‘I was with Nikator,’ she remembered. ‘He guessed it was you and warned me against you.’

‘He was right.’

‘I know he was. I never doubted that for a moment. Do you think I care what that silly infant thinks, as long as you come back to me?’

‘When I saw you again I knew I couldn’t have stayed away any longer,’ he said, ‘but I also knew I’d come back to danger. I was no longer master of myself, and that control-that mastery-has been the object of my life. I understood even then that I couldn’t have both it and you, but it’s not until now-’

It was only now that he’d brought himself to face the final decision, and for a moment she still wasn’t sure which way it would go. There was some terrifying secret that haunted him, and everything would depend on what happened in the next few minutes.

Suddenly she was afraid.

CHAPTER NINE

AT LAST he began to speak.

‘It started in my childhood with my mother’s fantasies about Achilles and his hidden vulnerability. I understood the point about keeping your secrets to yourself, but in those days it was only theory, little more than a game. I was young, I had more money than was good for me, I felt I could rule the world. I fancied myself strong and armoured, but in truth I was wide open to a shrewd manipulator.’

‘Is that what she was?’ Petra asked.

‘Yes, although it wasn’t so much her as the men behind her. Her name was Brigitta. She was a great-niece of Homer, not that I knew that until later. We met by chance-or so I thought-on a skiing holiday. In fact she was an excellent skier, but she concealed that, just kept falling over, so I began to teach her and somehow we fell over a lot together.

‘Then we abandoned skiing and went away to be by ourselves. I was in heaven. I didn’t know any girl could be so lovely, so sweet, so honest-’

He drew a ragged breath and dropped his head down onto his chest. He was shaking, and she wondered with dismay if this was only memory. After all these years, did some part of his love still survive to torment him?

She reached out to touch him but stopped at the last minute and let her hand fall away. He didn’t seem to notice.

After a while he began to speak again.

‘Of course I was deceiving myself. It had all been a clever trap. She was thrown into my path on purpose so that I could make a fool of myself over her. Even when I discovered who she was I didn’t have the wit to see the plot. I believed her when she said she’d concealed her background because she was truly in love with me and didn’t want me to be suspicious. Can you imagine anything so stupid?’

‘It’s not stupid,’ Petra protested. ‘If you really loved her, of course you wanted to think well of her. And you must have been so young-’

‘Twenty-one, and I thought I knew it all,’ he said bitterly.

‘How old was she?’

‘Nineteen. So young; how could I possibly suspect her? Even when I found out she was using a false name, that she’d engineered our meeting-even then I believed that she was basically innocent. I had to believe it. She was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.’

She could have wept for the boy he’d been then. To cling to his trust in the face of the evidence suggested a naïvety that nobody meeting him now would ever believe.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘We planned to marry. Everyone went wild-the two foes putting their enmity aside to join forces and present a united front to the world. My father advised me to delay; he was uneasy. I wouldn’t listen. We came here to be alone together and spent the summer living in this house. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone could be as happy as I was in those weeks.’

His mouth twisted in a wry smile.

‘And I’d have been right not to believe it. It was all an illusion, created by my own cowardly refusal to face the fact that she was a spy. She didn’t learn much, but enough for the Lukas family to pip us to the post on a lucrative contract. It was obvious that the information must have come from her, and that she’d listened in to a telephone conversation I’d had and managed to see some papers. She denied it at first, but there was simply no other way. I turned on her.’

‘Well, naturally, if you felt betrayed-’

‘No, it was worse than that. I was cruel, brutal. I said such things-she begged my forgiveness, said she’d started as a spy but regretted it in the end because she came to love me truly.’

‘Did you believe her?’ Petra asked.

‘I didn’t dare. I sneered at her. If she truly regretted what she’d done, why hadn’t she warned me? She said she tried to back out but Nikator threatened to tell me everything. But he promised to let her off if she did one last job, so that’s what she did.’

‘But Nikator must have been little more than an child in those days,’ Petra protested.

‘He was twenty. Old enough to be vicious.’

‘But could he have organised it? Would he have known enough?’

‘No. There was another man, a distant cousin called Cronos, who hadn’t been in the firm more than a couple of years and was still trying to make his mark. Apparently he was a nasty piece of work, and he and Nikator hit it off well, right from the start. People who knew them said they moved in the same slime. Cronos set it up and used Nikator as front man.’

‘Cronos set it up?’ she echoed. ‘Not Homer?’

‘No, to do him justice, he’s a fairly decent man, a lot better than many in this business. The story is that after the whole thing exploded Homer tore a strip off Cronos and told him to get out if he knew what was good for him. At any rate Cronos vanished.

‘Obviously, I don’t know the details of any family rows, but my impression is that Homer was shocked by Nikator’s behaviour. Being ruthless in business is one thing, but you don’t involve innocent young girls. But Nikator had come down hard on Brigitta when she tried to get free. He bullied her into “one last effort”, and she thought if she did that it would be over.’

‘No way,’ Petra said at once. ‘Once he had a blackmail hold over her he’d never have let it go.’

‘That’s what I think too. She was in his power; I should have seen that and helped her. Instead, I turned on her. You can’t imagine how cruelly I treated her.’

But she could, Petra thought. Raised with suspicion as his constant companion, thinking he’d found the love and trust that could make his life beautiful, he’d been plunged back into despair and it had almost destroyed him. He’d lashed out with all the vigour of a young man, and in the process he’d hurt the one person he still loved.

‘I said such things,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t tell you the things I said, or what they did to her-’

‘She’d deceived you.’

‘She was a child.’

‘So were you,’ she said firmly. ‘Whatever happened to her, they were responsible, the people who manipulated her. Not you.’

‘But I should have saved her from them,’ he said bleakly. ‘And I didn’t. We had a terrible scene. I stormed out of the house, saying I hated the sight of her and when I returned she’d vanished. She left me a letter in which she said that she loved me and begged my forgiveness, but there was nothing to tell me where she’d gone.’

Petra made no sound, but her clasp on him tightened.

‘I couldn’t-wouldn’t believe it at first,’ he went on in a voice that was low and hoarse. ‘I went through the house calling her name. I was sure she had to be hiding somewhere, waiting for a sign from me. I cried out that we would find our way somehow, our love was worth fighting for.’

And after each call he’d stood and listened in the silence. Petra could see it as clearly as if she’d walked the house with that devastated young man. She heard him cry, ‘Brigitta!’ again and again, waited while he realised that there would be no answering call, and felt her heart break with his as the truth was forced on him.

And she saw something else that he would never speak of-the moment when the boy collapsed in sobs of despair.

‘What did you do after that?’ she asked, stroking his hair.

‘I believed I could find her and still make it right. I set detectives on her trail. They were the best, but even they couldn’t find her. She’d covered her tracks too well. I tried the few who remained of her family in another country, but they weren’t close and she hadn’t been in touch with them. I tried Nikator. There was just a chance that he knew something, but I’m convinced he didn’t. I scared him so badly that he’d have told me if he could.

‘In the end I faced facts. A woman who could escape so completely must have been very, very determined to get well away from me. But I didn’t stop. Months passed, but I told them to keep looking because I couldn’t face the prospect of never seeing or talking to her again. I had to ask her forgiveness, do what I could to make it right.

‘At last I got a message from a man who said he thought he might have found her, but it was hard to be sure because she couldn’t talk and just sat staring into space all the time. I went to see her and found-’ He shuddered.

Petra didn’t make the mistake of speaking. She simply sat with him in her arms, praying that her love would reach him and make it possible for him to confront the monster.

‘I found her in a shabby room in a back street, miles away,’ he managed to say at last. ‘The door was locked. The last time anyone had gone in there she’d been so frightened that she’d locked it after them. I kicked it open and went in.

‘She was sitting up on a bed in the corner, clutching something in her arms as though she had to protect it. She screamed at the sight of me and backed away as though I was an enemy. Maybe that’s how I looked to her then. Or maybe she just didn’t know me.’