Walking in Darkness (2 page)

‘Maybe you liked it growing there?’ she thought aloud to Anya. ‘It is a cheerful colour, a much brighter yellow than buttercups. I tasted a stem once, there’s milk inside it but it’s nasty, it might be poison. I spat it out and washed my mouth out too, and nothing happened. If I’d died, I’d have come to heaven to be with you, but I was scared. What’s heaven like, Anya?’ She stopped talking, stared down, sighing. ‘I wish you could answer me.’

‘Sophie . . . Sophie!’

For a second she thought the windblown voices came from inside the grave and all the breath seemed to leave her body.

‘Sophie, where are you?’ That time the voice was louder and came from behind her. She breathed normally again, realising it was Mamma’s voice and knowing what that meant. They had discovered she wasn’t in her bedroom. They had come looking for her.

She jumped up and began to run but her new, still shiny-soled shoes skidded on the dew-wet grass and she fell on her face, breathing in the cold of earth and moss. Before she got up her mother was there, pulling her to her feet.

‘You bad girl. What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ She grabbed Sophie’s arm and shook her furiously, glaring down into her face. ‘I’ve been scared out of my wits. I told you to go to bed. What are you doing out here in the dark?’

Johanna Narodni had a hard hand, roughened by years of scrubbing floors for other people, reddened by years of having her hands in water and cheap soap. When she hit Sophie across the back of the head it left the child dazed, her ears ringing.

Johanna was not yet thirty, that day in 1976, a beautiful woman, with a warm, rounded figure, rich, lustrous dark hair and enormous velvety brown eyes which reminded Sophie of the centres of pansies.

‘I brought my wreath for Anya,’ wailed Sophie, beginning to cry.

The schoolmaster, Franz Michna, looked down at the neatly kept grave. A short, stocky man in his mid-thirties, with thick brown hair and a bristly moustache which Sophie hated to feel brushing against her when he kissed her cheek, he had taken over the village school two years ago and had married Johanna Narodni just eight months ago.

‘That’s nice, isn’t it, Johanna?’ he asked his wife softly. ‘A nice thing for her to do.’ He patted Sophie’s blonde head and she pulled her head away, her eyes resentful even of his kindness. He had spoilt her life by marrying her mother. He couldn’t get round her by being understanding. ‘But you should have told us what you were going to do, Sophie. Your mother was very worried when we couldn’t find you. If you had told us, we would have come with you.’

Sophie kept her eyes down, her pink mouth rebellious. She had not wanted to tell them what she was going to do. And she certainly hadn’t wanted them to come with her. That was the last thing she wanted. This was just for her and Anya. Once she and Mamma had come to visit Anya, but now it was just Sophie who came and she blamed Franz Michna. Since she’d met him, Mamma no longer cared about Papa or Anya. Sophie wasn’t sure Mamma cared much about her any more, either.

There was a little silence, then, putting a finger under Sophie’s chin, Mamma tilted the child’s head back and looked down at her with an odd expression in her eyes.

‘Do you wish you still had a little sister, Sophie?’ She looked up at Franz Michna and they smiled at each other while Sophie watched resentfully. Then Mamma said softly, ‘Next spring you’ll be getting a new little brother or sister, darling. I’m going to have a baby, and I’m going to need your help to look after it. If it is a girl we’ll call it Anya, shall we?’

Sophie stared, white-faced, cold as ice. ‘NO!’ she yelled, and began to run.

Steve Colbourne first saw her on a chilly November day in a New York hotel bar; she walked in and stood just inside the door, her blue eyes carefully not lingering on anyone as she looked around, very obviously not wishing to catch the eye of any of the men jostling elbow to elbow in the room. He didn’t blame her. From a girl like this the briefest meeting of eyes might be taken as a come-on – no doubt she had learnt that the hard way. Was she there to meet any of them? He looked around curiously, from face to familiar face. A number of them had also noticed her but he couldn’t see recognition in any of their staring eyes. Just lust.

The Washington circus had come to New York by invitation from Senator Don Gowrie. Those of them with good expense accounts were staying here, in this hotel, which was one of the more expensive hotels in the city, and, as was their habit, had looked at once for the most congenial watering hole and taken over this dark-oak panelled bar, with its deep leather seating and polished tables, the gleaming brass along the back of the bar, as their own. Any other guests wanting a drink soon learnt to use one of the other two bars in the hotel, but the blonde, he sensed, had not wandered in here by mistake. She was looking for one of them – lucky devil.

She was quite something: hair smooth, pale gold, tall, slim, with better breasts than model girls had and terrific legs, long and shapely, but above all with skin so smooth and such a luscious texture you felt it would taste like cream, and he wouldn’t mind tasting it, no, he wouldn’t mind at all.

Just when he was about to go over and offer to buy her a drink, she turned and walked out. He would have gone after her, but if she was meeting some other guy it could lead to trouble and he had had enough trouble for the moment. Enough emotion, too, come to that. It interfered with your work, and left scar tissue. A year ago he had been dealt a blow that still had not healed – how could it when there were so many memories everywhere in Washington?

That was why he was glad to get out of Washington, happy to see the run-up to the primaries starting, because that was what this was all about. Don Gowrie had called a press conference two days before he was due to fly to London to begin a tour of Europe. He was going as part of a Senate commission looking into restrictive market practices which might damage the US but it was an open secret that he was using this opportunity to renew his friendships and strengthen his ties with influential people in Europe. Gowrie was throwing his hat in the ring without actually announcing the fact and he had called a press conference to deny that that was what he was doing. The political pundits had not been fooled but their votes were not what he was looking for; he was appealing to the electorate over their heads, and the voters out there in Heartland America would probably take him at his word because Don Gowrie was a charmer, a man with fireside warmth, a man who breathed sincerity.

Steve enjoyed electioneering, tramping state to state, following the politicians out into the real world, where the voters lived, where life was not as cocooned, as cosy and incestuous as it was back home in the capital. The smell of battle put a brighter light into the eyes of politicians and journalists alike.

They were all in the bar that afternoon, waiting for two o’clock when the ballroom doors would be opened for the press to rush in. Like the Gadarene swine, thought Steve, looking at their faces in the hard electric light, faces that knew everything and valued nothing, eyes that were bright and shiny and blank as if they had not yet been switched on.

They were drinking and talking, telling dirty jokes to each other, boasting about their latest lay or their handicap at golf, complaining about their wives or the alimony they paid their ex-wives, and the ones with the dreamy expressions were talking about cars. Nobody was listening to anyone else. A few were just drinking steadily, silently, almost relentlessly; they were the old hands, the soaks, remnants of years of drinking in bars while they waited for something to happen, men who didn’t care anymore, just did the job and then went home to an empty apartment and drank until they passed out.

‘What d’ya think, Stevie?’ one of his crew shouted, leaning forward to peer at him along the bar. ‘You know the guy – d’ya think he’s got a bimbo stashed away somewhere, or not?’

Steve shrugged. ‘I don’t know him that well, Jack. He doesn’t tell me his bedroom secrets, if he has any.’

‘Didn’t I read somewhere that you once dated his daughter?’ another reporter along the bar called out.

Steve ignored him. Jack finished his beer then looked regretfully at the foam-flecked, empty glass. Steve hoped Jack wasn’t going to have another drink; he had had quite a few already and in that huddle in the ballroom the cameraman was going to need a steady hand. Jack was a big guy with broad shoulders and muscles like whipcord, he could carry weights that would make most men’s knees buckle, but he had a weak head where drink was concerned and Steve didn’t want their picture wavering all over the place; he was hoping to get a good slot in the night news running order. You were only as good as your last story and to keep your reputation you had to keep getting your piece into the front of the news.

The TV people had all their equipment set up already in the ballroom. They always got the prime position, right up in front of the platform. TV had more influence than the rest of the media; one picture on the news at night was worth any number of articles in the press. They had left their cameras and mikes and lights under the watchful eyes of the security men. No need to be afraid someone might get at their stuff here, steal it or wreck it, in the local headquarters of the Republican Party. There were enough security men around to stop a full-scale riot. This must be costing Don Gowrie a fortune. Steve’s mouth twisted sardonically. Not Gowrie, of course, no; he was wealthy, but this campaign must be costing millions and Gowrie wasn’t that rich.

No, Gowrie’s father-in-law was paying for all this, old Honest John, John Eddie Ramsey, one of the most influential men along the Eastern Seaboard, whose wealth was fabulous and who came from a family which had been up to its neck in Republican politics since the early nineteenth century, one of those who still called it the Grand Old Party, and meant it.

Honest John had been bred to be a president by an ambitious father, yet he had never quite made it, somehow. He had come close several times but his chance had slipped away each time. Hard to say why. Maybe he hadn’t really wanted it enough, or maybe he had had bad luck. He had certainly had no luck with his family. He had had three sons who all died, one of them fighting in Korea as a young conscript of eighteen, one of them on the hunting field when he broke his neck taking a jump too high for his horse, and Eddie Junior who had died of liver disease when he was only forty, having drunk his way steadily towards death since he was in his teens. None of them had married or had children. Old Ramsey must have thought he had made certain of having grandchildren by getting himself three sons. How could he have predicted the disasters that had overtaken them all? A funny business, life.

Honest John’s one daughter, Eleanor, a pale, fragile, jumpy woman, had looked as if she was going to die a spinster. There had never been any bees around that honeypot, for all her family’s money. She never learnt how to talk to people and if young men tried to chat her up she had fled, trembling. She was kept out of the political limelight, living quietly at home with her mother on the Ramsey estate at Easton, Maryland, the acknowledged social bastion along that seaboard. At thirty-three she had amazed them all by marrying Don Gowrie, a diplomat eight years her junior, good-looking and ambitious, but with very little money and no powerful family connections. The whisper around town was that her father had decided young Gowrie would make a reliable son-in-law, had put the marriage together, like a political deal, promised Gowrie his backing in the future in return for marrying Eleanor. How Eleanor felt about it nobody could guess and in those days the press did not dare ask, had never, anyway, been given an opportunity to question her. She had given no interviews. She had simply sat for photographers. In her ivory satin, lace and pearls, she had made a delicate bride, judging by the fading sepia photographs in the newspaper files Steve had seen. Whatever the truth, the two of them had finally, a couple of years later, given the old man his first and only grandchild, a girl, Catherine.

No doubt Honest John had prayed she would not take after her mother, but he must have been afraid she would. He needn’t have worried.

Catherine was lovely, even as a child, when she was painted by the most fashionable portrait painter of the day, in a simple white dress. The painting had caused a sensation that year; everyone had been enchanted by the slender, black-haired little creature standing in a woodland setting with a tame deer feeding from her hand; a modern Snow White, with big dark eyes and skin like cream. She was much photographed by the press, too, at the same time: Catherine aged eight, in immaculate jodhpurs and black hat, riding her palomino pony at the Ramsey family country house; Catherine winning cups for jumping at local gymkhanas, later; Catherine in a one-piece swimsuit, her black hair tied up in a knot behind her head, down on Chesapeake Bay, with her grandfather, catching crabs at low tide and taking a bucketful back to be cooked for lunch that morning, the press story said. By the time she reached eighteen she was always in the gossip columns, tipped as debutante of the year, hotly expected to marry young because she was surrounded from the start by eligible young bachelors. It was an open secret that Honest John Ramsey doted on her, and so did her father, and as heiress to one of the biggest fortunes on the East Coast she was a prize men would fight for. But she showed no interest in marrying young, indeed as she grew up she increasingly played hostess at Don Gowrie’s famous Washington dinner parties where the food was nouvelle cuisine, the talk was scintillating and the guests hand-picked. Catherine was not only beautiful, she had a shining intelligence and a sense of humour that gave her that far more elusive quality, charm.

In that, too, she took after her father. Her mother was almost never present on these evenings, or if she did appear she rarely stayed long. It was accepted that she was not strong; she had to spend most of her time in her own suite of rooms and she did not share in her husband’s political life.

‘Did you ever date Cathy Gowrie, Colbourne?’ someone else called out, one of a group of press men who resented anyone who worked for TV, resented and were jealous of them. The other men along the bar watched Steve, some of them grinning, hoping they would needle him into showing temper, some of them just curious, not having heard the gossip before.