Savage Atonement. PENNY JORDAN
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know about it, but she had developed a fierce dislike of her body, to the extent that she would only wash in a darkened room. Despite the heat of summer she refused to dress in anything but thick sweatshirts and baggy jeans.
Mrs Lee, her foster-mother, reported this to the social services. A psychiatrist came to talk to Laurel, but she refused to respond.
The day of the court hearing arrived. The court was packed with reporters, and as her lawyer had predicted, the defence counsel tore her to shreds. Several times she broke down in tears, muddling her story, looking helplessly at Rachel, who could only listen with black murder in her heart, as she witnessed what was happening.
On the second day of the trial Rowland Blandish insisted that Laurel was to be dressed in teenage fashion clothes rather than her enveloping jeans and sweatshirt. He even produced an outfit for her. She put it on as the judge had instructed in a small room at the rear of the court.
It was a pink and white striped mini-skirt and a matching tee-shirt. The tee-shirt pulled tautly against the thrust of her breasts, the skirt showing off her long legs. Rachel bit her lip when she saw her. The judge had also instructed that she was to wear her hair down, and this she did. A glance in the mirror before she was escorted from the room showed her a stranger; a tall, slender girl with a mass of dark red-brown hair and a curvaceous figure.
She disliked the defence counsel’s smile as she re-took the stand. ‘Look at her,’ he instructed the jury. ‘Add make-up and the provocative manner of teenagers the world over and can any man be blamed for losing his temper a little, which is what happened to my client. As he is not her natural father isn’t it also only natural that mingled with his anger should be desire? A desire any man might naturally feel.…’
And so it went on, question upon question, innuendo upon innuendo, until Laurel was ready to believe herself that she had encouraged him; that she was to blame.
The jury gave a verdict of guilty but with provocation, and Laurel left the court feeling besmirched and tainted.
The papers were flooded with articles on raising or lowering the age of consent for sexual relations; on the provocation of teenage girls in general, on rape and its side effects on the victims, and through it all Laurel remained silent and withdrawn.
The court had ordered that for own sake she was to be taken into care, which had resulted in her being sent to a home several miles away.
All through the court hearing she had heard nothing from her mother, and one afternoon when she could endure it no longer she left the school grounds and caught a bus for Hampstead.
She found her mother alone, lying in bed, looking tireder and older. Her face paled when she saw Laurel and she turned away.
‘How could you come back here after what you’ve done?’ she gasped. ‘Shaming me, telling all those lies!’
‘But Mother,’ Laurel’s mouth was dry. Her mother had seen with her own eyes, ‘you saw.…’
‘Your stepfather is right,’ her mother said weakly. ‘You’re a wanton, Laurel. It’s your father’s blood coming out in you. No decent girl would dream of doing a thing like that! From now on you aren’t my daughter.’ She moved the bedclothes and Laurel saw the newspaper cuttings. Sickness welled up inside her. Her mother was right: she wasn’t fit to live. She ran out of the house, not seeing the car parked by the kerb, nor the man lounging against it, and ran full tilt into the road, oblivious to the blare of the horn of the oncoming car.
Strong arms grasped her, snatching her back from death. Furious, she pounded angry fists against the broad shoulders, gasping for breath when she was suddenly set free.
‘You could have been killed!’
I wanted to be! The words trembled on the tip of her tongue, but remained unuttered.
‘What’s wrong?’
The man glanced from her to the house, and then frowned. He was taller, much taller than Bill, with a dark thatch of hair, tousled by the breeze. He was wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt. Dark hair curled at the base of his throat, and sickeningly Laurel remembered Bill’s body; Bill’s hands. She swayed and he caught her.
‘Please.…’ She shuddered as she pushed at his restraining hands. His eyes were grey and curiously blank, and yet she had the feeling that he was studying her minutely; the faded, baggy sweatshirt, the jeans, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her too fragile body and shadowed eyes.
‘Live round here, do you?’ he asked, releasing her and shifting his weight so that he was leaning against the car—a small powerful sports car, Laurel realised now.
‘No!’ The denial was quick and instinctive, but the raised eye brows insisted on some explanation.
‘I was just visiting someone.’ Unknowingly her eyes clouded ‘Now I’m going… home.’
‘Can I give you a lift?’
Strangely she knew she had nothing to fear from him. She shook her head, glancing towards the bus stop before feeling in her pocket for her money.
Appallingly, it wasn’t there. She remembered she had had a pound note, but she had taken it out of her pocket in the house when she reached for her handkerchief to dry her eyes. She glanced uncertainly towards it. She couldn’t go back there now, not after.…
‘Are you sure? I can put the hood down, and you can feel the breeze in your hair.’
‘I.…’ Should she tell him that she’d lost her bus fare? But what if he asked why she hadn’t borrowed some from the friends she’d been visiting?
It would be a long walk back to the home—several miles, and they had no idea where she was.
‘If you’re sure it won’t be any trouble?’
‘On the contrary.’
There was an irony in the words that went over her head, and neither did she see the cynical smile he gave her as he opened the car door and pushed down the canvas hood.
As he had said, the cooling breeze was pleasant. He drove well, but Laurel was unprepared for him to stop suddenly in a quiet lane several minutes away from the home, and completely deserted.
Panic flared as he turned towards her. He seemed to have changed somehow, his face, which she dimly recognised as handsome, hardening.
‘You’re Laurel James, aren’t you? he demanded.
She didn’t even think of lying. ‘Yes,’ she admitted huskily. ‘Who are you?’
‘Oliver Savage,’ he told her briefly, but his name meant nothing to her then.
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘I recognised your picture. You were going to see your mother, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ To her horror Laurel felt the tears filling her eyes and sliding helplessly down her cheeks. ‘She hates me,’ she blurted out, suddenly overwhelmed with pain and desolation. ‘She said it was my fault.…’
‘And wasn’t it?’
Oliver Savage had turned towards her, one arm along the back of her seat, but there was nothing threatening about him, in fact he seemed to exude the same sort of dependability as her grandfather.
‘I don’t know.’ Anguish and pain mingled in the words. ‘She says I encouraged him, but I didn’t… I didn’t!’
‘Not even the tiniest little bit? You’re a very attractive girl… very sexy too,’ he said with a glimmer of a smile. ‘Or rather you would be out of those baggy clothes. You must have known that he desired you?’
Laurel nodded. There was a certain amount of relief to be found in talking like this to a stranger, a certain catharsis, and all at once she was talking quickly, softly, words tumbling over each other as she told her story. He stopped her once or twice, asking questions, which she answered