Tomorrow's ghost (2 page)

Emergency.

Frances grabbed her phone. ‘Dad? Is that you?’

‘Marilyn love?’

‘It’s me. Dad. What’s the matter?’

‘Marilyn love—‘

The recognition sign was repetition.

‘It’s me, Dad. What’s the matter? Are you all right?’ For once the recognition jargon rang absolutely true.

Emergency.

‘It’s your mother, love—she’s been taken very bad. You must come home at once.’

‘What!’ Frances piled shock on surprise.

‘I’m sorry, love—springing this on you when you’ve just started your new job … But she needs you, your mother does. We both need you. You must come home to look after her.’

Sod it!
Sod it
—

‘Home—?’ Frances caught her anger just in time and transformed it into concern.

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, love. Right this minute. The doctor’s coming again this afternoon, and you must be there for him.’

Frances looked at the clock.
Home
—
right this minute
was a categorical order which left no room for argument: after all the time and careful planning that had gone into Marilyn Francis, and just when things were shaping up nicely, they were pulling her out and aborting the operation.

‘Yes, Dad—of course. I’ll leave this minute.’

‘There’s a good girl. I knew you wouldn’t let your old dad down.’

Sod it! thought Frances again. Something had gone wrong somewhere, but it couldn’t be anything she’d done, or not done, because at this stage she’d done nothing except be Miss Marilyn Francis, and Miss Francis as yet hadn’t gone anywhere near Research and Development.

‘I’ll get the bus to Morden, Dad. I can get a tube from there.’

‘No need to, love. A friend of Tommy’s is coming down to collect you—young Mitch.

You’ve met him, when he was in the army. He’ll pick you up at that cafe where Tommy came that time, in about half an hour, say. Okay?’

‘Okay, Dad. Don’t worry. I’ll be there.’

‘Goodbye then, love.’

‘Goodbye, Dad.’

She replaced the receiver automatically and sat staring at it for a moment. She had wasted a fortnight of her life as Marilyn, but now it was over and done with, and Marilyn was fading away, a gaudy little flower who had blushed unseen and wasted her April Violets and Faberge Babe on Gary’s nose. It was enough to make her weep.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Mrs Simmonds solicitously.

But there was no time for tears: Marilyn Francis could not die just yet. Or rather, she must die as she had lived.

‘Yes … I’m okay.’

Mrs Simmonds reached across and patted her arm. ‘Of course you are, dear.’

So Control had already planted the information.

‘But my Mum’s very ill, my Dad says.’

‘Yes, I know. Your father told me.’ Mrs Simmonds nodded. ‘But you mustn’t worry.

There are these drugs they’ve got now … and they’re finding new ones all the time, you know.’

Plainly, he had gone even further: in order to remove the daughter convincingly and quickly he had made the illness terminal. Nothing less than such a confidence could have turned Mrs Simmonds’ anger into sympathy.

But that was the last thing Marilyn Francis would have noticed at this moment, with a sick mum and an inadequate dad on her hands, and young Mitch to meet in half an hour.

She turned to Mrs Simmonds. ‘I’ve got to go and look after her—my Mum. My Dad’s dead useless.’

Mrs Simmonds winced at the adjective, but managed to keep the Awful Truth secret.

‘Yes, dear—naturally.’

‘I mean, I’ve got to go right now.’ Miss Francis reached for her typewriter cover. ‘The doctor’s coming to see her this afternoon. So I haven’t time to see Mr Cavendish. Will you tell him?’

‘Of course I will. Don’t you worry about that.’ Mrs Simmonds frowned suddenly.

‘Are you all right for money … to tide you over, I mean?’

‘Money?’ Frances realised suddenly that tomorrow was pay day.

Go directly home. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £58.55.

Mrs Simmonds reached for her bag. ‘I could let you have five pounds, dear.’

In the circumstances that was true sisterly generosity.

‘And I’ll phone up the Agency and tell them what’s happened,’ said Mrs Simmonds.

‘So don’t you worry about that either.’

It wasn’t sisterly generosity at all; the old bitch had decided that the instant departure of Marilyn was cheap at £5, especially when the chance of ordering a better class of girl from the Agency was included in the price.

Frances wondered whether Sir Frederick Clinton had a better class of female operative to hand on his books, complete with 140 words a minute Pitman’s.

But that was his problem now. More to the point, she wondered whether little Miss Marilyn Francis, painted and dyed, would have enough cash to tide her over at this stage of the week, and what she would do if she hadn’t, and her mum was very ill and she was having to throw up her job.

Poor little Marilyn!

Marilyn burst into tears.

IN FACT
, poor little Marilyn revenged herself twice over on Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon before Paul Mitchell arrived at the transport cafe, once in the person of an elderly lorry-driver who obviously feared that she was running away from home, and advised her against seeking her fortune in Central London, and the second time by a leather-jacketed youth of indeterminate age who obviously hoped she was running away from home, and offered to bear her to the bright lights on the back of his Kawasaki.

So she had been forced to re-animate Marilyn briefly, first to shake her head at the lorry-driver and then to send the Kawasaki owner about his business—

‘
Bug off! I
’
m waiting for someone.
’

‘
Suit yourself, scrubber!
’

*   *   *

‘You’re late.’ The lorry-driver’s concern and the youth’s knowing contempt combined with the strains of the morning to fray Frances’s nerves.

‘Christ! You look awful!’ Paul planted a kiss on her cheek before she could avoid him. ‘And what’s more—you smell awful too!’

‘And you’re still late. I thought there was an emergency of some sort?’

‘There is. But I’m not James Hunt—and if I was it wouldn’t have made any difference.

I’ve come all the way from Yorkshire this morning, non-stop except for the times the Police flagged me down for breaking the speed limit on the motorway—they should have sent a chopper for you, but all they had to spare was me. So get moving, Frances dear—‘ Paul picked up her cup and finished off its contents ‘—Ugh! Because there are leagues to be covered ‘ere 14.30 hours.’

He held the door open for her. The lorry-driver frowned and the Kawasaki youth gave her a jeering look.

‘Where are we going?’

Paul pointed to the yellow Rover directly ahead of them. ‘Back to Yorkshire again double-quick, if Jack Butler’s new car holds together so long. I would have preferred mine, but like you say—it’s an emergency.’

She waited until he had settled down into the traffic. ‘What’s the emergency in Yorkshire?’

‘Ah … now there you’ve got me, sweetie. So far as I was concerned, everything was going according to plan. By now there’s probably total confusion, without Mitchell to put things right. But when I left everything was A-Okay.’

Frances thought for a moment. ‘You know they pulled me off a job?’

Mitchell shook his head and put his foot down.

‘Nope. Or, at least, I didn’t know you were working until I saw you just now … and from our past acquaintance I’m assuming that you don’t normally spend your free time dressed like a two-bit dolly-bird. Not that it doesn’t suit you—‘

‘Don’t be offensive.’

‘I wasn’t being offensive. I was just admiring the skilful way you have thrown yourself into your cover, whatever it may be, respectable Mrs Fitzgibbon. In fact, if I hadn’t known you, I wouldn’t have known you, if you see what I mean—even apart from the smell, that is.’

Frances took hold of her temper, recalling Paul’s technique of old. Once upon a time he had fancied his chances, and this was his juvenile response to being brushed off; but she must not let it blind her to the knowledge that he was clever and efficient, and ambitious with it.

The effort of exercising will-power was steadying and soothing. They hadn’t pulled her out of British-American because anything had gone wrong there, but because something more important had come up elsewhere. And, by the same logic, they wouldn’t have wasted Paul on a chauffeur’s job without good reason when he was involved in that same more important something.

‘Are you supposed to be briefing me—is that the idea, Paul?’

He grinned at her. ‘Good on you, Frances! That’s Jack Butler’s idea exactly.’

‘Colonel Butler?’

‘
Colonel
Butler as ever is, yes. Fighting Jack, no less—the Thin Red Line in person.’

‘He asked for me?’ Frances frowned at the road ahead. She knew Colonel Butler by sight, and a little by reputation, but had never worked under him.

‘No-o-o. Fighting Jack did not ask for you.’ This time he grinned privately. ‘Not for this little lark, he wouldn’t.’

‘What lark?’

‘What lark…’ Paul tailed off as he waited to leave the slip-road for the motorway proper. The Rover coasted for a moment, then surged forward across the slow and fast lanes straight into the overtaking one. Frances watched the needle build up far beyond the speed limit.

‘What lark.’ Paul settled back comfortably. ‘I take it you’ve heard of O’Leary, Frances?’

‘Michael O’Leary?’

‘The one and only. Ireland’s answer to Carlos the Jackal.’

‘The Irish Freedom Fighters, you mean?’

‘Sure and begorrah, I do. De Oirish Fraydom Foighfers—yes.’

Frances swallowed. ‘But I’m not cleared for Irish assignments, even in England.’

Paul nodded. ‘So I gather. But apparently there’s a Papal dispensation in the case of Michael O’Leary and his boyos. And on the very best of grounds, too, I’m telling you, to be sure.’

‘On what grounds?’

There was a Jaguar ahead hogging the overtaking lane—far ahead a moment ago, but not far ahead now. Paul flashed his lights fiercely.

‘Get over, you bastard! Make way for Her Majesty’s Servants, by God!’ Paul murmured. ‘You’re breaking the bloody law, that’s what you’re doing.’

The Jaguar moved over, and flashed back angrily as they swept past him.

‘On what grounds? … Well, for a guess, on the grounds that O’Leary is about as Irish as—say—the Russian ambassador in Dublin. Or if, by any remote chance, there is a drop or two of the old Emerald Isle stuff in his veins … then because he’s not really concerned with foightin’ fer Oirish fraydom—at a guess, quite the reverse, if you take my point.’

Frances took his point. It was what her poor romantic Robbie had always maintained, she recalled with a dull ache of memory: to him the Irish had always been more victims than villains, even the psychos whom he hunted, and who had hunted him—hog-tied by ancient history which was no longer relevant, financed by Irish Americans who had no idea what was really happening to their dollars, but ultimately manipulated by some of the very best trained KGB cover-men in the business. It didn’t help the ache to recall that she hadn’t believed him, because he found Reds under every bed; though at least she hadn’t argued with him, because it helped him to fight more in sorrow than in anger, even after three beastly tours of duty; she’d even been oddly relieved, that last time, to learn that they hadn’t been responsible, his victims—at least not directly—for what had happened to him.

‘It’s not surprising, really,’ mused Paul, taking it for granted that she had taken his point. ‘Whenever there’s trouble in Ireland, someone else has to cash in—you can’t blame the buggers. The Spaniards did, and then the French, and the Germans. The KGB’s only bowing to history.’

Frances thrust Robbie back into his filing cabinet in the furthest corner of her memory, where he belonged. ‘We know that for sure?’

‘Not for sure. Nothing Irish is for sure. But it was the IRA that told us.’

Frances waited. Because she wasn’t cleared for Ireland she didn’t know much about the tangle of Irish security beyond what she had read in the weekly sheets in the department in her secretarial days, when she had had to type them out. But ion those days the IFF had amounted to little more than an abbreviation for Michael O’Leary’s expertise with the booby-trap and the high-velocity rifle.

‘They don’t quite know what to make of O’Leary. They smell sulphur, if not Vodka—though Vodka doesn’t smell, does it! Say caviare, then…’ He nodded to himself, watching the road. ‘They’ve been prepared to take the credit for his hits—in Ulster.’

‘But now he’s come to England?’

‘That’s right. “To take the war into the enemy country”, as he puts it. We think
they
think he may make the war a bit too hot for them—so they’ve dropped us the word.

Only they don’t know where he is, and nor do we.’

‘He’s pretty elusive, then.’

‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’s got nothing on Michael O’Leary. But we do rather think he’s using some of the KGB ultra-safe houses in Yorkshire, as a matter of fact. Just a hint we’ve picked up.’

Back to Yorkshire double
-
quick.

Frances nodded. ‘And just what is his war, exactly?’

‘Ah … well, you see he’s got a little list. Of Criminals Sentenced by Military Tribunal for Crimes Against Ireland, as he calls it.’

‘But that’s old hat.’

‘Sure it is. So everything in Ireland is old hat—it’s all just a re-run of the same old late-night films we’ve seen half a dozen times before. Only this time maybe the KGB has bought the natural breaks to advertise their product.’

And that did make a difference, thought Frances grimly. It might even change the end of the film itself.

‘I see. And the top name on the list is to be found in Yorkshire, presumably—is that it?’

‘Yes … and no—‘ Paul stopped as he glanced in his mirror.