The Old Vengeful

'There were twelve Vengefuls—the twelfth was a submarine in '44, but that's being attended to elsewhere, and you don't need to worry about it. You've drawn the other eleven, and I want you to eliminate them ... or not, as the case may be.'

Ridiculous, thought Mitchell.

'And Loftus was the expert on all of them. So you will start with him,' said Audley. 'Or, seeing that he's dead, you must start with his daughter—even if it means playing mixed hockey!'

The hero's daughter

I

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ELIZABETH ONLY BECAME fully aware of the handsome young man after an intermediate sequence of more casual emotions.

There was a Victorian mirror on the bric-a-brac stall, opposite her own bookstall on the other side of the gangway—

a big, ugly old thing, mahogany-framed, solid as an old battleship and as unsaleable—it had been on the same stall in the previous sale, and hadn't sold that time either, and wasn't going to sell this time at half the price. But now he was looking into it, and he was looking at her.

The first time, she had put it down to accident—to the accidental adjustment of the mirror; then, when she noticed that he was still looking at her, she put it down to brief curiosity—to the discovery that he could stare into it without being noticed, without knowing that she had observed his curiosity. But the third time, after she had moved down her stall and had then come back to her original position beside the cash-box . . . then he was still there, and she began to wonder what it was that held his attention.

It couldn't be the cash-box, because his suit fitted too well for that—a nice summer suit that was never straight off the peg—

that suit was too good for what there was in her cash-box, and so was his haircut; even the three young tearaways from Leigh Park, whom she had observed casing the stalls earlier, had dismissed the box at a glance as containing too much silver and too few notes.

But then it couldn't be her, either—that was equally unlikely, dummy3

to the point of being ridiculous, even though she now represented a very great number of banknotes—because he couldn't know that. . .

Or could he?

She began to day-dream pleasurably along the lines which dear old Mr Lovell at the solicitors' had sketched obliquely, even though he was unaware of the half of her good fortune.

It still amused her, the new deference—not plain Elizabeth any more, now that she was an esteemed client and not Father's messenger; she was still plain Elizabeth herself, but in Lovell, Cole & Lovell she had become Miss Loftus; and dear old Mr Lovell, who had never been unkind to her, had tied himself into a Gordian Knot trying to warn her of the temptations and pitfalls waiting to ambuscade her, now that she was a woman of modest wealth and property, and all alone.

There were people, he said—

(He was still watching her: she was sure of that now!) There were people—old Mr Lovell couldn't bring himself to say men, just as he would not have dreamed of telling her that she was no oil painting even if she now had a golden frame—there were people who might come to her with . . .

ideas . . . She must be careful of the company she kept, careful of new friends who might not be friends at all, careful . . .

Some hope! thought Elizabeth: it was she herself who had all dummy3

the ideas—even silly ideas about impossibly good-looking young men who watched her surreptitiously in mirrors at church fetes—mysterious young men like the hero in that Mills and Boon romance she'd confiscated from Angela McManners last term, when Angela should have been deep in Lockyer's Habsburg and Bourbon Europe for her A-level.

And there, as a reminder of that episode, was huge Mrs McManners herself, just a few yards down the stall, browsing on the ckeapest and tattiest paperbacks—it would never do to let her catch Miss Loftus ogling young men!

'I'll take these two,' said Mrs McManners. 'Both from the 10p box, dear.'

'Thank you, Mrs McManners,' said Elizabeth sweetly.

' Purity's Passion and The Sultan's Concubine—shall I wrap them for you?'

'They're for my daughter—she's very fond of history.' Mrs McManners hastily stuffed her purchases into her basket. 'I must fly, dear.'

The idea of fifteen stone flying diverted Elizabeth momentarily as she dropped the coins in the box. Then a hand came into the corner of her vision, its index finger running up the titles towards her.

'And I'm very fond of history too.' The finger came to rest on one of Elizabeth's own contributions to her stall. ' From Trafalgar to Navarino: The Lost Legacy—by Commander Hugh Loftus, VC, RN.'

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But it didn't say all that on the dark blue spine, thought Elizabeth. There was only From Trafalgar to Navarino and Hugh Loftus picked out in gold there.

They looked at each other directly for the first time, eye to eye, but whatever she let slip in her expression she could see no sign of any acknowledgement in his that they had already scrutinised each other in the mirror.

'How much would that be, then?' he inquired.

In second thoughts, now that he was right here in front of her, he not only looked ten years older, but Elizabeth had the strangest feeling that she had seen him before somewhere; not before during this same afternoon, in some unregistered fleeting glance in the crowd, but before somewhere else . . .