Tomorrow's ghost

by Anthony Price

  ‘Mr Hedges?’ The question was altogether superfluous after he had doubly identified himself by knowing her latest identity, but good manners and a modest demeanour was what the occasion demanded. ‘It’s very good of you to see me, to give me your time like this.’

  He studied her in silence for a moment, as though taking her to pieces and then reassembling her to see how the parts fitted together.

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs Fisher. I’ve got all the time in the world.’

  And so he had, thought Frances, and that was the trouble: if he’d still been a serving policeman it would have been in his best interest to co-operate with her to the full, and she could lean on him if he didn’t. But a retired man was beyond her reach, he could keep his mouth shut and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She smiled.

  No smile in return: Ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges was a man’s man, not a ladies’ man, that litmus paper test indicated.

  ‘May I see your warrant card, Mrs Fisher, please?’ said ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges.

  And a cautious man.

  ‘Of course.’ Frances opened her bag. For an instant she couldn’t remember which compartment held which identity. It would never do to give him Marilyn in her bikini.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He took his time comparing the Fitzgibbon photograph with the Fisher illusion. And at the end of his time he frowned at her.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hedges?’

  ‘Why the wig, Mrs Fisher?’

  Frances blinked at him. ‘Is it so obvious?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s very professional.’

  He was making a point: he was informing her that ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges wasn’t to be trifled with. But if he wasn’t already a hostile witness, why did he have to make that point?

  Hostile as well as cautious?

  ‘Then—why the question, Mr Hedges?’

  He nodded. ‘You’re not wearing a wig in your photograph. But it’s the same style, and the same colour, your hair. Young ladies don’t usually wear mouse-brown wigs …

  But perhaps I shouldn’t ask?’

  Frances made the connection. The implication of her presence was the re-opening of a nine-year-old case which had never been solved. And that could either mean that there was new evidence, or that Inspector William Ewart Hedges hadn’t done his job properly nine years before.

  Hostile, then. So at least she knew where she was.

  She smiled again. ‘That’s all right … As it happens, I’m blonde underneath.’

  ‘Blonde? Good gracious!’

  ‘Why “Good gracious”, Mr Hedges?’

  He pursed his lips disapprovingly. ‘You haven’t got the face for it, if I, may say so … without wishing to be personal—the figure, but not the face, Mrs Fisher.’

  He was telling her that blonde, on her, would be vulgar. (Which, of course, was the exact truth: Marilyn had been nothing if not vulgar.) He was also establishing his superiority, and that would never do.

  She took the warrant card from him, and as she did so Mrs Fisher was born. Marilyn Francis would have laughed, and would have given him something to look at. Mrs Fitzgibbon would have been embarrassed, and might have blushed. But the arrogant Miss Warren would have been angry, and Mrs Fisher and Miss Warren were sisters under the skin.

  ‘I have my job to do, Mr Hedges.’ She put the card into her bag and snapped the bag shut. ‘The Assistant Chief Constable has told you why I’m here, I take it?’

  He started to nod, but Mrs Fisher didn’t give him time to admit that the ACC (Crime)—or maybe it was the ACC (Operations)—had indeed disturbed his leisurely retired breakfast with a phone call.

  ‘What did he tell you?’ asked the frowning Mrs Fisher.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Hedges defensively.

  Attack, attack, attack!

  ‘Nine years ago. You were in charge of the case.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you recall it?’ Mrs Fisher pressed her point.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You recall it? After nine years?’

  ‘Yes—‘ His eyes clouded momentarily ‘—I remember it.’

  Sod Mrs Fisher, decided Frances instinctively. After a very short acquaintance she didn’t like Mrs Fisher. What was more important, this man would remember nine years ago and Colonel Butler for his own reasons, and not because Mrs Fisher was a hard little bitch with a wig and a warrant card and the ACC’s blessing. It would be Frances, not Mrs Fisher, who made William Ewart Hedges talk.

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

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

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

  ‘It’s important for Colonel Butler,’ said Frances.

  Hedges frowned at her. ‘Colonel—?’

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

  ‘Major Butler,’ corrected Frances.

  * * *

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

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

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

  He turned back to her. ‘Nine years ago…’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Bugged?’ He winced slightly at the slang. ‘No—‘ He cut off as Frances stared past him, and then turned towards the bar. ‘Ah … thank you, Isobel.’

  It was the publican’s lady—and she was looking at Frances with considerable surprise.

  ‘Thank you, Isobel,’ repeated Hedges.

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

  It was not a ladylike measure.

  ‘Would you like some water, madam?’

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

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

  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 head.

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

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

  ‘The colouring?’

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

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

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

  ‘But you never actually saw her, did you?’

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

  ‘Who said?’

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

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

  But how?

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

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

  ‘She was forty-one years old,’ said Frances.

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

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

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

  ‘If.’

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

  ‘But she’s not, you mean?’

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

  ‘Yes, Mr Hedges. And the Assistant Chief Constable’s submission
.’ She was losing him, and she didn’t know why. ‘In effect—“missing”. But you think she’s dead?’

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

  ‘But you think she’s dead, all the same.’

  ‘What I think isn’t proof.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘What do you want me to say, Mrs Fisher?’

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

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

  ‘Mr Hedges … I’ve got a difficult job to do. I’m not sure that it isn’t impossible—to be honest.’

  Bad word—wrong word. She wasn’t being honest.

  ‘A dirty job.’

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

  ‘She walked out of the front door. And she disappeared off the face of the earth—‘

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

  ‘Did he kill her, Mr Hedges? Could he have killed her?’

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

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

  ‘But you think he didn’t?’

  Still he wouldn’t give her anything.

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

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

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

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