A Suitable Vengeance

“Wouldn’t Mark have heard it then?”


“Mark?” Nancy hesitated. Obviously, she hadn’t yet considered her brother. “No. Mark sleeps heavy, doesn’t he? Plays his music sometimes as well. He’d not have heard. But they’re both upstairs asleep. For certain.” She moved on the seat, preparatory to getting out. St. James opened the door. “I’ll just go on in. I do thank you. I can’t think what would’ve happened if I hadn’t found you on Paul Lane.”

Her words were growing progressively drowsier. Lynley got out, and with St. James he helped her from the car. Despite Nancy’s declaration that both father and brother were sleeping soundly in the lodge, Lynley had no intention of leaving her without making sure that this was the case.

Beneath her words he had heard the unmistakable note of urgency which generally accompanies a lie. It was not inconceivable that she had spoken to her father by telephone during the evening. But he had not been home when Lynley had phoned from Gull Cottage just ninety minutes ago, and Nancy’s protestations that he—as well as her brother—would sleep through the noise of the telephone were not only improbable but also indicative of a need to conceal.

Taking Nancy’s arm, he led her up the uneven flagstone path and onto the porch where the climbing roses cast a sweet fragrance on the warm night air. Once inside the house, a quick look in the rooms affirmed his suspicions. The lodge was empty. As Nancy drifted into the sitting room and sat in a cane-backed rocking chair where she sang tonelessly to her daughter, he went back to the front door.

“No one’s here,” he said to the others. “But I think I’d rather wait for John than take Nancy up to the house. Do you want to go on yourselves?”

St. James made the decision for them all. “We’ll come in.”

They joined Nancy in the sitting room, taking places among and upon the overstuffed furniture. No one spoke. Instead they each attended to the Penellin personal effects which crammed the walls, the table tops, and the floor, attesting to the lives and personalities of the family who had occupied the lodge for twenty-five years. Spanish porcelains—the passion of Nancy’s mother—collected dust upon a spinet piano. Mounted butterflies in a dozen frames hung on one wall and these, along with a quantity of aging tennis trophies, spoke of the wide swings which Mark Penellin’s interests took. A broad bay window displayed a mass of Nancy’s poorly executed petit point pillows, faded and looking in their serried line as if they’d been placed there to get them out of the way. In one corner, a television set held the room’s only photograph, one taken of Nancy, Mark, and their mother at Christmastime shortly before the railway disaster that ended Mrs. Penellin’s life.

After a few minutes of listening to the sounds of crickets and a nightingale drifting in the window which Lynley had opened, Nancy Cambrey stood. She said, “Molly’s dropped off. I’ll just pop her upstairs,” and left them.

When they heard her movement on the floor above, it was Lady Helen who put into words what had been playing in the back of Lynley’s mind. She spoke in her usual, forthright manner.

“Tommy, where do you suppose John Penellin is? Do you think Nancy really spoke to him during the play? Because it seems to me that there’s something decidedly odd in the way she insisted that she’d talked to him.”

Lynley was sitting on the piano bench, and he pushed softly against three of the keys, producing a barely audible discordance. “I don’t know,” he replied. But even if he could ignore Helen’s intuitive remark, he could not forget his conversation with Nancy that afternoon or the aversion with which her father had spoken of Nancy’s husband.

The clock struck the half hour. Nancy returned to them. “I can’t think where Dad is,” she said. “You’ve no need to stay. I’ll be fine now.”

“We’ll stay,” Lynley said.

She pushed her hair behind her ears and rubbed her hands down the sides of her dress. “He must’ve just gone out a bit ago. He does that sometimes when he can’t sleep. He walks on the grounds. Often he does that before he goes to bed at night. On the grounds. I’m sure that’s where he’s gone.”

No one mentioned the wild improbability of John Penellin’s taking a walk on the grounds at half past two in the morning. No one even had to, for events conspired to prove Nancy a liar. Even as she made her final declaration, a car’s lights swept across the sitting room windows. An engine coughed once. A door opened and shut. Footsteps rang against the flagstones and, a moment later, on the porch. She hurried to the door.

Penellin’s voice came to the others clearly. It sounded sharp. “Nancy? What’re you doing here? It’s not Mark, is it? Nancy, where’s Mark?”