Tomorrow's ghost

'Yes. Well ...' Frances grasped the nettle. 'What is Colonel Butler doing at the moment?'

'Why ... he's still pursuing O'Leary, of course.' There was a frown in his tone, as though he was disappointed in her. 'Why do you wish to know, Fisher?'

'Up in Yorkshire?'

'Yes. That's where he thinks O'Leary is.'

'Where, exactly?'

'This morning I believe he is pursuing his inquiries in the town of Thirsk.' Extension 223 sounded as though he had no great confidence in the inquiries bearing fruit. 'Why do you have to know exactly where he is, may I ask?'

He was warning her off. They were keeping tabs on Butler now, naturally, but that was someone else's job, not hers - hers was Butler in '69, not Butler this morning, he was politely telling her.

And, for a guess, that might be Paul Mitchell's job, he would be good at that ... Paul Mitchell the watcher of Colonel Butler, the pursuer - Butler, in his turn, would be better at that, pursuing rather than waiting in ambushes festooned with computerised electronics. A hunter and a fighter, was Colonel Butler, not a trapper.

'Fisher?' Extension 223's patience was exemplary.

'I'd like to see the file on Trevor Anthony Bond.'

'Ah!'

Frances breathed a sigh of relief. There was a file on Trevor Anthony Bond, she knew that because it had been cross-referenced in the file on Colonel Butler. What she hadn't known was whether it was an active or a passive file - it might well have been passive with effect from 11.11.69, from . the afternoon when Butler had first and last quizzed Trevor Anthony on his KGB contacts. Indeed, it might very well have been passive from 11.11.69, but that Ah! told her it wasn't passive now; that it was - one will give you ten -

within reach of Extension 223's right hand on his desk, maybe.

'He's still alive, I take it?' 'Oh, yes - alive and kicking.' 'And living in Yorkshire?'

Pause.

'Yes.' Pause. Thornervaulx Abbey.'

'He's still there?' Frances shivered. Why had she assumed - why had she known before she asked - that Trevor Anthony Bond still worked for the Ministry of Public Building and Works at Thornervaulx?

'Yes.'

Fountains, Kirkstall, Jervaulx, Byland, Rievaulx, Thornervaulx - the great ruined abbeys of Yorkshire.

They were all a blur in her recollection of the things past in another life.

Fountains, Kirkstall, Jervaulx -

Fountains had been full of people picknicking on the grass, leaving their Coke cans and sweet papers and tinfoil...

* * *

She closed her eyes.

Frances Warren, aged 10, had had a green-flowered dress with a velvet bow for dinner - dinner with Uncle John in the immense Victorian vicarage - a dress which had flared out gloriously when she pirouetted in front of the mirror ... except that she had had no breasts at the time, when the unspeakable, rebarbative Samantha Perring had already owned a bra -

* * *

Kirkstall, with the marvellous museum across the road, with the Edwardian street and the penny-in-the-slot machine that reconstructed a murderer's last hours, right down to the six-foot hanging drop -

Frances! Stop working that gruesome machine!'

* * *

Kirkstall and the Hanged Man.

Jervaulx had been too ruined and dull, without the carefully manicured lawns of Byland, with its ruined pinnacle; and the wooded beauty of Rievaulx, where they had lunched on the hillside -

Chicken legs and white wine.

'John darling, don't give the child another glass - you'll make her quite tipsy!'

'Nonsense, m'dear. It's important for a girl to hold her liquor these days. Hold your glass steady, wench.'

And she had thought thereafter, and still half thought, that holding her liquor was really only a question of keeping her glass steady in her hand.

But Thornervaulx was still misty in her memory, mixed and confused with Fountains and Rievaulx ... in another wooded valley ('Dale, wench, dale - you're in Yorkshire now, not your muggy Midlands!') - in another wooded dale - hidden from the outside world of the flesh and the devil, as the old Cistercian monks planned it to be.

Perhaps that was the effect of that second glass of Uncle John's white wine, pale gold remembered through the