"Tomorrow's ghost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Price Anthony)

'And in this case he didn't like the look of it?'

'That's right.' He nodded. 'You see, he knew there hadn't been any local accidents that morning - road accidents involving personal injury - which was the most obvious answer. And she wasn't the sort of woman to just go off and not phone back, if she'd been delayed anywhere ... There was the kiddie in bed, see ... And although it had stopped raining by then there isn't much cover on those country roads at that time of year - it'd be about the same time as now, with most of the leaves off the trees. So she'd have likely got quite wet, with just a light coat and a head-scarf ... It just didn't smell right to him.'

'Yes?'

'What did it smell of, you mean? Well ... he thought it might be a hit-and-run, with her in a ditch somewhere maybe ...' He trailed off.

There was something else, something left unsaid or something not yet said. Frances waited.

'Or maybe worse...' He drank some more of his beer, and then wiped his mouth again with the table-cloth handkerchief. 'You see, usually, whether we're really worried or not, the first thing to do when a woman goes missing is to get on to the husband. If there's any trouble of any sort ... if he isn't part of the trouble himself, then nine times out of ten he knows what is, or he's got some idea of it. Or he knows where she'd go, anyway - to her mother, or her sister, or even to some friend of hers nearby...' He trailed off again.

There had been no mother, no sister and no nearby friend. But what was more interesting was that Hedges didn't like talking about Colonel - Major - Butler, so it seemed.

'But we had a bit of a problem there at first - or our lad did. Because the cleaning woman had told him the Major had gone up north on business - driven off at the crack of dawn, the wife had told her - but the woman didn't know where. And she didn't know what his business was, of course ... She thought he wasn't in the army any more, she said, and she thought he maybe worked for the Government in London. But she didn't know what at.' The cleaning woman had been a smart lady, thought Frances.

'Normally this isn't a problem.' Hedges shook his head. 'You just ask the neighbours.

But there weren't any neighbours, and they hadn't been living there long - not near neighbours, anyway. So the sergeant got the constable to find their address book, and told him to try the London numbers in it.' He gave Frances an old-fashioned look. 'There was one of them in the front with no name to it, so he tried that first.'

01-836 20066, thought Frances. Or its 1969 equivalent ... The cleaning lady and the constable had both been smart.

Hedges nodded at her. 'So that was when we really got our skates on - the CID and the Special Branch. But that's all on record, of course ... what we did, and what they did.

You probably know more about that than I do, Mrs Fisher.' The old-fashioned look had a sardonic cast to it now. 'Like what the Major's business up north was, that day. We never got a "Need to Know" clearance for that.'

'What were you told?'

'Verbally...' Hedges blinked and paused, as though for a moment the memory eluded him. 'I was told to discount him from my inquiries - that was at first. Then later on I was told that I must check for sightings of him, or of his car, in the vicinity at the material time. Which we would have done as a matter of routine by then if we hadn't been warned off in the first place, of course.'

Frances was tempted to ask him what he had deduced from that change of instructions, but then quickly rejected the temptation. He could only have made the wrong deduction, that the Major had provided an alibi which had not in the end seemed water-tight to the Special Branch; and by telling him how the actual facts had been so very curiously and inconclusively different she might colour his memory.

She waited.

His lips compressed into a tight line. 'There were no such sightings, Mrs Fisher.'

In that moment Frances decided that she would have to investigate the circumstances of Colonel Butler's not-alibi herself, and not merely ask for them to be re-checked as she had intended. It would mean another wearisome, time-consuming journey north, with little promise of further enlightenment because they had never seemed to have any rhyme or reason to them in the first place, let alone any connection with Mrs Butler's disappearance. But nevertheless, they remained as a small, strange inconsistency, like an irrelevant, but mysterious footnote at the bottom of the Special Branch report.

She pulled herself back to the more pressing problem. 'Is that what you meant by

"Could have", Mr Hedges? He could have been in ... the vicinity at the material time - in another car, say?'

'We never traced another car. He would have had to have hired one from somewhere, and left it somewhere.' Hedges paused. 'When he finally arrived that evening he was driving his own car, anyway. And we never turned up any unaccounted car hirings for that morning.' He stared into the fire for a second or two, and then glanced up sidelong at her. 'Assuming he couldn't prove his movements for that morning - where he was, or where he should have been ... if he didn't go north, as the cleaning woman said ... if he'd waited around somewhere until his wife came out ... if he knew where she was going...'

He was building up the 'its' deliberately, as though to demonstrate what a flimsy edifice they made.

'If he'd had a confederate, of course ... but then no one saw any strangers hanging around, and in a country district like that it's surprising what people notice ... it's possible, but the timing would have had to be good if they didn't want to risk being noticed .. . But it's possible - anything's possible.'

But not likely, he meant. For a moment Frances was reminded of her own dear old Constable Ellis, who prided himself on knowing everything that moved on his own rural area beat by day, and most things that moved by night. Though, of course, he was a very old-fashioned copper, altogether different from the wild boys of the Met. with whom she had worked in the spring, the new-fashioned coppers who had unashamedly fancied their chances of extending inter-departmental co-operation into the nearest convenient bed.

Well - sod it! - this was inter-departmental co-operation too, but at least he wasn't looking at her with that calculating, undressing stare which already had her on her back staring over her shoulder at the patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling.

Possible plus Unlikely equals Could Have.

They had given him a possible suspect in a possible murder case. But then, for security reasons, they had stopped him carrying through any investigation of Colonel -

Major - Butler's not-alibi, and had left him only with the suspicion that there might be something he'd missed somewhere; and although he was speaking now without any apparent rancour, nine years after the event, that rankled still.

Only it didn't rankle in the way she'd expected: whatever was in his mind now, it wasn't the nagging doubt that his Major had got away with murder in his patch.

Suddenly and vividly Constable Ellis came into her mind again: Constable Ellis sitting opposite her across her own fireplace, just as Hedges was sitting across from her now - Constable Ellis on one of his paternal visits to her, with a steaming mug of cocoa in his hands - she had heated the water for it on the primus stove: it had been during the power workers' strike, when he'd called on her every time it was the village's turn to be blacked-out . .. Constable Ellis telling her how -

God, but she'd been slow! He'd even told- her himself, had William Ewart Hedges -

once directly, and half-a-dozen times implicitly - and she'd failed to pick up the message.

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 extra 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 Parker, 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.

'Uh-huh.' And he did see too - she could see the seeing of it in his eye. 'But he didn't go along with them, eh?'

'It was something he said to me, Mr Hedges. They'd been leaning on the boy - '

'But if they can't prove he did it, Mr Ellis ... They can't arrest him if they can't prove it, can they?'

'Nor they can, Mrs Fitz. But 'tisn't the point, that isn't. Point is, I can't prove he didn't, neither.'

'- and he said that it was just as much a policeman's job to prove innocence as to prove guilt, and that sometimes the innocence was more important than the guilt - the more difficult it was, the more important it was likely to be.'

'It's like the Parson says, Mrs Fitz - "Number Nine: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour", and that's easy to know when you're doing it. But what price "Thou shall bear true witness for thy neighbour"? That's not so easy, I can tell you. Because half the time you don't know what the true witness is - an' the other half, you can't prove it.'

(She remembered, as she spoke, that it had struck her as incongruous - not funny, certainly not funny; but incongruous - that her fatherly Constable Ellis should see young Mickey Murphy as his neighbour; Mickey Murphy who might not have lifted the church silver, but who looked at her as though given half a chance he would lift her skirt; but then that was before she herself had declared Colonel Jack Butler to be her neighbour, which was equally incongruous.)

* * *

'I see.' Hedges sat back in silence for a moment. 'You think ... you believe ... that for some reason I never really rated the Major as a suspect. Is that it?'

'No, Mr Hedges - I don't mean that.' She smiled at him. 'I think you came round to it quite quickly. But that wasn't quite what I meant, not really.'

'Came round to it?' He seized on the phrase as though determined not to let its meaning escape.

'Oh yes.' She nodded. 'I agree entirely with your assessment: of all the men I've ever met, the ... Major is - he seems to me - the least likely to commit a murder. But I have no new evidence to prove it, either.'

He frowned at her.

'Proving the negative case is one of the most difficult Intelligence exercises - it always has been,' said Frances.

This time he nodded his acceptance. 'That's true.'

'So I know why I don't think he did it, Mr Hedges. But I can't put what I think - what my instinct tells me - in a negative report. If I write "Major Butler seems to me to be of all men the least likely to murder his wife" they'll just laugh at me. They want facts, Mr Hedges - not fancies.'

The corners of his mouth drooped. 'But I can't give you any facts, Mrs Fisher.'

'No. But I want to be sure. So you can tell me what you never put in any report -

which was what made you lay off the Major and concentrate on Patrick Parker before you'd ever heard of him.

That's what you can give me.'

He stared at her for a moment, then through her, and then at her again. 'All right...'

Then he looked at his watch, and then he put his glass back on the bar counter. 'Isobel!'

Frances waited.

'It was the little girls - him and the little girls, that night. The way he was.'