Anne Bennett 3-Book Collection: A Sister’s Promise, A Daughter’s Secret, A Mother’s Spirit. Anne Bennett
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heard his voice and saw the foot raised, and then she saw an old woman as if through a window in her mind. This image was not misty or hazy, though. The old woman’s cold eyes, like Edwin Collingsworth’s, were filled with malice and hatred, and her fists were raised. The image engendered such anger in her that she leaped to her feet and threw herself at Collingsworth with a shriek, like some sort of screaming virago.
Collingsworth was unprepared, both for the attack and for the strength of the girl, who looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away. He threw her against the wall, but as he came towards her, she kicked him between the legs.
She had no shoes on, however, and so, although he doubled up at first, he had recovered enough to be after her as she made for the living room. She wondered where Ray was and how long she had been with this mad man, and knew she had to get out of the place, out into the street and shout for help.
Collingsworth, who had thought Molly would be easily subdued, was taken aback at first and then he seemed to increase in strength. Chairs and small tables were overturned, and vases and lamps crashed to the floor as he crossed the room in pursuit of Molly until he had caught her by the arm and smacked a hard hand across her face so that for a moment she was blinded. In that moment he had her against him, his fingers pulling her knickers to one side. She gave a yelp of terror and punched him to each side of his head with her fists, which were as hard as little hammers. Then she tore herself from his grip, hearing her blouse rip but paying no heed as she made for the door.
But when Collingsworth caught hold of her again, she felt despair fill her being and she knew this was it. She was spent. He would have his way with her and there was nothing she could do about it because she had no strength left.
He kicked her to the floor, and she saw he had the heavy base of a table lamp raised to crash down on her head. She dived under a coffee table. Before her were Collingsworth’s legs, and in a split second she had hold of them and jerked with all her might. Collingsworth had been unbalanced, ready to smash Molly’s skull, and before he was able to recover himself he fell heavily. His head hit the table with a sickening thud as he went down so when he hit the floor he was already unconscious, and blood was seeping from a gaping wound, staining the carpet crimson.
For a moment Molly sat and looked at him. She was petrified and didn’t have a clue what to do, but she knew one thing: if he came to again he would kill her as easily as swatting a fly. She had to get him to the door, bolt and lock it against him and wait for Ray to come home. He would tell her what to do.
Ordinarily, Molly wouldn’t have been able to move even a man of Collingsworth’s stature, but that night she managed it although she was both sweating and crying with the effort when she eventually heaved him outside the door of the flat. She couldn’t leave him there – he was too close – and she rolled him to the top of the stairs, pushed him with her foot, watched him topple down the first couple of steps and then disappear into the darkness. She heard him hit every step.
She gave a sudden shiver and realised that, while she was scantily clad, Collingsworth was naked. She ran into the bedroom, collected up his clothes and threw them down the stairs. Shaking from head to foot, she bolted and barred the door behind her. Then, overcome by nausea, she fled for the bathroom where she vomited over and over into the toilet.
Now that the fight was over, she was aware of aching pain everywhere and she could plainly see why when she stood before the mirror. Her body was a mass of bruises, but her face had borne the brunt of Collingsworth’s anger and she sported two black eyes, her face was smeared with blood from the shattered nose, and her bottom lip was split wide open. She wanted to lie on the floor and weep but she knew that that would achieve nothing, so she forced herself to run a bath. She sank with a sigh into the perfumed waters, knowing everything would sting and throb afresh, but she felt defiled and dirty and she needed to try to wash that feeling away.
Molly tossed and turned on the bed, in too much pain and far too upset to sleep, but as she played the scenes over and over again in her head, she became horrified by what she had done and she began to wonder if it had been her fault in some way and if she could have handled it better. The point was, she had drunk too much to behave in any sort of logical way and that was her fault. And was it really necessary for her to push Collingsworth down the stairs, especially as he had already passed out and had a head wound seeping blood?
She hadn’t been thinking straight. She had just wanted the man as far away from her as possible, where he couldn’t hurt her any more, but what if she had killed him? He was rich and influential, Ray had intimated, and she knew she would never get away with killing or even maiming such a person. What would happen to her when it was discovered what she had done? She ran her trembling fingers around her neck, imagined the hangman’s noose tightening there and felt sick with fear.
Ray would know what to do when he came back, though she faced the fact he might be less than pleased with her at first, because pulling Collingsworth’s legs from under him so that he was knocked unconscious and then rolling him down the stairs could not be construed as being ‘nice’ to him by any stretch of the imagination.
But then when she told Ray what Collingsworth had wanted to do, surely he would see that she had little alternative? When he saw the mess that the man had made of her face, she imagined that he would be incensed on her behalf, because she knew that he couldn’t be involved in any of this, whatever the odious man had said. If he had been, wouldn’t he at the very least have tried to take advantage of her before this?
She had offered for him to share her bed. She was sure she wouldn’t have minded too much, not if it had been Ray, but he had been too much of a gentleman to do that. Instead, he had cared for her and certainly had never laid a finger on her in an inappropriate way.
However, Ray wasn’t there, so it was down to her. She knew she had to find out exactly what she had done to Edwin Collingsworth. Her nerve ends quivered and she wished she could curl up in bed and pretend that the naked man, maybe lying dead at the bottom of the stairs, was nothing to do with her.
She shivered as she pushed the covers back, for the place was like an ice box and her head pounded as she lifted it from the pillow. She felt as if she was going to be sick, but she fought the nausea and slid her feet thankfully into slippers. She wished the silky wrap she tied around herself was a cosy woolly one, for though it looked fine, it was not made for warmth.
She doubted, though, that anything could warm her up properly, for it was terror that was filling her veins with ice. She padded across to the front door and, once there, it took all her reserves of strength to slide the bolts back and ease it open. She had picked up one of the torches Ray always left in a cupboard in the hall, and by its light, dim though it was, she saw there was nothing at the bottom of the stairs. There was no body, no clothes – nothing.
However, she had to be certain, and she descended the stairs, her senses on high alert, ready to flee at any moment. But, the stairwell was completely empty except for the little pool of blood at the bottom. Then her torch showed up something gleaming on the floor. She bent to look more closely and saw that it was a pair of gold cufflinks. Collingsworth’s she presumed, which must have fallen out of his cuffs when she threw his clothes down the stairs. She put them into the pocket of her wrap.
She should have felt relieved, but she wasn’t. What if someone had found him and summoned an ambulance, or maybe he had regained consciousness enough to dress himself before stumbling into the street to get help. Either way, it wasn’t necessarily good news for her.
She went back to the apartment, not bothering to slide the bolts now that Collingsworth was no longer at the bottom of the steps. In the kitchen she made a cup of tea, hoping it might stop her teeth chattering. And that was where a furious Ray found her a little later.
Collingsworth’s chauffeur, Will Baker, had brought Ray and Collingsworth to the apartment the evening before. His instructions were then to take Ray wherever he wanted to go, return to the apartment, and wait outside it