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Chapter 10

The effort of telling the story had taken its toll on her. Kate tried to bite down on her yawn but it escaped, and then Paul yawned too, and they looked at each other and laughed.

‘I think I need my bed,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

As they stood up Paul turned to put his jacket on, and when he turned back he caught her eye. Something passed between them. Or was she imagining it? The tiredness that made her body feel strange, the state of the high emotion she was in, the mention of bed, and the undeniable fact that this man looked almost exactly like Stephen – it was a dangerous mix. She averted her eyes and concentrated on lifting Jack – god, he was getting heavy – hoping she hadn’t flushed pink the way she knew she did, and, if she had, hoping Paul hadn’t noticed.

When she looked more closely at him, she could tell they hadn’t been absolutely identical. She was sure that Paul was slightly taller and bulkier, and he had a tiny chip at the side of his front tooth . . . although what did their similarities or differences matter anyway? The point was, he wasn’t Stephen. It would feel like a betrayal to get involved with his brother – wouldn’t it? Not that Paul would be interested in her, she felt sure. He would undoubtedly see it as a betrayal too. He could be married himself, for all she knew. Although he hadn’t mentioned it, and he wasn’t wearing a ring . . . She wanted to slap herself. Kate, what the hell are you thinking? This is the last thing you need now.

‘Let’s meet here tomorrow morning,’ Paul said. ‘Nine o’clock?’

‘Make it nine-thirty.’

‘Okay.’

He hovered. What was he doing? She had this awful feeling he was trying to decide whether to kiss her goodnight.

‘Night, Paul,’ she said.

‘Okay. Night.’

She watched him walk across the lobby. At the revolving doors he looked back at her and nodded. A little shiver went through her.

After putting Jack to bed – he hadn’t stirred all the way from the lounge to the room; again, she had paranoid thoughts about being a bad mother because he hadn’t cleaned his teeth or washed his face – Kate lay down and tried to join him in sleep. But her brain was too active and her heart refused to slow down. She got up, fetched herself a glass of water and went out onto the balcony. Her room had a view of the river, the lights of the South Bank shimmering orange and lemon on the water. Voices floated up to her: a man shouting, a woman laughing. A plane drifted in the space between clouds.

Her life was in a mess. Her marriage was over, she had no home or job, and probably no friends any more. The only people she had were Aunt Lil, who barely recognised her, and her sister Miranda and her family.

When she’d boarded the plane in Boston she’d experienced the intoxicating thrill of new-found freedom, a euphoria that had made her want to stand up in her seat and scream with joy. But like a prisoner who busts out of jail after years inside, the euphoria didn’t last long. The outside world was a scary place.

But even though a primitive part of her – the part that longed for safety and comfort – wanted to flee back to the States, she knew she had done the right thing. She would get through this period.

If Vernon doesn’t find you, an internal voice whispered.

No, he wouldn’t find her. And if he did, what could he do?

He’ll say you’ve kidnapped your own son. He’s always threatened that he’d hunt you down if you ever tried to take him away. He’ll take Jack back. You’ll lose him.

No! That couldn’t happen. She had brought Jack to England for his own good. It was the right thing to do. And she was English – the law would protect her here, wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t let Vernon take her son away from her, would they?

Kate thought back to how powerful her initial attraction to Vernon had been, and how unbelievable it seemed to her now that she could ever have felt that way about him.

He had never been a particularly good-looking man, but he was possessed of that magical aphrodisiacal quality, charisma – and he’d had it in spades. The first time she saw him, he’d been giving a talk at a literary festival in Boston, on Gertrude Stein’s life and work. Kate had gone along on a whim, feeling that she needed to exercise the non-scientific synapses of her brain before they withered and died completely. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had always fascinated her. She’d turned up at the library where the free talk was taking place, and sat down in the middle of a long curved row at the front. Vernon had strode out before his meagre audience with the demeanour of a man taking the stage at Madison Square Gardens, rather than giving a lecture to half a dozen people in a library. What a prat, Kate had thought – until he began to speak. He was so passionate, so smart and articulate, and he knew his subject so well, that by the end of the talk, all the women present had fallen for him. He knew it, too – he made lingering eye-contact with each one, and when he asked, ‘Any questions?’ there was a glint in his eye that made every woman there want to cry, ‘Will you go on a date with me?’

But it was Kate he’d chosen that day, breaking away from the two breathless sophomores who were quizzing him afterwards, and introducing himself to her by the ‘Just Returned’ shelves.

‘I love your accent,’ he’d said. ‘Can I buy you dinner?’

The months that followed had felt to Kate like skydiving – a constant teetering on the edge of new experiences, a rush of adrenaline and the thrill of the new. Vernon introduced her to a world of culture she’d never experienced (or been able to afford) before: the ballet, the opera, art-house movies, poetry cafes. He gave her a reading list as long as her arm, horrified that she’d never read the Beat Poets, and declaimed extracts of On The Road to her as they lay in his double bed, his arm hooked casually around her neck, a joint in his free hand.

However, despite her infatuation, there were elements of his personality with which she was less than enamoured right from the beginning: the way he frequently mocked his colleagues and students, mercilessly picking on their weaknesses. Kate laughed at first, because he was funny in his cruelty, but after a while she tried to change the subject when he would gossip and slander. They had occasional bust-ups, great screaming painful rows in which he called her boring and straight and she walked out and said they were finished. But he always came after her, wooing her back into his life and bed with his words, tender again. It was unlike any other relationship she’d ever had, and the volatility of it excited her.

Things started to go downhill too soon, though, when Vernon failed to be appointed for the professorship he’d thought was in the bag. They’d been married a year by then, Jack was a new baby, and money was tight. It didn’t help that they were living in a tiny one-bed apartment on campus. Unfortunately, the timing roughly coincided with Kate being awarded her own PhD, and Vernon could barely bring himself to congratulate her. On the day of her graduation ceremony he made an excuse about having a migraine, and she later discovered he’d been seen in a bar with one of the prettier of his freshman students.

She was distracted from her unwelcome memories by the sight of a mosquito flitting about near the window. She immediately thought of her work instead – the many long hours staring into an electron microscope, studying the West Nile Virus and others like it. Viruses are so tiny that they can only be seen with a modern electron microscope. So tiny that hundreds of thousands would fit on the size of a pin. Kate and her fellow researchers spent their lives absorbed in this miniature world.

If only all her problems were as small – not huge like all this stuff with Stephen and Paul. She hadn’t come back to England to chase ghosts. Honestly, she hadn’t even thought about Stephen or the Cold Unit on the way back here – it had been the last thing on her mind. As she’d told Paul, she hadn’t thought about it for years.

But now she’d met Paul and read the letter, and a wound she’d thought long-healed had been torn open again. Feelings she thought were dead had proven themselves well and truly alive – and kicking.

Tonight, after Paul left, she had toyed with the idea of checking out at dawn and moving to another hotel. She didn’t need this complication. She had to find a school for Jack, a new job for herself. She had to get settled as soon as she could, for Jack’s sake, and so that Vernon wouldn’t be able to accuse her of being some kind of irresponsible vagrant.

But would she be able to move on with her life without finding out the answers to all of these questions? She decided that she would spend another day, maybe two, with Paul, trying to figure out what had really happened. She owed Stephen that much. After that, even if they hadn’t unearthed the truth, she would have to put it aside and try to settle down.

What Kate didn’t know was that within forty-eight hours she would be on the run for her life; and that settling down wouldn’t be an option.