CHAPTER 1 There was no one at the airport to meet Rachel Gairdner. It took her about half an hour to convince herself of it. At first she was sure that her brother was somewhere there among the crowd gathered outside the exit, waiting for friends and relatives to emerge, and that he had simply not seen her as site stood waiting. Then she thougllt that he would soon arrive, full of apol- ogies, of course, fo~ being late. Not that it was like him to be late. He was a p~unctilious young man, far less casual about such things as time, money or commitments gener- ally than she was herself. So inevitably she began to think that something must have happened to him. Either his car would not start, or he had been in an accident, or he had been taken suddenly ill. But he was never taken ill. He had the unobtrusive sort of good health that gets taken so for granted that even a common cold seems out of character. And if his car would not start, surely he would have had the sense to take a taxi rather than fail to meet her. And it was unthinkable that he should simply have made a mistake about the day on which she was to arrive. So it began to seem most unpleasantly probable that he had been in an accident. The sun beat down on Rachel out of a sky of deepest blue. She felt almost ready to cry from sheer fatigue, and the winter clothes that she had had to wear for the start of the journey from London in a peculiarly bitter January felt heavy and moistly clinging in the Australian morning. She
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