Tomorrow's ghost (16 page)

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 ex
tra 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 P
arker,
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 Mercia 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?’

Frances checked herself just in time. It was as if the ground had trembled beneath her, warning her of a hidden pit in front of her. Another step—another word, another sentence or two—and she would be over the edge: she would be telling him how clever she was, she would be patronising him, and that would close his mouth just when she needed him to tell her not
what
he thought about Major Butler, but
why
he thought it.

She put her empty glass carefully down on the hearth. It had been David Audley—again, and always, David—who had said in his interrogation lectures that
truth is the
ultimate weapon.
So it was time to pretend to drop her guard again. And this time it had to work.

‘Of course, my name isn’t really “Fisher”, Mr Hedges—as I’m sure you will have guessed.’

His face blanked over with surprise.

‘But the “Mrs” is genuine. My husband was killed in Ulster a few years back.’

It was more than a few now, strictly speaking. How time accelerated with its own passage! In a year or two Robbie would be ancient history. But in the meantime he surely wouldn’t mind helping her, anyway.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need to be. It was an accident, actually—not the IRA. He was on foot patrol one day, and he slipped on the edge of a pavement just as an armoured personnel carrier was passing. It was a road accident, I always think of it as that, now.’ Was that how Major—Colonel—Butler remembered his Madeleine Francoise? If it had been Patrick Parker cruising by … she might just as easily have been knocked down by his car on that country road as by the unknowable madness that had driven him.

‘We had bought a cottage on the edge of a village, about an hour’s run from here. I still live there.’

His mother had thought that was a mistake, and that a flat in London, near her work, would be far more sensible, far less lonely. But she would have been just as lonely in London; or even more lonely, since the loneliness of the cottage had been—and still was—something natural and inevitable which she could accept, and with which she could come to terms. And which, if she faced the truth (that ultimate weapon), was what she wanted. (Mother-in-law only wanted to get her married off again as soon as decently possible, anyway; gaining an unwanted daughter-in-law had been bad enough, but then losing a son and gaining only the responsibility of a young widow was unbearable—the more so when the widow had made it abundantly plain that once was enough.) Mustn’t think of all that again though, sod it! ‘—but I’m away a lot of the time, so the local police keep an eye on the place for me.’

He nodded to that. Keeping an eye on places was also something he understood; and since there was more that he had to understand that was encouraging.

‘There’s a policeman who comes to see me regularly. He’s an old chap, and he’s pretty close to retirement—he’s very nice and kind, and he knows everything that goes on in the village … Like, an old-fashioned bobby.’

Was that the right word?

‘A dying breed,’ said ex-Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges.

It was the right word.

‘Yes … well, it’s got so he’s keeping an eye on me as well as the cottage. We drink cocoa together, because he doesn’t like coffee. And he tells me I should get married again and have a houseful of babies.’

Constable Ellis and Mother-in-law were strange allies, when she thought about them.

‘So you should,’ said William Ewart Hedges.

‘Chance would be a fine thing!’ A maidenly blush would have been useful, but that wasn’t within her histrionic range. ‘Anyway, he came to see me regularly during the power workers’ strike last year, every time it was our turn for a black-out—he’d drop in of an evening to see how I was coping … To chat me up, or to cheer me up.’

He seemed for an instant to be on the edge of saying something, but then to have thought better of it, closing his mouth on the unspoken words. Perhaps he had felt the ground tremble under him too, thought Frances; perhaps he had been about to say
You
seem to be coping well enough, Mrs Not
-
Fisher. Well enough with power cuts
‘
and widowhood
both
—
perhaps too well for your own good, Mrs not
-
Fisher.

So the Fitzgibbon facade was on the top line today.

‘But one night he was the one who needed cheering up.’

(More and more it had been Mrs Fitz who had been cheering up Mr Ellis, and not vice-versa; because Mr Ellis could remember an older world in which he lived, and which he liked very much better; whereas Mrs Fitz didn’t know any better, so that for her the worse was only a small decline from the bad, and the better was just a legend.)

‘Yes?’ Hedges was looking at her with intense curiosity.

‘Sorry.’ Frances concentrated her mind again. There really was something wrong with her today, the way her thoughts were wandering into irrelevances. It must be post-Clinton (and post-Marilyn) shock, if not post-bomb malaise.

‘There was a break-in at the church … Well, not really a break-in, because it wasn’t locked properly. The thieves got away with some rather beautiful seventeenth-century silver.’

‘Yes…’ Hedges nodded reminiscently. ‘We’ve had the same thing hereabouts. It’s like taking chocolate from a baby.’

Frances nodded back. ‘They never caught the thieves—the local police didn’t.’

‘Never caught ours either. Long gone, they were. It was four days before we even knew they’d lifted the stuff, and—‘ He stopped abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. Go on, Mrs … Fisher.

Not coppin ‘em was putting him down, your old chap, was it?’

‘No, Mr Hedges, it wasn’t that at all. Quite the opposite, almost.’ She paused deliberately.

‘The opposite?’

She had him now. ‘Yes. The local CID thought it was one of his local tearaways—a boy they’d had their eye on already. But they couldn’t prove it, you see.