Tomorrow's ghost

thought she had had the night before when she had first encountered the name - Lord! If there was a story in the losing of her more than that in Sir Frederick's file there must also be a story (which the file had totally omitted) in the winning of her, if she was anything like her name. The very idea of Butler married was hard to swallow, but Butler carrying off a Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard took her breath away before she could swallow the idea. It sounded altogether too much like a romance from a woman's magazine, and even if the truth would surely be prosaic and dull she could no longer resist the temptation of asking the question she hadn't dared to put to Sir Frederick the night before:

'Was she beautiful, Mr Hedges?'

It wasn't the answer, or the form of the answer anyway, he had been expecting.

'Didn't they show you a picture, then? There was a lot of 'em about at the time, as I remember. Hundreds.'

Of course there would have been, thought Frances.

'No.'

'I expect they could find one for you.'

'Was she?'

'Beautiful?' He took another pull of his beer, but more slowly, as though he had decided that just as she had made him wait while she surfaced from her own deep thoughts, so he had a right to make her wait for his own to come up from the past. 'Have you seen the daughters?'

She shook her head.

'No? Well, they say the eldest girl - the one that's at college now - they say she's the spitting image of her mother.' He drew a vast snowy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth with it. 'I couldn't see it at the time, I must say. Except for the colouring, of course...'

The one at college now. So he had already done some checking of his own. But naturally.

'The colouring?'

'Red hair.' He nodded. 'All of 'em had it - the Major, the wife, and the three little girls. Like peas out of the same pod, they were, the girls.'

'She had red hair?' Frances conjured up Colonel Butler's short-back-and-sides, which had been clipped so close that it was almost en brosse. Yet when she thought about it now it had been not so much red as grey-faded auburn.

'More like chestnut - what they call 'titian', I believe.' That candid look of his was back again as his eyes flicked briefly to the mouse-wig covering her blonde crowning glory. 'Very striking, it was.'

'But you never actually saw her, did you?'

'No, I never actually saw her. None of us did.' He paused. 'But there was this picture of her, colour picture.' He paused again. 'They say it didn't do her justice.'

'Who said?'

'The milkman. The postman.' He shrugged. 'The shopkeepers in the village ... the woman who cleaned the house and kept an eye on the little girls when she was out.'

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?'