A Suitable Vengeance

28

Lady Helen sighed. 'This moves the definition of tedium beyond my wildest dreams. Tell me again what it's going to prove?'

St James made a third careful fold in the thin pyjama top, lining up the last point of the icepick's entry. 'The defendant claims he was assaulted as he slept. He had only one wound in his side, but we've got three holes, each one stained with his blood. How do you suppose that happened?'

She bent over the garment. It was oddly folded to accommodate the three holes. 'He was a contortionist in his sleep?'

St James chuckled. 'Better yet a liar awake. He stabbed himself and made the holes later.' He caught her yawning. 'Am I boring you, Helen?'

'Not at all.'

'Late night in the company of a charming man?'

'If only that were true. I'm afraid it was the company of my grandparents, darling. Grandfather blissfully snoring away during the triumphal march in Aida. I should have joined him. No doubt he's quite spry this morning.'

'An occasional bow to culture is good for the soul.'

'I loathe opera. If they'd only sing in English. Is it too much to ask? But it's always Italian or French. Or German. German's the worst. And when they run about the stage in those funny helmets with the horns…'

'You're a Philistine, Helen.'

'Card carrying.'

'Well, if you'll behave yourself for another half hour, I'll take you to lunch. There's a new brasserie I've found in the Brompton Road.'

Her face came to life. 'Darling Simon, the very thing! What shall I do next?' She looked round the lab as if seeking new employment, an intention that St James ignored when the front door slammed and a voice called his name.

He shoved away from the work table. 'Sidney,' he said and walked to the door as his sister came dashing up the stairs. 'Where the hell have you been?'

She came into the lab. 'Surrey first. Then Southampton,' she replied as if they were the most logical destinations in the world. She dropped a mink jacket onto a stool. 'They've got me doing another line of furs. If I don't get a different assignment soon, I don't know what I'll do. Modelling the skins of dead animals lies somewhere between absolutely unsavoury and thoroughly disgusting. And they continue to insist I wear nothing underneath.' Leaning over the table, she examined the pyjama top. 'Blood again? How can you endure it so near to lunch-time? I haven't missed lunch, have I? It's hardly noon.'

She opened her shoulder bag and began to dig through it. 'Now, where is it? Of course, I understand why they insist on some naked skin, but I've hardly the bosom for it. It's the suggestion of sensuality, they tell me. The promise, the fantasy. What rubbish. Ah, here it is.' She produced a tattered envelope which she handed to her brother.

'What is it?'

'What I've spent nearly ten days getting out of Mummy. I even had to trail along to David's for a week just so that she'd know I was determined to have it.'

'You've been with Mother?' St James asked incredulously. 'Visiting David in Southampton? Helen, did you-?'

'I phoned Surrey that once, but there was no reply. Then you said not to worry her. Remember?'

'Worry Mummy?' Sidney asked. 'Worry Mummy about what?'

'About you.'

'Why would Mummy worry about me?' She didn't wait for an answer. 'Actually, she thought the idea was absurd, at first.'

'What idea?'

'Now I know where you get your general poopiness, Simon. But I wore her down over time. I knew I should. Go on, open it. Read it aloud. Helen shall hear it as well.'

'Damn it, Sidney. I want to know-'

She grabbed his wrist and shook his arm. 'Read.'

He opened the envelope with ill-concealed irritation and began to read aloud.

My dear Simon,

It appears I shall have no rest from Sidney until I apologize, so let me do so at once. Not that a simple line of apology would ever satisfy your sister.

'What is this Sid?'

She laughed. 'Keep reading!'

He went back to his mother's heavily embossed stationery.

I always did think it was Sidney's idea to open the nursery windows, Simon. But, when you said nothing upon being accused of having done so, I felt obliged to direct all the punishment towards you. Punishing one's children is the hardest part of being a parent. It's even worse if one has the nagging little fear that one is punishing the wrong child. Sidney has cleared all this up, as only Sidney could do, and although she had begun to insist that I beat her soundly for having let you take her punishment all those years ago I do draw the line at paddling a twenty-five-year-old woman. So let me apologize to you for placing the blame on your little shoulders – were you ten years old? I've forgotten -and I shall henceforth direct it towards her in an appropriate fashion. We have had a rather nice visit, Sidney and I. We spent some time with David and the children as well. It's made me quite hopeful that I shall soon see you in Surrey. Bring Deborah with you if you come. Cotter telephoned Cook with the word about her. Poor child. It would be good of you to take her under your wing until she's back on her feet.

Love to you, Mother

Hands on her hips, Sidney threw back her head and laughed, clearly delighted with having brought off a coup. 'Isn't she grand? What a time I had getting her to write it, though. Had she not already wanted to speak to you about seeing to Deborah – you know how she is, always concerned that we'll become social heathens and not do the proper thing in these situations – I doubt if anything could have made her write it.'

St James felt Lady Helen watching him. He knew what she expected him to ask. He didn't ask it. For the past ten days he had known something had happened between them. Cotter's behaviour alone would have told him as much, even if Deborah had not been gone from Howenstow when he'd returned from Penzance on the evening after Trenarrow's death. But, other than saying he'd flown her back to London, Lynley said nothing more. And Cotter's grim restraint had not been a thing which St James wanted to disturb. So even now he said nothing.

Lady Helen, however, did not have his scruples. 'What's happened to Deborah?'

'Tommy broke their engagement,' Sidney replied. 'Cotter hasn't told you, Simon? From the way Mummy's cook tells it, he was practically breathing fire on the phone. Quite in a rage. I half-expected to hear he'd duelled with Tommy for satisfaction. "Guns or knives," I can hear him shouting. "Speaker's Corner at dawn." Tommy hasn't told you, either? How decidedly odd. Unless, of course, he thinks you may demand satisfaction, Simon.' She laughed and then sobered thoughtfully. 'You don't think this is a class thing, do you? Considering Peter's choice of Sasha, class can hardly be an issue with the Lynleys.'

As she spoke, St James realized that Sidney had no idea of anything that had happened since her bitter departure from Howenstow on that Sunday morning. He opened the bottom drawer beneath his work table and removed her perfume bottle.

'You misplaced this,' he said.

She grabbed it, delighted. 'Where did you find it? Don't tell me it was in the Howenstow wardrobe. I can accept that for shoes but for nothing else.'

'Justin took it from your room, Sid.'

Such a simple statement – seven words, no more. Their effect upon his sister was immediate. Her smile faded. She tried to hold on to the edges of it, but her lips quivered with the effort. Liveliness left her. The quick end to her insouciance told him how precarious a hold she had on her emotions. Her present madcap demeanour merely acted as a shield to fend off a mourning she had not begun.

'Justin?' she said. 'Why?'

There was no easy way for him to tell her. He knew that the knowledge would only add to her sorrow. Yet telling her seemed to be the only way that she might start the process of burying her dead.

'To frame you for murder,' he said.

'That's ridiculous.'

'He wanted to murder Peter Lynley. He got Sasha Nifford instead.'

'I don't understand.' She rolled the perfume bottle over and over in her hand. She bent her head. She brushed at her cheeks.

'It was filled with a drug she mistook for heroin.' At that she looked up. St James saw the expression on her face. The use of a drug as a means of murder did indeed make the truth so unavoidable. 'I'm sorry, love.'

'But Peter. Justin told me Peter was at Cambrey's. He said they had a row. And then Mick Cambrey died. He said that Peter wanted to kill him. I don't understand. Peter must have known Justin told you and Tommy about it. He knew. He did know.'

'Peter didn't kill Justin, Sid. He wasn't even at Howenstow when Justin died.'

'Then, why?'

'Peter heard something he wasn't supposed to hear. He could have used it against Justin eventually, especially once Mick Cambrey was killed. Justin got nervous. He knew Peter was desperate about money and cocaine. He knew he was unstable. He couldn't predict his behaviour, so he needed to be rid of him.'

Together, St James and Lady Helen told her the story. Islington, oncozyme, Trenarrow, Cambrey. The clinic and cancer. The substitution of a placebo that led to Mick's death.

'Brooke was in jeopardy,' St James said. 'He took steps to eliminate it.'

'What about me?' she asked. 'It's my bottle. Didn't he know that people would think I was involved?' Still she clutched the bottle. Her fingers turned white round it.

'The day on the beach, Sidney,' Lady Helen said. 'He'd been humiliated rather badly.'

'He wanted to punish you,' St James said.

Sidney's lips barely moved as she said, 'He loved me. I know it. He loved me.'

St James felt the terrible burden of her words and with it the need to reassure his sister of her intrinsic worth. He wanted to say something but couldn't think of the words that might comfort her.

Lady Helen spoke. 'What Justin Brooke was makes no statement about who you are, Sidney. You don't take your definition of self from him. Or from what he felt. Or didn't feel, for that matter.'

Sidney gave a choked sob. St James went to her. 'I'm sorry, love,' he said, putting his arm tighdy round her. 'I think I'd rather you hadn't known. But I can't lie to you, Sidney. I'm not sorry he's dead.'

She coughed and looked up at him. She offered a shattered smile. 'Lord, how hungry I am,' she whispered. 'Shall we have lunch?'

In Eaton Terrace, Lady Helen slammed the door of her Mini. She did it more to give herself courage – as if the action might attest to the fittingness of her behaviour -than to assure herself that the car door was securely locked. She looked up at the darkened front of Lynley's townhouse, then held up her wrist to the light of the street-lamp. It was nearly eleven, hardly the time for a social call. But the very unsuitability of the hour gave her an advantage which she wasn't willing to relinquish. She climbed the marble-tiled steps to his door.

For the past two weeks she had been trying to contact him. Every effort had received a rebuff. Out on a job, working a double shift, caught at a meeting, testifying in court. From a series of unquestionably polite secretaries, assistants and junior officers, she had heard every permutation of a job-related excuse. The implicit message was always the same: he was unavailable, alone, and preferring it so.

It would not be so tonight. She rang the bell. It sounded somewhere in the back of the house, resonating oddly towards the front door as if the building were empty. For a fleeting, mad moment, she actually harboured the thought that he had moved from London – ninning away from everything once and for all – but then the fanlight above the door showed a sudden illumination in the lower hallway. A bolt was drawn, the door opened, and Lynley's valet stood blinking owlishly out at her. He was wearing his bedroom slippers, Lady Helen noted, and a tartan flannel bathrobe over paisley pyjamas. Surprise and judgement played spontaneously across his face. He wiped them off quickly enough, but Lady Helen read their meaning. Well brought up daughters of peers were not supposed to go calling on gentlemen late at night, no matter which part of the twentieth century this was.

'Thank you, Denton,' Lady Helen said decisively. She stepped into the hall every bit as if he'd asked her in with earnest protestations of welcome. 'Please tell Lord Asherton that I must see him at once.' She removed her light evening coat and placed it along with her bag on a chair in the foyer.

Still standing by the open door, Denton looked from her to the street as if trying to recall whether he had actually asked her in. He kept his hand on the doorknob and shifted from foot to foot, appearing caught between a need to protest the solecism of this visit and the fear of someone's wrath should he do so.

'His Lordship's asked-'

'I know,' Lady Helen said. She felt a brief flicker of guilt to be bullying Denton, knowing that his determination to protect Lynley was motivated by a loyalty that spanned nearly a decade. 'I understand. He's asked not to be disturbed, not to be interrupted. He's not returned one of my calls these last two weeks, Denton, so I quite understand he wishes not to be bothered. Now that the issue is clear between us, please tell him I wish to see him.' 'But-'

'I shall go directly up to his bedroom if I have to.' Denton signalled his surrender by closing the door. 'He's in the library. I'll fetch him for you.' 'No need. I know the way.'

She left Denton gaping in the entry and went quickly up the stairs to the first floor of the house, down a thickly carpeted corridor, past an impressive collection of antique pewter, winked at by half a dozen Asherton ancestors long since dead. She heard Lynley's valet not far behind her, murmuring, 'My lady… Lady Helen…'

The library door was closed. She knocked once, heard Lynley's voice, and entered.

He was sitting at his desk, his head resting in one hand and several folders spread out in front of him. Lady Helen's first thought – with some considerable surprise as he looked up – was that she had no idea he'd begun wearing spectacles to read. He took them off as he got to his feet. He said nothing, merely glanced behind her to where Denton stood, looking monumentally apologetic.

'Sorry,' Denton said. 'I tried.'

'Don't blame him,' Lady Helen said. 'I bullied my way in.' She saw that Denton had moved one step into the room. With another he would be close enough to put his hand on her arm and escort her back down the stairs and out into the street. She couldn't imagine him doing so without Lynley's direction, but just in case he was considering the idea she headed him off. 'Thank you, Denton. Leave us, please. If you will.'

Denton gawked at her. He looked at Lynley, who nodded sharply once. He left the room.

'Why haven't you returned my calls, Tommy?' Lady Helen asked the moment they were alone. 'I've telephoned here and the Yard repeatedly. I've stopped by four times. I've been sick with worry about you.'

'Sorry, old duck,' he said easily. 'There's been a mass of work lately. I'm up to my ears in it. Will you have a drink?' He walked to a rosewood table on which were arranged several decanters and a set of glasses.

'Thank you, no.'

He poured himself a whisky but did not drink it at once. 'Please sit down.' 'I think not.'

'Whatever you'd like.' He offered her a lopsided smile and tossed back a large portion of his drink. And then, perhaps unwilling to keep up the pretence any longer, he looked away from her, saying, Tm sorry, Helen. I wanted to return your calls. But I couldn't do it. Sheer cowardice, I suppose.'

Her anger melted immediately. 'I can't bear to see you like this. Walled up in your library. Incommunicado at work. I can't bear it, Tommy.'

For a moment, the only response was his breathing. She could hear it, shallow and unevenly spaced. Then he said, 'The only time I seem to be able to drive her from my mind is when I'm working. So that's what I've been doing, that's all I've been doing. And when I haven't been on a case I've spent the time telling myself that I'll get over this eventually. A few more weeks, a few months.' Shakily, he laughed. 'It's a bit difficult to believe.'

'I know. I understand.'

'God, yes. Who on earth could know better than you?'

'Then, why haven't you phoned me?'

He moved restlessly across the room to the fireplace. No fire demanded his attention there, so he gave it instead to a collection of Meissen porcelain plates on the overmantel. He took one from its stand, turning it in his hands.

Lady Helen wanted to tell him to have a care, the plate might well shatter under the strength with which he gripped it, but she said nothing. He put the plate back. She repeated her question.

'You know I've wanted to talk to you. Why haven't you phoned me?'

'I haven't been able to. It hurts too much, Helen. I can't hide that from you.'

'Why on earth should you want to?'

'I feel like a fool. I should be stronger than this. None of it should matter. I should be able just to slough it off and go on.'

'Go on?' She felt all her anger return in a rush. Her blood heated in the presence of this stiff-upper-lip attitude which she'd always found so contemptible in the men she knew, as if schooling and breeding and generations of reserve condemned each of them to a life of feeling nothing. 'Do you actually mean to tell me that you've no right to your sorrow because you're a man? I don't believe that. I won't believe that.'

'It's nothing at all to do with sorrow. I've just been trying to find my way back to the man I was three years ago. Before Deborah. If I can reclaim him, I'll be fine.'

'That man was no different from the man you are now.'

'Three years ago, I'd not have taken this so hard. What were women to me then? Bed partners. Nothing more.'

'And that's what you want to be? A man drifting through life in a sexual fugue? Only thinking about his next performance in bed? Is that what you want?'

'It's easier that way.'

'Of course it's easy. That kind of life is always easy. People fade out of one another's bed with hardly a word of farewell, let alone one of commitment. And, if by chance they wake up one morning with someone whose name escapes them, it's all right, isn't it? It's part of the game.'

'There was no pain involved in relationships then. There was nothing involved. Never for me.'

'That may be what you'd like to remember, Tommy, but that's not the way it was. Because, if what you say is true, if life was nothing more than collecting and seducing a stableful of women, why did you never have me?'

He reflected on the question. He went back to the decanters and poured himself a second drink. 'I don't know.'

'Yes, you do. Tell me why.' 'I don't know.'

'What a conquest I would have been. Thrown over by Simon, my life in a shambles. The last thing I wanted was an involvement with anyone. How on earth did you resist a challenge like that? What a chance it was to prove yourself to yourself. What incredible fodder for your self-esteem.'

He placed his glass on the table, turned it beneath his fingers. She watched his profile and saw how fragile a thing was his veneer of control.

'I expect you were different,' he said.

'Not at all. I had the right equipment. I was just like the others – heat and pleasure, breasts and thighs.'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'A woman, after all. Easily seduced, especially by an expert. But you never tried with me. Not even once. That sort of sexual reticence doesn't make sense in a man whose sole interest in women revolves round what they have to offer him in bed. And I had it to offer, didn't I, Tommy? Oh, I would have resisted at first. But I would have slept with you eventually, and you knew it. But you didn't try.'

He turned to her. 'How could I have done that to you after what you'd been through with Simon?'

'Compassion?' she demanded. 'From the man bent on pleasure? What difference did it make whose body provided it? Weren't we all the same?'

He was quiet for so long that she wondered if he would answer. She could see the struggle for composure on his face. She willed him to speak, knowing only that he had to acknowledge his sorrow so that it could live and rage and then die.

'Not you,' he said finally. She could tell the phrase cost him dearly. 'Not Deborah.' 'What was different?' 'I let things go further.' 'Further?' 'To the heart.'

She crossed the room to him. Her hand touched his arm. 'Don't you see, Tommy? You weren't that man bent on pleasure. You want to think you were, but that wasn't the case. Not for anyone who bothered to take the time to know you. Not for me certainly, who was never your lover. And not for Deborah, who was.'

'I wanted something different with her.' His eyes were red-rimmed. 'Roots, ties, a family. I was willing to be something more to have that. It was worth it. She was worth it.'

'Yes. She was. And she was worth grieving over as well. She's still worth that.' 'Oh God,' he whispered.

Her hand slid down his arm, closed over his wrist. 'Tommy dear, it's all right. Really.'

He shook his head blindly, as if by that movement he could shake off his terrible desolation. 'I think I shall die of loneliness, Helen.' His voice broke horribly, the sound of a man who hadn't allowed himself to experience a single emotion in years. 'I can't bear it.'

He started to turn from her, to go back to his desk, but she stopped him and closed the remaining space between them. She took him into her arms.

'You're not alone, Tommy,' she said quite gently.

He began to cry.

Deborah pushed open the gate just as the street-lamp in Lordship Place lit for the evening, sending delicate sprays of light through the mist that fell on the garden. She stood for a moment and gazed at the warm burned sienna bricks of the house, at its fresh white plasterwork, at its old wrought iron hand rail that forever rusted in spots that forever needed paint. In so many ways, it would always be home to her, no matter how long she managed to stay away – three years, three decades or, like this time, a month.

She'd managed avoidance through a string of fabrications which she knew her father didn't believe for a moment. Setting myself up professionally, Dad. Working very hard. Appointments here and there. Showing my portfolio around. Shall we meet somewhere for dinner? No, I can't come to Chelsea. He'd accepted the excuses rather than quarrel with her again.

No more than did she, her father didn't savour a repetition of their row in Paddington, a week after her return from Cornwall. He had wanted her to come home. She refused to consider it. He didn't understand. To him, it was simple. Pack your things, close the flat, come back to Cheyne Row. In effect, as far as he was concerned, return to the past. She couldn't do so. She tried to explain her need for a time that was solely her own. His response was a nasty castigation of Tommy – for changing her, destroying her, distorting her values – and from there the row grew, ending with her wresting from him a bitter promise not to speak of her relationship with Tommy ever again, to her or to anyone else. They had parted acrimoniously and had not seen each other since.

Nor had she seen Simon. Nor had she wanted to. Those few horrifying moments in Nanrunnel had exposed her to herself in an unforgiving light that she could no longer ignore, and for the month that followed she'd had to examine and admit to the lie she'd been living for the last two and a half years. The lover of one man, bound in a thousand different ways to another. And yet bound forever to Tommy as well in ways she could never allow him to know.

She didn't know where to begin to undo the damage she had done to herself and to others. So she had stayed in Paddington, working as an apprentice photographer for a Mayfair studio, spending a long weekend in Wales and another in Brighton. And she had waited for her life to take on a semblance of peace. It had not done so.

So she had come on this visit to Chelsea, not exactly knowing what she could accomplish, only knowing that the longer she stayed away, the more difficult a reconciliation with her father would be. What she wanted from Simon, she could not have said.

Through the mist, she saw the kitchen lights come on. Her father passed the window. He went to the stove, then to the table where he disappeared from her view. She followed the flagstone path across the garden and descended the stairs.

Alaska met her at the door as if, with that preternatural sensitivity inherent to felines, he'd known she'd be arriving. He twitched one ear and began a stately crisscrossing through her legs, his tail waving majestically.

'Where's Peach?' she asked the cat as she rubbed his head. His back arched appreciatively. He began to purr.

Footsteps came out of the kitchen into the foyer. 'Deb!'

She straightened. 'Hello, Dad.'

She saw him looking for signs that she'd come home -a suitcase, a carton, an easily movable item like a lamp. But he said nothing other than, 'Had your dinner, girl?' and returned to the kitchen where the rich smell of roasting meat was scenting the air.

She followed him. 'Yes. At the flat.' She saw that he was working at the table, that he'd lined up four pairs of shoes to be polished. She noted the heaviness of their construction, necessary so that the crosspiece of his brace could fit through the left heel. For some reason, the sight effected a blackness in her. She looked away. 'How's work?' Cotter asked her.

'Fine. I've been using my old cameras, the Nikon and the Hasselblad. They're working for me well. They make me rely on myself more, on knowledge and technique. I find I like that.'

Cotter nodded, applied two fingertips of polish to the top of a shoe. He was nobody's fool. 'It's forgotten, Deb,' he answered. 'All of it, girl. You do what's best for you.'

She felt a rush of gratitude. She looked round the room at the white brick walls, the old stove with three covered pots sitting on it, the worn worktops, the glass-fronted cabinets, the uneven tile floor. A small basket near the stove legs sat empty.

'Where's Peach?' she asked.

'Mr St James's taken 'er out for walk.' Cotter gave a glance to the wall clock. 'Absent-minded, 'e is. Dinner's been ready these last fifteen minutes.'

'Where's he gone?'

'The Embankment, I expect.'

'Shall I fetch him?'

His reply was perfectly noncommittal. 'If you fancy a walk. If you don't, it's fine. Dinner'll keep a bit.'

She said, 'I'll see if I can find him.' She went back to the hallway but turned at the kitchen door. Her father was giving his complete attention to the shoes. 'I've not come home, Dad. You know that, don't you?'

'I know what I know,' was Cotter's answer as she left the house.

The mist was encircling each street-lamp with an amber corona, and a breeze was beginning to blow off the Thames. Deborah turned up the collar of her coat as she walked. Inside houses, people were sitting down to their evening meals while at the King's Head and Eight Bells at the corner of Cheyne Row others gathered at the bar for conversation and refreshment. Deborah smiled fondly when she saw this latter group. She knew most of them by name. They'd been nightly patrons of the pub for years. The sight of them filled her with unaccountable nostalgia which she dismissed as nonsensical and pushed on to Cheyne Walk.

Traffic was light. She crossed quickly to the river and saw him some distance away, elbows resting on the embankment wall, studying the charming whimsicality of Albert Bridge. In the summers of her childhood they had frequently wandered across it to Battersea Park. She wondered if he remembered that. What a gawky little companion she'd been to him then. How patient and kind his friendship had been in return.

She stopped for a moment to observe him unnoticed. He scanned the bridge. A smile played on his lips. And all the while at his feet Peach sat placidly chewing on her lead. As Deborah watched the two of them, Peach caught sight of her and began pulling away from St James. She turned a quick circle, got tangled in the lead, fell in a heap, and gave a happy yelp.

Distracted from his admiration of one of London's most capricious structures, St James looked down at the little dachshund and then back up as if to locate the cause of her desire for escape. When he saw Deborah, he released his grip on the lead and let the dog run to her, which Peach did, ears flopping wildly, rear legs nearly overtaking the rest of her body. She was a frenzy of joy. She threw herself upon Deborah, barking ecstatically, wagging her tail.

Deborah laughed, hugged the dog, allowed herself to be licked on the nose. She thought about how it was so simple with animals. They gave their hearts without question or fear. They had no expectations. They were so easy to love. If people could only be like that, no-one would ever be hurt, she thought. No-one would ever need to learn how to forgive.

St James watched her walk towards him in the light of the embankment lamps with Peach dancing along at her side. She carried no umbrella against the mist that was creating a net of bright beads on her hair. Her only protection was a lamb's wool coat, its collar turned up so that it framed her face like an Elizabethan ruff. She looked lovely, like someone out of a sixteenth-century portrait. But there was a change to her face, something that hadn't been there six weeks ago, something aching and adult.

'Your dinner's ready,' she said when she reached him. 'You're out late for a walk, aren't you?' She joined him at the wall. It felt like a commonplace sort of meeting, as if nothing had happened between them, as if in the last month she hadn't faded in and out of his life without greeting or farewell.

'I wasn't thinking of the time. Sidney told me she went with you to Wales.'

‘We had a lovely weekend on the coast.'

He nodded. He had been watching a family of swans on the water and would have pointed them out to her – their presence at this section of the river was certainly unusual – but he did not do so. Her manner was too distant.

Apparently, however, she saw the birds herself, caught in silhouette in the lights that sparkled from the opposite bank. 'I've never seen swans in this part of the river before,' she said. 'And at night. D'you suppose they're all right?'

There were five of them – two adults and three nearly grown cygnets – floating peacefully near the piers of Albert Bridge.

'They're all right,' he said and saw how the birds gave him a small opening to speak. 'I was sorry you broke the swan that day in Paddington.'

'I can't come home,' she said in reply. 'I need to make peace with you somehow. Perhaps take a step towards being friends again some day. But I can't come home.'

This was the difference then. She was maintaining that kind of careful emotion-sparing distance that people develop to protect themselves when things come to an end between them. It reminded him of himself three years ago, when she had come to say goodbye and he had listened, too afraid to speak lest saying one word might cause the floodgates to open and everything he felt to spill forth in a humiliating wave of entreaty that both time and circumstance would have forced her to deny. They had come full circle, it seemed, to goodbye again. How simple just to say it and get on with living.

He looked from her face to her hand resting on the embankment wall. It was bare of Lynley's ring. He lightly touched the finger that had worn it. She didn't pull away, and it was that absence of movement which prompted him to speak.

'Don't leave me again, Deborah.'

He saw that she hadn't expected a response of that kind. She'd come without a line of defence. He pressed the advantage.

'You were seventeen. I was twenty-eight. Can you try to understand what it was like for me then? I'd cut myself off from caring about anyone for years. And all of a sudden I was caring for you. Wanting you. Yet all the time believing that if we made love-'

She spoke quickly, lightly. 'All that's passed, isn't it? It doesn't matter really. It's much better forgotten.'

'I told myself that I couldn't make love to you, Deborah. I manufactured all sorts of mad reasons why. Duty to your father. A betrayal of his trust. The destruction of our friendship – yours and mine. Our souls couldn't bond together if we became lovers, and I wanted a soulmate, so we couldn't make love. I kept repeating your age over and over. How could I live with myself if I took a seventeen-year-old girl to bed?'

'What does it matter now? We're beyond that. After all that's happened, what does it matter that we didn't make love three years ago?' Her questions weren't so much cold as they were cautious, as if whatever careful reasoning she'd gone through in her decision to leave him were under attack.

'Because if you're going to make this leaving of yours a permanent arrangement, then at least you'll leave this time knowing the truth. I let you go because I wanted peace. I wanted you out of the house. I reasoned that if you were gone I'd stop feeling torn. I'd stop wanting you. I'd stop feeling guilty for wanting you. I'd get the whole issue of sex driven out of my mind. You'd been gone less than a week when I saw the truth of the matter.'

'It doesn't-'

He persisted. 'I'd thought I could exist quite nicely without you, and my own hypocrisy slapped me right in the face. I wanted you back. I wanted you home. So I wrote to you.'

As he was speaking, she'd kept her attention on the river, but now she turned to him. He didn't wait for her to ask the question.

'I didn't post the letters.'

'Why?'

And now he had come to it. So easy to sit alone in the study and rehearse for a month all the things he had needed to say to her for years. But now that he had the opportunity to say them he found himself faltering all over again and he wondered why it had always been so frightening that she should know the truth. He drew in air like resolution.

'For the same reason I wouldn't make love to you. I was afraid. I knew that you could have any man in the world.' 'Any man?'

'All right. You could have Tommy. Given that choice, how could I expect that you might want me?'

'You?'

'A cripple.'

'So there it is, isn't it? We end up at cripple no matter where we begin.'

'We do. Because it's a fact of who I am and we can't ignore it. I've spent the last three years considering all the things I could never do at your side, things that any other man – Tommy – could do with ease.'

'What's the point of that? Why keep torturing yourself?'

'Because I had to work through it. It had to stop mattering so much that I couldn't even hold you if I were unattached to this cursed brace. It had to stop mattering so much that I'm crippled. And that's what you need to know before you leave me. That it doesn't matter any longer. Crippled or not. Half a man. Three-quarters. It doesn't matter. I want you.' And then he added unfairly but without a regret since there are no rules that govern affairs of the heart, 'Once and for life.'

It was done. In whatever fashion she would judge them, the words had been said. Three years too late, but said all the same. And, even if she chose to leave him now, at least she chose knowing the worst he was and the best. He could live with that.

'What do you want of me?' she asked.

'You know the answer to that.'

Peach moved restlessly at their feet. Someone shouted from the patch of green across Cheyne Walk. Deborah watched the river. He followed the direction of her gaze to see that the swans had cleared the final piers of the bridge. They were floating unchanged as they had done before, as they always would do, seeking the safety of Battersea.

'Deborah,' he said.

The birds gave her the answer. 'Like the swans, Simon?'

It was more than enough. 'My love, like the swans.'