‘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.’

Another silence, in which she felt his fingers tighten on her arm, release her and tighten again.

‘At last all the fight seemed to go out of her. She sagged against the wall and I managed to get close and look at what she was holding.’

His grip was agonisingly tight. Petra closed her eyes, guessing what the bundle had been, and praying to be wrong.

‘It was a dead baby,’ Lysandros said at last.

‘Oh, no,’ Petra whispered, dropping her head so that her lips lay against his hair.

‘It was premature. She’d hidden her pregnancy and had no proper medical attention, so she gave birth alone. Then she just sat clutching the child and not letting anyone near her. She’d been like that for days, shivering, starving, weeping.

‘I begged her to calm down, told her it was me, that I loved her, I’d never harm her, but she told me to go away because she had to feed the baby. By that time he must have been dead for days. He was cold in her arms.

‘The people who owned the house were decent and kindly, but they couldn’t cope. I had her moved to hospital, ordered the best attention for her, said I’d pay for everything-whatever money could buy, I’d give her.’ He said the last words with bitter self-condemnation.

‘I went to see her every day in the hospital, always thinking that the care she was receiving would soon take effect, she would become herself again, and we could talk. But it didn’t happen. As she became physically stronger her mind seemed to retreat further into a place where I couldn’t follow, and I understood that she wanted it that way. But still I waited, hoping she’d recover and we could find each other again.

‘Then she had a heart attack, apparently an adverse reaction to a drug she’d been given, but the doctors told me that she wasn’t fighting for life. Her will had gone, and it was only a matter of time. I sat beside her, holding her hand, praying for her to awaken. When she did I told her that I loved her and begged her forgiveness.’

‘Did she forgive you?’ Petra asked quietly.

‘I don’t know. She only said one thing. By that time she’d accepted that the child was dead and she begged me to make sure he was buried with her. I gave her my word and, when the time came, I kept it. She’s buried with our baby in her arms.’

‘She must have recognised you to ask such a thing,’ Petra said.

‘I’ve told myself that a thousand times, but the truth is that she might have said it to anyone she thought had the power to ensure that it happened. I’ve tried to believe that she forgave me, but why should I? What right do I have after what I did? I terrified her into running away and hiding from the world when she desperately needed help.

‘What kind of life did she have? The doctors told me she was severely undernourished, which had damaged the child, hence the premature birth-and death-of my son.’

‘You have no doubt that-?’

‘That he was mine? None. She must have been about a month pregnant when we parted. They were very tactful. They offered me a test, to be sure, but I refused. Such a test implied a doubt that dishonoured her. She was carrying my son when I abandoned her.’

‘But you didn’t throw her out,’ Petra protested.

‘No, I wanted her to stay here until I could arrange our breakup to look civilised in the eyes of the world,’ he said savagely. ‘And then, fool that I was, I was surprised when I came back and found her gone. Of course she fled. She looked into the future I’d mapped out and shuddered. I didn’t throw her out, but I drove her out with coldness and cruelty.

‘If I’d known-everything would have been different, but I made her feel that she had no choice but to run away from me. So there was nobody to help her when she knew about her condition. She faced everything alone, and they both died.

‘I was with her to the last. She died in my arms, while I prayed for a word or a look to suggest that she knew me. But there was nothing. She’d gone beyond my reach and all I could do was hold her while she slipped away, never knowing that I was begging her forgiveness. I destroyed her life, I destroyed her last moment, I destroyed our child-’

‘But it wasn’t-’

‘It’s my fault-don’t you understand? I killed them, both of them. I killed them as surely as if I’d-’

‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself.’

‘But I must,’ he said bleakly. ‘If I’m not hard on myself, who will be? How many times since then have I gone to her tomb and stood there, watching and waiting for something that’s never going to happen?’

‘Where is her tomb?’

‘Here, in the garden. I had the ground consecrated and got the priest to come and bury them both at the dead of night. Then I covered the place so that nobody can find it by accident.

‘Then I had to decide what to do with myself. I looked at what this kind of life had made of me, and I hated it. I told my father I was finished with it all, and took the next plane out of Greece, trying to escape what I’d done, what I’d turned into.

‘When you and I met, I’d been on the run for two years.’ He gave a brief bark of laughter. ‘On the run. Like a criminal. That’s how I felt. I went to Monte Carlo, to New York, Los Angeles, London, Las Vegas-anywhere I could live what they call “the high life”, which is another way of saying I indulged myself in every despicable way. I drank too much, gambled too much, slept around too much, all because I was trying to escape myself. But at the end, there was always a menacing figure waiting for me at the end of the road. And it was me.

‘Then, one night in Las Vegas-well, you know the rest. You showed me to myself in a light I couldn’t bear, and I returned to Greece the next day.’

‘It wasn’t just me,’ Petra said. ‘You were ready to see things differently or I couldn’t have had any effect.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ He gave her a faint smile. ‘Part of me prefers to give you the credit-my good angel, who stopped me going even further astray the first time and now-’

‘Now?’ she asked cautiously.

‘I’m not blind, Petra. I know about myself. I’m not a man anyone in their right mind could want to meet. I scare people, and that’s been fine up to now. It suited me. But you showed me the truth then, and somehow you’ve done it again. For years I’ve sheltered deep inside myself because that way I felt safer. I keep people at a distance because if you don’t let yourself need anyone, nobody can hurt you.