Tomorrow's ghost

by Anthony Price

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

  ‘But this wasn’t like that.’

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

  ‘And it started to rain.’

  ‘That’s right … It came on to rain quite heavily, and she only had a light coat with her.’ Another reminiscent pause. ‘It was the cleaning woman phoned us in the end—she’d waited long past .her time, and she wanted to get home. But she couldn’t leave the little one all by herself.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes?’

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

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

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

  ‘Yes?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What were you told?’

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

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

  She waited.

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

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

  She pulled herself back to the more pressing problem. ‘Is that what you meant by “Could have”, Mr Hedges? He could have been in … the vicinity at the material time—in another car, say?’

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

  He was building up the ‘its’ deliberately, as though to demonstrate what a flimsy edifice they made.r />
  ‘If he’d had a confederate, of course … but then no one saw any strangers hanging around, and in a country district like that it’s surprising what people notice … it’s possible, but the timing would have had to be good if they didn’t want to risk being noticed .. . But it’s possible—anything’s possible.’

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

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

  Possible plus Unlikely equals Could Have.

  They had given him a possible suspect in a possible murder case. But then, for security reasons, they had stopped him carrying through any investigation of Colonel—Major—Butler’s not-alibi, and had left him only with the suspicion that there might be something he’d missed somewhere; and although he was speaking now without any apparent rancour, nine years after the event, that rankled still.

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

  Suddenly and vividly Constable Ellis came into her mind again: Constable Ellis sitting opposite her across her own fireplace, just as Hedges was sitting across from her now—Constable Ellis on one of his paternal visits to her, with a steaming mug of cocoa in his hands—she had heated the water for it on the primus stove: it had been during the power workers’ strike, when he’d called on her every time it was the village’s turn to be blacked-out . .. Constable Ellis telling her how—God, but she’d been slow! He’d even told- her himself, had William Ewart Hedges—once directly, and half-a-dozen times implicitly—and she’d failed to pick up the message.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Get it right. Chest in, extinguish girlish smile.

  ‘Patrick Parker, Mr Hedges.’ Patrick Raymond Parker, born Liverpool 11.7.41. s. Michael Aloysius Parker and Margaret Helen Mclntyre—

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

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

  Never proved, like everything else, thought Frances bitterly.

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

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

  ‘I agree. It was never proved,’ Frances nodded.

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

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

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

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

  ‘She was the one whose car broke down? That’s true. And she wasn’t so young, either—that’s also true.’ He had raised an eyebrow at ‘scrubber’, as though it wasn’t a word he expected from her. But then he could hardly be expected to know that yesterday she—or at least Marilyn—had been a card-carrying member of the National Union of Scrubbers, thought Frances.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘North Mer
cia put him next to a couple of them—in the same pub as one of them on the night she disappeared.’

  ‘He was an opportunity murderer. Lack of opportunity—say on the Monday night—that might have pushed him further out.’

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

  ‘I’m a modern girl, Mr Hedges.’

  ‘Would you accept a lift from a stranger?’

  ‘It was raining,’ said Frances.

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

  ‘I’m not her.’

  ‘She was a lady.’

  A compliment. The blonde hair was forgotten.

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

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

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

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

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

  And in vain.

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

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

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

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

  ‘What makes you think that, Mrs Fisher?’