Walking in Darkness Read online

  His nerves jumped. At last! He had been waiting on tenterhooks for this call.

  He let go of the ends of the tie, sprinted over to the bedside table and picked up the phone, the white tie hanging loose around his neck.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dad?’ The voice was not the one he had been expecting to hear. For a second he was still, shaken, then his face lit with warmth.

  ‘Cathy. Hi, darling.’ Then anxiety came into his eyes, the old, familiar fear of one day losing her, the sense of a threat always hanging over this precious child. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  She was quick to reassure him, Cathy had had years of hearing that note in his voice. ‘No, of course not, Dad – I’m fine. We’re both fine, and looking forward to seeing you soon. I just wanted to send my love to Grandee. You’re having dinner with him tonight, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Relaxing, he smiled. ‘I was just trying to tie my tie when you rang.’

  ‘Haven’t you learnt how to tie a bowtie yet, Dad?’

  Her laughter sounded so clearly in his ear that it was like having her in the room. When she was a baby he had felt nothing much for her except relief that he had her, that the miracle had been pulled off, he and his wife had a child against all the odds, and if it was not a boy, as he had prayed, at least he had an heir to the Ramsey fortune.

  What he had not expected was that she would turn into so beautiful a girl or that he would be so proud of her. She did everything so well, she had never put a foot wrong all her life: wore her clothes with classy style, rode horses as if she had been born in the saddle, was intelligent, could talk to people at all levels of society, like a true politician, and when she chose a man chose brilliantly, a man of his own kind, wealthy, powerful, obviously ambitious and meaning to climb to the very top in his own country.

  He smiled, too. ‘Bowties have a life of their own! But I’ll do it, if it takes me all night,’ he assured her, the underlying obstinacy of his nature showing in his bony face for a second. He was a man who never gave up once he had set his mind on something.

  ‘Where’s Cope? Isn’t he with you?’

  ‘He had to have a tooth out yesterday so I sent him off to bed.’ His valet had been grey with pain. Cope was nearly sixty now. He had worked for Don Gowrie for ten years, doing all the little jobs a wife normally did, taking care that Don’s wardrobe was always in good shape, the suits and coats cleaned, the shirts immaculate, the shoes polished, ties pressed. He had made himself indispensable and Don had been shocked to see him look so old. If Cope retired it would disrupt his life, he would have to find someone to replace the man and he knew it would not be easy. Cope was one of a dying breed.

  ‘You old softie!’ Cathy’s voice was full of affection, and Don Gowrie smiled, his face smoothing out into boyish charm once more.

  ‘So, I’m to give your love to your grandfather? I will, but you could talk to him yourself, you know. He’s resting in his own suite.’

  ‘I don’t want to over-tire him. That trip out from Easton eats into his energy, and he has to sit through a long dinner tonight. Now, Dad, don’t let him drink too much or stay up too late. I know what you men are like when you get together and start talking politics. Has he got the Gorgon with him?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Upcher flew here with him, and whisked him off to his suite as soon as they arrived.’

  ‘I don’t know how Grandee can stand her, she’s the ugliest woman I ever saw, but I have to say she does take care of him.’

  ‘She’s a good nurse,’ he chided. ‘And devoted to your grandfather. That he’s still alive is largely down to her.’

  ‘I know,’ Cathy said, and he knew she was serious now. ‘You know, I can’t imagine the world without him, Dad. Can you? He’s the totem pole we all live by, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear you say that.’ The dryness escaped before he could stop it, but Cathy didn’t seem to pick up on the ambivalence of his voice.

  Laughing, she said, ‘He’s obsessed with native American culture, isn’t he? I remember when I was four and he drove me along the Mohawk Trail for hours, to see the colours of the woods in the fall. He recited Hiawatha to me, and bought me a pair of moccasins at a trail gift shop. I grew out of them before I had worn them out. I hung them on the wall in my room.’

  ‘They’re still there, darling,’ he assured her. ‘We haven’t done a thing to your room since you left, don’t worry.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounded touched and he smiled.

  ‘It will always be there for you when you want to come home. Sorry, darling, but I have to go and finish tying this goddamn tie or I’ll be late for dinner with Grandee and then he’ll have me roasted over a very slow fire. If there is one thing your grandfather cannot abide it is unpunctuality.’

  ‘Punctuality is the courtesy of kings,’ Cathy growled in a very good mimicry of Eddie Ramsey’s deep New England accents. Then she said, ‘Goodnight, Dad, see you soon. We can’t wait to welcome you to our home again.’

  ‘I can’t wait to be there. It seems years, not months, since I last saw you,’ he said, choked with sudden feeling, and heard her blow him a kiss before hanging up.

  He didn’t even have time to get back to the dressing-table to finish tying his tie when the phone rang again.

  This time it was the voice he had been waiting to hear. ‘I just heard on the local news that there was an accident on the subway this evening. A girl fell under a train.’

  Gowrie hadn’t expected that. He said blankly, ‘Fell under a train? What girl?’

  The voice was wary, no doubt remembering that there could be other ears listening to the calls he got on this line. ‘The Czech reporter – Sophie Narodni.’

  Cold pearls of sweat sprang out on Gowrie’s pale forehead. He sat down abruptly on his bed, no longer able to stay on his feet, and gripped the phone so tightly his knuckles showed white.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  As Catherine Gowrie put down the phone, an arm came up out of the bed and pulled her back into the warmth, the crumpled sheets, where they had made love an hour ago. A mouth nuzzled her neck, a hand cupped one of her naked breasts, her rounded flesh overflowing the hot crucible of fingers.

  ‘You and your father could talk the hind leg off a donkey. I thought you would never ring off. Chatter, chatter, chatter,’ Paul said. ‘There are better things to do in bed than talk. Mmm . . .’ His body pressed into her back, touching her from shoulder to ankle, and she felt the stirring rise of his flesh, heard his breathing quicken.

  ‘You’re insatiable,’ she said, laughing, half-incredulous, but feeling her insides melt as he began moving against her with that sweet, familiar insistence.

  ‘I can’t have enough of you, sweet Cat,’ he said, his lips parting on her nape, pushing aside her long silken hair, then beginning to trail down the deep indentation of her spine. He knew exactly how and where to touch her to arouse her. Shutting her eyes, she felt the rough brush of the hair on his thighs, the intimacy of his lips in the crease between her buttocks, seeking, sliding down, down, underneath and inward, until they found the heat and moistness hidden there, and she gave a groan of fierce pleasure.

  ‘Aaah,’ she moaned. ‘Oh . . . yes . . .’ Although they had made passionate love for half an hour so short a time ago, she was ready for him again. Her whole body was trembling, yielding, her bones waxen in her overheated flesh, as he turned her on to her back again and moved on top of her, entering her and slowly, slowly, tormentingly, began, refusing to let her hurry, rush on to the climax she was crying out to achieve.

  With no other man had she ever felt anything like this wild clamouring for release to which Paul could bring her. His body had a power over hers that had become an addiction from that first night together.

  They had met in Washington nearly a year ago, at a Christmas party given by a famous political hostess. Cathy had known almost everyone else in the huge, glittering room and had been a centre of attention as soon as she a
rrived. It had been a lively, noisy occasion, everyone dressed up like Christmas trees, jewellery blinding you on every side.

  She remembered the instant she first saw Paul. Their eyes had met, quite literally, across a crowded room. She had seen a tall, distinguished man with a striking, powerful face, dark eyes that seemed to pierce her to her very soul, hair still jet-black and thick. Older than her, in his late forties, she suspected, but then she liked older men. Young men were either obsessed with sex or with themselves, and bored her. She had been talking to a crowd of politicians and she had gone on talking, smiling, pretending to listen, while all the time she was only aware of this stranger on the other side of the room.

  She had had no idea who he was, except that he was English. She could hear his cool, deep, cultured tones without straining although he was not raising his voice and all around them both people were talking loudly. She had loved the way he talked, she had always loved the way the English talked. It was very close to the way her own people talked in New England.

  She had made no move to go over to him; she had been so sure he would come over and speak to her and she had known, even then, right from the very first, that this was going to be the most important relationship of her life.

  He had detached himself from the group he was talking to and strolled calmly, without hurrying, towards her, and she had waited without looking at him, her whole body alive with excitement.

  She couldn’t remember what they had talked about, although they must have asked each other the obvious questions. ‘Who are you? What do you do? Where do you live?’ The only thing that mattered was that they had not felt like strangers; there had been something so familiar about him, as if she had known him in another life, and this was meant, intended, they belonged together.

  After a while they had quietly slipped out of the party, indifferent to watching eyes or the gossip they might arouse. They were almost silent in the cab they took back to his hotel room. They had sat side by side, their bodies not even touching, from time to time looking at each other, and knowing what was going to happen as soon as they were alone.

  Cathy had never before gone to bed with a stranger. She wasn’t promiscuous; there had not been that many men in her life. She had twice thought she was in love. If she had not met Paul she might have married the man she had been seeing just before the night of that party. Steve would have been there with her if he had not been abroad that month.

  She had known Steve most of her life. She had believed she was in love with him for a while, but at the first sight of Paul she knew the difference.

  Everything she had ever felt before had been playing at love. Paul hit her like lightning striking a house, setting her on fire, and the whole landscape of her life was illuminated for her by what she felt with him. She knew she would never be the same again.

  They had made love three times that night, and in the morning after sleeping a few hours they had woken up and made love again. She had been so stunned that she had said to him, ‘You aren’t real! Do you always do it this often?’ and Paul had hoarsely laughed and shaken his head.

  ‘Never in my life before! I can’t believe it either. It’s just that I haven’t been to bed with anyone for a long time, and you’re so bloody marvellous, I can’t have enough of you. I feel like a starving man who gets his first meal for days and can’t stop eating.’

  It had not been a romantic declaration of love, but it had made her heart turn over. She could have told him there and then that she was in love, but she waited until Paul told her first. From the beginning she had let him set the pace, even when she was consumed with the need to know he loved her. Paul was the sort of man, she knew instinctively, who needed to be in control of everything in his life, and Cathy loved him enough to give him what he needed, whatever the cost to her.

  He had proposed before he went back to England and she hadn’t even stopped to think about it before accepting. Her father had known she was seeing him, but he hadn’t had any idea it was serious and when she told him she was marrying Paul he had been stunned.

  ‘But . . . Cathy . . . he’s not much younger than me!’ he had protested.

  It was an argument she had expected. She had her answer ready. ‘He’s forty-eight – but so what? I’m not far short of thirty. I think that’s quite a good age-gap.’

  It had taken a while to talk her father round, but he had always been sensible enough to know when she was serious. And there were compensations. He couldn’t deny it was a good match: Paul was a very wealthy man with a great deal of power in his own country. He not only owned an important national newspaper, but was a major shareholder in a television company, and her father could see he would be a very useful son-in-law, although he would much rather have seen her marrying an American.

  Telling Steve had been far harder. She didn’t like remembering his face, what he had said. She had realized she would hurt him, but not guessed how much. His feelings had been far more deeply engaged than hers. That much she had always known. It had made her uneasy at times: she felt love should be equal between lovers and ached to know a deeper intimacy than she had ever felt with Steve. In a way she knew him too well, he was more like a brother than a lover. She was fond of him rather than in love with him.

  She hadn’t suspected that he would be so unforgiving. She had not seen or spoken to him since. That had hurt her, because he had been her friend long before he became her lover and she missed him. She still did.

  But it had been just one more thing she had had to lose for Paul. She had walked away from her country, her family, her friends – and all the sacrifices had been worth it. She didn’t regret a thing. She would do it all over again.

  Their wedding had been the social event of the year on the Eastern Seaboard; everyone who was anyone had been there. Cathy had refused to have her dress made by some top designer of the moment; she had delighted her grandfather by wearing the dress her grandmother had been married in, which had been put away in layers of tissue for seventy years. Cathy had loved to see it when her grandmother brought it out every spring to air in the sunshine for a day. She always imagined wearing it, had breathed in the fragrance of the pot-pourri of rose petals and lavender in little handmade gauzy bags which her grandmother scattered over it before putting it away. Full-length, with a sweetheart neckline, a tight, tiny waist and a skirt with a long train at the back, the dress had been hand-stitched in Paris in the Twenties. Ivory satin which was softly fading into cream, covered in drifts of real Chantilly lace, it had fitted her like a glove, as if it had been made for her, so she must have been exactly the same size as her grandmother on her wedding-day. Her grandfather had looked at her with tears in his eyes and said, ‘If only she could have been here to see you!’

  ‘She can see me, Grandee,’ she had insisted, sure of it, feeling her grandmother’s loving presence all that day while she wore the dress, like someone moving through a dream, a dream she still inhabited.

  She clung to Paul’s driving body, groaning in wild orgasm and hearing his deep moans of satisfaction. One flesh, she thought, consumed with pleasure; I knew, from the first time I saw him, that we were meant to be one flesh.

  While Lilli Janacek gave the hospital reception the documents proving that Sophie Narodni had medical insurance, Steve talked to the doctor who was dealing with her case, a short, energetic man with the hooked nose and profile of an Aztec, and perfect white teeth which he displayed in cheerful smiles all the time.

  ‘Very lucky, very lucky girl. Yes, you can see her, why not?’ He returned Steve’s grin of relief. ‘Good news, huh? Pity the other woman was not so lucky.’

  He had lost Steve. ‘Other woman?’ Steve said blankly, frowning at him.

  ‘Your friend, Miss Narodni, trying to save herself, clutched at the woman next to her, fell sideways and hit the platform instead of falling under the train. She got some bad bruises and a minor head injury, which is the reason why we’re keeping her in here tonight, for observation in
case of concussion. The X-rays don’t show any sign of internal damage, but you never know.’

  ‘And the other woman?’ Steve was accustomed to holding on to the main thread of a subject even when someone buried it in endless strings of words. Interviewing people required not merely patience but the ability to cut through a lot of crap without losing your temper.

  Dr de Silva soberly shook his head. ‘Fell under the train, I’m afraid.’

  That shook Steve. ‘She was killed?’

  ‘No, and she shouldn’t die, unless she develops complications . . . You know, winter is a bad time to get sick, you can develop pneumonia if you’re kept bedridden for long, even with central heating and warm covers, and she isn’t going to be able to move about much, not for a long while, because she broke a leg, broke both arms, and various ribs, not to mention she was knocked out by the fall, which, oddly enough, was lucky for her, because it meant she didn’t try to move, and managed not to get fried alive by the electric current. They got it turned off before she recovered consciousness, which saved her life.’

  Steve nodded, forehead still creased in a frown. ‘That was lucky. Poor woman, though – has she got any family?’

  ‘A husband and two sons. She works uptown, was on her way home when the accident happened.’

  ‘Did the police give you any idea how it happened?’

  Dr de Silva gave him a curious look, shrugging. ‘Miss Narodni says somebody pushed her.’

  Steve froze, staring at him. ‘Pushed her?’

  ‘So she says. Maybe some nut did push her, it happens, or maybe there was such a crowd on the platform that she got shoved forward.’ His bleeper went and he groaned. ‘Sorry, got to get that.’ He rushed off, along the green-walled corridor, white coat flying.