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‘The name is Jerome.’ He remained calm and relaxed as if he hadn’t heard her tirade. ‘The photographs—I had them suppressed, but I still have the negatives, and this is not your house. It belongs to your friend Helen, the struggling artist. I hear her last exhibition didn’t go too well. Do you think she would refuse a reasonable offer for the property? I could make it a very good offer, if I was driven to it—too good to be refused. As for Shirley, could it have really been as bad as she led you to suppose? She married Theo, didn’t she? And after the boy was born, she went back to him. Or was the lure of money too strong for your empty-headed little sister?’

Kate sighed and put her head down while she remustered her forces. ‘My sister is dead,’ she spat at him, ‘and empty-headed or not, I loved her. I don’t think there can be much love in your family, Mr Manfred, so you wouldn’t understand. As for my friend Helen, she’s been a good friend, but she has to live the same as everybody else. You wouldn’t know about that either, you’ve never had to bother about the pennies. Yes, Helen’s an artist, and if her pictures don’t sell, she has to look around for some other way to keep herself and buy materials for her next pictures so she can try
to
sell those. If she sold you this cottage, I wouldn’t blame
her a bit nor
think any worse of her for doing so.’ She looked up at him wearily. ‘Oh, it’s useless trying to ex
plain
to you. You haven’t been there, you just don’t know! You sit in your superior seat and pull strings so that poor fools like me jump about like puppets because we did what we had to do, whether we liked it or not.’ Futile, silly tears sprang to her eyes and slowly trickled down her cheeks. ‘I’ll still fight,’ she whispered huskily.

‘With what?’ Calmly he produced cigarettes and a lighter. ‘You have nothing to fight with, Kate, not one single weapon—and besides, you’ve forgotten something.’ He sounded almost amused. ‘You’ve flung a great number of insults about, you’ve insulted my mother, you’ve insulted my brother, who can no longer defend himself, and you’ve insulted me. This is a lonely cottage and I could exact payment for those insults, a very pleasant payment, and who would believe you if you said I forced you?’

‘And will you leave money on the table as your brother did to my sister?’ Kate’s voice was hoarse with bitterness.

‘There may be no need if you’re reasonable.’

‘Oh, I’m reasonable,’ she looked hate at him. ‘I know when I’m beaten.’

‘Good! That, then, is the end of the preliminaries. We can now get down to some serious business.’ Thoughtfully, he studied the burning end of his cigarette and pushed the case and the lighter across to her. ‘I prefer to bargain from a position of strength, and in this case my position is so strong that I don’t have to bargain at all.’

She pushed the case and lighter back across the table to him with a slight shake of her head. ‘I don’t smoke.’

‘No vices?’

Kate ignored the question.

‘No, as you say, you don’t have to bargain with me, you’ve just proved that!’ She felt unutterably weary and went slack in her chair, drained of everything but the deep abiding hate which had kept her going for so long. ‘Whatever you have in mind, it won’t be a bargain, it’ll be an ultimatum.’

‘Have you any food in the house, Kate?’

She looked at him in surprise, watching as his long fingers extinguished the cigarette efficiently. There seemed to be a calm content about his mouth. His next words surprised her even more.

‘I think you’ve been living in fear ever since your sister died, and it was all unnecessary, you know. I saw you at the funeral and I would have spoken to you then, but you slipped away like a black ghost. One minute you were there under the tree and the next, you’d gone. It would have been better if you’d waited. You could have saved yourself all these months of flight and fear. You had reason to fear,’ he admitted. ‘You knew I would find you. Now the fear is over and you’re tired. You need food and so do I—there’s a lot of me to maintain, as you can see. I suggest we eat and have a civilised conversation.’

‘Civilised!’ Kate looked at him wearily. ‘I suppose by that you mean that you’ll converse and all I’ll have to do will be to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in the correct places. Please go. I’ve got some soup and cheese and things which will do for me, you can get a meal in the village. I’ll still be here when you come tomorrow. Where could I run?’

Slowly he shook his head, his expression enigmatic.

I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you, Kate. As soon as my back was turned you’d be off. I have a sixth sense about people and it’s telling me that you’ve given in a little too easily. You have a car here somewhere and even if
I
immobilised it, you would walk, and carry the boy, if you had to. Any woman who would do what you did for your sister is a worthy opponent, and I treat worthy opponents with caution. No, Kate, I’ll share your soup and cheese and things, and then we’ll talk.’

‘I’m too tired to talk.’

‘Nervous reaction.’ Jerome Manfred sounded practical and implacable. ‘Where’s the soup?’

Dinner,
such as it was, was over. Kate had apologised sarcastically for the lack of caviare, porterhouse steak and asparagus tips, her tone biting and her air one of disdain. Jerome Manfred had spared her one cool glance.

‘I don’t care for caviare and I consider the omelette I made to be the equal of any steak,’ he observed flatteningly.

Now Kate moved about the- kitchen, rinsing down the draining board, restoring crockery to the dresser and aware all the time of the big man seated comfortably by the fire, the smoke from his cigarette drifting up to the low rafters. Although he never looked her way, she was aware all the time of being watched. At the cutlery drawer she hesitated, her fingers closing round the wooden handle of the big carving knife. It fitted snugly into her palm and there was a comfortable and comforting feel about it, but it was too big for concealment. And where would it get her? she thought drearily. Only as far as the nearest gaol, and then Philip would go to his grandmother for certain. Besides, she wasn’t at all sure that she could do it. It would take a peculiar kind of courage or madness to stick a knife in somebody, and she didn’t think she had that sort of courage—and despite her months of hiding and worry, she wasn’t mad. Reluctantly she let her fingers slide from the smooth, well shaped wood.

‘You couldn’t do it.’

Kate gasped and turned round swiftly. How could
he
know what she had been thinking?

‘Don’t be too sure.’ Food and a quiet half hour had restored some of her natural optimism and she spoke belligerently. ‘I did something once before, remember? I didn’t think I could do that either, but I did!’

‘But there was no blood.’ He was still calm. ‘You don’t like blood, Kate. You faint.’ He seemed filled with a cold sort of humour. ‘I know every little thing about you. Now, stop fiddling and sit down. It’s time we had our talk.’

She sat down quietly, but her eyes flamed as she looked at him across the table and her voice dripped acid with every word. ‘You know. Of course you know! You’ve had your grubby little men investigating me. Pawing through my life with their dirty, curious fingers. Ugh!’

There was a wry look about his mouth. ‘Shall I tell you, Kate? Yes, I think I will. You were a bonus and one I didn’t expect, but it often happens that way. I started out investigating your stepsister.’

‘You were investigating Shirley?’ Kate allowed the disgust she felt to become evident in her voice. ‘What was the matter? Didn’t you trust her either?’

‘Not completely.’ He was calm and factual. ‘I never did. Your little sister was an accomplished liar. After she went back to Theo, when Philip was nearly a year old, I trusted her even less. Too many of her stories were thin and they didn’t add up. According to her she was alone in the world and, to be blunt, I suspected that there was another man. I’m a business man, Kate, and I can’t afford to take chances, so your little sister was investigated. And what did I find? I found Miss Katherine Forrest, a stepsister, but even so nobody of whom Shirley should have been ashamed. It puzzled me, and yet at the same time it explained several mysteries. It explained how Shirley could vanish from the face of the earth for more than a year, how she could live without working, how she could have a baby without any money or without drawing any state benefits and afterwards live with the baby without having to consider adoption or having to work for a living. And when she was reunited with Theo, she chattered like a whole group of parakeets and yet not one word of Kate Forrest. Never, either before her marriage or afterwards, did she mention you.’

Kate shrugged. ‘Why should she? We were only stepsisters, we weren’t so close.’

‘Lies, Kate!’ He sounded tired. ‘I’m weary of lies. Shirley was living with you when she ran away with Theo. You brought her up when her mother died. I know where you were born, what schools you went to. I have copies of your school -reports and copies of your tutor’s comments on your work at university. I have also a letter of reference from the headmistress of the school where you taught. I phoned the lady and implied that you were considering working for me and she wrote back in glowing terms, saying how much she’d missed you and what a loss your departure had been to the teaching profession.’

Kate managed an indifferent shrug. ‘So?’ Her voice was acid as she glared at him. ‘You said we were going to talk,’ she reminded him. ‘What’s there to talk about? We both want the same thing—Philip! Only you have all the weapons, all the heavy artillery. You can stand up in court and make me out to be just what you choose—a nude model, even though you know I was no such thing. I can’t fight that! I could point out that you’re a lascivious womaniser, but where would that get me? You’re a man, and for some silly reason that seems to make a difference.’ Angrily she sprang to her feet and stood looking down at him.

‘I said we would talk, Kate. But you don’t talk, you hurl insults.’

Her voice became quiet and deadly. ‘I couldn’t insult you, Mr Manfred. It’s an impossibility to be rudely discourteous to somebody like you.’

Jerome Manfred’s face became bleak and his nostrils thinned. ‘Sit down! First of all we’ll talk about Gerald Twyford.’

Kate sat. ‘What about Gerald?’ She was seething. That he should talk about insults after having her investigated like a common criminal!

‘Are you his mistress?’

Kate’s face flamed and then went quite white as she struggled to hold her temper. She even indulged in a little black humour.

‘Don’t you know? Haven’t your spies been peeping in the right bedroom windows? I thought you said you knew everything, surely you’ve gone into that! Your spies could have reported to you where intercourse took place, how many times and the duration, I should have thought! Think of the extra weight you could use to prove that I’m not fit to have control of a child! A nude model and now a tramp!’ Her voice thinned so that the next words were a hiss of hate. ‘You could even buy a few other men to say I’ve slept with them as well. After all, there’s safety in numbers, and think what it would do for you in court. You’d look ten feet tall!’

His hand came across the table to grasp hers cruelly. She looked down at it. Had she been able, she would have flung it off and gone and washed her wrist with disinfectant, but the grip was too strong. She considered the hand idly. A nice hand, long and slim, with thin brown fingers and smooth, well kept nails. She thought of Gerald’s hands and shivered. Hands were a fetish with her. Gerald had thick white fingers and spatulate nails, and sometimes he bit those nails. And there were rough, red hairs on the backs of his hands and fingers. She knew that she could never have borne for those hands to touch her, not even though he had offered to help. The price of that help would have been those hands wandering over her body. She shuddered, coming back to the present and sitting erect in her chair.

Jerome Manfred’s voice was nasty. ‘You’re wasting words and the bitterness is running out of your mouth. You need have said none of those things, all that was needed was “Yes” or “No”. I would have believed you.’

‘You would have believed me!’ She made it sound like the eighth wonder of the world. ‘My, Mr Manfred, you are trusting!’

‘Very well, so you weren’t his mistress. He wanted to marry you?’ He rapped out the question and without thinking, she nodded. ‘And you refused?’ Again she nodded, and he released her wrist and sat back in his chair, apparently satisfied.

‘And again you believe me?’ She made her eyes round in pretended wonder while she strove for a calm to match his own. ‘Mr Manfred, I don’t care whether you believe me or not. I don’t care anything about you. I hate you. I hate your family and I hated your brother even more. The only good thing to come out of the mess you and your family have made of Shirley’s life is Philip, and you shan’t spoil him, I won’t let you. Somehow I’ll stop you—I don’t know how, but I will, if I have to get down in the slime you crawl in and fight you there!’

‘Good!’ He sounded pleased and his eyes gleamed with gratification. ‘I’m offering you that opportunity. You may come and share our—er—slime, as you call it.’ Her gasp of surprise was stifled as he raised a hand and her words hung, unspoken on her lips. ‘You can hardly refuse,’ he drawled aggravatingly. ‘You say that you wish to care for Philip—well, you may, but only on my terms.’

'Your
mistress?’ she shook her head violently. ‘No, thank you, Mr Manfred. I’m not that much of a fool. I know how long I’d last in that position—a few days at the most and then you and Philip would disappear, and what chance would I have of getting him back after that? At present, my chances of keeping him are small, but the chance is always there that you mightn’t be believed by everybody when you start flinging your dirt about. But after a period, no matter how short, as your mistress, I wouldn’t expect anybody to believe me.’ She sat back in her chair, outwardly composed, but her eyes were wary.