A Suitable Vengeance

“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 garbage-sack goal posts behind.

While a uniformed constable remained at the front of the building, tying the police line from the handrail on the front steps to a nearby lamp post, the rest of the group entered. From his own years at the Yard, St. James recognised 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 on 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 ball-point 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 bedsheet 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.”

“I covered her,” Peter said. “I thought she was asleep.”

Sergeant Havers raised an expressive, disbelieving eyebrow. She wrote in her notebook. She looked from Lynley, to his brother, to the corpse on the bed.

“I went to buy eggs. And bread,” Peter said. “When I got back—”

Lynley stepped behind his brother, dropping his hand to Peter’s shoulder. It was enough to still him. Havers glanced their way again.

“When you got back?” She spoke entirely without inflection.