Tomorrow's ghost

... even weeks. There was even just a chance that it would sink altogether in some backwater.

But that wouldn't do at all, she chided herself: putting a smile on the face of a risk was a bad habit, it was always safer to assume the worst. And the worst ... allowing for collation and transcription - and from her own typing pool days she could estimate that closely enough: as a semi-friendly, semi-civilised foreign agency Mossad wouldn't rate high on the pile at the moment - allowing for all that, the worst could be forty-eight hours before the balloon went up ... And then it would be back to that same ignominious typing pool, maybe.

She stared again through the window at the rain-distorted figure of the young man waiting for her under the canopy above his petrol pumps. She was deluding herself again, of course: breaking a direct instruction, and using a foreign intelligence service to do it, wasn't on a par with breaking school rules, as posted on the assembly hall notice-board for all to see. (Everyone must keep to the LEFT in corridors and on staircases, and Forms must move in single file.) It was big time stuff, like being caught with a boy in the shrubbery, deshabillee, which needed no written rules to indicate the likely punishment.

So, once they'd added two and two together it would be bread-and-water for some unspecified period, and then out on her shell-like ear, and back to her widow's pension with a framed copy of the Official Secrets Act, the relevant passages heavily underlined in red.

Unless, of course, it was Colonel Butler himself who was by then in charge of hiring and firing.

Irony, irony ... all she had to do was to give him a clean bill of health. And although she could argue - and it was true - that she was only making contact with David Audley because it was the truth she was after, it was also true that the truth she was very much predisposed to uncover would give Colonel Butler his promotion, his Ring of Power.

She snapped her bag shut and stepped out briskly into the rain.

* * *

The young man looked at her with undisguised curiosity now: he was bursting to ask her about the souped-up engine under the bonnet.

'I've checked the oil, it's okay.' He rubbed his hands on his bit of rag. 'And the tyres -

they're okay too...'

'Thank you.' Frances stared at him discouragingly. The final irony would be for the promoted Colonel Butler to decide - being the man he was - that however grateful he might be for her disobedience he couldn't possibly overlook such unstable behaviour, such unreliability, in one of his agents. And a female agent too, by God!

'I - I've filled her up, too.' He was nerving himself to pop some sort of question.

'Fourteen gallons - or just under fourteen and a quarter, actually.'

That was at least six gallons more than the normal tank of this make of small family car was designed to take, Frances computed. The only car they'd had spare when the Colonel had banished her from the university had been a tailing special, she'd known that the moment she put her foot down on the accelerator, though without any particular gratitude. But now it was certainly a convenient vehicle to possess.

'Thank you.' She looked through him as she felt in her purse for a tip. Twenty pence would be enough, but a Honda Four-hundred-four sounded expensive, and he'd remember her whatever she gave him, so ... say, fifty, because he was so beautiful.

'Could I have my receipt, please.'

'Oh ... yes, of course!' He blushed becomingly too. 'Thank you very much.'

'There's a Colonel Butler who lives just outside the village. Brookside House, I think the name is?'

'Brookside House ... ?' Either the fifty-pence piece, or the engine, or the foxy lady Fitzgibbon seemed to have dried up his mouth.

'Colonel Butler. Brookside House.'

'Yes.' He nodded quickly. 'Runs a Rover - a yellow Rover. And ... he's got a daughter

...' His eyes glazed again, exactly as they had done for the Honda Four-hundred-four. If that was for Diana Butler, she must be quite a dish, thought Frances.

'Three daughters.'

'Yes. Three daughters - Brookside House.' He focused on her briefly, and then pointed down the road towards the houses. 'You go straight through the village, and then bear left at the junction, down the Sandford road, towards the motorway. It's about half a mile on, all by itself, with a long drive to the house, on the edge of the woods - you can't miss it.'

'Thank you.'

She wanted to give him a smile, to leave him with something that was really hers, but her mouth wouldn't obey orders, and there was no more time. The wipers swept the screen clear, but when she looked back in the mirror the first of the dead elms had blanked him out of sight, and she was alone again in her shadow country.

CHAPTER NINE

Twenty-four hours earlier, before she had studied the edited highlights of the file on Colonel Butler, Brookside House would have ambushed Frances with surprise, even shock.

Now, of course, the opulent rhododendron tangles at its gateway and the manicured quarter-mile of gravel drive between trimly-fenced horse paddocks amounted to no more than a gloss on the file, computed at compound interest over the years since Captain Butler, sole beneficiary (no relative) of General Sir Henry Chesney, had capitalised on his inheritance.

The mathematics of the scene confirmed her previous estimate: Chesney and Rawle's had been an old- established, deeply-entrenched and almost disgracefully prosperous business, which had been sold when the pound was still something to conjure with (which was when little Frances Warren had been not long out of her push- chair). Even allowing for the depredations of a quarter of a century's taxation and inflation, and throwing in a full- time gardener and maybe a stableboy with nannie and the school fees of the last ten years, and adding them all to Brookside House, which had been purchased when the Colonel - then the Major - had finally quit his