‘Anya, I’m not lying to you. I haven’t told Steve anything. He got me a job working for his production team as a researcher –’
‘Why?’ Cathy sharply asked. ‘Why would he do that?’
Sophie bit her lip, looking down. ‘I’m afraid he suspects me of being your father’s mistress. He may even think I’m trying to blackmail your father.’
Cathy was dumbstruck. ‘Why on earth would he think that?’ She drew a painful breath. ‘Unless you were?’ She turned dark red with embarrassment and shock. ‘You . . . you aren’t, are you?’ The idea of her father having a mistress was not new to her – she wasn’t a child, she knew how little his marriage meant any more. Her mother was not a real wife, had not been one for years. But suspecting her father had other women was one thing – seeing this girl younger than herself and imagining her with Dad was something else. The very idea made her feel sick, her throat filled with bile.
‘No! Of course not!’ Sophie burst out, and Cathy breathed again, believing her implicitly, recognizing the look of truth.
There was a tap on the door and the housekeeper looked in: ‘The policeman’s at the gates asking if he can come in now, madam.’
Cathy pulled herself together. ‘Are you ready to see him?’ she asked Sophie, who reluctantly nodded. Cathy looked back at the housekeeper. ‘He can come in, then.’
When the other woman had gone Sophie begged, ‘Don’t leave me alone with him, will you? I hate talking to policemen, Anya.’
‘Yes, I’ll stay, but for God’s sake stop using that name, it is not my name.’
‘It is! I can’t understand how you can have forgotten it so completely. After all you were two when you were taken away – don’t you remember us at all?’
‘I don’t want to get into an argument with you again, let’s leave it for now, but I’ve been Cathy all my life and I don’t know myself as anything else.’
‘But I don’t know you as Cathy, I only know you as Anya.’
‘I am not Anya! Even if you’re telling the truth . . . and I’m not ready to believe you are . . . but even if you were I would still think of myself as Cathy. Every day of the life that is all I remember, I’ve been Cathy Brougham – this girl Anya means nothing to me.’
But she glanced sideways at the table where they lay, all those eerie, pale reproduced photocopies, and frowned at the woman in the old-fashioned wedding-dress, at the face so like her own, at something even more disturbingly familiar, at an emotion she felt deep inside herself and couldn’t quite pin down. What was it she felt every time she saw that face?
The telephone rang and both women jumped. Cathy leaned over to answer it. ‘Hello? What? My father? Security men?’
Sophie’s breathing stopped for a beat, her mouth open, in panic. Cathy looked at her, her face shaken, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone. Then she said harshly, ‘No. Absolutely not. Tell them they will have to wait until my husband gets here, he is on his way, and will deal with them.’
She put the phone down hurriedly as if afraid of being talked into changing her mind. She and Sophie stared at each other.
‘American security guys are at the gates, asking to come in,’ Cathy said.
‘They want me,’ Sophie said, trembling violently.
Cathy gripped her hands tightly. ‘No, of course not – I expect they just want to ask questions about the accident.’
‘They’re here to do the job that woman in the car didn’t manage to do, they’re going to kill me.’
‘I won’t let them in!’ Cathy was surprised to hear herself say that. She hadn’t meant to. Sophie’s terror had startled it out of her. Cathy didn’t believe what she was saying, but she was obviously scared sick, and who could blame her after the way that car had tried to run her down?
‘They’ll make you, they’ll use force if they have to!’
‘They wouldn’t dare! This is England, not the States.’ She was shouting. Stop shouting, Cathy told herself silently. What was she afraid of? But she knew. She was terrified that Sophie Narodni might be telling the truth. That would mean chaos, black night, the abyss of not knowing who she really was or where she belonged.
She took herself in hand and spoke more quietly, her face confident. ‘They have no jurisdiction here. They have no right to bust into my house, or use any force.’
Sophie suddenly lapsed into Czech, muttering.
‘What? I don’t understand,’ Cathy said.
‘I’m so frightened,’ Sophie whispered. ‘Because they’ll lie, invent reasons to make you give me up, and then they’ll take me away and kill me!’
‘I won’t let them through the gates!’ Cathy promised, she would have promised anything to stop Sophie looking that way, like a scared little kid, all eyes and a white face.
‘They’ve tried to kill me twice! First in New York, in the subway, they pushed me off the platform and I was lucky I wasn’t killed – that’s where I got the bruises the doctor pointed out to you, the ones that are starting to fade. Then, just now, outside – you saw what happened. You can’t pretend I’m imagining that, you saw with your own eyes what almost happened.’
Cathy was as white as death now, too, her mouth bloodless. ‘My f . . . father wouldn’t k . . . k . . .’ She couldn’t get the word out, it stuck in her throat like a bone, hurting her, silencing her.
‘Kill?’ Sophie said it for her. ‘Wouldn’t he? How well do you really know him? I talked to him, face to face, in New York, in the hotel, and he said to me that my mother had made a deal which included a promise never to tell anyone and she had broken that promise. He was very angry. He threatened me. He’s a killer, Cathy.’
Anguished, Cathy cried out, ‘Don’t say that! I don’t believe you. He’s my father!’ She loved him, she had always loved him, they had been so close throughout her life. He had kept her with him during the years when her mother was away at Easton and lost to her.
Dad had always been there for her. She thought back over all the times they had spent together, when she was a child, and later, after she grew up and before she married Paul. There had been many days on fishing trips, sailing the Ramsey yacht, or just drifting in a little wooden rowboat; summer days riding or walking in the forest, or wandering along the beach at Easton, talking politics, talking ideas, talking ways and means of making dreams reality, while they gathered clams at low tide, digging them out and taking them home in a bucket to be cleaned and cooked in a chowder by Grandee’s cook. They had talked and listened to each other, argued, and agreed.
‘I know him better than anyone in the world does,’ she said with a faint sob in her throat. ‘I always loved him better than anyone. Better than my mother, because she has had so much illness, for years we hardly saw much of her, but Dad and I were always together, he took me everywhere with him, on campaigns, all around the country, from coast to coast. Nobody knows him like I do.’
‘You didn’t know he wasn’t your father!’
For a few seconds Cathy was silenced, staring at her with stretched, dilated eyes, then she angrily said, ‘He is! He is! You’re lying, I know you are.’ She had to be lying, Cathy couldn’t bear it to be true, everything she had thought she knew about herself was disintegrating in front of her, she was confused, watching her very identity crumbling, her memories dissolving and disappearing.
She held onto them, would not let them slide out of her fingers. ‘You’re lying,’ she said again. ‘He is my father, he loves me and I love him – and everything you’ve told me is moonshine.’
‘Then why is somebody trying to kill me?’
The fierce question made Cathy’s breath catch. ‘How do I know?’ she finally muttered. ‘I don’t know anything about you, except that you’re lying.’
‘Why are his security men outside the gates trying to get me?’ Sophie came back without a second’s hesitation, and Cathy looked wildly at her.
‘I don’t know!’
There was a tap on the door. They both looked a
t it in shock. Cathy found herself trembling a little, too, and was disturbed by that. Sophie’s fear was getting to her, too. She felt it pulsing in her throat, in her ears.
‘Who is it?’ she called in a voice she barely held steady.
The door opened and a woman in a neat dark dress looked into the room. ‘The police, madam.’
Cathy’s tense muscles relaxed; she grew angry with herself now. What was the matter with her, letting herself get into such a state? As if her father would be involved in something like this! As if he would send killers to get a girl from this house. Her father spoke half a dozen languages, was highly musical, highly educated, a cultured, civilized man – not a hood. She knew what sort of man he was – why had she let herself be persuaded to doubt him?
‘Show him in, please, Nora,’ she said with a little sigh of weak relief, then, as the housekeeper went out again, turned to frown at Sophie and whispered urgently, ‘Don’t dare tell the police all those lies about my father!’
Sophie gave her a cynical look. ‘If it isn’t true, why are you worried?’
‘Because if the press gets hold of your story it could do Dad’s election prospects terrible damage.’
‘Which is why he’s trying to shut me up!’
‘I don’t believe he’s doing anything of the kind. Who’s behind you? One of the other Republican candidates? How much were you paid to pull this stunt?’ Cathy stopped, hearing the housekeeper’s footsteps outside in the hall, on the polished wood-block flooring, and even louder a man’s heavy tread following.
‘Constable Hawkins, madam,’ the housekeeper announced and a tall broad-shouldered man in a navy-blue uniform came into the room, removing his peaked cap as he came towards them.
Cathy stood up to greet him, pulling herself together.
‘Good evening, Mrs Brougham.’
‘Good evening, Constable Hawkins.’
Their polite, prim voices made Sophie want to laugh hysterically. This was such a different world to the one she had been moving in over the last few days – outside in the night the dangerous animals prowled with bared fangs. In here, in this elegant room, people spoke with all the formality of dancers in a stately quadrille, showing no emotions, no fear or alarm. Death had no meaning for them; that car beyond the gates had never blazed and consumed the woman inside it.
The policeman turned to look at her, his eyes like round black currants, in his bony, weatherbeaten face, curious, but only with a calm, professional interest. ‘Good evening, miss. I’m told you both saw the accident – could I ask you a few questions?’
‘Sit down, Constable Hawkins,’ Cathy said with a friendly smile, and the man took a brocade-seated, upright chair, placed his peaked cap on a nearby occasional table, put his black-shod feet together primly and got a little black notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket.
‘Could I have your name first, please, miss?’
Half an hour later, the little police car drove back through the open gates of Arbory House. The gatekeeper stood on the doorstep waiting to close the gates, but still more engrossed in what was happening on his television, eating a sandwich with his head screwed round to stare into his living-room.
If he had been more alert he would have noticed the big, American car waiting in the shadows just to one side of the gates, he would have been in time to stop them suddenly shooting past the police car and vanishing up the drive a great deal faster than the five miles an hour requested on the signs at intervals along the way up to the house.
‘Oh, no! JC and his twelve disciples!’ the gatekeeper groaned, coming out to stare after the disappearing tail-lights. ‘That’s tore it.’
He ran back into the cottage and picked up the phone. ‘Nora, trouble,’ he puffed. ‘Tell madam those Yanks have got past me, they went in while Hawkins was going out, I couldn’t stop them, they might have mowed me down, the speed they were doing! You’d better warn her, though, and pronto. And tell her it isn’t my fault, nothing I could do.’
The housekeeper made a contemptuous, disbelieving snort and hung up to hurry off to break the news to her employer.
‘My husband should be here soon. You can tell him your far-fetched story,’ Cathy was telling Sophie as the housekeeper knocked on the door and entered without waiting.
Flushed, Nora began at once, ‘Madam, it seems the American security people have got past the gates and are on their way here. What do you want us to do? Should we let them in?’
Sophie’s intake of breath was audible, her face had filled with panic. ‘I knew it . . . I told you what they’d do . . . they’ve come to get me.’
‘They’ll have me to reckon with,’ Cathy said with all the natural confidence of someone who has been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, educated to rule, and filled with a cool belief in her own invincibility.
The heavy doorknocker thudded sharply outside in the hall. Sophie shrank back among the cushions of the couch.
‘Tell them to go away, don’t let them in,’ Cathy said, her chin up.
‘No! Don’t open the front door!’ Sophie pleaded, but the housekeeper was already obeying her mistress.
They heard her voice from across the hall. ‘Mrs Brougham wants you to leave imm . . . Stop! How dare you, come back here!’
The heavy front door crashed shut, there was a clatter of footsteps across the wood floor and two men loomed in the doorway. Cathy recognized their look rather than their faces; she had seen it all her life, those rapidly moving, all-seeing, emotionless eyes, the faces smooth-shaven, angular, the hair very short, close to the skull, the bodies fit and yet bulky, hard with muscle, and no doubt packing guns under their expensive tailoring, the dark suits, the heavy overcoats.
‘They pushed their way in, madam,’ said the housekeeper.
‘How dare you force your way into my house? I told you to wait until my husband arrived. He’s on his way here now, he’ll be here any minute.’ Cathy got between Sophie and the intruders, her manner immediately becoming arrogant, high-handed. It was what they understood from people like her and her father. She knew men like this, too; it was only power they respected, a power greater than their own, and she was certain she possessed it.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Brougham, but Senator Gowrie sent us to get this young woman without delay. I’m sure you understand our position.’
The older man of the two spoke in a civil voice, smiling insincerely, his thin mouth stretched like rubber which snapped back into its usual tight line as soon as he stopped smiling. Cathy glared, disliking him and his companion intensely, admitting for the first time how much she had always disliked having men like this around her and her home. They were always in the background, watching, waiting. She still had men like this around her now that she had married Paul, because although he was not a politician he was a very wealthy man with a lot of power in the media, and he needed protection too, he was always a potential target for crazy people with grievances, criminals and terrorists. OK, she knew that, she wasn’t stupid, she realized she had to put up with them, but she didn’t have to like these guys.
Her voice icy, she said, ‘I don’t believe my father told you to push your way into my home and throw your weight around!’
Softly he said, ‘Your father wants Miss Narodni taken back to London. He told us to come here and get her, at all costs, so that is what we are going to do. We don’t want to upset you, Mrs Brougham, but don’t waste your sympathy on her. I’m sure she talks a good story, that’s what she gets paid for, she’s a con artist, but the truth is she was sent over to Britain to cause trouble for your father. She’s part of a dirty-tricks brigade who’ve been following him around the States for quite a time, trying to discredit him with lies, anonymous phone calls and letters, the usual game. I’m sure you’re familiar with the techniques. You’ve been around politics all your life, you know the way it gets done. Anything she has told you is a lie.’
This was what Cathy had been telling herself, that Sophie was lying, that this wa
s just a con game, a dirty trick, to wreck her father’s chances of nomination – but somehow when this man said it aloud she didn’t believe it.
The other man had wandered behind the couch while Cathy was talking to his colleague. Before Cathy had time to realize what he was up to he was beside Sophie, grabbing her by the arm and yanking her up from the couch.
‘Come along, Miss Narodni!’ he said, forcing her arm up behind her back.
‘Leave her alone!’ Cathy said, her stomach twisting in a strange pain as she saw Sophie being hurt. At that instant she felt as if she shared Sophie’s pain and fear, as if they inhabited one body, their minds linked, too.
Instinctively she ran towards them and the older man caught at her shoulder with a hand that pulled her back and made her wince and gasp in shock. She had never been manhandled that way before; she couldn’t believe it was happening to her.
‘If you want your father to run in the presidential race, Mrs Brougham, you’ll stop making this fuss and let us take her away,’ he intoned in that same cold, tight voice. ‘Your father will explain what she’s been up to when you see him tomorrow.’
Cathy clenched her hand into a fist and punched him angrily. ‘Get your grubby fingers off me, you big ape!’
The next second she found herself falling backwards on to the couch, was stunned to realize the man had hit her, and then heard with terror Sophie screaming as she was pulled out of the room.
‘Anya, Anya . . . help me . . .’
Steve and Vladimir had been lucky not to get stopped for speeding as they did a hundred miles an hour along the motorway, putting London far behind them in the race to get to Sophie, they hoped, before any of Gowrie’s people caught up with her. It was a chilly night and there wasn’t much other traffic around, or they might have had far less luck. The moon had risen, showing them the shadowy countryside they were driving through. The stars were white-hot points of fire high above them; frost began to make the tyres slip, and it sparkled white on the grass along the motorway verges, and into the distance the rolling English fields, backed by dark shadows of hills.
Walking in Darkness Page 24