struck then by how pretty the girl was with her luminous blue eyes and her long blond hair arranged in an elaborate chignon. And her cheeks had been brightly flushed, perhaps from drinking too much champagne but also because she was excited at the outcome of the trial. There was nothing wrong with that. It was the reason for the gathering after all. But Vanessa remembered how it had seemed so personal for the girl. Swain, her previous lover, had killed Katya’s new boyfriend in a fit of jealousy, and she clearly hated him for it. She’d almost been saying that life imprisonment wasn’t enough, that the man deserved to hang. Perhaps she had actually said that. Vanessa couldn’t remember. Well, the girl had certainly changed since then. Vanessa thought she would never have recognized this wraithlike apparition as Katya Osman if the girl’s presence in Titus’s house hadn’t provided her with the connection.
Katya opened her mouth to speak but the words stuck in her throat. She felt sick and faint, and the room had started to revolve. Two great tears sliding slowly down her sunken cheeks bore silent witness to her inner distress.
Recovering from her initial shock, Vanessa crossed the room and put her arm around Katya, helping to hold her up.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Water,’ Katya whispered. ‘Water.’
Vanessa couldn’t hear her the first time and had to listen hard before she understood what Katya was saying.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, getting up and going over to the drinks tray on the sideboard, but as soon as her back was turned Katya collapsed to the floor, taking a small ornamental table with her. Vanessa couldn’t see any water and so she instinctively seized hold of a soda fountain, pulled down on the mother of pearl handle, and sprayed a jet of foaming water in the general direction of the girl’s mouth. After a moment Katya coughed and opened her eyes, but she hardly seemed to know where she was. Vanessa knelt down beside Katya, supporting the girl’s head in her hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, repeating her earlier question.
Katya could hear Vanessa’s voice, but it was very far away. She was sinking to the bottom of a deep, dark pool and knew that talking would soon be beyond her, and so, with one last superhuman effort, she launched herself upward through the thick black darkness and into the light of her uncle’s drawing room. She had come too far to stop now.
‘They’re . . .’
‘Yes?’ said Vanessa, putting her ear close to Katya’s mouth so that her cheek brushed the wet soda water on the girl’s upturned face.
‘They’re trying to kill me,’ said Katya in a rush. But the struggle to get out the words was too much. The sedative that Jana Claes had half-injected into her vein upstairs finally did its work, and Katya collapsed back into Vanessa’s arms, dead to the world.
CHAPTER 2
Vanessa reached up and took a cushion off the sofa and placed it under the girl’s head, and then, letting go of Katya, she sat back on her haunches, wondering what the hell to do next. She’d come out for a pleasant romantic evening and had ended up within ten minutes of her arrival holding her lover’s niece in her arms while the girl accused nameless assailants of trying to kill her. Vanessa closed her eyes, trying to think. It was all just so crazy. She knew Titus – he was a good man. She couldn’t conceive of him as a murderer. And yet the girl had seemed so insistent, as if she would have done anything to tell Vanessa her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she had said. But who was they? Perhaps it wasn’t Titus at all, but his brother-in-law, Franz, whom the girl had been talking about. Franz and someone else. Certainly there was no blood relationship between Katya and Franz. Titus had told Vanessa very little of his family history, but she knew that Katya was the daughter of Titus’s sister, whereas Franz was the brother of Titus’s dead wife, about whom he never spoke.
Vanessa had met Franz Claes quite a few times during the last year and she had never warmed to the man. Titus didn’t like to drive, and sometimes Franz would act as chauffeur, driving him and Vanessa to restaurants in the back of Titus’s Bentley. She could make no criticism of his behaviour – Franz was always polite, and yet he never failed to make her feel uneasy when she was in his company. It wasn’t his wounds, or at least she hoped it wasn’t. Rather it was the way he avoided her eye and yet always seemed to be watching her. She’d noticed how he always kept everything razor sharp: his too short slicked-down, jet-black hair; the crease in his trousers; the polish on his shoes. Everything was defiantly masculine, except that he felt feminine somehow underneath. He gave Vanessa the creeps when she thought about him. Not that she had very much. Franz Claes had been at the periphery of her life up until now.
She needed to talk to Titus. That was what she needed to do. He’d make sense of all this for her. She thought about going to look for him, but she didn’t want to leave the girl on her own. Getting up, she went over to the door, opened it, and called out Titus’s name several times. But there was no response. It felt awkward shouting in someone else’s house, and she was just about to give up when she heard Titus’s voice on the stairs, although she couldn’t make out the words, and moments later he came into view. She went out into the hall to meet him.
As always, he looked entirely calm and self-possessed. There was not a wrinkle in his evening dress and he was coming down the stairs at his own pace, without rushing. The sight of her lover reassured Vanessa. Since the death of her teenage son, her only child, in a motorcycle accident three years earlier, Vanessa had convinced herself that the world was an entirely frightening, hostile place and that survival, not happiness, was the most that could be hoped for from life. Her husband hadn’t supported her at all with her grief. Bill Trave might be good at his job, but he was hopeless at expressing his emotions or helping his wife to cope with hers. He’d locked himself away in a dark, inaccessible place after Joe died, taking refuge in his police work. Every day he’d acted like their son had never existed, turning in on himself to hide his grief, until she couldn’t stand it any more. It was a crime – it was like killing their child all over again. Joe might only have been on the earth nineteen and a half years but they were the most important years of her life. He was her own personal miracle, wound about her heart forever, and she couldn’t forgive her husband for denying him. She’d left her husband eighteen months earlier because she’d had to. She’d have died otherwise. And all she’d expected from life once she was on her own was some small easing of her sense of oppression. But instead Titus had come along and lifted her right up off her feet. The happiness was difficult, of course: it made her feel guilty because of Joe and because of her husband, and it didn’t help that she’d met Titus because he’d been a witness in one of Bill’s cases. But Bill was going to hate whomever she took up with, and she deserved the chance of a little joy before age caught up with her. Her new life might not be perfect, but it was certainly better than the death in life she’d been experiencing before. And recently she had begun to embrace it with both hands. Titus made her feel safe, and he made her feel desirable when she had never expected to feel that way again. He made her feel that she mattered.
‘Are you all right, my dear?’ asked Titus, seeing the anxious expression on Vanessa’s face as she looked up at him from down below. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you so long.’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s your niece.’
‘Katya?’
‘Yes, she’s in there,’ said Vanessa, pointing toward the drawing room behind her. ‘She was in a bad way. I gave her some soda water but she passed out.’
For the first time since she had known him, Titus went ahead of Vanessa through a door. Katya was where Vanessa had left her over by the sofa, and, as far as Vanessa could see, she was still unconscious. It was better that way, Vanessa thought instinctively. The expression of terror had left the girl’s face and she looked quiet now, peaceful even.
Titus knelt beside his niece on the carpet and gently brushed her long, tousled fair hair back behind her head. Vanessa noticed the tenderness of his touch; she saw the intense worry and concern plainly written all over his face. It was obvious Titus didn’t mean his niece any harm. The idea was ludicrous, thought Vanessa, looking down at the two of them on the