A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,14

piece about torture, don't you?

So what the hell do you think these three years have been like for me? And how do you imagine I felt waiting to see you, last night, hour after hour - after three goddamned years - and knowing now you were here all that time with him?"

"I don't care how you felt! Whatever it was, it couldn't come close to the misery you foisted on me."

"What a compliment to your lover! Are you sure misery is the word you want to use?"

"It comes back to that, doesn't it? Sex is the issue. Who's screwing Deb. Well, here's your chance, Simon. Go ahead. Have me. Make up for lost time. There's the bed. Go on."

He didn't reply. "Come on. Screw me. Have me for a quickie. That's what you want, isn't it? Damn you, isn't it?"

When still he was silent, she reached in a fury for the first available object that came into her hand. She threw it at him with all her strength, and it crashed and splintered against the wall near his head. They both saw too late that in her rage she had destroyed his gift to a long ago childhood birthday, a porcelain swan.

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 flood waters within his skull, the usual precursor of an 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