A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,17

its location served Peter's needs, which were few. And more importantly, his wallet, which as of today was nearly empty.

The way he had it worked out, they could make it another fortnight if they played it conservatively and held themselves to just five lines a night. All right, perhaps six. Then during the day, they'd start looking for work in earnest. A job in sales for him. New performances for Sasha. He had the brains and the personality for sales. And Sasha still had her art. She could use it in Soho. They'd want her there. Hell, they'd probably never seen anything like her in Soho. It would be just like Oxford, with a bare stage, a single spotlight, and Sasha on a chair, letting the audience cut her clothes off, daring them to cut off everything. "Get in touch with yourself. Know what you feel. Say what you want."

All the time she'd be smiling, all the time superior, all the time the only person in the room who knew how to be proud of who and what she was. Head high, held confidently, arms at her sides. / am, her posture declared. / am. I am.

Where was she, Peter wondered.

He checked the time. His watch was an unattractive, secondhand Timex that managed to exude an air of unreliability simply by existing. He'd sold his Rolex some time ago and had quickly discovered that relying on this current piece for accuracy was just about as ridiculous as relying on Sasha to make a score on her own without latching onto a copper's nark by mistake.

He avoided dwelling upon that thought by shaking his wrist anxiously and peering at the watch. Had its blasted hands even moved in the last half hour? He held it to his ear, swore in disbelief at the gentle ticking. Could it only have been two hours since she'd left? It seemed like ages.

Restlessly, he got up from the sagging sofa, one of the room's three pieces of fourth-hand furniture, if one didn't count the cardboard cartons in which they kept their clothes or the overturned vegetable crate that held their only lamp. The sofa unfolded into a lumpy bed.

Sasha griped about it daily, saying it was doing in her back, saying she hadn't had a decent hour's sleep in at least a month.

Where was she? Peter went to one of the windows and flicked back its covering, a bedsheet crudely fashioned into a curtain by shoving a rusting rod through its hem. He gazed through the pane. It was grimy inside as well as out.

As Peter searched the street for Sasha's familiar form - for a glimpse of the old carpetbag satchel she always carried - he took a dirty handkerchief from the hip pocket of his blue jeans and wiped his nose. It was an automatic reaction, done without thought. And the brief spurt of pain that accompanied it was gone in an instant and thus easily ignored as inconsequential. Without looking at the linen or examining the new, rust-coloured stains upon it, he replaced the handkerchief and chewed with rabbit bites on the side of his index finger.

In the distance, at the mouth of the narrow street in which they lived, pedestrians passed in Brick Lane, commuters on their way home for the day. Peter tried to focus upon them, making a deliberate exercise of attempting to pick Sasha out of the bobbing heads on their way to or from Aldgate East Station. She'd come on the Northern, he told himself, make a switch to the Metropolitan and home. So where was she?

What was so hard about one buy, after all? Give over the money. Get the stuff. What was taking so long?

He mulled over the question. What was taking Sasha so long? For that matter, what was to prevent the little bitch from taking off with his cash, making the score on her own, and never coming back to the flat at all? In fact, why should she bother to return? She'd have what she wanted. That's why she continued to hang about.

Peter rejected the idea as completely impossible. Sasha wouldn't leave. Not now, not ever. She said only last week that she'd never had it as good as she had it from him.

Didn't she beg for it practically every night?

Pensively, Peter wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

When had they last done it? Last night, wasn't it? She was laughing like crazy and he'd caught her up against the