Walking in Darkness

‘What? I don’t understand,’ Cathy said.

‘I’m so frightened,’ Sophie whispered. ‘Because they’ll lie, invent reasons to make you give me up, and then they’ll take me away and kill me!’

‘I won’t let them through the gates!’ Cathy promised, she would have promised anything to stop Sophie looking that way, like a scared little kid, all eyes and a white face.

‘They’ve tried to kill me twice! First in New York, in the subway, they pushed me off the platform and I was lucky I wasn’t killed – that’s where I got the bruises the doctor pointed out to you, the ones that are starting to fade. Then, just now, outside – you saw what happened. You can’t pretend I’m imagining that, you saw with your own eyes what almost happened.’

Cathy was as white as death now, too, her mouth bloodless. ‘My f . . . father wouldn’t k . . . k . . .’ She couldn’t get the word out, it stuck in her throat like a bone, hurting her, silencing her.

‘Kill?’ Sophie said it for her. ‘Wouldn’t he? How well do you really know him? I talked to him, face to face, in New York, in the hotel, and he said to me that my mother had made a deal which included a promise never to tell anyone and she had broken that promise. He was very angry. He threatened me. He’s a killer, Cathy.’

Anguished, Cathy cried out, ‘Don’t say that! I don’t believe you. He’s my father!’ She loved him, she had always loved him, they had been so close throughout her life. He had kept her with him during the years when her mother was away at Easton and lost to her.

Dad had always been there for her. She thought back over all the times they had spent together, when she was a child, and later, after she grew up and before she married Paul. There had been many days on fishing trips, sailing the Ramsey yacht, or just drifting in a little wooden rowboat; summer days riding or walking in the forest, or wandering along the beach at Easton, talking politics, talking ideas, talking ways and means of making dreams reality, while they gathered clams at low tide, digging them out and taking them home in a bucket to be cleaned and cooked in a chowder by Grandee’s cook. They had talked and listened to each other, argued, and agreed.

‘I know him better than anyone in the world does,’ she said with a faint sob in her throat. ‘I always loved him better than anyone. Better than my mother, because she has had so much illness, for years we hardly saw much of her, but Dad and I were always together, he took me everywhere with him, on campaigns, all around the country, from coast to coast. Nobody knows him like I do.’

‘You didn’t know he wasn’t your father!’

For a few seconds Cathy was silenced, staring at her with stretched, dilated eyes, then she angrily said, ‘He is! He is! You’re lying, I know you are.’ She had to be lying, Cathy couldn’t bear it to be true, everything she had thought she knew about herself was disintegrating in front of her, she was confused, watching her very identity crumbling, her memories dissolving and disappearing.

She held onto them, would not let them slide out of her fingers. ‘You’re lying,’ she said again. ‘He is my father, he loves me and I love him – and everything you’ve told me is moonshine.’

‘Then why is somebody trying to kill me?’

The fierce question made Cathy’s breath catch. ‘How do I know?’ she finally muttered. ‘I don’t know anything about you, except that you’re lying.’

‘Why are his security men outside the gates trying to get me?’ Sophie came back without a second’s hesitation, and Cathy looked wildly at her.

‘I don’t know!’

There was a tap on the door. They both looked a

t it in shock. Cathy found herself trembling a little, too, and was disturbed by that. Sophie’s fear was getting to her, too. She felt it pulsing in her throat, in her ears.

‘Who is it?’ she called in a voice she barely held steady.

The door opened and a woman in a neat dark dress looked into the room. ‘The police, madam.’

Cathy’s tense muscles relaxed; she grew angry with herself now. What was the matter with her, letting herself get into such a state? As if her father would be involved in something like this! As if he would send killers to get a girl from this house. Her father spoke half a dozen languages, was highly musical, highly educated, a cultured, civilized man – not a hood. She knew what sort of man he was – why had she let herself be persuaded to doubt him?

‘Show him in, please, Nora,’ she said with a little sigh of weak relief, then, as the housekeeper went out again, turned to frown at Sophie and whispered urgently, ‘Don’t dare tell the police all those lies about my father!’

Sophie gave her a cynical look. ‘If it isn’t true, why are you worried?’

‘Because if the press gets hold of your story it could do Dad’s election prospects terrible damage.’

‘Which is why he’s trying to shut me up!’

‘I don’t believe he’s doing anything of the kind. Who’s behind you? One of the other Republican candidates? How much were you paid to pull this stunt?’ Cathy stopped, hearing the housekeeper’s footsteps outside in the hall, on the polished wood-block flooring, and even louder a man’s heavy tread following.

‘Constable Hawkins, madam,’ the housekeeper announced and a tall broad-shouldered man in a navy-blue uniform came into the room, removing his peaked cap as he came towards them.

Cathy stood up to greet him, pulling herself together.

‘Good evening, Mrs Brougham.’

‘Good evening, Constable Hawkins.’