Obsession

by Susan Lewis

  ‘But that’s not Siobhan. That’s Annalise …’

  ‘You’ll not be fooling me now,’ he growled. ‘’Tis Siobhan right there.’

  ‘No!’ Corrie cried. ‘Luke, please, listen to me. That’s Annalise there. So tell me, who is Siobhan?’

  ‘She’s his sister!’ Annalise sobbed. ‘Siobhan is his sister.’

  Luke’s head jerked back, as though someone had struck him. Then suddenly he was moving towards Annalise.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she shrieked, cowering back in the chair. ‘Keep away from me!’

  A mask of feral rage dropped over Luke’s face as he grabbed her by the throat.

  ‘Luke! Stop!’ Corrie yelled, struggling to break free of the rope.

  He spun round. ‘And who are you to be giving me orders?’ he snarled, thrusting Annalise back on the chair and advancing on Corrie. ‘Just who will you be thinking you are to tell me what to do?’

  Corrie was pressed hard into a corner of the bench, her head strained back away from him, her whole body shaking with fear. ‘Don’t hurt her,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Why?’ he rasped. ‘Why shouldn’t I hurt her? She’s mine to do with as I please. She’s mine, do you hear? Mine! She’s nothing to do with you …’

  ‘Luke, stop it, please!’ Corrie sobbed.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ he shrieked, mimicking her. ‘It’s too late for that now, Corrie. It’s too late to be …’ He stopped suddenly and cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. Then a strange, knowing smile twisted across his mouth as he turned once again to Annalise.

  ‘You haven’t told her, have you?’ he said. ‘She’s not knowing who …’

  ‘Shut up!’ Annalise seethed. ‘Just shut up!’

  Luke sniggered and went to sit on the chair with Annalise. For a moment or two he was still, then looking down at her legs he lifted a hand and placed it on her thigh. Annalise recoiled so violently that the chair almost tipped over.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she screeched. ‘Don’t ever touch me again or I swear I’ll kill you!’ Her eyes were gleaming so wildly she looked half deranged, and her fingers were bent like claws ready to attack.

  ‘It’ll be rabbit stew for you tonight, now,’ he taunted her, picking up the bowl from the floor. ‘I’ll be serving it to you, right here in your dish and you’ll be eating every mouthful now, won’t you?’

  Annalise’s eyes darted to Corrie, and Luke seized the moment to lunge at her. As his full weight hit her Annalise grunted with the pain. He had her arms pinned between their bodies, his legs hooked around hers – she couldn’t move. Then his hands slipped around her throat and he started to squeeze the life from her.

  Corrie was screaming for him to stop while scrabbling frantically with the knots at her ankles.

  ‘Tell me you’ll fuck me and I’ll let you go,’ Luke seethed into Annalise’s face. ‘Tell me you want my cock, tell me it’s all you ever want …’

  ‘Tell him! For Christ’s sake, tell him!’ Corrie yelled, but Annalise was lying limply beneath him, all the fight gone from her body. ‘Annalise!’ Corrie screamed. ‘Annalise, for God’s sake! He’s going to kill you! Just tell him!’

  Still there was no response from Annalise, then Corrie saw the way she was staring up into Luke’s face. She was so calm, so frighteningly still, that were it not for the expression in her eyes she might already have been dead – and the expression chilled Corrie to the very depths of her soul. It was as though Annalise wanted him to kill her, was waiting, almost longing, for the moment when her life would slip away. But until that moment she was going to gaze into the eyes of the man she had loved, right through to the corrupt and tortured void of his mind and let him feel the fathomless depths of her hatred.

  ‘No!’ Corrie cried, clawing helplessly at the knots. ‘Annalise, don’t do this! Annalise! Listen to me …’

  But Annalise was intent on fuelling his madness with all the loathing in her heart.

  Corrie cried out to her again and again, watching helplessly as she started to choke, as her face turned blue. Even in her panicked state Corrie could sense that in some horrific, inexplicable way, this was a battle of wills – but it was one that Annalise was going to lose.

  But Corrie was wrong, and she watched in stupefaction as with an inhuman snarl Luke suddenly wrenched himself away, so abruptly that the chair pitched wildly on its chains.

  ‘I’ll be having a much better idea,’ he said starting towards Corrie, and taking a knife from his pocket he sliced through her bonds. Instinctively Corrie cowered away from him then cried out as he gouged his fingers into her upper arm and dragged her across the veranda. Screwing her hair in his fist he forced her head down to look at Annalise, who was still struggling to heave the air back into her lungs.

  ‘You be telling me now, is she or is she not a beautiful woman?’

  ‘Yes, she’s beautiful,’ Corrie gasped, wincing against the pain as she twisted her body to try and get away from him.

  Luke laughed. ‘Ah, now, that’s good to be hearing you say that, ’cos you won’t mind getting down there with her and fucking her yourself now, will you?’

  Corrie’s eyes rounded with horror.

  ‘And What’ll be the matter with you?’ he said, pulling her round so that his face was almost touching hers.

  ‘Luke, stop this!’ Corrie pleaded. ‘You don’t want us …’

  ‘Ah, but I do. It’ll be you who doesn’t want it now Corrie. Or will you just be pretending? Is it that you don’t want her to be knowing how you’ve lusted after her all these months? How you’ve dreamed of getting your hands on her body? Or putting your tongue in her …’

  ‘Luke, for Christ’s …’ She gasped as his hand cracked across her face, so hard that she staggered back onto Annalise.

  ‘That’s it, you be getting onto the bed with her now,’ he snickered. ‘Put your hand between her legs.’

  ‘Luke …’

  ‘Do it!’ He slapped her again, bringing the blood spurting from her nose.

  Annalise gasped as though it was she who’d been struck. ‘Corrie, please! Just do it,’ she begged.

  ‘I can’t,’ Corrie cried.

  ‘You can, please.’

  Luke was watching them and grinning. ‘Do you want to be telling her why you can’t do it?’ he said to Corrie.

  ‘Stop it!’ Annalise yelled. ‘Stop tormenting her like this.’

  ‘Do it, or tell her!’ Luke snarled at Corrie. ‘You be telling her why it is you can’t bring yourself to touch her and she’ll be telling you why you can.’

  ‘You’re sick!’ Corrie hissed up at him. ‘You’re warped, you’re …’

  ‘Don’t you be speaking to me that way, you filthy cunt,’ he raged, and his fist smashed into her face splitting her lips wide open.

  ‘Corrie, for God’s sake, do as he tells you,’ Annalise cried and grabbing Corrie’s hand she thrust it between her legs.

  ‘That’ll be it now,’ Luke grinned, a lascivious light leaping to his eyes. ‘Make her rub you.’

  As Corrie coughed and gurgled on the blood in her mouth Annalise moved her hand back and forth over her crotch. Luke leaned forward and yanked down her panties. ‘Put her fingers in you,’ he growled.

  ‘No!’ Corrie spluttered, jerking her hand away. ‘I won’t do it!’

  Above them Luke was snorting with laughter. ‘Is it the incest that’s bothering you now, Corrie?’

  Corrie’s head fell back against the chair and she turned to look at Annalise.

  ‘But Annalise knows all about incest, isn’t that right, Annalise? It’s why she tried to kill herself, isn’t it m’darling?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Annalise yelled. ‘Just shut up!’

  ‘Annalise, what is it? Tell me …’

  For a long moment Annalise’s eyes blazed up into Luke’s, then turning to look at Corrie she said, ‘You’re not my sister, Corrie. I know you think you are, but you’re not.’

  Corrie was so confused she could only
shake her head. ‘But Phillip … Phillip’s my father,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ Annalise said, and as the enormity of the trauma she had suffered engulfed her she pressed a bunched fist to her mouth as if to keep in the stultifying horror of it. ‘I know he is,’ she whispered. ‘But he’s not my father.’

  ‘What?’ Corrie gasped, then seeing the way Annalise was looking up at Luke Corrie spun round to look at him too. Then, as the paralysis of shock started to creep through her body, it was as though the world was trying to suck her into an abyss of endless horror. ‘No,’ she breathed, starting to pull away from them both. ‘No, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Annalise said, ‘my own mother told me.’

  – 28 –

  ‘BENNATI?’ RADCLIFFE SAID into the phone. ‘I think you should get yourself over here. Bring Denby with you.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Radcliffe paused. This wasn’t something he could tell Bennati over the phone – but there was something he could. ‘The frogs have just informed me that a taxi-driver’s been missing since yesterday afternoon,’ he said. ‘He was last seen taking two women who fit Corrie’s and Annalise’s descriptions out of the airport.’

  ‘What about Fitzpatrick?’

  ‘No mention, but they’re working on it. Anyway, there’s someone just flown in from London you and Denby ought to meet.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A doctor. He’s with the frogs now, but he should be finished by the time you get here. We’ll be at my hotel,’ and he rang off.

  Minutes later Cristos and Phillip roared away from the Majestic Hotel in Cristos’s hired Peugeot, heading along the Croisette for the autoroute to Nice. Both men’s faces were taut and concentrated on the impossibly dense traffic. Cristos held his hand menacingly on the horn and jumped red lights. Behind them a convoy of press, who had dived into their cars the second Cristos and Phillip had leapt into theirs, were creating even more havoc in their efforts to keep up.

  ‘Shit!’ Cristos suddenly muttered under his breath.

  ‘What is it?’ Phillip asked.

  Cristos shook his head and kicking his foot down hard spun the car into the Boulevard Carnot. What he’d just remembered had no relevance to where they were going. He’d forgotten that he was taking his mother to a screening of Past Lives Present. But she’d understand. She knew what all this meant to him, and, to quote her, it was one hell of a lot more than the Palme d’Or meant to her.

  An hour later, having been alerted by reception, Radcliffe was waiting at the door of his hotel room when Cristos and Phillip stepped out of the lift.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cristos wanted to know. ‘Did they find the taxi-driver yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Radcliffe answered, waving them into his room. ‘But they’re keeping me posted.’

  As Cristos, followed by Phillip, walked into the featureless room a man in his mid-fifties with a head of glossy silver hair and an ungainly, thin body turned from the terrace where he’d been gazing absently into the cluttered street below.

  ‘Doctor Horowitz, Cristos Bennati, Phillip Denby,’ Radcliffe said as Horowitz stepped back into the room.

  When the three men had shaken hands and all of them, with the exception of Cristos, were seated, Radcliffe said, ‘The doctor here read in the papers that we were looking for Fitzpatrick. He got onto the police in London, now he’s here to help. He’s got something to tell you that, well …’

  Cristos frowned as a wave of unmistakable discomfort came over Radcliffe – it was almost as though he was wishing that the doctor hadn’t bothered.

  ‘You better tell Mr Denby and Mr Bennati what you told me, doctor,’ Radcliffe said lamely.

  ‘Yes,’ Horowitz said, and removing his half spectacles he raised his sombre grey eyes to Phillip’s. ‘You have my deepest sympathy for the strain you are undoubtedly under at this time, sir,’ he said in his faintly accented voice. ‘I only wish that it were in my power to alleviate your anguish. Unfortunately however, I find myself in the position of having to add to it and must therefore ask you to prepare yourself for a shock.’

  Panic burned across Phillip’s eyes as they darted between Horowitz and Cristos. If the doctor was condoling with him and him alone then it must be … ‘Annalise!’ he cried, starting to get up. ‘What is it? What’s happened to her?’

  ‘We still don’t know,’ Radcliffe said, putting a hand on Phillip’s shoulder to steady him. He turned to the doctor, ‘Just get it over with,’ he murmured.

  With a grim smile the doctor nodded. ‘I’m afraid, Mr Denby, that Annalise, your youngest daughter … Well, I’m afraid, she isn’t your daughter.’

  ‘What?’ Cristos hissed.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Phillip cried. He spun round to Radcliffe. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘Who is this man? How dare you …’

  ‘Please,’ Radcliffe interrupted, ‘hear him out.’

  ‘No! ‘I’m damned if ‘I’m going to sit here and listen to some quack …’

  ‘Denby!’ Radcliffe said sternly. ‘You’re not her father. I know you think you are, but you’re not. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to find out like this, but you’d have had to sooner or later …’

  Ashen faced and trembling Phillip turned to Cristos.

  ‘You’d better be able to back this up,’ Cristos said to Horowitz, his voice dangerously low.

  Horowitz glanced at Radcliffe who turned his head away, making it apparent he wished he was anywhere right now other than where he was. ‘Finish it,’ Radcliffe muttered into his hand.

  Horowitz turned back to Phillip. ‘Luke Fitzpatrick is Annalise’s natural father,’ he said flatly.

  Cristos’s eyes flew to Phillip.

  ‘You’re crazy!’ Phillip yelled, leaping to his feet. ‘The man’s crazy!’ he roared to Cristos. ‘Get him out of here! Just get him away from me before I …’

  ‘Denby!’ Radcliffe barked, as Philip lunged towards Horowitz. Like a shot he was between the two men and wrestling Phillip back into his chair.

  ‘What are you trying to do to him?’ Cristos shouted at Horowitz. ‘The girl’s been having an affair with Fitzpatrick for over two years …’

  ‘I know,’ Horowitz said gravely. ‘At least I know it now.’

  For several moments the two men looked at each other. Cristos’s eyes were blazing hostility, the doctor’s were a sorrowful insistence of the truth. In the end the doctor stared Cristos down and clasping a hand to his head Cristos turned away. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he muttered. ‘I just don’t fucking believe it!’

  ‘Would you like some brandy, Mr Denby?’ Radcliffe was saying, shaking Phillip’s arm. ‘Shall I get you something from the bar?’

  Phillip was slumped in his chair, his stark white face an effigy of the deepest and most painful confusion. It was as though someone had struck him a death blow and he couldn’t work out why it was he was still alive.

  ‘We have brandy right here in the room,’ Radcliffe persisted.

  ‘Just get it!’ Cristos snapped.

  As Radcliffe crossed the room to the mini-bar Horowitz went to Phillip and putting a hand on his arm said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denby. ‘I’m truly very sorry.’

  Phillip blinked, but whether he had heard the words there was no way of telling. He seemed to be lost, floundering in a despair the like of which Cristos couldn’t even begin to imagine. However, it revived him a little when, taking the brandy from Radcliffe, Cristos put it to his lips.

  ‘Thanks,’ Phillip whispered, taking the glass from Cristos. He tried to make himself smile, but his lips merely contorted in a grimace of bewilderment and pain.

  ‘We don’t have to go on with this,’ Cristos said, squeezing his shoulder. ‘If you want some time …’

  Phillip shook his head. ‘No, I think we’d better hear it. After all, there could be some mistake. I mean, I was there when Annalise was born. I saw her come into the world …’ It was only then, as Phillip and Cr
istos looked at each other, that it seemed to occur to either of them that Octavia …

  ‘She can’t have,’ Phillip said, his eyes steeping with horror. He turned to Horowitz. ‘No, you see, there is a mistake. My wife has always known about Annalise and Luke’s affair, she wouldn’t have let it continue … Jesus Christ! She’d never have let it start if Luke was Annalise’s father.’

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Denby,’ Horowitz said soberly, ‘that that is precisely what she did do.’

  Cristos stared at him aghast. ‘Are you saying that Annalise’s own mother allowed her to have an affair with Fitzpatrick, knowing that she was Fitzpatrick’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bennati, that is what I’m saying.’

  Cristos turned back to Phillip who was holding his head in his hands. ‘What kind of woman are you married to?’ Cristos muttered incredulously. ‘What kind of fucking mother is she?’

  Phillip didn’t answer, but no one expected him to. What Octavia had done was beyond any words he could find, that anyone could find.

  ‘Does Annalise know?’ Cristos asked Horowitz.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I wouldn’t imagine …’

  ‘I think she knows,’ Phillip interrupted, and as they all turned to look at him they saw tears pushing their way through his fingers. ‘It would explain why she tried to kill herself,’ he went on, his voice slurred with emotion. ‘It would explain why she’s been the way she has since – with her mother and with Luke.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Cristos murmured.

  ‘I think,’ Phillip said, pulling his head up and looking at Horowitz with wide, haunted eyes, ‘that you’d better start from the beginning.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Horowitz said. When he returned to his chair he looked up at Radcliffe and Cristos, as though asking them to sit too. Radcliffe did, but Cristos walked to the window, sliding it closed to drown out the sounds of the traffic.

  ‘I have known Luke Fitzpatrick for some years,’ Horowitz began when Cristos turned and leaned his shoulders against the window. ‘I have his sister, Siobhan Fitzpatrick, in my clinic.’

  ‘Siobhan?’ Phillip interrupted.