Authors: Anthony Price
‘All right. This message is for Mr Lee. He must contact our mutual friend, the one to whom he owes six favours -‘ Frances launched herself into space; time would tell if there were rocks far below, or too little water ‘—who is at present in our Washington Embassy.
The contact must be indirect, but soonest.’
‘”Indirect, but soonest,” I got that. And whose embassy would that be, now?’
‘Mr Lee will know. The message then is “Return to U.K. immediately. I will contact you through Mr Lee”. Have you got that?’
‘Ah, I got it. But I ain’t makin’ no promises. If –‘
‘If nothing. Do it now. Or find another pub.’ She hung up before he could contest the threat, which was empty and childish and self-defeating, but the best she could manage in mid-air at short notice.
She reached up and swept the remains of her small change into her purse. One thing was for sure, anyway: she had burnt her boats with a vengeance. If Mossad’s line into the Saracen’s Head public house wasn’t secure—David had thought it was okay, but David wasn’t infallible; and the Israelis were damn good, but they weren’t infallible either—then even if the eavesdroppers didn’t manage to trace the call back to this forecourt (and they’d had enough time, it had lasted far too long for safety) there’d be enough on that tape to identify her, and David too, once the right people got round to listening to it.
The plus factor was that that would take time, because it would be a plain different section evaluating the tape, who certainly wouldn’t be able to place her or her embassy straightaway, the more so as their heads would be full of their own Arab-Israeli hassles; it would have to travel through the proper channels, and because money and manpower were short some of those channels were so choked with material that it might take days … 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.
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 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 Re
gimental 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?’
‘Only a minor drawing.’ He bobbed his head. ‘But very nice of its kind—the only thing of substantial value in the house. The only thing I’d take. Only not to get rid of.
Probably too difficult to hock anyway … not rich enough for the hot market, but still easily traceable. Not worth the risk, in fact.’
Her surprise had adjusted itself. There was no reason why a copper shouldn’t know his art, and no reason why Colonel Butler shouldn’t collect, with his money. It was no more surprising—rather, much less surprising—than Robbie’s obsession with fairy stories.
Her nails dug into her palms. Why, just since yesterday, was she continually thinking of Robbie?
‘Was anything taken?’
‘So far as we can make out … three christening mugs—modern silver. One carriage clock, gilt. One transistor radio, plastic … Just small stuff, like the other places.’
‘The other places?’
‘Didn’t they tell you—no? This is one of three. The other two down the road, over Sandford way—‘ He pointed ‘—same sort of jobs: all done between eight and nine-thirty this morning, when the kids were being taken to school. Then the mothers went on to do a bit of shopping … here it was the housekeeper … and when they came home the back door had been forced. The other two places chummy found some cash—not much—and a bit of costume jewellery in one.9 He shook his head. ‘He didn’t do very well for himself at all.’
‘I see.’ Frances exhibited relief which was only partly feigned. In fact the department’s resident break-in artist, if there was such a person, seemed to have done quite nicely at short notice. ‘So it looks like a local job, then?’