A Suitable Vengeance (51 page)

“We’ll survive all this, Deborah. We’ll find our way back. We’ll be what we were. Don’t cry.” Roughly, he kissed the side of her head. She turned into his arms. He held her, stroked her hair, rocked her, said her name. And all at once felt flooded by peace. “It doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “We’ll always be mates. We’ll never lose that. I promise.”

At his words, he felt her arms slip round him. He felt the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest. He felt her heart beating, felt his own heart pounding, and accepted the fact that he had lied to her again. They would never be friends. Friendship was absolutely impossible between them when with so simple a movement—her arms slipping round him—every part of his body lit on fire for her.

Half a dozen admonitions rang out in his head. She was Lynley’s. He had hurt her quite enough already. He was betraying the oldest friendship in his life. There were boundaries between them that couldn’t be crossed. His resolve was acceptance. We aren’t meant to be happy. Life isn’t always fair. He heard each one of them, vowed to leave the room, told himself to release her, and stayed where he was. Just to hold her, just to have her like this for one moment, just to feel her near him, just to catch the scent of her skin. It was enough. He would do nothing else…save touch her hair again, save brush it back from her face.

She lifted her head to look at him. Admonitions, intentions, boundaries, and resolves were shot to oblivion. Their cost was too high. They didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Just the moment, now, with her.

He touched her cheek, her brow, traced the outline of her lips. She whispered his name, a single word that finally obliterated fear. He wondered how he had ever been afraid to lose himself in the love of this woman. She was himself. He saw that now. He accepted that truth. It was a form of fulfillment. He brought his mouth to hers.

Nothing existed save being in his arms. Nothing mattered save the warmth of his mouth and the taste of his tongue. It was as if only this single moment counted, allowing her life to be defined by his kiss.

He murmured her name, and a sure current passed between them, gathering force from the wellspring of desire. It swept away the past and took in its flow every belief, every intention, every aspect of her life but the knowledge that she wanted him. More than loyalty, more than love, more than the promise of the future, she wanted him. She told herself that this had nothing to do with the Deborah who was Tommy’s, who slept in Tommy’s bed, who would be Tommy’s wife. This had to do only with a settling of accounts, one hour in which she would measure her worth.

“My love,” he whispered. “Without you—”

She drew his mouth back to hers. She bit his lips gently and felt them curve in a smile. She wanted no words. In their place, she wanted only sensation. His mouth on her neck, describing a curve to the hollow of her throat; his hands on her breasts, teasing and caressing, dropping to her waist to the belt of her dressing gown, loosening it, pushing the gown from her shoulders, slipping the thin straps of her nightdress down the length of her arms. She stood. The nightdress slid to the floor. She felt his hand on her thigh.

“Deborah.”

She didn’t want words. She bent to him, kissed him, felt him drawing her down to him, heard her own sigh of pleasure as his mouth found her breast.

She began to touch him. She began to undress him.

“I want you,” he whispered. “Deborah. Look at me.”

She couldn’t. She saw the candles’ glow, the stone surround of the fireplace, the bookshelves, the glint of a single brass lamp on his desk. But not his eyes or his face or the shape of his mouth. She accepted his kiss. She returned his caress. But she did not look at him.

“I love you,” he whispered.

Three years. She waited for the rush of triumph, but it didn’t come. Instead, one of the candles began to gutter, spilling wax in a messy flow onto the hearth. With a hiss, the flame died. The burnt wick sent up a wisp of smoke whose smell was sharp and disturbing. St. James turned to the source.

Deborah watched him do so. The single small flame of the remaining candle flickered like wings against his skin. His profile, his hair, the sharp edge of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder, the sure quick movement of his lovely hands…She got to her feet. Her fingers trembled as she put on her dressing gown and fumbled uselessly with its slippery satin belt. She felt shaken to her core. No words, she thought. Anything else, but no words.

“Deborah…”

She couldn’t.

“For God’s sake, Deborah, what is it? What’s wrong?”

She made herself look at him. His features were washed by a storm of emotion. He looked young and so vulnerable. He looked ready to be struck.

“I can’t,” she said. “Simon, I just can’t.”

She turned away from him and left the room. She ran up the stairs. Tommy, she thought.

As if his name were a prayer, an invocation that could keep her from feeling both unclean and afraid.

PART VI

EXPIATION

CHAPTER

25

T
he day’s fair weather had begun to change by the time Lynley touched the plane down onto the tarmac at Land’s End. Heavy grey clouds were scuttling in from the southwest and what had been a mild breeze back in London was here gathering force as a rain-laden wind. This transformation in the weather was, Lynley thought bleakly, a particularly apt metaphor for the alteration that his mood and his circumstances had undergone. For he had begun the morning with a spirit uplifted by hope, but within mere hours of his having decided that the future held the promise of peace in every corner of his life, that hope had been swiftly overshadowed by a sick apprehension which he believed he had put behind him.

Unlike the anxiety of the past few days, this current uneasiness had nothing to do with his brother. Instead, from his meetings with Peter throughout the night had grown a sense of both renewal and rebirth. And although, during his lengthy visit to New Scotland Yard, the family’s solicitor had depicted Peter’s danger with transparent simplicity unless the death of Mick Cambrey could be unassailably pinned upon Justin Brooke, Lynley and his brother had moved from a discussion of the legal ramifications of his position to a fragile communion in which each of them took the first tentative steps towards understanding the other’s past behaviour, a necessary prelude to forgiving past sins. From the hours Lynley had spent talking to his brother had come the realisation that understanding and forgiveness go hand-in-hand. To call upon one is to experience the other. And if understanding and forgiveness were to be seen as virtues—strengths of character, not illustrations of personal weakness—surely it was time he accepted the fact that they could bring harmony to the single relationship in his life where harmony was most needed. He wasn’t certain what he would say to her, but he knew he was ready to speak to his mother.

This intention—a resolution which lightened his steps and lifted his shoulders—began to disintegrate upon his arrival in Chelsea. Lynley dashed up the front steps, rapped on the door, and came face to face with his most irrational fear.

St. James answered the door. He was pleasant enough with his offer of a coffee before they left, and confident enough with his presentation of his theory about Justin Brooke’s culpability in Sasha Nifford’s death. Under any other circumstances the information about Brooke would have filled Lynley with the surge of excitement that always came with the knowledge that he was heading towards the conclusion of a case. Under these circumstances, however, he barely heard St. James’ words, let alone understood how far they went to explain everything that had happened in Cornwall and London over the past five days. Instead, he noted that his friend’s face was etiolated as if from an illness; he saw the deepening of the lines on his brow; he heard the tension beneath St. James’ exposition of motive, means, and opportunity; and he felt a chill through his skin and settle in every vital organ of his body. His confidence and his will—both flagships of the day—lost a quick battle with his growing dismay.

He knew there could be only one source of the change that had come over St. James, and she walked down the stairs not three minutes after his arrival, adjusting the leather strap of a shoulder bag. When she reached the hallway and Lynley saw her face, he read the truth and was sick at heart. He wanted to give sway to the anger and jealousy that he felt in that instant. But instead, generations of good breeding rose to commandeer his behaviour. The demand for an explanation became meaningless social chitchat designed to get them through the moment without so much as a hair of feeling out of place.

“Working hard on your photos, darling?” he asked her and added, because even good breeding had its limits, “You look as if you haven’t had a moment’s rest. Were you up all night? Are you finished with them?”

Deborah didn’t look at St. James, who went into the study where he began rooting in his desk. “Nearly.” She came to Lynley’s side, slipped her arms round him, lifted her mouth to kiss him, and said in a whisper against his lips, “Good morning, darling Tommy. I missed you last night.”

He kissed her, feeling the immediacy of her response to him and wondering if everything else he had seen was merely the product of pathetic insecurity. He told himself that this was the case. Nonetheless he still said, “If you’ve more work to do, you don’t need to go with us.”

“I want to go. The photographs can wait.” And, with a smile, she kissed him again.

All the time with Deborah in his arms, Lynley was acutely aware of St. James. During the journey to Cornwall, he was aware of them both. He studied every nuance in their behaviour towards him, in their behaviour towards each other. He examined each word, each gesture, and remark under the unforgiving microscope of his own suspicion. If Deborah said St. James’ name, it became in his mind a veiled avowal of her love. If St. James looked in Deborah’s direction, it was an open declaration of commitment and desire. By the time Lynley taxied the plane to a halt on the Land’s End airstrip, he felt tension coiling like a spring in the back of his neck. The resulting pain was only a secondary consideration, however. It was nothing compared to his self-disgust.

His roiling emotions had prevented him from engaging in anything other than the most superficial of conversations during the drive to Surrey and the flight that followed it. And since not one of them was gifted with Lady Helen’s capacity for smoothing over difficult moments with amusing chatter, their talk had ground itself down to nothing in very short order so that when they finally arrived in Cornwall, the atmosphere among them was thick with unspoken words. Lynley knew he was not the only one to sigh with relief when they stepped out of the plane and saw Jasper waiting with the car next to the tarmac.

The silence during their ride to Howenstow was broken only by Jasper telling him that Lady Asherton had arranged to have two of the farm lads waiting at the cove “at half-one like you said ’at you wanted.” John Penellin was still being held in Penzance, he confided, but the happy word had gone out to everyone that “Mister Peter be found.”

“Her ladyship’s looking tenyers younger this morning for knowing the lad’s safe,” Jasper concluded. “She was wacking her tennis balls at five past eight.”

They said nothing more. St. James riffled through the papers in his briefcase, Deborah watched the scenery, Lynley tried to clear his mind. They met neither vehicle nor animal on the narrow lanes, and it wasn’t until they made the turn onto the estate drive that they saw anyone at all. Nancy Cambrey was sitting on the front steps of the lodge. In her arms, Molly sucked eagerly at her bottle.

“Stop the car,” Lynley said to Jasper, and then to the others, “Nancy knew about Mick’s newspaper story from the first. Perhaps she can fill in the details if we tell her what we know.”

St. James looked doubtful. A glance at his watch told Lynley that he was concerned about getting to the cove and from there to the newspaper office before much more time elapsed. But he didn’t protest. Nor did Deborah. They got out of the car.

Nancy stood when she saw who it was. She led them into the house and faced them in the entry hall. Above her right shoulder, an old, faded sampler hung on the wall, a needlepoint scene of a family picnic, with two children, their parents, a dog, and an empty swing hanging from a tree. The wording was nearly obscure, but it probably had spoken, with well-meaning inaccuracy, of the constant rewards of family life.

“Mark’s not here?” Lynley asked.

“He’s gone to St. Ives.”

“So your father’s still said nothing to Inspector Boscowan about him? About Mick? About the cocaine?”

Nancy didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She merely said, “I don’t know. I’ve heard nothing,” and walked into the sitting room where she placed Molly’s bottle on top of the television and the baby herself into her pram. “There’s a good girl,” she said and patted her back. “There’s a good little Molly. You sleep for a bit.”

They joined her. It would have been natural to sit, but none of them did so at first. Instead, they took positions like uneasy actors who do not yet know how their play will be blocked: Nancy with one hand curled round the push bar of the pram; St. James with his back to the bay window; Deborah near the piano; Lynley opposite her by the sitting room door.