and tapped a pencil on the desk in front of him.
‘This interview is being recorded...’ he began. ‘Those present are...’
There were two other men, as well as the brigadier, one in uniform, one in civilian clothes. Their names were given; Patrick didn’t ever consciously remember them later. He remembered their faces, most of all their eyes, watching him.
Patrick was to spend hours in that room that night, endlessly going over the same ground. The brigadier was a thorough man, patient and obsessed with detail.
He kept coming back to Patrick’s behaviour at the barbecue, asking him why he had stared at the blonde girl.
‘It was noticed, the way you couldn’t take your eyes off her. We have lots of witnesses.’ He picked up a pile of typed pages; the leaves of paper fluttered as his fingers riffled them.
‘All these people saw you staring fixedly at her. Why were you staring, Mr Ogilvie?’
It was the one point on which Patrick felt any guilt. He was uneasy every time they went back to that. Half sullenly, he muttered, ‘I told you—she reminded me of someone.’
‘Who?’
Patrick’s upper lip was sweating. ‘A girl I know.’
The brigadier watched him relentlessly. ‘Miss Laura Grainger?’
It was like cold water in the face. Patrick sat still, white. ‘I never told you her name. Who told you...?’ Rae, he thought; Rae told him. Did Rae see me staring at that girl? Did Rae pick up that haunting similarity, the shifting, fragmentary likeness to Laura which had deceived him for a moment? One minute it had been there, the next it had gone, dissolving like a reflection when a hand broke the still surface of the water, yet leaving ripples and broken particles where it had been.
What had Rae thought when she saw him staring at the girl? What had she thought when she heard the girl had been attacked, that the girl had given Patrick’s description to the police?
Was that why she had told them about Laura? Did Rae think he was guilty, that he had attacked that girl because she reminded him of Laura?
And that was the core of his uneasiness: that in his mind now he was confusing her with Laura. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t Laura who had been attacked, but some other girl, a stranger, someone he didn’t even know.
He tried to stop muddling them up like that, but as the night wore on and he got more and more tired he kept forgetting. His mind blurred their images; they merged inside in his head—pale, slender girls with long gold hair and lovely bodies. They danced in his mind like candle-flames; dazzling and blinding him, making it even harder to think clearly, to keep his attention on the questions being asked.
‘You were very distressed by the ending of your engagement to Miss Grainger,’ the brigadier softly insinuated. ‘Angry and humiliated. Any man would be—to lose his woman to another man! You must have wanted to kill them both.’
His face tightened, white and bitter. He had. Of course he had. Not Laura! he thought quickly; he would never have hurt Laura. But Kern. He could kill him, and feel no flicker of regret.
‘And then at this party you saw a girl who reminded you of the woman you loved, the woman who had betrayed you, rejected you. How did you feel, Mr Ogilvie? What were you thinking as you stood there staring at her so fixedly?’
He had thought it was Laura; for one crazy, terrible second he had thought she had followed him to Italy, had come to say she had changed her mind, that she had realised she loved him, not Kern, after all.
All that had gone through his head in a flash as he stood there staring, and then she had turned and he had realised his mistake. He had fallen from a great height at that moment: all the way from heaven to hell.
He stared at the brigadier, not really seeing him.
‘You had a strange expression on your face, some witnesses say,’ the policeman said, flicking through the reports again, without taking his eyes off Patrick. ‘You turned away, and then the girl walked over to you—what did she say to you, Mr Ogilvie?’
‘She asked if I wanted to dance,’ Patrick absently said, had already told him a hundred times. Sometimes Patrick almost invented something new to say, simply to break the monotony; but he wasn’t crazy enough, yet, not stupid enough, yet. Once he did that he was lost.
‘Is that all she said?’
Patrick’s temper snapped again; his mouth writhed in a sneer. ‘Surely your observant witnesses have told you that!’
The brigadier gazed stolidly at him. ‘If you would bear with me, Mr Ogilvie. I have to be certain about details. So, Miss Cabot came over to you—’
‘Cabot?’ It was the first time the girl’s name had been mentioned; Patrick couldn’t help the startled question.
The brigadier waited, watching with the patience of a fisherman who thought he might have got a bite on his line.
‘That’s her name?’ Patrick asked.
‘Antonia Cabot,’ the brigadier told him, and there was a strange echo inside Patrick’s head, as if he had heard the name before; and maybe he had, from Rae, or the Holtners, when they had spoken about Alex’s niece, the art student, coming from Florence.
‘Antonia Cabot,’ he said huskily, aloud, and shivered. It was a beautiful name and she was lovely—what had happened to her last night?
The brigadier watched him shiver, his eyes narrowing.
‘A beautiful girl,’ he said softly. ‘Young, blonde, desirable...’
Patrick thought of her as he had first seen her, dancing with another man, her body moving sensually, lightly, with gaiety.
She had come over to him, smiled at him, with that shy, unconscious invitation; and he had been bitterly angry because she looked so much like Laura, but wasn’t Laura, and because...
He swallowed, feeling sick, perspiration on his face.
‘You wanted her,’ the brigadier said, and the words echoed what he had almost thought just now, what he wished he could pretend he had never thought.
He almost screamed, Yes! because it was true, although he wished it weren’t. Yes, he had wanted her. He had looked at that lovely face, that lovely body, and wanted her, but she wasn’t Laura, and he wasn’t interested in a one-night stand with some unknown girl just because she looked like Laura, so he had turned his back and walked away.
Why had she told the police that the man who had attacked her looked like him?
Or was him? Had she actually said it was him? Why would she say that? Had she lied? Or simply been confused? The questions ran round and round inside his head.
‘Why won’t you tell me exactly what happened?’ he broke out. ‘You keep asking me questions, but you never answer mine. Was the girl attacked at the party? In the gardens? In the house? Didn’t anybody see, hear, anything? There were all those people around; surely somebody must have seen something?’
‘They
