Tomorrow's ghost

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.'