Walking in Darkness (42 page)

‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it was her who suggested he targeted us,’ Paul said flatly. ‘Chantal has always been one of those people who enjoys revenge served cold. She’s never forgiven me.’

‘She must have been crazy about you to feel that bad,’ Freddy said, sounding pitying, and Paul laughed angrily.

‘It was her ego not her heart that got hurt, Freddy! Don’t be so sentimental. Everyone knew we’d been dating; she felt I’d humiliated her. If she had had any warning she’d have publicly dumped me first, but I was over in the States when I met Cathy, and half the gossip columnists had the story before I got round to ringing Chantal. She never forgives an injury. Oh, she’s put on a good act this past year, pretending to be very friendly whenever we met, but she must have been waiting her chance to hit back at me, and when she met Salmond she had the idea of plotting with him to take my firm away from me.’

Freddy groaned. ‘What are we going to do, Paul?’

‘There’s nothing we can do. Her people hold a quarter of our shares – that, combined with what Salmond has already acquired, will give him control.’

‘We can’t just sit here and wait for the blow to fall!’ Freddy broke out.

‘What do you suggest we do, Freddy? Oh, use your head. Salmond knew he would win before he went public with the bid. They’ve just been having fun with me. It’s a foregone conclusion. We’ll go ahead with the shareholders’ voting, it will give us time to work out our next move, but we’ve already lost, take it from me.’

‘I can’t believe you’re taking this so calmly!’

Paul laughed shortly. ‘I’m not calm, Freddy. I’m shellshocked, believe me, but facts are facts and there’s no point in hiding our head in the sand.’

‘But there must be something you can do! You always have in the past. Couldn’t you talk to her? Persuade her not to sell?’

‘Persuade a shark to give up the body it has between its teeth, you mean? What do you think? She has the taste of my blood now. She won’t let me go until she has the rest.’

‘But we’ll still have our own shares, Paul. If we sell those to Salmond we’ll release all that money, we can start again.’ Freddy tried to sound optimistic, daring, but that had never been his nature. It had always been Paul who was the high flyer, the reckless one.

‘I’ll come back to London at once, Freddy. We’ll talk then,’ Paul said.

Cathy was almost asleep when she heard the soft footsteps outside her door. They paused. She heard muffled breathing and lay with closed eyes, suddenly knowing it was Paul. Her heart began to beat fast and hard; shaking her body. Was he going to come in? But after a moment he walked on, past her room, and opened his dressing-room door.

Was he changing his clothes? She lay still, listening, and heard him getting down a suitcase from the top of one of the long wardrobes which ran the length of the narrow room. As if she were in the room with him, she could see what he was doing, heard him snap open the case, heard the rattle of hangers as he took down clothes, shirts, jackets, suits.

Why is he packing? What is he packing? He had clothes in London, in the penthouse flat he used when he could not get home. He had everything he might need there.

Why was he packing all that stuff? More rattling of hangers; other clothes going in, and now he was opening drawers, getting out socks, underwear, pyjamas. How many cases was he taking, for God’s sake?

Cathy sat up, trembling, stumbled off the bed, tying a dressing-gown around her; she had taken off her clothes so that she could sleep. Under the dressing-gown all she wore was a silky slip, bra and panties.

Paul was so intent on packing that he didn’t hear her open the door into his dressing-room. He was closing the lid, locking the case, his head bent; the wintry sunlight striking his hair made it look quite white. With a shock Cathy thought, He looks . . . old. Overnight he had begun to look his age. His face was so gaunt, so haggard, and the silvery hair had no life in it at all.

He straightened to shut the wardrobe door, and saw her. They stared at each other without speaking; the abyss between them had been growing ever since he had discovered that she was not Don Gowrie’s daughter. Now it was so wide, so deep, she felt she would never be able to reach him again.

‘What are you doing?’ she stupidly asked, wanting to howl and scream like a wounded animal. How was it possible to feel such pain but talk in such a normal voice?

‘Packing a case.’ His face moved, then, with some thought she saw but could not identify – what was he thinking? His bones had tightened as if he was in pain, but his eyes stared at her from that terrible distance.

‘I can see that. Why? Why are you going? Where are you going?’

‘Back to London. I’ll be staying at the flat there for a while, I’ve got problems to deal with . . . it looks as if we can’t be at Salmond, I’m probably going to lose the company.’

‘Oh.’ It was another shock; the news shook her. ‘Oh, God, Paul, I’m so sorry.’ What did that mean? For them? If he lost the company would he leave her? Or not? ‘Can’t my father . . .?’ She stopped, shivering, at having used that word – she couldn’t stop thinking of him as her father yet, she didn’t know how else to think of him. She needed time to get used to the real truth. ‘Can’t he help?’ she huskily finished.

Paul shook his head. ‘Nobody can help. It’s all over, bar the counting.’

‘What happened? I thought various of your shareholders had pledged their votes to you.’

‘They changed their minds.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘They just did.’

‘Talk to me, Paul! Tell me what is going on!’

‘I haven’t got time now. I have to go.’

‘Why don’t I come with you?’ she pleaded. ‘Let me come! You shouldn’t be alone with all these worries, let me come.’

‘No!’ He took a long, rough breath, shuddering with it. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

A chill certainty seeped into her. ‘You’re leaving me,’ she half accused, half stated. ‘You aren’t coming back, are you?’

He looked away, his face stiff and set, nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Cathy. It’s over.’

‘What do you mean – over? Just like that? You’re leaving me without a word? Why? Why, Paul? At least tell me, to my face, why you’re going?’

‘There’s nothing to talk about. I’m sorry,’ he said again in a terse, harsh voice, and picked up the case, moving towards the open door.

She couldn’t just let him go without trying to hold on to him, she needed him too much. She kept remembering their nights together, their bodies moving in hot desire and then, when they had exhausted themselves with love, how they had slept closely entwined, arms and legs around each other, skin to skin, breathing as one creature, totally at ease one with the other. He couldn’t just have married her for her father’s money: he had loved her, she could have sworn he loved her, or he was the greatest actor in the world.

She stepped between him and the door and threw her arms round his neck, clinging, pushing her body into his. ‘Don’t go, please don’t leave me, I can’t bear it, I need you.’ She lifted her face to kiss him but he sharply jerked his head aside so she buried her mouth against his throat, kissed him with desperate urgency, her mouth moving, inviting, begging, breathing in the scent of his skin.

For a second she felt the surge of emotion rising in his body like sap in a tree. His hands gripped her shoulders, the fingertips moved, caressingly, he was breathing as if he were drowning, then he groaned, ‘NO!’ and suddenly thrust her away with a violence that sent her sprawling backwards on to the smooth white carpet.

By the time she had struggled back to her feet, Paul had gone. Cathy was crying by then, wildly, helplessly, her whole body shaking with the force of her sobbing. She ran into the bedroom and threw herself on her bed, face down.

Downstairs, Steve, Sophie and Vladimir were standing in the hall, beside the open fire, arguing. Steve had given Vladimir a brief sketch of the discussions with Gowrie which had gone on while he was waiting outside the gates of Arbory House. Vladimir listened, glowering, a large half-drunk tumbler of whisky in his hand. It was his second. After his first he had asked to be shown around the hall. He wanted to have a closer look at some of the pictures hanging on the walls.

As Paul came down the stairs, Steve and Sophie looked round, and immediately noticed the case he was carrying.

‘Going somewhere?’ Steve asked drily.

‘Where’s Cathy? Is she OK?’ demanded Sophie anxiously.

‘Why don’t you go up to her?’ He was brusque, unsmiling; she saw a darkness in his eyes and was afraid for Cathy – had they quarrelled? Surely to God Cathy hadn’t been right? He wasn’t leaving her because she wasn’t Gowrie’s daughter?

Vladimir, in his obsessed way, was still thinking about what they had been discussing. In Czech he burst out, ‘I don’t care what you two say, Sophie, unless that bastard Gowrie is nailed and we tell the world just what sort of creep he is, he’ll end up president of the United States – and God help all of us then! Doesn’t that bother you?’

Paul harshly said, ‘It bothers the hell out of me.’

There was a silence. Sophie and Vladimir stared at him, then at each other, with shock and surprise. He had spoken in Czech: fluent, unaccented Czech.

‘You didn’t say you spoke Czech,’ Sophie said, in her own language.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Steve asked in English, looking from her to Paul.

‘Do I know you?’ Vladimir asked Paul slowly, eyes hard and thoughtful. ‘I thought I recognized you earlier, when I first arrived, then I wasn’t sure. But I was right, wasn’t I? We have met somewhere.’

Paul laughed with an odd sort of defiance and recklessness. ‘Maybe. Sorry, I have to go.’ He turned towards the front door and Vladimir drew a sharp breath, staring at his face in profile.

‘My God. Pavel.’

Paul turned to look at him again, not speaking.

Vladimir stared at him fixedly. ‘It can’t be. He’s dead. But my God, you look like him.’

Sophie stared at Paul too. ‘Looks like who?’ she asked Vladimir, still speaking Czech.

Furiously Steve shouted, ‘What are you all talking about? Will you speak English, please?’

But Sophie was remembering her own brief sense of familiarity when she saw Paul. Who was it he looked like? One of her photos . . . what had happened to them? She had had them last night when she talked to Cathy.

‘My family photos,’ she said in English, looking at Steve. ‘Have you seen them around this morning? I had them last night. Could you look in the drawing-room over there, please, Steve?’

‘I burnt them,’ Paul said, and she looked at him sharply.

‘Why did you do that? You burnt my photos? I . . .’

Vladimir had been staring at him all this time, his face confused, uncertain.

‘It is you, isn’t it? My God, it is!’ he burst out. You aren’t dead, you were never dead. You’re alive. My God. I don’t believe it. Pavel . . .’

Cathy started. Pavel? He couldn’t mean . . . no, it couldn’t be! Pavel was a popular name; there must be thousands of Czechs with the name Pavel. What was the matter with her, getting into a panic over nothing? Vlad must know a hundred Pavels. She knew several herself; there had been three Pavels in her first year at college, she remembered.

Then she thought: of course, Paul was the English version of the name Pavel. Vladimir must have met Paul before somewhere. Nothing to do with her father!

But what was all that about being alive, not dead?

Vladimir said hoarsely, ‘It is you, isn’t it? I’m not imagining things? My God, I can’t believe it, although after the story your wife told me about Anya I’m almost past being amazed. Even if you tell me you’re a ghost I think I’ll believe it.’ He grinned. ‘Are you a ghost, Pavel?’

Sophie began to shake violently. She felt she was almost breaking apart. It couldn’t be true. Her father had been killed by the Russians; she knew the story by heart, she had heard it all her life – how he had been in a car that didn’t stop at a Russian checkpoint, they had shot the driver and the car had crashed, killing everyone in it, and her father had been a martyr to the cause of freedom, a hero of their country.

What was Vladimir talking about? He had mentioned Anya. Asked if Paul was a ghost. But he couldn’t mean her father. Paul couldn’t be her father. Her father was dead.

But she had been told Anya was dead. Her own mother had told her over and over again how Anya had died of measles before she was born. She had visited Anya’s grave a thousand times, talked to her, taken flowers to her, even taken her own first communion wreath to her – but it hadn’t been her sister in that grave; it was Gowrie’s child. All those years her mother had been lying to her.

Had her father’s death been another of her mother’s lies?

Once upon a time Sophie had believed in something she thought of as ‘facts’, but now she was beginning to realize that ‘facts’ could be just as lying and manipulative as any fiction ever written. Her head spun dizzyingly. Everything was a cheat, you couldn’t believe anyone or anything.

‘What did you say, Vlad? What the hell are you talking about?’ Steve asked, his eyes sharp as diamond cutters, whirring from Vlad and Sophie to Paul’s grey, stony face, biting into them all.

Sophie was almost fainting. Vladimir saw the colour draining from her face, the wild shock in her eyes. He caught hold of her just as her body turned heavy, began giving at the knees, falling. He held her up, muttering roughly, anxiously, ‘Sophie! I’m sorry, girl. I am stupid, a stupid fool. I forgot what it would mean to you . . . Steve, you better take her in that room. She should lie down, she’s going to pass out, I guess.’

‘No! I want to know . . .’ Sophie took a long, audible, shuddering breath, fixing her eyes on Paul. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’ She didn’t believe it, yet she had to ask because she no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t, and she had to know or she would go mad.

Paul looked at her bleakly. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I’m sorry, Sophie.’

‘You . . . you’re . . . my father?’

He didn’t say anything, but his eyes told her the truth.

Steve caught her as she fainted, lifted her bodily into his arms, her head on his shoulder, his arm under her slack legs. He was barely conscious of her weight, he was too busy looking at her unconscious face, reading the pallor, the lines around mouth and eyes, and so worried about her he felt sick.