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crowd was already gathering round Clemmens, who was trying to sit up.
    She heard his voice like a wounded bull. ‘Stop her—she’s a thief.’ But she didn’t falter, or slacken her pace. She received a few curious looks, but no one attempted to detain her.
    She turned abruptly and dodged into a bar that she knew, and made her way through the groups of drinkers as if on her way to the women’s room. Once at the rear, she took the emergency exit instead, finding herself in a quiet backstreet.
    However, she’d shot her bolt, and she knew it. She was limping heavily now, and her ankle was swelling up like a balloon, so she hailed the first cruising cab she saw and asked to be taken to the airport.
    And now here I am, she thought mirthlessly, as she climbed out of the bath and swathed herself in a towel. Out of the frying pan, straight into the inferno.
    She towelled herself down swiftly, then rubbed the excess moisture from her hair and combed it back from her face with her fingers, grimacing as she remembered that her hairdryer was one of the items she’d been forced to abandon on the boat.
    But I had a spare one here, she thought, getting back into her robe. I kept it in my dressing table.
    Will it still be there—and do I have the nerve to check?
    Yet, it was safe enough, she assured herself. Daniel was at the office, and she was surely entitled to retrieve her own property?
    She limped across the living area, pushed open the door of her bedroom, and went cautiously inside—only to pause with a small, shocked gasp as she looked around her.
    Because it was unrecognisable. The pretty wallpaper with its delicate tracery of honeysuckle had been painted over in plain ivory, and her pale yellow silk bedcover had been replaced by something far more austere in dark brown. The curtains were brown too, and even the bedside rugs had been changed.
    Every trace of her, every charming personal touch that her earnings from the gallery had provided, seemed to have been deliberately erased.
    They say you shouldn’t go back, she thought, because you’ll find the space you occupied has gone.
    And I’m suddenly beginning to feel as if I no longer exist.
    As if everything I loved most has been taken away from me. My father first, when I was a baby, then Simon, and eventually Abbotsbrook. Maybe it was never the sanctuary I imagined, and my last memories of it were pretty hideous, but it held a kind of security all the same.
    I always thought one day I’d go back, and somehow rediscover everything that was precious from my childhood.
    She bit her lip. Oh, come on, now, she adjured herself impatiently. You’re here to dry your hair, not collapse into sentimentality.
    She took a breath, then raised her head and looked across the room into the dressing table mirror. If Daniel hadn’t changed, there was little difference in her either. Her hair was still mousy, albeit streaked by the sun, and her figure remained like a stick. Her eyes would always be more grey than green, although she did have her mother’s cheekbones, which perhaps redeemed her face from being totally nondescript.
    But not a great deal to set, all the same, against Daniel’s known preferences in womankind. The glamorous leggy blondes with the knowing eyes who’d made her adolescence miserable.
    Or Candida, she thought, flinching as she recalled the sultry mouth, the body that swayed inside its clothes as if impatient to be free of them, and the sweet husky voice like poisoned honey.
    How could any man resist her?
    Deep within her something twisted in renewed agony, and she heard herself gasp.
    ‘Do not,’ she said aloud, her voice vehement. ‘Do not go there.’
    But it was too late. And suddenly it was all too much, the throb in her ankle swamped by this other fiercer pain. She was alone, broke and scared. And she’d been through forty-eight hours of sheer trauma only to find a different kind of hell waiting for her in the place that should have been her