A Suitable Vengeance

She felt defeated. The air in the car seemed stiflingly hot.

“Sometimes I think of telling them,” she said. “They say that’s the only way to cure it, you know.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” She saw his fingers curl.

“Important people in the user’s life find out. His family. His employers. So he bottoms out. Then he—”

Justin’s hand flashed, caught her wrist, twisted her hand. “Don’t even think of telling anyone. Don’t even think of it. I swear if you do, Sid…if you do…”

“Stop it. Look, you can’t go on like this. What are you spending on it now? Fifty pounds a day? One hundred? More? Justin, we can’t even go to a party without you—”

He dropped her wrist abruptly. “Then get out. Find someone else. Leave me bloody well alone.”

It was the only answer. But Sidney knew she couldn’t do it and she hated the fact that she probably never would.

“I only want to help.”

“Then shut up, all right? Let me go down that sodding alley, make the buy and get out of here.” He shoved open the door and slammed it behind him.

Sidney watched him walk halfway across the square before she opened her own door. “Justin—”

“Stay there.” He sounded calmer, not so much because he was feeling any calmer, she knew, but because the square was peopled with Soho’s usual Friday night throng and Justin Brooke was not a man who generally cared for making public scenes.

She ignored his admonition, striding to join him, disregarding the certain knowledge that the last thing she ought to be doing was helping him get more supplies for his habit. She told herself instead that if she weren’t there, sharply on the lookout, he might be arrested or duped or worse.

“I’m coming,” she said when she reached him.

The whipcord of tension in his features told her he had moved beyond caring.

“As you like.” He headed towards the gaping darkness of the alley across the square.

Construction was underway there, making the alley mouth darker and narrower than usual. Sidney made a moue of distaste at the smell of urine. It was worse than she had expected it to be.

Buildings loomed up on either side, unlit and unmarked. Grills covered their windows and their entryways housed shrouded, moaning figures who conducted the sort of illicit business which the nightclubs of the district seemed eager to promote.

“Justin, where’re you planning to—”

Brooke raised a cautionary hand. Up ahead, a man’s hoarse cursing had begun to fill the air. It came from the far end of the alley where a brick wall curved round the side of a nightclub to form a sheltered alcove. Two figures writhed upon the ground there. But this was no love tryst. This was assault, and the bottom figure was a black-clad woman who appeared to be no match in either size or strength for her furious assailant.

“You filthy…” The man—blond by the appearance of him and wildly angry by the sound of his voice—pounded his fists against the woman’s face, ground them into her arms, slammed them into her stomach.

At this, Sidney moved, and when Brooke tried to stop her, she cried out, “No! It’s a woman,” and ran towards the alley’s end.

She heard Justin’s sharp oath behind her. He overtook her less than three yards away from the couple on the ground. “Keep back. Let me see to it,” he said roughly.

Brooke grabbed the man by his shoulders, digging into the leather jacket he wore. The action of pulling him upward freed his victim’s arms, and she instinctively brought them up to protect her face. Brooke flung the man backwards.

“You idiots! Do you want the police after you?”

Sidney pushed past him. “Peter!” she cried. “Justin, it’s Peter Lynley!”

Brooke looked from the young man to the woman who lay on her side, her dress dishevelled and her stockings in tatters. He squatted and grabbed her face as if to examine the extent of her injuries.

“My God,” he muttered. Releasing her, he stood, shook his head, and gave a short bark of laughter.

Below him, the woman drew herself to her knees. She reached for her handbag, retching momentarily.

Then—most oddly—she began to laugh as well.





* * *



LONDON AFTERNOONS





CHAPTER 1


Lady Helen Clyde was surrounded by the trappings of death. Crime scene exhibits lay upon tables; photographs of corpses hung on the walls; grisly specimens sat in glass-fronted cupboards, among them one particularly gruesome memento consisting of a tuft of hair with part of the victim’s scalp still attached. Yet despite the macabre nature of the environment, Lady Helen’s thoughts kept drifting to food.

As a form of distraction, she consulted the copy of a police report that lay on the worktable before her. “It all matches up, Simon.” She switched off her microscope. “B negative, AB positive, O positive. Won’t the Met be happy about that?”