A Suitable Vengeance

Peter went back to the window, gnawing his thumb.

“But you won’t do that, will you?” Sasha continued. “You wouldn’t dare ask your brother for a loan. We’re going to traipse all the way to Cornwall because you’re scared to death of him. You’re absolutely petrified at the thought of Thomas Lynley’s getting wise to you. And what if he does? What is he, your keeper? Just some big toff holding an Oxford degree? Are you such a little pansy that—”

“Stow it!”

“I won’t. What the hell’s in Cornwall that we’ve got to go there?”

“Howenstow,” he snapped.

Her jaw dropped. “Howenstow? A little visit with Mummy? Jesus, that’s just about what I’d expect of you next. Either that or sucking your thumb. Or playing with yourself.”

“Fucking bitch!”

“Go ahead! Hit me, you pathetic little twit. You’ve been aching to do it ever since I walked in the door.”

His fist clenched and unclenched. God, how he wanted to. Years of upbringing and codes of behaviour to hell. He wanted to pound on her face, see blood pour from her mouth, break her teeth and her nose, to blacken both of her eyes.

Instead, he fled the room.



Sasha Nifford smiled. She watched the closed door, meticulously counting the seconds that it would take Peter to crash down the stairs. When a sufficient amount of time had elapsed, she cracked the bedsheet back from the window and waited for him to fling himself from the building and stumble down the street towards the corner pub. He did not disappoint her.

She chuckled. Getting rid of Peter hadn’t been difficult at all. His behaviour was as predictable as a trained chimpanzee’s.

She went back to the sofa. From the spilled contents of her carpetbag, she took a chipped compact and flipped it open. A pound note was folded into the mirror. She removed it, rolled it, and reached into the V neck of her jersey.

Brassieres, she thought dryly, have such varied uses. She removed a plastic bag which held the cocaine she’d bought for them in Hampstead. Cornwall be damned, she smiled.

Her mouth watered as she poured a small quantity of the drug onto the compact’s mirror, hastily using a fingernail to chop it into dust. Using the rolled pound note, she inhaled it greedily.

Heaven, she thought, leaning back against the sofa. Unutterable ecstasy. Better than sex. Better than anything. Bliss.



Thomas Lynley was on the telephone when Dorothea Harriman entered his office, a sheet of memo paper in her hand. She gave the paper a meaningful shake and winked at him like a fellow conspirator. Seeing this, Lynley brought his conversation with the fingerprint officer to a conclusion.

Harriman waited until he had hung up the phone. “You’ve got it, Detective Inspector,” she announced, using his full, organisational title in her cheerfully perverse fashion. Harriman never referred to anyone by mister, miss, or ms when she had the opportunity to string six or ten syllables together as if she were making introductions at the Court of St. James. “Either the stars are in the right position, or Superintendent Webberly’s won the football pools. He signed without a second glance. I should be so lucky when I want time off.”

Lynley took the memo from her. His superior officer’s name was scrawled in approval across the bottom along with the barely legible note, “Have a care if you’re flying, lad,” seven words that telegraphed Webberly’s accurate guess that he planned upon heading to Cornwall for a long weekend. Lynley had no doubt that the superintendent had also deduced his reason for the trip. Webberly had, after all, seen and remarked upon the photograph of Deborah on Lynley’s desk, and although he was not himself uxorious, the superintendent was always first with congratulations when one of his men got married.

The superintendent’s secretary was examining this picture herself at the moment. She squinted to bring it into focus, once again eschewing the spectacles which Lynley knew were in her desk. Wearing spectacles detracted from the marked resemblance Harriman bore to the Princess of Wales, a resemblance which she did much to promote. Today, Lynley noted, Harriman was wearing a reproduction of the black-sashed blue dress which the Princess had worn to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in America. Royalty had looked quite svelte with it on. Harriman, however, was given over just a bit too much to hips.

“Rumour has Deb back in London,” Harriman said, replacing the picture and frowning at the unorganised clutter of his desktop. She gathered up a fan of telephone messages, clipped them together, and straightened five files.

“She’s been back for more than a week,” Lynley answered.

“That’s the change in you, then. Grist for the marriage mill, Detective Inspector. You’ve been grinning like a fool these last three days.”

“Have I?”