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mac.”
“Who’s Uncle Cormac?” she asked, puzzled. Aunt Bridget she could never forget, try as she might.
“A treat in store.” His smile twisted and became rueful. “But I wanted to tell you that Sidney has been arrested for embezzlement, from the British Embassy in Washington. That’s British soil, technically, and he can be tried here.”
“Embezzlement? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“How do you know?”
“You think he wouldn’t stoop to such a thing?” There was a definite shadow in his face.
“No, of course not!” She heard a sharpness in her voice that she had not intended, at least not intended to show. “I didn’t think he’d be so stupid as to do such a thing in the embassy and get caught!”
“Perhaps he meant to tidy it up, so it was invisible, and he didn’t have time,” Patrick suggested. “He left pretty quickly. He had no choice. He didn’t expect to get caught, obviously,” he added with a degree of contempt. “Arrogant bastard. People don’t hide things if they really think they’ll never have to pay. A lot of them aren’t anywhere near as clever as they think.”
“That’s a circular argument,” she said, then immediately wished she hadn’t.
“What does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means that the ones you catch aren’t very clever. If they were, you wouldn’t have caught them.”
“And the British police would?”
“No one would. Nobody knows about them!”
“Then how is it you do?”
“I don’t! You’re trying to…” She stopped. This was only going to get worse. “What are you going to do about Sidney?”
“I asked Daniel to defend him.” He ignored her startled look and the beginning of a protest. “He says he’s not experienced enough yet, and I have to accept that, but he said he’d get Kitteridge to, and Kitteridge is very good indeed.”
Jemima drew breath to argue that Daniel was just as good, then realized how childish she was being, how very defensive. Patrick was right. It just hurt her that an Englishman, with the same name as one of her childhood heroes, was letting them all down so badly. How simpleminded she was. How territorial. How much she missed belonging! It was so much easier not to have to think about everything and, above all, not to be different.
“Jem?”
“Good.” She forced a smile. “Will Daniel help to get the result you want? It won’t be easy.”
“Daniel cares,” Patrick answered her. “He thinks it’s as terrible as I do. And you! Don’t you?” That was a challenge again.
“Of course I do! I…am just not sure this is going to work the way we want it to.” Suddenly, she was frightened, even chilled by the thought of all the ways it could go wrong. It could end by hurting Patrick in particular, more than any sense of justice or vengeance would be worth. “Patrick, above all, I want you to be safe.”
The anger vanished from his face, as if washed away by a tide. “Jem, I’m not going to do anything wrong, or stupid. I care about you and the girls more than anything else! But I’m no use to you, or even to myself, if I let an injustice go by and don’t do all I can within the law to put it right.” He touched her hair gently. “If that had been you, instead of Rebecca, would you expect me to stand by and do nothing? If it was Cassie or Sophie, I’d want to kill him, and so would you! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t.”
“I’d want you to do whatever was best for her.” Jemima was furious to hear her voice waver. She controlled it savagely, swallowing her feelings. “It isn’t always the obvious thing that works out best in the end. You want revenge, but you have to think further than tomorrow, or even next week, or next month.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“I like your mother!”
“So do I, but I don’t always agree with her. And this isn’t revenge, it’s justice, and it’s about stopping it from happening again. What if Tobias hadn’t heard her scream? What would Sidney have done if he hadn’t been prevented? Have you weighed that in?”
She hadn’t, but it wasn’t the whole argument. “Maybe nothing.”
“Oh, really, you can do better than that!” he said with disgust.
“You can’t condemn a man for what you think he might have been going to do.” She sounded very reasonable, and colder than she meant to. She was not thinking of some future possible victim; she was thinking of Rebecca and of the looks and sniggers she would get. The thinly veiled suggestions. The conversations that suddenly stopped when she appeared. And the young man she might fall in love with one day who would always wonder if it had been a tryst and she had changed her mind. She would not be the first woman to make a false accusation to end an affair that had been consensual to begin with.
