Silver

‘What I plan to do has nothing to do with you,’ she told him distantly, dismissing him with the ice that ran through her voice like the chill of northern snows. ‘I did what I had to do, and now it’s over.’

She turned her back on him and swung down the street, a tall, silver-haired woman whose arresting beauty drew glances from everyone she passed. But for once she was unconcerned with the effect of her looks, and for the first time, although she herself didn’t know it, her face was that of a woman real and alive, full of emotion and character, and not simply a mask of beauty almost unreal in its perfection.

She had two more days before she left Switzerland and returned to London. She took a taxi back to her rented chalet, dismissing the maid, who was so well trained that she exhibited no surprise either at Silver’s command or at her reappearance in the middle of the day, after an unexplained absence of several weeks.

From the chalet she rang Annie, who expressed pleasure at hearing from her.

‘Where have you been?’ she scolded. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘Oh, I had things to do,’ Silver told her vaguely, quickly changing the subject. ‘Annie, I’m leaving in a couple of days… How about dinner this evening?’

‘I’d have loved to, but Jake beat you to it. Unless of course you want to join us…’

Silver paused for a moment, her heartbeat quickening. Would Jake tell Annie what had happened? Somehow she doubted it, and anyway, what would it matter if he did? There was no point in joining them for dinner simply to sit in torment all evening waiting for Jake to mock her by revealing their arrangement. Despite the fact that she felt that Jake and Annie were not lovers, she wondered if perhaps tonight they would be together… if Jake would want to wipe from his memory any record of her by superimposing another woman’s essence over hers.

What did it matter who the hell he slept with? she derided herself as she refused the invitation and hung up.

She had things to do… phone-calls to make…

In London she had an agent who would be expecting to hear from her. The apartment she had purchased through that agent and handed over to a very up-market and expensive interior designer should be ready for her by now. It was time to start psyching herself up to her new image. From now on she was leaving the past behind her.

When she returned to London it would be as a completely different person. A person who was already in some ways familiar to her, and yet in very many others still a stranger.

She walked into her bedroom and removed from her case a thick file. In it were all the details she had assembled for her new life… for her new image, right down to her name. From the moment she left this chalet behind her, she would be playing that new role. Silver Montaine, that was who she was now, widow of a Swiss, but wholly an Anglophile.

One more night and then she would be on her way home. She looked around the large, impersonal bedroom, shivering despite its almost sub-tropical temperature, conscious of a sensation of loss which crept up on her, taking her unawares, making her frown and glance over her shoulder as though half expecting to see Jake walk through the door.

Jake! She tried to dismiss him from her mind and found she could not. Last night the bed had carried his scent; she had woken with it all around her. She shuddered at the memory. Tonight was going to be a very long night indeed. Then she remembered the mild sedatives Annie had prescribed for her just after she had first left hospital.

She found them at the bottom of her leather handbag and took one, grimacing as she swallowed it, trying not to remember last night and the way Jake had watched her while she took his pain-killer; the medical palliative offered to her after she had refused the physical one.

An early night, a sound sleep, the ability to switch herself off from Switzerland and Jake… These were the things she needed now… And then Paris and her new wardrobe, and then home with her new face… her new personality… her new name and past…

She had a bath, experimentally stretching her muscles and discovering that last night’s pain had completely gone. That pleased her. It seemed a good omen for the future. She was reaching for the perfumed body lotion to stroke into her skin when she stopped and instead lifted the jar to her nose, sniffing it delicately and then hesitating.

She had chosen that particular perfume for a specific reason and yet now she felt reluctant to wear it. Impatient with herself, she recapped the jar and pulled on the ancient brushed cotton nightdress that was a legacy from her past, grimacing at her own reflection as she did so. How disparate the two images of herself looked. Her face was all perfect, stunning beauty, her eyes as they had always been, in colour at least, although in the past they had not been so almond-tipped and mystically slumberous… and her mouth no longer over-large for her face, but instead sensually full.

She studied the silver tangle of her hair, curling slightly in the steam from her bath, and then switched her attention to the homeliness of her nightdress, subduing the faint bubble of laughter. From the neck down she looked like an unawakened adolescent, the curves of her breasts barely discernible, her nipples unaroused and flat against the fabric, her wrists and ankles betraying the fact that the nightdress was something she had outgrown.

But from the throat up… She threw back her head, studying the arch of her throat with concentration, pouting slightly, trying to imagine how a man would visualise her… how Charles would react to the sight of her. On impulse she tugged off the nightdress and studied the lines of her body. That at least was her own, she reflected acidly, far thinner and more shapely than it had been, perhaps, but still untouched by the surgeon’s knife. The fullness of her breasts, the glowing coral of her nipples, the narrow indentation of her waist, the smooth flatness of her belly, the unexpectedness of the triangle of russet hair at the apex of her thighs, and then her thighs themselves, slender, sleek, fluidly muscled, an athlete’s body, softening into femininity but hinting at sensual strength… that at least was her own…

Suddenly her head had begun to ache and her mouth felt dry. The sedative was making her drowsy, and she left the nightdress where it lay and padded into the bedroom, switching off the lamps as she went and flipping back the silk sheets, grimacing a little at their almost vulgar opulence, trying not to think of the cool crispness of the cotton sheets on Jake’s bed… Sheets that had reminded her of Ireland, and of her childhood and the lavender-scented sheets on her bed there. Sheets embroidered with her family’s crest, and a little worn in places. Sheets which had been ordered by a bride who had married into the family while Victoria was still on the throne.

The bed was vast, and Silver moved restlessly in it, disliking the over-softness of the mattress, instinctively trying to resist the pull of the drug, but ultimately giving in to it.

On the other side of the valley Jake and Annie had finished dinner and were sitting in her small private sitting-room in her quarters at the back of the Institute.

Jake stood up. ‘Thanks for dinner, Annie.’

She got up too. ‘There are some letters for you. Do you want me to read them?’

When he nodded, she did so, her own expression growing grave when she had finished.

‘So… confirmation that your fourth man is in London, but your tracing agents haven’t been able to discover where or who he is…’

‘No… I’m going to have to go over there myself.’

‘Jake, isn’t it time that you let it rest? That you let Beth rest?’ Annie suggested gently. She knew that she was taking a risk, that Jake hated any mention of his wife’s death, and she could sympathise with him.

She had felt much the same way when her own husband had died.

Tom and Jake had been in the same regiment and had become good friends, a friendship which had continued when they had both left the army to join the government department of special agents fighting against the growing menace of the drug traffickers.

After Tom had been killed in the bomb blast which had taken Jake’s sight, Annie had insisted on removing her husband’s friend from the overcrowded hospital where she had found him, and bringing him here to Switzerland.

After his recovery physically, he had spent several months at a special rehabilitation centre run for the blind.

It had been during the early days of his recuperation that he had told her what he was doing.

Initially the government had turned a blind eye to the personal vendetta he was carrying out against Beth’s killers—after all, as drug dealers they were his legitimate quarry—but once he had lost his sight he was no longer employable as a government agent, and so he had to pursue his one remaining quarry at second hand.

Several times Annie had tried to counsel him to forget the past, even while she knew he wouldn’t listen to her.

She had known and liked Beth, but she suspected that had she not been killed there would have come a time when Jake might have tired of carrying the burden of a wife who would never really have been able to match him in either intelligence or maturity. Beth had been a young man’s love, and Jake was a young man no longer.

He was also intelligent enough to recognise for himself what she herself had seen, and she suspected that it was this knowledge that added to his guilt and reinforced his determination to hunt down Beth’s killers.

After his return from the rehabilitation centre she had offered him the use of the chalet which had been given to her by the parents of one of her young patients. She suspected he would have liked to refuse her offer, but both of them knew he had nowhere else to go. He wasn’t a rich man; government agents did not receive pensions, and he had used what money he had in trying to track down the final member of the quartet.

‘I can’t let it rest, Annie,’ he told her quietly. ‘You know that. Not yet.’

She wondered if he knew how much he betrayed in those two final words. This was the first time she had ever heard him express any desire to be free of his self-imposed task.

He moved away from her and, sensing his withdrawal, she guessed that he was thinking of Beth.

If she had only known it, she was wrong. It was an entirely different woman who was occupying his thoughts as he said his goodnights and left.

He had already made all his arrangements. His driver was waiting and took him in silence to his destination, dropping him at a pre-arranged point and then driving away, the big car crunching heavily over the snow.