Walking in Darkness by Charlotte Lamb Read Free Book Online Page B

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