Walking in Darkness

‘Stop calling me that!’ Cathy automatically said, staring at her. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘I swear I am. I haven’t told Steve anything about you. He kept asking questions but I never answered them.’ Sophie stared fixedly at the familiar, bewildering face which was her sister’s and yet so like the mother Sophie remembered from her childhood. Had Steve been deeply in love with her? Thinking back over everything he had said about Cathy, she realized how much emotion had charged his attitudes from the start. She had guessed when he talked about some guy he knew who had been in love with Cathy – his voice had given him away. And he had made so many odd, bitter, cynical remarks about the Gowrie family. She had assumed he was against their politics, but it had been personal all along. When Cathy married Paul Brougham, Steve had got hurt. Was he still in love with her? Looking away, Sophie stared into the fire, watching sparks flying upward, flames curling round the log. Her chest hurt. Was this strange, jabbing pain jealousy?

‘He really doesn’t know?’ Cathy whispered.

Sophie put out her hand, seeing her sister in the glow of the fire, her dark hair aureoled in gold and her hazel eyes big and glittering with the strain of everything that had happened that evening.

‘Anya, I’m not lying to you. I haven’t told Steve anything. He got me a job working for his production team as a researcher –’

‘Why?’ Cathy sharply asked. ‘Why would he do that?’

Sophie bit her lip, looking down. ‘I’m afraid he suspects me of being your father’s mistress. He may even think I’m trying to blackmail your father.’

Cathy was dumbstruck. ‘Why on earth would he think that?’ She drew a painful breath. ‘Unless you were?’ She turned dark red with embarrassment and shock. ‘You . . . you aren’t, are you?’ The idea of her father having a mistress was not new to her – she wasn’t a child, she knew how little his marriage meant any more. Her mother was not a real wife, had not been one for years. But suspecting her father had other women was one thing – seeing this girl younger than herself and imagining her with Dad was something else. The very idea made her feel sick, her throat filled with bile.

‘No! Of course not!’ Sophie burst out, and Cathy breathed again, believing her implicitly, recognizing the look of truth.

There was a tap on the door and the housekeeper looked in: ‘The policeman’s at the gates asking if he can come in now, madam.’

Cathy pulled herself together. ‘Are you ready to see him?’ she asked Sophie, who reluctantly nodded. Cathy looked back at the housekeeper. ‘He can come in, then.’

When the other woman had gone Sophie begged, ‘Don’t leave me alone with him, will you? I hate talking to policemen, Anya.’

‘Yes, I’ll stay, but for God’s sake stop using that name, it is not my name.’

‘It is! I can’t understand how you can have forgotten it so completely. After all you were two when you were taken away – don’t you remember us at all?’

‘I don’t want to get into an argument with you again, let’s leave it for now, but I’ve been Cathy all my life and I don’t know myself as anything else.’

‘But I don’t know you as Cathy, I only know you as Anya.’

‘I am not Anya! Even if you’re telling the truth . . . and I’m not ready to believe you are . . . but even if you were I would still think of myself as Cathy. Every day of the life that is all I remember, I’ve been Cathy Brougham – this girl Anya means nothing to me.’

But she glanced sideways at the table where they lay, all those eerie, pale reproduced photocopies, and frowned at the woman in the old-fashioned wedding-dress, at the face so like her own, at something even more disturbingly familiar, at an emotion she felt deep inside herself and couldn’t quite pin down. What was it she felt every time she saw that face?

The telephone rang and both women jumped. Cathy leaned over to answer it. ‘Hello? What? My father? Security men?’

Sophie’s breathing stopped for a beat, her mouth open, in panic. Cathy looked at her, her face shaken, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone. Then she said harshly, ‘No. Absolutely not. Tell them they will have to wait until my husband gets here, he is on his way, and will deal with them.’

She put the phone down hurriedly as if afraid of being talked into changing her mind. She and Sophie stared at each other.

‘American security guys are at the gates, asking to come in,’ Cathy said.

‘They want me,’ Sophie said, trembling violently.

Cathy gripped her hands tightly. ‘No, of course not – I expect they just want to ask questions about the accident.’

‘They’re here to do the job that woman in the car didn’t manage to do, they’re going to kill me.’

‘I won’t let them in!’ Cathy was surprised to hear herself say that. She hadn’t meant to. Sophie’s terror had startled it out of her. Cathy didn’t believe what she was saying, but she was obviously scared sick, and who could blame her after the way that car had tried to run her down?

‘They’ll make you, they’ll use force if they have to!’

‘They wouldn’t dare! This is England, not the States.’ She was shouting. Stop shouting, Cathy told herself silently. What was she afraid of? But she knew. She was terrified that Sophie Narodni might be telling the truth. That would mean chaos, black night, the abyss of not knowing who she really was or where she belonged.

She took herself in hand and spoke more quietly, her face confident. ‘They have no jurisdiction here. They have no right to bust into my house, or use any force.’

Sophie suddenly lapsed into Czech, muttering.