Tomorrow's ghost dda-9

by Anthony Price

  'It's a long time, Mr Hedges,' said Frances. 'But it's important that you do remember.'

  He looked at her strangely, as though he was seeing her for the first time - and seeing Frances, and not Mrs Fisher, or anyone else out of her bag.

  The fine art of interrogation David Audley had always maintained. It's a game, and it's a duel, and it's a discipline, and it's a job like any other. But in the end it's an art. And that means, in the end - or it may be the very beginning - you may have to risk losing in order to win.

  'It's important for Colonel Butler,' said Frances.

  Hedges frowned at her. 'Colonel - ?'

  Nine years ago, thought Frances. It had been Major Butler then, and although the ranks hadn't mattered after that, it would be Major Butler that Inspector Hedges remembered.

  'Major Butler,' corrected Frances.

  * * *

  'Would you like something to drink, Mrs Fisher?' Hedges gestured to the chair on the other side of the fire. 'I'm sorry - I'm forgetting my manners.' She needed a drink. 'A whisky - would that be possible?'

  Why had she said that?-'Any particular brand?' He smiled at her. 'They have some very fine malt here.'

  Frances sat down, and without waiting for an answer he swung round to the empty bar counter behind him. 'Isobel! One large Glenlivet, if you please!'

  He turned back to her. 'Nine years ago...'

  Malt whisky. Nine years ago she had never even heard of malt whisky, thought Frances. Nine years ago she had never tasted whisky in her life, in her nineteen sheltered years. And now she didn't know (except that it was a cold day, and she was colder still) why she had asked for whisky - or why he had offered, of all whiskies, the one she knew how to drink, from the years between.

  He nodded at her, a nod for each year. 'A year or two back - maybe not ... Or not so well. But now ... yes, I can remember it.'

  Was that how it was? thought Frances bleakly. In the end, was it the ones that got away that came back to mind, yesterday's ghosts?

  'I'm glad to hear it,' she lied. Or, at least for the time being, didn't lie. 'This one bugged you, did it?'

  'Bugged?' He winced slightly at the slang. 'No - ' He cut off as Frances stared past him, and then turned towards the bar. 'Ah ... thank you, Isobel.' It was the publican's lady - and she was looking at Frances with considerable surprise. 'Thank you, Isobel,'

  repeated Hedges. Isobel looked from Frances to the tumbler in her hand, and Frances understood the raised eyebrows.

  It was not a ladylike measure.

  'Would you like some water, madam?'

  As Frances estimated the tumbler's contents - more like three fingers' generous measure than two - memory twisted inside her. Robbie had taught her to drink malt, but she had also learnt bitterly what his own measures signified: one for pleasure and relaxation over his books and his music, two for sleep and forgetfulness, and three to nerve him again to fumbling passion with his unresponsive partner. And for all the good it did him, he might have doubled the dose.

  'No, thank you.' She smiled mechanically. Perhaps he'd have done better to have doubled hers, three had only tightened every nerve in her to do what he had wanted, but hadn't helped her to deceive him in the doing; and that had been a disaster out of which not even Marshal Foch could have attacked his way.

  Isobel gave her one last, very old-fashioned, glance, and ducked back into the depths of the pub;

  Hedges swept the glass off the bar and presented it to her.

  'Thank you, Mr Hedges.'

  She sipped the fiery stuff, and thought as she did so how very strange it was that the spirit itself - this ardent spirit which had always failed to arouse any ardour in her - the thing itself hadn't instantly reminded her of Robbie, but only the quantity of it which had been poured into the tumbler, a purely visual memory. But then ever since Marilyn had been terminated - or perhaps it was ever since the bomb, as though its concussion had shaken loose some defensive shield in her head - her memory had been playing tricks on her, reminding her of what she didn't want, and didn't need, to remember.

  Hedges was staring at her, and with a start she realised that she had been staring at him across the rim of the tumbler, and not seeing him at all.

  'Do you want to know about her ... or him, Mrs Fisher?' Being looked through seemed to have disconcerted him slightly, the tone of his voice told her. 'The wife or the Major?'

  The Major.

  The nine years fell away from Frances at last. Nine years ago (she had been a student nine years ago, and a spinster, and a virgin, and the secretary of the University Labour Club, and an admirer of Anthony Wedgwood Benn; and now she was none of those things and nine years might have been nine million) ... and nine years ago Colonel Butler had been a major, and before that a captain, and before that a lieutenant, and before that an officer-cadet, and before that a corporal, and before that a private, and before that a schoolboy, and before that a child and a baby and a glint in his father's eye in a backstreet house on the wrong side of the tracks (Paul had been right there - right as usual); but for her he would always have been Colonel Butler if it hadn't been for ex-Detective Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges (who, nine years ago had been Detective Inspector Hedges), who had suddenly put Major Butler in another perspective of time, his own perspective - with Butler pickled forever in the aspic of a police report as Major - but one which opened all the other perspectives to her ... even the perspective of the future, in which (although rank didn't really matter in the department, and she didn't even understand what her own grade of assistant-principal meant) - in which they would surely promote him to Brigadier if ... if she, Mrs Fisher, Mrs Fitzgibbon and Miss (nine years ago) Frances Warren, the student-spinster-virgin-admirer, gave him a clean bill of health, pronouncing him fit to wear one of Sir Frederick's Rings of Power for better and not for worse, whatever that might mean.

  The Major -

  Even the deferential way he had pronounced the rank told her something: Et tu, William Ewart Hedges, and she must make an allowance for that.

  But there was no more time to think of that now. There would be time for that later.

  At least it had all flashed through her mind quickly: after he had said The wife or the Major? he had reached for his pint of mild, hitherto untouched, and now he was just setting it back on the table, two inches down from the brim.

  The wife or the Major?

  Major and Mrs Butler.

  Major John (but always Jack) Butler, MC (General list).

  Mrs Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Butler, nee Boucard.

  Lord! thought Frances, still staring at Hedges but thinking a carbon copy of the thought she had had the night before when she had first encountered the name - Lord! If there was a story in the losing of her more than that in Sir Frederick's file there must also be a story (which the file had totally omitted) in the winning of her, if she was anything like her name. The very idea of Butler married was hard to swallow, but Butler carrying off a Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard took her breath away before she could swallow the idea. It sounded altogether too much like a romance from a woman's magazine, and even if the truth would surely be prosaic and dull she could no longer resist the temptation of asking the question she hadn't dared to put to Sir Frederick the night before:

  'Was she beautiful, Mr Hedges?'

  It wasn't the answer, or the form of the answer anyway, he had been expecting.

  'Didn't they show you a picture, then? There was a lot of 'em about at the time, as I remember. Hundreds.'

  Of course there would have been, thought Frances.

  'No.'

  'I expect they could find one for you.'

  'Was she?'

  'Beautiful?' He took another pull of his beer, but more slowly, as though he had decided that just as she had made him wait while she surfaced from her own deep thoughts, so he had a right to make her wait for his own to come up from the past. 'Have you seen the daughters?'

  She shook her h
ead.

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

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

  'The colouring?'

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

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

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

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

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

  'Who said?'

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

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

  But how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'If.'

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

  'But she's not, you mean?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'A dirty job.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'But you think he didn't?'

  Still he wouldn't give her anything.

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

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

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

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

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

  'But this wasn't like that.'

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

  'And it started to rain.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Yes?'

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

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

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

  'Yes?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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