Savage Atonement

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 briefly. In many ways he wasn’t there, he was simply a listening post, a substitute for the grandfather she loved; someone she could unburden herself to.

When it was over she was crying, softly and quietly. His fingers touched the back of her neck, drawing her head down against his shoulder. The contact with another human being was strangely comforting. The emotional storm had left her tired and drained, and the slow thud of his heart soothed her.

‘Better now?’ he asked at length. ‘You’re a pretty potent package, you know,’ he added when selfconsciousness returned and she had moved away from him. And there was an oddly strained look to his mouth. ‘I’d better get you back before I’m accused of rape myself!’

His words shocked her, reminding her of how little she knew about him, how foolishly trusting she had been, and she scrambled out of the car before he could stop her—not that he made any attempt to do so. The smile he gave her as he drove off disturbed her. There was something about it that frightened her.

When she got back to the home no one had missed her. Rachel came to see her to tell her that they were moving her to another home—an all-girls one this time, where they thought she would fit in better.

For the first time since the trial she didn’t ask about her mother, and as Rachel told her parents that night over their evening meal, ‘I think she’s beginning to accept that her mother’s deserted her, poor little scrap. That brute Trenchard ought to have been locked away for a lifetime—not simply six months!’

It was the weekend before Laurel knew the truth; a weekend that brought to light Oliver Savage’s real identity in the shape of a colour supplement article about her; an article that purported to be a personal interview with Oliver Savage, in which he tore her reputation and everything she had said to him in shreds. ‘Does any really innocent teenager accept a lift from a stranger and then proceed to practically invite him to make love to her?’ And so it went on, and reading it Laurel was barely able to believe it. Haltingly she explained to Rachel what had actually happened; how Oliver Savage had twisted everything she had said, pounced on her own admission that she had known of her stepfather’s desire, and according to him fanned it.

‘The man must have a warped mind to do something like this!’ Rachel stormed later, when Laurel had been sedated and put to bed. ‘He’s talked to Laurel, seen her—he’s supposed to be an intelligent human being, can’t he guess what sort of effect his article is going to have on her? The first human being she brings herself to confide in, and he does this to her!’

‘He’s a reporter,’ Peter told her dryly, ‘What do you expect? Although I agree it was bad luck on Laurel’s part that she had to meet him when she was at her most vulnerable. He’s renowned for his dislike of the present rape laws; claims that in ninety cases out of a hundred the men have been led on and aren’t totally to blame. No doubt he was waiting there, hoping for an interview with Trenchard, instead he got Laurel, poor little kid!’

Being involved in a rape case was something that clung like mud all through your life if you let it, Laurel reflected as she folded the papers and put them away. Shortly after the trial her mother had died, and then Bill Trenchard had been killed in a car accident several months after he had been released from gaol. Over the years she had learned to bury the past so deeply that it could never be resurrected, but today Oliver Savage had reappeared in her life, ripping the tissue of scars from old wounds, making her relive the past, and he wanted to talk to her. Why? So that he could do a follow-up article? Victim of sexual attack, six years on? What was he hoping to find? That she had lovers by the score? Bitter laughter welled up inside her. Well, he was doomed to disappointment. No man had ever touched her since. How could she let them; how could she offer a decent, moral man the body that had been sullied by her stepfather’s touch; a body that the world told her had actively encouraged that touch? Coming on top of her ordeal at the trial Oliver Savage’s article had driven her completely into her shell. For months she had simply refused to talk to anyone, and looking back now she shuddered to realise how close she had come to insanity. But that was all behind her now, and just as long as she remembered to trust no one, to rely on no one, she would be safe.

A little to her surprise she slept reasonably well, without the nightmares which had plagued her after the article was published. Feeling thankful that it was a Saturday and she had the weekend to recover her composure, she ate her breakfast, made out a shopping list and set out for her local shops, as was her normal Saturday morning ritual. One of her weekly chores was the changing of her library books. She was an avid reader, and the girl behind the desk recognised her.

‘Why don’t you try this?’ she suggested, proffering Laurel a book. Her hand shook as she took it and saw the name Jonathan Graves on the spine.

‘No, I don’t think so.…’ she began, then changed her mind, and clutched at the book until her knuckles whitened. Perhaps she ought to read it? Perhaps it would give her a deeper insight into the man, a clue as to why he would want to see her.