Tomorrow's ghost

It was the right word.

'Yes ... well, it's got so he's keeping an eye on me as well as the cottage. We drink cocoa together, because he doesn't like coffee. And he tells me I should get married again and have a houseful of babies.'

Constable Ellis and Mother-in-law were strange allies, when she thought about them.

'So you should,' said William Ewart Hedges.

'Chance would be a fine thing!' A maidenly blush would have been useful, but that wasn't within her histrionic range. 'Anyway, he came to see me regularly during the power workers' strike last year, every time it was our turn for a black-out - he'd drop in of an evening to see how I was coping ... To chat me up, or to cheer me up.'

He seemed for an instant to be on the edge of saying something, but then to have thought better of it, closing his mouth on the unspoken words. Perhaps he had felt the ground tremble under him too, thought Frances; perhaps he had been about to say You seem to be coping well enough, Mrs Not- Fisher. Well enough with power cuts 'and widowhood both - perhaps too well for your own good, Mrs not-Fisher.

So the Fitzgibbon facade was on the top line today.

'But one night he was the one who needed cheering up.'

(More and more it had been Mrs Fitz who had been cheering up Mr Ellis, and not vice-versa; because Mr Ellis could remember an older world in which he lived, and which he liked very much better; whereas Mrs Fitz didn't know any better, so that for her the worse was only a small decline from the bad, and the better was just a legend.)

'Yes?' Hedges was looking at her with intense curiosity.

'Sorry.' Frances concentrated her mind again. There really was something wrong with her today, the way her thoughts were wandering into irrelevances. It must be post-Clinton (and post-Marilyn) shock, if not post-bomb malaise.

'There was a break-in at the church ... Well, not really a break-in, because it wasn't locked properly. The thieves got away with some rather beautiful seventeenth-century silver.'

'Yes...' Hedges nodded reminiscently. 'We've had the same thing hereabouts. It's like taking chocolate from a baby.'

Frances nodded back. 'They never caught the thieves - the local police didn't.'

'Never caught ours either. Long gone, they were. It was four days before we even knew they'd lifted the stuff, and - ' He stopped abruptly. 'I'm sorry. Go on, Mrs ... Fisher.

Not coppin 'em was putting him down, your old chap, was it?'

'No, Mr Hedges, it wasn't that at all. Quite the opposite, almost.' She paused deliberately.

'The opposite?'

She had him now. 'Yes. The local CID thought it was one of his local tearaways - a boy they'd had their eye on already. But they couldn't prove it, you see.

'Uh-huh.' And he did see too - she could see the seeing of it in his eye. 'But he didn't go along with them, eh?'

'It was something he said to me, Mr Hedges. They'd been leaning on the boy - '

'But if they can't prove he did it, Mr Ellis ... They can't arrest him if they can't prove it, can they?'

'Nor they can, Mrs Fitz. But 'tisn't the point, that isn't. Point is, I can't prove he didn't, neither.'

'- and he said that it was just as much a policeman's job to prove innocence as to prove guilt, and that sometimes the innocence was more important than the guilt - the more difficult it was, the more important it was likely to be.'

'It's like the Parson says, Mrs Fitz - 'Number Nine: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour', and that's easy to know when you're doing it. But what price 'Thou shall bear true witness for thy neighbour'? That's not so easy, I can tell you. Because half the time you don't know what the true witness is - an' the other half, you can't prove it.'

(She remembered, as she spoke, that it had struck her as incongruous - not funny, certainly not funny; but incongruous - that her fatherly Constable Ellis should see young Mickey Murphy as his neighbour; Mickey Murphy who might not have lifted the church silver, but who looked at her as though given half a chance he would lift her skirt; but then that was before she herself had declared Colonel Jack Butler to be her neighbour, which was equally incongruous.)

* * *

'I see.' Hedges sat back in silence for a moment. 'You think ... you believe ... that for some reason I never really rated the Major as a suspect. Is that it?'

'No, Mr Hedges - I don't mean that.' She smiled at him. 'I think you came round to it quite quickly. But that wasn't quite what I meant, not really.'

'Came round to it?' He seized on the phrase as though determined not to let its meaning escape.

'Oh yes.' She nodded. 'I agree entirely with your assessment: of all the men I've ever met, the ... Major is - he seems to me - the least likely to commit a murder. But I have no new evidence to prove it, either.'

He frowned at her.

'Proving the negative case is one of the most difficult Intelligence exercises - it always has been,' said