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That’s why I went back to the office in the first place. When I went into the filing room, and heard them shouting, I was distracted for a minute. I turned off the filing-room light so they wouldn’t come in and see me. It was then that I saw the red light on the machine flickering and I went to turn this off, too. But it suddenly occured to me to record their conversation, since I was getting the general drift of it, and realized its importance. So I pressed the record button. Everything they said after that moment is here, even the things which were said after I closed the door and couldn’t hear clearly.’
    Emma had the irresistible desire to laugh out loud, a bitter, hollow laugh. She resisted the impulse, lest Gaye think her raving mad and out of her senses, or hysterical at the most. The fools, the utter fools! she thought. And the irony of it! They had chosen her own boardroom in which to plot against her. That was their first and most crucial mistake. An irrevocable mistake. Kit and Robin were directors of Harte Enterprises, but they were not on the board of the department-store chain. They did not come to board meetings at the store, and so they did not know that she had recently installed sophisticated equipment to record the minutes, another time-saving device. It liberated Gaye for other duties and she simply typed up the minutes from the tapes when it was convenient. The microphones were hooked up under the boardroom table, hidden for aesthetics rather than for any reasons of secrecy in the elegant Georgian room with its fine antiques and paintings of great worth. Emma looked down at the tape on the glass desk, and to her it was an evil thing, lying there like a coiled and venomous snake.
    ‘I assume you have listened to this, Gaye?’
    ‘Yes, Mrs Harte. I waited until they left and then I played it back, I took it home with me on Friday and it hasn’t been out of my sight since then.’
    ‘Is there much more on it? More than you have already told me?’
    ‘About another ten minutes or so. They were discussing…’
    Emma held up her hand, utterly exhausted, unable to hear any more. ‘Never mind, Gaye. I’ll play it later. I know quite enough already!’
    She stood up and walked across the room to the window, erect and composed, though her steps were slow and dragged wearily across the thick carpet. She moved the curtains slightly. It had started to snow. The crystal flakes fell in glittering white flurries, swirling and eddying in the wind, brushing up against the window and coating it with a light film as delicate and as fine as white lace. But the flakes were rapidly melting under the bright sun, running in rivulets down the glass and turning into drizzle before they reached the ground. Emma looked down. Far below her the traffic moved in slow unending lines up and down Park Avenue and the scene was strangely remote. And everything was hushed in the room, as if the entire world had stopped and was silent, stilled for ever.
    She pressed her aching head against the window and closed her eyes and thought of her two sons, of all her children, but mostly of her adored Robin, her favourite son. Robin, who had become her antagonist after they had clashed a few years before about a take-over bid for the chain of stores. A bid which came from out of the blue and which she did not want to even discuss, never mind consider. When she had refused to talk to the conglomerate involved, he had been vociferous in his condemnation of her, exclaiming angrily that she did not want to sell because she did not want to relinquish her power. She had met resentment from him in such virulent proportions that she was at first incredulous and then truly infuriated. What nerve, what gall, she had thought at the time, that he would dare to dictate to her about her business. One in which he did not have the slightest interest, except for the money it brought him. Robin the handsome, the dashing, the brilliant Member of