‘I want you to see my home,’ Kenneth had told her the last time they had met. ‘It will be a perfect setting for you.’
‘I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘I…’
‘You can and you will,’ he had contradicted her softly. ‘Wait and see.’
She had thought that he meant she would change her mind, not that he would manipulate events so that she would have a perfectly acceptable excuse for visiting him.
His behaviour reminded her slightly of the way Joel had taken charge of her when she was at school. The feeling of knowing there was someone else there, someone that she could rely on was comfortingly familiar.
Now, as Kenneth reached the door, he paused and turned to smile at her.
* * *
His car had barely turned into the road before Daphne was questioning her, demanding to know all she knew about him.
‘He was a patient, that’s all,’ Sally fibbed, grateful that her sister’s ego prevented her from suspecting the truth. Daphne quite plainly had no conception of the real reason for Kenneth’s visit, thank goodness.
‘You’ll have to come with us, of course,’ Sally heard Daphne telling her. ‘It would look odd if you didn’t, but for heaven’s sake, Sally, try and make a bit of an effort to smarten yourself up a bit. That dreadful shirt and those jeans…’
‘I was working,’ Sally reminded her. ‘I’ve finished the stripping,’ she added, ‘but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to start the papering…’
‘Oh, yes. I meant to have a word with you about that. Teresa Craven has a decorator who is marvellous, apparently, and quite cheap. We’ve decided to ask him to do the work; after all, we can’t afford to have a second set of paper ruined. You should have made Joel come back and put it right, you know, Sally. You’re far too soft with him. You could never imagine someone like Kenneth allowing his wife to shoulder his responsibilities, could you?’
‘No,’ Sally agreed quietly. ‘I couldn’t.’
As she collected her things she acknowledged that Joel had probably been quite right when he’d insisted that it wasn’t so much her dining-room wallpapering that Daphne wanted, but to humiliate him. But if she hadn’t come round she wouldn’t have seen Kenneth… Kenneth, who had obviously remembered that comment she had made about having to do her sister’s wallpapering on her day off and acted upon it.
Kenneth who had very cleverly and subtly worked with her sister’s vanity and not against it as Joel did.
* * *
Philippa tensed, her fingers curling nervously round the receiver as the number she had dialled rang out.
When it did there was a brief initial silence. Her excitement faded as she recognised the tell-tale signs of an answering machine. She would just have to leave a message and her number and wait for her prospective employer to ring her back, she recognised in disappointment. She started to rehearse her message mentally and then froze as the cool, firm tones of a male voice filled her ear—a voice and name she recognised immediately even though she had not heard it for years, and when she had, the last time she had, it had not been as it was now—cool and pleasant—but hotly, furiously, bitingly angry, hard with a contempt which had lashed her sensitivities and her pride red raw with whipthin acid strokes of dismissal and dislike.
Her reactions were instinctive and immediate, her face draining of colour as she frantically replaced the receiver, cutting off the voice in mid-sentence, her hand trembling so much that it took her several attempts to replace the receiver properly, her heart thumping as hard as though she had just woken up from a nightmare of terror.
She stared at the telephone as though she half expected it to ring and then she would hear Blake’s voice angrily demanding to know what it was she wanted, why she had hung up; why she had rung him in the first place when she knew just exactly what he thought of her.
Caught as she was in a web of shock, paralysed by it and by her own emotions, it was minutes rather than seconds before she had even enough control over herself to accept the irrationality of her own fears.
Of course Blake wasn’t going to ring her back. How could he? He had no idea who she was. When he reran his machine he would simply assume that she was yet another person who balked at the thought of using an answering machine.
Her thoughts formed slowly like tired swimmers fighting desperately against a too swift current.
Blake was a colleague of Elizabeth’s husband, a man in need of a woman to take charge of his orphaned godchild; could coincidence really stretch a long arm so far?
To the best of her knowledge Blake was still working abroad. America somewhere, her brother Michael had said the last time he had mentioned him. Before that he had spent some time working with disturbed children, some of the victims in Romania, his time and skill given free, so her brother had told her.
How could he now be working at a relatively small local hospital in a part of the country with which he had no connections?
It was impossible; she must have imagined it… She stared at the telephone, willing herself to find the courage to dial the number again. When she did so, the voice declaring the name ‘Blake Hamilton’ and the phone number was as cool and precise as before. Her mouth dry, her heart pounding, she replaced the receiver, a cold sweat had engulfed her body, making her shiver.
Thank God Elizabeth had arranged things so that she was the one to get in touch with him.
‘He knows something of your circumstances, by the way—not the full details,’ Elizabeth had told her. Had that ‘something’ included her name and, if it had, had he recognised it?
Obviously not, otherwise he would never have agreed to interview her.