Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

Lynley carefully placed his sandwich, untouched, on the paper in which it had been wrapped. He was suddenly unhungry. And wanting to be nothing more than unfeeling as well. He reached for his tea and circled his hands around it. A dull but comforting warmth emanated from the cup.

'Will you let me help you?'

Peter's right hand gripped his left. He made no reply.

'I can't change the kind of brother I was when you needed me,' Lynley said. 'I can only offer you what I am right now, however little that may be.'

Peter seemed to withdraw at this. Or perhaps it was that the cold – within and without – was causing him to diminish in size, conserving energy, garnering whatever small resources he had left. When he finally answered, his lips scarcely moved. Lynley had to strain to hear him.

'I wanted to be like you.'

'Like me? Why?'

'You were perfect. You were my standard. I wanted to be like you. When I found I couldn't, I just gave it up. If I couldn't be you, I didn't want to be anything.'

Peter's words sounded the sure ring of finality. They sounded not only like the end of an interview that had barely begun, but also like the end of any possibility to put things right between them. Lynley sought something -words, images, a common experience – that would allow him to reach back through those fifteen years and touch the little boy he had abandoned at Howenstow. But he could find nothing. There was no way to go back and no way to make amends.

He felt leaden. He reached in his jacket pocket, brought out his cigarette case and lighter, and lay them on the table. The case had been his father's, and the elaborately engraved A on the cover had worn through time. Portions of it had disappeared altogether, but the case was familiar to him, dear to him, nicked and dented with age though it was. He wouldn't have considered replacing it with another. Staring at it – small rectangular symbol of everything he had run from, all the areas of his life he had chosen to deny, the welter of emotions he had refused to face – he found the words.

'It was knowing that she was sleeping with Roderick while Father was alive. I couldn't stand that, Peter. It didn't matter to me that they'd fallen in love, that they hadn't set out to but that it just happened between them. It didn't matter that Roderick had every intention of marrying her when she was free. It didn't matter that she still loved Father – and I knew she loved him, because I saw how she acted with him even after she'd begun the affair with Roderick. Still, I didn't understand, and I couldn't abide my own blind ignorance. How could she love them both? How could she be devoted to one – take care of him, bathe him, read to him, see to him hour after hour and day after day, feed him, sit with him… all of that – and still sleep with the other? And how could Roderick go into Father's bedroom – talk to him about his condition – and all the time know that he would be having Mother directiy afterwards? I couldn't understand it. I didn't see how it was possible. I wanted life simple, and it wasn't. They're savages, I thought. They have no sense of propriety. They don't know how to behave. They have to be taught. I'll teach them. I'll show them. I'll punish them.' Lynley took a cigarette and slid the case across the table to his brother. 'My leaving Howenstow, my coming back so seldom, had nothing to do with you, Peter. You just turned out to be the victim of my need to avenge something which Father probably never even knew was happening. For what it's worth – God knows it's little enough – I'm sorry.'

Peter took a cigarette. But he held it in his fingers, unlit, as if to light it would be taking a step further than he wished to go. 'I wanted you to be there, but you weren't,' he said. 'No-one would tell me when you'd be home again. I thought it was a secret for some reason. Then I finally realized that no-one would tell me because no-one knew. So I stopped asking. Then after a while I stopped caring. When you did come home, it was easier to hate you so that when you left again – as you always did – it wouldn't really matter.'

'You didn't know about Mother and Trenarrow?'

'Not for a long time.'

'How did you find out?'

Peter lit a cigarette. 'Parents' Day at school. Both of them came. Some blokes told me then. "That chap Trenarrow's been boffing your mum, Pete. You too daft to know it?"' He shrugged. 'I pretended to be cool. I pretended I knew. I kept thinking they'd get married. But they never did.'

'I made certain of that. I wanted them to suffer.'

'You didn't have that sort of control over them.'

'I did. I do. I knew where Mother's loyalties lay. I used them to hurt her.'

Peter asked for no further explanation. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and watched its fragile plume of smoke rise. Lynley chose his next words carefully, feeling his way in a land that should have been old and familiar but was instead quite foreign.

'Perhaps we can make our way through this together. Not try to go back, of course. That's impossible. But try to go on.'

'As restitution on your part?' Peter shook his head. 'You don't have to make anything up to me, Tommy. Oh, I know you think you do. But I chose my own path. I'm not your responsibility.' And then, as if he thought this final statement sounded petulant, he finished with, 'Really.'

'None of this has anything to do with responsibility. I want to help. You're my brother. I love you.'

Uttered so simply as a declaration of fact, the statement might have been a blow to his brother. Peter recoiled. His raw lips trembled. He covered his eyes. 'I'm sorry,' he finally said. And then only, 'Tommy.'

Lynley said nothing more until his brother lowered his hand. He was alone in the interrogation room with Peter solely because of Inspector MacPherson's compassion. MacPherson's partner, Sergeant Havers, had protested vociferously enough when Lynley had asked for these few minutes. She had cited regulations, procedures, Judge's Rules and civil law until MacPherson had silenced her with a simple 'I dae know the law, lass. Gie me credit for that, if ye will,' and sent her to sit by a phone and await the results of the toxicological analysis of the powder they had found in Peter's Whitechapel room. After which, MacPherson himself had lumbered off, leaving Lynley at the interrogation room's door, and saying, 'Twenty minutes, Tommy,' over his shoulder. So, in spite of what needed to be said about the years of suffering he and Peter had caused each other, there was little enough time for gathering information and none at all for restoring the relationship they had destroyed. That would have to wait.

'I need to ask you about Mick Cambrey,' Lynley said. 'About Justin Brooke as well.'

'You think I killed them.'

'It doesn't matter what I think. The only thing that matters is what Penzance CID think. Peter, you must know I can't let John Penellin take the blame for Mick's death.'

Peter's eyebrows drew together. 'John's been arrested?'

'Saturday night. You'd already left Howenstow when they came for him, then?'

'We left, directly after dinner. I didn't know.' He touched a finger to the sandwich in front of him and pushed it aside with a grimace of distaste.

'I need the truth,' Lynley said. 'It's the only thing that's going to help anyone. And the only way to get John released – since he doesn't intend to do anything to help himself – is to tell the police what really happened on Friday night. Peter, did you see Mick Cambrey after John went to Gull Cottage?'

'They'll arrest me,' he mumbled. 'They'll put me on trial.'

'You've nothing to fear if you're innocent. If you come forward. If you tell the truth. Peter, were you there? Or did Brooke lie about that?'

Escape was well within Peter's reach. A simple denial would do it. An accusation that Brooke had lied. Even a manufactured reason why Brooke might have done so since the man himself was dead and couldn't refute it. Those were the possibilities of response. As was a decision to help a man who had been part of their extended family for Peter's entire life.