A Suitable Vengeance

movements. He savoured her presence. He had no fondness for the tender angst of being in love with a woman who was six thousand miles away. So Deborah's absence had created anything but an easy time for him. Most of it he had spent with his mind fixed upon when he would next see her on one or another of his quick trips to California.

But now she was back. She was with him. He was fully determined to keep it that way.

He crossed the lawn, scattering pigeons who were pecking about in search of crumbs from afternoon lunches. They took hasty flight, and Deborah looked up. Her hair, which had been pulled back with a haphazard arrangement of combs, tumbled towards freedom. She muttered in exasperation and began to fuss with it.

'You know,' she said by way of greeting him, 'I always wanted to be one of those women who're described as having hair like silk. You know what I mean. An Estella Havisham type.'

'Did Estella Havisham have hair like silk?' He pushed her hand away and saw to the snarls himself.

'She must have. Can you imagine poor Pip falling for someone who didn't have hair like silk? Ouch!’

‘Pulling?'

'A bit. Honestly, isn't it pathetic? I lead one life and my hair leads another.'

'Well, it's fixed now. Sort of.' 'That's encouraging.'

They laughed together and began gathering her belongings which were scattered on the lawn. She'd come with tripod, camera-case, a shopping-bag containing three pieces of fruit, a comfortable old pullover, and her shoulder- bag.

'I saw you from my office,' Lynley told her. 'What are you working on? A tribute to Mrs Pankhurst?'

'Actually, I was waiting for the light to strike the top of the scroll. I thought to create some diffraction with the lens. Utterly defeated by the clouds, I'm afraid. By the time they decided to drift away, the sun had done so as well.' She paused reflectively and scratched her head. 'What an appalling display of ignorance. I think I mean the earth.' She fished in her shoulder-bag and brought out a mint which she unwrapped and popped into her mouth.

They strolled back towards Scotland Yard.

‘I’ve managed to get Friday off,' Lynley told her. 'Monday as well. So we're free to go to Cornwall. I'm free, that is. And if you've nothing planned I thought we might…' He stopped, wondering why he was adding the verbal apologia.

'Cornwall, Tommy?' Deborah's voice was no different when she asked the question, but her head was turned away from him so he couldn't see her expression.

'Yes. Cornwall. Howenstow. I think it's time, don't you? I know you've only just come back and perhaps this is rushing things. But you've never met my mother.'

Deborah said only, 'Ah. Yes.'

'Your coming to Cornwall would give your father an opportunity to meet her as well. And it's time they met.'

She frowned at her scuffed shoes and made no reply.

'Deb, it can't be avoided for ever. I know what you're thinking. They're worlds apart. They'll have nothing to say to each other. But that isn't the case. They'll get on. Believe me.'

'He won't want to do this, Tommy.'

'I've already thought of that. And of a way to manage it. I've asked Simon to come along. It's all arranged in fact.'

He did not include in the information the details of his brief encounter with St James and Lady Helen Clyde at the Ritz, they on their way to a business dinner and he en route to a reception at Clarence House. He also didn't mention St James' ill-concealed reluctance or Lady Helen's quick excuse. An enormous backlog of work, she'd said, promising to keep them busy for every weekend over the next month.

Helen's declining the invitation had been too quick to be believable, and the speed of her refusal, in combination with the effort she made not to look at St James, told Lynley how important absence from Cornwall was to them both. Even if he had wanted to lie to himself, he couldn't do so in the face of their behaviour. He knew what it meant. But he needed them in Cornwall for Cotter's sake, and the mention of the older man's possible discomfort was what won them over. For St James would never send Cotter alone to be wretchedly enthroned as a weekend visitor to Howenstow. And Helen would never abandon St James to what she clearly visualized as four days of unmitigated misery. So Lynley had used them. It was all for Cotter's sake, he told himself, and refused to examine the secondary reasons he had – even more compelling than Cotter's comfort – for arriving at Howenstow with a surfeit of companions.

Deborah was inspecting the silver letters on the Yard's revolving sign. She said, 'Simon's to go?'

'And Helen. Sidney as well.' Lynley waited for her further reaction. When there was none other than the smallest of nods, he decided they were finally close enough to the single area of discussion which they had long avoided. It lay between them, unspoken, putting down roots of potential doubt which needed to be extirpated once and for all.

'Have you seen him, Deb?'

'Yes.' She shifted her tripod from one hand to the other. She said nothing else, leaving everything up to him.

Lynley felt in his pocket for cigarette case and lighter. He lit up before she had a chance to admonish him. Feeling weighted down by a burden he did not wish to define, he sighed.

'I want to get us through this, Deb. No, that's not quite true, is it? We need to get through it.'

'I saw him the night I got home, Tommy. He was waiting up for me in the lab. With a homecoming present. An enlarger. He wanted me to see it. And then the next afternoon he came to Paddington. We spoke.'

That's all was left unsaid.

Lynley tossed his cigarette to one side, angry with himself. He wondered what it was that he really wanted Deborah to say, and why he expected her to account for a relationship with another man that had spanned her entire life, and how on earth she could ever begin to do so. He disliked the belief that was eating at his confidence, a gnawing conviction that somehow Deborah's return to London had the power to nullify every word and act of love that had passed between them in the last several years. Perhaps, hidden beneath the most troubling of his feelings, was the real reason he was determined to have St James with them in Cornwall: to prove to the other man once and for all that Deborah was his. It was a contemptible thought.

'Tommy.'

He roused himself to find that Deborah was watching him. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to tell her how he loved the way her green eyes were flecked with bits of gold, the way her skin and hair reminded him of autumn. But all of that seemed ridiculous right now.

'I love you, Tommy. I want to be your wife.'

That, Lynley decided, didn't seem ridiculous at all.

Part Three. BLOOD SCORE

4

Nancy Cambrey scuffed her feet along the gravel drive that wound from the Howenstow lodge to the great house. She sent up delicate puffs of dust like miniature brown rain-clouds. It had been an unusually dry summer thus far, so a greyish patina of grime dressed the leaves of the rhododendrons that lined the roadway, and the trees arching overhead seemed not so much there to provide shade as to trap the heavy, dry air beneath their boughs. Out from under the trees the wind whipped round from Gwennap Head on its way into Mount's Bay from the Adantic. But where Nancy walked the air was still as death, and it smelt of foliage burned to cinders by the sun.