Walking in Darkness (6 page)

What would it cost? A cut-price plane ticket from a bucket shop, a cheap hotel. She could save a lot by walking instead of taking public transport, buying cheap food to eat in her room instead of eating out. Oh, she could cut expenses to the bone. She was an expert at living on almost nothing.

‘I’m a mind-reader,’ Steve said and she started.

‘What?’

‘You mean to go on this trip, too, right?’

‘If I can talk Vlad into paying for it,’ she confessed. ‘Which will be like talking Dracula into giving me a blood transfusion from his own veins.’

Steve roared with laughter.

In the penthouse suite of the hotel Don Gowrie was talking on the phone. ‘Her passport details all check out, then? Born Prague, 1968. Parents, Johanna and Pavel Narodni. Father dead, mother remarried, now has two younger sons. Mother still alive, then?’ He bit down on his lower lip. ‘I see. No, don’t bother with the Czech end. Leave it now; close the file.’ There was a murmur on the other end of the line. ‘No, I said close the file!’ Don Gowrie put down the phone with a faint crash, the hand that held it slippery with sweat, picked up a decanter from the antique black-lacquered Chinese-style table and poured himself a glass of whisky, then walked over to the window of the suite to stare down, down, down at the pale grey ants flickering along the street below. From up here on the sixtieth floor you couldn’t make out their sex, or what they wore, let alone their faces. It was hard to be sure they were human beings. Their life or death meant nothing at this height. If one of them suddenly fell down dead you wouldn’t even notice. Would any of the others hurrying past them stop to look, or would they just step over the body and rush on?

Behind him someone asked quietly, ‘Do you think she knows something that could be a problem?’

He shrugged without turning round or answering.

‘How serious a problem?’

‘I don’t even dare ask her. That serious.’ He swallowed the whisky and went back to pour himself another.

‘You haven’t forgotten you’re speaking tonight at that dinner.’

The soft reminder made him stop pouring. He picked up the glass, swirled the whisky, holding it up in front of the Tiffany lamp on the side-table. The art nouveau glass with its metal-outlined red roses and Celtic-styled green leaves gave the whisky a deep, alluring glow, but he barely saw it. His mind was too busy, considering solutions, rejecting all of them. There was only one way out and he knew it. She had to be silenced.

Behind him, his companion was thinking along very much the same lines. ‘We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble, then, won’t we?’

Don turned to stare, face furrowed, pale, set.

‘Be careful.’

Sophie felt the American watching her and glanced quickly at him, a frisson of warning down her spine. She must not let this man get too close, he could become a problem. She looked at her watch, ready to make her excuses and go.

‘Thank you for the drink, I must –’

His voice rode over hers. ‘So when did you move on to New York?’

‘A couple of months ago. Vlad decided that people in East Europe were fascinated by the American political process but unless they were political students they found it all too complicated. They wanted simple explanations. Vlad had started a bureau over here, which was run by an old friend of his, Theo Strahov – Theo is an American citizen now, but he was born in Prague, worked with Vlad there before he came to America. Theo retired from full-time work some years ago, but for Vlad he came out of retirement and started the new bureau. He has been running it singlehanded ever since. But he found it more and more tiring. So Vlad sent me to help out for a while, and then last week Theo collapsed in the street. He’s OK now, but the doctors say it was a stroke warning, and he must start to take it easy. So I shall be running the bureau from now on.’

She was telling him a lot, but telling him nothing, she hoped, nothing of any importance, about herself, about her life, about her world. But the cat-and-mouse game was more tiring than she had expected.

Quickly, before he could ask her any more questions, she asked him one. ‘Do you know Senator Gowrie’s wife? What is she like?’

‘Frail, sick, a lady who doesn’t always know what time of day it is.’

She already knew all that, but she pretended surprise. ‘Yes? That is sad. What’s wrong with her?’

‘God knows. She has never been strong, I gather.’

Still casual, she murmured, ‘How many children do they have?’

‘Just one. Cathy.’

She noted the intimacy of the shortened name with a pang of shock. Did he know Gowrie’s daughter well enough to call her that, or did the press all use her pet name?

‘What’s she like?’ she asked, keeping her eyes down on her linked hands on the polished bar table, struggling not to betray anything by her face, by her voice, but it wasn’t easy; emotion kept trying to break through.

‘Beautiful,’ he said with a bitter tang to his voice. She looked up then, startled, but this time it was Steve who avoided her stare, his eyes fixed on his empty glass. ‘She’s smart, too,’ he said as if talking to himself. ‘She’s clever and cool-headed, a political animal. Of course, it’s in her blood. She comes from a family who’ve been mixed up in politics for generations. She has travelled from coast to coast with her father many a time. He worships the ground she walks on, she has always been more of an asset to him than her mother, who almost never shows up. Cathy sat on platforms with him, worked on campaigns, talked to the press . . . she knew exactly how to talk to people, she could have had a career in politics any time she wanted it.’

‘But she didn’t?’ Sophie took in everything he had said, and thirsted to hear more. She needed to know everything about this other woman whose existence dominated Gowrie’s life.

He shrugged without answering. ‘She may once have done, but not any more.’

Why not? Sophie wondered. What had changed? ‘Does she have a career?’

He grimaced, his face sardonic. ‘Several, none of them very serious. She was an interior designer for a while, she’s an expert on eighteenth-century porcelain, she paints and writes articles for specialist magazines . . . she dabbles in a lot of things. I wouldn’t call any of them a career. Anyway, she’s married now.’

She nodded absently. ‘To an Englishman. I know.’

‘Why are you so interested in Gowrie?’ Steve asked abruptly, and her nerves jumped.

‘Well . . . obviously . . . if he should become president of the United States that would make him the most powerful man in the world.’ She knew she had stammered, sounded odd, but he had taken her by surprise. He kept coming far too close. She must get away from him before he guessed too much . . .

She got up unsteadily, very pale. ‘Thank you for the drink. I must go, I have copy to file,’ she said in a rush, beginning to move away just as his producer appeared in the doorway, looking agitated. He didn’t come over to them, but stared fixedly at Steve, held up his wrist, tapped his watch pointedly.

Steve nodded and began to walk towards him, in step with Sophie. ‘Looks as if I’ve got to go and do some more work, too, before Simon blows his stack. Time always flies by when you’re enjoying yourself. Look, could we have dinner together tonight?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and meant it. For once she wanted to, she really did, but she couldn’t. It would be far too dangerous. He was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, and if he wasn’t so shrewd and perceptive she might have taken the risk, but this was not a man it was easy to fool – she knew she would find it hard to go on lying, deceiving him, for long, if they saw each other again.

‘Come on, for God’s sake,’ Simon grunted as they reached him, ‘We’re all set up outside, we’ve been waiting for you for ten minutes. If we miss the evening news you can explain it – I’m not taking the can for you.’

‘No need to panic, we have plenty of time.’

Steve Colbourne sounded so calm and unflappable – was he always like that? Sophie envied him; she wished she could stand up to pressure that well. She tried to look and sound as cool as a cucumber, but her nerves made her stomach cramp into agony at times.

As they walked towards the swing doors leading out of the hotel, the lift doors opened and out came a massed body of men who began moving at speed in their direction, cutting a swath through the hotel guests, who fell back, parting like the Red Sea in the face of that unstoppable force. Sophie’s breath caught as she saw it was Don Gowrie, flanked by security men on all sides.

Steve and his producer had already gone through the swing doors, but Sophie was too slow in following. A second later the little army of men was on her, but they didn’t march past because Don Gowrie stopped, and they all stopped with him.

‘Miss Narodni,’ Don Gowrie said, giving her that boyish smile of his. ‘Hello again. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to answer your question – another time, maybe?’

His cool nerve took her breath away. She would have loved to shout out the truth, wipe that smile off his face – but she couldn’t, not yet at least. She needed to meet Mrs Gowrie and Catherine, first. She didn’t want to destroy their lives just because Don Gowrie was a lying, cheating bastard. Why should they pay for what he had done? She felt an intense sympathy and pity for his wife; no doubt she had known the truth all along, but the poor woman had suffered. Sophie didn’t want to hurt her even more.

‘Maybe you’ll have time to talk to me while you’re in London?’ she told him, hoping she sounded as cool as he did.

She saw the flicker of shock in his eyes before he veiled them. ‘So you’ll be in London too?’ he said. ‘I’ll certainly look out for you.’

Then he was gone, his entourage hiding him from her; she followed through the swing doors a moment later and saw the long black limousines driving off at speed, while police held up the rest of the traffic until the limousines had got away.

While she stared, Don Gowrie’s face briefly showed at the back window of the second car. He looked towards her and then he was gone.

She heard Steve Colbourne’s voice from a hundred feet away; he was standing with his back to her, and the hotel behind her, recording a piece to camera, his voice confidential, smooth, accustomed.

Sophie didn’t hover to listen to what he was saying. She pulled her jacket closer, and began to walk towards the subway station nearest the hotel. She had to get back to her flat and file her story with Vlad, try to talk him into letting her fly to London.

She bought a token, walked towards the turnstile, and began to push her token into the slot, conscious of a man behind her waiting for his turn. Sophie didn’t look at him. She had learnt never to make eye-contact with men in the subway. She slid through the turnstile and walked on to the platform, staying where she could see the token booth; although it was daylight she still felt uneasy on the subway. There were other passengers waiting, she was not alone, but you heard such horror stories. She was relieved when another couple of women came along.

A train rattled along the tunnel and came out into the lighted station; she glanced up at the indicator board, then checked the route number, a big blue numeral, on the front of the coming train.

She was still getting used to the routes and the names of stations; she had to think for a second before she worked out that she would have to change trains at Washington Square to get to the station nearest to her flat. New York’s subway system was as complicated as the underground system in London, to which she had only just become adjusted when she was transferred here.

She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a sound behind her or see anything.

She had no warning. A hand suddenly hit her in the middle of her back, right between the shoulder blades, propelling her violently forward to the edge of the platform.

Steve Colbourne was driving away from the hotel in a cab a quarter of an hour later when an ambulance passed him, siren going, and pulled up outside the entrance to a subway station already surrounded by a small crowd. A couple of uniformed policemen were barring entry to everyone but the medical team which jumped out of the ambulance and ran with their equipment down the stairs.

Steve was in a hurry but his reporter’s instincts wouldn’t let him drive on past without checking it out. He leaned forward and said to the taxi driver, ‘Hey, pull over here, would you? I just want to find out what’s going on.’

The driver looked round at him, shrugged, and put on his brakes. Steve leaned out of the window, and yelled to one of the policemen, ‘What’s happened in there?’

He got an impatient stare. ‘Accident – drive on, you’re holding up traffic.’

Steve pulled out his press card and held it up. ‘Press. What sort of accident?’

The crowd all turned to stare at him. Before the policeman could answer, a young black guy in the crowd shouted, ‘There’s a girl on the line, fell under a train.’

‘Dead?’

The guy spread his hands, his big shoulders moving. ‘Well, they don’t generally get up and walk afterwards, now do they?’

A woman hovering near the kerb complained, ‘Why do they always have to do it during rush hour, huh? I got to get home. They take so long to clear the line after one of these jumpers.’

‘Take the bus,’ the black guy told her, and got a glare.

‘Easy for you to say, you ain’t got my feet.’

He looked down at her swollen ankles. ‘Don’t want ’em neither, lady.’

Others in the crowd began to laugh, but not the policemen. Behind the cab, traffic had now built up in a noisy log jam.

‘Get going!’ the cab driver was ordered by one of the policemen, who came down to the kerb to bang on the top of the cab with his night stick.

‘Hey, don’t damage the cab!’ the driver yelled at him. The air was raucous with car horns blaring, drivers leaning out to shout insults at the cab driver, who turned to say to Steve, ‘Got to go, mister. D’you wanna pay me and get out, or can we drive on now?’

Leaning back, Steve gestured. ‘OK, let’s go.’ After all, it happened all the time, people were always throwing themselves under subway trains, although God knew why they would want so violent and painful a death, but there was nothing in it for him. It wouldn’t rate more than a para in any newspaper, and, anyway, regular news wasn’t his scene. He had always specialized; politics was all he had ever been interested in because, like Catherine Gowrie, he had been bred to it.