A Prospect of Vengeance

fun?'

'No. I don't think it's fun ... Is that enough for you, Jen?'

'No?' She peered over his shoulder, and the smell of her and the beef aroused different carnal desires simultaneously. 'No, I'm absolutely ravenous . . . and look at all that lovely blood, too! God, I must take up cooking, I think — evening classes in cordon bleu, and all that — and nouvelle cuisine — that'll do, darling. What d'you think?'

What he thought was that she now had a heavy-manual-worker's plate of roast beef, which would make a nouvelle cuisine chef quite ill to look at. 'What I think, Jen, is ... that being followed scares me. And David Audley terrifies me ...

since you ask.' He offered her the plate.

'Can I have a little more of that . . . sort of gravy-stuff.'

'Blood, you mean?' He accepted the spoon she was holding out to him in anticipation. 'Well, at least you have the right appetite, I suppose.'

'What?' Greed deafened her for a moment. 'Do you want some of my Yorkshire pudding? I did put cheese in it, like the recipe said.'

Ian's memory of the outcome of that experiment enabled him to concentrate on his carving, while pretending similar deafness.

'What d'you mean — 'the right appetite'?' She had heard, after all.

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'People involved with Audley end up dead, according to Reg Buller.' He might as well match her greed: what wasn't eaten here and now would probably be thrown away, and it would be a sin to waste this noble animal.

'Ah! I see what you mean — ' She cleared a space for them on the kitchen table simply by throwing everything into the sink, higgledy-piggledy ' — and that's what this friend of Daddy's I talked to said, actually.'

'And doesn't that frighten you?' He watched her fish cutlery out of a drawer, and glasses from a cupboard. The cutlery was beautiful bone-handled antique, tarnished but razor-sharp, and the glasses were the thick and ugly petrol-coupon variety, and none-too-clean. But he was past caring about that now.

'I don't see why it should.' She let him pour, and then raised her glass high. 'Here's to us — and crime paying, anyway!'

Then she drank. 'Mmm! It is good — trust Daddy!' Then she attacked her beef. 'Mmmm! So's this!' She grinned and munched appreciatively. 'I mean ... if you look at what Johnnie and Reg dug up about him . . . it is all rather vague . . . sort of gossip, I mean . . . There were inquests. But there was always a perfectly reasonable story of some sort —

like that young man who blew himself up, during that cavaliers-and-roundheads mock-battle — '

'After someone else had got murdered, at another mock battle?' The need to concentrate on what she was saying detracted cruelly from the paradisal meat and wine. 'And dummy2

that case has never been closed, Reg says.'

'But Audley wasn't there, that time — '

'So far as anyone knows. But he was there the second time —

'

'But nowhere near the explosion — ' All the same, she nodded as she cut him off ' — I do agree, though: he is rather accident-prone . . . Except that he's never been summoned to give evidence, or anything like that.'

'Or anything like anything.' He swallowed, and disciplined himself against eating and drinking for a moment. 'And the year before last, when that visiting Russian general died —

Tully says he didn't have a heart-attack — that he was shot by someone.'

'But not by Audley, Ian.' Jenny didn't stop eating, but she had somehow become a devil's advocate. 'He's a back-room boy, not a gunfighter. He's too old for that sort of thing.'

'But he was there, somewhere — Tully also thought that — '

'No.'

Thus flatly contradicted, Ian returned to his food. Whatever crimes Audley had, or had not, connived at, there was no reason why he should compound them by letting his meat congeal on his plate. If Jenny thought Audley was innocent of the Russian general's death, so be it. And if he'd never come out into the limelight, so be that, too. Because Jenny quite obviously thought there were other things he had to answer for.

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'No.' She pushed her plate away and then filled her glass again, like Daddy's daughter.

'No?' He pushed his own empty glass towards her.

'Johnnie didn't think that. I told him that. But then he did some checking, and he says there was one hell of a shoot-out, somewhere down there in the West Country. Only it was all very efficiently hushed-up. And the Russians helped with the hushing, apparently.' She nodded at him. 'And Audley was probably mixed up in that.'

'Probably?' Jenny had a prime source — that was both obvious and nothing new: Jenny had more sources than she had had take-away dinners (or expensive restaurant dinners, for that matter). But, what was more to the point, it would be easier to excavate a two-year-old scandal than a nine-year-old one. 'Probably, Jen?'

'Maybe. But who cares?' She shrugged. 'It's Audley-and-Philly-Masson we're after, not Audley-and-General- Zarubin, darling.'

'But Zarubin sounds more promising.'