she was wearing underneath it was either extremely brief or totally non-existent. But as she glanced towards Garth, Estelle saw that he was looking the other way, his mind plainly on other things. Never mind, she promised herself as her taxi arrived, there would always be another time, and for now her growing frustration and need called out for Blade.
Garth waited until he had seen Estelle stepping safely into the taxi he had called—the same reliable firm the business always used. Garth had heard too many scary stories of women being abused by unauthorised cab drivers to take any risks with the safety of his employees. Then he reached out to pick up the telephone a second time, punching in the number Estelle had written down for him.
After she had undressed and showered, Claudia opened the drawer of her dressing-room cupboard, pausing as she stared down at the small bottle of sleeping tablets she kept there. Her doctor had prescribed them in the early weeks after she asked Garth to leave. She rarely used them now, but at the same time she was never without a bottle. Just occasionally there were nights, a week or more of them at times, when something would happen, trigger her memory, and she would know that sleep was going to be impossible … unwanted even, because if she did sleep, she would be haunted by her nightmares, her fears, her guilt, and then and only then did she resort to the awful and frighteningly empty oblivion of drug-induced sleep as an escape.
The last time she had taken them had been towards the end of last year. Garth’s birthday … his fiftieth.
Tara had thrown a party for him. She had begged Claudia to go, but as she had quietly explained to Tara at the time, Garth was hardly likely to want her to be there.
‘But we’re still family,’ Tara had protested stubbornly while Claudia had shaken her head.
‘You and Garth are still family, Tara. You and I are still family, but the three of us …’
‘You were both there for my twenty-first and for my graduation,’ Tara had reminded her mother, ‘and everyone said then that both of you …’ She stopped.
What everyone had said at the time was that it was a shame that her parents had split up and even more of a shame that they couldn’t get back together, but Tara knew that to say as much to either her father or her mother was to court one of their rare displays of anger—a defensive anger in her mother’s case and a protective one in her father’s.
‘Gramps and Nan will be there and so will the Brig and Nannie,’ she had coaxed, referring not only to her paternal grandparents but her maternal ones, as well, but still Claudia had refused.
She had known perfectly well, of course, having been told by her mother, that they had accepted Tara’s invitation to celebrate their ex-son-in-law’s fiftieth birthday.
‘We could hardly refuse, darling, and in fact, your father simply wouldn’t have heard of it. You know how much he thinks of Garth.’
‘Yes, I know, and there’s certainly no reason why you shouldn’t both go,’ Claudia had assured her mother quietly.
‘It will seem so odd without you being there….’
‘It won’t seem odd at all, at least not to me or to Garth,’ Claudia had had to point out to her mother as she reminded her gently, ‘We are divorced and have been for a full decade now.’
‘Yes, I realise that,’ her mother had fretted, ‘although I’ve never really understood why.’
‘I told you at the time. Garth had … there was—’
‘Garth was a little bit naughty, I know that, darling, but men are sometimes like that,’ her mother had interrupted her. ‘That’s just the way they are. Even your father … not that he ever … not that there was … but Garth is such a very handsome and charming man that—’
‘I’m not going,’ Claudia had told her mother firmly and she hadn’t done so.
Instead, she had gone to bed early with her sleeping tablet and her unwanted memories. On that occasion, the tablet hadn’t worked, but her memories had. Perhaps tonight she ought to take two instead of her usual one.
When the telephone rang an hour later, Claudia was deeply asleep.
Frowning, Garth replaced the receiver and then dialled the number of his daughter’s London flat.
‘Daddy,’ Tara exclaimed, her voice full of love and warmth as she recognised his voice. ‘I’m glad you rang.’
‘Oh, have you been trying to get in touch with me?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I drove over to see Ma this afternoon. There was something I wanted to tell her. She’s had the most fabulous write-up in the local rag. Have you seen it?’
‘Yes, I have,’ Garth agreed curtly.
He had seen, as well, the photographs accompanying the article. In one of them, a man was standing close to his ex-wife’s side, his expression as he looked at her both predatory and betrayingly indulgent.
Garth knew him by reputation. He had downsized his business interests, moving out of the city and back to his roots where he was apparently intending to run his computer-based business from his old home town. Claudia, if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, had been approached by him for her views and advice on the type of problems likely to be faced by potential home computer workers he might employ. Garth had his own ideas about why Luke Palliser might be interested in his ex-wife, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with her professional expertise.
‘Whatever you wanted to say to your mother must have been important if it necessitated driving all the way to Gloucestershire and then back again without staying overnight,’ Garth commented as he switched his thoughts back from his ex-wife to his daughter.
‘Well, yes, it was, but I couldn’t have stayed anyway. There wouldn’t have been any point. Ma was going out for the evening. Daddy …’
Garth waited. He knew of old that particular note in his daughter’s voice. It had accompanied every minor and sometimes not-so-minor mishap in Tara’s life, from the collision that had bent the front wheel of her first proper bike to the less dire but far more expensive bump that had damaged the small car he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.
‘You know I told you that I needed to take all my holiday allowance because I was planning to spend time in Boston with Ry?’
‘Yes …’
‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time—not until I’d told Ma—but Ry and I … it could be more than just a few weeks I’ll be spending in America.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in, but Garth wasn’t in need of any extra time to assimilate what she was telling him. He had known … guessed … sensed already, his guesswork keeping pace with her carefully delivered words.
As his hand gripped the telephone receiver, he could feel his palm starting to sweat. At the same time, a cold shock of nausea was gripping his stomach. Now he knew why Claudia had been trying to get in touch with him.
‘Daddy, are you still there?’ he heard Tara demanding uncertainly.
‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he told her, praying that his voice sounded far calmer than he felt.
‘Can
