Tomorrow's ghost

God, but she'd been slow! He'd even told- her himself, had William Ewart Hedges -

once directly, and half-a-dozen times implicitly - and she'd failed to pick up the message.

What was worse, it had also been there between the lines of the report she'd read the night before. Hedges had merely confirmed it.

'Would you like another drink, Mrs Fisher?' Frances looked down at her empty glass with surprise. She had drunk the stuff without noticing it, and now the warm feeling deep inside her was indistinguishable from the excitement that tightened her muscles and made her throw out her chest almost as far as Marilyn had once done for Gary. Cool it! 'Good heavens!' Girlish smile. 'No, thank you, Mr Hedges.'

David Audley: The time to be extra careful is when you think you've won - when you think you know. 'I don't want to be breathalysed before midday.' Because she hadn't won.

There simply hadn't been a duel: the duel had been in her imagination, because of her own slowness and stupidity. Simply, because she hadn't known which side he was on, she hadn't understood that Mrs Fisher and ex- Chief Inspector William Ewart Hedges had been on the same side from the start.

So she had to get it exactly right now. 'But can I get you something?' She pointed to his empty tankard.

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. Although he hadn't admitted it, he knew, just as well as she did, that they'd moved on from Could have to Didn't.

Get it right. Chest in, extinguish girlish smile.

'Patrick Parker, Mr Hedges.' Patrick Raymond Parker, born Liverpool 11.7.41. s. Michael Aloysius Parker and Margaret Helen Mclntyre -

Again, he knew. And this time he knew if anything even better than she did: the print-out from the Police National Computer, the circular, the telex, laying it on the line that the North Mercian Police Force had turned a fatal crash on the motorway and six missing women into an Incident Room, complete with a possible murderer and victims, and even a hypothetical modus operand!.

'Uh-huh. Patrick Parker, of course.' This time he didn't nod, he merely acknowledged the fatal name with a single lift of his head, pointing his chin at her. 'But that was never proved.'

Never proved, like everything else, thought Frances bitterly.

Patrick Parker, born Liverpool 11.7.41. - a blitz baby, conceived in emergency, carried in fear and born twenty-eight years before to the sound of air raid warnings and bombs to Michael Aloysius Parker and Margaret Helen Mclntyre - Patrick Parker had slammed into the back of a lorry (which had braked to avoid a car, which had skidded to avoid another car, which had swerved to avoid another car which had overtaken another car without giving a signal - it happened all the time, but this time fatally) four weeks after Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Butler nee Boucard had said 'I won't be very long' to her cleaning woman. And although they'd never traced either the car that had given no signal (perhaps there were no such cars, anyway: there had only been the first car driver's word for that chain of events. But it didn't matter, anyway), they had found Stephanie Alice Cox, spinster aged 26, as well as Patrick Parker, bachelor aged 28, in the wreckage of the maroon Ford embedded in the back of the lorry.

Only, while Patrick had been where they expected him to be, safety-belted and transfixed by his last moment of agony in the driver's seat, Stephanie had not been found in the passenger's seat beside him; she had been travelling less conventionally and far more uncomfortably in the boot of the car; though not really uncomfortably, since she hadn't felt a thing, even at the moment of impact, because she'd been strangled ten hours before the lorry-driver jammed his foot on the air-brakes.

'I agree. It was never proved,' Frances nodded.

Madeleine Francoise Butler, not proved. And Julie Anne Hartford, not proved. And Jane Wentworth, not proved. And Patricia Mary Ronson, not proved. And, not quite proved, Jane Louise Smith - Only Stephanie Alice Cox, proved. (Stephanie Alice Cox hadn't even been reported missing when the car in front of the lorry had skidded, but then Stephanie Alice Cox's mother didn't count one night's absence as anything out of the ordinary for Stephanie Alice.)

'But she could have been one of them, couldn't she?'

Hedges rocked on his seat. 'Yes ... she just could have. He picked up one of them in the morning. Of the likely ones, that is.'

'And not all of them were scrubbers. Jane Wentworth wasn't.'

'She was the one whose car broke down? That's true. And she wasn't so young, either

- that's also true.' He had raised an eyebrow at 'scrubber', as though it wasn't a word he expected from her. But then he could hardly be expected to know that yesterday she - or at least Marilyn - had been a card-carrying member of the National Union of Scrubbers, thought Frances.

In fact, Marilyn would have fitted into that list of likely pick-ups for a free-spending psychopath, as to the manner born.

She shivered. He'd been good-looking, nicely-spoken with just a Beatles-touch of Liverpool, and - so his mates had recalled - surprisingly gentle for a skilled operator of such a big earth-moving machine. But also a murderer.

'And the date fits too, Mr Hedges. It was a Tuesday, and he wasn't back at work until the Wednesday.' The shiver remained with her as she thought of the long stretches of embankment on Patrick Parker's ten miles of motorway extension, now busy with the thunder of traffic, under which (if the North Mercian Police and the Police National Computer were to be believed) Julie Anne Hartford, Jane Wentworth and Patricia Mary Ronson would lie until Doomsday, and maybe Jane Louise Smith and Madeleine Francoise Butler as well.

He shook his head. 'The date helps, but it isn't conclusive. If he did kill them, he never killed to a recognisable cycle. And the distance is right on the very edge of his radius - maybe a little beyond it.'

'But you don't know how far he went. You never knew where he went.'

'North Mercia put him next to a couple of them - in the same pub as one of them on the night she disappeared.'