Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

'They're on their way.' Lynley closed the door behind him. He crossed the room. 'Are you all right, St James?'

'Yes. Quite.' To prove this beyond doubt, he moved -it took an effort of will – away from the window. Lynley had dumped the clothes from the room's only chair and placed it at the foot of the bed, its back towards the body.

'The police are on their way,' he repeated. Firmly, he led his brother to the chair and sat him down. 'There's a bottle of something over by the sofa that's likely to get you arrested, Peter. We've only a few minutes to talk.'

'I didn't see a bottle. It isn't mine.' Peter wiped his nose on his arm.

'Tell me what happened. Where have you been since Saturday night?'

Peter squinted as if the light hurt his eyes. 'I've been nowhere.'

'Don't play games with me.'

'Games? I'm telling-'

'You're on your own in this. Are you capable of understanding that? You're entirely on your own. So you can tell me the truth or talk to the police. Frankly, I don't care one way or the other.'

'I'm telling you the truth. We've been nowhere but here.'

'How long have you been back?'

'Since Saturday. Sunday. I don't know. I don't remember.'

'What time did you arrive?' 'After dawn.' 'What time!’

'I don't know the time! What difference does it make?'

'The difference it makes is that Justin Brooke's dead. But you're lucky for the moment because the police seem to believe it was an accident.'

Peter's mouth twisted. 'And you think I killed him? What about Mick? Are you setting me up for that as well, Tommy?' His voice broke when he said his brother's name. He began to cry again, thin body racked by the force of dry sobs. He covered his face with his hands. His fingernails were bitten, crusted with dirt. 'You always think the worst of me, don't you?'

St James saw that Lynley was preparing for verbal battle. He spoke to intervene. 'You're going to be asked a great many questions, Peter. In the long run, it might be easier to answer them with Tommy so that he can help you, rather than with someone you don't even know.'

'I can't talk to him,' Peter sobbed. 'He won't listen to me. I'm nothing to him.'

'How can you say that?' Lynley demanded hotly.

'Because it's true, and you know it. You just buy me off. It's what you've always done. You were there with the chequebook all right because that was easy for you. You didn't have to be involved. But you were never there -never once in my life – for anything else.' He leaned forward in the chair, his arms cradling his stomach, his head on his knees. 'I was six years old when he got sick, Tommy. I was seven when you left. I was twelve when he died. Do you know what that was like? Can you even imagine it? And all I had – all I had, damn you – was poor old Roderick. Doing what he could to be a father to me. Whenever he thought he could get away with it. But always in secret because you might find out.'

Lynley pushed him upright. 'So you turned to drugs and it's all my fault? Don't put that on me. Don't you dare.'

'I put nothing on you,' his brother spat back. 'I despise you.'

'You think I don't know it? Every second you breathe is a second you live to hurt me. You even took Deborah's cameras to get back at me, didn't you?'

'That's really rich, Tommy. Get out of here, will you? Leave me to the police.'

St James forced himself to intercede, desperate to get the information he needed. 'What did she take, Peter?' he asked. 'Where did she get it?'

Peter scrubbed his face on his tattered T-shirt. It was ancient, faded, bearing the figure of a skeleton, a cluster of roses and the words Grateful Dead. 'I don't know. I was out.'

'Where?' Lynley demanded.

Peter shot him a contemptuous look. 'Buying bread and eggs.' He flung his hand towards the string bag that lay on the floor by the wall, the two items within it. He directed the rest of his answer to St James. 'When I came back, she was like that. I thought she was asleep at first. But then I could tell… I could see.' He faltered, lips trembling. 'I rang Tommy's office, but they said he wasn't there. I rang his house, but Denton said he was still in Cornwall. I rang Cornwall, but Hodge said he was in London. I-'

'Why were you looking for me?' Lynley asked.

Peter dropped his hands. He stared at the floor. 'You're my brother,' he said hollowly.

Lynley looked as if his heart were being torn from his chest. 'Why do you do these things, Peter? Why? God, why?

'What does it matter?'

St James heard the sirens. They had made good time. But, then, they would have had the advantage of being able to clear away traffic with those shrieking alarms and flashing lights. He spoke quickly, determined to know the worst. 'There's a silver container by the bed. Could it be Sasha's?'

Peter gave a short laugh. 'Hardly. If she owned a piece of silver, we would have sold it long ago.'

'She never showed it to you? You never saw it among her things? She never said where she got it?'

'Never.'

There was time for nothing more. The noise of the arriving police swelled to a crescendo, then ceased abruptly. St James went to the window and pushed back the curtain to see two panda cars, two unmarked police cars and one van pulling up behind the Bentley. They took up most of the street. The children had scattered, leaving the rubbish-sack goalposts behind.

While a uniformed constable remained at the front of the building, tying the police line from the hand rail on the front steps to a nearby lamp post, the rest of the group entered. From his own years at the yard, St James recognized most of them, either by name or by function: two CID detectives, the scenes-of-crime team, a photographer, the forensic pathologist. It was unusual for all of them to effect an arrival at the same time, so there was no doubt that they knew it was a colleague who had placed the call. That would be why Lynley had telephoned the Met in the first place and not the local station -Bishopsgate – in whose jurisdiction Whitechapel lay. While he intended Peter to face whatever consequences grew from Sasha Nifford's death, he did not intend that his brother should face them without his own indirect participation. It was one thing to swear off assisting Peter if drugs were involved. It was quite another to leave him to his fate in a situation that could possibly turn into an investigation of an entirely different nature. For if Peter had known about the drugs, if he had passed them on to Sasha, if he had even helped her to take them, intending to shoot up himself upon his return from the market… These were all possibilities of which St James knew that Lynley was well aware. And they could all be moulded into various degrees of homicide. Lynley would want the entire investigation handled by a team he could trust, so he'd called the Met. St James wondered which officer in Victoria Street was phoning the Bishopsgate station right now with the explanation of why Scotland Yard were invading a foreign patch.

The officers pounded up the stairs. Lynley met them at the door.

'Angus,' he said to the man at the head of the group.

He was Detective Inspector Angus MacPherson, a hefty Scot who habitually wore old worsted suits that looked as if they doubled at night as his pyjamas. He nodded at Lynley and walked to the bed. The other officer followed him, removing a small notebook from her shoulder bag and a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of her rumpled puce blouse. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, MacPherson's partner. St James knew them both.

'What hae we here?' MacPherson murmured. He fingered the bed sheet and looked over his shoulder as the rest of the team crowded into the room. 'Ye havena moved anything, Tommy?'

'Just the sheet. She was covered when we got here.'