Wounds of Passion by Charlotte Lamb (sci fi books to read TXT) 📗

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 saw you, Mr Ogilvie,’ the brigadier said, ‘walking down through the gardens, to the beach. They saw you. She saw you go, too, the girl, Antonia Cabot. She was sorry for you. She thought you looked unhappy, and her uncle later told her about your broken engagement. So she followed you, down to the beach, with some idea, I suppose, of talking to you, comforting you. She saw the trail of your footsteps along the sand and followed them, fitting her own feet into them, she said; it was some sort of game, I gathered.’ The brigadier looked faintly indulgent. ‘She is very young. And then suddenly someone jumped out at her from behind a boat; she caught a brief impression by moonlight of a face, light brown hair, a T-shirt, jeans. She thought it was you, playing a trick on her; she began to laugh.’

‘It wasn’t me; I never saw her on the beach!’ Patrick said.

The brigadier just watched him, then went on, ‘Then something hit her on the head, and she lost consciousness. She doesn’t know how long she was out, but when she came round she had been gagged with sticky tape; she couldn’t scream, and her attacker had taped her eyes, too, so she couldn’t see him, but he spoke to her, she said. In English; it was an English accent. She said it sounded like your voice.’

‘I only spoke to her once; I said one sentence to her! How could she possibly know what I sound like from that?’

‘You were on the beach, Mr Ogilvie?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Your clothes were covered in sand and salt water.’

‘I sat down on the sand for a long time, but I didn’t see that girl, and I did not attack her!’

‘Tell me again why you went down to the beach,