A Suitable Vengeance

“Can I do anything?” she asked. “Anything at all? Please. I feel so useless.” She looked stricken and afraid. “I can’t believe someone would actually want to hurt Sidney. She’s just gone off somewhere, Simon. Hasn’t she? She’s in agony over Justin. She needs to be alone.”


He heard the penultimate statement and knew it for the truth. He had seen his sister’s grief in Cornwall and had felt the inchoate fury which that grief provoked. Still, she had gone and he had allowed her to do so. Whatever fell upon Sidney now was in large part his responsibility.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. He started for the door. His face was impassive. He could feel each feature settle until he wore a perfectly insensate mask. He knew that Deborah wouldn’t understand such a reaction to her offer. She would read it as rejection, seeing it, perhaps, as an adolescent retaliation for everything that had passed between them since her return. But that couldn’t be helped.

“Simon. Please.”

“There’s nothing more to be done.”

“I can help. You know I can.”

“There’s no need, Deborah.”

“Let me help you find her.”

“Just wait here for Tommy.”

“I don’t want—” She stopped. He could see a pulse beating in her throat. He waited for more. There was nothing. Deborah took in a slow breath, but she didn’t look away. “I’ll go to Cheyne Row.”

“There’s no point to that. Sidney won’t be there.”

“I don’t care. I’m going.”

He had neither the time nor the wish to argue with her. So he left, forcing himself back to his original purpose in returning to London. He hoped that a visit to Islington-London might somehow reveal the truth behind Mick Cambrey’s death and that this additional death in Whitechapel were somehow tied to the previous two. For tying them together would serve as a means of exonerating Sidney. And tying them together meant a pursuit of the ghost of Mick Cambrey. He was determined to incarnate this spectre from Cornwall. Islington-London seemed to offer the final opportunity of doing so.

But in the back of the taxi, he felt his weary mind lose the battle against images that attacked his calm, forcing him back to a time and a place he thought he had left behind forever. There, he saw them as they had appeared at the hospital, distorted faces emerging out of the fugue created by alternating states of consciousness and by the drug that deadened his most immediate suffering. David and Andrew in hushed consultation with the doctors; his mother and Helen, riven by sorrow; Tommy, driven by guilt. And Sidney. Just seventeen years old, with a butchered-up haircut and earrings that looked like communication satellites. Outrageous Sidney, reading to him from the most ridiculous of the London dailies, laughing uproariously at the worst of their gruesome and titillating stories. She was always there, never missing a day, refusing to allow him to sink into despair.

And then later in Switzerland. He remembered the bitterness with which he had looked at the Alps from his hospital window, loathing his body, despising its weakness, confronting for the very first time the inescapable reality of never being able to walk with ease in those mountains—or any others—again. But Sidney was with him, bullying, shouting, harassing him back to health, stubbornly insisting he would live to an old age even when he prayed each night that he might die.

Remembering all this, he fought against the facts that nagged at his consciousness: Sidney’s presence in Soho, the nature of her relationship with Justin Brooke, her easy access to drugs from the life she led, the people she knew, and the work she did. And while he tried to convince himself that she did not know—could not possibly have known—Mick Cambrey and thus could not be involved in his death in any way, he could not dismiss the fact that Deborah had told him Sidney had seen Tina Cogin that day in her flat. Sidney herself had talked about seeing Peter assaulting a woman in Soho, a woman whose description was identical to Tina’s. Even though it was tenuous enough to be disregarded as meaningless, the connection was there. He could not overlook it. So he wondered where she was and what she had done, while twenty-five years of mutual history cried out that he find her before the police.