Authors: Anthony Price
But it
was
nonsense all the same. If fairy tales were about unreality, or other reality, or God only knew what, then her beloved Faulkner was about the problems of living in a real world and somehow making it work, even when it was unbearable.
Suddenly all Frances’s fear evaporated: where Frances Fitzgibbon was out of her depth, young Frances Warren was in her element: as always, the secret of a good cover was self-discovery.
‘Utter nonsense.’ She smiled up at Julian. ‘Can you find a contemporary English novelist—
British
novelist—to put in the same class as Faulkner?’
‘John Fowles.’ The light of battle flared in Julian’s eye.
‘
The Magus?
’
The last vestige of Miss Fitzgibbon fell away from Frances: Miss Warren was in charge, and she was as arrogant as Julian.
‘
Daniel Martin?
You dare put them up against
Sanctuary?
Or
The
Bear
?’
‘Hah!’ said Tom. ‘Hah!’
‘Not that Fowles isn’t good,’ said Miss Warren magnanimously. ‘Some of the so-called critics need their heads examining. But to compare Faulkner with Fowles … Do me a favour!’
‘Do us all a favour,’ said Tom. ‘Start with
The Bear,
Julian.’
He smiled at Frances, cowlike eyes swimming joyfully behind the thick lenses. Gary had smiled at Marilyn like that, ready and hoping to die for her.
Forget Marilyn. Marilyn was with her useless father and her dying mother, somewhere in South-East London.
Detective-Sergeant Ballard was standing in the doorway.
‘Well … I’m not an expert in the hunting of bears with mongrel dogs in Yoknapatawpha County,’ said Julian.
‘It isn’t about hunting bears,’ said Tom.
‘It’s about slavery,’ said Frances. ‘Faulkner’s got more to say about the negro problem in the South than all other American writers put together.’
‘He has? I’ve always thought his approach was a bit Schweitzerish myself,’ Julian prodded her gently. ‘But then perhaps you have insights into slavery denied me?’
It was a pity that they were settling down to a good argument just when the expression on Sergeant Ballard’s face suggested that the computer had choked on one of the names fed into it, thought Frances.
‘No more so than any woman. We have some of the same problems the freed slaves had in searching for an identity…’ But she could no longer ignore the Sergeant’s signals.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me…’
‘An identity -?’ Julian turned as she pushed past him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake—not again!
Hugo, do be a good chap and tell the fuzz either to arrest her or let her alone-
* * *
‘Yes, Mr Ballard?’
‘We have a suspicious object, madam.’
‘Suspicious?’ Frances repeated the word stupidly.
We
’
re not expecting any trouble in the library!
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Where?’
‘In the cloakroom. Almost directly under where we are standing.’
Frances looked at her wristwatch. Damn Paul Mitchell! And Colonel Butler. And the computer. She had six minutes.
THE CLICK-CLACK
of Frances’s high heels echoed in the high open space of the entrance foyer as she descended the stairway alongside Sergeant Ballard. ‘I have informed Colonel Butler, madam,’ said Ballard.
Except for the two civilians on the desk, Dickson and Collins, the foyer was still empty. The three Special Branch officers were still in position outside the glass doors, but through the expanse of glass wall on the other side of the doors she could see that a large crowd of students and hangers-on had now assembled outside the entrance.
God! There was alt
ogether too much glass,
thought Frances with a swirl of fear.
‘We’ll have to get those people away from the front of the building. Sergeant,’ she said.
Ballard cleared his throat. ‘Instructions are to stand fast, madam.’
‘Instructions?’ Frances frowned at him.
‘The moment we start clearing them away they’ll know we’re on to them,’ said Ballard. ‘Otherwise … the odds are they won’t detonate until they’ve got the targets into the blast zone.’
Frances realised that she had been foolish. If the suspicious object really was a bomb then detonation would be by remote signal, activated from some visual vantage-point in the surrounding campus, and not by any old-fashioned time mechanism. So long as the crowd didn’t scatter they were theoretically safe until the Chancellor’s party came through the doors.
Above the heads of the crowd and away across the open space between the new Library and the nearest great white tower she caught a momentary flash of academic scarlet.
‘Colonel Butler will have to hold the Chancellor’s party. Sergeant.’ With an effort she kept her voice steady.
‘He’s doing that, madam.’
‘And the people upstairs must stay where they are.’
Ballard nodded. ‘Mr Collins, sir! I wonder if you would be so good as to go to the Common Room and prevent the ladies and gentlemen there from leaving? You can tell them there’s been a slight delay in the schedule.’
Collins and Dickson exchanged glances.
‘Perhaps they’d both better go,’ said Frances.
Ballard cleared his throat again. ‘Mr Dickson found the—ah—object, madam,’ he said.
‘I thought you might want to have a quick word with him.’
Frances could feel the seconds ticking away from her life.
‘Of course … Thank you, Mr Collins … Mr Dickson?’ Frances attempted to exude confidence. ‘I won’t keep you a moment, Mr Dickson.’
Dickson nodded to his friend. ‘Off you go, Harry.’
They both looked old enough to have seen war service, thought Frances gratefully.
Certainly they were behaving like veterans.
Collins bobbed his head. ‘See you upstairs then, Bob.’
Frances watched him depart for five heart-beats before turning back to Dickson. ‘You found this thing, Mr Dickson?’
‘Briefcase, madam. Dr Penrose’s briefcase.’
‘Briefcase?’ Frances looked at Ballard. ‘But all the briefcases were checked.’
‘This one
was
checked,’ said Dickson quickly. ‘I saw it checked myself.’ He pointed to the glass doors. ‘Then I took it off of Dr Penrose, and labelled it up like the rest, and took it into the cloakroom.’ He indicated the door on his left with a nod of the head.
‘Yes?’
‘Officer there asked me to check out the cloakroom again, just now—‘ another nod, this time to Ballard ‘—so I reaches up to the top shelf, to make sure there’s nothing else there but the cases, just to make doubly sure, like. And Dr Penrose’s case—I can’t hardly move it. ‘Fact, it took me all my time to lift it down.’
‘To—lift it down?’
Dickson sniffed. ‘I put the heavy cases on the lower shelves, and the light ones up top. Dr Penrose’s was light as a feather, like there was nothing in it. Now it’s
heavy
…
And, what’s more, it’s
locked.
And it wasn’t locked when I put it in—because I saw Dr Penrose close it up right here, on this desk-top.’
Frances found herself staring at the door towards which Dickson had nodded, which bore the legend GENTLEMEN.
Heavy
—
but still on the top shelf—and locked, when it should have been light and unlocked. Those plain facts disposed of the faint hope that Dickson and Ballard had raised a false alarm with good intent, it didn’t take a computer to produce that unpalatable print-out of the statistical probabilities for her. But how—
‘Madam!’ said Sergeant Ballard sharply. Someone who was certainly no gentleman had somehow got into the cloakroom, so that now there was only one adequate thickness of brick between whatever he had left behind him and her own shrinking flesh and blood. But Ballard was right: this was not the time to inquire further into that particular mystery.
‘Thank you, Mr Dickson.’ Frances swallowed a quick lungful of air. ‘You’d better go and help Mr—Mr—‘
‘Collins,’ supplied Ballard, stepping towards the cloakroom.
* * *
Francis had never in her life been inside a gentleman’s cloakroom.
Once, by accident and in semi-darkness, she had taken the first few steps down towards a men’s lavatory in London, at which point the atrocious smell had warned her of the error she was making.
She had never expected to have the door of a gentleman’s cloakroom held open for her.
* * *
There was a strong smell in the new English Faculty Library gentleman’s cloakroom—a smell so cloying that it rasped on Frances’s dry throat.
But its dominant ingredient was lavender, not ammonia.
And there was also a large, ruddy-faced man clutching a walkie-talkie to his cheek and sweating profusely.
As well he might sweat, decided Frances with a sudden sense of detachment which surprised her as her eyes were drawn instantly to the briefcase at his feet. It was enough to make anyone sweat.
‘Mrs Fitzgibbon is here now, sir,’ said the sweating man in an unnaturally steady voice.
He had never set eyes on her before, thought Frances, but it was an entirely reasonable deduction in the circumstances.
The man offered her the little walkie-talkie.
‘Colonel Butler for you, Mrs Fitzgibbon,’ he said in the same matter-of-fact tone.
It was curious how fear took different people in different ways, thought Frances analytically.
‘Fitzgibbon here, sir—‘
Her knees were trembling, and the Special Branch man was sweating, but they both had their voices under control. It was only their bodies which reacted to the imminent threat of dissolution.
‘Hullo there, Mrs Fitzgibbon. Over.’ Colonel Butler sounded positively casual, almost sociable.
Frances frowned at the row of innocent briefcases, each neatly labelled, on the shelf directly in front of her. This wasn’t the harsh-voiced Colonel Butler she had last met, who had no time for women and even less for pleasantries, beyond the bare necessities of good manners. From another man.
Hullo there!
would have meant nothing. From Colonel Butler it was practically an improper suggestion.
What did he want her to say in reply? ‘Meet me tonight behind the ruins of the library?’
Suddenly she knew exactly why he’d said
Hullo, there:
he was scared witless—and with good reason—that at any moment she was going to let the side down by slumping to the floor of the gentleman’s lavatory in a dead faint.
‘Sir—‘ She looked from the briefcases to the sweating man, and then to Sergeant Ballard. The Sergeant regarded her with fatherly concern, and he wasn’t sweating. ‘Sir, I have Sergeant Ballard and one of his men with me. And one highly suspect briefcase. I suggest that there are too many men in the gents’ at the moment. Over.’
Her knees were still trembling, and what she’d just said did not at all reflect how she felt—the sense of it, if not the actual words, had a curiously Marilynish cheeky ring about it, not like Frances at all. (Marilyn would have made a joke of going into the gents’; she wished Marilyn was here now, and not Frances!’)
‘Hah! Hmm…’ After a brief silence the voice crackled in her ear. ‘Ballard’s man came off the back door. Send him back there. Over.’
Frances nodded the reprieve at the sweating man.
‘I’ve done that. Over.’
‘Good. Now give me Ballard for a moment. Over.’
Frances handed the radio to the Sergeant.
‘Sir?’ Ballard barked. ‘Over!’
Frances didn’t want to listen. The silent majority of her wanted to be treated like a weak and feeble woman, and sent to a place of safety to sniff sal volatile. But there was a small vociferous Liberated minority which was outraged at the prospect of being passed over—so much so that it made her stare quite deliberately again at the briefcase, which was something she’d been trying very hard not to do.
It sat there, black and bulging and malevolent, four feet away from her on the brown quarry-tile floor. It seemed to get blacker and to bulge more as she watched it. The silent majority insisted on exercising its democratic rights, and for a fraction of a second the quarry tiles swam alarmingly.
‘Madam!’ Ballard handed her the radio. ‘I have my instructions. The Colonel is transmitting to you now.’
He was going. She was about to be left alone with the briefcase. She wished Sergeant Ballard hadn’t looked at her so sympathetically.
‘Fitzgibbon?’ Pause. ‘Over.’
Now she really was alone with the sodding thing.
‘Sir.’ Pause. ‘Over.’
Ridiculous jargon. But he had said
Fitzgibbon
as he might have done to his poor bloody second-lieutenants in battle, and somehow that was enormously gratifying to the idiotic Liberated minority.
‘Listen to me, Fitzgibbon. I’ve got people here with me who press buttons, and they tell me that that briefcase of yours is the decoy they’ve been waiting for—don’t worry about this transmission being picked up, they’ve got a black box that scrambles it … that’s one thing they can do, by God!’
And they’d be listening to him too, and he didn’t give a damn. Against the run of play her heart warmed to him.
‘They say it’s a brick, or a book, or a couple of telephone directories, to make us look the wrong way. And I should tell you that—‘
They sounded eminently sensible, thought Frances.
‘—and we should ignore it, and wait for the right one.’
Frances looked at the briefcase again, and her knees advised her that the button-pushers were not themselves in the gentleman’s lavatory.
‘But I say it’s the real thing—d’you hear, Fitzgibbon? Over.’
There wasn’t a clever answer to that. ‘Yes, sir. Over.’
‘Good.’
Not good. Bad.
‘They also say the moment we start clearing people from outside the Library, we start playing O’Leary’s game. And I agree with them there. But by the grace of God, because that fool of a porter moved it, we know there isn’t a trembler in it.
So pick it up,
Fitzgibbon.
”
Pause. ‘Over.’