Obsession (51 page)

By the time Phillip arrived Corrie was already on her second Bellini. She saw him before he saw her, and thought straight away how different he looked to the last time they’d met. He seemed to be standing straighter, walking tall and there was an expression of something like eagerness in his eyes. Then, to her amazement, when he spotted her his whole face lit up.

Corrie was instantly annoyed. Though he had sounded friendly enough on the phone earlier, she certainly hadn’t expected anything like this. But if something had happened to soften him then he could at least, she thought, show some remorse for the way he’d treated her before. She quickly pushed that to one side though, it hardly mattered now in light of what she had to tell him. If anything, she realized with inordinate relief, it was going to make it easier.

‘Hello,’ he said, sitting down on the small couch beside her. ‘Am I late?’

‘No,’ Corrie told him. ‘I was early. I needed to fortify myself before you got here in case you turned on me again.’

‘I’m not going to do that,’ Phillip assured her, with an immediate and very genuine sorrow in his eyes. ‘I’m never going to do that again, Corrie. In fact, I was hoping, I mean, if you’re agreeable, that we might turn back the clock and pretend that this is the first time we’ve ever met.’

Corrie was more than a little thrown by this, and found herself looking helplessly about the plush, dusky-pink room as though in its ornateness she might discover what she should say. She didn’t want to sound churlish by telling him it was too late for that, yet on the other hand it just
wasn’t
that easy to forget all that had gone before. Why, she wondered angrily, did she feel that if Cristos were here he could give her the answer? She was perfectly capable of finding it for herself! Except she couldn’t. So she simply turned back to her father and forced herself to smile.

He smiled too, and then she saw the uncertainty in his eyes. He was afraid she would reject him, was even expecting her to, and because of it Corrie felt her heart starting to thaw.

‘I’m a weak man,’ he said frankly, ‘I know that. And I have many other faults besides. But I am capable of love, and I want you to know, Corrie, that I loved your mother more than I’ve ever loved any woman.’

Then why did you abandon her the way you did? Corrie wanted to shout. Though deep in her inner-self she was asking herself if she should tell him that Edwina had loved him too – until the day she died. But fearing that would upset him, Corrie decided not to. And it was that decision which started her realizing that coming to him was going to be of no help at all. If anything, it was he who needed her help. He wanted her to ease him over his guilt, not only by forgiving him for what he’d done to her mother, but by telling him that she understood. Corrie could see it all written there in his earnestly imploring eyes. But she didn’t understand! She could never understand a man who had allowed his child to grow up pretending he didn’t even know she existed. And to think of all the pain he had caused her mother …

But then she remembered Luke, recalled vividly the night she had seen Phillip at Luke’s apartment, and how certain she had been that Luke was somehow, for some reason, tormenting her father. Just like he was tormenting Annalise. And that, after all, was why she was here – to talk about Annalise, or, she realized now, more specifically about Luke. But, dear God, how to begin?

She did, somehow, but with more false starts than she’d
care
to remember, until eventually she realized that she had her father’s undivided attention. In fact, he was listening so intently to everything she was telling him, that Corrie could feel herself in danger of losing her concentration. She was suddenly reassessing him, thinking that perhaps he wasn’t so spineless after all, because the look on his face was of such deep anger and concern that she just couldn’t believe that he was incapable of acting now.

When Corrie had finished, sparing him nothing, right down to the way Luke had threatened the night before that he would hurt Annalise again if Corrie didn’t agree to marry him, Phillip’s face was so rigid that she really didn’t know what he was thinking. But she found out soon enough, and if his response hadn’t been so tragic it would have been laughable.

‘Just tell me what you want me to do, Corrie,’ he said, gravely. ‘Just tell me and I’ll do it.’

Unable to stop herself Corrie closed her eyes in exasperation. So the decisions were going to be hers. How tired she suddenly felt, and how responsible too. He was like a child, and just as though he were a child, she had no doubt that he meant every word he’d said. He would do anything she asked of him, it was just that he wouldn’t, probably couldn’t, take the responsibility himself.

‘You could begin,’ she said, wearily, ‘by telling me what it is that Luke Fitzpatrick is holding over you.’

If she’d expected any reluctance, hesitation even, she’d have been wrong, because there was none. ‘Oh, that’s to do with my wife,’ he said, and his eagerness in honesty was so touching that Corrie actually found herself moved by it. She listened, with no surprise, to what he then told her about Octavia. It was so frank, so utterly repulsive and revealing of himself, that it had to be true. No man would make up a story like that about his wife, most of all not about himself, and after all Corrie had met Octavia herself. The profligacy wasn’t difficult to believe.

‘But there’s more, isn’t there,’ she said, when he’d finished. ‘There has to be, or why else is Luke behaving the way he is with Annalise and me?’

‘I really don’t know the answer to that,’ Phillip said helplessly. ‘God knows, I wish I did.’

Corrie looked at him, then steeling herself to be brutal she began by saying, ‘Luke must hate you to an almost unimaginable degree to be doing this to you, after all we are your daughters. So please, tell me, what have you done to him? Because you must have done something for …’

‘I’ve done nothing, Corrie. I swear to you, nothing. I don’t know why he’s doing it, I don’t even know what he’s trying to achieve. All I know is that he’s been terrorizing my family one way or another ever since I went into partnership with him. That was why I didn’t want to get involved with you. I was afraid that if he knew who you were he’d start hurting you too.’

‘But you’re here now,’ Corrie said. ‘So what’s happened to change that?’

Phillip bowed his head and Corrie could already sense there was another heart-wrenching confession to come. It saddened her to think that it had to be like this, but how else could she help him – any of them – unless he told her the entire truth?

It was some time before he spoke, but when he did it was only to ask if he could hold her hands. Had he not asked then things might have turned out very differently, but he did, and Corrie gave him her hands. And that was how, before Phillip could tell her anything about the prostitutes, Octavia discovered them.

The scene that followed was so staggering in its suddenness that Corrie simply sat rooted in horrified fascination. The true ugliness of Octavia’s face was seeping through its mask of surgery. Corrie had never heard such invective, nor such venom in her life. It wasn’t until Octavia suddenly
started
to strike Phillip that she finally came to her senses and jumped to her feet to defend him.

‘Get your hands off me, you slut!’ Octavia snarled, as Corrie started to drag her away. ‘Get your filthy hands off of me. This is a whore!’ she cried to an approaching waiter. ‘A whore in the Ritz! What are you doing letting scum like her in the door? Get her out of here! Get the bitch …’

‘Shut up!’ Corrie hissed. ‘Just shut up before I slap your face!’

‘She’s threatening me!’ Octavia screamed to anyone who was listening, and everyone was. ‘She’s threatening me with violence, and that’s my husband sitting there! She’s got the audacity to threaten me while she’s trying to procure money from my husband …’

Phillip was on his feet. ‘Octavia!’ he barked. ‘Pull yourself together, now!’ And to Corrie’s amazement, he wrenched Octavia from her and started to march her out of the hotel.

Totally dumbfounded Corrie stood and watched them go, as stunned now by the sudden assertiveness in Phillip as she was by Octavia’s outburst. It was only when the waiter touched her lightly on the arm to enquire if he could get her anything else that Corrie remembered where she was. She looked around to see that all eyes were still on her, and recalling all too vividly what Octavia had called her she hastily settled the bill and left.

But the degradation of Octavia’s words that seemed to crawl out into the street after her was sufferable, if only for the fact that she had managed to get through to Phillip. To what degree she wasn’t yet sure, but right at that moment she felt a strong desire to congratulate him for the way he had taken Octavia in hand. Corrie would lay odds that he had never done it before, she only hoped he had it in him to carry on doing it. Or better still, to leave Octavia altogether. But more pressing than that was what he was going to do about Annalise. Corrie already knew she’d have
to
decide that for him, but whatever she concluded he’d do it, of that she was certain. The question was, what
could
he do when neither of them had any idea what they were up against?

Phillip himself however, believed he had the answer, for early the next morning, unbeknownst to Corrie, he went to the police and told them everything he’d been holding back from them about Luke.

He was extremely pleased with himself when he left the station, but had he only known it, he’d made such a mess of what he’d told them, that after he’d left DI Radcliffe and DC Archer were of the opinion that somehow the father had now become embroiled in the love problems concerning his two daughters and Luke Fitzpatrick. However, with a certain weariness they did call Fitzpatrick back to the station.

‘I don’t believe this!’ Luke stormed, when they repeated what Phillip Denby had disclosed to them. ‘I told you before, I don’t know anything about Bobby McIver or about those murdered women except what you’ve told me yourselves! And the reason I didn’t come to you before about Denby was precisely because he is the father of the woman I’m in love with …’

‘Who is?’ Radcliffe enquired.

‘Annalise Kapsakis.’

‘But if you had suspicions, Luke,’ Radcliffe pointed out, ‘then you shouldn’t have kept them to yourself. That’s an offence, you know, withholding information.’

‘But I tried everything I could to make the man come forward himself. And he did, didn’t he? Surely you can give me credit for that.’

Radclife waited.

‘Look,’ Luke said, dashing a hand through his hair. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, but it looks like I’ll have to. That family is really screwed up. I mean seriously screwed up. If it weren’t for Annalise I’d pull out right now. Shit,
they’re
nearly taking me round the bend with them. If you only knew the half of it …’

‘We’ve got time,’ Radcliffe said.

‘OK. Then here it is.’ And Luke then told the police not only what Octavia was like, but that Phillip was trying to hide the fact that he had another daughter whom neither his wife nor Annalise knew about. ‘On top of which,’ he added, ‘the bastard beats Annalise half out of her senses, has done all her life, which is why she spends as much time as she can with me. I’m the only one she has to protect her, and I’m trying to keep Corrie away from him now before he starts on her. So if you want to question anyone around here, I suggest you start over again with him.’

‘But we only have your word for this, Luke,’ Radcliffe reminded him.

‘Then it’s up to you whose word you take,’ Luke said, ‘because quite frankly I’ve had it up to here. And until somebody does something about that bastard then I’m quite prepared to accept that I’m on my own.’

‘You’re asking us to help?’ Archer asked.

‘Help, intervene, whatever you want to call it.’ He laughed suddenly and bitterly. ‘Oh, I know what you call it, you call it a domestic. You don’t want to get involved, do you?’

‘Don’t we?’ Radcliffe said. ‘If he’s beating up on either one of those girls then we want to know about that.’

‘Well I’ve told you, so it’s up to you now to do the rest,’ Luke stated, only just able to disguise his triumph. They’d never find any evidence against Denby, and Denby could point the finger all he liked at him, he’d never get anywhere without Annalise to back him up. Which was something Annalise would never do, just so long as Luke asked her to marry him. He wouldn’t marry her of course, he couldn’t, he was going to marry Corrie – but it was vital that for now he kept Annalise on his side.

That wasn’t going to be easy though, he was thinking to
himself
as he walked back down the street. Corrie was proving almost impossible to control, but damn it, he’d work it out. Didn’t he work everything out in the end. In fact, now he came to think of it, he knew precisely how he was going to handle Corrie, but he’d have to be exceptionally careful how he went about it, for Corrie was nobody’s fool. In fact, on second thoughts, he wasn’t too sure he should risk it. No, keeping Corrie occupied with Bennati wasn’t such a good idea, since the last thing he wanted was for Bennati to whisk her out from under his nose. He wanted Corrie himself, he needed her, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that, despite everything, he must do all he could to keep her and Bennati apart. Which might not be a problem at all were Bennati not right here in England, and just to think of that caused the demon of rage to heave to his throat. He was only sorry that he couldn’t be taking Corrie, right now, but with the police breathing down his neck the way they were that just wasn’t possible. But he’d be having her in the end, to be sure he would. But first there was Annalise to be dealing with … Annalise, his darling Annalise, who was so like Siobhan it tore his heart apart just to look at her. And all the bastard had done to Siobhan he, Luke Fitzpatrick, was going to inflict on Annalise … It was the only way, he knew that now – he only wondered why he’d never seen it before. All this time he’d been fighting to stop himself, but he knew he no longer could, or should. Because only then, once this devil inside him was exorcised, could he turn to Corrie. Corrie, his everlasting salvation, the perfect mother for his children, the only one of them he would never hurt … Unless Bennati got in his way.