‘What are you doing here?’
She sounded terrified, and Lilli gave Steve a quick, narrowed look.
‘Isn’t he a friend of yours? He told me he was.’
Deliberately Steve said, ‘Who pushed you under that train, Sophie?’ and saw her eyes fill with fear.
‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded Lilli, looking from one to the other of them. ‘Sophie? Were you pushed? What is all this?’
Sophie didn’t answer her. She whispered, ‘I don’t know . . . I didn’t see.’
‘But you can guess,’ Steve said. ‘You know who wants you dead, and I think I know too. For your own safety, I think you should tell me everything. Once you’ve talked, there’ll be no more attempts on your life.’
3
Sophie had been given some sort of sedative, but it hadn’t made her sleep. Her body felt so heavy it was like being paralysed, but her head was tumbling with uncontrolled ideas and images. They kept jumping up like the spooks in a fairground House of Horror, leaping out of the dark, at her, glowing green, phosphorescent, eerie. Each time her mind shrieked with panic and fear, as it had when she felt the hand in the small of her back. Each time she lived it over again, falling forward, falling, falling, for what seemed an eternity, clutching at something, an arm, a body, and being thrown off in another direction, the grinding crash as she hit something hard, and then pain. There had been screaming too: herself first then someone else, another woman’s voice, then others began, their cries overlaying each other in her head.
‘God . . . help me . . . Jeez . . . what’s happening? Oh, God . . . Look, somebody’s on the line . . . somebody dead? A woman . . . on the line under the train . . . on the line . . .’
After that she couldn’t remember how things had happened; she might have passed out briefly. The next thing she was looking up at a ring of faces staring down at her, and couldn’t remember what had happened or where she was; her stare wandered from the circle of strangers, swung in a wild arc around the tiled walls, up to the shadowy arch of a ceiling. Lights strobed, darkness pressed in on the edge of . . . of what? Where was she? Disorientated, dazed, she heard a train shudder backwards right next to her, and knew she was in a station. Men swarmed, shouting instructions to each other. A man in uniform began pushing the crowd of people back from her.
‘Get back, let the paramedics deal with her – c’mon, move back, please.’
Someone knelt beside her. ‘Hi, I’m Bill. What’s your name? How are you feeling? Any pain?’
A light shone in her eyes, she blinked, frowning, then shut her eyes against the intrusion and put a hand up to her head, groaning at a stab of pain.
‘Don’t worry about a thing, we’re here to take care of you. OK, guys, on the count of three, lift.’
They took hold of her shoulders and feet and she was lifted on to a stretcher. A moment later she was being wheeled along a low-lit corridor, into a lift, out again, and then she felt cold air on her face, heard loud noises, and opened her eyes on night-time New York. She was dazed for an instant; down on the platform she had thought she was back in Prague. The underground system was much the same, indeed brighter, more modern, in Prague, whose metro had only been built in 1967, a year before her birth.
Now, staring around, bewildered, she was dazzled by the bright lights of the street, neon flashing on and off, and near by the sound of the wind in the trees in Central Park a short walk from here, the sound of rain on shop canopies and rushing in gutters, the sound of cars hooting, tyres skidding on wet tarmac, the hiss of hot air escaping from the subway up through the road.
She had really woken up then, and remembered. As they put her into the waiting ambulance she had thought: somebody pushed me, somebody wants me dead. And each time her heart raced and she couldn’t breathe.
Don Gowrie . . . No, it couldn’t be. But Sophie kept remembering his face when he heard her question at the conference and turned to stare with that stunned expression on his face. If she chose to she could hurt him, maybe even ruin him. He was an ambitious man, a driven man who had no scruples about doing what had to be done to get what he wanted. That much was very clear to her; and, after all, he didn’t even need to get his own hands dirty. He hadn’t had to do anything himself. He was rich enough to pay someone to do it for him, to hire a hitman – he need not have even met the man who was hired, he would just have put out a contract on her, wasn’t that what they called it here? But whatever they called it, it was murder, plain and simple, or would have been murder, if the attempt had succeeded.
She shivered. No, she couldn’t believe it – he might be a hard, ambitious man, but she hadn’t got the impression that he was a cold or cruel one. He certainly wasn’t without feeling or he would not have been so shaken when he heard her speaking. She had seen the shock and dismay in his face. Of course, that could simply have been fear of the threat she posed, but she couldn’t believe he would go so far as to want her killed. Or would he?
Well, somebody did, she reminded herself. She hadn’t imagined that hand pushing her into the path of the train. Somebody had tried to kill her – and who else had a reason for wanting her dead?
But couldn’t it have been some crazy person, some total stranger, who had no motive, just wanted the kick of killing someone? Or maybe it had been an accident? Someone might have tripped and put out a hand to save himself, sending her tumbling?
No, no, it had been no accident – she was sure it had been coolly deliberate. She hadn’t heard or felt anyone stumble into her. There had just been that hand coming out of nowhere. Someone had tried to kill her, and there had to be a reason. The more she thought about it, the more she had to face the fact that nobody else had a notive – it had to be Don Gowrie who wanted her dead. What on earth was she to do? He had tried, and failed – he would try again.
Her mouth dry, her skin sweating, she desperately tried to work out what to do. She could ask Vladimir to get her out of New York, send her back to London . . . anywhere, out of Gowrie’s way.
Oh, but how could she just turn her back on something that meant so much? She had made promises, promises she had to keep. Emotion choked her. She was trapped by her feelings; however risky it was, she couldn’t turn her back.
You couldn’t turn your back on love. But oh, why did love have to hurt so much?
It should be warm and gentle. It shouldn’t drive spikes into your heart whenever you thought about it.
She tried to think of something else . . . home, she thought, aching with longing; she wished she was back home, not in Prague but in her childhood home, but she could never go back there now because it no longer existed as it had in her earliest memories. The golden glow which had lit it in her first years had gone now.
When she was little the village had always seemed to be bathed in sunshine. She remembered sharp vignettes of Christmas and skating on the village pond, but mostly she remembered May, her favourite time of year, the hedges white with hawthorn in flower, purple lilac out in all the gardens, orchards white with cherry and plum trees in frothy bridal blossom. She had often lain on her back on the grass under them and stared at the blue May sky through their foaming branches.
How long ago it seemed, those childhood years, before her mother married again, while there were just the