Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

The act ended anger.

Deborah started to speak, a fist at her lips, as if she were seeking the first horrified words of apology. But St James felt beyond hearing another word. He looked down at the broken fragments on the floor and crushed them into powder beneath his foot, a single sharp movement with which he demonstrated that love, like clay, can be pitiably friable.

With a cry, Deborah rushed across the room to where a few pieces lay beyond his reach. She picked them up.

'I hate you!' Tears finally coursed down her cheeks. 'I hate you! This is just the sort of thing I'd expect you to do. And why not when everything about you is crippled? You think it's just your stupid leg, don't you, but you're crippled inside, and by God, that's worse.'

Her words knifed the air, every nightmare come to life. St James flinched from their strength and moved towards the door. He felt numb, weak, and primarily conscious of the terrible awkwardness of his gait, as if it were magnified a thousand times for her to see.

'Simon! No! I'm sorry!'

She was reaching towards him, and he noted with interest that she'd cut herself on the edge of one of the pieces of porcelain. A hairline of blood ran from palm to wrist.

'I didn't mean it. Simon, you know I didn't mean it.' He marvelled at the fact that all previous passion was quite dead in him. Nothing mattered at all, save the need to escape.

'I know that, Deborah.'

He opened the door. It was a mercy to be gone.

The blood felt like rising floodwaters within his skull, the usual precursor of intolerable pain. Sitting in his old MG outside the Shrewsbury Court Apartments, St James fought it, knowing that if he gave it even a moment's sway the agony would be so excruciating that finding his way back to Chelsea without assistance would be impossible.

The situation was ludicrous. Would he actually have to telephone Cotter for assistance? And from what? From a fifteen-minute conversation with a girl just twenty-one years old? Surely he, eleven years her senior with a world of experience behind him, ought to have emerged the victor from their encounter rather than what he was at the moment – shattered, weak-kneed and ill. How rich.

He closed his eyes against the sunlight, an incandescence that seared his nerves, one that he knew did not really exist but was only the product of his heat-oppressed brain. He laughed derisively at the tortured convolution of muscle, bone, and sinew that for eight years had been his bar of justice, prison, and final retribution for the crime of being young and being drunk on a winding road in Surrey long ago.

The air he drew in was hot, fetid with the scent of diesel fuel. Still, he sucked it in deeply. To master pain in its infancy was everything, and he did not pause to consider that doing so would then give him leave to examine the charges which Deborah had hurled against him and, worse, to admit to the truth of every one.

For three years, he had indeed not sent her a message, not a single letter, not a sign of any kind. And the damnable fact behind his behaviour was that he could not excuse it or explain it in a way she might ever come to understand. Even if she did, what point would it serve for her to know now that every day without her he had felt himself growing just a bit more towards nothing? For while he had allowed himself to die by inches and degrees, Lynley had taken up position within the sweet circumference of her life, and there he had moved in his usual fashion, gracious and calm, completely self-assured.

At the thought of the other man, St James made himself stir and felt for the car keys in his pocket, determined not to be found – looking like a puling schoolboy – in front of Deborah's block of flats when Lynley arrived. He pulled away from the kerb and joined the rush-hour traffic that was hurtling down Sussex Gardens.

As the light changed on the corner of Praed Street and London Street, St James braked the car and let his glance wander forlornly with a heaviness that matched the condition of his spirit. Without registering any of them, his eyes took in the multifarious business establishments that tumbled one upon the other down the Paddington street, like children eager to grab one's attention on the pathway to the Tube. A short distance away, beneath the blue and white Underground sign, a woman stood. She was making a purchase of flowers from a vendor whose cart stood precariously, one wheel hanging over the kerb. She shook back her head of close-cropped black hair, scooped up a spray of summer flowers, and laughed at something the vendor said.

Seeing her, St James cursed his unforgivable stupidity. For here was Deborah's afternoon guest. Not Lynley at all, but his very own sister.

The knocking began at her door just moments after Simon left, but Deborah ignored it. Crouched near the window, she held the broken fragment of a fluted wing in her hand, and she drove it into her palm so that it drew fresh blood. Just a drop here and there where the edges were sharpest, then a more determined flow as she increased the pressure.

Let me tell you about swans, he had said. When they choose a mate, they choose once and for life. They learn to live in harmony together, little bird, accepting each other just the way they are. There's a lesson in that for us all, isn't there?

Deborah ran her fingers over the delicate moulding that was left of Simon's gift and wondered how she had possibly come to engage in such an act of betrayal. What possible triumph had she managed to achieve beyond a brief and blinding vengeance that had as its fountainhead his complete humiliation? And what, after all, had the frightful scene between them managed to prove at the heart of the matter? Merely that her adolescent philosophy – spouted to him so confidently at the age of seventeen – had been incapable of standing the test of a separation. I love you, she had told him. Nothing changes that. Nothing ever will. But the words hadn't proved true. People weren't like swans. Least of all was she.

Deborah got to her feet, wiping at her cheeks roughly with the sleeve of her frock, uncaring if the three buttons at the wrist abraded her skin, rather hoping they would. She stumbled into the kitchen where she found a cloth to wrap round her hand. The fragment of wing she placed in a drawer. This latter she knew was fruitiess activity, carried out in the ridiculous belief that the swan itself might someday be mended.

Wondering what excuse she could make to Sidney St James for her appearance, she went to the door where the knocking continued. Wiping her cheeks a second time, she turned the knob, trying to smile, but managing only a grimace.

'What a mess. I'm perfectly…' Deborah faltered.

A bizarrely clad, but nonetheless attractive, black-haired woman stood on the threshold. She held a glass of milky green liquid in her hand, and she extended it without a prefatory remark. Nonplussed, Deborah took it from her. The woman nodded sharply and walked into the flat.

'Men are all the same.' Her voice was husky, with a regional accent she seemed to be trying to shed. She padded on bare feet to the centre of the room and continued to speak as if she and Deborah had known each other for years. 'Drink it up. I go through at least five a day. It'll make you feel a new woman, I swear it. And, Christ knows, these days I need to feel like new after every-' She stopped herself and laughed, showing teeth that were extraordinarily white and even. 'You know what I mean.'

It was hard to avoid knowing exactly what the woman did mean. In a black satin negligee with voluminous folds and flounces, she was a walking advertisement for her calling in life.

Deborah held up the glass which had been pressed upon her. 'What is this?'

A buzzer sounded, indicating the presence of someone in the street below. The woman walked to the wall and pressed the reciprocal bell for entry.