Tomorrow's ghost

Frances clenched her teeth. 'You mean - there was no bomb? How d'you know that?'

'For sure, we don't know. But I'll give you ten to one against. Or twenty to one, if you like.'

She remembered the look Maitland had given him when he implied almost as explicitly that the bomb was imaginary. 'You know something that I don't know.'

Her anger was defusing his. 'I know we picked up those two chaps of yours -

Brunton and Penrose.

Brunton was all set to score with a Moral Philosophy student in his rooms - a female student, nothing queer about Brunton ... And Dr Penrose was on his way back to the Library. He'd been posting a letter. He didn't need his briefcase for that.'

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.

CHAPTER FIVE

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.