Tomorrow's ghost (37 page)

The spectator’s detachment was evident.

‘And, what is rarer with that conjunction, of some intellect, I fancy—though he is at pains to conceal it under a khaki manner.’ Crowe contemplated Colonel Butler’s virtue for a moment. ‘So … we have had much excitement here, these last twenty-four hours. Already one of my staff in the Library has been detained. And one of our post-graduate students is … helping the police with their inquiries, as the saying goes.’

Frances frowned with the effort of recollection. There had been Dixon and … and Collins. And Penrose and Brunton—Brunton the Great American Novel seeker, who had been unveiling his girlfriend when the Minister was scheduled to unveil the new Library. And if that, in retrospect, was too good an alibi to be true, she would have staked her reputation on both Collins and Dixon.

‘Now you
are
surprised,’ said Crowe. ‘But you must accept, my dear, that life goes on, and great events occur, even when you are not there to observe them. Remember the Youth in Crane’s
Red Badge
’
,
his armageddon was only a skirmish, and the real battle was being lost and won on another part of the field. That is a very important lesson to learn—‘ He looked up, and past her, over her shoulder ‘—wouldn’t you agree, David?’

Frances stiffened. As she swivelled in the direction of the Professor’s look her bare shoulder reminded her of her relative state of undress, and of Marilyn’s appalling hair, but there was nothing she could do about her appearance.

‘The whole bloody battle can be irrelevant,’ said David Audley. ‘Battle of New Orleans—January, 1815. Peace Treaty of Ghent—December, 1814. Everything’s a matter of communication. Or lack of communication, in this instance.’ He acknowledged Frances with an incurious blink, without a second glance. She might just as well have been stark naked, or dressed as a nun, for all he cared, the blink indicated. ‘Hullo, Frances.’

Come to that, he looked decidedly rough himself, Frances noted. The good suit was creased and rumpled, the shirt was well into its second day, and the unspeakable Rugby Club tie—thin magenta and green stripes on yellow, ugh!—revealed his top shirt button, which was undone, even though the tie itself was savagely pulled into a tiny knot. He hadn’t shaved either, and altogether he didn’t look like a would-be emperor, even of a dying empire.

‘They’ve both gone hunting with Jack Butler, Hugo. The whole damn place is crawling with Special Branch—it’s like the Fuhrer’s bunker, the Science Block, there’s no way I can get into it. I was able to talk to Jock Maitland for a moment or two, thank God—he can be trusted to hold his tongue if no one asks him any questions, but he didn’t know much. How the hell Jack bamboozled the University into installing all that equipment, I’ll never know.’

‘Money, dear boy. Your people stopped their mouths with gold, it never fails; Applied Science is king at the moment, and they’ve been offered all sorts of grants to turn a blind eye to it. Besides which your Jack can be very charming, you know.’

‘I don’t know—not with me, he isn’t!’ said Audley feelingly. ‘The long and short of it is … I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, anyway, Hugo. Except that Jack’s busy routing out an old KGB contact of his somewhere.’

‘They are about to ensnare O’Leary—I told you, dear boy,’ said Crowe.

‘Not alive, they won’t. The information they’ve got is false—he may be regular KGB, but he’s not Russian either—he’s Irish. And I had that from those Irish madmen in the CIA. He’s a bloody kamikaze pilot, that’s what he is.’

‘So you said,’ murmured Crowe mildly. ‘So they will kill him.’

‘That’s not what I’m afraid of—‘ Audley caught himself up short and looked at Frances. ‘Bad manners. I’m sorry, Frances. I’ve got a headache. And part of a hangover … which has been dosed by a crazy pilot in the United States Air Force with an old Indian recipe of his, so the part of me that isn’t hung-over now feels as if it’s been bitten by a rattlesnake…. On top of which I’ve got jet-lag, and I don’t know whether it’s Monday or Christmas. It feels like Monday.’

‘It’s Friday,’ said Frances. That was one thing she really did know. ‘Friday, the eleventh of November. In the afternoon. Hullo, David—good afternoon.’

‘And good afternoon to you, Frances. Although it isn’t.’ He removed his rain-smeared spectacles, wiped them with a grubby handkerchief, put them back on, and stared at her out of eyes like blood-oranges. ‘Why, incidentally, are you partially unclothed?’

‘She got wet, dear boy,’ said Crowe. ‘Like you.’

‘Eh?’ Audley looked down at his jacket: ‘I see—yes. It’s raining, isn’t it!’ He brushed ineffectually at his shoulders.

Frances felt herself smiling. The longer David was away from his wife, the more like a tramp he became. It was hard to imagine him as the source—or, rather, to imagine his abilities and his unpopularity—as the source of all their recent troubles.

He gave up brushing. The blood-oranges came back to her again.

Frances decided to get her information in first. ‘You know I’m responsible for calling you back?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve talked to Jake Shapiro. He was at the base waiting for me, the bastard.’

But how was she going to say it? He was back, and now she didn’t need him. He would roast her, and Sir Frederick would also roast her in due course. And then she would resign, and that would be that. But the inevitable outcome, which no longer worried her at all, did not solve the problem of how to break it to him now.

‘No need to be scared, love.’ Audley misconstrued her silence. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘I did?’ He wasn’t making it any easier.

‘Fred Clinton had you figured right, as my CIA buddies would say.’ Suddenly he was grim. ‘Fortunately.’

She stared at him. ‘What?’

‘You and Mitchell between you. A perfect recipe for disobedience. Or initiative, as Horatio Nelson applied it.’

‘Sir Frederick intended me to call you?’

‘He surely did. He’s determined to make me fight for Jack Butler, and so I will. Now he thinks I shall fight for you two as well—and so I will. But he’ll never take “no” for an answer—which is what I call a communications failure—and I won’t have his job for all the tea in China. I have the same problem with that scheming bastard Jake Shapiro but at least that’s understandable—Jake knows how I feel about Israel, from way back. But Clinton has let the thing become an obsession to such an extent that it’s become dangerous. Now he’s missing the things he should be seeing.’

‘What things?’

‘Ever since I put Jack Butler up for poor old Tom Stocker’s job they’ve been giving him tough assignments—putting him in the forefront of the battle like Uriah the Hittite.

But that’s fair enough—trial by ordeal will prove that God’s on the Butler side as well as Audley.’

‘North Yorkshire University being one of the ordeals, presumably?’ murmured Crowe.

‘That’s what I thought, when I heard about it,’ Audley nodded. ‘A more diabolically stupid operation, that degree ceremony, I find it hard to imagine.’ He paused. ‘Too hard, in fact.’

Frances could nod to that.

‘You’re not suggesting that Colonel Butler was to be discredited at the cost of other people’s lives, David?’ Crowe sat up angrily in his spectator’s chair. ‘You’re not serious!’

‘I’m not sure what I’m suggesting any more, to be honest, Hugo. But I’m beginning to think I’ve been quite unusually stupid—almost as stupid as Sir Frederick Clinton. Stupid and arrogant and self-satisfied. And I’m only just in time to make amends—‘ he gave Frances a little bow ‘—thanks to Mrs Fitzgibbon’s commonsense disobedience.’

Frances gritted her teeth. ‘David, I’ve got something to tell you. And you’re not going to like it one bit.’

He smiled at her tolerantly. ‘It’s okay, love—I know. They wanted you to find a reason why Jack might have wanted to kill her, and of course you found one. But it doesn’t matter, not now.’

‘But he didn’t kill her, David.’

‘Of course he didn’t! The idea’s plainly ridiculous—you know it, I know it. She was a selfish, scheming, cold-hearted, unloving bitch, and if ever a woman needed murdering, she did. But he hasn’t got murder in him. I could have told you that in two seconds flat. And Fred should have realised it too—when they fed him the dirt it should have put him on his guard. The moment I heard about it I realised how bloody stupid I’d been.

‘I mean … it made me think about Jack himself for the first time, not about the great David Audley. Everything that’s been happening to him, I thought it was because of me—because the department’s full of faceless little bastards who hate my guts. So I rather enjoyed letting Jack rub their faces in the mud—I’ve always enjoyed letting them hate me.’

‘”
Oderint dum metuant,
murmured Crowe. ‘Enmity is the most rewarding form of flattery.’

‘Yes.’ Now the smile was vengeful. ‘I’ve half a mind to take Fred’s job and screw the lot of them, just for that, Hugo. Except that now I’ve put the whole thing together differently, and it fits much better this way.’

‘What way?’ Frances heard the sharp note of fear in her voice.

‘I turned Fred’s job down flat—they were never serious about Tom Stocker’s job, they knew I wouldn’t take that. But then there were all these rumours about me wanting Fred’s job—no matter how often I squashed them they kept coming up again—‘

Crowe stirred. ‘You really don’t want the top job?’

Audley scowled at him. ‘Christ, Hugo—not you too!’

‘I only asked, dear boy…. Are you saying that these rumours were planted deliberately—by those who knew you wouldn’t accept it?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I was too stupid to consider the possibility—I’m saying that too.’

‘Ah—now I’m beginning to see! You thought that what was happening to Colonel Butler was directed against you. But now you believe that the rumours about you were actually calculated to stimulate opposition to his appointment? A simple reversal of the obvious, in fact?’

‘More than that, Hugo.’

‘More than that?’ Professor Crowe gazed into space. ‘Yes … it would also account for what happened to Butler. A campaign directed against Butler would have made people suspicious—particularly you—because he is generally well-regarded. But a campaign against your acquisition of Sir Frederick’s job wouldn’t surprise anyone—least of all you.

Is that it?’

Audley nodded.

‘I see. So Butler has been the real target all along? And that effectively eliminates Sir Frederick—and your illegitimate Israeli friend—
and
all the faceless little love-children from your list of villains, dear boy.’ Crowe paused.

‘Then it’s just Butler.’ He started up again. ‘Someone must be very frightened indeed of his getting the job. Quite terrified, in fact, to go to such lengths. They’ve gone a long way beyond domestic politics and slander—they’re into treason and murder, constructively.’

‘Yes,’ said Audley.

‘Is the job that important?’

‘It is and it isn’t. It’s basically a bloody thankless dogsbody job. But whoever gets it carries a lot of clout. And also gets to see a lot of things he’s never seen before. From his own file upwards.’

His own file, thought Frances. Even she had only seen an edited version of that. But he had never seen it at all and now he would be able to. In his promoted place that would be the first thing she’d look at: all her test analyses, all her fitness reports, all her successes and failures.

His file would be a lot bigger than hers, though. It would start before she was born, and it would follow him across the world and back. It would list General Chesney’s last will and testament. It would miss the marital disaster, and the visits to Rifleman Sands, because those were private matters that he had never revealed to anyone, and in certain things Colonel Jack Butler was a very private man…. For a guess, it might also miss this investigation, if Sir Frederick decided to play that close to
his
chest now, after what she had done. But it would certainly include everything about the original disappearance of Madeleine Francoise, and—
Successes and failures
—

‘What’s up, Frances?’ said Audley.

Failures.

‘What’s the matter, Frances?’ repeated Audley.

She looked at him. In fact she had already been looking at him, but not seeing him.

‘Have you ever heard of Leslie Pearson Cole?’

‘Leslie—?’ He frowned at her. ‘Leslie Pearson Cole?’

‘And Trevor Anthony Bond.’

‘Never heard of
him.
But Pearson Cole—what d’you know about Pearson Cole?’

‘Very little. He committed suicide.’

‘That’s right.’ Audley nodded. ‘I wasn’t on the case, thank heavens. There was a botch-up of some kind. Pearson Cole was mixed up in a big security leak, but there was a delay in picking him up, so he took his leak with him. What—?’

‘The delay was because a Major Butler was taken off the case, David. His wife had disappeared—he was delayed by that first. And then someone gave some conflicting evidence, for no reason. And nobody put two and two together.’

They stared at each other.

‘Yes…’ Audley nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that would do very well—very well indeed. At least for a start.’

‘In what way, dear boy?’ asked Crowe.

Audley turned to him. ‘Jack Butler’s a good chap—he’ll do a good job when he’s promoted. He’s very painstaking. Not a genius, but very, very painstaking. There’s no general reason why anyone should go to such lengths to block his promotion—he isn’t disliked. He isn’t going to carry me up with him—so there has to be a
specific
reason.

That’s what I’ve been thinking ever since I came back: somebody doesn’t want him to be able to put two and two together and make four. If he isn’t promoted, then he never will—and two and two will never meet. And then somebody will go on being safe somewhere.’

‘You have a traitor in the camp, dear boy.’ Crowe sat back in spectator’s comfort, hands at prayer. ‘It happens in the best regulated families from time to time.’

‘Yes.’ Audley gave Frances a grimly anticipatory nod. ‘Someone quite low down nine years ago, most likely. But quite high up by now. And someone who doesn’t know that we know, by God!’