A Prospect of Vengeance

'But it wasn't a happy ending for Mrs Fitzgibbon, Reg.' Ian couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice.

For a moment, Buller didn't reply. '"Fitzgibbon", was it?'

Another pause. 'You had an interesting day, did you, Ian lad?'

He had to keep his cool. 'But she had a bad day — November 11, 1978?'

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Another pause. 'What was she doing in Rickmansworth?'

'What was she doing in ... where was it?' Surprisingly, it was Jenny who came to his rescue. 'At Thornervaulx — the ruined abbey there, wasn't it?'

'You know the place, do you?' Buller had obviously decided that he was giving too much and receiving too little in exchange.

'I know the place. Daddy used to shoot near Thornervaulx —

or hunt, or something.' Jenny also knew Buller's game. 'Or maybe it was racing at Catterick . . . What was she doing in Thornervaulx, Reg — this Mrs FitzPatrick?'

'Ah . . .' With Jenny, Buller usually surrendered more quickly than this. 'Well, it's like they always say with makin'

omelettes: you 'ave to break the eggs now an' then. Only . . .

it's always the cooks an' the omelette-eaters talkin', isn't it?

Never the eggs and the chickens.'

'So she was just doing her job.' It was impossible to say whether Jenny was more irritated by Buller's obstinacy or by fluctuating extremes of the accent he tended to assume with her. 'But was she Police, Mr Buller? Or was she Intelligence?

And ... if she was Intelligence, in R & D? Because they do appear to pretend that they're "equal opportunity", it seems.'

Equal opportunity to die, in this case, Ian added silently.

'I tell you one thing, Lady . . .' But Buller trailed off maddeningly as the sound of another train came down the line towards them.

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'One thing — ?' Jenny urged him on, her voice rising against the sound.

'Aye. She was . . . brave, Lady — ' The rest of his shout was cut off by the train, the noise sucking the words away with it again.

This time she waited until the noise had gone, and the hum of the city had reasserted itself as a background to the silence in the cutting. 'Brave, Mr Buller?'

'She was the one that picked up the bleedin' bomb at the University.'

Frances? thought Ian. Frances! 'How do you know that, Reg?'

'I thought it was Audley, first. But he wasn't there — at the University.' Buller addressed him deliberately in the darkness. 'An' then I thought it must 'ave been Mitchell. But it was ' er — '

'How do you know?' That it had never occurred to him before seemed like a betrayal, almost: like Buller, he had never dreamt of equating the 'heroic secret services officer' of Reg's favourite tabloid newspaper with its 'innocent bystander' at Thornervaulx a few days later. ' How do you know, man?'

'I talked to a bloke that was there — what d'you think?' Buller was guarded about his police contacts again. 'An' I've just put two-an'-two together. An' they make four, just like always.'

'She sounds a bit stupid, to me.' Jenny spoke to no one in particular. 'But . . . she was R & D, then — is that what you're dummy2

saying, Mr Buller?'

Suddenly Ian didn't want to talk about Frances any more.

And he didn't want Jenny to talk about her either. 'I thought we were talking about Mitchell, not Mrs Fitzgibbon.'

'And we know that he's R & D,' agreed Jenny. 'But . . . what's Thornervaulx got to do with Philip Masson, Mr Buller?'

There was doubt in her voice, and she wasn't arguing now: she was conceding a point while seeming to ask for an explanation.

But Thornervaulx was Frances Fitzgibbon to Ian. 'He wasn't there — you said, Reg?' (If there had been the slightest possibility of that, Jenny wouldn't have asked her question: it would have been all Thornervaulx then!)

'No, 'e wasn't there.' Buller dismissed the idea scornfully.

'The bleedin' generals don't go into the front line, lad—'

'Mr Buller!' Jenny snapped him off. 'Just answer the question, please.'

Buller crunched the dirty people's refuse under his feet. 'It's time we got out of 'ere, Lady. It's not too far to that pub I know. An' I can phone from there — '

'Mr Buller!'

'Okay, okay!' He drew a noisy breath. 'I don't know for sure.

But if I'm right . . . then Thornervaulx wasn't just the death of O'Leary an' the woman: it was the death of your bloke too, Lady.'

8

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It was always another pub with Reg Buller: it was a mystery to Ian how the man had found enough opening hours in all the days of his life to be so intimately friendly with so many landlords and landladies, barmaids and barmen, so that they were willing to spirit him away into their small back rooms on the nod, safe from prying eyes.

'Not one of my usual watering 'oles — not since the brewery done it up,' Reg had murmured in his ear as he propelled them through the noise and smoke towards a door at the back of the bar-room. 'But the bloke 'ere owes me a favour, anyway . . . Up the stairs, door straight ahead, an' I'll join you in a mo', when I've fixed up our travel arrangements —

okay?' Then he ducked back into the noise again, leaving them staring at each other.

'What travel arrangements, Jen?' Ian felt that he had left the wet outer darkness of the street outside for a brightly-lit but greater inner darkness.

'Don't ask me, darling.' She shrugged while attempting to repair the ruin of what had probably started out as an expensive hair-do. 'Mr Buller seems to have taken over, that's all I know. Don't you know?'

'You spoke to him this afternoon, Jen.'

'But only on the phone, darling. And he didn't say much then, except that he wanted me to ask around about Paul Mitchell . . . which I had already started to do on my own account, actually . . . But I thought you knew all about his dummy2

trip north — ?' She gave up the repair-attempt. 'I'm not going to argue the toss with you here, darling, in public. So just do like the wretched man said — get up those stairs.'

The only thing he knew — or the only additional thing he knew — thought Ian wearily . . . was that, however scared Paul Mitchell and others might be running now, or soon, Reg Buller was running scared already. And after John Tully, never mind what had happened at Lower Buckland this afternoon, that made sense. So getting up the stairs also made sense.

But the room at the top of the stairs in no way resembled the Shah Jehan room: it had foul red-plastic covered tables and an even fouler smell of stale tobacco-smoke, complete with overflowing ashtrays: it was a meeting-room of some sort, and all that could be said for it now was that it was empty.

'What about Mitchell?' He faced her again.

'Darling — you know him better than we do.' She returned to her repair work, letting the whole elaborate ruin down in a red cascade. 'If only I had an elastic band! You don't happen to have one, do you, darling?' She glanced at him a little too casually. 'No — of course you don't! But... he did save your life — didn't he? Mitchell, I mean . . . No . . . well, of course, we don't know that for sure, do we? And you were busy with that woman of yours . . .'

He had to hit her back. 'Whom you didn't think was important?'

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'I still don't think she's important.' She spoke through several hairpins.

'And Reg Buller going north — ?' Buller had come back with information about Mitchell. So she damn-well couldn't argue with that. 'What — '