we ended up with the job of wrecking his chances?' she frowned at him. 'And how did David ... bog it up?'

Paul looked to Shapiro for the answer. 'Colonel?'

'Who's got it in for Colonel Butler?' Frances shifted the questions in the same direction. And come to that, she added silently, what the hell arc you doing here. Colonel Shapiro?

Shapiro rubbed the tip of his nose with a grubby finger.

'Yes...' He considered her reflectively for a moment, as though he'd picked up an echo of what she hadn't said. 'Well, Mrs Fitzgibbon, I would guess that the probable answer to your second question is "Nobody". Or it was to start with, anyway.' He paused. 'And I'm afraid that the answer to your first question is that David wasn't very clever for once. He tried to play politics, and he played foolishly.'

'Politics?'

Shapiro sighed. 'And ... very regrettably ... some of the blame is mine too. I condoned

- I contributed to - a most egregious error of judgement. I must confess it. And I have come here tonight to do all I can to rectify it.'

Frances began to feel out of her depth. That Mossad should be interested in Brigadier Stocker's successor was fair enough. But although it would have suited them down to the ground for David Audley to take the job they had no reason to expect any favours from Colonel Butler.

'It was such an excellent ideas, that was the trouble with it. One should always be suspicious of excellent idea,' said Shapiro sorrowfully. 'The better they are, the worse the situation becomes if they go wrong.'

Way out of her depth, decided Frances.

'It was such a good idea that Audley came back from Washington to make sure Sir Frederick

Clinton acted on it - to make sure nothing went wrong. And while he was here he came to me to enlist my support for it - I have some influence with the West Germans, also with the Americans over here. He wanted the right people to be primed if there was consultation ... and we both agreed it was ... an absolutely excellent idea.'

But why did the Israelis think Butler was an excellent idea?

'For quite different reasons, as it turned out,' continued Shapiro. 'Although at the time I thought differently - I thought David was playing the same game as I was, even though he said he was being entirely altruistic - ' he nodded at Paul' - exactly as you claim to be, Mitchell. You say Colonel Butler doesn't like you, but you trust him... And that's precisely what David Audley said. And I didn't believe a word of it.'

'Why not?' said Frances. 'Don't tell me it was just because David is devious.'

'You know, I am being rather altruistic,' said Paul to no one in particular. He sounded suspicious of himself.

'My dear lady - young lady - ' Shapiro caught himself just in time. 'I told you - I made a mistake. Isn't that enough for you?'

Under the urbanity he was angry with himself - so furious that it required a continuous effort not to burn up everything and everyone around him, not excluding dear young ladies, thought Frances. But one thing he wasn't going to receive from this young lady - and 'young lady' from him was patronising and he ought to have known better: in Israel 'young ladies' were accepted as young soldiers - was any special consideration. Whatever he'd done, there was no way Colonel Shapiro of Mossad would have behaved altruistically.

'I didn't believe him - ' Shapiro saw that he wasn't about to be offered an olive branch, and that cooled him down ' - for the sufficient reason that Colonel Butler thinks very highly of him, professionally. Which is all that matters.'

Yes. And so here was another one who wasn't concerned with motives and wives and murder, decided Frances. For all Shapiro cared. Colonel Butler could be the Motorway Murderer himself, with women planted under the roadway one to every hundred yards for miles on end. Professionally that was of no consequence whatsoever, provided it was done efficiently.

'My God!' said Paul in a hollow voice. 'It's Audley that they're after, not Butler!'

'What?' For once Frances ignored her own hateful feminine squeak of surprise.

'What?'

'Christ - I'm dim - dim!' Paul, in turn, ignored her, addressing himself to Shapiro. 'I thought Fred Clinton was losing his grip - letting them push Butler out of the way, doing their dirty work for them.'

'He is losing his grip,' snapped Shapiro. 'Five years ago ... even two years ago ... he would have closed up that file on Butler tight - he would have locked it up and thrown away the key. If Stocker hadn't been a sick man he still might have managed it. But with Stocker the way he was - no help ... waiting for the next pain in his chest ... and he's too old to fight the way he used to, Clinton is. The politicians pushed him - you're right, Mitchell: there are people who know all about Audley, and they don't like what they know - he doesn't push around easily, and he isn't polite with it either. Also there's the anti-Audley faction in your own department - they really hate his guts too.'

'For a different reason, I hope to God!' murmured Paul.

Audley?

'So do I,' said Shapiro grimly. 'By God - I hope that too!'

Audley? Audley?

'Clinton's 64. He's retiring next year,' said Paul.

Clinton - Audley? Not Butler, not Stocker. But Clinton and Audley?

'In November. One year exactly,' Shapiro nodded. 'We have one year - to the day, near enough. He'll be at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, and that'll be the last time.'

The irrelevance of the exact dating threw Frances into confusion. Sir Frederick Clinton had always attended the Remembrance Day parade in Whitehall, every Sunday of every November that she could remember, with his medals on his chest. Twice, when she'd been duty officer, he'd quite deliberately taken her too - had put someone else on duty for an hour quite deliberately.

'You'll want to come of course, Frances. You have something to remember.'

She'd never seen David there - in spite of the Wessex Dragoons' 80 per cent casualties. But-then David wasn't sentimental.

She'd never seen Butler there either... And that was much stranger, with his passion for anniversaries and the Lancashire Rifles' battle honours, which must be scattered across dozens of cemeteries all the way to Korea and back.

But that was all irrelevant: she was being diverted from the wood by the ba-rk on the trees.

Paul noticed her confusion at last, and took pity on her.

'Frances - I'm sorry! I am dim-witted.' But he was pleased with himself, nevertheless.

'Fred Clinton's retiring next year.'

'Yes?'

'It's as plain as the nose - ' Paul's eye flicked to Shapiro's beak, which almost rivalled Nannie's, and then came back to her ' - as the pretty nose on your face. I just didn't get it until I realised that no one would expect me to be altruistic - to want to do the right thing just for once for the right reason, like poor old Thomas Archbishop in Murder in the Cathedral.

Exasperation. 'Paul, what are you talking about?'

'He turned the job down - David did. Stocker's job. And he pushed Butler for it - '

Paul pointed at Colonel Shapiro ' - and he lobbied all over the place for Butler to get it.

And David doesn't normally play politics, he despises politics almost as much as Fighting Jack does. Right, Colonel?'

'Correct.' Shapiro nodded. 'And a grave mistake, too. David Audley is a professional who tries to behave like an amateur. He suffers from the gentlemen-and-players syndrome - a common British disease afflicting ex-public schoolboys.'

'Very true. But not a common Israeli disease afflicting ex-tank commanders,' Paul agreed, deflecting the insult back at the Colonel. 'So few gentlemen in that line of business, I suppose?'

Frances looked at them angrily. 'For God's sake - both of you - why are they after David, not Butler? What's David done?'

'It's not what he's done, it's why he did it,' said Shapiro.

'Or rather, dear Princess, why everyone thought he did it,' said Paul.

Motive again, thought Frances bitterly. She had already found a motive Colonel Butler had had for something he hadn't done; now all she had to find was a motive David Audley had lacked for something he had done.

It came to her a second before Paul spoke, but too late.

'They thought David was going for Sir Frederick Clinton's job,' said Paul.

Just like that. Simple, obvious and self-evident. Like the nose on Nannie's face - plain as the nose, plain as the face.

David Audley for Number One.

Therefore, in advance, to prepare the way for the lord, his old friend and colleague -

godfather to his daughter - for Number Two.

'Correct,' said Shapiro.

David Audley for Emperor.

But first Colonel Butler for Grand Vizier.

It was safe as well as simple: the Grand Vizier never got the Emperor's job, that required different qualifications as well as cojones. But the Grand Vizier was uniquely well-placed to influence the succession ... and - God! - also to eliminate rivals.

Frances stared at Paul. Was he thinking what she was thinking: that whoever was urging them both on to dig the dirt on Colonel Butler, was acting in self-defence, to avert the possibility that before long, otherwise. Butler would be urging Mitchell and Fitzgibbon to dig the dirt on them with his new Ring of Power? Everybody had dirt hidden somewhere, and given time and resources someone else could find that dirt.

(She went on staring at Paul. It wouldn't take him long to find out that Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon's marriage had been breaking up because Mrs Fitzgibbon was rotten in bed; and that Captain and Mrs Fitzgibbon both knew that Captain Fitzgibbon wouldn't come back to her from that last Ulster tour, one way or another. It wouldn't take him long. He might even know already, at that, being Paul.)

(She mustn't think of that. She didn't want Robbie to come back any more than Colonel Butler would not want Madeleine Francoise to come knocking at his mock-Tudor door again.)

David Audley for Emperor.

No wonder there was a palace revolution in progress!

'I know what you're thinking,' said Paul. That wasn't possible. She had to head him off, anyway.

She turned to Shapiro. 'Is David after the job?' 'I wish he was!' Shapiro scowled at her. 'But he's not. He just isn't hungry enough to fight, that's the trouble.'

'Maybe this'll change his mind,' said Paul. 'He may not like to fight, but he doesn't like to be beaten.'

Paul was hungry, thought Frances. If Paul thought he was being altruistic, he was deceiving himself.

'I wouldn't rely on that assumption,' said Shapiro. 'And even if he does fight - even if we fight - I wouldn't rely on our chances of winning.'

Paul nodded. 'No - I agree. This makes it a different ball-game. It's relegation or promotion now.'

'It's the bloody Cup Final - I beg your pardon, Mrs Fitzgibbon.' Shapiro acknowledged Frances, but kept his eye on Paul. 'You think you've been shouting for the wrong team, Mitchell?'

Paul grunted ruefully. 'I don't think I've got any choice now - in this company. The trouble is, I don't even see how to win by fighting dirty.' He nodded at Frances. 'That's what our little Princess was thinking. You're going to have to produce one hell of a magic spell to get us out of this one, Princess. Otherwise it's going to be "unhappy ever after" for us.'

Shapiro saved Frances. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean, Colonel... that it won't be good enough for Fitzgibbon and Mitchell to give Colonel Butler a clean bill of health. We weren't put on this one to find an answer they didn't know. We were set to find what they knew already - to make it nice and respectable.' He shook his head at Frances. 'Somebody's already talked - I knew that smug bastard who briefed me was giving me the message, not seeking after wisdom.'

'What message?'

Paul's lip curled. 'Nine years ago. Colonel - nine years to the day, almost - our dear Colonel could have killed his wife. And that was very naughty of him.'

'He didn't,' said Frances.

'Of course he didn't. Fighting Jack wouldn't do a vulgar thing like that - the old General wouldn't approve. Besides which he knows his Kipling on the subject of service wives - of course he didn't! He couldn't.' He paused. 'And if he did it would have been a beautiful tragic accident, with an unbreakable alibi built into it, and no comeback nine years later.'

So Paul Mitchell and William Ewart Hedges, travelling from different directions, had reached the same destination, thought Frances.

'But that doesn't matter,' said Paul. 'Unfortunately our job isn't to give him a character reference - we just have to breathe suspicion over him. I thought it might be enough if we did the exact opposite - Frances and I. But the stakes are too big for that, and if we don't provide the right answer they'll simply send down someone else who will.'

Shapiro looked at Frances.

'Am I right. Princess?' asked Paul.

Shapiro continued to look at Frances.

'Princess?'

Frances looked at Shapiro. 'When does David get back?'

'Not until midday tomorrow. He's got a meeting he can't break - Washington time,'

said Shapiro.

Washington time. Not enough time.

'I'll give you whatever help you need,' said Shapiro.

Everyone was so helpful. There was altruism everywhere.

'I'm going to Blackburn,' said Frances for the second time. But now she knew why she was going there.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For the second time in one morning Miss Marilyn Francis was in Thistlethwaite Avenue, at the entrance of the driveway to St. Luke's Home for Elderly Gentlefolk. But this time she was going inside.

Frances looked at her watch. It was 11.25, which ought to be just about right for visiting.

She turned to the woman beside her. 'If you could wait here, Mrs Bates - just down the road, perhaps.'

'Yes, luv.' Mrs Bates gave her a motherly smile. Mrs Bates was a motherly person, almost grandmotherly. 'Shall I have Brian bring your own car up, from behind the hotel?'

Mrs Bates was also a well-organised and well-organising person, who thought of everything, as befitted an Israeli intelligence cell commander.

Frances sorted Brian from Evan Owen and Mr Harcourt, who were taking it in turns to keep Colonel Butler in sight. Brian was the plump-faced young man on the motor-cycle, the junior partner in the team. Evan Owen drove the van, and Mr Harcourt was the commercial traveller in the nondescript Cortina.

She also wondered, for the umpteenth time, how Paul Mitchell had made out with Nannie on her return from night duty. The girls, mercifully, had accepted the unscheduled dawn departure of the potential Second Mrs Butler after she had reassured them that Paul was only a colleague, and that he would never be anything more than a colleague, and that he was too young for her anyway, and that she would be coming back to see them at the earliest opportunity; which reassurances - three truths and one lie (she would never come back to Brookside House, that was a near-certainty) - had been the least she could do for Paul, whom they would otherwise have either murdered or seduced during the night as an obstacle to their plans. But Nannie was a different problem - she would give Paul a hard time, supposing his charm didn't work; and she would also report on him to Colonel Butler at the earliest opportunity, after which the cat would very likely be out of the bag. But by then, very likely, it wouldn't matter much, he could think what he liked, it would be all over; and, anyway, it was all over for Paul, that part of it - Nannie's part - and by now he would be two hours up the motorway to Yorkshire.

(The same motorway that Colonel Butler had once travelled at another November dawn, nine years ago.)

She felt strangely fatalistic about it all. 'Thank you, Mrs Bates.' As she stepped out of the car she saw Mrs Bates reach under the dashboard for the microphone which linked her to Brian and Evan Owen and Mr Harcourt in his Cortina.

* * *

A cobweb of rain brushed her face, fine as gossamer but nonetheless quickly soaking.

This was real northern rain - not so much rain as total wetness. When she had left Brookside House it had been raining - raining obviously, with real raindrops spattering on her. But somewhere along the drive northwards it had stopped raining and had become simply wet, the very air so saturated with moisture that a fish could have breathed it.

She put up Mrs Bates' big black umbrella, but the dampness ignored it. By the time she reached the porch she could feel it running down her face, spoiling Marilyn's make-up. If someone didn't come quickly to answer the bell Marilyn's blonde frizz, which had jumped so surprisingly from under the wig, would be reduced to unsightly rats'-tails.

The door opened.

' 'Northern Daily Post-Gazette," said Frances quickly, hunching herself up against a trickle of rain which had infiltrated the top of her plastic mac. 'I phoned up about an hour ago. To see Mr Sands, please.'

'Mr Sands?' A blast of warm air reached Frances's face.

Rifleman Sands, please, begged Frances silently.

'Oh, yes - the young lady from the newspaper?' The green-uniformed nurse was as crisp and fresh as a young lettuce leaf. But she looked at Frances - at Marilyn -

doubtfully for a moment, as though she had expected a better class of young lady, not something off the cheapest counter at the supermarket.

'That's right,' said Frances desperately. Marilyn would just have to do, now. But the theory that as Colonel Butler and the North had never seen Marilyn, so that she might purchase a minute or two more of anonymity if the worst came to the worst ... that theory of Paul's didn't seem so clever now.

She shivered uncontrollably, and the Florence Nightingale training of the lettuce leaf came to her rescue.

'Ee - but you're wet, dear - come inside!' The lettuce leaf opened the door wider. Tut your umbrella down there - in the stand - so it won't drip on the floor.'

Frances collapsed the umbrella gratefully. The door closed at her back and the warmth swirled around her.

'And get your raincoat off - let me help you - there now - that's better! Oh ... isn't it a right miserable day - that's better!'

That was better. And without the raincoat Marilyn was better too: she was only Marilyn from the neck up. From the neck down she was still Frances, in Mrs Fitzgibbon's best Jaeger suit.

'Thank you, nurse.' Marilyn-Frances took in her surroundings. Everything that wasn't a cool, freshly-laundered, green-uniformed lettuce leaf was painted and polished in St. Luke's Home for Elderly Gentlefolk. And on the landing window-sill halfway up the staircase was a great spray of out-of-season flowers, too: one thing St. Luke's Home didn't need was a grant from the Ryle Foundation, it was doing very nicely thank-you on the fees from the Elderly Gentlefolk. Colonel Butler was certainly doing right by General Chesney's ex-gardener, ex-batman, in return for the old man's 50 per cent share in pulling the General off the barbed wire at wherever-it-was in France sixty years before.

'And you've got an appointment with Mr Sands.' The lettuce leaf smiled at her this time, it was the influence of the Jaeger suit, no doubt. 'He is having an exciting time!'

'Yes?'

'Oh yes - this way, if you please - ' The lettuce leaf pointed up the stairs ' - the Colonel this morning ... with a big box of chocolates for us, and flowers for Matron ...

and the young man yesterday - ' she glanced over her shoulder at Frances ' - and he was from your paper too, wasn't he? What has Mr Sands been up to?'

She was moving at nurses' quick-step. 'We're planning a series on veterans of the First World War,' said Frances breathlessly.

'That's right,' agreed the lettuce leaf. 'The young man told me. There aren't many of them left, I suppose - didn't he get everything, the young man? Old Mr Sands talked to him for ages.'

'I'm the woman's angle,' said Frances.

'Ah ... of course.' Nod. 'Well, when you do a series on the Second World War, you come to me - I wasn't born then, but my mum remembers it all. Dad was at El Alamein, and had his toe shot off in Italy, in a monastery there - would you believe it? Here we are.'

She knocked at a gleaming door. 'Mr Sands? Another visitor for you! You're really in luck today...' She filled the door for a moment. 'All right, then? You don't want the bottle, or anything like that? You're ready to see your visitor?'

There came a sound from beyond her, a sort of croak.

God! Don't let him be senile, prayed Frances: he wasn't yesterday for Paul. Don't let him be below par for me. I have the right question for him, Paul didn't.

'That's good,' said the lettuce leaf briskly. But she caught Frances's arm then. 'Now, dear. ..' she murmured into Frances's ear confidentially '... he's a lovely old man, really -

not like most of our old gentlemen, not exactly - but a dear old chap, all the same.'

Most of their old gentlemen would be rich old gentlemen in their own right, that must be the difference.

'But you've got to watch him like a hawk. He pretends he can't see you properly -

and it's him who's got eyes like a hawk. And he pretends he can't hear either, and he hears perfectly well when he wants to. He tells you he can't hear just to lure you close to him, that's all - he did it with the Mayor's daughter, I think it was, when they came to the Home last year, the old devil!'

'Did what?' whispered Frances.

'He put his hand up her skirt, dear - right up\' hissed the lettuce leaf urgently. 'You should have heard her scream! I was down the passage - it frightened me out of my wits.... We're used to it, of course. But you - ' she glanced quickly at Marilyn's hair ' - you better just watch him, that's all.' She straightened up abruptly, and poked her head round the door again. 'Here you are, Mr Sands: it's the young lady from the newspaper.

And you behave yourself, or I won't let you watch The Sweeney - I'll take your set away, and that's a promise!'

Which was The Sweeney? Marilyn had kept up with all the popular TV programmes, from Coronation Street upwards -

My God! The Sweeney was the violent one, where the cops and robbers were always putting in the boot.

She entered the room cautiously.

It was a beautiful room, high and peach-and-white, with bright-flowered curtains framing a window which gave a view of trees on a far hillside.

And a big colour TV set for The Sweeney. And a little old man sitting up in bed, against a mound of pillows -

Like a little old wizened monkey, Paul had said. Sans teeth, almost sans eyes, but not sans memory.

Paul wasn't quite so clever though, again: more like a little bird of prey, with bright eyes fastening on her. (Or perhaps that wasn't quite fair to Paul, and she was being wise after the nurse's warning of his predatory habits once the prey was within reach.) He didn't say anything, he just looked at her. There was a copy of the Sun under his hand, opened to page three's bare breasts. As she looked back at him he closed the page.

Well, she hadn't been so clever either. There was obviously nothing wrong with his eyes or his memory, but she'd forgotten to ask what was wrong with his legs... Though perhaps she should be grateful for their weakness, so it seemed. 'Mr Sands?'

'Yes?' He sank back into the pillows. 'I'm from the Post-Gazette, Mr Sands. A colleague of mine came to see you yesterday... About you war experiences.'

'What?' He cupped his hand to his ear. 'About-your-war-experiences, Mr Sands.'

'Speak up. Missy. I can't hear you.' Frances advanced towards the bed. 'My colleague came to see you yesterday to ask you about your war experiences. When you were in the trenches with General Chesney.'

'I still can't hear you. You'll have to speak up.'

'You can hear me perfectly well,' said Frances clearly.

'Don't shout. There's no call to shout,' said Rifleman Sands. 'I'm not deaf.'

'I want to talk to you about after the war,' said Frances.

'Ar? Well, you'll have to come closer,' said Rifleman Sands, laying down the price by patting the bed. 'You can come and sit on the edge here. Then I can hear you.'

Then you can do more than hear me, thought Frances.

She looked down at the hand which had patted the bed, and which now lay resting itself on the coverlet. It was a working hand, one size bigger than the rest of Rifleman Sands, what she could see of him - a hand expanded by work, old and knotted now, the veins standing up from the parchment-thin skin, but very clean and manicured - a St.

Luke's hand now. When she thought about it dispassionately, it didn't disgust her at all.

It had been up a good many skirts in its time, that hand, without doubt. Now it was about to go up hers, but it wouldn't be the first - or the worst - to make that short journey. It had been cleaned by the earth of the old General's flowerbeds a thousand times over, and by that other earth of France and Flanders too, and it couldn't possibly do her any harm now. If her skirt was the last skirt, that was just the final bit of the unpaid debt.

The bed was high off the floor, her skirt rode up quite naturally as she hitched herself aboard it.

Rifleman Sands smiled at her happily, and she found herself smiling back at him in perfect accord, perfect innocence.

'Now, Missy. After the war? There was a big fireworks display on the top of Corporation Park, along Revidge ... where there's now tennis courts - there was a bit of spare land there - where we used to go capertulling of a Sunday night - '

'Capertulling?'

The hand patted the coverlet. 'A big fireworks display. We used to walk up Revidge -

about this time of year, too - and on our front gate we used to have an arch of laurels, with candles in jam jars ... My elder brother used to say he was watching these people coming back, stopping to light their cigarettes on the candles in the jam jars. I didn't go, of course.'

'Why not?'

'Fireworks reminded me of the trenches.' He spoke as though it was a silly questions, to which she ought to know the answer without asking. 'We had enough fireworks...

Though later on I did go up. You forget, see - in the end you forget.'

It was after the first war, he was talking about - sixty years ago, nearly! She was going to have to watch her time-scale, thought Frances. He was dredging back into his memory, already prepared by Paul's questions of the day before, telling her what he thought she wanted to know.

'Top of the Corporation Park, luv - you know it. Where the tennis courts are now.'

The hand fastened on her ankle, which dangled just over the edge of the bed beside him.

'Top of the Corporation Park.'

* * *

The Corporation Park.

Dripping, dripping, dripping wet. Under the umbrella, but everything dripping - the wet mist in her face.

She had walked alongside Brian. She had pushed the child's push-chair which he had provided, the mist fogging her glasses until she'd been forced to stop in a shop doorway and substitute her contact lenses for the glasses; and he'd made her take her green raincoat off and put on the beige-coloured one he'd produced from inside the push-chair; and also a head-scarf instead of the umbrella (not Mrs Bates' umbrella, but a smaller, useless feminine one, which he'd collapsed into an eight-inch cylinder and stuffed back into his pocket; Brian knew a thing or two about tailing a target, and was prepared to change their profile on the assumption that Colonel Butler knew a thing or two about being tailed).

* * *

'Yes, I know Corporation Park.'

'Well, I remember that, then.' He squeezed the ankle encouragingly. 'And Blackburn Rovers won the Cup - in 1927 or 1928 ... 1928, it was. And then, before the war - the other war. Hitler's War - Lancashire won the county championship three years in succession.

That was under the* captaincy of Leonard Green - Colonel Leonard Green, he was a friend of the General's, of course.... He lived at Worley, where we used to play an annual match. The Lancashire players in those days ... there was Ted MacDonald, the most marvellous bowler of all time - and George Duckworth kept wicket - '

Frances closed her eyes. They were on to cricket now - cricket was Colonel Butler's game, so it wasn't surprising that it had also been Sands' game and the General's. But Rifleman Sands was also on to her calf and a different game now.

* * *

She had seen better with her contact lenses, blinking the rain out of her eyes, although she still couldn't see one hell of a lot of the Corporation Park.

But she could hear the ducks away to her left in the murk, enjoying the weather. The very sound of them frightened her.

Where was Colonel Butler going? He'd been to the shops, and bought flowers and a large parcel from the confectioner's. But now he was walking in the rain, very straight and purposeful, as though he knew where he was going. Flowers and parcel had already been delivered to St. Luke's - Frances and Brian had huddled under the inadequate umbrella at the end of the road for twenty minutes; then Brian had taken the lead, but at the gate to the Park she had moved past him to keep the broad back, the deer-stalker (of all utterly ridiculous headgear, a deer-stalker!) and the multi-coloured golfing umbrella in view - if he's set out to be obvious he couldn't have done better, so it wasn't difficult; but it was exceptionally wet and uncomfortable.

(All the same, she'd been glad about St. Luke's. That had been exactly, almost uncannily, what she'd been expecting, against hope.)

* * *

Perhaps he'd moved up from her ankle to her calf because her feet were still wet.

No way! He'd moved up because that was the way to her knee: This is Number Three (they'd sung at Robbie's battalion seven-a-side rugby contest, within earshot of the battalion ladies) and my hand is on her knee!

And Rifleman Sands had reached Number Three. But at least, if he was genuinely bed-ridden, he couldn't manage Number Four, Frances felt entitled to hope.

But just in case ... and in any case, she had to keep his mind on her job.

She moved her leg warningly. He held on grimly.

'I saw Colonel Butler in the Park today, Mr Sands.'

The hand relaxed - it didn't move away, but it relaxed.

'Oh ah? Been to see me today, has the Colonel - ' He stared at her suddenly, as though she was not an ankle and a knee, but potentially something more, a human being. 'There was a man came to see me not long ago.'

'He's been to see you?' Frances pounced on what she wanted.

'From the newspaper, aye,' Rifleman Sands nodded. 'He was a good-looking lad, but a bit too pleased with hisself.' He nodded again. 'Mind you, he knew about the war, I'll give 'im that. Ypres, he knew Ypres - ' he winked at Frances ' - "Wipers" what we called, he knew that. And Bapaume and Albert, with the old Virgin...'

The old Virgin? That sounded like a contradiction in terms with young Rifleman Sands about.

'And Beaumont Hamel - he's been there. And he saw the Lone Tree!' Rifleman Sands shook his head in wonder. 'He actually saw the Lone Tree! It's still there - I wouldn't have believed it, but he's seen it with his own eyes! After all this time! And it was dead when I knew it. But he's seen it!'

Frances winced at the sudden pressure on her leg, just above the knee.

'I've never been back. No point.... It's not pretty, like the Ribble Valley. Over the top, across the golf course over to Mellor - all that's open country... I mean over the top - not like we used to say "over the top", that was different, that was... But over the top from the golf course, and you drop down to the Ribble - as youngsters we used to go that way, and wade the Ribble, and on to Ribchester. You don't want to go to Bapaume if you can do that, an' nobody shoot at you. Waste of time - waste of money! It used to cost Thruppence to get into Alexandra Meadows for the cricket - and you could see it for nothing from the Conservatory in the Park, "the Scotsman's Pavilion" was our name for it. And when there wasn't any cricket - there was no telly then, but there was fifteen cinemas in the town, and a music hall ... and the repertory - the Denville Repertory, I used to watch that. The beer was better too, not so gassy - Dutton's and Thwaites' - the next biggest brewing town to Burton we were, because of the good spring water, see.

And of an evening we'd take a tram to Billinge End ... eight-wheelers, they were. Four at the front and four at the back - Blackburn trams and Blackpool trams are best in country.'

The past was getting mixed up with the present, but it would be a mistake to stop him too abruptly, decided Frances. She'd just have to judge her moment.

' - and then walk up Revidge for a bit of capertulling with the girls.'

The present was also beginning to slip above her knee, and it would be a mistake to stop that too: he seemed to have judged his moment as right now, for a final bit of capertulling.

' - and back through the Park, past the lake ...' He looked at her, and she wasn't sure whether he was checking that she was still listening or to see if she intended to scream like the Mayor's daughter. 'That lake's an old quarry, you know. That's why there's no boating on it, or skating in winter, it's that deep they don't rightly know how deep it is.

And there's a stream runs down, right under the War Memorial - underground - and goes through the town, under a street that used to be called Snigg Brook - "snigg" being an eel - but the silly buggers have re-named it 'Denville Street', would you believe it! I suppose it was because the people from the Denville Rep. used to lodge thereabouts, and it didn't sound posh enough. They did the same with Sour Milk Hall Lane and Banana Street, silly buggers. It's not the same - ' He stopped abruptly, pulling back his hand as though he'd been stung.

Frances couldn't bring herself to ask him what the matter was. He certainly hadn't encountered any resistance, quite the opposite. Could that be what had frightened him?

Or was it her lack of encouragement? But that had never discouraged previous hands.

'Tights,' said Rifleman Sands with disappointed scorn. 'Tights.'

Tights were death on capertulling, of course. It was just Rifleman Sands' bad luck that she was Frances below the waist, not Marilyn.

'But you're a good lass, all the same,' Rifleman Sands patted her Jaeger-skirted thigh forgivingly, as though to reassure her that she wasn't a failure. 'Not a catawauller, like some I could mention.'

She smiled at him, and he smiled back. Nurse Lettuce Leaf was quite right: he was a lovely old man as well as a randy old devil.

And he was ready now.

'So Colonel Butler came to see you today, then, Mr Sands?'

'Aye, the Colonel.' He nodded happily. 'A good lad too, he is, young Jack. Happen you'd make a good pair, him and you.'

'Does he come to see you often?'

'Oh, aye.'

'This time of year?'

'One of the best,' he nodded again. 'The General - he'd be right proud of him.... Of course, he was proud of him already. When he won his medal, fighting those Chinamen, he was pleased as though it was his own boy - him that was killed by the Paythens. "The M.C., Sands," he says to me. "That's a fighting man's medal, that is." And-he should know, seeing how he'd won it too - that was at Loos, up under Fosse Number Eight, where he was wounded the first time. And that was a terrible bad place. Fosse Number Eight, believe you me, lass. I was up there with the Rifles later on - a terrible bad place, that was.'

He was rambling hopelessly now. Damn tights, thought Frances. He'd have been sharp enough with a suspender to twang.

'At this time of year?' she tried again.

He looked out of the window, up towards the high green ridge where he had once walked, on which he would never walk again.

'It's raining,' he said. 'It's not the same rain as it used to be, though.'

Now he was into nostalgia, thought Frances despairingly.

'It used to be right dirty rain - mucky rain,' said Rifleman Sands unnostalgically.

'Woman couldn't put her whites out - couldn't put anything out - when it was raining.

Bloody mill chimneys'd cover everything with bloody soot. It's a sight better now, thank God!'

Frances looked at her watch. She was losing him, and she was also running out of time. It had all been a dream, anyway - a four-out-of-ten guess which was going to end up in the losing six.

'Got to go, then?' He looked at her wistfully, memories of capertulling before the invention of tights in his eyes. 'He had to go, of course. The Colonel.'

He looked out of the window again.

'I remember in the old days, though... There'll be nobody out there now, not today.

But in the old days there'd be the Regiment, with the red poppies in their caps. And the Territorials. And the nurses, and the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides - and us, of course.

The Old Contemptibles. And the Blackburn Prize Band.... We'd form up in the centre of town, and we'd march up Preston New Road - with all our medals - the General, and young Jackie's father just behind him, that was his RSM - cor! you should have seen us then! The whole town was out. Didn't matter if it rained or shined - left, right, left, right -

swing those arms! And the band playing the old tunes!

'And young Jack was there too, with the Scouts. And he used to stay behind with his dad afterwards... But now they do a bit of something on a Sunday, not worth going to -

waste of time. But then it was right on the day - November the eleventh. Two minutes'

silence at 11 o'clock: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - '

* * *

Frances had come past him, hiding her face behind the little umbrella heading towards the gates beyond the fountain.

Colonel Butler was standing in front of the ugly memorial obelisk which was topped by an even uglier representation of Peace - a female Peace presiding in bronze over the countless dead of the two World Wars (no room for the Korean dead, or the bad luck casualties of all the other little wars since, from Malaya to Ulster. No room for Blackburn's Robbie Fitzgibbons).

She hadn't watched him from the front, that would have been too risky. But from behind, from the cover - no shelter - of the gates she had observed that he was standing easily, his multi-coloured golfing umbrella over his head, as though reading the names.

And then a clock sounded, away somewhere behind her in the dripping town. As it did so, as though at a time-signal, a sheet of heavier rain - genuine rain - slashed down across the Park, blotting out the further landmarks she had passed a few moments before.

As the first strokes of the clock rang out, rain-muffled. Colonel Butler collapsed his umbrella and removed his ridiculous hat, and came to attention. Even after the sound of the last stroke had cut off - with the loud spattering of the rain and the noise of the traffic behind her it didn't die away, it ended abruptly - he still stood there, for what seemed like an age, bare-headed in the downpour.

Then, unhurriedly, for by then he was wet enough not to need to hurry, he replaced his hat and opened the umbrella again, just as Brian came trotting by him.

* * *

Not an age, but two minutes exactly, counted off in heartbeats.

* * *

That's why he had to go, of course. He keeps the proper day, naturally. Never fails -

leastways, not when he's in England, and not fighting somewhere. But always comes to see me first, even if only for five minutes - and I've been here ten years now, since me legs went, and he's not missed once.'

He twisted awkwardly in the bed to feel under his pillows.

'He has to, see...' He turned back towards her. 'He has to bring me my red poppy.'

He displayed the evidence triumphantly.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Once upon a time, concluded Frances, there had been a great mansion somewhere hereabouts; one of those huge northern granite palaces built out of coal or cotton, in a rolling parkland, with lodges at the gates - and a duck pond - and a dower house into which the first widow could retreat when her eldest son brought his young bride home from the honeymoon in Piranesi's Italy.

But now, amid the concrete high-rise towers and temples of North Yorkshire University, the Dower House (which was all that had survived of that splendid Once Upon a Time ... except, of course, the duck pond) ... the Dower House seemed more like a cottage out of the Grimms' fairy tales which had been magicked from its clearing in the forest into the open.

Not that it frightened her any more, as it might have done before - as the duck pond still did. She was no longer Gretel (was it Gretel?), if she ever had been; and she was no longer Miss Fitzgibbon, the fairy story blue-stocking; and, for all her bedraggled blondeness, she was no longer Marilyn - she no longer needed to be.

She was Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon returning to Paul Mitchell in triumph and victory.

Even the day wasn't so grey now, even the rain wasn't so wet. There was more fighting to be done - the Enemy had lost a battle, but not yet the war itself after the Pelennor Fields. But it was not a battle they had expected to lose, and she had won it.

So it was only reasonable to feel drained and a little light-headed.

* * *

It didn't matter, waiting in the rain outside the Dower House, as it had mattered outside St. Luke's Home.

The door opened, and there was dear old Professor Crowe - brave old Colonel Crowe. It didn't even matter that he was looking at her with stranger's eyes, unrecognising her.

'Professor Crowe - you remember me?'

'Miss Fitzgibbon - I beg your pardon - Mrs Fitzgibbon! Well met, my dear, very well met!' He beamed at her more warmingly than the St. Luke's central heating. 'But you're soaking - quite soaking - come in, my dear, come in! Come in, come in, come in!'

He bustled around her, half wizard, half Hobbit, all elderly bachelor. He fetched a towel. He thought about giving her coffee, but it was too late; he thought about making tea, but it was too early. He didn't mind that she covered his snowy towel with lipstick and mascara - 'It'll look wicked, dear - it'll make my students think, and anything which makes them think cannot be bad.' And finally he presented her with a whisky even more outrageous than that which Isobel had given her once upon another time, which she wanted even less and needed not at all, a true Robbie-measure.

'Now - move up close to the fire - ' It was a fire like Isobel's too, generous with well-selected pieces of coal ' - take off that wet jacket, I'll put it in the airing cupboard - on a hanger, don't worry, so it won't lose its shape - it doesn't matter you've only a slip underneath: you won't lose your shape - hah! - and I'm practically old enough to be your grandfather, so if the incipient scandal doesn't worry you it won't worry me - there now, that's better! Drink your whisky, child ... there's plenty more where that came from -

see!'

Frances saw: it was a big new bottle of Glenfiddich from a tall cylindrical case, 86 per cent U.S. proof, out of the nearest duty-free air terminal or American base. It burned her throat as she sipped it.

At last he sank down into the chair opposite her, breathless from his exertions. So far as she could remember, she hadn't yet said a single coherent thing to him, least of all to ask where Paul Mitchell was - why the Dower House was Paul's new headquarters.

'Relief, my dear! The blessed relief of seeing you... And I know all about you now, too. All about you!'

That was a conversation stopper. Frances burned her throat again, speechless.

'I've been so worried about you. I haven't been so worried since the weather report they gave us before D-Day - "Shall we go or shall we stay?" I never admired Ike more than then, that was'his moment. We'd discussed it, of course - every probability, every possibility. The state of the beaches, and so on. But I was to be one of his men on the spot, so I had to put my money where my mouth was, it was no problem for me - if I was wrong I wouldn't be there afterwards to worry about it. But he had to make the decision, and then sit around and wait to see how it turned out - I felt for him. But I really thought I'd guessed what that was like, but do you know I hadn't at all, not at all!

Not until I started to worry about you, young lady.'

In spite of the fire outside her and the malt inside her, Frances felt a chill shiver her.

'I'm sorry - ' she croaked, the chill and the Glenfiddich interacting.

'And so you should be. You told the Death Story!'

'The Death Story?'

'Yes. And then you didn't die. Such effrontery! When we strolled over to the pond -

and you were as cool and calm and collected as though you were about to feed those beastly birds with bread - -I was much more frightened than on Sword beach. I thought you were going to take me with you - absolutely petrified I was, I can tell you!'

'I'm - I'm sorry, Professor. You've quite lost me now,' said Frances.

'I suppose I should still be worried, for it's still on the end of your finger - ' He stopped suddenly. 'Unless you've killed somebody already, of course. Have you killed anyone during the last twenty-four hours, by any chance? You don't look as if you have, but one can never tell these days...'

'Killed anyone?' The chill was an ice-block now.

'Or presided over a death, perhaps?' Crowe looked at her hopefully. 'Or even seen a death? An accident would do, so long as you were nearby. Have you pointed at anyone?

Or touched anyone deliberately?'

Frances thought of Rifleman Sands. He was old enough, and frail enough. But he had done all the touching. And she very carefully hadn't pointed at the young man in the petrol station - Paul's inexplicable advice had been loud in her brain then.

'No.'

'Well, we'll have to leave it to Jack Butler. Perhaps that'll qualify.' He blinked at her uneasily.

The Death Story.

'I - am sorry. Professor. But just what is the Death Story?'

'My dear...' She watched the scholar take over from the old man with his memories of Sword Beach and Eisenhower '... your so-called fairy story - the ugly princess and the blind prince - have you no idea what you really did?'

She knew exactly what she had done: she had told a fairy story - Granny's creepy fairy story - to take the heat off herself in the Common Room of the new English Faculty Library. And although there had been a bomb just under her feet, no one had died after that -

Horrors, though: she had also told it to Robbie that last time, to get him searching for its origin among his books - to get his mind off going to bed with her.

Successfully, too.

And then Robbie had stepped off the pavement, and tripped over his big feet, three days later as the armoured pig was passing.

Was that success, too?

It wasn't possible. It was pure fancy - as accidental and coincidental as Sir Frederick's wild idea that she had some special wild skill in picking right answers. It was no more than some aberrant mathematical figuring by men who ought to know better.

All the same. 'The Death Story?'

Crowe nodded. 'Yes ... I've been checking up on it, as a matter of fact. A lot of fairy stories can be explained in terms of very simple psychology. For example, little girls like fairy stories because of their oedipal problems - they can identify with beautiful princesses held captive by jealous step-mothers because that makes them unavailable to a male lover, which is their father. All of which is not something I like to go into, because it mixes up quite normal enjoyment of good stories with the most terrible pubertal situations. One ends up with Walt Disney's Snow White as a really frightful story of sexual jealousy ... and, frankly my dear, I won't have that. Academics must be careful when they find they're playing with fire.'

He gazed for a moment into the heart of the fire, and then came back to her. 'But your story is different - with a different root. But it also seems to ... play with fire, as it were.'

'I don't see how.' Frances took a firm grip on her imagination. Robbie's death was an accident. Accidents happened all the time. That was the beginning and the end of it. 'It's just a fairy story. With a happy ending, too - a eucatastrophic ending. Professor.'

'Hah!' For a moment he twinkled at her for being an attentive student, then he was serious again. 'Your story is. My story isn't.'

'Then tell me your story. I'm not superstitious.'

'Bravely said! And the ritual challenge, too: where did you pick it up?'

Frances sighed. 'As usual. Professor, I don't know what you're talking about.'

'I don't think you have to know. You are your

Grandmother's grand-daughter, I suspect!'

'You're doing it again.'

'So I am! Forgive me.... Very well. But first I will demolish your story, my dear.

Forget about the three princes. There is only one - the third, of course. The other two are medieval accretions. Or, more accurately, bowdlerisations of a sort.'

'A dirty fairy story?'

He ignored her irreverence. 'One prince, then. He comes upon a hideous old woman, but because he's blind that doesn't matter to him. He makes her young again by kissing her; she was a beautiful young thing all the time, just bewitched. And they lived happily ever after. Presumably he was bewitched too, and the moment he gives the kiss he receives his sight in exchange?'

'That wasn't in my story.'

'Good. Forget the bewitching too, anyway. But then what do we have.'

'No story.'

'We have a hideous old woman - a real woman. Once she was young and beautiful, like you. Now she is old, and nothing works properly any more - Candide's "old woman" to the life: "My eyes were not always sore and bloodshot, my nose did not always touch my chin.... My breast was once as white as a lily, and as firmly and elegantly moulded as the Venus de Medici's.'" He shook his head sadly. 'It happens to all of us, except those- the gods love, who die young, before they know the humiliation of missing a train because they are afraid to run that last fifty yards, as I am now.' He smiled at her. 'And I swear I clipped two seconds off the 220 record on Sword Beach that morning, running in boots on sand, armed cap a pied - I wasn't sure that the gods didn't love me, I suppose!'

It was Rifleman Sands all over again, thought Frances. It was one weakness that women didn't have, because they'd always missed battle and sudden death - this remembering with advantage their deeds of daring.

Crowe held up his finger. 'Can she be delivered from all this? Of course she can! One kiss - and no more ugliness, no more aches and pains. No more remembrance of all that's been lost, and all that might have been but never was. One kiss - and either nothing, or youth and beauty again for ever and ever. Happy ever after!'

He nodded. 'It's pre-Christian, of course. Or pre-medieval Christian - they were the ones who made the Prince himself ugly and frightening, before them he was a god, and a beautiful and merciful god in his own right. And a god who rewarded you if you played the game properly.' Crowe pointed at the Glenfiddich bottle, and then at Frances herself. 'Valhalla is good whisky and pretty women. No one who offers that can be ugly

- it's against reason!'

He stared at her, for all the world as though imprinting her specification on his memory, with the Glenfiddich, for future reference.

'The trick, my dear, is to call the Prince up when you want him. If I'm right ... your Grandmother - she knew it. Pass the story on, and die - that's the Neapolitan version of it. When you're tired of fighting, tell the story - and summon the Prince of Death!'

He frowned suddenly. 'But the trick has a catch to it: once you've told the story you have to pay the score. Because if you don't, then someone else will have to. It's as though you've summoned him - it's actually called "The Summoning Story" in one version - and he's not going to go away empty-handed. The Neapolitans say that the Grandmother has a choice - she can point at someone who is dear to her. Or she can let him choose at random, in which case he'll choose someone dear to her, so it amounts to the same thing.

He likes the youngest and best, for choice.'

It was totally insane. It was an old man's macabre game, nothing more than that. He had read his own book on superstition too often.

'Fortunately - very fortunately - you are not a grandmother yet, so it may not work for you like that. And also Colonel Butler may be able to provide you with a substitute, it now seems likely.'

'What?'

'Haven't you been brought up to date?' He smote his forehead. 'No - of course! You haven't seen your young man yet - the dashing Mitchell. But David Audley will be able to put you in the picture.'

'David's here - now?' Frances sat up.

'Very much so. Though ... I gather ... unofficially.' Crowe glanced at the clock on the mantlepiece above his fire. 'He should be back here - I thought he was you, at the door.

Except he doesn't knock, he always barges straight in. He hasn't changed one bit over the years.... Anyway, he went off to find young Mitchell, I think, to ascertain from him the whereabouts of his friend Colonel Butler.'

Frances frowned at him. 'What did you mean - "Colonel Butler may have a substitute"?'

'I think so. He's about to catch that fellow O'Leary - he thinks he's going to catch him alive, but David believes otherwise.' He looked at her, eyes bright with excitement which he probably hadn't felt for years, thought Frances - maybe since he had sprinted across his Normandy beach. Teaching students English literature for half a lifetime would be no substitute for that drug, at a guess.

'You know a lot that's going on. Professor?' 'That I shouldn't, you mean?' He twinkled again happily. 'Well, you started it, my dear... Or you started it again, I should say. I was half in your line of business after the war, but they were making such a fearful mess of it that I got out of it as soon as I decently could, before I was too old to do anything else. That would be about the time Jones did the same thing - R. V. Jones ...

though I wasn't in his class, of course.... Helping to win a war is one thing - it's rather stimulating, actually. But losing a peace can be intolerably frustrating.' He regarded her mildly. 'I've kept in touch to some extent, but I'm really no more than an interested spectator.'

Frances counted up to ten, for the sake of good manners. 'Colonel Butler is going to catch O'Leary?'

'That is my impression. You seem surprised?' She didn't know how to answer that.

For some reason she was surprised: the reason lay in the atmosphere of ants' nest disaster she had left behind her here only forty-eight hours earlier. Yet even then.

Colonel Butler had been in the middle of the nest, but not part of its confusion, she remembered.

'He is a man with great drive and will-power, your Colonel Butler.' The spectator's detachment

was evident. 'And, what is rarer with that conjunction, of some intellect, I fancy -

though he is at pains to conceal it under a khaki manner.' Crowe contemplated Colonel Butler's virtue for a moment. 'So ... we have had much excitement here, these last twenty-four hours. Already one of my staff in the Library has been detained. And one of our post-graduate students is ... helping the police with their inquiries, as the saying goes.'

Frances frowned with the effort of recollection. There had been Dixon and ... and Collins. And Penrose and Brunton - Brunton the Great American Novel seeker, who had been unveiling his girlfriend when the Minister was scheduled to unveil the new Library. And if that, in retrospect, was too good an alibi to be true, she would have staked her reputation on both Collins and Dixon.

'Now you are surprised,' said Crowe. 'But you must accept, my dear, that life goes on, and great events occur, even when you are not there to observe them. Remember the Youth in Crane's Red Badge', his armageddon was only a skirmish, and the real battle was being lost and won on another part of the field. That is a very important lesson to learn - ' He looked up, and past her, over her shoulder ' - wouldn't you agree, David?'

Frances stiffened. As she swivelled in the direction of the Professor's look her bare shoulder reminded her of her relative state of undress, and of Marilyn's appalling hair, but there was nothing she could do about her appearance.

'The whole bloody battle can be irrelevant,' said David Audley. 'Battle of New Orleans - January, 1815. Peace Treaty of Ghent - December, 1814. Everything's a matter of communication. Or lack of communication, in this instance.' He acknowledged Frances with an incurious blink, without a second glance. She might just as well have been stark naked, or dressed as a nun, for all he cared, the blink indicated. 'Hullo, Frances.'

Come to that, he looked decidedly rough himself, Frances noted. The good suit was creased and rumpled, the shirt was well into its second day, and the unspeakable Rugby Club tie - thin magenta and green stripes on yellow, ugh! - revealed his top shirt button, which was undone, even though the tie itself was savagely pulled into a tiny knot. He hadn't shaved either, and altogether he didn't look like a would-be emperor, even of a dying empire.

'They've both gone hunting with Jack Butler, Hugo. The whole damn place is crawling with Special Branch - it's like the Fuhrer's bunker, the Science Block, there's no way I can get into it. I was able to talk to Jock Maitland for a moment or two, thank God

- he can be trusted to hold his tongue if no one asks him any questions, but he didn't know much. How the hell Jack bamboozled the University into installing all that equipment, I'll never know.'

'Money, dear boy. Your people stopped their mouths with gold, it never fails; Applied Science is king at the moment, and they've been offered all sorts of grants to turn a blind eye to it. Besides which your Jack can be very charming, you know.'

'I don't know - not with me, he isn't!' said Audley feelingly. 'The long and short of it is ... I don't know what the hell's going on out there, anyway, Hugo. Except that Jack's busy routing out an old KGB contact of his somewhere.'

'They are about to ensnare O'Leary - I told you, dear boy,' said Crowe.

'Not alive, they won't. The information they've got is false - he may be regular KGB, but he's not Russian either - he's Irish. And I had that from those Irish madmen in the CIA. He's a bloody kamikaze pilot, that's what he is.'

'So you said,' murmured Crowe mildly. 'So they will kill him.'

'That's not what I'm afraid of - ' Audley caught himself up short and looked at Frances. 'Bad manners. I'm sorry, Frances. I've got a headache. And part of a hangover ...

which has been dosed by a crazy pilot in the United States Air Force with an old Indian recipe of his, so the part of me that isn't hung-over now feels as if it's been bitten by a rattlesnake.... On top of which I've got jet-lag, and I don't know whether it's Monday or Christmas. It feels like Monday.'

'It's Friday,' said Frances. That was one thing she really did know. 'Friday, the eleventh of November. In the afternoon. Hullo, David - good afternoon.'

'And good afternoon to you, Frances. Although it isn't.' He removed his rain-smeared spectacles, wiped them with a grubby handkerchief, put them back on, and stared at her out of eyes like blood-oranges. 'Why, incidentally, are you partially unclothed?'

'She got wet, dear boy,' said Crowe. 'Like you.'

'Eh?' Audley looked down at his jacket: 'I see - yes. It's raining, isn't it!' He brushed ineffectually at his shoulders.

Frances felt herself smiling. The longer David was away from his wife, the more like a tramp he became. It was hard to imagine him as the source - or, rather, to imagine his abilities and his unpopularity - as the source of all their recent troubles.

He gave up brushing. The blood-oranges came back to her again.

Frances decided to get her information in first. 'You know I'm responsible for calling you back?'

He nodded. 'I've talked to Jake Shapiro. He was at the base waiting for me, the bastard.'

But how was she going to say it? He was back, and now she didn't need him. He would roast her, and Sir Frederick would also roast her in due course. And then she would resign, and that would be that. But the inevitable outcome, which no longer worried her at all, did not solve the problem of how to break it to him now.

'No need to be scared, love.' Audley misconstrued her silence. 'You did the right thing.'

'I did?' He wasn't making it any easier.

'Fred Clinton had you figured right, as my CIA buddies would say.' Suddenly he was grim. 'Fortunately.'

She stared at him. 'What?'

'You and Mitchell between you. A perfect recipe for disobedience. Or initiative, as Horatio Nelson applied it.'

'Sir Frederick intended me to call you?'

'He surely did. He's determined to make me fight for Jack Butler, and so I will. Now he thinks I shall fight for you two as well - and so I will. But he'll never take "no" for an answer - which is what I call a communications failure - and I won't have his job for all the tea in China. I have the same problem with that scheming bastard Jake Shapiro but at least that's understandable - Jake knows how I feel about Israel, from way back. But Clinton has let the thing become an obsession to such an extent that it's become dangerous. Now he's missing the things he should be seeing.'

'What things?'

'Ever since I put Jack Butler up for poor old Tom Stocker's job they've been giving him tough assignments - putting him in the forefront of the battle like Uriah the Hittite.

But that's fair enough - trial by ordeal will prove that God's on the Butler side as well as Audley.'

'North Yorkshire University being one of the ordeals, presumably?' murmured Crowe.

'That's what I thought, when I heard about it,' Audley nodded. 'A more diabolically stupid operation, that degree ceremony, I find it hard to imagine.' He paused. 'Too hard, in fact.'

Frances could nod to that.

'You're not suggesting that Colonel Butler was to be discredited at the cost of other people's lives, David?' Crowe sat up angrily in his spectator's chair. 'You're not serious!'

'I'm not sure what I'm suggesting any more, to be honest, Hugo. But I'm beginning to think I've been quite unusually stupid - almost as stupid as Sir Frederick Clinton. Stupid and arrogant and self-satisfied. And I'm only just in time to make amends - ' he gave Frances a little bow ' - thanks to Mrs Fitzgibbon's commonsense disobedience.'

Frances gritted her teeth. 'David, I've got something to tell you. And you're not going to like it one bit.'

He smiled at her tolerantly. 'It's okay, love - I know. They wanted you to find a reason why Jack might have wanted to kill her, and of course you found one. But it doesn't matter, not now.' 'But he didn't kill her, David.' 'Of course he didn't! The idea's plainly ridiculous - you know it, I know it. She was a selfish, scheming, cold-hearted, unloving bitch, and if ever a woman needed murdering, she did. But he hasn't got murder in him. I could have told you that in two seconds flat. And Fred should have realised it too - when they fed him the dirt it should have put him on his guard. The moment I heard about it I realised how bloody stupid I'd been.

'I mean ... it made me think about Jack himself for the first time, not about the great David Audley. Everything that's been happening to him, I thought it was because of me

- because the department's full of faceless little bastards who hate my guts. So I rather enjoyed letting Jack rub their faces in the mud - I've always enjoyed letting them hate me.'

'"Oderint dum metuant, murmured Crowe. 'Enmity is the most rewarding form of flattery.'

'Yes.' Now the smile was vengeful. 'I've half a mind to take Fred's job and screw the lot of them, just for that, Hugo. Except that now I've put the whole thing together differently, and it fits much better this way.'

'What way?' Frances heard the sharp note of fear in her voice.

'I turned Fred's job down flat - they were never serious about Tom Stocker's job, they knew I wouldn't take that. But then there were all these rumours about me wanting Fred's job - no matter how often I squashed them they kept coming up again - '

Crowe stirred. 'You really don't want the top job?'

Audley scowled at him. 'Christ, Hugo - not you too!'

'I only asked, dear boy.... Are you saying that these rumours were planted deliberately - by those who knew you wouldn't accept it?'

'That's exactly what I'm saying. And I was too stupid to consider the possibility - I'm saying that too.'

'Ah - now I'm beginning to see! You thought that what was happening to Colonel Butler was directed against you. But now you believe that the rumours about you were actually calculated to stimulate opposition to his appointment? A simple reversal of the obvious, in fact?'

'More than that, Hugo.'

'More than that?' Professor Crowe gazed into space. 'Yes ... it would also account for what happened to Butler. A campaign directed against Butler would have made people suspicious - particularly you - because he is generally well-regarded. But a campaign against your acquisition of Sir Frederick's job wouldn't surprise anyone - least of all you.

Is that it?'

Audley nodded.

'I see. So Butler has been the real target all along? And that effectively eliminates Sir Frederick - and your illegitimate Israeli friend - and all the faceless little love-children from your list of villains, dear boy.' Crowe paused.

'Then it's just Butler.' He started up again. 'Someone must be very frightened indeed of his getting the job. Quite terrified, in fact, to go to such lengths. They've gone a long way beyond domestic politics and slander - they're into treason and murder, constructively.'

'Yes,' said Audley.

'Is the job that important?'

'It is and it isn't. It's basically a bloody thankless dogsbody job. But whoever gets it carries a lot of clout. And also gets to see a lot of things he's never seen before. From his own file upwards.'

His own file, thought Frances. Even she had only seen an edited version of that. But he had never seen it at all and now he would be able to. In his promoted place that would be the first thing she'd look at: all her test analyses, all her fitness reports, all her successes and failures.

His file would be a lot bigger than hers, though. It would start before she was born, and it would follow him across the world and back. It would list General Chesney's last will and testament. It would miss the marital disaster, and the visits to Rifleman Sands, because those were private matters that he had never revealed to anyone, and in certain things Colonel Jack Butler was a very private man.... For a guess, it might also miss this investigation, if Sir Frederick decided to play that close to his chest now, after what she had done. But it would certainly include everything about the original disappearance of Madeleine Francoise, and -

Successes and failures -

'What's up, Frances?' said Audley.

Failures.

'What's the matter, Frances?' repeated Audley. She looked at him. In fact she had already been looking at him, but not seeing him.

'Have you ever heard of Leslie Pearson Cole?' 'Leslie - ?' He frowned at her. 'Leslie Pearson

Cole?'

'And Trevor Anthony Bond.'

'Never heard of him. But Pearson Cole - what d'you know about Pearson Cole?'

'Very little. He committed suicide.'

'That's right.' Audley nodded. 'I wasn't on the case, thank heavens. There was a botch-up of some kind. Pearson Cole was mixed up in a big security leak, but there was a delay in picking him up, so he took his leak with him. What - ?'

'The delay was because a Major Butler was taken off the case, David. His wife had disappeared - he was delayed by that first. And then someone gave some conflicting evidence, for no reason. And nobody put two and two together.'

They stared at each other.

'Yes...' Audley nodded slowly. 'Yes, that would do very well - very well indeed. At least for a start.'

'In what way, dear boy?' asked Crowe.

Audley turned to him. 'Jack Butler's a good chap - he'll do a good job when he's promoted. He's very painstaking. Not a genius, but very, very painstaking. There's no general reason why anyone should go to such lengths to block his promotion - he isn't disliked. He isn't going to carry me up with him - so there has to be a specific reason.

That's what I've been thinking ever since I came back: somebody doesn't want him to be able to put two and two together and make four. If he isn't promoted, then he never will

- and two and two will never meet. And then somebody will go on being safe somewhere.'

'You have a traitor in the camp, dear boy.' Crowe sat back in spectator's comfort, hands at prayer. 'It happens in the best regulated families from time to time.'

'Yes.' Audley gave Frances a grimly anticipatory nod. 'Someone quite low down nine years ago, most likely. But quite high up by now. And someone who doesn't know that we know, by God!'

'Don't be too sure, dear boy. They'll be running scared now,' Crowe admonished him. That's when they'll become dangerous.'

'They can't know. Because they don't know I'm back.' Audley reached towards the Glenfiddich. 'I think I'll have a celebratory slug of my duty-free USAF hooch. I'm going to enjoy this... And, above all, they won't be running scared because they'll be expecting Mrs Fitzgibbon here to come up any moment with a nice handful of sticky mud which will keep Jack Butler firmly and safely among the other ranks. A nice, neat bloodless solution. Nothing to stir nasty suspicions in nasty suspicious minds like mine. No need to put O'Leary at risk by using his special talents.... Cheers!' He swung towards Frances.

'My manners! May I top you up - ' he stopped.

'What - what d'you mean - O'Leary's special talents?' said Frances.

He relaxed. 'It's all right, Frances. As long as Jack is under suspicion of murdering his eminently murderable wife then they'll strive to keep him healthy and unpromoted.

You've actually saved him by giving him his motive, love - if you'd proved him innocent then O'Leary would have probably been given a new target by the name of Butler.'

'Oh my God!' whispered Frances.

Crowe was looking at her. Crowe knew what Audley didn't know.

She'd told the Death Story.

'I've already phoned Control,' said Frances.

Once you've summoned him, he won't go away empty-handed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

This Yorkshire rain wasn't like Lancashire rain, or even like Midland rain, thought Frances resentfully as the car thudded into another unavoidable puddle which had spread into the centre of the narrow road: in the Midlands it had been half-hearted drizzle, with the occasional well-bred little storm; in Lancashire it had been pervasive wetness; but here, on the shoulder of the high moors, it was an obliterating deluge which had to be fought every inch of the way.

The car juddered and skidded over a pot-hole hidden in the puddle and the spray rose up simultaneously ahead, to dash itself on the windscreen a fraction of a second later, and underneath, to strike the floor beneath them with a solid thump.

'You're going too fast,' said Audley nervously. 'If you kill us on the way we won't get there at all.'

It was such a stupidly obvious thing to say that Frances felt a half-hysterical giggle beneath her irritation that he should have said it at all.

'If you can drive better, then you can drive,' she snapped back at him out of her knowledge (which was common knowledge, for he had never concealed it) that the great David Audley was a bad driver who hated driving, and who would have still managed to put them at risk in this downpour, on this road, even at half her speed.

He lapsed into sullen silence beside her, and she instantly felt half-ashamed, and half-angry with herself for snapping him down. It was the sort of thing a shrewish wife might have said, all the worse for being true; and, worse still, she knew also that his fear for their safety was sharpened by a greater fear which she shared with him.

* * *

They were dropping down off the ridge, she could sense it rather than see it, between the low, half-ruined dry-stone walls with their occasional stunted bushes and trees in the featureless moorland landscape which the rain narrowed around them.

Somewhere ahead of them, down there ahead of them in the greyness, was the opening into the tree-shrouded valley of the Thor Brook, still almost as secret and isolated as when the first monks and lay brothers trudged up it all those forgotten centuries ago.

'How much further?' asked Audley.

The child's eternal question -

* * *

'How much further. Mummy?'

'Not far, dear.'

'But I don't see anything.'

'You're not meant to see anything.' Father always knew the answer. He always knew how much further and how long. He even knew, unfailingly, how the films on TV

ended, whether they were sad or happy. He knew everything.

'Why not?'

'Because that's why they came here, the old monks. Because there was nobody here, and it was miles from anywhere. Remember Rievaulx, Frances - hidden there in its valley. Getting away from men to be closer to God, that was what being a Cistercian monk was all about.'

'But why. Daddy?' She knew the answer now, he had told it to her before, but she wanted the comfort of hearing it again.

'Because it was a nasty, rough world, and they wanted to get away from it.' Patient repetition.

'But Kirkstall Abbey's in the middle of a town.' Unanswerable logic.

'It wasn't when they built it, sweetie. Things have changed a lot since the twelfth century, you know.' Unarguable answer.

'It's still a nasty, rough world,' said Mother dryly.

'And now you can't get away from it, either,' said Daddy.

* * *

And so Frances Warren had come to Thornervaulx the first time.

* * *

'Thornervaulx?' The man presiding over - the communications centre had not been overawed at first by Audley's appearance, for Audley's appearance had not been overawing. But the penny had dropped at last, with Jock Maitland banging the machine, and the man had accepted that the big dishevelled man with the little bedraggled blonde dolly-bird added up to something that was not what it seemed. 'Yes, sir - Colonel Butler and Mr Cable have gone to Thornervaulx.'

'And Paul Mitchell?' said Frances.

'Yes - ' For the life of him, in spite of her warrant card, he couldn't bring himself to add 'madam' ' - Mr Mitchell's gone there too.'

'To see Trevor Bond?' It fitted too well to be wrong: O'Leary needed a safe house close to the University, and there, just across the high ridge of heather within sight of the top of the Science Block on a clear day, was someone Colonel Butler of all men would never have forgotten. It would be so close to the surface of his memory, the remembrance of that name and that place, that it was a certainty. And because it was a certainty it was more than that, was her fear: it was the bait on a hook for Colonel Butler if things went wrong.

Or was she imagining everything? And was David Audley imagining everything?

The man didn't answer her directly, and Audley started to growl something angry in his throat.

'Yes - ' The man's answer pre-empted Audley's anger.

'We have to get a message to Colonel Butler - at once. About O'Leary,' Audley converted the anger into a command.

'I'm afraid we can't do that, sir.'

'Why the hell not?' Audley pointed to the banks of equipment. 'You've got enough there to transmit to bloody Moscow!'

'The system is deactivated, sir.' As the man's voice strengthened Frances's heart sank: he was no longer scared because he was sure of his ground. 'I'm only here to watch over it - and to take any calls.' He nodded towards the telephone on the table beside him.

Audley pounced on the phone. 'Well - give me the line to Thornervaulx then, for God's sake. There has to be a line, damn it!'

'Yes, sir - but there isn't at the moment - '

'Why not?' Audley shook the receiver impotently.

'The line is out. Sergeant Ballard phoned me half an hour ago - not half an hour, sir.

The Post Office says there's probably water in the cable somewhere. They've sent men out to look for the trouble, but ... but we haven't been able to get through for an hour or more. Sergeant Ballard says. They're doing all they can - ' He broke off abruptly, and Frances saw that he at last was beginning to become frightened too. Then he brightened.

'Sergeant Ballard said he was sending men out to tell the Colonel, sir.'

Audley looked at Frances, and the look confirmed her own fear - and Sergeant Ballard's too.

If the line was out, that might mean there was water in the cable - it happened, and there was enough water to make it happen now. But she could remember Sergeant Ballard's cool competence, and she knew that even in the most torrential downpour he wouldn't accept water as the only answer to a breakdown in communications.

Well ... there was a flicker of hope there, kindling against the bigger blaze of fear.

Perhaps Colonel Butler's disdain of complicated modern electronics might warn him now, where a totally secure communications system wouldn't have hinted that someone was trying to isolate him. And even if it was a much fainter hope than the fear - not only because O'Leary was a kamikaze assassin, but also because he had no reason to believe that he was now O'Leary's target - then at least he would by now have Sergeant Ballard's reinforcements beside Cable and Mitchell to make the hit more difficult.

But it was still only a hope.

'Frances. We must go.' Audley's tone betrayed the same inescapable conclusion.

'You'd better drive.'

* * *

'How much further?' repeated Audley.

'Not far now - ' It was no longer a childish question. But childish memories, which she had never recognised as having registered at the time, came from nowhere to help her. 'There's a bridge up ahead, over the stream - we go along beside the stream, and then we come to the bridge. It's a little narrow bridge - '

She knew what he was thinking, his thoughts burned her.

* * *

'Why did you phone Control?'

'Why?' Frances pressed her foot down to the floor. Why indeed!

'It was finished. I wanted to get it over and done with.'

Not true. Or, not the whole truth, anyway. She had been very pleased with herself, very full of the pride before which every fall had to go, very pleased with her own cleverness, with her own unerring instinct.

She hadn't known how the instinct had come to her, but she'd been consciously saving that up for consideration at leisure, like a favourite sweet to be smuggled up to bed, past the tooth-cleaning ritual, to be sucked secretly and selfishly in the darkness after lights-out. Four out of ten had become ten out of ten.

And she had wanted the smug sod at the end of the telephone. Extension 223, to squirm - she had wanted to hear him squirm as she gave him the answer he hadn't expected.

* * *

'He couldn't have done it. Not possibly.'

Fact. He couldn't dispute fact.

'What?'

'He was in Blackburn at 10.30 that day - maybe earlier. Like he said in his report.'

'What?'

'I have a cast-iron witness. He remembers the time exactly.'

No answer. She would throw him a bone to gnaw at, then - out of sheer cruelty.

'He had a motive. But he'd never have done it then - or got anyone else to do it. Not on November 11th.'

That had been sheer bravado, to go with the cruelty. She didn't even know how she would record that subjective evidence of character and temperament and upbringing and history, which was much stronger in the end - at least for her - even than Rifleman Sands' resolute evidence.

She only knew that she could hardly write: Of all the dates in the year, if he was going to murder his wife, or even wish her dead - which, being Colonel Butler, he would never do anyway, or even wish - that would be the very last, most impossible day. Because that was the day -

It was the day that had thrown her, even when her instinct had told her it was important. Nowadays, when it didn't matter, when it was just a pious formality except for the old generation who knew which day was really which. Remembrance Day was always on a Sunday: that was the day they marched to the Cenotaph and to the thousands of war memorials up and down the country and planted their wreaths and poppies without really remembering anything at all, because they had nothing to remember, because yesterday's ghosts weren't worth mourning in a nasty, rough world.

They would have mostly forgotten, as she had, that the Sunday was always only the closest day to that old real eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of that original year - it was almost an accident that she recalled her father telling her (he who knew everything) that in the old days everything in Britain had stopped for two minutes to remember something which had happened at 11 o'clock on November llth in 1918.

But Colonel Butler had always remembered. What exactly he remembered - he hadn't been alive when Rifleman Sands had first walked up Revidge for the big fireworks display, which had reminded him of the trenches, with the candles in jam jars at his front gate - what he remembered, she could only guess at: maybe his father, against whom he'd revolted, or his father's friends; or his own friends and comrades from Normandy and Germany; or his own men from those other trenches of Korea, Nannie's husband among them; or even the men he himself had killed so efficiently in his time. Or even the old General himself, who'd had a hand in it all from the beginning, father and son beginning.

That was something she intended to find out eventually - his girls could find it out for her simply by asking: they were probably the only human beings who could ask the question with a chance of receiving an answer; no one else (not even a second Mrs Butler) had the right to expect an answer - which she already knew in her heart, but which she would never write down, for it must always be his secret act of remembrance: Because that is the day when he keeps faith with his dead, the day of love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice, and he would never add a private ghost of his own to that list, on that day, not ever, not this man, not ever -

* * *

A private ghost.

Yesterday's ghost - Frances could feel her heart thump - she had laid yesterday's ghost at the terrible cost of raising a new one for tomorrow - had she?

They were getting very close now. Through the rain-streaked side window she had been catching glimpses of the swollen Thor Brook between the fringe of trees which separated the road from the stream for the last half-mile before they met at the bridge of Thornervaulx.

The bridge was a colour-transparency in childhood's memory - high and hump-backed and narrow as the ordeal bridge of Al-Sirat between earth and heaven over hell -

A new ghost was waiting for her on the other side: there was still so much she didn't know, so much that was still guesswork, about that November llth as well as this November llth, but the new ghost was already an instinctive, stomach-churning certainty.

* * *

The enemy had revived the old Butler scandal into suspicion by dropping the right word into the right ear at the right moment - the classic disinformation stratagem.

And they had calculated its strength not only from the lying truth it contained, but also because all those who feared and disliked and mistrusted David Audley would work hard to make it true, blocking his advancement by blocking Butler's promotion -

playing the enemy's game for reasons which probably ranged from pure selfishness and hatred and fear and prejudice to mistaken patriotism.

And also because, all the while, Sir Frederick himself had let them go ahead for his own reason, hoping that Audley would be forced in the end to take power simply for the sake of friendship and survival -

Was that how it had been?

If it was -

She caught a flash of grey through the trees, against the browns and yellows and greens of late autumn, rain-misted: ruined walls and pinnacles across the stream on the other side of the valley. If it was, then she had made a ruin of it.

And if it was, then Colonel Butler might now die in that ruin, and maybe in those ruins: there must always have been a contingency plan for a last resort, and this was the ideal place for it, where it might just pass scrutiny as a natural hazard of duty.

* * *

Paul.

Frances clasped the name like a straw. Paul was Colonel Butler's last chance. Paul was always suspicious, Paul always had his eyes open. Paul, in the unseen presence of O'Leary, would have his hand on that gun of his, of which he was so proud, with which he was so born-to-the-manner good, as he was good at everything. Paul was the best.

She frowned.

Paul - ?

* * *

'There's the bridge,' said David Audley. There was the bridge. Childhood's memory had been wrong - No. It wasn't so high, or so narrow as she had remembered, or as the ordeal bridge of Al-Sirat, between life and death. But as they had come up to it eighteen years ago there had been a big orange coach swinging on to it, and Mother had said

'Wait, Charles - it's too narrow - sit down, Frances!' and they had waited while the coach-driver backed and manoeuvred.

* * *

Paul? The youngest and best?

* * *

She twisted the wheel just in time, almost too late. Another second's hesitation would have carried them on up the valley, to somewhere she'd never been. A great splash of rain from the saturated branches of the trees above obscured the windscreen for a moment, then there was a bump as they crossed the bridge and the windscreen wipers swept the water away.

Hard left and hard right - her father's hands on the wheel, impossibly remembered, swung them on to the car park which the old Ministry of Public Buildings and Works had carved out of the monastic gardens, the wheels spinning and the gravel spurting.

Daddy had never driven that fast - Daddy had parked carefully under the trees on the right, between the wall and the ice-cream van from which he had bought her a choc-ice, and himself a choc-ice too -

But the path to the abbey ruins was at the top, on the left: she had walked across the gravel with him, licking the melting chocolate off her fingers - and he had been licking the chocolate off his fingers too, and grinning at her, while Mother unloaded the picnic with Uncle John - it was at the top, the path. She swung the wheel the other way, skidding round the vividly-striped police car - the day-glo orange and white flashed in front of her and was gone as though it had never existed.

'Christ!' said Audley.

She stood on the brakes, feeling the car slither under her.

Now she knew: Butler was a dream - the girls' dream which she had started to dream against all reason and all reality. Butler was already invulnerable - he had always been invulnerable, from the start, the stars in their million courses were running for him, as they had on his battlefields; his bad luck would always come from a different direction, from where it had always come.

It would be Paul -

Frances slammed out of the car, leaving the door swinging.

It would be Paul -

There was a man ahead of her. Audley shouted something, but the words were lost to her.

She could run. She had always been able to run. Some women couldn't run, their hips got in the way, their breasts went every whichway. But Frances Warren never saw anyone's back in the 100 and 220, no girl could touch her.

The man was gone, open mouthed. It was not James Cable, she saw only that - it was not James Cable, so James Cable was also up ahead somewhere, with Jack Butler and Trevor Anthony Bond - and with Paul -

Make it James Cable, prayed Frances. It won't be Trevor Anthony Bond, it can't be Butler - it'll never be Butler in this age of the world - make it Cable, not Paul!

There were steps up, between modern stone walls. She knew where she was going, it was past the lay brothers' dormitory, past the great kitchen and the wide quadrangle of the ruined cloister -

* * *

'Now sweetie: you're standing in the middle of the cloister - so you know where the Chapter House and the Parlour are ... the Parlour where they were allowed to

parlez

to each other ... and the Warming House where they lifted their cassocks and warmed their

- ' 'Charles!'

* * *

Not the Chapter House, not the Cloister, not the Parlour - the wall ended with the Galilee Porch.

There was a reason for Galilee Porch, and he had told her the reason; but she could never remember it then, and she couldn't think of it now. But that was where the wall ended, that was still the entrance to Thornervaulx Abbey.

* * *

The great quire of the abbey stretched ahead of her - quire and retroquire, monks'

quire and presbytery, which had once been the glory and the wonder of the Thor Brook valley, and far beyond - and the High Altar, once gilded and jewelled, under which the miraculous bones of St. Biddulph had lain, which no virgin could look upon with safety, because they guaranteed pregnancy even to the most barren -

* * *

'Where, Daddy?' Virgin Frances had looked for the high altar.

* * *

Where, Daddy? thought Frances again, desperately.

But there was only the long sweep of broken pillars, like jagged teeth, rising higher and higher out of the smooth turf, each with its swirl of dead leaves around it, until the towering walls of the roofless transepts reared up, and the perfect open circle of the rose window framing grey sky where once the Virgin and Child had been enthroned in glory

-

Where?

* * *

Frances ran down into the wide empty quire of the lay brothers, between the dark woods of the hillside, almost leafless, on her left, and the labyrinth of abbey ruins on her right.

The emptiness mocked her and terrified her. Paul - the rain ran down her face - Paul!

As though called by that soundless cry Paul Mitchell emerged from behind one of the slender columns of the opening into the south transept, beside the high altar's site.

Another movement caught her eye, away beyond the pillars in the labyrinth.

Colonel Butler walked out on to the green square of the cloister quadrangle, unmistakeable under his golfing umbrella. Now they were both in the open: she could see them both. And now he, whom she had summoned, only had to make his choice -

that was the story's ending.

* * *

She saw him rise out of the ruin of summer's growth on the hillside under the eaves of the trees, ten yards from her, his rifle lifting for the heart shot. He hadn't seen her, she was half-masked by a broken pillar. The choice was still hers: she could shout

Paul - there!

But that would be too late for Colonel Butler. Or she could shout Down, Colonel Butler! And that would be just one second too late for Paul -

* * *

The choices were gone in the same instant of their imagining, as the rifle rose.

There had never been any choices, only the true ending.

* * *

Frances stepped into the open.

'O'Leary - ' she pointed at him ' - you're dead!'

* * *

That would give Paul and Butler the time they both -

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Where she lay close to the stump of the third pillar in the ruined quire, it was quiet now.

For a moment it had been noisy - she had not truly heard the noises, but she was aware that there had been noises - but now there was only the steady swish of an infinite number of raindrops on stone and grass and leaves around her, where she lay.

Then she was aware that she had heard the noises at the exact moment when she had been punched such a terrible blow on the chest, so that the grey sky and the greyer stonework and the green grass had cartwheeled - no one had ever punched her so hard, it had quite knocked the breath out of her.

So now her eyes were full of tears, blurring green and grey into indistinguishable shapes of colour; but that was only natural, that she should cry after being hit so hard, to make her so breathless.

* * *

Daddy - I hurt - Daddy -

* * *

It wasn't tears, it was the rain on her face. But she couldn't close her eyes against the rain -

* * *

'Frances!'

* * *

That was the name she had wanted to remember. That was the name in her handbag

- But there were other names in her handbag, and they wouldn't know which name was her name - Where was her handbag? Without her handbag she had no name at all: they wouldn't know who she was.

* * *

'Mitchell. Are you all right?' A different voice, far away but well-remembered. 'Yes.'

The first voice, much closer but far above her. 'Over here. Colonel - Oh God! Frances!'

* * *

She had made a fascinating discovery: they were quite right when they said

you never

hear the one that hits you.

But they were also quite wrong, because she had heard it long before, and everything she had done had been only to make sure she was in the right place at the right time to meet it.

She wanted desperately to tell them that, but she couldn't, and that made her angry: it seemed to her that she had failed in everything she had set out to do in her life -

* * *

'Frances - Frances - '

The colours swirled and swam. She floated into them.

'Let her be, lad. Let her be.'

* * *

'Frances!'

* * *

She no longer recognised the names, or the faraway voices. And yet the sound of them took away her anger and her despair at her failure.

Perhaps not everything, perhaps not everything -

And that was enough for the Act of Contrition, which must be the last feeling of all -

* * *

No, not the last.

The last feeling, as the greens and greys darkened, was the gentle kiss of the rain - of the Prince - on her lips.