Walking in Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

her guard. What was this man after? Why had he come over to her like that? Why had he hung around while the security men questioned her?
    Sophie’s mouth went dry; she was stranded, high and dry, on the sands of shock and anxiety again. She wished she hadn’t come in here with this stranger; she needed to be alone, to think. She ought to be working out what to do next. She had had one plan and one only, and now she had gone through with it. She had started something without being quite sure what would happen if she did, and she was scared. She kept remembering Don Gowrie’s expression when she asked her question, the way he had swung to stare. What had gone through his mind? What was going on in his head right now?
    She tried to tell herself she needn’t be scared, he wouldn’t dare do anything to her – but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the jangling of her nerves. Maybe she should have gone about this some other way? Maybe she should have written to his wife? But she hadn’t quite dared do that. Far too dangerous to put anything on paper. She had tried ringing his home but neither he nor his wife or daughter were ever available and the distant, icily polite voice which answered each time had scared her too much for her to risk leaving any messages.
    ‘Can’t you make up your mind what to have?’ the reporter repeated and she blinked.
    ‘Oh . . . yes . . . a glass of white wine, please.’
    A young Mexican waiter in black skin-tight pants and a close-fitting waistcoast had sauntered over; he was visibly pleased with his own lithe body, walking like a matador, a look of inner attention on his face, the look of a man listening for the roar of a crowd. Sophie couldn’t help smiling at him and his dark eyes glowed at her as if waiting for her to throw him a red rose.
    ‘A glass of white wine for the lady, and a whisky for me,’ the reporter said.
    ‘Glass white wine, whisky, certainly, sir,’ the waiter said in a warm, Spanish-accented voice, and sauntered away.
    ‘Sophie . . . you don’t mind if I call you Sophie? I’m Steve. Tell me about yourself,’ the TV reporter said with the practised manner of one who was a professional interviewer, and she wished to God she dared talk freely to him. If only she knew someone here in New York well enough to trust them, talk to them. This city was so huge, so crowded, yet she knew nobody well enough to talk to them, but then it was nothing new to her, that feeling of isolation. Since she was very small she had been lonely, she had been cut off from other kids her age because of her stepfather’s job; they didn’t trust her, thought she might spy on them, tell on them. Even her mother had no time for her once she had other children. Sophie had been driven to talking to the dead because the living ignored her. That was crazy, wasn’t it? Or at least not normal, talking to your dead sister because you had no one else to talk to.
    When she got older she had tried to make friends, but maybe she hoped for too much, needed too much, made it all too important; her need, her air of desperation, had driven people away instead of attracting them. Even when she left the village and went to Prague to university, she had only made acquaintances; she had gone around for a couple of years in a big group, one of the crowd, but never getting very close to anyone.
    The men had, it was true, wanted to date her, and didn’t waste much time or finesse in trying to get her into bed. Sex seemed all they were interested in, but Sophie needed something better than sex – she wanted to be loved, but that had always eluded her.
    ‘Everyone calls you the snow queen,’ one young man had said. ‘And they’re right, that’s what you are. Frozen from the neck down. Who wants a woman like that?’
    She remembered the way she had felt as he spat the words at her, the misery that had swamped her. They had been in his car; he was driving her home from a concert. She could still hear the