Walking in Darkness Read Free Page B

of the year, hotly expected to marry young because she was surrounded from the start by eligible young bachelors. It was an open secret that Honest John Ramsey doted on her, and so did her father, and as heiress to one of the biggest fortunes on the East Coast she was a prize men would fight for. But she showed no interest in marrying young, indeed as she grew up she increasingly played hostess at Don Gowrie’s famous Washington dinner parties where the food was nouvelle cuisine, the talk was scintillating and the guests hand-picked. Catherine was not only beautiful, she had a shining intelligence and a sense of humour that gave her that far more elusive quality, charm.
    In that, too, she took after her father. Her mother was almost never present on these evenings, or if she did appear she rarely stayed long. It was accepted that she was not strong; she had to spend most of her time in her own suite of rooms and she did not share in her husband’s political life.
    ‘Did you ever date Cathy Gowrie, Colbourne?’ someone else called out, one of a group of press men who resented anyone who worked for TV, resented and were jealous of them. The other men along the bar watched Steve, some of them grinning, hoping they would needle him into showing temper, some of them just curious, not having heard the gossip before.
    ‘Get off my back!’ Steve coolly said without rising to the bait, although there was a tense line to his mouth and his jaw was tight.
    ‘Isn’t it true that his wife is a few cents short of a dollar?’ Jack muttered, still trying to catch the eye of the barman.
    Steve had already had this conversation with Harry Doberman, the editor-in-chief of the network, at their headquarters in New York, not a stone’s throw from this hotel. Not that he would dream of telling Jack about it. Jack was a good cameraman but you didn’t tell him anything sensitive, anything you did not want repeated to all and sundry the minute Jack had had a few.
    ‘Any truth in this rumour about Gowrie’s wife?’ Harry had asked, and Steve had looked at him wryly, knowing that Harry knew far more about Gowrie than he did and was just throwing out feelers to see how much Steve had heard.
    ‘Well, she seems to spend a lot of time out of sight, back home in Maryland, with her parents, and there is something a bit . . . blank . . . about her, as if she isn’t listening, isn’t even aware of what’s going on around her, but since the election started hotting up, she’s been with Gowrie all the time, and she smiles and nods, and says yes and no and maybe, so it may just be that she’s bored by politics. After all, she comes from a political family – she must have had it stuffed into her all her life. Maybe she’s just sick of it, but now Honest John has put it to her that it’s time to do her duty and stand by her man.’
    Harry had been chewing the end of his pen the way he did when he was trying to give up smoking for the umpteenth time. It made him bad-tempered and liable to blow up over nothing and he always started to put on weight if he kept it up for long.
    When he was smoking he was as thin as a greyhound and twice as nervy, inclined to bite your head off if you said anything out of turn, so on the whole everyone preferred him to smoke.
    Screwing up his eyes to stare at Steve, he asked, ‘And what about this other dame? Is there one? Or is it just dirty minds and wishful thinking?’
    Even more on the alert, Steve carefully said, ‘If there is, Gowrie has done a brilliant job so far in keeping her hidden away. You know what Washington is like. You can’t keep a secret for five minutes. Eyes and ears everywhere. A lot of people would pay a fortune to get the goods on Gowrie, but he seems to be as clean as a whistle.’ And while he talked he was wondering if Harry knew something he could not openly pass on, was dropping him a hint to dig it out for himself.
    Harry chewed on his pen some more. ‘Is that a “Don’t know”