A Suitable Vengeance

Peter grinned, tasted blood where he’d bitten through the skin. It was time for control. He inhaled. He stretched. He touched his toes.

It didn’t matter, anyway. He had no real need of it. He could stop any time. Everyone knew that. One could stop any time. Still and all, he was something with it. Master manipulator, king of the world.

The door opened behind him and he spun to see that Sasha was back. In the doorway, she pushed her lank hair off her face and watched him warily. Her stance reminded him of a cornered hare.

“Where is it?” he asked.

An emotion flickered across her features. She kicked the door closed and went to the sofa where she sat on its threadbare brown cushions, her back to him, her head dropped forward. Peter felt the skeletal fingers of warning dance against his skin.

“Where is it?”

“I didn’t…I couldn’t…” Her shoulders started shaking.

Control disintegrated in an instant.

“You couldn’t what? What in hell’s going on?” He dashed to the window and inched back the curtain. Christ, had she blown it? Had she been followed by the cops? He peered at the street. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. No unmarked police car held occupants busily observing the building. No van stood illegally against the kerb. No plainclothes policeman loitered beneath the streetlamp. There was nothing.

He turned back to her. She was watching him over her shoulder. Her eyes—like a dog’s curious shade of yellow and brown—were watery, red-rimmed. Her lips trembled with defeat. He knew.

“Jesus Christ!” He flew across the room, shoved her to one side, and grabbed the carpetbag. He dumped its contents onto the sofa and sifted through them. His hands were clumsy, his frantic search useless. “Where the hell…? Where’s the stuff, Sasha? Where is it? Where?”

“I didn’t—”

“Then where’s the cash?” Sirens shrieked in his head. The walls tilted in. “Sasha, what the fuck have you done with the cash?”

Sasha reared up at that, right off the sofa and across the room. “That’s it?” she shouted. “‘Where the fuck is the cash?’ Not ‘Where’ve you been?’ Not ‘I’ve been worried.’ But ‘Where the fuck is the cash?’” She whipped back the sleeve of her stained, purple jersey. Deep scratches covered her jaundiced skin. Bruises were rising to the surface there. “Look for yourself! I was mugged, you little bastard!”

“You were mugged?” The question climbed a scale of disbelief. “Don’t you give me that crap. What’ve you done with my cash?”

“I told you! Your sodding wad of cash was pinched on the bloody platform of the bloody station. I’ve spent the last two hours socialising with the bloody Hampstead police. Ring them yourself if you don’t believe me.” And she began to sob.

He couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t. “Christ, you can’t do anything, can you?”

“No, I can’t. And neither can you. If you’d got it yourself last Friday like you said you would—”

“I told you, goddamn it. How many times do I have to repeat it? It didn’t work out.”

“So you got me to do it, didn’t you?”

“I got you?”

“You did. You bloody well did!” Her face worked bitterly. “You were too flipping terrified that you’d get busted, weren’t you? So you left it to me. Don’t harp on it now when it didn’t work out.”

Peter felt his palm itch with the need to strike her, to see the red rush of blood on her skin. He walked away from her, buying time, seeking calm, trying to think what to do. “You’ve got them, Sash. All the facts. All in order.”

“It was all right, wasn’t it, if I took the fall? What difference would that make? Sasha Nifford. Nobody. Nothing in the newspapers about her, right? But what would it look like if the Honourable Peter got his little hands slapped?”

“Shut up about that.”

“Making smelly little messes on the family name?”

“Shut up!”

“Upsetting the applecarts of three hundred years of law-abiding Lynleys? Upsetting Mummy? Upsetting big brother at Scotland Yard CID?”

“Goddamn you, shut up!”

Someone below them pounded on the ceiling, shouting for peace. Still, Sasha glared at him, her posture and expression daring him to disprove what she’d said. He couldn’t.

“Let’s just think this out,” he muttered. He noticed that his hands were shaking—every joint had begun to sweat as well—and he shoved them into his pockets. “There’s always Cornwall.”

“Cornwall?” Sasha sounded incredulous. “Why the hell—”

“I don’t have enough money here.”

“I don’t believe it. If you’re out of money, ask your brother for a cheque. He’s rolling in cash. Everyone knows that.”