CHARLOTTE LAMB: Wounds Of Passion

Did she, too, believe he was guilty?

She knew him, for God’s sake! Patrick thought. She couldn’t possibly believe he would do something like this, surely? Surely.

He wished he could have talked to her, told her... But would she believe him? She looked so shocked. He felt sick. If even Rae believed he had done it! He was almost coming to believe he had, himself! It was the way people looked at you, the waves of hatred coming from them.

* * *

Years later, dreaming about it, he had the same disorientating impression of being trapped in a living nightmare; he kept hoping he was asleep and dreaming, that this couldn’t really be happening to him.

The difference was, years later, that he did wake up.

At the time, there was no escape for him. He had to go where they took him, helpless in their hands.

As the car drove out of the villa the policeman sitting in the back with him grabbed the back of his neck with one large hand, pushed his head down, and held it there. ‘Paparazzi!’ he grunted in explanation, and Patrick was feeling so dazed that for a moment he didn’t get the point.

Then, as the car slowed to turn out into the road, he heard an outburst of noise: people pressing around the sides of the car, pushing and rocking it, hands banging on the windows. Flash bulbs went off, the car was full of brightness exploding like lightning, people shouted and yelled; then the car shot forward at great speed and he was thrown forward too, and hit his head with a thud on the back of the seat in front. The policeman beside him hauled him up by the slack of his shirt, almost tearing it. Patrick felt dizzy, and his forehead hurt, throbbed. He would have a bruise there tomorrow.

The drive was a short one, and he was forced to go through the same humiliating procedure of crouching down out of sight as the car shot into the police car park, then the officers put a blanket over his head and ran him into the building.

The first person he saw was a man in a white coat who seemed to be a doctor. He told Patrick to strip again, then gave him a medical examination in great detail. To Patrick it felt as if the man was crawling over his body with a microscope; every orifice was examined, every pore in his skin, every hair on his head, it seemed. Samples of his blood, urine, even his perspir ation, were taken.

Swabs were taken, too, from under his nails, in his mouth, and other places, while Patrick suffered it, white-faced and dark-eyed with humiliation.

By the time he reached the brigadier’s office he was even angrier, and he was thinking coherently again. The first shock had worn off; he was fighting back.

‘I want a lawyer,’ he said as soon as he saw the senior officer again. ‘I’m entitled to a lawyer; you can’t refuse to let me see one—an English-speaking one—and I think I’d better speak to the British consul first and ask his advice on who should represent me.’

‘All in good time. It’s your right, of course, but this is only a preliminary interview—we aren’t charging you yet—so first we have to establish that you are going to need a lawyer, surely?’ The black eyes were shrewd, watchful, hard. ‘Or are you admitting your guilt?’

‘No!’ The word exploded. Patrick paused, flushed and tense. ‘No,’ he said more calmly. ‘I haven’t done anything to be guilty about.’

‘Well, then, no need for lawyers and consuls,’ smiled the brigadier bluffly, and Patrick almost began to feel easier, then the man added, ‘Yet!’ and the fear kick-started into life again.

‘Sit down, Mr Ogilvie,’ the brigadier said. ‘I am going to have some coffee—would you like some?’

Patrick nodded.

‘Black? Milk? Sugar?’

‘Black, sugar,’ Patrick said, and the brigadier lifted a phone, gave an order, leaned back in his chair, 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?’