Authors: Anthony Price
Frances swallowed. ‘Someone else could have tampered with it. The cloakroom wasn’t out of bounds, damn it.’
‘With those two old watchdogs looking on? And they were watching for anything suspicious—and since they would have caught the first blast you can bet your sweet life they
were
watching.’
‘But somebody
did
tamper with it all the same,’ Frances persisted.
‘So what if they did?’ His lip twisted. ‘The only person who was ever at risk was whichever of those two picked it up first … that’s what Brunton’s girlfriend would call empirical verification.’
She had to stop being angry. ‘If there was a bomb it would be remotely-controlled—Butler said as much.’
‘Is, not was. We know that—he couldn’t say anything else. All the O’Leary bombings in Ulster have been copy-book remote-controlled jobs, it’s his speciality. The whole operation was based on that, for God’s sake, Frances—‘ his voice sharpened ‘—this whole aborted operation, that is.’ He consulted his watch again. ‘Over which obsequies I must now go and preside, while you go to receive your accolade from the butcher.’
Accolade?
She had never been in any danger
—
?
‘No—wait, Paul!’ She reached out a dirty hand to stop him. ‘I still don’t understand.’
He grimaced at her. ‘Christ, Frances! Don’t you ever read any of the technical handouts? Or the daily papers, come to that?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Didn’t you read about the local radio-taximen screwing up the Delta rockets on Cape Canaveral?’
‘Yes. But -‘ Frances stopped. Any radio-controlled device could be set off by any signal on the right frequency. But that was old hat. ‘You can jam the signal -‘
Again she stopped. It wasn’t good enough… They had brought three of O’Leary’s prime targets together not simply to save them, and certainly not to ensure that she would never be in any danger, but to ambush O’Leary.
‘Of course we can jam it.’ He swung half round and pointed towards the university buildings through the trees away to his right. ‘With what we’ve got up there we can jam half of Europe—the cream of Signals Intelligence raring to go, all
the.
latest West German-American equipment the SIGINT boys have been begging to use—Top Secret U equipment.’
Frances stared past the finger at the high rise concrete towers. Top Secret U put her way out of her league.
‘We can not only jam it, we can
trace
it.’ The finger was part of the hand again, and the hand was an exasperated fist six inches from her face. ‘A ten-second trace within ten feet over a one mile radius, and enough manpower to hit the source of the signal within half a minute on the campus—‘
For a moment she thought he was going to hit her too.
‘—and that bloody stupid old woman up there backs his prejudice against that
certainty
—
‘
In that second, when Frances was just beginning to object to the term ‘bloody stupid old
woman
’
,
when ‘bloody stupid old
man
’
would have served just as well, the briefcase exploded.
THE FIFTH
successive match flared, licked the already-charred edge of the newspaper but failed once again to ignite it, and went out, leaving Frances in darkness.
She prodded blindly through the wire mesh of the incinerator, cursing her own irrationality. The matches were damp and the paper was damper, and it would have been far easier and much more sensible simply to have dropped the whole pathetic bundle into the dustbin to await the next garbage collection; and even if she could induce the newspaper to smoulder it probably wouldn’t generate enough heat to burn up Marilyn’s suspender belt and almost-see-through blouse and plastic raincoat; and even if they did catch fire then the flames would fail to consume the bits and pieces in the cheap handbag, the Rose Glory and Babe containers, which would survive to clog the bars at the bottom of the incinerator, to the annoyance of old Mr Snow when he burnt the next lot of garden rubbish unsuitable for his beloved compost heap.
And now she had dropped the sodding matches…
Yet even as she groped for the torch which was also somewhere at her feet, she recognised the necessity of Marilyn’s destruction.
Marilyn was dead and gone—her fingers touched the cold metal of the torch—and Marilyn had never been alive anyway. But there was something about Marilyn which frightened her nevertheless.
She clicked the torch button.
In the beam of light she saw clearly for the first time the stick of wood with which she had been poking the incinerator. Only, it wasn’t a stick of wood, it was a cricket stump.
It had been the first thing that had come to her hand in the garden shed, she hadn’t bothered to look at it, it was just a stick to push down the bundle into the incinerator. It hadn’t been a cricket stump then, because there was no way a cricket stump could have got into the garden shed.
And yet now it was unquestionably a cricket stump.
There had been a bag, an ancient scuffed leather bag, full of cricketing gear which she had inherited with the rest of his worldly goods—
With all my worldly goods I thee endow
—
In fact, there had been a weird and wonderful collection of sporting equipment scattered through the tin trunks of clothes dating back to his prep school days. In his short life Robbie seemed to have tried his hand at everything from fives to fencing by way of boxing and badminton.
All of which she had given outright to the Village Sports Club.
Not, repeat
not
…
not
with the intention of eliminating him from the reckoning, as she now purposed to obliterate Marilyn. She had known from the start that there was no way of doing that—had known it instinctively, and because of that instinct had set out to embrace the inevitable by accepting it and making use of it.
Making use of it—
That was why his dressing gown, which was good and warm and only needed its sleeves turned back, enfolded her now.
That was why, although she had given away all his adult clothes to Oxfam, she had kept the orange-and-black striped rugger shirts and white sweaters he had worn as a fifteen-year-old, which fitted her perfectly; all of which, with the Cash’s name tapes identifying them as the property of R. G. FITZGIBBON, could hardly be more explicitly memorable every time she touched them—
Robbie, not in the morning and at the going down of the sun shall I remember you, but beside
the washing machine, and on the clothes
-
line, and at the ironing board, and in the airing
cupboard, where I shall he ex
pecting you and you cannot take me by surprise.
She stared down at the cricket stump in her hand.
Marilyn and Robbie.
But Robbie wouldn’t have fancied Marilyn at all, she wouldn’t have been his type—
Or would she?
Or would he?
* * *
The snap of a twig underfoot and the polite warning cough and the powerful beam of another torch caught Frances almost simultaneously, crouched over the incinerator like a murderess disposing of her victim’s belongings, clad in nothing but her underwear and a dressing gown which obviously did not belong to her.
She turned quickly, swinging the feebler beam of her own torch to challenge the intruder, but his light blinded her.
‘Mrs Fitzgibbon?’ There was only half a question mark after the name; it was as though he was as much concerned to reassure her that he was not a night prowler as to confirm her identity to his own satisfaction.
‘Yes—‘ She realised that she knew the voice, but there was something which prevented her from bridging the gap between that knowledge and full recognition; also, in the same instant, a breath of cooler air on her body warned her that the treacherous dressing gown was gaping open in the light. She dropped the stump hurriedly and pulled the folds together at her throat.
‘Who—‘ She managed at last to direct her own beam on his face. ‘Oh!’
She knew why she had not been able to put a name to the voice.
Messenger:
The king comes here tonight.
Lady Macbeth
…. Frances Warren (Upper Sixth) Lady Macbeth:
Thou
’
rt mad to say it
!
Except there had been no messenger to warn her of his coming, so that he had caught her in total disarray, with no words—without even any coherent thoughts—to conceal her surprise.
‘My dear -‘ He snapped off his torch, leaving only hers to illuminate him’—I do apologise for appearing like this, without warning … and at this time of night too.’
Without warning, and at this time of night: the politeness rang hollow inside Frances’s mind. With or without warning, more like, and at any time of the day or night—here—for God’s sake,
here
—
that required more than an apology.
‘And I’m afraid I startled you … But I was walking up the path to your front door, and I saw your torch, you see…’
He was talking like a casual caller, or as a friendly neighbour might have done if she had had any friendly neighbours, or even as dear Constable Ellis would have done on one of his fatherly don’t-worry-I’m-keeping-an-eye-on-the-place visits, which invariably occurred within twenty-four hours of her return from whatever she’d been doing if she was away more than a week—it had even been in the back of her mind before he had spoken that it might be Constable Ellis behind the light.
All of which somehow made it worse, because of all people
he
was furthest away from being a casual caller or a friendly neighbour or a fatherly policeman, and the comparisons only emphasised that infinite distance.
That’s quite all right. Sir Frederick.’ But that was a lie, and a palpable lie too, in spite of the cool voice she could hear like an answering tape played back to her: if he knew anything he must know that she was surprised half out of her wits at his sudden appearance out of the dark in her back garden, away from his own proper setting which was as much part of him as was the heavy gilded frame a part of the portrait which hung above the fireplace in his office. And, Christ! If it had been old Admiral Hall himself who had stepped out of the darkness with a polite ‘Mrs Fitzgibbon’ on his lips she would have been hardly more disconcerted!
A lie, then—to be qualified into a half-truth at the least.
‘I didn’t recognise your voice for a moment, though,’ said the coolly taped voice, her own voice.
Well, that was closer to the truth, because in the four years—or nearly four years—that she had worked for him he had hardly spoken to her four times directly; when she had been Group Captain Roskill’s secretary the year before those nearly-four-years, carrying and fetching between them, he had talked to her more often than that, and smiled at her too.
As he was smiling at her now, if she was reading the shadow-lines on his face correctly in the feeble light of her own torch; but this time the smile frightened her, shaking her torch-hand so that the other shadows danced and crowded round behind him, like the uninvited ghosts from her own past whom he had disturbed—Robbie and Mrs Robert Fitzgibbon, and Frances Warren (Upper Sixth), and even the new half-ghost of Marilyn Francis which she had been trying to exorcise in the incinerator.
She didn’t want him to smile at her, because whatever had brought him here could not be a smiling matter, but she couldn’t turn off the smile.
‘In the circumstances that’s hardly surprising.’ He chuckled briefly, and the sound seemed to her as far from amusement as the shadow-smile had been. ‘For a moment I hardly recognised you, my dear Frances. They’ve made you blonde again—and frizzed your hair. And you’re wearing those contact lenses, of course.’ He nodded as though he could still see her clearly. ‘Well … I wouldn’t quarrel with the lenses, but I can’t say I like your hair that
way.
’
‘No?’ She put her hand involuntarily to her head, which she had forgotten was still outwardly Marilyn’s. ‘Well, I can’t say that I like it much either. Sir Frederick, to be honest.’
Or not to be honest, as the case might be, the still-unexorcised Marilyn whispered in her inner ear; and that involuntary gesture had been pure Marilyn, too. A dead give-away, in spite of the cool Frances-voice.
She switched off her own torch, enveloping them both in total darkness, and for a moment total silence also.
‘Ye-es … But it was entirely right for British-American at the time, nevertheless, as I recall now. And as I’m sure you appreciated very well. That is to say, you understood…’
He trailed off, as though the related subjects of her appearance and her assignment in British-American were of no great interest to him any more. ‘What an absolutely marvellous night-sky you have out here in the country! You know, we have nothing like this in central London, or very rarely—galaxies like grains of sand—and I cannot help thinking that it’s a bad thing for us Londoners … The stars … without them one is inclined to lose one’s sense of … not proportion so much as insignificance, I suspect—wouldn’t you say?’
Insignificance?
Was
entirely right for British-American at the time.
A statement of fact—
was:
with that he eliminated the possibility that she had been taken off British-American because of some mere administrative stupidity. He knew all about that, just as he knew all about her, and all this was as near to an apology for seeming to push her around as he could bring himself to make.
Away in the far distance, beyond the immediate circles of darkness and silence which surrounded them both, she could hear the faint drone and snarl of cars jockeying for position on the long pull up Hammond’s Hill on the motorway. And she fancied that if she listened carefully enough she ought to be able to hear the computer-whine of her own brain merging the non-information she possessed already with the non-information he had just given her, and, more than that, adding to it his presence here now—a very large and significant mountain come uninvited to a very small and insignificant Mohammed.