Tomorrow's ghost dda-9

by Anthony Price

  'Can I help you?' He smiled, and was more beautiful, and the accent went with the sweat-shirt.

  'Do you take Barclaycards?'

  'Barclay and Access - not American Express, for some obscure reason. But you won't get any Green Shield Stamps, they're only for hard cash, I'm afraid.' Still smiling, still looking down at her, he tossed his curls towards the great garish poster above his shoulder. 'It's all in the small print. Though actually our petrol is cheap at the moment -

  you're supposed to come in for our extra special offer, plus quintuple stamps for cash, and then think better of it and buy a new car instead, with a full tank and a million stamps, or something.'

  He really was lovely, thought Frances uncontrollably. But he was ten years too young for her - in another ten years she'd be old enough to have a son of his age - and as unattainable as a shaft of sunlight.

  'Should I be tempted?' She knew that it was the temptation of make-believe, if only for a moment, to which she was surrendering.

  The smile compressed itself with mischief. 'There's a couple of salesmen back there just waiting for me to give them the signal ... Actually, the cars aren't bad at the price, though the spares are a bit pricey. Myself, I'd rather have a Honda Four-hundred-four.'

  'A motor-bike?'

  'A bike, yes.' His eyes glazed at the thought, blotting her out, and when they saw her again they were no longer interested in her. 'Four star, you want?'

  The gossamer moment was over. She was just a woman customer in a nondescript car and he was a young petrol pump attendant, a strange face glimpsed for an instant in passing, and then gone forever.

  Yet, in a strange cold way, Frances had the feeling that she was the stranger, the unreality, not this boy. For he belonged to the warm-blooded world of friends and car salesmen, and pay on Friday, saved towards his Honda Four-hundred-four, which was a real world beside which hers was a shadow country of ghosts and memories. Simply, she had caught his warmth for an instant, as any ghost might warm its pale hands on the living, and that had made her substantial enough for him to see. But now she was fading again, and the sooner she faded away altogether, the better - the safer - for them both.

  'Five star, please.' She reached decisively into her bag for the right Barclay card, neither Fitzgibbon nor Fisher, but her own very private untraceable Maiden Warren.

  'Five star?' He controlled his surprise just short of disbelief. 'How many gallons?'

  She no longer saw him. It was curious that she had pretended to herself for so long that she was in two minds about the phone call, even that she'd half-blamed Paul for setting her to it, when she'd intended all along to make it, since last night. Paul had merely added reason to her instinct for disobedience.

  'Fill her up.' She passed the card across without looking at the boy, and opened the car door. 'I'm going to make a phone call.'

  * * *

  She pressed the button and the coins dropped.

  'Saracen.'

  It was a rough East End voice. But then, the Saracen's Head was a rough East End pub, David Audley had said, where the beer was as strong as the prejudices and it didn't pay to ask the wrong question or support any team except West Ham.

  'I'd like a word with Mr Lee.' Out aloud 'Mr Lee' sounded rather Chinese, or even Romany, certainly not Israeli.

  ' 'Oo wants 'im?' the rough voice challenged her.

  'A friend of a friend of his,' replied Frances obediently.

  'Oh yus? Well, 'e ain't 'ere.'

  Recognition sign.

  'Mr Lee owes my friend six favours, for services rendered.' She wondered as she spoke whether that meant anything or nothing; with David's quirky sense of humour it might even be a genuine reminder.

  'Is that a fact, now? 'Old on a mo', luv.'

  Frances waited. Through the smudgy window of the phone box she saw the young man take the nozzle of the petrol hose out of the tank. He peered at the numbers registered on the pump, and then back at the car. Then he scratched his thatch with his free hand. Then he bent down and looked underneath the car. Then he straightened up and stared towards the phone box. Then he reinserted the nozzle into the tank again.

  Frances cursed her carelessness, which had quite unnecessarily turned him from an uninterested, disinterested young man into an interested young man. And more, a sharp young man (as it was November, and term had started, for a guess a sharp young man serving out his free year before Oxford, earning enough on the pumps for that Honda of his dreams?). And, most of all, a young man who would remember her now, right down to the Warren Barclaycard, if anyone came to unlock his memory. Sod it!

  "Ullo there?'

  It was a different voice, but only marginally different, and not what she had expected even though she had never expected Colonel Shapiro himself.

  'Mr Lee?'

  'Naow, 'e ain't 'ere. I'm a friend of 'is. Do I know you, darlin'?'

  'No - ' Frances floundered for a moment as she watched the young man filling the tank. When he had done that, if he was the young man she took him to be, he would look under the bonnet on the pretext of checking the oil. 'No. I'm a friend of a friend of his.

  'Oh ah?'

  The young man replaced the hose in the pump, taking a sidelong glance at the phone box as he did so. Then he walked round to the driver's window and leaned inside to release the bonnet catch.

  'You still there, darlin'?'

  'Yes.'

  Sod it! He was lifting the bonnet now. She had never made stupid little mistakes like this before, never taken big risks like this before ... never disobeyed direct orders like this before, or almost never. And it was making mistakes, taking risks and disobeying orders which killed people, and more often than not other people too. That had been what David himself had said; and, in a very creepy way, that had been also what Professor Crowe had told Paul Mitchell - you shouldn't have told that story. And the queer thing was that she had always known there was something malevolent about Grandmother's fairy story, even before she'd told it to Robbie that last time, by the fireside, on his last leave.

  'Come on, darlin' - spit it out, get it off yer chest.'

  Superstition, sod it! 'Is this line secure?'

  'You arskin'? It was until I 'eard your voice, ducks!'

  Superstition: if she pointed her finger at the young man with his head under the bonnet of her car, then that would solve one of her problems. But that would be too cruel...

  'My friend said ... if I ever needed to get a message to him, Mr Lee would do it. And Mr Lee owes him six favours, he said. But is this line secure?'

  'Hah-hargh! If you ain't blabbed - if my pools comes up this Saturday ... an' if my old auntie 'ad two of 'em she'd be half-way to being my uncle - if you 'ain't blabbed, then you pays yer money an' you takes yer choice, darlin'. And I ain't promisin' nothin', mind you. But if you was to give me a message then I might pass it on to Mr Lee if I sees 'im.

  'An then it'ud be up to 'im, like - wouldn't it, if 'e owes yer friend like you say 'e does.

  Right?' The young man closed the bonnet, pressing it down to engage the lock and carefully wiping his paw-marks from the cellulose with a rag from his back pocket.

  Beyond him, on the edge of the forecourt, there was an old break-down truck, looking rather broken-down itself, like a sick doctor waiting for emergency calls he couldn't attend; and beyond the truck a line of dead elms with the bark peeling from their diseased trunks; and beyond the elms a great bank of rainclouds from whose advance-guards above her the first spots of rain spattered on the dirty window, as she stared out of it, blurring the scene.

  He was flannelling her, of course: he was Mr Lee, because there was always a Mr Lee in the Saracen's Head during opening hours, David had said - one Mr Lee or another, it didn't matter who - to take messages for Colonel Shapiro, that was Mr Lee's job.

  And she, equally, was flannelling herself, still pretending up to the very last moment and beyond it that maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn't give Mr Lee her message.
/>   'Right, darlin' - ' He knew it too ' - speak up, then.'

  'All right. This message is for Mr Lee. He must contact our mutual friend, the one to whom he owes six favours -' Frances launched herself into space; time would tell if there were rocks far below, or too little water '- who is at present in our Washington Embassy.

  The contact must be indirect, but soonest.'

  '"Indirect, but soonest," I got that. And whose embassy would that be, now?'

  'Mr Lee will know. The message then is "Return to U.K. immediately. I will contact you through Mr Lee". Have you got that?'

  'Ah, I got it. But I ain't makin' no promises. If -

  'If nothing. Do it now. Or find another pub.' She hung up before he could contest the threat, which was empty and childish and self-defeating, but the best she could manage in mid-air at short notice.

  She reached up and swept the remains of her small change into her purse. One thing was for sure, anyway: she had burnt her boats with a vengeance. If Mossad's line into the Saracen's Head public house wasn't secure - David had thought it was okay, but David wasn't infallible; and the Israelis were damn good, but they weren't infallible either - then even if the eavesdroppers didn't manage to trace the call back to this forecourt (and they'd had enough time, it had lasted far too long for safety) there'd be enough on that tape to identify her, and David too, once the right people got round to listening to it.

  The plus factor was that that would take time, because it would be a plain different section evaluating the tape, who certainly wouldn't be able to place her or her embassy straightaway, the more so as their heads would be full of their own Arab-Israeli hassles; it would have to travel through the proper channels, and because money and manpower were short some of those channels were so choked with material that it might take days

  ... even weeks. There was even just a chance that it would sink altogether in some backwater.

  But that wouldn't do at all, she chided herself: putting a smile on the face of a risk was a bad habit, it was always safer to assume the worst. And the worst ... allowing for collation and transcription - and from her own typing pool days she could estimate that closely enough: as a semi-friendly, semi-civilised foreign agency Mossad wouldn't rate high on the pile at the moment - allowing for all that, the worst could be forty-eight hours before the balloon went up ... And then it would be back to that same ignominious typing pool, maybe.

  She stared again through the window at the rain-distorted figure of the young man waiting for her under the canopy above his petrol pumps. She was deluding herself again, of course: breaking a direct instruction, and using a foreign intelligence service to do it, wasn't on a par with breaking school rules, as posted on the assembly hall notice-board for all to see. (Everyone must keep to the LEFT in corridors and on staircases, and Forms must move in single file.) It was big time stuff, like being caught with a boy in the shrubbery, deshabillee, which needed no written rules to indicate the likely punishment.

  So, once they'd added two and two together it would be bread-and-water for some unspecified period, and then out on her shell-like ear, and back to her widow's pension with a framed copy of the Official Secrets Act, the relevant passages heavily underlined in red.

  Unless, of course, it was Colonel Butler himself who was by then in charge of hiring and firing.

  Irony, irony ... all she had to do was to give him a clean bill of health. And although she could argue - and it was true - that she was only making contact with David Audley because it was the truth she was after, it was also true that the truth she was very much predisposed to uncover would give Colonel Butler his promotion, his Ring of Power.

  She snapped her bag shut and stepped out briskly into the rain.

  * * *

  The young man looked at her with undisguised curiosity now: he was bursting to ask her about the souped-up engine under the bonnet.

  'I've checked the oil, it's okay.' He rubbed his hands on his bit of rag. 'And the tyres -

  they're okay too...'

  'Thank you.' Frances stared at him discouragingly. The final irony would be for the promoted Colonel Butler to decide - being the man he was - that however grateful he might be for her disobedience he couldn't possibly overlook such unstable behaviour, such unreliability, in one of his agents. And a female agent too, by God!

  'I - I've filled her up, too.' He was nerving himself to pop some sort of question.

  'Fourteen gallons - or just under fourteen and a quarter, actually.'

  That was at least six gallons more than the normal tank of this make of small family car was designed to take, Frances computed. The only car they'd had spare when the Colonel had banished her from the university had been a tailing special, she'd known that the moment she put her foot down on the accelerator, though without any particular gratitude. But now it was certainly a convenient vehicle to possess.

  'Thank you.' She looked through him as she felt in her purse for a tip. Twenty pence would be enough, but a Honda Four-hundred-four sounded expensive, and he'd remember her whatever she gave him, so ... say, fifty, because he was so beautiful.

  'Could I have my receipt, please.'

  'Oh ... yes, of course!' He blushed becomingly too. 'Thank you very much.'

  'There's a Colonel Butler who lives just outside the village. Brookside House, I think the name is?'

  'Brookside House ... ?' Either the fifty-pence piece, or the engine, or the foxy lady Fitzgibbon seemed to have dried up his mouth.

  'Colonel Butler. Brookside House.'

  'Yes.' He nodded quickly. 'Runs a Rover - a yellow Rover. And ... he's got a daughter

  ...' His eyes glazed again, exactly as they had done for the Honda Four-hundred-four. If that was for Diana Butler, she must be quite a dish, thought Frances.

  'Three daughters.'

  'Yes. Three daughters - Brookside House.' He focused on her briefly, and then pointed down the road towards the houses. 'You go straight through the village, and then bear left at the junction, down the Sandford road, towards the motorway. It's about half a mile on, all by itself, with a long drive to the house, on the edge of the woods - you can't miss it.'

  'Thank you.'

  She wanted to give him a smile, to leave him with something that was really hers, but her mouth wouldn't obey orders, and there was no more time. The wipers swept the screen clear, but when she looked back in the mirror the first of the dead elms had blanked him out of sight, and she was alone again in her shadow country.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Twenty-four hours earlier, before she had studied the edited highlights of the file on Colonel Butler, Brookside House would have ambushed Frances with surprise, even shock.

  Now, of course, the opulent rhododendron tangles at its gateway and the manicured quarter-mile of gravel drive between trimly-fenced horse paddocks amounted to no more than a gloss on the file, computed at compound interest over the years since Captain Butler, sole beneficiary (no relative) of General Sir Henry Chesney, had capitalised on his inheritance.

  The mathematics of the scene confirmed her previous estimate: Chesney and Rawle's had been an old-established, deeply-entrenched and almost disgracefully prosperous business, which had been sold when the pound was still something to conjure with (which was when little Frances Warren had been not long out of her push-chair). Even allowing for the depredations of a quarter of a century's taxation and inflation, and throwing in a full-time gardener and maybe a stableboy with nannie and the school fees of the last ten years, and adding them all to Brookside House, which had been purchased when the Colonel - then the Major - had finally quit his regiment...

  subtracting all this (and the running costs of Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard) from the Chesney-Butler inheritance and there would hardly be a scratch in it, much less a dent.

  The drive curved ahead, alongside a stable block. A horse poked its head out of a loose-box, returning her frown incuriously.

  Add horses to the list ... although of all
people Colonel Butler was no horseman, surely ... but add horses, nevertheless.

  Still only a scratch, not a dent.

  The daughters, then. Obviously the daughters. For girls the horse was as potent a symbol of power and glory as the motor-cycle was for boys - as the Honda Four-hundred-four was for that magnificent young man on the petrol pumps.

  Quadruple garage ahead, beyond another great rhododendron jungle, and a collection of cars to be categorised: Nannie's Allegro in one open garage, under cover; a Police panda, white and pale blue; a gleaming Marina and another gleaming Marina, with close registration marks - both smelling of the Fuzz too, CID and Special Branch, for a guess ... by their cars shall ye know them!

  In a way, it wasn't just a disappointment, it was a surprise, all this. And it wasn't simply that it was hard to adjust Colonel Butler to this state of wealth and comfort which had not come to him either by right of birth or as the spoils of success, but rather that the product of it all - this house, this property, that horse - was not Butler.

  Simply, but inexplicably, they cast the wrong shadow from her sharp memory of the man.

  Colonel Butler - her Colonel Butler - was not stockbroker mock-Tudor and horse-paddocks. He was solid Victorian red brick, gabled and respectable and rooted in all the lost certainties of the nineteenth century, when the sun never set on his flag. His house, his true house, would be a house with good bone structure and secrets of its own, not a thing like this, with no past and no future, but only an endless ephemeral present.

  This wasn't his house, it was her house - Madeleine Francoise's house - out of which she had stepped, across this gravel, down that drive, on to that road, to nowhere, nine years ago, almost to the very day if not to the actual hour.

  'Mrs ... Fisher?'

  She had caught the footfall crunch on the gravel behind her. It had been more important to think that thought through than to turn towards the sound. Now she could come back to it later.