Tomorrow's ghost (38 page)

‘Don’t be too sure, dear boy. They’ll be running scared now,’ Crowe admonished him. That’s when they’ll become dangerous.’

‘They can’t know. Because they don’t know I’m back.’ Audley reached towards the Glenfiddich. ‘I think I’ll have a celebratory slug of my duty-free USAF hooch. I’m going to enjoy this… And, above all, they won’t be running scared because they’ll be expecting Mrs Fitzgibbon here to come up any moment with a nice handful of sticky mud which will keep Jack Butler firmly and safely among the other ranks. A nice, neat bloodless solution. Nothing to stir nasty suspicions in nasty suspicious minds like mine. No need to put O’Leary at risk by using his special talents…. Cheers!’ He swung towards Frances.

‘My manners! May I top you up—‘ he stopped.

‘What—what d’you mean—O’Leary’s special talents?’ said Frances.

He relaxed. ‘It’s all right, Frances. As long as Jack is under suspicion of murdering his eminently murderable wife then they’ll strive to keep him healthy and unpromoted.

You’ve actually saved him by giving him his motive, love—if you’d proved him innocent then O’Leary would have probably been given a new target by the name of Butler.’

‘
Oh my God!
’
whispered Frances.

Crowe was looking at her. Crowe knew what Audley didn’t know.

She’d told the Death Story.

‘I’ve already phoned Control,’ said Frances.

Once you’ve summoned
him, he
won’t go away empty-handed.

THIS YORKSHIRE RAIN
wasn’t like Lancashire rain, or even like Midland rain, thought Frances resentfully as the car thudded into another unavoidable puddle which had spread into the centre of the narrow road: in the Midlands it had been half-hearted drizzle, with the occasional well-bred little storm; in Lancashire it had been pervasive wetness; but here, on the shoulder of the high moors, it was an obliterating deluge which had to be fought every inch of the way.

The car juddered and skidded over a pot-hole hidden in the puddle and the spray rose up simultaneously ahead, to dash itself on the windscreen a fraction of a second later, and underneath, to strike the floor beneath them with a solid
thump.

‘You’re going too fast,’ said Audley nervously. ‘If you kill us on the way we won’t get there at all.’

It was such a stupidly obvious thing to say that Frances felt a half-hysterical giggle beneath her irritation that he should have said it at all.

‘If you can drive better, then you can drive,’ she snapped back at him out of her knowledge (which was common knowledge, for he had never concealed it) that the great David Audley was a bad driver who hated driving, and who would have still managed to put them at risk in this downpour, on this road, even at half her speed.

He lapsed into sullen silence beside her, and she instantly felt half-ashamed, and half-angry with herself for snapping him down. It was the sort of thing a shrewish wife might have said, all the worse for being true; and, worse still, she knew also that his fear for their safety was sharpened by a greater fear which she shared with him.

*   *   *

They were dropping down off the ridge, she could sense it rather than see it, between the low, half-ruined dry-stone walls with their occasional stunted bushes and trees in the featureless moorland landscape which the rain narrowed around them.

Somewhere ahead of them, down there ahead of them in the greyness, was the opening into the tree-shrouded valley of the Thor Brook, still almost as secret and isolated as when the first monks and lay brothers trudged up it all those forgotten centuries ago.

‘How much further?’ asked Audley.

The child’s eternal question—

*   *   *

‘
How much furt
her. Mummy?
’

‘Not far, dear.’

‘But I don’t
see
anything.’

‘You’re not meant to see anything.’ Father always knew the answer. He always knew how much further and how long. He even knew, unfailingly, how the films on TV ended, whether they were sad or happy. He knew everything.

‘Why not?’

‘Because that’s why they came here, the old monks. Because there was nobody here, and it was miles from anywhere. Remember Rievaulx, Frances—hidden there in its valley. Getting away from men to be closer to God, that was what being a Cistercian monk was all about.’

‘But why. Daddy?’ She knew the answer now, he had told it to her before, but she wanted the comfort of hearing it again.

‘Because it was a nasty, rough world, and they wanted to get away from it.’ Patient repetition.

‘But Kirkstall Abbey’s in the middle of a town.’ Unanswerable logic.

‘It wasn’t when they built it, sweetie. Things have changed a lot since the twelfth century, you know.’ Unarguable answer.

‘It’s still a nasty, rough world,’ said Mother dryly.

‘And now you can’t get away from it, either,’ said Daddy.

*   *   *

And so Frances Warren had come to Thornervaulx the first time.

*   *   *

‘Thornervaulx?’ The man presiding over—the communications centre had not been overawed at first by Audley’s appearance, for Audley’s appearance had not been overawing. But the penny had dropped at last, with Jock Maitland banging the machine, and the man had accepted that the big dishevelled man with the little bedraggled blonde dolly-bird added up to something that was not what it seemed. ‘Yes, sir—Colonel Butler and Mr Cable have gone to Thornervaulx.’

‘And Paul Mitchell?’ said Frances.

‘Yes—‘ For the life of him, in spite of her warrant card, he couldn’t bring himself to add ‘madam’

‘—Mr Mitchell’s gone there too.’

‘To see Trevor Bond?’ It fitted too well to be wrong: O’Leary needed a safe house close to the University, and there, just across the high ridge of heather within sight of the top of the Science Block on a clear day, was someone Colonel Butler of all men would never have forgotten. It would be so close to the surface of his memory, the remembrance of that name and that place, that it was a certainty. And because it was a certainty it was more than that, was her fear: it was the bait on a hook for Colonel Butler if things went wrong.

Or was she imagining everything? And was David Audley imagining everything?

The man didn’t answer her directly, and Audley started to growl something angry in his throat.

‘Yes—‘ The man’s answer pre-empted Audley’s anger.

‘We have to get a message to Colonel Butler—at once. About O’Leary,’ Audley converted the anger into a command.

‘I’m afraid we can’t do that, sir.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Audley pointed to the banks of equipment. ‘You’ve got enough there to transmit to bloody Moscow!’

‘The system is deactivated, sir.’ As the man’s voice strengthened Frances’s heart sank: he was no longer scared because he was sure of his ground. ‘I’m only here to watch over it—and to take any calls.’ He nodded towards the telephone on the table beside him.

Audley pounced on the phone. ‘Well—give me the line to Thornervaulx then, for God’s sake. There has to be a line, damn it!’

‘Yes, sir—but there isn’t at the moment—‘

‘Why not?’ Audley shook the receiver impotently.

‘The line is out. Sergeant Ballard phoned me half an hour ago—not half an hour, sir.

The Post Office says there’s probably water in the cable somewhere. They’ve sent men out to look for the trouble, but … but we haven’t been able to get through for an hour or more. Sergeant Ballard says. They’re doing all they can—‘ He broke off abruptly, and Frances saw that he at last was beginning to become frightened too. Then he brightened.

‘Sergeant Ballard said he was sending men out to tell the Colonel, sir.’

Audley looked at Frances, and the look confirmed her own fear—and Sergeant Ballard’s too.

If the line was out, that might mean there was water in the cable—it happened, and there was enough water to make it happen now. But she could remember Sergeant Ballard’s cool competence, and she knew that even in the most torrential downpour he wouldn’t accept water as the only answer to a breakdown in communications.

Well … there was a flicker of hope there, kindling against the bigger blaze of fear.

Perhaps Colonel Butler’s disdain of complicated modern electronics might warn him now, where a totally secure communications system wouldn’t have hinted that someone was trying to isolate him. And even if it was a much fainter hope than the fear—not only because O’Leary was a kamikaze assassin, but also because he had no reason to believe that he was now O’Leary’s target—then at least he would by now have Sergeant Ballard’s reinforcements beside Cable and Mitchell to make the hit more difficult.

But it was still only a hope.

‘Frances. We must go.’ Audley’s tone betrayed the same inescapable conclusion.

‘You’d better drive.’

*   *   *

‘How much further?’ repeated Audley.

‘Not far now—‘ It was no longer a childish question. But childish memories, which she had never recognised as having registered at the time, came from nowhere to help her. ‘There’s a bridge up ahead, over the stream—we go along beside the stream, and then we come to the bridge. It’s a little narrow bridge—‘

She knew what he was thinking, his thoughts burned her.

*   *   *

‘Why did you phone Control?’

‘Why?’ Frances pressed her foot down to the floor. Why indeed!

‘It was finished. I wanted to get it over and done with.’

Not true. Or, not the whole truth, anyway. She had been very pleased with herself, very full of the pride before which every fall had to go, very pleased with her own cleverness, with her own unerring instinct.

She hadn’t known how the instinct had come to her, but she’d been consciously saving that up for consideration at leisure, like a favourite sweet to be smuggled up to bed, past the tooth-cleaning ritual, to be sucked secretly and selfishly in the darkness after lights-out. Four out of ten had become ten out of ten.

And she had wanted the smug sod at the end of the telephone. Extension 223, to squirm—she had wanted to hear him squirm as she gave him the answer he hadn’t expected.

*   *   *

‘He couldn’t have done it. Not possibly.’

Fact. He couldn’t dispute fact.

‘What?’

‘He was in Blackburn at 10.30 that day—maybe earlier. Like he said in his report.’

‘What?’

‘I have a cast-iron witness. He remembers the time exactly.’

No answer. She would throw him a bone to gnaw at, then—out of sheer cruelty.

‘He had a motive. But he’d never have done it then—or got anyone else to do it. Not on November 11th.’

That had been sheer bravado, to go with the cruelty. She didn’t even know how she would record that subjective evidence of character and temperament and upbringing and history, which was much stronger in the end—at least for her—even than Rifleman Sands’ resolute evidence.

She only knew that she could hardly write:
Of all the dates in the year, if he was going to
murder his wife, or even wish h
er dead
—
which, being Colonel Butler, he would never do anyway,
or even wish
—
that would be the very last, most impossible day. Because that was the day
–

It was the day that had thrown her, even when her instinct had told her it was important. Nowadays, when it didn’t matter, when it was just a pious formality except for the old generation who knew which day was really which. Remembrance Day was always on a Sunday: that was the day they marched to the Cenotaph and to the thousands of war memorials up and down the country and planted their wreaths and poppies without really remembering anything at all, because they had nothing to remember, because yesterday’s ghosts weren’t worth mourning in a nasty, rough world.

They would have mostly forgotten, as she had, that the Sunday was always only the closest day to that old real eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of that original year—it was almost an accident that she recalled her father telling her (he who knew everything) that in the old days everything in Britain had stopped for two minutes to remember something which had happened at 11 o’clock on November llth in 1918.

But Colonel Butler had always remembered. What exactly he remembered—he hadn’t been alive when Rifleman Sands had first walked up Revidge for the big fireworks display, which had reminded him of the trenches, with the candles in jam jars at his front gate—what
he
remembered, she could only guess at: maybe his father, against whom he’d revolted, or his father’s friends; or his own friends and comrades from Normandy and Germany; or his own men from those other trenches of Korea, Nannie’s husband among them; or even the men he himself had killed so efficiently in his time. Or even the old General himself, who’d had a hand in it all from the beginning, father and son beginning.

That was something she intended to find out eventually—his girls could find it out for her simply by asking: they were probably the only human beings who could ask the question with a chance of receiving an answer; no one else (not even a second Mrs Butler) had the right to expect an answer—which she already knew in her heart, but which she would never write down, for it must always be his secret act of remembrance:
Because that is the day when
he keeps faith with his dead, the day of love and honour and pity
and
pride and compassion and sacrifice, and he would never add a private ghost of his own to that list,
on that day, not ever, not this man, not ever
—

*   *   *

A private ghost.

Yesterday’s ghost—Frances could feel her heart thump—she had laid yesterday’s ghost at the terrible cost of raising a new one for tomorrow—had she?

They were getting very close now. Through the rain-streaked side window she had been catching glimpses of the swollen Thor Brook between the fringe of trees which separated the road from the stream for the last half-mile before they met at the bridge of Thornervaulx.