Tomorrow's ghost (15 page)

She had been beautiful. He hadn’t said it out loud, but he had shouted it nevertheless, more loudly than if he had actually said it. And she, Frances, had known it all along—the certainty had been there in her original question: not ‘Was she
pretty,
Mr Hedges?’ but ‘Was she
beautiful,
Mr Hedges?’ Not a four-out-of-ten certainty, but a ten-out-of-ten certainty.

But how?

The fire blazed up and she felt its heat on her face, and she shivered.

Wife to Colonel Butler:
Madeleine Frangoise de Latour d
’
Auray Boucard, born La Roche
Tourtenay, Indre
-
et
-
Loire, 4.8.28.

‘She was forty-one years old,’ said Frances.

He gazed at her impassively. ‘Was she now? I suppose she would have been about that, yes … But she didn’t look it.’ The light of the flames flickered over his face, emphasising its impassivity. ‘You’ll have to look at the eldest daughter—that’s your best bet, Mrs Fisher, if you want to know what she looked like … and add a few years.’

A few years. The eldest daughter—Diana, Sally or Jane? Diana for choice … The eldest daughter would be 19 now, maybe 20, thought Frances irritably, struggling with the mathematics. Diana Butler, the Art student, but with the dominant de Latour d’Auray Boucard genes which made her the spitting image of her mother. It was hard to imagine the John (but always Jack) Butler genes not being the stronger ones.

‘So if she’s alive she’d be fifty now,’ thought Frances aloud, the maths falling into place at last.

‘If.’

Death and decay and dissolution coffined the
if,
buried it deep and erected a headstone over it.

‘But she’s not, you mean?’

‘You’ve read the reports, Mrs Fisher.’ Just a shade testy now, he sounded.

‘Yes, Mr Hedges. And the Assistant Chief Constable’s submission.’ She was losing him, and she didn’t know why. ‘In effect—“missing”. But you think she’s dead?’

He drew a deep breath through his nose. ‘There’s no proof.’

‘But you think she’s dead, all the same.’

‘What I think isn’t proof.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘What do you want me to say, Mrs Fisher?’

Now she was fighting for an answer, and it was almost as important to know why she had to fight for it as to win the answer itself. So although it would be the easiest thing in the world to say, simply: ‘I want you to say what you think, Mr Hedges’, that wasn’t good enough any more, because it would only win half the battle, and she needed to win both halves now.

So again it had to be instinct, the heart and not the head.

‘Mr Hedges … I’ve got a difficult job to do. I’m not sure that it isn’t impossible—to be honest.’

Bad word—wrong word. She wasn’t being honest.

‘A dirty job.’

Better word. And ex-Detective Chief Inspector Hedges knew all about dirty jobs, too.

‘She walked out of the front door. And she disappeared off the face of the earth—‘

She could have put it better than that: the deadpan police reports, the dozens of minutes of inquiries by dozens of different policemen, all had the garlic smell of death on them, the smell of killing.

‘Did he kill her, Mr Hedges? Could he have killed her?’

Even that wasn’t enough. But did she have to give him everything, leaving herself nothing?

‘He could have, Mrs Fisher. Physically, he could have.’ He stared at her. ‘Unless you have an alibi for him.’

‘But you think he didn’t?’

Still he wouldn’t give her anything.

‘Yet you treated it as murder from the start, Mr Hedges.’

‘No.’ He relaxed. ‘We got to it quickly, that’s all.’

She had made a mistake—she had let him get away from her.

He shook his head. ‘Cases like this, Mrs Fisher—you have to bear in mind that a lot of murders start with missing persons. Or, to put it another way, every missing person is a potential murder victim. So every report, it’s not just kicked under the carpet—it’s taken seriously.

‘On the other hand, having said that, it is a matter of the actual circumstances. With a young kid, for instance, even if there’s a history of his running off, I used to get moving straight off. But with a woman … saving your presence, Mrs Fisher … you get quite a lot of women just sloping off, one way or another, and there are inquiries you’ve got to make first. Like, if there’s been a row … or if there’s another man—you can’t just jump straight in.’

‘But this wasn’t like that.’

‘No, it wasn’t—precisely. She just went off for a bit of a walk, and she said she wasn’t going for long.’ He paused, staring reflectively at a point just above Frances’s head. ‘She didn’t even take her bag with her. ..’

‘And it started to rain.’

‘That’s right … It came on to rain quite heavily, and she only had a light coat with her.’ Another reminiscent pause. ‘It was the cleaning woman phoned us in the end—she’d waited long past .her time, and she wanted to get home. But she couldn’t leave the little one all by herself.’

Jane Butler, asked six. One of the identical peas. Not at school because she had flu.

Mother had sat up with her part of the night, which was why she had wanted a breath of fresh air…

He focused on her. ‘But you know the details, of course.’

And there weren’t really many details to know at that, thought Frances. In fact, that was the whole trouble, the beginning and the end of it: Mrs Madeleine-and-all-the-rest Butler, aged 41, had stepped out for a breath of air after having spent a disturbed night with a sick child, and it had started to rain, and she hadn’t been seen again from that November day to this one, nine years later. And so far as the local CID and the Special Branch had been able to establish, she hadn’t met anyone, or even been observed by anyone. She had taken nothing with her, no money, no cheque book, no means of identification; and she had left behind her no debts, no worries, no fears. She had turned a quiet piece of English countryside into a Bermuda Triangle.

‘How did you get on to it so quickly, Mr Hedges?’

He half-shrugged, half shook his head. ‘Routine, really. Like I said … we don’t take missing persons lightly.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well … in a case like this it’s usually the uniformed patrol officer who answers the call, and he’s likely to be a sensible lad … He’ll talk to the person who called us, and have a bit of a quick scout-round, maybe. And if he doesn’t like what he finds he’ll phone his sergeant pretty sharpish—because if there is something badly wrong then time can be important—and he’ll say “I don’t like the look of this one, guv’nor”, like as not.’

‘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.