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would have been less daunting than his quiet determination to hide all his feelings and act as though the past had never happened.

Chapter 4
    Toby shut the door and checked that the lock had caught. Another phone was ringing upstairs, on and on. The sound made him feel as though someone was tightening a clamp around his head. ‘Jo!’ he shouted. ‘Answer the phone.’
    He ran upstairs to the office and pushed open the panelled door. She was gazing at her computer screen, oblivious to everything else. He nearly hit her.
    ‘When will you learn to answer the fucking phone?’
    Jo looked round, her usually sweet face ugly with contempt. ‘What phone? There isn’t one ringing.’
    Toby looked round the room. His lungs were pumping so fast they seemed to tear at his chest and still left him without enough oxygen to breathe. She was right.
    ‘They’ve rung off,’ he said, fighting the thought that he might have imagined the sound because it frightened him so much now. ‘I’ve told you before, you must answer within four rings; otherwise they give up. It could have been important. I can’t cope with this much longer, Jo. You’re going to have to take your job more seriously or leave.’
    ‘I do take it seriously,’ she shouted. ‘And I’m not mad. Or deaf. This phone has not rung all morning.’ She turned away and muttered something he couldn’t hear. Then she looked back, her expression marginally more gentle. ‘What’s happened to you, Toby? You never used to be like this. At the beginning I even
thought you were the perfect boss. Now all you do is shout at me. Why?’
    ‘You’re imagining things.’ As Toby wiped his sweating forehead, he dropped his glasses. Stooping to pick them up, he knew that his face would redden as the blood rushed down into it. He hoped the colour would stop her noticing that he was in tears again, too.
    ‘Make sure you answer the phone as soon as it does ring,’ he said sharply, to counteract his weakness. ‘And for God’s sake remember to take proper messages in future. I can’t believe you let Peter go last night without at least taking a phone number from him.’
    ‘I told you, I tried.’
    He didn’t believe her. He could always tell when someone was lying. But why should she lie now? What on earth could she be hiding?
    ‘But he refused to leave any details,’ she went on, not meeting Toby’s eyes. ‘He said you’d know who he was, and you did, didn’t you?’
    Toby nodded. Then he took off his glasses again to rub the corners of his aching eyes. She was right about that. Her description had made it entirely clear that the mystery caller was Peter Chanting, whom he hadn’t seen for eighteen years and whose letters had stopped coming nearly a decade ago.
    ‘So why do you keep blaming me ?’ She tossed back her hair. ‘If you’d been here at five o’clock, like you promised, you’d have seen him yourself. Anyway it’s no big deal. He said he’d come back again. It’s not my fault you haven’t seen him.’
    Or mine, Toby thought, remembering the traffic that had clogged the Embankment yesterday afternoon.
    ‘But why didn’t you phone me when he came back the second time?’ he said. ‘You know I always have my mobile switched on when I’m away from the gallery.’
    ‘Because you make so much fuss whenever a phone rings and
bang on and on about how you hate them,’ Jo said with a snap. ‘I didn’t want to get another earful about not disturbing you. Why’s he so important anyway?’
    Since he couldn’t tell her that, Toby went to sit in his own office and stared at the pile of post she’d put there when she arrived for work. Peter Chanting was important because he’d put the whole of Toby’s life at risk by blabbing the secret they’d both sworn to keep till they died.
    Had it been a mistake or a deliberate betrayal? Toby had asked himself the question a hundred times in the two months since his persecution had begun.
    At first it hadn’t