Tomorrow's ghost

by Anthony Price

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

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

  ‘What d’you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘—and that bloody stupid old woman up there backs his prejudice against that certainty—‘

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

  CHAPTER 5

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

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

  And now she had dropped the sodding matches…

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

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

  She clicked the torch button.

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

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

  And yet now it was unquestionably a cricket stump.

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

  With all my worldly goods I thee endow—

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

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

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

  Making use of it—

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

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

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

  She stared down at the cricket stump in her hand.

  Marilyn and Robbie.

  But Robbie wouldn’t have fancied Marilyn at all, she wouldn’t have been his type—

  Or would she?

  Or would he?

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who—‘ She managed at last to direct her own beam on his face. ‘Oh!’

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

  Messenger: The king comes here tonight.

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

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

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

  Without warning, and at this time of night: the politeness rang hollow inside Frances’s mind. With or without warning, more like, and at any time of the day or night—here—for God’s sake, here—that required more than an apology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘No?’ She put her hand involuntarily to her head, which she had forgotten was still outwardly Marilyn’s. ‘Well, I can’t say that I like it much either. Sir Frederick, to be honest.’

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

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

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

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

  Insignificance?

  Was entirely right for British-American at the time.

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

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

  * * *

  After the bomb there had been Colonel Butler—

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

  * * *

  He was good, was Colonel Butler, she had decided at that point, observing him control the ant-heap confusion without fuss, without raising his voice, without a nuance of I-told-you-so: it had been like watching a re-enactment of Kipling’s If by one quiet, ugly-handsome, totally decisive man who somehow made the time and had exactly the right word of reassurance or encouragement or command for everyone, from the slightly panicky ministerial security officer, whose minister had been whisked away from him by Paul Mitchell, to a Jock Maitland drenched with muddy water and plastered with feathers and flying duck entrails but still—or even more—dourly and gloriously Scottish—

  * * *

  ‘—ye wain night, sairr—and a lateral charge too, of aboot six poounds … But that doesna’ make a nothing of the otherr—he’s a trricky one, this fella’…’

  ‘Happen you’re right too, major—‘ Colonel Butler had smiled at him, and it was that rare and private change in his own expression which purged his ugliness; and at the same time the Lancashire which Paul had noticed peeped through the Sandhurst accent, so that for a moment it was like speaking with like ‘—so you get yoursel’ over to t’other, an’ doan’t let that young chap Pirie lay a finger on it. He wants t’be a hero. I rely on you not to let him make his wife a widow -‘

  * * *

  The other and t’other had confused her for a moment, but then she had disentangled them:

  There had been a second bomb.

  * * *

  ‘Oh sure. Princess, there were two of them … hold on a sec while I fix the seat for you… James’s legs aren’t as pretty as yours, but they are somewhat longer… Because that’s Comrade O’Leary’s modus operand! when he’s expected. And the trick is… There! I think that will do nicely… the trick is to distinguish which is the diversion and which is the real killer. Is A intended to set you up for B? Or is B intended to divert you from A?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘I don’t mean y
our little bomb, duckie -‘

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

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

  ‘So what?’

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

  ‘I thought you were Colonel Butler’s Number Two?’

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

  ‘He sent you to collect me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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