Walking in Darkness Read Free Page A

a full-scale riot. This must be costing Don Gowrie a fortune. Steve’s mouth twisted sardonically. Not Gowrie, of course, no; he was wealthy, but this campaign must be costing millions and Gowrie wasn’t that rich.
    No, Gowrie’s father-in-law was paying for all this, old Honest John, John Eddie Ramsey, one of the most influential men along the Eastern Seaboard, whose wealth was fabulous and who came from a family which had been up to its neck in Republican politics since the early nineteenth century, one of those who still called it the Grand Old Party, and meant it.
    Honest John had been bred to be a president by an ambitious father, yet he had never quite made it, somehow. He had come close several times but his chance had slipped away each time. Hard to say why. Maybe he hadn’t really wanted it enough, or maybe he had had bad luck. He had certainly had no luck with his family. He had had three sons who all died, one of them fighting in Korea as a young conscript of eighteen, one of them on the hunting field when he broke his neck taking a jump too high for his horse, and Eddie Junior who had died of liver disease when he was only forty, having drunk his way steadily towards death since he was in his teens. None of them had married or had children. Old Ramsey must have thought he had made certain of having grandchildren by getting himself three sons. How could he have predicted the disasters that had overtaken them all? A funny business, life.
    Honest John’s one daughter, Eleanor, a pale, fragile, jumpy woman, had looked as if she was going to die a spinster. There had never been any bees around that honeypot, for all her family’s money. She never learnt how to talk to people and if young men tried to chat her up she had fled, trembling. She was kept out of the political limelight, living quietly at home with her mother on the Ramsey estate at Easton, Maryland, the acknowledged social bastion along that seaboard. At thirty-three she had amazed them all by marrying Don Gowrie, a diplomat eight years her junior, good-looking and ambitious, but with very little money and no powerful family connections. The whisper around town was that her father had decided young Gowrie would make a reliable son-in-law, had put the marriage together, like a political deal, promised Gowrie his backing in the future in return for marrying Eleanor. How Eleanor felt about it nobody could guess and in those days the press did not dare ask, had never, anyway, been given an opportunity to question her. She had given no interviews. She had simply sat for photographers. In her ivory satin, lace and pearls, she had made a delicate bride, judging by the fading sepia photographs in the newspaper files Steve had seen. Whatever the truth, the two of them had finally, a couple of years later, given the old man his first and only grandchild, a girl, Catherine.
    No doubt Honest John had prayed she would not take after her mother, but he must have been afraid she would. He needn’t have worried.
    Catherine was lovely, even as a child, when she was painted by the most fashionable portrait painter of the day, in a simple white dress. The painting had caused a sensation that year; everyone had been enchanted by the slender, black-haired little creature standing in a woodland setting with a tame deer feeding from her hand; a modern Snow White, with big dark eyes and skin like cream. She was much photographed by the press, too, at the same time: Catherine aged eight, in immaculate jodhpurs and black hat, riding her palomino pony at the Ramsey family country house; Catherine winning cups for jumping at local gymkhanas, later; Catherine in a one-piece swimsuit, her black hair tied up in a knot behind her head, down on Chesapeake Bay, with her grandfather, catching crabs at low tide and taking a bucketful back to be cooked for lunch that morning, the press story said. By the time she reached eighteen she was always in the gossip columns, tipped as debutante