Tomorrow's ghost

'What d'you mean - smear?'

'Have it your own way - 'investigate', if you prefer. Just so you keep on digging until something starts to smell. Choose your own euphemism, I don't care.'

'I seem to recall, last time we met you weren't so pleased with him,' Frances snapped back defensively.

'Hah! Nor I was. But that was ... let's say professional disagreement, tinged with envy. This is different - and don't tell me you don't know it ... Come on, you tell me you're not digging dirt. If you can do that then okay. But if not...'

The challenge hit her squarely. That was the way it had seemed to her when Extension 223 had first talked to her, but somehow she'd forgotten her initial reaction.

And now that he wasn't talking to her - now that his voice wasn't seeping into her ear -

she could recall how she'd felt -

'Come on, Frances. Take me seriously just this once - is that what you're doing?'

Digging dirt - ? Well, crudely put, that was exactly what she was doing, even if she didn't want to find any.

The voice of Extension 223 had been the voice of Saruman, Tolkien's wicked wizard, who could always daunt or convince the little people.

'Yes.'

'Good girl. Because that's what I'm supposed to be doing too - digging dirt. My problem is your problem.'

A moral Paul? Frances didn't have to test the possibility in order to reject it. A delicate conscience had never hampered him in the past, and it wasn't likely to be spiking him on one of its horns now. Paul's dilemmas were always strictly practical ones.

'So what? It won't be the first time either of us has dug dirt, Paul.'

'Very true. That's where the gold is, in the dirt - I know.'

'Then what's so different now?'

'Hah! The difference. Princess, is that then we were digging in the national interest.

What old Jack would call 'the defence of the Realm' ... not as part of a bloody palace revolution.'

'A - what?'

'You heard me. A bloody-palace-revolution. The Ides of March in the Forum. A quick twist of garrotting wire and a splash in the Golden Horn. The Night of the Long Knives.

And us in the middle of it, up to the elbows in gore.'

'Paul ... are you out of your mind?' Frances stared at the white wall in dismay.

For a moment the phone was silent. 'Paul?'

'All right ... so I'm exaggerating. We do these things in a more civilised manner, of course ... But if I'm crazy. Princess, then I'm being crazy like a fox, I tell you. And ... you start thinking for yourself, for God's sake. Have you ever taken part in anything as whacky as this before?'

Frances started thinking.

'Whacky' was a typical Paul word, but it wasn't too far off the mark. There had been something decidedly odd about this operation from the start, she had been telling herself that all along.

'Who briefed you, Frances?' He paused only for half a second. 'Top brass? And off the record?'

'Yes.' Exercise caution. And that applied to her dealings with Paul as well, because if there really was a major security shake-up in progress - 'palace revolution' was also typical Paul - then two things were certain: there would be rival factions jockeying for power, and Paul Mitchell intended to be on the winning side, regardless of the interests of Frances Fitzgibbon, never mind Colonel Butler. 'But I wasn't told to smear Colonel Butler, Paul.'

'Don't be naive, Princess. Whose side are you on?'

He was being unusually direct or exceptionally devious, decided Frances. But which?

'My side. Whose side are you on, Paul dear?'

'Hah! I deserved that!' He chuckled at his own self-knowledge. 'Okay, Frances dear -

Princess mine - my off-the-record top brass set me to inquire gently into two small areas of doubt about our Jack's warlike career ... gently and discreetly, but I'd better get the required answer if I value my civil service pension bien entendu. Namely, if he was so bloody good at his job, why was his promotion so slow? And was the late glamorous Madame Butler the pillar of wifely chastity - or wifely virtue - that the official records suggest? To which I strongly suspect the required answers are He wasn't really any good, so he wasn't promoted, and He wasn't really any good because Madame B wasn't so virtuous while he was away at the wars, and he found out and that screwed him up. Right?'

Frances stared at the white wall. 'Damn you, Paul -'

'I said required - hold on. Princess - I said required. I didn't say 'correct'. Those are the answers they want me to come up with, not the answers I may come up with.'

'Damn you! I haven't started yet!'

'Well, hard luck! You wanted to know which side I'm on, and I'm telling you.

Though it's not easy on this bloody instrument - David Audley's right: the telephone is the devil's device, and