Savage Atonement. PENNY JORDAN
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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
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 cardboard 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