Tomorrow's ghost (4 page)

‘Why didn’t he?’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose … because his idea of Colonel Butler is of someone who obeys and gets on with the dirty jobs that other lesser breeds and bloody desk-wallahs wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole. Which is a noble thought, but maybe not really what the late 1970s require.’ As though he’d suddenly realised that he was giving himself away he glanced quickly at her and grinned his subaltern’s grin at her. ‘So instead he just exudes disgust and disapproval at the world, and bites my head off every time I open my mouth. I suppose I’m just not his type, really.’

If she’d ever had a chance of asking the real Paul what in particular scared him about the operation, other than the actual prospect of encountering Comrade O’Leary round some unexpected corner, she’d lost it now, realised Frances irritably. At the best of times he disliked admitting human weaknesses, and he certainly wasn’t going to do so this time.

‘But then neither are you, Frances dear.’ The grin broadened. ‘So it didn’t exactly cheer him this morning when they told him you were coming, believe me…’ He trailed off.

Whereas now
…
thought Frances, contemplating the plastic mac and the platform shoes… whereas now he’d probably burst a blood-vessel at the sight of her. The memory of the Colonel’s reaction to her proper mousey self, casually encountered in the corridor, was vivid enough. She blanched at the prospect of his reaction to Marilyn.

‘I can’t possibly turn up like this at the University,’ she snapped.

‘Very true,’ agreed Paul. ‘Not that there aren’t some proper little dollies among the students, and you could still pass for one, believe me, with your looks … Except we’re not infiltrating the delectable student body on this one—so your station this afternoon is inside the new Library, and that’s out of bounds to students today. Which means we’ve got to do a quick respectability job on you at the Crossways Motel—a de-tarting process, one might call it in the circumstances.’

‘What d’you mean?’ The prospect of another cover identity alarmed Frances. Covers were not to be taken lightly, they required detailed and careful preparation. Even Marilyn, who had been a rush job, had been allowed a week’s cramming.

‘Oh, nothing elaborate,’ Paul reassured her. ‘Nothing you can’t do with your eyes closed. And they’ve supplied me with a suitcase full of your own clothes—I picked it up twenty minutes before I picked you up. You’ll be playing yourself, near enough.’

They had been to the cottage, thought Frances. Some stranger had gone to her wardrobe and the big old chest-of-drawers, and the dressing table, and had sifted through her belongings, choosing her own personal things. She shivered involuntarily at the thought.

You
’
ll be playing yourself, near enough.

There was something creepy about that, too. After the last three years that was a role she was no longer sure she wanted to play ever again, always supposing she could recall the character and the lines clearly.

‘You can wash that muck off your face at the motel,’ went on Paul. ‘We can’t do anything about that ghastly hair-do except put a wig on it—there’ll be a selection waiting at the motel by now. There isn’t time to do anything else, but you’ll be wearing an academic cap anyway—and a gown, because it’s full academic battle-dress this afternoon. Perhaps a pair of spectacles to make you look a bit more scholarly, instead of your contact lenses. Then you’ll pass all right.’

‘Pass for what?’

‘Post-graduate research fellow. There are a couple of dozen new ones in the English faculty, and as term’s only just started they hardly know each other—and you are an English graduate yourself, Frances, aren’t you? Bristol, was it? Or Durham?’ Paul’s Cambridge superiority surfaced momentarily. ‘You should be able to speak the language.’

‘That was seven years ago.’ Frances ignored the gibe.

‘So long? Well, your supervisor will vouch for you—Professor Crowe. He has full clearance and knows the score.’ Paul gave her another reassuring look. ‘Don’t worry, Frances. All you’re doing really is releasing one of Fighting Jack’s blue-eyed boys for a more sensitive job. We’re not expecting any trouble in the library.’

Famous last words, thought Frances. Apart from being male chauvinist pig patronising words. Obviously Colonel Butler and Paul Mitchell had mentally relegated her to
Kirche, Kinder
and
Kuche,
as being sexually equipped for nothing else.

But she would not give him the satisfaction of observing her anger. Not so long as there was a chance of catching him out.

‘I see … And might an English post-graduate research fellow know what she is supposed to be researching? That’s the first thing she’ll get asked.’

Paul nodded. ‘Ah… now as it happens I had a hand in that little detail, as I’ve been a research fellow myself in my time, you see.’

There was nothing more insufferably pompous than an insufferably pompous young ex-Cambridge male pig, decided Frances.

‘Indeed? And your research included me, did it?’

‘Let’s say, I know where your special interest lies in literature. That one time you invited me down to that little cottage of yours I took a look at your bookshelves, Frances.’

‘My—bookshelves?’

‘That’s right. You can tell a lot about a person by the books on their shelves. Their books don’t lie about them.’

‘But—‘ The words dried up on Frances’s tongue.

‘You’ve got all the books I’d expect an English graduate to have—Chaucer to Hemingway, by way of Fielding and Hardy. And the usual spread of poetry.’ He paused. ‘But you’ve also got three full shelves of folk-lore and fairy stories … La
Belle au
Bois Dormant
in the original French, and a nineteenth-century German copy of
Dom
roschen
…
right down to
The Lord of the Rings
and a first edition of
The Hobbit.
All well-thumbed and dust-free—a dead give-away.’

All well-thumbed and dust-free. Frances stared at him helplessly.

Of course they were well-thumbed and dust-free. Dusting Robbie’s favourite books was one of her compulsive habits. Once she’d decided not to throw them out it had seemed obscene to let them gather dust.

He took her silence for speechless admiration, or something like. ‘So all I did was to tell Professor Crowe about your collection, and he jumped at. the idea. By now he’ll have put it around that the title of your thesis is “The Land of Faerie: From Spenser to Tolkien”. He’s putting in Tolkien because with
The Silmarillion
just out, and the Carpenter biography, Tolkien-lore will be all the rage.’

She had read
The Lord of the Rings,
all three volumes of it, because Robbie had adored it, and was always quoting from it. Its awful poetry apart, it had seemed to her an absolutely marvellous adventure story for romantically-inclined 14-year-olds. But since Robbie had been a 24-year-old SAS lieutenant she had never said so aloud for fear of offending him. And if Professor Crowe thought otherwise perhaps Robbie had been right and she had been wrong, in this as in other matters.

Paul looked at her expectantly, with just the faintest touch of innocence waiting for approbation. But she couldn’t think of anything to say. She had seen that look on Robbie’s face.

He turned back to the road in disappointment. A big sign bearing the legend The North’ flashed by.

‘Well … I thought you could probably have a ball in the new Library, talking Tolkien, while Fighting Jack and I sweated on the outside—that’s all.’ He sniffed.

Frances swallowed. ‘Yes, I’m sure I shall, Paul.’

‘That’s the ticket.’ He grinned at her, quickly reassured that he’d been right all the time. ‘You can be our Sleeping Princess in the Library, and I shall come and wake you with a kiss when we’ve killed the wicked O’Leary.’

THERE WAS
more than one faerie kingdom, Frances decided nervously as she followed Professor Crowe up the main staircase of the new English Library: hardly ten minutes before, she had left Colonel Butler in one such kingdom of magic and illusion, and she had been profoundly sorry for him; now she herself was entering another, and she would need all her wits about her to play her part in it.

*   *   *

‘
Frankly, Mrs Fitzgibbon, I don
’
t know why you are here.
’

To which she had wanted for a moment to reply
Well, that
makes two of us. Colonel,
except the way he had said it had somehow suggested to her that he really wished they were both somewhere else, and that had been the beginning of sympathy.

Or perhaps the sympathy had already germinated as she passed through the banks of chattering, flickering surveillance equipment which had been established on the top floor of the half-occupied Science Tower of the new—or fairly new—University of North Yorkshire, and which reminded her of nothing so much as a television studio girding itself to provide live coverage of a Third World War.

In the midst of which sat Colonel Butler.

He wasn’t exactly brooding over it all, if anything he seemed to have its operators rather well under his control, from what Frances could observe. But his face, as he glanced past her at them from time to time, bore the same expression of heavily-censored contempt which she had noticed on the face of the American air force general who had once lectured her on the development of one-way remotely-controlled pilotless vehicles (he, who had three times brought back a damaged Phantom from the Hanoi bridges) and the psychological hang-ups of the ‘pilots’ who ‘flew’ the RPVs from the depths of their concrete bunkers (‘Those goddamn pinball wizards get to like being briefed by computers…’).

*   *   *

‘
But since you are here I
’
m putting you into the library, to take James Cable
’
s place.
’

No, it wasn’t quite contempt. (She had studied the Colonel’s face carefully. All the features which had gone to make Charlton Heston a box office idol—the forehead, and the bone structure of cheek and jaw, and the artfully broken nose—added up on his face to ugliness, like a miss that was as good as a mile; yet, at the same time, it was an oddly reassuring ugliness, without any hint of cruelty or brutality.) Not contempt, but rather resigned acceptance of another inevitable change for the worse. So might the 1914 Colonel Butler of Paul’s imagination have contemplated a war of machine-guns and trenches, so unpleasantly different from the jolly manoeuvres of Salisbury Plain, but which had to be accepted and mastered nevertheless, and that was that, damn and blast it, with no time for tears.

He was watching her, too—a little warily, as though he was half expecting her to complain about taking over from James at such short notice, or simply because she was a woman, and women tended to be troublesome.

‘Very good, sir,’ said Frances.

*   *   *

‘
Ah
-
urrumph
…
The Library has been designated a safe and secure area. Which means, as a
result of action already initiated, that the probability of an attempt there is
…
statistically low.
’

Frances remembered what Paul had said, which Colonel Butler was now repeating in the approved jargon as though the words hurt his mouth. And recalling her own first reaction to it she wondered if he was waiting for her to make a liberated protest at being fobbed off, as a mere woman, with a dull job while lucky James was given an opportunity to distinguish himself.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Frances.

*   *   *

‘
Detective
-
Sergeant Bollard is in charge of the practical arrangements there, and he will
report to you. Your function is
…
to assess behavioural deviations
—
‘

The machines hummed and hiccupped and whirred and bleeped at Frances’s back, and she knew exactly how Colonel Butler felt as they computed their probabilities and behavioural deviations: the more godlike the technology made him, the more powerless he felt.

*   *   *

‘
Do you think I
’
m talking tommy
-
rot, Mrs Fitzgibbon?
’

Frances realised that she had raised an eyebrow at ‘behavioural deviations’.

‘No, sir. It just sounds that way.’ He had enough troubles without a tantrum from Mrs Fitzgibbon. ‘I can translate it.’

‘
Quite right.
’
He would have smiled, she felt, if it hadn’t been a frowning matter.
‘
The
experts say the library is clear. I say that
’
s the time to start worrying. I have to act on what they
tell me, but you mustn
’
t
—
is that understood?
’

‘Yes, sir.’ Frances decided that she approved of Colonel Butler.

‘
Any questions, then?
’

*   *   *

Yes, Colonel Butler, thought Frances.

You don’t know why I’m here, and neither do I. And it doesn’t make sense to pull me off one operation, where I was halfway to becoming useful, in order to waste me on another.

So what am I really doing here. Colonel Butler?

‘No, sir,’ said Frances.

*   *   *

Professor Crowe opened the Common Room door for her.

An immensely tall young man with a shock of uncombed fair hair and an Oxford D.Phil, gown did a double-take on her, coffee cup halfway to his lips, and then pointed at her.

‘Good God, Hugo—is this your Amazonian blue-stocking?’ he said.

‘Another of your false assumptions, dear boy,’ said the Professor. ‘I said no such thing.’