Tomorrow's ghost

Frances.

This time he nodded his acceptance. 'That's true.'

'So I know why I don't think he did it, Mr Hedges. But I can't put what I think - what my instinct tells me - in a negative report. If I write 'Major Butler seems to me to be of all men the least likely to murder his wife' they'll just laugh at me. They want facts, Mr Hedges - not fancies.'

The corners of his mouth drooped. 'But I can't give you any facts, Mrs Fisher.'

'No. But I want to be sure. So you can tell me what you never put in any report -

which was what made you lay off the Major and concentrate on Patrick Parker before you'd ever heard of him.

That's what you can give me.'

He stared at her for a moment, then through her, and then at her again. 'All right...'

Then he looked at his watch, and then he put his glass back on the bar counter. 'Isobel!'

Frances waited.

'It was the little girls - him and the little girls, that night. The way he was.'

Isobel appeared, took the glass, and looked expectantly at Frances. 'Madam?'

'No thank you.' Frances hated to look away from him, even for a second.

'I was there when he came back. He didn't know anything - he saw the police vehicles, of course, so he'd have known something was up, but he couldn't have known what, exactly...'

Unless he did know, exactly, thought Frances heretically.

'At that stage I'd been told to count him out. Otherwise I'd maybe have been suspicious - with a wife missing, and you don't like the look of it, it's the husband you look at first...' He tightened his lips '... I still looked at him pretty sharp, but more out of curiosity than suspicion. Because by that time I knew he was Military Intelligence, and I wasn't sure that his wife going missing might not have something to do with that ... even though your people said that it didn't, and it was a CID job, not a Special Branch one.

'We had our Special Branch man there, of course. But on a 'Need to Know' basis - he didn't do the talking, I did...

'So I gave it to the Major straight, all the details. And why we were worried - we'd already had the dogs out, in the late afternoon, while there was a bit of daylight, and they hadn't found anything.' Isobel appeared at his shoulder. 'Here you are, Billy.'

'Billy, didn't seem right.

'How much do I owe you, Isobel?'

'Get away!' She disappeared before he could argue. He took a long pull of the beer, produced the huge handkerchief again, and went through the mouth-wiping ritual.

'He didn't say anything, he just listened. And the questions I asked him, all I got was

'yes' or 'no', nothing more. He didn't say a thing until I'd finished, and then he simply said 'Where are my girls?'

'And I told him we had a policewoman with them... You see, Mrs Fisher, there wasn't anyone locally they knew, having moved in not long before. And the cleaning woman had her own family to look after - and there weren't any relatives, not on either side, that we could trace. So my WPC had given the kiddies their tea, and had looked after them -

she'd even helped the eldest one with her bit of homework from school -'

Diana. Now at university, and beautiful like her mother. But then ten or eleven years, and with her bit of homework to do.

'- and then put them to bed -'

That 'bit of homework' at ten years of age was a reminder that they'd all been privately educated from the start, Diana and Sally and Jane, the three peas in the pod.

' - but she couldn't get the little one, that'd had the flu, to go to sleep - '

* * *

Jane. Aged fifteen now, but only six then ... Jane, then at St. Bede's junior preparatory house and now at famous and exclusive St. Bede's School five miles down the road, with her sister Sally (eight then; now seventeen and coming up to her A-levels).

Mathematics. Even as day-girls they'd leave no change from ?1,000 a year each at St.

Bede's, plus taxi fares if there weren't any buses, which there probably weren't. Plus university keep for Diana. Plus wages for a full-time housekeeper ... All that drove home, as nothing else could, the curious fact from the record that Major (then Captain) Butler had been the sole beneficiary of the late General Sir Henry Chesney, sometime owner of Chesney and Rawle Printing & Publishing; and that whatever problems Colonel Butler had (and Major Butler had had, and Captain Butler might have had), they hadn't been - and weren't - money problems.

Sole beneficiary of General Sir Henry Chesney (no relative) equals private means.

Private means equals girls' public school education multiplied by twelve years multiplied by three (plus housekeeper multiplied by nine years).

'No relative' made all that worthy of closer scrutiny. And the more so because although the young (and newly- rich) Captain Butler had sold up Chesney and Rawle's for blue chips - ICI and Marks and Spencer's, but not Rolls-