'It's not quite like anything I've ever tasted.'
'Special, isn't it? I ought to bottle the stuff
'Yes. Well, it's good. Very good. Thank you. I'm terribly sorry about the row.'
'It was a great one. I couldn't help overhearing most of it - walls being what they are - and for a bit I thought it might come to blows. I'm just next door.' She cocked her thumb to the left. 'Tina Cogin.'
'Deborah Cotter. I moved in last night.'
'Is that what all the thumping and pounding was about?' Tina grinned. 'And to think I was imagining some competition. Well, none of that talk. You don't look the type to be on the game, do you?'
Deborah felt herself colouring. 'Thank you' hardly seemed an appropriate response.
Apparently finding reply unnecessary, Tina busied herself looking at her reflection in the glass that covered one of Deborah's photographs. She rearranged her hair, examined her teeth, and ran a long fingernail between the front two. 'I'm a ruin. Make-up just can't do it all, can it? Ten years ago, a bit of blusher was all it took. And now? Hours in front of a mirror and I still look like hell when I'm done.'
A knock sounded on the door. Sidney, Deborah decided. She wondered what Simon's sister would say about this unexpected visitor to her flat who was currently studying the photograph of Lynley as if she were considering him a source of future income.
'Would you like to stay for tea?' Deborah asked her.
Tina swung from the picture. One eyebrow lifted.
'Tea?' She said the word as if the substance had not passed her lips for the better part of her adult life. 'Sweet of you, Deb, but no. Three in this kind of situation is a bit of a crowd. Take it from me. I've tried it.'
'Three?' Deborah stammered. 'It's a woman.'
'Oh, no!' Tina laughed. 'I was talking of the table, love. It's a bit small, you see, and I'm all elbows and thumbs when it comes to tea. You just finish that drink and return the glass later. Right?'
'Yes. Thank you. All right.'
'And we'll have a nice litde chat when you do.'
With a wave of her hand, Tina opened the door, swept past Sidney St James with an electric smile, and disappeared down the hall.
3
Peter Lynley hadn't chosen his Whitechapel flat for either amenities or location. Of the former, there were none, unless one could call four walls and two windows - both painted shut - a strong selling feature. As to the latter, the flat indeed had ease of access to an Underground station, but the building itself was of pre-Victorian vintage, surrounded by others of a similar age, and nothing had been done to clean or renovate either buildings or neighbourhood in at least thirty years. However, both the flat and its location served Peter's needs, which were few. And, more importantly, his wallet, which as of today was nearly empty.
The way he had it worked out, they could make it another fortnight if they played it conservatively and held themselves to just five lines a night. All right, perhaps six. Then during the day they'd start looking for work in earnest. A job in sales for him. New performances for Sasha. He had the brains and the personality for sales. And Sasha still had her art. She could use it in Soho. They'd want her there. Hell, they'd probably never seen anything like her in Soho. It would be just like Oxford, with a bare stage, a single spotlight, and Sasha on a chair, letting the audience cut her clothes off, daring them to cut off everything. 'Get in touch with yourself. Know what you feel. Say what you want.' All the time she'd be smiling, all the time superior, all the time the only person in the room who knew how to be proud of who and what
she was. Head high, held confidently, arms at her sides. I am her posture declared. I am. I am.
Where was she? Peter wondered.
He checked the time. His watch was an unattractive, second-hand Timex that managed to exude an air of unreliability simply by existing. He'd sold his Rolex some time ago and had quickly discovered that relying on this current piece for accuracy was just about as ridiculous as relying on Sasha to make a score on her own without latching on to a copper's nark by mistake.
He avoided dwelling upon that thought by shaking his wrist anxiously and peering at the watch. Had its blasted hands even moved in the last half-hour? He held it to his ear, swore in disbelief at the gentle ticking. Could it only have been two hours since she'd left? It seemed like ages.
Restlessly, he got up from the sagging sofa, one of the room's three pieces of fourth-hand furniture, if one didn't count the cardboard cartons in which they kept their clothes or the overturned vegetable-crate that held their only lamp. The sofa unfolded into a lumpy bed. Sasha griped about it daily, saying it was doing in her back, saying she hadn't had a decent hour's sleep in at least a month.
Where was she? Peter went to one of the windows and flicked back its covering, a bedsheet crudely fashioned into a curtain by shoving a rusting rod through its hem. He gazed through the pane. It was grimy inside as well as out.
As Peter searched the street for Sasha's familiar form -for a glimpse of the old carpet-bag satchel she always carried - he took a dirty handkerchief from the hip pocket of his blue jeans and wiped his nose. It was an automatic reaction, done without thought. And the brief spurt of pain that accompanied it was gone in an instant and thus easily ignored as inconsequential. Without looking at the linen or examining the new, rust-coloured stains upon it, he replaced the handkerchief and chewed with rabbit bites on the side of his index finger.
In the distance, at the mouth of the narrow street in which they lived, pedestrians passed in Brick Lane, commuters on their way home for the day. Peter tried to focus upon them, making a deliberate exercise of attempting to pick Sasha out of the bobbing heads on their way to or from Aldgate East Station. She'd come on the Northern, he told himself, make a switch to the Metropolitan and home. So where was she? What was so hard about one buy, after all? Give over the money. Get the stuff. What was taking so long?
He mulled over the question. What was taking Sasha so long? For that matter, what was to prevent the little bitch from taking off with his cash, making the score on her own, and never coming back to the flat at all? In fact, why should she bother to return? She'd have what she wanted. That's why she continued to hang about.
Peter rejected the idea as completely impossible. Sasha wouldn't leave. She said only last week that she'd never had it as good as she had it from him. Didn't she beg for it practically every night?
Pensively, Peter wiped his nose on the back of his hand. When had they last done it? Last night, wasn't it? She was laughing like crazy and he'd caught her up against the wall and .. . wasn't that last night? Sammy from across the hall pounding on the door and telling them to hold it down, and Sasha shrieking and scratching and gasping for breath - only she wasn't shrieking, she was laughing - and her head kept bouncing back against the wall and he didn't finish with her, couldn't finish, but it didn't matter at the time because both of them were up in the clouds.
That was it. Last night. And she'd be back when she scored.
With his teeth, he pulled at the rough edge of a fingernail.
So. What if she couldn't make the buy? She'd talked big enough this afternoon about Hampstead, a house near the heath where deals went down if the money was right. So where was she? How long could it take to get there and back? Where the hell was she?
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 police? 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 plain-clothes policeman loitered beneath the street-lamp. 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 carpet-bag. He dumped its contents on to 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 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 socializing 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, God damn 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 apple-carts of three hundred years of law-abiding Lynleys? Upsetting Mummy? Upsetting big brother at Scotland Yard CID?'
'God damn 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.'
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, 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 carpet-bag, 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 drily, 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 on to the compact's mirror, hastily using a fingernail to chop it into dust. Using the rolled pound note, she inhaled in 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 organizational 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 jus
t a bit too much to hips.
'Rumour has Deb back in London,' Harriman said, replacing the picture and frowning at the unorganized clutter of his desk-top. 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?'
'Walking on bubbles with not a trouble in the world. If this is love, I'll take a double portion, thank you.'
He smiled, sorted through the files and handed two of them to her. 'Take these instead, will you? Webberly's waiting for them.'
Harriman sighed. 'I want love and he gives me' - she examined them - 'fibre optic reports from a killing in Bayswater. How romantic. I'm in the wrong line of work.' 'But it's noble work, Harriman.'
'Just what I need to hear.' She left him, calling out to someone to answer a phone that was ringing in an unmanned office nearby.
Lynley folded the memo and flipped open his pocket watch. It was half-past five. He'd been on duty since seven. There were at least three more reports on his desk waiting for comment, but his concentration was dwindling. It was time to join her, Lynley decided. They needed to talk.
He left his office, making his way down to the lobby and out the revolving doors onto Broadway. He walked along the side of the building - such an unprepossessing combination of glass, grey stone, and protective scaffolding - towards the green.
Deborah still stood where he had seen her from his office window, in the corner of that misshapen trapezoid of lawn and trees. She appeared to be alternating between studying the top of the Suffragette Scroll and gazing at it through her camera, which she had mounted on its tripod perhaps ten feet away.
Whatever she hoped to capture through the lens seemed to elude her, however. For, as Lynley watched, she scrunched up her nose, dropped her shoulders in disappointment, and began disassembling her equipment, packing it away in a sturdy metal case.
A Suitable Vengeance Page 5