A Suitable Vengeance

“We came here as boys. I expect he hadn’t forgotten it. But those papers look old. He can’t have been here recently.”


“Hmm. Yes. They’re from a year ago April. But someone’s been here more recently than that.” St. James indicated several sets of footprints on the dusty floor. They led to a wall ladder that gave access to the mill loft and the gears and shafts which drove its great grindstone. St. James examined the ladder rungs, pulled on three of them to test their safety, and began an awkward ascent.

Lynley watched him make his slow way to the top, knowing quite well that St. James would expect him to follow. He could not avoid doing so. Nor could he any longer avoid the force of reminiscence that the mill—and more so, the loft above him—provoked. For after ages of searching, she’d found him up there, where he had hidden from her and from the knowledge that he had come upon unexpectedly.

Dashing up through the garden from the sea, he’d only had a glimpse of the man passing before a first floor window, a glance that gave him the impression of height and stature, a glance in which he saw only his father’s paisley dressing gown, a glance in which he hadn’t bothered to think how impossible it was that his father—so ill—would even be out of bed, let alone sauntering round his mother’s bedroom. He didn’t think of that, only felt instead a sunshot bolt of joy as the words cured cured cured sang out in his mind and he ran up the stairs—pounded up the stairs calling to them both—and burst into his mother’s room. Or at least tried to. But the door was locked. And as he called out, his father’s nurse hurried up the stairs, carrying a tray, admonishing him, telling him he would awaken the invalid. And he got only as far as saying, “But Father’s…” before he understood.

And then he called out to her in a such savage rage that she opened the door and he saw it all: Trenarrow wearing his father’s dressing gown, the covers on her bed in disarray, the clothing discarded hastily on the floor. The air was heavy with the pungent odour of intercourse. And only a dressing room and bath separated them from the room in which his father lay dying.

He’d flung himself mindlessly at Trenarrow. But he was only a slender boy of seventeen, no match for a man of thirty-one. Trenarrow hit him once, a slap on the face with his open palm, the sort of blow one uses to calm an hysterical woman. His mother had cried, “Roddy, no!” and it was over.

She had found him in the mill. From the one small window in the loft, he watched her coming through the woodland, tall and elegant, just forty-one years old. And so very beautiful.

He should have been able to maintain his poise. The oldest son of the earl, after all, he should have possessed the strength of will and the dignity to tell her that he’d have to return to school and prepare for exams. It wouldn’t matter whether she believed him. The only object was to be off, at once.

But he watched her approach and thought instead of how his father loved her, how he shouted for her—“Daze! Darling Daze!”—whenever he walked into the house. His life had revolved round making her happy, and now he lay in his bedroom and waited for the cancer to eat away the rest of his body while she and Trenarrow kissed and clung and touched and…

He broke. She climbed the ladder, calling his name. He was more than ready for her.

Whore, he screamed. Are you crazy? Or just so itchy that anyone will do? Even someone with nothing more on his mind than sticking you a good one and laughing about it with his mates in the pub when he’s done. Are you proud of that, whore? Are you fucking proud?

When she hit him, the blow came completely by surprise because she had stood there, immobile, and accepted his abuse. But with his last question, she struck him so hard with the back of her hand that he staggered against the wall, his lip split open by her diamond ring. Her face never changed. It was blank, carved in stone.

You’ll be sorry! he screamed as she climbed down the ladder. I’ll make you sorry! I’ll make both of you sorry. I will!

And he had done so, over and over again. How he had done so.

“Tommy?”

Lynley looked up to find St. James watching him over the edge of the loft.

“You might want to see what’s up here.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He climbed the ladder.



It had only taken a moment for St. James to evaluate what he found in the loft. The mill shaft, its tremendous gears, and its grindstone took up much of the space, but what was left gave mute evidence of the use to which the mill had been put most recently.

In the centre of the room stood a rusting card table and one folding chair. This latter held a discarded T-shirt, long ago metamorphosed from white to grey, while on the surface of the former an antique postage scale measured the weight of a tarnished spoon and two dirty razor blades. Next to this was an open carton of small plastic bags.