Walking in Darkness

by Charlotte Lamb

  ‘He doesn’t deserve that much luck,’ Steve said very quietly, and Paul’s head swung his way, staring into his eyes. Steve smiled ironically. ‘Leave him to me. I’ll make sure Cathy gets justice. When I’ve finished telling the world the whole story, Gowrie will be finished, believe me.’

  ‘You’ll break the story?’ Paul asked, and Steve nodded.

  Gowrie went white. ‘You can’t do that. You made a deal with me. Are you crazy? You don’t think the network will let you put this out? Have you forgotten how much influence I have? My friends won’t let you do it.’

  ‘What friends? What influence?’ Steve mocked him. ‘Now Cathy is dead, so are you, Gowrie. Your wife’s father will be the first to hear the whole story, and after that you’re finished. Nobody will lift a finger to save you once the Ramsey family turn against you.’

  Desperately, Gowrie caught at his arm, gabbling. ‘Listen, Steve, don’t be a fool, I can do a lot for you, name your price, the sky’s the limit, you can’t do this –’

  ‘Watch me. You’re a dead man, Gowrie,’ Steve said, shaking him off.

  ‘Why don’t I just shoot him?’ suggested Paul. ‘It would be easier. It would make me feel better, too.’

  Gowrie gave him a wild look, then turned and began to run. Over his shoulder he screamed, ‘Don’t even think about telling anyone, Colbourne, or I’ll see you get yours!’

  They heard the slam of the front door, his running feet on the gravel.

  Paul began to laugh. ‘Well, I’ll leave him to you, then, Steve.’ He held out his hand and with a surprised look Steve slowly took it. ‘Sorry I didn’t get to know you better,’ Paul said with a friendly look. ‘Too late now, but thanks. Crucify the bastard, for Cathy’s sake.’

  He walked back to the couch and picked up Cathy again, before moving towards the door at an unhurried pace. The others all stood and watched. Sophie put a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob. She had never had a real chance to get to know her sister. Now she never would.

  ‘Give me ten minutes alone with her,’ Paul said as he walked out of the room. ‘Then ring the police.’

  Nobody moved or spoke as he went out into the hall, up the stairs. In the silence the creak of the floorboards upstairs sounded as loud as a shot.

  Sophie jumped, opening her mouth to scream. Nothing came out. She felt as if her head was exploding. Nothing seemed real any more.

  At last she managed to whisper, ‘We ought to go with him. He’s desperate, he might . . . do anything.’

  ‘He’s old enough to make his own decisions,’ Steve said gently, looking with compassion at her white, drawn face.

  Vladimir said, ‘I need a stiff drink, I don’t know about you.’

  ‘I think we could all do with one this time,’ Steve grimaced.

  Looking at Sophie intently, Steve said, ‘You’re not going to faint again, are you?’

  She couldn’t even answer. He pushed her down on to a chair and held a glass of brandy to her white lips.

  She pushed it away, shaking her head, but he put it up to her mouth again. ‘Drink some. No argument, Sophie. You need it.’

  She reluctantly parted her lips and took a swallow. The spirits made her cough, her throat growing hot as the brandy went down.

  Steve made her take another couple of swallows, then he sipped at his own glass. She saw from his face that he was as shocked as she was; he needed the brandy.

  ‘This isn’t really happening. I’m having a nightmare,’ Sophie murmured to herself.

  ‘I wish to God you were,’ said Steve heavily.

  ‘I wish I was, too,’ she whispered.

  They heard the shot upstairs a moment later.

  Epilogue

  Eighteen months later, on a fine May morning, Sophie pushed open the gate of Arbory’s medieval church and paused to look across the grass which lapped the graves in a green sea, looking for the grave which, last time she saw it, had been a raw, weeping wound in the earth, without a headstone to mark it.

  It had rained the day they were buried. The gargoyles on the ancient grey stone walls had spouted water from their mouths, rain dripped from holly and yew, the very paths became small streams running downhill towards the gate.

  Today the weather was very different. Sunlight gilded the stained-glass windows along the sides of the church, making the haloes of medieval saints glitter, robins and blackbirds were busy feeding their young in the ivy which curtained the wall around the churchyard, carrying caterpillars and moths to stuff into the gaping mouths waiting for them. The trees were all in full, green, glorious leaf, rustling and sighing around the churchyard. The whole world was full of promise.

  ‘There it is, Anya, at the back,’ she said, looking down at the baby she was carrying in a wicker carrycot, and as if in answer the pink starfish hands waved back at her.

  The grave lay in a pool of dense shadow cast by a great, spreading yew. Sophie walked slowly along the path to it and put her free hand on the scaly bark, looking back across the years, remembering another churchyard, another yew tree far away, and another grave.

  She had been back to the Czech Republic a few months ago to put flowers on her mother’s grave. Johanna had died without ever knowing what had happened to Cathy. The joy of talking to her long-lost daughter on the phone had been too much for her. She had had a stroke a few hours later and been taken to hospital, where she lingered in a coma for several weeks before dying. To Sophie at that time it had seemed that death was all around her, she could not escape it wherever she went. It was months before she came out of that grim mood.

  When she had visited her home again she wandered over to look at the grave which for so long had claimed to be the last resting place of Pavel and Anya Narodni. The stone had been removed, and so had the remains of little Cathy Gowrie. Her grandfather had had his only grandchild brought home to lie in the graveyard at Easton. The real Paul Brougham was still buried where he had lain since 1968, but no headstone proclaimed his identity. Sophie had knelt beside his grave and said a prayer for his soul, wondering if he would want to be moved. The little village was a peaceful place to sleep until eternity.

  The real Anya and Pavel had been buried here, in England, a week or two after their deaths, once the local coroner had allowed the burial to take place. First there had been an inquest, held in a small hall locally, with a grey, stooped coroner listening to the evidence, asking polite, hushed questions with a sympathetic, appalled, incredulous expression on his wrinkled, tortoise-like face, while a great mob of reporters scribbled, whispered, stared.

  They had waited outside to pounce on Sophie, Steve and Vlad when they left. Flashbulbs exploding, photographers jostling, reporters screaming questions. The story was already out in the States. Steve had done his weekly programme from London, via the satellite, and made sure with a few judicious leaks to major newspapers that the media were all watching that night. Next day every daily newspaper in America had carried the story as their lead.

  Gowrie had been a front-runner for the Republican nomination. His exposure had been a major scandal. The world press had gone to town on the story: newspapers and television had been awash with photographs of Gowrie; his home; his wife; her father, old Ramsey; distant shots of the Ramsey family estate at Easton; wedding pictures of Cathy and Paul. From Vladimir’s agency they were also supplied with pictures of the Narodni family and their home village.

  By the time Steve had finished, Gowrie’s tour of Europe had been cut short and he flew home a disgraced man, with no chance of getting the nomination as presidential candidate and no future in politics. The entourage that had flown out to Europe with him had all drifted away; he flew home alone.

  Over the next few months his wife had divorced him quietly, unopposed, through the person of her lawyers. She, herself, was by then living at Easton with her father, and was never seen in public. For not contesting the divorce, old Ramsey agreed to pay him an undisclosed sum, but other than that he was cut off from the Ramsey money. D
uring the same period, Gowrie gave up his seat in the Senate, on grounds of ill health, and went into hiding somewhere in Florida. Steve said Gowrie was quietly drinking himself to death there.

  Whether or not there were going to be official proceedings against him only time would tell. The mills of God and the government ground exceeding slow. The Czech Republic had made a lot of angry noise about an American diplomat illegally removing a Czech child without official permission, but it had all happened so long ago that nobody seemed to know what should be done about it now, and the same applied to the American government. There had been rumblings of threats against him for bringing a Czech child into the country on an American child’s passport, and threats of prosecution for fraud over presenting another child as the legal heir to the Ramsey fortune – but nothing had actually happened on either count.

  After the funeral of Anya and Pavel Narodni, Sophie and Steve had flown back to the States, Vladimir had returned to Prague and slowly life returned to a familiar pattern again. Steve had been summoned to Easton and had told a frail and desolate Ed Ramsey the same story he had told the British police, the inquest and the press. Ramsey was a tougher audience, harder to convince, his eyes shrewd and cold, yet Steve had sensed that his grief for Cathy, as well as for the little granddaughter who had never come home from Czechoslovakia, had sapped his life already. He wanted to destroy Don Gowrie, he made no secret of that, but once that was done Steve had the feeling the old man would not last much longer. He had told Steve that his estate was now tied up carefully in an involved trust fund administered by a charity. Don Gowrie would never get his hands on a cent of the Ramsey money.

  There had been no sign of Gowrie’s wife. A friend of Ed Ramsey had told Steve one day that she had descended completely into senility now.

  She didn’t remember her own name or where she was; only occasionally would she ask for her father, never for Gowrie, but sometimes she would start to sob and call out, ‘Cathy . . . where’s Cathy?’

  It had taken Sophie a long time to recover; she had made herself concentrate on her work, and had not wanted to see Steve at first. He reminded her of everything that had happened.

  He didn’t give up or go away. Lilli grew used to him turning up on their doorstep and usually asked him in, gave him her favourite Czech meal, a beef consommé with dumplings made from liver and garlic, and showed him her latest progress with the wheel of his family which she was creating.

  Lilli was not in a hurry, but then neither was Steve. It gave him an excuse to come to the apartment whenever he was in New York. Worn down by his persistence, Sophie let him take her out to dinner in quiet restaurants and then to parties given by old friends of his who lived in Manhattan. Or they saw the latest films, went to opera at the Met, to premieres of new plays. When Lilli finished his family wheel, he persuaded Sophie to come with him to present it to his parents. That was the first time she had met them and she had been shy with them. His father she found easy to talk to, but his mother intimidated her on first sight. Sophie saw that Mrs Colbourne was not happy with the idea of her precious son marrying a foreigner.

  Sophie had felt like telling her that she had no intention of marrying Steve! It was true then; she was fighting how she felt about him, reluctant to love him, afraid of getting hurt. Her emotional skin had been so thin after the events at Arbory – for a long time she had only wanted peace and quiet, but slowly her grief had healed and Steve was there, patiently, inexorably, waiting for her. He was not a man, it seemed, who had ever heard the word no.

  Kneeling beside the grave, Sophie put the carrycot down; her baby was blowing bubbles now, gazing up with those dark blue eyes at the sky wheeling overhead.

  Sophie looked at the clear-cut names carved on the headstone. It seemed odd to see them here, in England. Pavel Narodni and his daughter, Anya. So far from the country where they had been born.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been for a long time, Anya,’ she said softly. ‘But look who I’ve brought with me . . . she’s a month old, and I’ve called her Anya Katherine – and she has your dark hair, Anya, but then Steve is dark, of course.’ Lifting the baby out of her carrycot, Sophie held her up, the little feet in knitted white bootees kicking violently. ‘I think she has the family face. She’s a Narodni, all right, just look at her chin – obstinate and determined to get her own way. Steve says we’re going to have trouble with her, and I think he’s right, don’t you?’

  The baby gurgled, reaching for a fistful of the long grass which swayed so temptingly beside the grave. Sophie laughed.

  ‘See what I mean? Grab, grab, grab! Steve thinks the sun shines out of her. He’s already a doting father, he wants to give her the moon on a plate.’

  She laid the baby back in her nest of blankets. ‘We’re very happy. I did have a problem when I was carrying Anya, I had to stop work for a few months – high blood-pressure problems, I had to rest a lot. It was so boring, and Steve probably found me even more boring, I kept crying for no reason, I couldn’t help it. Steve thought it was the shock still working its way out, but my doctor told me pregnant women are often very emotional. I don’t want to give up my career, mind you. I’d like to go back to work, but not yet, not until she’s old enough to go to school. It costs a fortune to have someone else minding your baby while you work, and you miss out on all the fun stuff of the first couple of years, so I’m staying home with her for the moment. Steve’s show is being networked coast to coast twice a week now, so we bought a lovely house in the countryside outside Washington and he commutes daily. At weekends we often visit his parents, but since Anya was born his mother is driving me mad. She thinks she knows it all, nag, nag, nag. Oh, she means well, and she does love Anya, but I need to keep my temper, and that isn’t easy when you’ve been up all night with a grizzly baby.’

  She looked down into the cot and smiled at the way her baby was watching the branches moving on the yews.

  ‘She’s on her best behaviour today, for you and Papa. You should see her some night on one of her crying jags! Last time we stayed with the Colbournes, Steve’s mother said to me: leave her with me tonight, so I did, just to show her what it was like! I heard Anya yelling blue murder once or twice but I pretended to be deaf. I bet she doesn’t suggest that again! His father’s a darling, though. I wouldn’t want to hurt him, and Steve can handle his mother. I guess it will work out, and it’s good to be part of a family. I’m planning to have another baby once Anya is walking.’

  She picked up a bouquet of red and white roses she had brought, unwrapped them carefully and laid them loosely on the grave.

  ‘Smell these! Isn’t that scent gorgeous? I bought them in the village. We’re staying at the Green Man for a few days. Steve will come tomorrow, but he let me come alone with Anya today. He knows I’d feel self-conscious talking to you with him listening. I expect he thinks I’m crazy, talking to the dead. Oh, I miss you, Anya. And Papa. I wish I’d had a chance to get to know you both better. I hope Mamma has found you at last. I put roses on her grave too, last time I was there. It was so strange, her dying so soon after you both. As if it was meant. I visited Franz and my half-brothers while I was there, but really we don’t have that much in common. I think we had, Anya. We would have had, if there had been time.’ She sighed, looking at her watch. ‘I’ll have to go. It’s nearly feeding time, and Anya won’t wait, she’ll go red and start yelling any minute. I’ll be back with Steve tomorrow. I wish we lived in England and could visit you more often, but while we are here we’ll come every day, I promise.’

  She picked up the carrycot and looked once more at the quiet grave. Sunlight glinted on the carved stone, a speckled mistlethrush sang among the rustling grass, there was a scent of roses and honeysuckle on the air, and even in the brightest sunshine the yew trees cast their dark shade over this fine and private place.

  It was hard to believe how violent the deaths of those who slept here had been. All the uncertainties, the grief and anguish, had ebbed away. The world
’s heartache and glory meant nothing to them any more. Unseen, their dust slowly merged in the warm earth, yet she would not have been surprised to be told that they walked together under the silent midnight moon or in and out of the shadow of the courtyard yews, pale flitting ghosts like summer moths, their spectral voices whispering secrets all night long.