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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘SO YOU’RE really going to do it.’

      ‘I don’t see that I have much choice, after a letter like that,’ Maggie muttered through the biscuit she was munching.

      The letter in question lay on the coffee-table where Maggie had placed it. It was written in a round, schoolgirlish hand, the letters neatly formed, much like her own handwriting at that age.

      ‘Mm,’ Lara, her flatmate, agreed, sipping the coffee Maggie had made them both. ‘But girls of that age are prone to exaggeration, you know. Are you sure the situation’s as dire as she says? What does she say, exactly?’ she added curiously.

      ‘Read it for yourself.’ Maggie got up, and Lara watched thoughtfully as her flatmate walked over to the small table. Maggie never ceased to fascinate her, even now, after the length of time they had known one another. There was something very compelling about Maggie: a power she herself wasn’t aware she possessed, a warmth that drew people to her. That she was beautiful as well seemed to be another unfair advantage fate had handed her. When they first met almost ten years ago, Lara had felt envious of the tall, slender redhead with her creamy skin and mysterious dark green eyes. Her envy had not lasted long. Although they were roughly the same age, Maggie had had a maturity about her, a sadness which Lara felt instinctively but had never been allowed to penetrate, Maggie being a very private person. She still possessed that slightly melancholy-tinged mystery, that aura of having withdrawn slightly from the rest of the world to a secret and inviolate place.

      Maggie picked up the letter and handed it to her. Lara read it out loud, dark eyebrows lifted in faint amusement.“‘Come home quickly. Something terrible has happened and we need you.” Oh, come on, Maggie,’ she exclaimed wryly. ‘You surely aren’t taking this seriously? If there was really something wrong, someone would have been in touch with you…a telephone call…’

      ‘No,’ Maggie told her fiercely, her expression changing from its normal one of sweetness to an unfamiliar hardness that made Lara’s eyes widen slightly. She and Maggie had known one another ever since Maggie had first arrived in London and, despite her red hair, Maggie was one of the most placid and gentle people she had ever known. Which was perhaps why she had opted out of the aggressive and demanding world of art and instead used her talents to provide herself with an excellent living illustrating books.

      ‘But surely someone would have got in touch with you,’ Lara protested. ‘Some older, more responsible member of your family.’ She groped in her memory for more concise details of Maggie’s family and couldn’t find any. In fact, until the letters in that round, schoolgirlish hand had started arriving eight months ago, Maggie hadn’t had any contact with her family at all.

      She never talked about them other than to say that her parents were dead and that until their death she had lived with them in the Scottish borders where her father taught at a small private school. After their death she had gone to live with her grandfather, and Lara had rather gathered from her silence on the subject that the relationship had not been a happy one and that that was why, when she had come to London, Maggie had cut herself free of all her family ties.

      And yet, from the time of the receipt of that first letter, forwarded to her by the publishers, and the others which had come after it, Maggie had changed. Not discernibly perhaps to those who didn’t really know her, but the difference in her was obvious to Lara and she was intrigued by it.

      What was it that lay in her friend’s past that caused that unmistakable aura of restless tension to possess her when the letters arrived? What was it that made the swift hunger fly to her face when she opened the letters, only to be quickly controlled, as though she was desperately afraid of it being observed?

      Since the arrival of the letters, Lara had realised what it was about Maggie that set her so unmistakably apart from others. It was the protective cloak of withdrawal she wore at all times to distance herself from others; she was a part of their lives at the same time as she was refusing to allow them to enter anything more than the periphery of hers. Almost as though she was afraid of allowing anyone to get too close to her.

      A result of her parents’ death, perhaps, which must have come as a traumatic shock for a sensitive child in her early teens. But Lara suspected there was more to it than that, although she was puzzled to know exactly what.

      In another woman she might have ascribed the withdrawal to an unhappy love affair, but Maggie had been seventeen when she’d arrived in London,