Moreton's Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

impression of the man had been one of cold indifference to a transient love affair.
    She hardly expected an answer to her final phone call and she returned the receiver to its hook with a little angry snap. How could Coralie be so exasperating? How could she go off somewhere to amuse herself when she must surely know by now that there was nobody at Beck Cottage to take her child?

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    Early the following morning Katherine phoned London again, almost expecting to draw a blank. Even Coralie’s flatmate had flown the nest, and she went down to breakfast with Sandy’s hand in hers, wondering what she should do next.
    To return to London might be one way of solving the problem, but again it might not. It could be a long, frustrating journey which could end in disappointment. Katherine stood at the foot of the stairs, looking at Sandy with a new kind of pity in her heart as the word abandoned stuck in her mind. How could anyone have acted like Coralie had done without feeling a grievous remorse? She was Sandy’s mother and she had expressed her love for him, and she was also extremely intelligent, wanting to succeed in her chosen career because of him, but how could she have left him entirely in a stranger’s care when she knew that her ex-husband was determined to claim him one way or another?
    She left Sandy in the dining-room coping with the last of the toast and marmalade while she went back to the bedroom to re-pack their cases. The child’s tartan holdall lay on the smaller of the two beds and she folded his one-piece pyjama suit into it before she went to the adjoining bathroom to pick up their toilet bags. Sandy’s was a vivid blue covered with nursery-rhyme characters which he had named for her the night before as he dutifully brushed his teeth with the miniature toothbrush which Coralie had packed for him before he had left London, and the small brush looked oddly pathetic as she dropped it into the waterproof bag, but suddenly her eye caught the sewn-on name-tape on one corner. Sandy Moreton, she read as her blood froze.
    Sandy Moreton? Charles Moreton’s child. It was painfully obvious now, after all that Coralie had told her. He had been there at the party in Kensington hoping to track Coralie down, but he must have arrived as Coralie had left, or soon afterwards. No, Katherine remembered, it was while she had been speaking to Coralie that she had first noticed the tall man in the grey suit at the far side of the noisy room, but Coralie had left so quickly afterwards that he could conceivably have missed her in the crowd. When he realised that Coralie had escaped him he had crossed the room to her side.
    It all seemed to fall into place as she remembered: the questions he had asked; his interest in her future movements; the offer to see her home and, above all, the suggestion of coldness in his manner which had baffled her at the time but which she had foolishly taken for a natural reserve. He had been assessing her with a clinical detachment which now seemed all too obvious, and she had told him all he wanted to know. When they had eventually reached her flat she had told him that she could not invite him in because she was tired, and he had suggested that she would be leaving for Scotland the following morning. She hadn’t had the wit to contradict him nor, at that time, the inclination. He had bowled her over completely as no doubt he had intended to do, and she had fallen for the treatment like a romantic teenager.
    Ramming the toilet bags into her case, she zipped up Sandy’s holdall and walked to the head of the stairs; then suddenly she was running down the hall as if her life depended on reaching the dining-room before disaster struck. But Sandy was still seated at the table in the corner, counting prune stones on to his side plate.
    Hastily she paid her bill, driving back to the cottage as quickly as she could, but the kindly neighbour could tell her nothing further about Hattie