Penny Jordan - Silver

He wasn’t looking at her, and Silver had the feeling that he had almost forgotten she was there. It was as though the words were drawn from him like splinters of steel from a wound, and that with every word the pain increased, so that when he said under his breath, ‘But, dear God, it was never more important to me than her life,’ she felt a dull, paralysing ache close her own throat.

Sympathy… compassion… for Jake Fitton? Why? He had had none to spare for her.

‘Since Beth’s death I’ve spent my time tracking down the four people responsible for planning her murder…’

He had recovered with awesome speed and was once again apparently in full control of himself and his emotions.

‘Two of them are in American gaols under sentence of death; one of them died in the same bomb blast that cost me my sight… So far I’ve been robbed of the pleasure of making those responsible for Beth’s death pay personally and with compound interest for her suffering.

‘There’s only one member of the quartet left. No doubt he’s forgotten that Beth ever existed. Once I find him I intend to make him remember.’

The icy coldness of his voice sent shivers running down Silver’s spine.

‘And you dare to caution me against revenge?’ she demanded bitterly.

He smiled then, a humourless, chilling smile. ‘Revenge demands a high price: total dedication, total commitment.’

‘And you think I can’t meet those demands?’

He felt drained to the point of exhaustion. He never discussed Beth with anyone, and it stunned him that he should have chosen this woman out of everyone he knew to unburden himself to… And it had been an unburdening, even if she herself was unaware of that fact. It had been an admission to himself and to her of his guilt, his pain, his need to pay whatever price was demanded of him so that Beth’s death might be avenged.

And yet there was still one small, sane part of him that urged him to turn away from the past and to face forward into the future.

Was that why he was doing this? Was that why he was trying to make Silver recognise…? But why? She meant nothing to him…

Nothing other than the fact that she was a fellow human being and vulnerable. Far more vulnerable than she herself recognised.

Tiredly he told her, ‘Whatever you might say to the contrary, I remain unconvinced that you do actually hate this man. Has it occurred to you yet that you could all too easily fall into your own trap?’

Yes, it had occurred to her. Charles was a powerfully charismatic personality. Far more sophisticated women than she was had fallen under his spell. But she knew things about him that they did not… she had a far stronger motive for hating him than Jake Fitton knew.

It gave her an odd sense of awareness about him to recognise that both of them were linked together by their desire to avenge the death of someone they had loved; and more than that. Charles was heavily involved in the London drugs scene as a pusher. Something she hadn’t told Jake for reasons of her own.

Another thought struck her.

‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked him curtly. ‘Because you need the money to track down the fourth man?’

‘Yes,’ he told her, equally briefly. ‘I know he’s based in London…’

Silver found she was holding her breath. Surely the fourth man couldn’t be Charles? And then she released it as Jake added, ‘He also does a lot of travelling, legitimately of course, using it as a means of contacting his suppliers.’

‘But if he’s smuggling drugs into the country—–’ Silver began.

Jake stopped her with a cold smile. ‘This isn’t someone who smuggles the stuff. He’s way, way above that part of the organisation. This is someone who plans and recruits… who deals direct with the drug barons and who is trusted by them. This is someone who runs a countrywide network of pushers… if you like, the drug barons’ ambassador to England.’

So it couldn’t be Charles. He had rarely left England. She was relieved, and recognised that part of the reason she had said nothing to Jake about Charles’s involvement with drugs was because she had been afraid that he might somehow snatch her prey away from her.

Out of some protective instinct Jake had thought he had long ago exhausted, he heard himself saying as he put down his knife and fork, ‘It’s not too late, you know. You can always change your mind. Revenge isn’t sweet… it’s acid, corrosive, bitter, and finally destructive. It will eat into your soul until there’s nothing left of you…’

Silver smiled at him, an animal baring of her teeth, her eyes glittering with resolve. Everything he had said to her had only strengthened her determination.

‘Who wants sweetness?’ she said evenly. ‘Unless, of course, you’re trying to tell me that eating Irish stew isn’t the only thing you’re incapable of doing.’

He picked up his knife and fork and ate some of his chicken slowly and deliberately, while she watched him with fascinated horror, wondering, as she always did, how he managed to cope so well with his blindness. Apart from a momentary hesitation as he searched for the chicken, no one would ever have guessed that he couldn’t see what was on his plate, and then, when he had finished chewing… when he must have known that her nerves were stretched to breaking-point by her own mindless, reckless idiocy, he said evenly, ‘In that case, you’d have an excellent opportunity to show us both how well you’ve learned everything I’ve attempted to teach you, wouldn’t you? The supreme test, so to speak.’

The moment of intimacy, of allowing her into his private thoughts and feelings was gone, Silver recognised, and she shivered in a return of her earlier tension.

It might have been better if Jake had not chosen to give her advance warning of what was to happen. And then she admitted, with the percipient intelligence that had been honed to such sharpness under her father’s tutelage, that whichever route he had chosen to take towards the final culmination to her studies with him she would have criticised it, and moreover that it was not for her to criticise or accuse, since it was by her own demand that it was to take place.

There could be no shielding herself from the reality of her own decisions by trying to hide behind Jake’s apparent authority.

Nevertheless… a tiny, uncomfortably sharp corner of her mind acknowledged that she would have felt happier had she been the one to dictate the timing of their final passage of arms.

Although she hadn’t said a word, Jake was alert to every single one of the emotional vibrations she was giving off. He wondered what it was that gave rise to that specific and, to him at least, very obvious mingling of fear, anger and resentment. The anger and resentment were directed at and caused by him, he knew, but the fear… Was she frightened of him? He had given her no cause to be. But the fear was there, no matter how much she tried to disguise it, and for some unack-nowledgeable reason that irked him. All through dinner he was sharply aware of it, like a piece of uncomfortable cloth rubbing against tender flesh, and that in itself was an annoyance. Why should he give a damn how she felt? Theirs was a financial bargain… an act of sale and an act of purchase… a necessary intimacy of the flesh without any involvement of either the emotions or the mind.

And yet, as he realised as clearly as though he could see her that she was toying with her food, he pushed his own plate to one side and said quietly, ‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t want to change your mind, we might as well get it over and done with.’

His words, gruffly delivered, almost stiltedly so—which in itself was out of character because normally he allowed no emotion to cloud the ice-clear coldness of his voice—only increased her tension. He was almost on the brink of feeling sorry for her. Just as so many others had already felt sorry for her. Their pity… his pity were the last things she wanted. She got up jerkily and started to clear the table, saying unevenly, ‘Not yet, if you don’t mind… I haven’t had my coffee.’