Tomorrow's ghost

'indirectly'.'

'And this house.' He looked around him again, then back at her. 'You're still not levelling with me, Princess.'

'Not levelling? What d'you mean?'

'I mean ... you came here, and you talked to them - and you somehow got them to talk to you,

God knows how. But you couldn't have known what they were going to say, or what you were going to find. But you came.'

It would be easy to say 'Where else could I start?' It would even be logical, so that he couldn't argue with it.

But it wouldn't be the truth, or the most important part of the truth, and he would know that too. Because there were rare moments when Paul's instinct also operated independently from the data in his memory store, and this was one of them.

All the same, if she could avoid admitting the whole truth -

'It was in the report ... Or rather, it wasn't in the report, Paul.'

'What wasn't?'

'It never stated that they were a devoted couple.'

'Would you have expected it to?' He regarded her incredulously. 'Hell, Princess -

those Special Branch chaps of ours are bright coppers, but they haven't exactly been raised on Shakespeare's sonnets.'

'I've talked to the inspector who was on the case at the time...'

'Yes?'

'He was quite sharp too. And he liked Butler. I was waiting for him to say it - there were half a dozen times when he could have said it - 'It was a happy marriage'. Or even

'There was nothing wrong with the marriage' - anything like that - '

'Or 'It was a bad marriage'? He didn't say that either?'

'He didn't say anything at all, not deliberately.'

'So it didn't stick out enough to seem important to him.'

'But in this case it was important. Because there was no circumstantial evidence either way, so the motive had to be twice as important.'

'Okay, Princess.' Paul conceded the point gracefully. 'Then he liked Butler - so he didn't push it, you may be right. But, a bit of cold fish is our Jack. And cold fish plus stiff upper lip plus duty - it doesn't make for demonstrations of affection.'

'No! That's just where you're wrong, Paul. Colonel Butler isn't really a cold fish at all.

He's terrifically affectionate with his daughters.' Frances swallowed. 'And I mean, physically affectionate. I mean ... for example, every night he was home - right up until they started to develop, anyway - he'd insist on bathing them. And they loved it. In fact

... they still don't mind if he sees them naked - they actually tell him their measurements

- '

* * *

' - and Father always has to have the scores when he gets home, Frances. Like 'Australia 356

all out, England 129 for two, and Jane 31-23-31 - '

* * *

'Good God!' Paul sounded not so much surprised as slightly shocked at her intimate revelation of Butler family life. (But then, of course, Paul was an only son of a widowed mother, and a boarding school boy too, so under the Cavalier exterior there was probably a Puritan hang-up or two about adolescent girls, thought Frances nastily.)

'They adore him.' She struck at his embarrassment. 'They'd do anything for him.'

The blow rebounded instantly: anything even included attempting to conscript the wholly unsuitable Mrs Fitzgibbon as a potential Second Mrs Butler. And how many others before her? she wondered, remembering the eager, scheming little Butler faces.

'Uh-huh?' Paul quickly had his hang-up under control. 'But mightn't that make them perhaps not so reliable witnesses to the marriage?'

'No, I don't think so.' Frances shook her head. He still wasn't totally convinced, and she couldn't blame him. The omission of any judgement of the quality of the Butler marriage, either in the report or in William Ewart Hedges' recollections, was negative evidence, and her own investigation of the house was hardly less subjective, even when added to his own findings. But she could hardly admit to him that all this, plus what the girls had told her, were merely corroborative to the instinct she'd had from the beginning about Butler. How could she ever tell anyone that she knew what she was going to find before she had found it? That the knowledge was like a scent on the wind which she alone could smell? That this house itself still smelt of that old hatred?

* * *

'One thing about Maman, though - she always smelt beautiful, I do remember that.'