'Or maybe worse...' He drank some more of his beer, and then wiped his mouth again with the table-cloth handkerchief. 'You see, usually, whether we're really worried or not, the first thing to do when a woman goes missing is to get on to the husband. If there's any trouble of any sort ... if he isn't part of the trouble himself, then nine times out of ten he knows what is, or he's got some idea of it. Or he knows where she'd go, anyway - to her mother, or her sister, or even to some friend of hers nearby...' He trailed off again.
There had been no mother, no sister and no nearby friend. But what was more interesting was that Hedges didn't like talking about Colonel - Major - Butler, so it seemed.
'But we had a bit of a problem there at first - or our lad did. Because the cleaning woman had told him the Major had gone up north on business - driven off at the crack of dawn, the wife had told her - but the woman didn't know where. And she didn't know what his business was, of course ... She thought he wasn't in the army any more, she said, and she thought he maybe worked for the Government in London. But she didn't know what at.' The cleaning woman had been a smart lady, thought Frances.
'Normally this isn't a problem.' Hedges shook his head. 'You just ask the neighbours.
But there weren't any neighbours, and they hadn't been living there long - not near neighbours, anyway. So the sergeant got the constable to find their address book, and told him to try the London numbers in it.' He gave Frances an old-fashioned look. 'There was one of them in the front with no name to it, so he tried that first.'
01-836 20066, thought Frances. Or its 1969 equivalent ... The cleaning lady and the constable had both been smart.
Hedges nodded at her. 'So that was when we really got our skates on - the CID
You probably know more about that than I do, Mrs Fisher.' The old-fashioned look had a sardonic cast to it now. 'Like what the Major's business up north was, that day. We never got a 'Need to Know' clearance for that.'
'What were you told?'
'Verbally...' Hedges blinked and paused, as though for a moment the memory eluded him. 'I was told to discount him from my inquiries - that was at first. Then later on I was told that I must check for sightings of him, or of his car, in the vicinity at the material time. Which we would have done as a matter of routine by then if we hadn't been warned off in the first place, of course.'
Frances was tempted to ask him what he had deduced from that change of instructions, but then quickly rejected the temptation. He could only have made the wrong deduction, that the Major had provided an alibi which had not in the end seemed water-tight to the Special Branch; and by telling him how the actual facts had been so very curiously and inconclusively different she might colour his memory.
She waited.
His lips compressed into a tight line. 'There were no such sightings, Mrs Fisher.'
In that moment Frances decided that she would have to investigate the circumstances of Colonel Butler's not- alibi herself, and not merely ask for them to be re-checked as she had intended. It would mean another wearisome, time-consuming journey north, with little promise of further enlightenment because they had never seemed to have any rhyme or reason to them in the first place, let alone any connection with Mrs Butler's disappearance. But nevertheless, they remained as a small, strange inconsistency, like an irrelevant, but mysterious footnote at the bottom of the Special Branch report.
She pulled herself back to the more pressing problem. 'Is that what you meant by
'Could have', Mr Hedges? He could have been in ... the vicinity at the material time - in another car, say?'
'We never traced another car. He would have had to have hired one from somewhere, and left it somewhere.' Hedges paused. 'When he finally arrived that evening he was driving his own car, anyway. And we never turned up any unaccounted car hirings for that morning.' He stared into the fire for a second or two, and then glanced up sidelong at her. 'Assuming he couldn't prove his movements for that morning - where he was, or where he should have been ... if he didn't go north, as the cleaning woman said ... if he'd waited around somewhere until his wife came out ... if he knew where she was going...'
He was building up the 'its' deliberately, as though to demonstrate what a flimsy edifice they made.
'If he'd had a confederate, of course ... but then no one saw any strangers hanging around, and in a country district like that it's surprising what people notice ... it's possible, but the timing would have had to be good if they didn't want to risk being noticed .. . But it's possible - anything's possible.'
But not likely, he meant. For a moment Frances was reminded of her own dear old Constable Ellis, who prided himself on knowing everything that moved on his own rural area beat by day, and most things that moved by night. Though, of course, he was a very old-fashioned copper, altogether different from the wild boys of the Met. with whom she had worked in the spring, the new-fashioned coppers who had unashamedly fancied their chances of extending inter-departmental co-operation into the nearest convenient bed.
Well -
Possible plus Unlikely equals Could Have.
They had given him a possible suspect in a possible murder case. But then, for security reasons, they had stopped him carrying through any investigation of Colonel -
Major - Butler's not-alibi, and had left him only with the suspicion that there might be something he'd missed somewhere; and although he was speaking now without any apparent rancour, nine years after the event, that rankled still.
Only it didn't rankle in the way she'd expected: whatever was in his mind now, it wasn't the nagging doubt that his Major had got away with murder in his patch.
Suddenly and vividly Constable Ellis came into her mind again: Constable Ellis sitting opposite her across her own fireplace, just as Hedges was sitting across from her now - Constable Ellis on one of his paternal visits to her, with a steaming mug of cocoa in his hands - she had heated the water for it on the primus stove: it had been during the power workers' strike, when he'd called on her every time it was the village's turn to be blacked-out . .. Constable Ellis telling her how -
