Walking in Darkness

by Charlotte Lamb

  He wasn’t even wearing a coat, probably because he had only had to drive such a short distance and he was used to the longer hauls of America, to New England winters, Washington winters, cruel as the grave. Under a leather flyer’s jacket he wore a thick blue sweater, a blue shirt under it, jeans with a broad belt, silver-buckled, and black leather boots. He looked very American, she felt the warmth of home just looking at him, and reached out to hug him, eagerly, instinctively.

  ‘Steve! Oh, I’m so glad you got here. Long time, no see. How are you?’

  He held on to her slim waist, tilting his head back to look down at her in her warm gold and amber jersey dress, an amber necklace round her throat and gold studs in her ears.

  ‘I’m OK, how about you?’ His quizzical, searching eyes slid over her face, absorbing the pallor, the lines of anxiety and stress at eyes and mouth. She looked like a victim of shell-shock, which was probably just how she felt, thought Steve, pity jabbing in his chest. Sophie shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have told her. Hadn’t he warned her she was playing with fire coming after Don Gowrie, and that was even before Vladimir told him what was behind Sophie’s quest. Why in God’s name was she so pig-headed?

  Cathy pulled away. ‘I’ll live.’ She forced a light laugh which made him wince at the brave pretence. ‘Come in, out of this cold wind.’

  ‘How’s Sophie?’ he asked, following her into the breakfast-room which by now smelt of the coffee which had arrived, along with a rack full of perfect toast and a little row of silver dishes kept warm electronically. The housekeeper had vanished again, the room was warm and quiet and homely, and he sighed with enjoyment at the smell of real American coffee after the stuff he had been drinking ever since he hit the UK. Why couldn’t the Brits make good coffee?

  ‘She’s getting dressed, she’ll be down in a minute,’ Cathy said, pouring him strong black coffee, remembering without needing to think about whether he took cream. She knew Steve backwards and forwards. She handed him the cup, looking at his face and suddenly thinking, Well she had thought she knew him, but what did you ever know about anyone?

  She had thought she knew Paul so well; she had thought her life was based on the solid rock of his love. This morning she knew how wrong she had been. All her certainties had crumbled under her feet.

  ‘Is she OK, though?’ he insisted, staring at her stricken face and seeing far too much, things she did not want anyone to see. He had ruthless eyes; that was something she had never noticed until now.

  ‘I’ll let you decide that for yourself,’ she evaded, turning her face away from that steely probe. ‘Can I get you cooked breakfast? Eggs, bacon?’

  She lifted the silver lids and he peered at the contents and was startled to feel his stomach clench in hunger at the smell of the beautifully cooked food. ‘A little of everything, please,’ he said, watching her spoon out scrambled egg, lift several rashers of bacon on to the plate.

  ‘Hungry?’ she asked, and he laughed wryly.

  ‘I’m starving. We only had sandwiches last night, and far too much to drink. God knows when Vladimir will wake up, and when he does he’ll have the hangover to end all hangovers. That man could drink the Pacific dry. Could I have two tomatoes, please? I love them. Plenty of mushrooms, yes, thanks.’

  Cathy placed his generous plate of food in front of him. ‘Help yourself to toast.’ She moved the toast, the butter and a yellow glass bowl of thick home-made marmalade to his elbow, then went out into the hall, hearing footsteps.

  Sophie was wandering about, looking into rooms like a lost child. Her face brightened as she saw Cathy.

  ‘Oh, there you are! I didn’t know where to go – this house is so enormous!’

  ‘We’re in here.’ Cathy stood back to gesture her into the room, and followed, watching as Sophie stopped, her breath catching, as she saw Steve at the table.

  He got up at once, scowling. ‘So there you are at last! I ought to slap you stupid for going off like that, without even telling me what you were planning! Didn’t I tell you not to take risks? You could be dead this morning – do you realize that, you silly bitch?’

  ‘I know,’ she said submissively. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Huh!’ he snorted. ‘You don’t fool me with that sweet, feminine stuff.’ But his face had softened, and he was looking her over with hunger, taking in every inch of her warm, feminine body in the almond green dress, her blonde hair gleaming in the morning sunlight. ‘You look good anyway. How do you feel?’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and they smiled at each other, the atmosphere suddenly dancing with sexual awareness.

  Cathy knew what a gooseberry felt like; she was prickling with tiny hairs of irritation and felt distinctly green. For so long Steve had been her property; now he only had eyes for Sophie, he had forgotten she was in the room. Stop it! You’re being ridiculous! she told herself but the feeling didn’t go away, it lurked at the bottom of her heart, an ugly black sediment she couldn’t identify and was ashamed about.

  She was deeply in love with her husband, she didn’t love Steve, or want him back – why was she reacting like this? Why?

  The question was rhetorical because she knew the answer even as she asked the question. She was unhappy and frightened and needed reassurance; she wanted the stability and certainty of her childhood and Steve meant that. Steve meant a lot of other things too: he stood for her own country, for America, for home, Easton, New England, for comfort and kindness. He had been there for as long as she could remember: when hadn’t she known Steve? He was as solid and real as Thanksgiving and Christmas, summer camp, beach parties, all the memories of her childhood and adolescence, everything in her life that had once mattered so much. Steve was bound up with it all.

  Oh, she wasn’t in love with him but she was fond of him, it had made her heart lift to see him standing at the front door.

  When he hugged her she had almost burst into tears of gratitude because he was just the same, he hadn’t changed towards her. Steve knew about Sophie’s allegations – but it hadn’t changed him, he obviously didn’t care whether or not she was rich or came from a famous old family. He had smiled at her and hugged her with the old cheerful warmth, and that had made her heart lift.

  Now, seeing him with Sophie, she was childishly jealous. She wanted to shout at Sophie, Get away from him, he belongs to me! Because he did, in the way that Papa had always belonged to her, and Grandee, and the dogs and ponies, everything at Easton, all the things that she loved. Love made them hers.

  Cold reason sank through her mind then, told her that she had to face the truth – none of them belonged to her. Papa was not her father, Grandee was not her grandfather, and Easton would never now belong to her. She might still love them, but love gave you no hold on anything.

  ‘Your breakfast is getting cold,’ she told Steve sharply, but didn’t meet the surprised look he gave her, flushing because she knew she was behaving badly. She went over to the sideboard and gestured to the food. ‘Sophie, do you like eggs, bacon?’

  Sophie joined her and looked at the scrambled eggs as Cathy lifted their silver lid. Steve sat down again and picked up his knife and fork, but was more interested in watching them together.

  ‘I can see the likeness now,’ he said as they turned to come back to the table, and they stood stock-still, startled, turning to look at each other. Standing so close, one to the other, in profile the resemblance was even more striking, and Steve breathed, ‘My God, yes! The shape of your faces . . . the angle of your cheeks, same nose, same jawline, same mouth.’

  Cathy said angrily, ‘I don’t see any similarity at all! I’m dark, she’s blonde!’

  He made an impatient gesture. ‘That’s just surface – your colouring is so different it deceives at first, but the bone-structure underneath the skin is identical, Cathy.’

  Cathy looked at Sophie’s face, not wanting to see any likeness, but seeing it, all the same. She didn’t want to believe it, but the bewildering sense of recognitio
n kept growing. My sister? she thought. My sister?

  Sophie thought that too, in an echo of Cathy’s thoughts but without the question mark. My sister. My sister.

  ‘You see, Anya? I’m not crazy. Steve sees it, I see it,’ she said with a face like morning sunshine.

  ‘I’m Cathy,’ the automatic reply came, but Cathy was thinking: Anya? Is that really my name? It was even beginning to sound familiar. She was beginning to like it. More than she had ever liked Cathy.

  What’s in a name? she angrily thought. Everything, it seemed. Anya Narodni was a very different person from Cathy Brougham. Changing her name changed everything.

  ‘Anya, look at me!’ Sophie eagerly said, staring into the mirror. She took hold of Cathy’s chin and turned her face forward. Cathy gazed at her own reflection, then at Sophie’s, and Sophie breathed huskily, ‘You see? We both get our bone-structure from Mamma, but you’re more like her, she always said I was like Papa, although I never saw it in the photos of him. I brought some with me – where did I leave my photos? I had them with me last night.’

  ‘They’re in the sitting room,’ Cathy said. ‘You can look for them after breakfast.’ She felt too tired and miserable to talk any more. She pulled her chin out of Sophie’s fingers and turned away. ‘Please sit down, Sophie, and eat your food before it gets cold.’

  She poured coffee, sat down, too, and ate half a slice of toast and marmalade while the others ate their cooked food.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’ asked Steve.

  ‘In bed asleep. He’s very tired.’ Cathy tried not to sound defensive, not to betray her anxiety, but Steve knew her too well. His narrowed eyes probed her averted face.

  ‘Does he know about Sophie?’

  She nodded without looking up. She did not want to talk about Paul; Steve was far too shrewd, his prescience disturbed her.

  Sophie was staring at Steve fixedly. ‘I just realized . . . I didn’t tell you about Cathy, about us being sisters . . . how do you know?’ She looked at Cathy. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘No, of course not!’

  ‘Vladimir,’ Steve said, swallowing a bit of bacon.

  ‘Vlad?’ she gasped. ‘But Vlad doesn’t know either. I never told him, I didn’t tell anyone!’

  ‘You underestimate your friends,’ Steve drily said. ‘Apparently you left him a message to say you were coming to London, so he rang Lilli at Theo’s apartment, and Lilli told him what happened in the subway, and about the burglary. Vladimir was worried about you. He’s a born newspaperman, he couldn’t rest until he knew what was behind it all, so he went to see your mother.’

  ‘He didn’t tell her people had been trying to kill me?’ Sophie had gone very pale, her eyes wide and full of distress. ‘Oh, why did he have to do that? She’ll be so scared. I wish Vlad would for goodness’ sake mind his own business! I’ve a good mind to ring him up and tell him so! Wait till I see him!’

  ‘You won’t have to wait very long.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s here, with me, staying at the Green Man. When your mother told him about Don Gowrie he flew over to London to find you. He reckoned you’d need help. He’ll be along later to see you.’

  Sophie’s lips quivered into a half-tearful smile. ‘That’s so kind of him . . . typical Vlad! But all the same, I wish to God he had not told my mother about the accident in New York.’

  ‘It was not an accident, Sophie. Someone tried to kill you and they’ve tried again since then,’ Steve said flatly. ‘Wake up to the danger you’re in! These people are not going to give up – they’ll try again.’

  ‘Not under my roof,’ Cathy said, and winced as Steve looked at her with irony and pity.

  ‘You’re almost as naive as your sister!’

  My sister, she thought, looking at Sophie, and Sophie smiled at her.

  ‘My sister,’ she said, echoing Cathy’s thought again. She was still having trouble believing that this was Anya, not dead, but alive.

  The village was busy with traffic and people shopping when Don Gowrie’s helicopter appeared on the horizon. Villagers halted in the street to watch briefly as it flew towards them, then hovered over Arbory House, but they were used to seeing Paul coming and going by helicopter and soon went about their business. The rotating blades on the chopper made it impossible for Gowrie to hear the faintly cracked note of the church clock when it chimed ten o’clock, but looking down into the village he got a clear view of the warm, golden stone of the houses, the grass, the trees, the blackened, twisted metal shape of the car in which Emily had died.

  Having caught one glimpse, he looked away, his face stiff and cold as a carved statue. He wouldn’t think about her. It wasn’t his fault she had been killed – she had been the one who crashed that car, not him. In the office she had been a miracle of efficiency. Why, when it came to killing Sophie Narodni, had she failed again and again? He couldn’t understand it, unless she had not really wanted to kill the girl at all.

  Or maybe it had been a run of bad luck. He had been having a run of bad luck ever since that damned girl showed up in the press conference.

  Luck was something you couldn’t manipulate or bribe. It had its own rules and its own logic. Random, unpredictable, blind – it struck out of the blue.

  In his mind’s eye he saw the remains of the car again – had they got Emily out yet, or was there nothing left to . . .?

  He shivered. He wouldn’t think about that – there was too much on his mind, far more important things to think about; he had no time to dwell on her death. First, he had to survive, end Sophie Narodni’s threat to him. After that he could think about . . . about other things.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Jack Beverley, who was as calm as a bowl of milk. Gowrie envied him his temperament. But then, what had he to lose?

  In the house they all heard the sound of the chopper coming down to land.

  ‘He’s here,’ Cathy told Steve, who nodded, watching Sophie, who had turned pale and was trembling a little. Paul had not put in an appearance, but none of them had mentioned him. They had left the breakfast-room and gone into a small, sunlit sitting-room with a view of the landing pad and had been listening for the chopper while they sat around the fire in ancient, sagging leather armchairs.

  ‘Maybe I should go back up to my room? If the senator finds me here he’ll be very angry.’

  Sophie was white with nerves. She was terrified of seeing Don Gowrie again. Last night was still alive in her memory. The way the car had come out of nowhere and hit her; climbing on to her knees just as it turned and drove straight back at her; then the driver swerving away and hitting the tree, the explosion, the roar of flames, the great red light illumining the darkness. In her dreams she had heard the woman in the car screaming; but that had not happened, she had not heard that. Or had she? She didn’t want to remember if she had.

  Steve saw the fear in her eyes, and put his arm round her. ‘You’re safe with me, don’t worry. He won’t dare touch you under this roof. He’d have to kill all of us. And even Gowrie hasn’t got the neck to try anything like that. No, he’s stymied, and he knows it. I’m just curious to know how he’s going to handle all this. What sort of excuses is he going to come up with? I wonder, has he got his speechwriters to write that script? Or has he worked it up by himself?’

  The sarcasm and contempt made Cathy flinch, and the sight of Sophie in Steve’s arms angered her too. She needed his comfort too, but he was only concerned with Sophie, it seemed.

  Fiercely, she burst out, ‘Once word of these accusations leaks out – and it will, gossip like this always does – he’s finished as a politician, he may even have to face some sort of proceedings. He certainly won’t get the presidential nomination. The money men will desert him. Grandee will be so furious he won’t want to know him either.’

  ‘Don’t waste your pity on him.’ Steve’s face turned grim and scathing. ‘Can’t you see yet what sort of cold-hearted bastard he is? He deserves everything that�
�s coming to him. And it will come, Cathy. Sooner or later someone will launch an investigation into what he’s been up to, and I just bet they find all sorts of skeletons buried in his backyard. Somebody once said that Washington is filled with two kinds of politicians – those trying to get an investigation started, and those trying to get one stopped. But once a can of worms is opened you can’t get the worms back into the can.’

  Cathy was white, her eyes shadowed with dark rings. ‘For God’s sake, you’re talking about my father!’

  ‘No, that’s the whole point. I’m not,’ Steve curtly said. ‘Your father is dead, and Gowrie took you away from your mother just when she needed you most, needed you to hold on to. What if she had lost the baby she was expecting? She’d have been left alone with nothing in the world to love. God knows what would have happened to her then.’

  Cathy stared at him, realizing that the sick, sad woman she had called ‘Mother’ all her life was, perhaps, not her mother at all, that the strange distance between them which Cathy had felt all her childhood, could be because they shared no blood, were not mother and child at all. She had thought it was because her mother was always sick that she had not really loved her. She had felt guilty because she didn’t care for her mother the way other people seemed to love their parents. She could remember many times when she had watched Steve with his mother, seeing the warmth between them, the easy, relaxed affection, and envying him.

  Somewhere in a strange country she had never visited there was this other woman who might be her real mother. What was she like, this other mother? How would it feel to see her, get to know her?

  ‘It’s time you faced all that,’ Steve said, more gently, seeing the haunted look in her face and intensely sorry for her. ‘You have a lot of re-thinking to do, Cathy.’

  Yes, he was right – if Sophie’s story was true her whole life had been a lie and it would take her a long time to think it through, come to terms with it. She would be losing everything she had ever thought so secure.

  If it was true. If it was true.