Frowning slightly, he opened it. When he saw the contents, his face lost colour.

There was a plain sheet of paper on which someone had written in large uneven capitals, "Congratulations', and then as he lifted the sheet to see what was pinned behind it, he caught his breath.

It was a simple and very brief typed letter confirming that its recipient was pregnant.

At first, he thought it was the very worst kind of bad joke--a cruelly bad joke, the kind that would surely destroy Claudia if she ever got to hear about it. But then he realised that if it was a joke, it was being played on him by life. fate. and not some boneheaded rookies out to put one over on an officer, because the letter wasn't addressed to Claudia. And the letter had been sent by a Katriona Wallace--a woman using his surname.

Garth swallowed and stared at the top left- hand corner of the letter again.

"Katriona Wallace, Flat 12, Stanway House, Victoria Street."

Katriona. Katriona Spencer.

Claudia's client, the girl who had stolen her house keys, the girl who had broken into the flat, the girl he had caught going through his wallet. Katriona. The girl, who it now seemed was trying to claim that he was the father of the child she was carrying, which was, of course, impossible. He had never been near the girl. He had never touched her. He had always had a strong suspicion that some of the people Claudia had to deal with came very close to being pretty psychotic. Now he had proof of it.

What on earth had made her pick on him for the role of father to her child? Surely not the fortunately small amount of money she had taken from his wallet.

So what then? Had her choice been a deliberate act of spitefulness or merely a motiveless act of pointless boredom? She must have got his address from his wallet but she hadn't actually taken his ID papers, which meant that she must have memorised it.

Congratulations. His face contorting, he screwed up both papers and hurled them into the waste-paper basket. Then on some impulse he couldn't define, he got them out again, smoothed them flat and reread them before searching in his desk drawer for a box of matches. Very deliberately, he proceeded to rip them into small pieces before burning them.

The girl was obviously just trying it on. She had to be. There was no way he could possibly be the father of her child. No way at all.

"Any luck with the agents?" Garth forced himself to sound bright and cheerful as he waited for Claudia's response, picturing her standing by the telephone they had recently had installed in the flat as she answered his call. He had hoped to get home for the weekend but there were one or two matters he had to tie up at HQ before he took his final leave of the army.

"Nothing we'd be interested in," Claudia responded.

"All that seem to be around at the moment are rambling country rectories, not the sort of thing we'd want at all."

"But that's..."

Just in time. Garth stopped himself.

As they were never going to have a family, there was no point in looking at family houses, Claudia had told him. Since she had now decided to stay on at work and since he, too, would be working in London, they would be much better off with a modern London apartment rather than buying some ridiculously oversize country house.

Garth didn't agree with her. The last thing he wanted was a soulless city apartment. He had been looking forward to spending his weekends and his free time in some sleepy little country town, preferably one with a decent stretch of fish able river close to it and certainly one with a good golf course, but he had learned over the past few months to tread warily around Claudia and not say or do anything that would bring on one of the deep, dark moods of despair that were caused by anything reminding her of what had happened.

To Garth, she had become heartbreakingly and very worryingly frail in recent weeks, both in appearance and manner, but she stubbornly resisted all his attempts to discuss his concern for her with him. She was perfectly all right, she in n sis ted But, of course, they both knew that she wasn't. And Garth had taken to telephoning her every day when he was away from her just to make sure.

Just to make sure of what? It was a question he didn't want to ask himself, never mind answer.

"I'm going to see what sounds like an ideal place in a new block with views over the river," Claudia told him brightly--overbrightly. Garth recognised.

"It will be perfect for us--almost within walking distance of where your office will be."

"Claudia, I didn't think--' Garth began, but she refused to let him finish.

"I must go. Garth," she broke in abruptly.

"I've got a conference meeting in half an hour."

Garth's meeting finished earlier than he had anticipated. With a free afternoon and evening ahead of him, his first instinct was to go home to Claudia, but a couple of miles from the flat, he got caught up in a traffic jam caused by some roadworks he had forgotten about, leaving him no alternative but to sit and wait. On some impulse he refused to name, he reached into the glove compartment and withdrew the A to Z road map he kept there and thumbed through it.

As he had suspected, Stanway House in Victoria Street had to be a sixties tower block built by one of the city councils.

There was a side-street several yards away and after a very creative interpretation of the traffic laws, he was able to turn into it and follow the labyrinth of narrow backstreets into which it led, eventually coming out half an hour later onto the main road that ran past the block of flats.

Wisely, he parked his car far enough away not to be at any risk from vandals and, having rechecked the A to Z, started to make his way on foot towards the flats.

The smell that reached him as he climbed up the first set of stairs made him wrinkle his nose un appreciatively but when the group of youths clustered together in the shadowed overhang started to make jeering comments about his appearance, all it took to silence them was one quick, steady look.

Tucking copper pig," he heard one of the youths muttering as he started up the next set of stairs.

"Naw/ one of his companions denied.

"He's no pig. He hasn't got the look. He's army. Look at his hair."

Ruefully, Garth applauded the youth's visual astuteness--pity he wasn't putting it to better use. Claudia had already teased him about the fact that once he was formally 'out', he would have to adopt a more trendy hairstyle, but Garth suspected that he would feel uncomfortable with the foppishly long hair currently favoured by so many members of his own sex after years of sporting a short army back and sides.

Number 12 was on the third landing, a no man's land of boarded-up windows and barred doors. The flats were quite plainly being emptied, hopefully getting readied for demolition, Garth reflected.

They were more like a nest of rat holes than a good environment for human beings to thrive in.

Number 12 looked no better than the rest. The only difference was that someone had removed the boarding evidently meant to keep unwanted house hunters out, a someone who did not in tend to be put off by any would-be attempts to remove them if the graffiti scrawled across the doors and windows were anything to go by, Garth decided as he briefly read the colloquial message to the effect that uninvited visitors would not be welcome.

Ignoring it, he rapped sharply on the door. When no one opened it, he paused for a second, studied it thoughtfully, then reflecting briefly on the wisdom of his un citizen-like behaviour, he leaned forward and, putting his shoulder to the door, gave it extremely professional if somewhat illegal encouragement to open of its own accord.

He was just about to make a second attempt when he heard sounds of movement behind the door and an irritable female voice calling out, Tor God's sake, if you're that desperate. " and then the door was being unbolted and pulled open.

As Garth stepped into the gloomy, dank darkness of the unlit hallway, his first thought was that she was far prettier than he remembered; in fact, so pretty that the shock of it jolted through him as though he had gripped hold of an electrical cable. That she had recognised him as immediately as he had done her was equally evident.

"Well, hello there. Daddy," she spat viciously at him, giving him a wide and totally unwelcoming smile.

"Come to check it out for yourself, have you? Well, go ahead ... here he is."

Still smiling mockingly at him, she patted her round belly, the only part of her that was round, the taut mound of her pregnancy somehow grotesque against the shocking thinness and gauntness of the rest of her body.

"It isn't true," Garth denied flatly.

"It can't be."

"Can't it?" she taunted him.

"Then why are you here? What's wrong... frightened your little wifey will find out? What will she say? I wonder. She won't be pleased, will she? Not that she's got anything to boast about. She couldn't manage to hold on to hers could she? Mine's going to be a big, fine, strong baby." She patted her belly again and laughed.

"She wasn't even really showing, was she? Call herself a woman. I bet she didn't give you as good a time in bed as I did. I bet she's never even given you a proper blow job, has she, never mind if you had to go down on her? I bet it felt good, didn't it, getting a real taste of pussy juice, from the way you were licking away at it?"

"Stop it," Garth warned her.

"Stop that right now. You're making it up. I've never been to bed with you. I--' " No. Want me to tell you some more about what you did. what you said? Want me to describe the mole you've got right here? " As she accurately touched the place on his in n ner thigh where he had a small, flat, oval mole, Garth winced and not just because of the fact that she was touching him.

"Not got much to say for yourself now, have you?" Katriona gloated.

"You were begging me for it," she told him.

"Begging me... you couldn't wait to get it... couldn't wait to have me. You told me that you'd never had a fuck like it, that you'd never had a woman like me.

You said it was a hundred, a thousand, times better than it had ever been with her. Do you want me to tell you how many times you had me? "

she asked him softly, watching mercilessly as his colour came and went.

"For a man who had drunk as much whisky as you had, you did pretty well, but then I suppose you have to be tough in the army."

As she was speaking, she was reaching out as though to caress his body. Instinctively, Garth stepped back from her.

What she was saying was some grotesque perversion of the truth. It had to be. It couldn't possibly be true. He couldn't possibly have made love to her. had sex with her, and yet as his brain was forging the furious panic-stricken denials, deep down inside a part of him was already recognising that somewhere in what she was saying there lay a vicious, poisoned shard of truth. He couldn't remember saying or doing the things she had said, but there was something not so much a memory as a shocked sense of awareness.

"What? Nothing to say?"

Swallowing hard. Garth tried to compose him 7 self. No matter what he might feel towards her, if she was speaking the truth, then this wretched creature was carrying his child and if that was the case, no matter how unpalatable, how appalling he found the prospect, he had a moral obligation towards that child.

That child. his child. Oh, my God, what was he going to do? How the hell was he going to tell Claudia?

"We need to talk," he announced curtly, starting to move farther into the hallway, but Katriona immediately blocked his way.

"Talk? What about?"

"About the fact that you're carrying my child. Arrangements will have to be made." Wearily, Garth pushed his hand into his hair. Never in a thousand years had he ever envisaged himself being in this sort of situation, at least not once he had left his youthful wild-oats-sowing excesses behind him. It made him feel sick to think. to contrast this with the loving hopes he and Claudia had shared; the excitement and pleasure with which they had been looking forward to the arrival of their child.

"Arrangements. The only arrangement I'll be making is when to get rid of it," he heard Katriona telling him ruthlessly.

"Get rid of it? No, you can't--' " Who says not? " she demanded scornfully.

"This is my baby ... mine, and I can do what the hell I want with it and there's not a fucking thing you can do to stop me."

As he saw the way her eyes were glittering, Garth recognised that there was no point in trying to reason with her.

He was no stranger to the sight of someone on drugs. It happened. Even in the army.

"It might not even be yours," Katriona was saying now.

"You aren't the only man I've ever rucked, you know."

Garth could well believe it. His stomach churned nauseously as he looked away from her, praying that she wouldn't guess how much he hoped the child she was carrying was not his, or rather how much he hoped that she was not going to be the mother of a child he had fathered, and not just because of what that knowledge would do to Claudia if she ever found out about it.

"What did you come round here for anyway?" Katriona challenged.

"Another chance to get a taste of what you don't get at home? I don'tcome cheaply. I don't come cheaply. Get it?"

She laughed wildly at her own joke, the humour dying from her face to be replaced by a sour look of dislike as she stared at Garth.

"Think you're so good, don't you? Too good for someone like me. Well,that wasn't the way it was the night you gave me this." Eyes flashing,she jabbed downwards at her stomach.

"I was the one you wanted then, not her, your precious Claudia.

Claudia. My God, even her bloody name's precious, but I'm the one who's having your baby, not her."

"You just said you didn't know if it was my child," Garth reminded her grimly.

She shot him a sideways look.

"Yes, I did, didn't 17' " If it is my child, then I have a right to--'

"You have no rights over me. No rights. No man does. No man ever will," Katriona denied angrily.

"If this turns out to be a man child, then God help him," she told him.

"I hate men... hate them. I'd have him castrated at birth. All men should have their balls cut off the moment they're born..."

Garth tried to hold on to his self-control as he listened to her drug-crazed ravings.

"I just want to help you," he began when she eventually fell silent.

Was the child she was carrying his? Did she even know? Would he everknow if it was. If it was what?

"Now what are you going to do?" Katriona was demanding softly, watching him.