Savage Atonement Read online

  ‘Goodness, you look pale—are you all right?’ Sally questioned when she emerged into her own office. When Laurel nodded her head, she added in a more enthusiastic tone, ‘Well, come on, tell me all about him. Is he as incredibly sexy close up as he is in his pictures?’

  ‘I didn’t look.’

  Sally grimaced, obviously not surprised by the lie. And it was a lie, for she had looked, searching that all male face for some tinge of compassion or regret, but there had been none. Only arrogant maleness.

  ‘I suppose they’ll be in there hours yet,’ Sally protested, ‘You know what old Marshall’s like once he gets going. Have you got much to do?’

  ‘Only these notes. They shouldn’t take long. I’m leaving early tonight,’ Laurel announced, averting her face so that Sally wouldn’t guess how sudden this decision was. ‘I’ll leave the notes on my desk before I go, but I’m going to have to rush.’

  ‘Okay, I get the message,’ Sally told her, taking the hint and sliding off her desk. ‘It’s time I was rounding up the mail anyway.’

  Once she had gone Laurel concentrated on typing back her shorthand, glad of the solitude of her office which offered no outside distractions. It took her just over an hour, and towards the end of it she was holding her breath as she raced to get the work finished before the meeting inside her boss’s office came to a close. Some deep instinct was urging her to get away, to leave the office before Oliver Savage walked in and found her there. Savage by name and savage by nature, she thought numbly. And she had been savaged once by his merciless talent for destruction, she wasn’t going to let it happen again.

  She had just pulled the last sheet from her machine, and was reaching for the cover, when Sally suddenly burst in, her curls tangled, a smudge of ink on one cheek.

  ‘Thank goodness you haven’t gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘Laurel, it’s the photocopier. The wretched thing just won’t work, and John Lever wants a dozen copies of some document running off before I leave. He wants to send them out in tonight’s post.…’

  ‘I’ll come and have a look at it.’

  Laurel was halfway down the corridor before she remembered that she had left her handbag in her office and that she would have to go back for it. She hesitated, and Sally, suddenly impatient, grasped her arm, tugging her towards the general office. ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘He’s going mad with me, you know what he’s like’.

  It took longer than Laurel had anticipated to find the problem—a piece of paper jammed inside the copier, but eventually she managed to get it working again, and at Sally’s insistence remained at her side while it ran off a dozen perfect copies of the requisite document.

  Her hand was on the door of her office when she heard voices inside, and she was just about to retreat when Mr Marshall opened it, his frown relaxing as he saw her.

  ‘Ah, Laurel, I was just telling Oliver that it isn’t like you to leave early. You’ve done the notes?’

  Skirting her desk and carefully avoiding so much as glancing at the tall male figure standing by the window, Laurel proffered the typescript to her boss. Her handbag was by her desk, and she reached for it, her voice hesitant as she asked if she might leave.

  Mr Marshall looked slightly surprised at such unusual behaviour on the part of his perfect secretary. The phone rang before he replied and Laurel answered it. It was Mrs Marshall, and her boss excused himself to Oliver Savage to take the call in his own office.

  Hastily grabbing her handbag, Laurel made for the door, but inexplicably Oliver Savage was there before, her, blocking her exit.

  ‘Laurel… it is you, isn’t it?’

  His eyes held her mesmerised, unable either to deny or accept his question.

  ‘I want to talk to you. I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘No!’

  The word jerked past her lips, her eyes dilating in her pale face.

  The grey eyes narrowed, studying her slowly, missing nothing of her clothes or appearance. Like someone on the threshold of a nightmare Laurel saw his hand reach out to her, touching her face. She cringed back, seeing but not understanding the hardening of his mouth.

  ‘You’ve got a smudge on your face. Ink.’

  He turned his hand towards her, showing her the ink on his own fingers from the contact with her skin.

  ‘It’s the photocopier. I.…’ I must get out of here, her mind screamed wildly, but she managed to subdue the impulse to give way to her emotions. Emotions trapped and betrayed. She had learned that lesson by now, surely? She had learned that screaming and panic achieved nothing, and coldly incisive questioning and lies all.

  Laurel?’

  The warmly tender way he said her name sickened her. He had said it like that before… before.

  ‘I must talk to you.…’

  ‘No!’

  It was a low animal cry of pain, regretted as soon as she had uttered it, and she saw from the sudden darkening of his eyes that Oliver Savage had registered it.

  She heard the faint click as Mr Marshall replaced his receiver and came out to join them. Quickly picking up her bag, she hurried towards the door, and then to her horror she heard Oliver Savage drawling coolly, ‘You’ll excuse us if we rush off, Marshall, but I’ve promised to give your secretary a lift. It seems she has an important date this evening.’

  Mr Marshall positively goggled, and if she had been in a mood to appreciate it, Laurel must have been struck with the humour of the situation. Mr Marshall was plainly not used to thinking that his secretary might have a life outside the firm that she was anxious to run home to every night. Instead, she stammered a bitter protest, stifled beneath the coolly measured tones of Oliver Savage’s voice as he murmured something about getting in touch and studying the notes, and then, her arm in his imprisoning grip Laurel was forced to endure the disbelieving stares of the girls in reception as she was marched past them and out into the late autumn evening.

  Once outside she tried to tug herself free, anger lending a faint colour to her otherwise pale face.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed angrily at her captor. ‘I have no intention of going anywhere with you or saying anything to you.…’

  ‘Well, at least that’s an improvement on the ice-cold maiden I saw back in that office. It’s a relief to know you’re not entirely subhuman, Laurel.’

  ‘Is it?’ Her wrist was caught in his free hand, the intimate contact of his flesh against hers shocking her into silence. No man had touched her since… since.… She made a small whimper of protest in the back of her throat, her eyes giving away more than she knew.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ She got the words out between clenched teeth, surprised to see how white he had gone.

  ‘You don’t like being touched, do you, Laurel?’ he asked with quiet emphasis, reading his answer in the sudden tightening of her features. ‘Dear God! I’ve been looking for you for five years, do you know that?’

  Her wooden expression seemed to defeat him and she felt a momentary flash of triumph that she had been able to reduce him to a loss of words; he who had always been so clever with words, made them do his bidding, made them destroy her life.

  ‘Laurel, we must talk.…’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you!’

  Someone jostled them accidentally, and he released her momentarily. It was enough. Deftly twisting away from him, Laurel ran, mingling with the crowds, allowing herself to be swept away with them, her heart thudding like thunder as she waited for him to catch up with her.

  A taxi slid to a halt in front of her and disgorged its passenger. Without hesitation, Laurel leapt in, giving the driver her address, and as they pulled away from the kerb she had a fleeting glimpse of Oliver Savage’s angry and disbelieving face

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE couldn’t eat, couldn’t even drink the cup of tea she had made for herself, and she paced her small flat restlessly before coming to a decision. Like a sleepwalker she went into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe, lifting the cardboa
rd box out of the bottom. They had given her this when her mother died. She had been at the convent then and Sister Theresa had wanted to burn them, but the social worker had murmured the magic words ‘mental therapy’ and she had been allowed to keep the box. She had looked at them again and again in those first few months, reading and re-reading until her head was full of the words.

  Now she was going to look at them again.

  Her hands shook as she lifted first the album and then the newspaper cuttings from the box. Yellowed and slightly faded now, they were all clipped together in date order. Drawing a shuddering breath, Laurel looked at the first one.

  ‘Teenage girl accuses stepfather of attempted rape,’ screamed the headline.

  There was a blurred, grainy photograph of her at fifteen, her long russet hair windswept and untidy. Rachel Hartford, the social worker in charge of her case, was holding her hand. Poor Rachel, she had been as bitter about the outcome as Laurel herself and had given up her job.

  Beneath the first cutting were others, gutter-press cuttings, with stories made up of the gleanings of whatever the reporters had been able to learn from their neighbours.

  Then there was the court case. Laurel started to tremble as she remembered the ordeal, the cuttings disregarded on the floor. That should have been the worst she had to endure. Rachel had been disturbed when she learned who the defence counsel was, he had a formidable reputation and was extremely expensive. Neither of them had known where her stepfather found the money to afford such a lawyer—at least, not then; and Laurel had gone straight from his clever mauling almost literally into the arms of Oliver Savage, who had skilfully soothed and questioned her. So skilfully that she hadn’t even realised that he was a reporter until his article appeared. And he didn’t write for the gutter press; his articles carried weight, and what he had written about her was something she couldn’t endure to contemplate even now.

  For her own sake the social services had sent her to a children’s home after the hearing; her mother was already seriously ill and unable to look after her.

  She glanced at the small bundle of cuttings clasped in her hand, the past hovering over her like a dark shadow.

  ‘Don’t shut it away,’ the psychiatrist who had seen her at the children’s home had told her, ‘talk about it—work it out of your system.’

  But because she had always been over-sensitive, because of her self-loathing and hatred of everything that had happened, she had locked it all away, becoming withdrawn and repressed.

  If only she had known who Jonathan Graves was—but she hadn’t, and now it was too late to stop the memories crowding in on her, taking over her mind, forcing her to remember.…

  She had been thirteen when her grandparents died, just on the threshold of womanhood. She had missed them dreadfully. To supplement the family income her mother had decided to take in lodgers; the big house near the Heath was too large and expensive for the two of them, and yet both were loath to leave it.

  Their first lodger had been a teacher. Laurel had liked her. She taught at a large comprehensive school and Laurel had listened wide-eyed to her stories about it, comparing it with the small convent school she attended.

  Miss Sayers had got another job and had left, and for a while Laurel had watched her mother’s face grow pinched and worried. But then one day she had returned home from school to find her mother smiling at a strange man sitting on the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea.

  Laurel had disliked him on sight and had shrunk away when her mother introduced him as their new lodger.

  He was some sort of salesman and seemed to work odd hours, because whenever Laurel returned home from school she invariably found him in the kitchen with her mother. This had always been their special shared part of the day, on which even her grandparents did not intrude, and Laurel had resented his presence. She disliked him altogether. He was only an inch or so taller than her mother, but powerfully built, and slightly balding. Laurel didn’t like the way he watched her mother, or the way his eyes rested on her sometimes, as though he was aware of the feminine budding of her body beneath her school uniform. Always acutely sensitive, her defence system sprang into action whenever he was in the vicinity, the tiny hairs on her body prickling with dislike.

  She longed to tell her mother how she felt, but somehow a gulf had sprung up between them. Her mother seemed to like Bill Trenchard. Her cheeks and eyes glowed whenever she was talking to him, and one afternoon when Laurel came home from school a little early, as she walked into the kitchen they seemed to spring apart, guilt written large in her mother’s eyes, satisfaction in Bill Trenchard’s.

  His air of satisfaction made Laurel feel sick. He had been kissing her mother; she sensed it with all the outraged instinct of her own growing sexuality.

  She was just beginning to learn about sex at school from her friends; Laurel had always been slow to make friends and had no ‘best friend’ in whom she could confide her growing dislike of their lodger. All she could do was to acknowledge in her own mind that to think of her pretty mother and ‘that man’—as she mentally thought of him—doing those things she had heard about at school made her feel physically ill.

  She hadn’t known then that it was a normal part of growing up to feel a certain amount of disbelief and revulsion towards the sexual act on first learning about it, and she had remained locked in a world of misery, hating herself for loathing a man her mother so obviously liked and yet unable to do a thing about it.

  At night she prayed fervently that he would be transferred elsewhere, that he would leave; and then, as though to punish her, her mother announced that she and Bill Trenchard were to marry.

  ‘Please understand, darling,’ she appealed, seeing the disbelief and dismay in Laurel’s eyes. ‘I’ve been alone so long, and Bill is such fun. We’ll be like a real family,’ she promised. ‘Bill adores you.… I know it will seem strange at first, because you’ve never had a father.…’

  ‘Bill isn’t my father,’ Laurel said bitterly, just as the door opened and he walked in.

  For a moment she thought he was going to strike her, he looked so furious, and she cringed back instinctively, hoping against hope that her mother would change her mind.

  As she shot out of the kitchen she heard Bill Trenchard comforting her mother. ‘Don’t worry about it, she’ll come round. You know what they’re like at that age. She probably fancied me herself.…’

  Fancied him! Alone in her bedroom, Laurel shuddered with loathing, hot tears of misery sliding down her cheeks. How could her mother marry a man like that? How could she bear the thought of him touching her, of…? Like a nervous colt her mind skittered away. Bill was not a particularly fastidious man. She had seen him coming from the bathroom, draped merely in a towel. His torso was thickset and covered in coarse dark hair, as were his back and arms. The sight of his partially naked body revolted her, and she couldn’t understand how her mother could endure to look at it, never mind touch it.

  They were married within the month—a quiet register office ceremony. Laurel had had a new outfit for the occasion. Her mother and Bill had taken her shopping. She had hated it. Bill had chosen her dress, a brief mini which exposed the fine length of her legs. It was far shorter than anything she had worn before, and she had felt acutely selfconscious in it. She had worn her hair down; and it was only later, looking at the photographs with the eyes of an adult, that she had realised how provocative she had looked; the tight, short dress with its scooped neckline; her hair, long and thickly unruly, but at thirteen she hadn’t been aware of such things and she had merely known that her new stepfather was looking at her in a way she didn’t like.

  After the ceremony Bill had taken them all out for a meal. They had had wine, and Laurel had a vivid memory of her mother looking flushed and happy. If only she could have stayed like that!

  They weren’t going away on honeymoon, but her mother had arranged for Laurel to spend the night with one of their neighbours. When she came downsta
irs with her case, after their return to the house, Laurel was surprised to find her stepfather alone in the kitchen.

  ‘Your mother’s just gone upstairs,’ Bill informed her. His face was darkly flushed and when he came near her Laurel could smell the wine on his breath, sour and unpleasant.

  ‘Well, now that you’re my little girl, how about a kiss for your new dad?’

  Laurel froze and stared uncomprehendingly up at him. She had kissed her grandparents, of course, and her mother, but some deep protective instinct warned her that kissing them was different from kissing Bill Trenchard.

  ‘Still sulking, are we?’ Bill demanded aggressively when she remained mute. ‘Well, don’t think I don’t know why! Wishing you were getting a little of what’s in store for your ma, is that it?’

  Not really understanding what he was saying, but knowing that she didn’t like the tone of his voice, nor the look in his eyes, Laurel started to move away, but Bill moved faster, trapping her against the sink.

  ‘No need to get jealous, there’s plenty to go round,’ he told her thickly. His hands were large and sprinkled with dark hairs, and Laurel shuddered as they closed on her shoulders, his breath hot and sour against her face.

  ‘Now.…’ He was breathing heavily, as he brought his face down to hers. ‘How about a kiss for your new dad?’

  Laurel longed to scream, but she was too frightened. If only her mother would return! She hated the way Bill was touching her; the red moistness of his mouth. If it touched her own she would be sick, she knew it.

  She heard her mother outside, and shook with relief as Bill released her, grabbing her case and rushing out of the room before her mother could see her fear.

  All that night she barely slept. How could her mother marry a man like that? She longed for someone to confide in; someone to talk to, and she bitterly regretted the death of her grandparents. Slow painful tears coursed down her cheeks as she contemplated her future.