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
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
