Walking in Darkness

‘You couldn’t tell your son-in-law the truth and what’s at stake?’

Don Gowrie’s fingers tightened on a pencil he had picked up; it snapped and he threw it down with a scowl.

‘Too big a risk. He might divorce her if he knew there was a chance, however remote, that she wouldn’t inherit.’

His secretary’s eyes opened wide behind her spectacles. ‘You really think so? I had the impression it was a real love-match, the way they look at each other. And he would have to pay her hefty alimony, if he divorced her for a reason like that. Not being the heir to a fortune is hardly grounds for divorce. Anyway, I thought you and he got on well.’

‘I guess we do, but there’s something about him that bugs me. He’s very cagey; clams up if you ask questions, especially about money.’

She laughed. ‘That’s pretty normal with businessmen.’

‘Yeah, but when she first met him I had him investigated, and my people couldn’t come up with much about his early life before he left France. He came from a very remote village originally, but none of his family still lived there, and nobody remembered much about them. There were family graves in the little churchyard, his grandparents were buried there and a couple of uncles, but some sort of massacre happened there during the Second World War, and the church itself had got hit by bombs later. There were no documents surviving.’

Emily’s brows rose. ‘You suspect he could be lying about his background?’

Gowrie frowned, shaking his head. ‘No, his name turned up in local government records – where he went to school, what exams he passed, and so on – but my guys couldn’t find a living soul who remembered him.’ He grimaced. ‘Mind you, the French can be awkward sons of bitches, especially when they’re talking to an American – my people weren’t sure if they were getting the run-around or not. The French love to pretend they don’t speak English. And Brougham checked out in Paris, that’s for sure. A lot of people knew him there. Oh, maybe I don’t trust him because he’s a goddamned Frenchman. Whatever, I’m not ready to tell him the truth about Cathy. So get me Jack.’

When she had put down the phone, Cathy wrote a letter to her friend Bella, retailing some of the latest gossip about other old schoolfriends and all about her father’s forthcoming visit. At the back of her mind she kept thinking about that weird phonecall, though. Who was Anya? And who was the girl who made the call? The voice had seemed familiar but she couldn’t place the accent. It hadn’t been an American voice, or a British one. Russian?

She had visited Russia several times and knew a few Russians, and the voice hadn’t had the right intonation. East European, she thought later that morning – yes, it had been an East European voice. Her father had taken her to East Europe several times: to Poland, Hungary, both countries she had adored, and only two years ago to East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell. Her father had worked in the diplomatic service in East Europe; she had lived in Czechoslovakia with her parents as a small baby, she had been told, although she didn’t remember it. On their tour of East Europe, however, her father had chosen not to revisit the Czech Republic, although Prague was the city Cathy most longed to see.

Lots of her friends had been there. It was where American students headed in their thousands, the new Mecca, taking the place of Paris in the Twenties, when Americans saw that city as a soul city. Now it was Prague they rushed to, coming home babbling reverently of the incredibly ornate baroque architecture with its curling lines and gilding and cherubs in profusion, at the cobbled streets and art nouveau buildings, of sitting out at night drinking cheap wine out of pewter carafes in street cafés with paper tablecloths, talking about art and sex and poetry and sex and politics, and sex, while they listened with one ear to street musicians from the latest pop songs to latest pop songs to Mozart or medieval plain chant.

Cathy had felt she was being deprived, left out of a central experience of her peers; she had been furious with her father at the time, but he had pleaded lack of time.

‘I prefer Hungary and Poland. We’ll go there some other time.’

One day I’ll get there, she thought. I’ll ask Paul to take me. We could do a quick trip in the spring – that would probably be a great time of year to go. Spring is lovely in Europe, so much warmer than it is in the States.

That thought gave her a sudden visitation of childhoods at Easton in the snow; the sparkle of icy sunlight on a trackless white vista glimpsed from her bedroom window on winter mornings, woods decked out by crisp white snow which scrunched underfoot as you walked through it, and when you looked back you saw lines of footsteps following you, your own betraying imprint.

Icicles hung from branches, there was a polished gleam of frozen blue-grey lakes, through the trees. The lake surface was scratched and powdered by ducks, orange-beaked with black webbed feet, landing and taking off under a bright blue sky. If the ice seemed strong enough she was allowed to skate, wheeling and spinning on the lake, the steel runners on her skates cutting like diamond through the surface with a satisfying sound she could still hear.

She felt a homesick yearning at the memory. It was never that cold here. The English always made her laugh, complaining if a flake or two of snow came floating down the sky, stopping the buses and trains in their tracks, sending a collective shiver of dismay and incredulity through the whole of Britain – but then they had never felt the iron grip of a New England winter. What would they do if they woke up morning after morning to sub-zero temperatures and arctic blizzards and had to trek to work between head-high banks of snow? She had learnt to love it, and the mild green winters of England were too tame by comparison. Maybe instead of going to Prague she would get Paul to take her to Easton this winter? Then, frowning, she thought, I wonder why Dad doesn’t like Prague? He has never talked much about his time there, has he? If you bring the subject up he’s very slippery and evasive.

But then Dad was always secretive. She adored him, always had, but now and then she wondered if the man she knew was the whole man, and how much of him was hidden, like an iceberg in northern seas, beneath the surface.

Paul could be secretive, too – were all men so reluctant to talk about their past lives, before you met them? Paul said little about his home in France, his family, his childhood. He had been born in a remote village in the Auvergne, his parents were long dead and he had been an only child. He had no family left there. She kept badgering him to take her there, so that she could see where he had grown up, but Paul was reluctant – he hated the place, he said, all there was to see was a church and one dusty village street. He had spent his time there simply longing to get away.

In London, Paul Brougham spent the day in meetings. One of his companies was having trouble with shareholders who weren’t happy with the annual profits forecast. Of course, they had no clue that it could have been much worse – Paul and Freddy had carefully moved figures around, shifted money between companies, done a clever cosmetics job on the final figure. At the shareholders’ meeting that morning Paul got a rough ride. One or two of the shareholders were hard to shake off, asked far too many shrewd questions, but he managed to talk his way through the problems, promising better results the following year and a firm dividend, which was all the majority of those present wanted to hear.

Halfway through a long, complaining speech from one of the leading shareholders, Freddy leaned over and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Back row, third along . . . in tweeds . . . I know him, he’s with Salmond.’

Paul looked down at the pad in front of him, scribbled one word in capitals, NAME? Under cover of doing that he glanced through his drooping lashes at the back row. The man’s face meant nothing to him but he did not doubt Freddy for an instant.

Freddy wrote on the pad, ‘Bennett, accountant.’ He picked up the thick print-out of shareholders’ names which lay on the table, skimmed through it and stopped, pointing at the name he had been looking for. Bennett was a minor shareholder; he had held shares for only a few months.

Paul nodded, tore off the top sheet of his pad and pushed it into his pocket. So, Salmond had someone planted among the shareholders of this particular company? Was that repeated over all his companies?

He murmured to Freddy, turning his head away so that nobody in the hall could lipread what he said, ‘When you get back to the office, check all our companies to see how many of them have shareholders who might be planted by Salmond.’

Freddy nodded, frowning. Paul saw the alarm in his eyes. Freddy was constantly afraid that Nemesis would catch up with them.

‘Stop worrying,’ Paul told him affectionately.

Freddy sighed. ‘Wish I could.’

Paul rushed off from the shareholders’ meeting to a private meeting with the chairman of a company he was considering acquiring. Their negotiations had been going as merrily as a wedding bell until the news of Salmond’s take-over bid got out, and now the other board was in a state of panic. Before the lunch, which took place in Paul’s boardroom, with his private staff serving an elegant, sophisticated meal, Freddy produced a list of suspected Salmond plants among the shareholders of all the Brougham companies, which he gave privately to Paul.