A Suitable Vengeance

Heat returned, a wave of it. St. James felt it on his face and in his joints. Oblivious of Peter, who leaned against the wall, weeping into his hands, he moved woodenly to the window. He fumbled behind the bedsheet curtain to open it, only to find that sometime in the past it had been painted shut. The room was stifling.

Less than twenty-four hours, he thought. The bottle was marked with the silversmith’s identification, a small, fanciful escutcheon worked into its base. It wouldn’t take long for the police to trace the piece back to Jermyn Street where he’d bought it. Then, it would be a simple matter. They would go through the files and look at orders. These they would compare to the bottle itself. After making some telephone calls to patrons, they would follow up with discreet enquiries at those patrons’ homes. The most he could hope for was twenty-four hours.

Dimly, he heard Lynley’s voice, speaking into the telephone in the hallway, and nearer, the sound of Peter’s weeping. Above that, the harsh grating of stertorous breathing rose and fell. He recognised it as his own.

“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 wracked 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.”