A Suitable Vengeance

Peter looked at his brother as if for guidance. First his tongue then his teeth sought his upper lip. “She was like that,” Peter said.

Lynley’s fingers whitened on his brother’s shoulder. It was obvious that Sergeant Havers saw this, for she exhaled in a brief, knowing snort, a woman who possessed no affinity for Thomas Lynley and no fellow-feeling for his situation. She turned back to the bed. MacPherson began speaking to her in a low, quick voice. She jotted down notes.

When MacPherson had completed his preliminary inspection, he joined Peter and Lynley. He drew them to the far corner of the room as the forensic pathologist took over, pulling on surgical gloves. The pathologist probed, touched, poked, and examined. In a few minutes, it was over. He murmured something to Havers and made way for the scenes-of-crime officers.

St. James watched them begin to gather the evidence, his every sense alive to the presence of Sidney’s silver bottle on the floor. The water glass on the packing crate was placed into a sack and marked. The tarnished spoon likewise. A fine residue of powder, which St. James himself had not seen in his first inspection of the fruit packing crate, was carefully brushed from its surface into a container. Then the crate was inched to one side, and the bottle itself was plucked from the floor. When it, too, had been dropped into a sack, the twenty-four hours had begun.

St. James signaled to Lynley that he was going to leave. The other man joined him.

“They’ll be taking Peter in,” Lynley said. “I’ll go with him.” And then, as if he believed that his intention to accompany his brother in some way negated his prior determination to let Peter stand on his own, he went on to say, “I must do that much, St. James.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Will you tell Deborah for me? I’ve no idea how long I’ll be.”

“Of course.” St. James thought how to phrase his next question, knowing that Lynley, upon hearing it, would leap to a conclusion which might make him refuse. Still, he had to have the details, and he had to have them without Lynley’s knowing why. He led into it cautiously. “Will you get me some information from the Yard? As soon as they have it?”

“What sort of information?”

“The postmortem. As much as you can. As soon as you can.”

“You don’t think that Peter—”

“They’re going to rush things through for you, Tommy. It’s the most they can do, all things considered, and they’ll do it. So will you get the information?”

Lynley glanced at his brother. Peter had begun to shake. MacPherson rooted through the pile of clothing on the floor until he found a striped sweatshirt which he handed over to Havers who inspected it with deliberate slowness before passing it on to Peter.

Lynley sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “All right. I’ll get it.”



In the back of the taxi spinning towards St. Pancras, St. James tried to remove every thought of his sister from his mind, replacing her image with an unsuccessful attempt to formulate some sort of plan of action. But he could come up with nothing other than a host of memories, each one more importunate than the last, making its own demand that he save her.

He had stopped briefly in Paddington to deliver Lynley’s message to Deborah. There, he had used her telephone, ringing his sister’s flat, her modelling agency, his own home, knowing all along that he was duplicating Lady Helen’s earlier efforts, knowing and not caring, not even thinking, doing nothing but trying to find her, seeing nothing but the silver bottle on the floor and the intricate scrollwork of initials that identified it as Sidney’s.

He was aware of Deborah standing nearby, watching and listening. She was alone in the flat—Helen having gone her way to do what she could with the messages on Mick’s answering machine and the file marked prospects—and he could read her concern in the fine tracery of lines that appeared on her brow as he continued to dial, continued to ask for his sister, continued to meet with no success. He found that, more than anything, he wanted to keep from Deborah the true nature of his fear. She knew Sasha was dead, so she assumed his concern revolved only round Sidney’s immediate safety. He was determined to keep it that way.

“No luck?” Deborah asked, when he finally turned from the telephone.

He shook his head and went to the table upon which they had left the material they’d gathered from Mick Cambrey’s flat. He sorted it, stacked it, tapped it into a neat pile which he folded and put into his jacket pocket.