Tomorrow's ghost

regiment...

subtracting all this (and the running costs of Madeleine Francoise de Latour d'Auray Boucard) from the Chesney-Butler inheritance and there would hardly be a scratch in it, much less a dent.

The drive curved ahead, alongside a stable block. A horse poked its head out of a loose-box, returning her frown incuriously.

Add horses to the list ... although of all people Colonel Butler was no horseman, surely ... but add horses, nevertheless.

Still only a scratch, not a dent.

The daughters, then. Obviously the daughters. For girls the horse was as potent a symbol of power and glory as the motor-cycle was for boys - as the Honda Four- hundred-four was for that magnificent young man on the petrol pumps.

Quadruple garage ahead, beyond another great rhododendron jungle, and a collection of cars to be categorised: Nannie's Allegro in one open garage, under cover; a Police panda, white and pale blue; a gleaming Marina and another gleaming Marina, with close registration marks - both smelling of the Fuzz too, CID and Special Branch, for a guess ... by their cars shall ye know them!

In a way, it wasn't just a disappointment, it was a surprise, all this. And it wasn't simply that it was hard to adjust Colonel Butler to this state of wealth and comfort which had not come to him either by right of birth or as the spoils of success, but rather that the product of it all - this house, this property, that horse - was not Butler.

Simply, but inexplicably, they cast the wrong shadow from her sharp memory of the man.

Colonel Butler - her Colonel Butler - was not stockbroker mock-Tudor and horse-paddocks. He was solid Victorian red brick, gabled and respectable and rooted in all the lost certainties of the nineteenth century, when the sun never set on his flag. His house, his true house, would be a house with good bone structure and secrets of its own, not a thing like this, with no past and no future, but only an endless ephemeral present.

This wasn't his house, it was her house - Madeleine Francoise's house - out of which she had stepped, across this gravel, down that drive, on to that road, to nowhere, nine years ago, almost to the very day if not to the actual hour.

'Mrs ... Fisher?'

She had caught the footfall crunch on the gravel behind her. It had been more important to think that thought through than to turn towards the sound. Now she could come back to it later.

Fisher was careless of them. Here, where she could be remembered and described by Nannie, she could only be herself.

Nannie.

Mrs Elizabeth Mary Hooker, S.R.N., widow of Regimental Sergeant-Major Alfred Charles Hooker, Royal Mendip Borderers (killed in action, Korea 1951).

Nannie.

'Yes.' She felt inside her bag for the Fisher credentials.

He studied them only briefly, because he had already stared his fill at her, taking in face and colouring, height and weight.

'Geddes, Mrs Fisher. Detective-Sergeant, Special Branch.'

She took her details back from him, and his own. He was short for a copper, and long-haired, and swarthy enough to pass for a Pakistani. Which, all of it, might be not without its Special Branch uses, reasoned Frances.

Thank you, madam.' The dark eyes were bright with intelligence, assessing her but not stripping her. Storing her away for future references, too.

'But ... for today's purposes I shall be Mrs Fitzgibbon, Mr Geddes.' Because she liked the look of him, and also because she needed him on her side, she smiled at him carefully, without opening her lips. 'Colonel Butler already knows me as Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'Very good, Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'You've met Colonel Butler?'

'Yes, madam. In the way of routine, that is. Not today, of course.'

Like her own cottage, this was a house on the list. Which meant that the Special Branch would have checked out its security and the Uniform Branch would keep an eye on it, regularly but unobtrusively, day by day. In the way of routine.

She nodded. 'Tell me about the break-in.'

'Nothing to worry you.' He smiled white teeth at her. 'That's my guess, anyway ... for what it's worth.'

'Yes?'

'Small time job. No precise information - just looking for money and jewellery.' He nodded over his shoulder towards the house. 'This is the sort of place where it's usually lying around for the taking ... easy pickings nowadays. Except that the Colonel doesn't leave it lying around, except on the walls.'

'On the walls?'

'Some nice water-colours. Samuel Atkins, Copley Fielding, Paul Sandby ... a couple of William Callows ... a Labruzzi, rather a striking one. And the Turner, of course...'

'A Turner?' She was torn between surprise at his appreciation of art - a rather striking Labruzzi - and this new insight into Colonel Butler, whom she could no more place in an art gallery, catalogue in hand, than she could on a horse, bridle in hand. 'You mean, J. M.

W. Turner?'