A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  'I wanted him to have the best of everything. I never asked him to stand on his own. What he's become is the result. I'm at fault here, St James. The real sickness is mine.'

  St James gazed out of the window and sought a reply. He thought about the energy people expend in seeking to avoid what they most need to face. They fill their lives with distraction and denial, only to find at an unexpected eleventh hour that there is in reality no absolute escape. How long had Lynley been engaged in avoidance? How long had he himself done the same thing? It had become a habit with both of them. In scrupulously avoiding what they needed to say to each other, they had learned to adopt evasion in every significant area of their lives.

  He said, 'Not everything in life is your responsibility, Tommy.'

  'My mother said practically the same thing the other night.'

  'She was right. You punish yourself at times when others bear equal responsibility. Don't do that now.'

  Lynley shot him a quick look. 'The accident. There's that as well, isn't there? You've tried to take the burden from my shoulders all these years, but you never will, not completely. I drove the car, St James. No matter what other facts exist to attenuate my guilt, the primary fact remains. I drove the car that night. And when it was over I walked away. You didn't.'

  'I've not blamed you.'

  'You don't need to do so. I blame myself.' He turned off New Oxford Street and they began another series of side-street and back-alley runs, edging them closer to the City and to Whitechapel which lay just beyond it. 'But at least I must let go of blaming myself for Peter if I'm not to go mad. The best step I can take in that direction at the moment is to swear to you that, no matter what we find when we get to him, it shall be Peter's responsibility, not mine.'

  They found the building in a narrow street directly off Brick Lane, where a shouting group of Pakistani children were playing football with a caved-in ball. They were using four plastic rubbish sacks for goalposts, but one sack had split open and its contents lay about, smashed and trodden under the children's feet.

  The sight of the Bentley called an abrupt halt to the game, and St James and Lynley climbed out of the car into a curious circle of faces. The air was heavy, not only with the apprehension that accompanies the appearance of strangers in a closely knit neighbourhood but also with the smell of old coffee grounds, rotting vegetables, and fruit gone bad. The shoes of the football players contributed largely to this pungent odour. They appeared to be caked with organic refuse.

  'Wha's up?' one of the children murmured.

  'Dunno,' another replied. 'Some motor, that, i'n it?'

  A third, more enterprising than the others, stepped forward with an offer to 'watch the motor f'r you, mister. Keep this lot off it.' He nodded his head towards the rest of the crew. Lynley raised his hand slightly, a response which the boy seemed to take as affirmation, for he posted himself with one hand on the bonnet, the other on his hip, and one grubby foot on the bumper.

  They had parked directly in front of Peter's building, a narrow structure five floors high. Originally, its bricks had been painted white, but time, soot, and lack of interest had dirtied them to a repellent grey. The woodwork of windows and front door appeared to have been untouched for decades. Where handsome blue paint had once made a pleasing contrast to the white of the bricks, mere flecks remained, azure spots like freckles on a skin being eaten by age. The fact that someone on the third floor had tried to ease the aspect of the building by planting freesias in a splintered window box did nothing to combat the general feeling of poverty and decay.

  They climbed the four front steps to the door. It stood open. Above it, the words last few days had been sprayed on to the bricks with red paint. They seemed a suitable epigraph.

  'He said he's on the first floor,' Lynley said and headed for the stairs.

  Once covered with a cheap linoleum, they were worn through in the centre to the black backing, and the edges that remained were crusted with a combination of old wax and new dirt. Large, greasy discolourations splodged the stairway walls, which were pockmarked with bolt holes where once a hand-rail had been mounted. Hand-prints covered them, as well as an enormous gravy-like stain which oozed down from an upper floor.

  On the landing, a dusty pram tilted on three wheels, surrounded by several sacks of rubbish, two tin pails, a broom and a blackened mop. A gaunt cat, ribs showing and an ulcerated sore in the middle of its forehead, slunk by them as they climbed upwards, assailed by the odour of garlic and urine.

  In the uncarpeted first floor corridor, the building came to life. Televisions, music, voices raised in an argument, a baby's sudden wail - the discordant sounds of people going about the daily business of living. This was not the case in Peter's flat, however, which they found at the far end of the corridor where a grimy window admitted a weak shaft of light from the street. The door was shut, but neither closed nor latched, so when Lynley knocked, it swung inwards to reveal a single room whose windows - closed and covered by bedsheets - seemed to entrap the odours of the entire building, mingling them with the stronger stench of unwashed bodies and dirty clothes.

  Although the room was not altogether much smaller than the bedsit they had just left in Paddington, the contrast was unnerving. There was virtually no furniture. Instead, three large, stained pillows lay on the floor among discarded newspapers and open magazines. In lieu of either wardrobe or chest of drawers, a single chair held a pile of unfolded clothing which spilled down to four cardboard cartons in which more clothing lay. Up-ended fruit packing crates served as tables, and a shadeless floor lamp provided the room with light.

  Lynley said nothing at all as they entered. For a moment, he didn't move from the threshold, as if he were summoning the strength of purpose to shut the door behind them and face the truth.

  He pushed the door closed so that nothing further obstructed their line of vision. Against the near wall, a threadbare sofa had been folded out into a bed. On this, a partially shrouded figure lay motionless. On the floor, just beyond the sofa, Peter Lynley was curled into a foetal position, his hands curved round his head.

  'Peter!' Lynley went to him, kneeled, cried his name again.

  As if roused by the sound, Peter gasped and made a convulsive movement. His eyes focused, found his brother.

  'She won't move.' He stuffed part of his T-shirt into his mouth for a moment as if in an attempt to prevent himself from crying. 'I came home and she was there and she won't move.'

  'What's happened?' Lynley asked.

  'She won't move, Tommy. I came home and she was there and she won't move.'

  St James went to the sofa. He removed the sheet which covered most of the figure. Beneath it, Sasha lay naked on her side on the filthy linen with one arm stretched out and one hand dangling from the edge of the bed. Her thin hair fell forward to cover her face, and where her neck was exposed its flesh looked grey with dirt. He put his fingers to her outstretched arm, although even as he did so he knew the exercise was mere rote formality. He'd once been a member of the Met's crime-scene team. This wasn't the first time he'd looked upon a dead body.

  He straightened and shook his head at Lynley. The other man came to join him.

  St James pushed the fallen hair to one side and moved the arm gently to check for rigor. He took a step back, however, when he saw the hypodermic needle embedded in her flesh.

  'Overdose,' Lynley said. 'What's she taken, Peter?'

  He went back to his brother. St James remained with the body. The hypodermic, he noticed, was empty, the plunger down, as if she'd mainlined a substance that had lolled her in an instant. It was hard to believe. He looked for some indication of what she had taken to bring about such a death. There was nothing on the packing crate next to the bed, save an empty glass with a tarnished spoon inside it and a residue of white powder on its rim. The bed itself held nothing other than the corpse. He stepped back, looking on the floor between the bed and the crate. And then, with a rush of horror, he saw it.

/>   A silver bottle lay on its side, almost out of sight. It spilled forth a white powder, undoubtedly the same substance which clung to the rim of the glass, the same substance which ended Sasha Nifford's life. Unprepared for the sight, St James felt his heart begin to pound. He felt burned all at once by a sudden heat. He refused to believe it.

  The bottle was Sidney's.

  21

  'Get control of yourself, Peter,' Lynley was saying to his brother. He took Peter's arm, pulling him to his feet. Peter clung to him, weeping. 'What's she taken?'

  St James stared at the bottle. He could hear Sidney's voice with utter clarity. She might have been standing right there in the room. ' We drove him home,'' she had said. 'Squalid little flat in Whitechapel’ And then later, more damning and completely undeniable, 'Just tell little Peter when you find him that I have lots to discuss with him. Believe me, I can hardly wait for the opportunity.'

  In the light from the lamp the bottle glinted, winking at him and demanding recognition. He gave it, admitted it without hesitation. For from where he stood St James could see part of the engraving that comprised her initials, and he'd insisted upon the delicacy of that engraving himself because he'd given the bottle to his sister four years ago on her twenty-first birthday.

  'You were my favourite brother. I loved you best.'

  There was no time. He did not have the luxury in which to consider his various options and weigh the relative morality of each. He could only act or let her face the police. He chose to act, bending, reaching out his hand.

  'Good. You've found it,' Lynley said, coming to his side. 'It looks like—' He suddenly seemed to recognize the significance of St James' posture, of his outstretched hand. Certainly, St James thought, from the chill that had rapidly followed the heat in his body, Lynley must have seen something in the pallor of his face. For directly after his words faded away Lynley drew St James back from the bed. 'Don't protect him for my sake,' he said quietly. 'That's finished, St James. I meant what I said in the car. If it's heroin, I can only help Peter by allowing him to face the consequences. I'm going to telephone the Met.' He walked from the room.

  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 some time 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 recognized 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 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 wo
uld 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.