A Suitable Vengeance (30 page)

Cotter glanced warily at St. James. “Have a bit more,” he said.

St. James rooted through a drawer, looking for her nightdress. He found it under a Sidney-like pile of jerseys, jewellery, and stockings.

“You must get out of those wet things,” he told her. “Cotter, will you find a towel for her hair? And something for the cuts?”

Cotter nodded, eyeing Sidney cautiously before he left the room. Alone with his sister, St. James undressed her, tossing her wet clothes onto the floor. He drew her nightdress over her head, pulling her arms gently through the thin satin straps. She said nothing and didn’t seem to realise he was present at all. When Cotter returned with towel and plaster, St. James rubbed Sidney’s hair roughly. He saw to her arms and legs and the muddy splatters on her feet. Swinging her legs up on the bed, he pulled the blankets round her. She submitted to it all like a child, like a doll.

“Sid,” he whispered, touching her cheek. He wanted to talk about Justin Brooke. He wanted to know if they had been together in the night. He wanted to know when Brooke had gone to the cliff. Above all, he wanted to know why.

She didn’t respond. She stared at the ceiling. Whatever she knew would have to wait.

Lynley parked the Rover at the far end of the courtyard and entered the house through the northwest door between the gun room and the servants’ hall. He had seen the line of vehicles on the drive—two police cars, an unmarked saloon, and an ambulance with its windscreen wipers still running—so he was not unprepared to be accosted by Hodge as he quickly passed through the domestic wing of the house. They met outside the pantry.

“What is it?” Lynley asked the old butler. He tried to sound reasonably concerned without revealing his incipient panic. Upon seeing the cars through the wind-driven rain, his first thought had run unveeringly towards Peter.

Hodge gave the information willingly enough and in a fashion designed to reveal nothing of his own feelings in the matter. It was Mr. Brooke, he told Lynley. He’d been taken to the old schoolroom.

If the manner in which Hodge had relayed the information had been fleeting cause for hope—nothing could be terribly amiss if Brooke hadn’t been taken directly to hospital—hope dissipated when Lynley entered the schoolroom in the east wing of the house a few minutes later. The body lay shrouded by blankets on a long scarred table at the room’s centre, the very same table at which generations of young Lynleys had done their childhood lessons before being packed off to school. A group of men stood in hushed conversation round it, among them Inspector Boscowan and the plainclothes sergeant who had accompanied him to pick up John Penellin on the previous evening. Boscowan was talking to the group in general, issuing some sort of instructions to two crime-scene men whose trouser legs were muddy and whose jacket shoulders bore large wet patches from the rain. The police pathologist was with them, identifiable by the medical bag at her feet. It was unopened, and she didn’t look as if she intended to do any preliminary examining of the body. Nor did the crime-scene men seem prepared to do any work at present. Which led Lynley to the only conclusion possible: Wherever Brooke had died, it hadn’t been in the schoolroom.

He saw St. James standing in one of the window embrasures, giving his attention to what could be seen of the garden through the rain-streaked glass.

“Jasper found him in the cove.” St. James spoke quietly when Lynley joined him. He did not turn away from the window. His own clothes had had a recent wetting, Lynley saw, and his shirt bore streaks of blood which the rain had elongated like a waterwash of paint. “It looks like an accident. It seems there was slippage at the top of the cliff. He lost his footing.” He looked past Lynley’s shoulder at the group round the body, then back at Lynley once again. “At least, that’s what Boscowan’s considering for now.”

St. James didn’t ask the question that Lynley heard behind the final guarded statement. He was grateful for the respite, however long his friend intended it to be. He said, “Why was the body moved, St. James? Who moved it? Why?”

“Your mother. It had begun to rain. Sid got to him before the rest of us. I’m afraid none of us were thinking too clearly at the moment, least of all myself.” A yew branch, struck by a gust of wind, scratched against the window in front of them. Rain created a sharp tattoo. St. James moved farther into the embrasure and lifted his eyes to the upper floor of the wing opposite the schoolroom, to the corner bedroom next to Lynley’s own. “Where’s Peter?”

The respite had been brief indeed. Lynley felt the sudden need to lie, to protect his brother in some way, but he couldn’t do it. Nor could he say what drove him to the truth, whether it was priggish morality or an unspoken plea for the other man’s help and understanding. “He’s gone.”

“Sasha?”

“As well.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

St. James’ reaction was a single word, sighed more than spoken. “Great.” Then, “How long? Was his bed slept in last night? Was hers?”

“No.” Lynley didn’t add that he’d seen as much at half past seven this morning when he’d gone to speak to his brother. He didn’t tell him that he’d sent Jasper out to search for Peter at a quarter to eight. Nor did he describe the horror he’d felt, seeing the police cars and ambulance lined up in front of Howenstow, thinking Peter had been found dead, and recognising in his reaction to that thought a small measure of relief behind the dread. He saw St. James reflectively considering Brooke’s covered body. “Peter had nothing to do with this,” he said. “It was an accident. You said that yourself.”

“I wonder whether Peter knew that Brooke spoke to us last night,” St. James said. “Would Brooke have told him so? And if he did, why?”

Lynley recognised the speculation that drove the questions. It was the very same speculation he was facing himself. “Peter’s not a killer. You know that.”

“Then you’d better find him. Killer or not, he has a bit of explaining to do, doesn’t he?”

“Jasper’s been out looking for him since early this morning.”

“I did wonder what he’d been doing at the cove. He thought Peter was there?”

“There. At the mill. He’s been looking everywhere. Off the estate as well.”

“Are Peter’s things still here?”

“I…no.” Lynley knew St. James well enough to see the reasoning that came upon the heels of his answer. If Peter had run from Howenstow with no time to lose, knowing his life was in danger, he’d be likely to leave his belongings behind. If, on the other hand, he had left after committing a murder that he knew wouldn’t be discovered for some hours, he’d have plenty of time to pack whatever possessions he’d brought with him to Howenstow. That done, he could steal off into the night, with no one the wiser until Brooke’s body was found. If he had killed him. If Brooke had been murdered at all. Lynley forced himself to keep in mind the fact that they were calling it an accident. And surely the crime-scene men knew what they were looking at when they made their observations at the site of an untimely death. Earlier in the morning, the thought of Peter having stolen Deborah’s cameras in order to sell them and purchase cocaine had been repellent, a cause for disbelief and denial. Now it was welcome. For how likely was it that his brother had been involved in both the disappearance of the cameras and Justin Brooke’s death? And if his mind was focussed on his body’s need for cocaine, why pause in his pursuit of the drug to eliminate Brooke?

He knew the answer, of course. But that answer tied Peter to Mick Cambrey’s death, a death that no one was calling an accident.

“We’ll be taking the body now.” The plainclothes sergeant had come to join them. In spite of the rain, he smelled heavily of sweat and his forehead was oily with perspiration. “With your permission.”

Lynley nodded sharply in acquiescence and longed for liquor to soothe his nerves. As if in answer, the schoolroom doors opened and his mother entered, pushing a drinks trolley on which she’d assembled two urns, three full decanters of spirits, and several plates of biscuits. Her blue jeans and shoes were stained with mud, her white shirt torn, her hair dishevelled. But as if her appearance were the least of her concerns, when she spoke, she took command of the situation.

“I don’t pretend to know your regulations, Inspector,” she told Boscowan. “But it does seem reasonable that you might be allowed something to take the edge off the chill. Coffee, tea, brandy, whisky. Whatever you’d like. Please help yourselves.”

Boscowan nodded his thanks and, having received this much permission, his officers occupied themselves at the trolley. Boscowan strolled over to Lynley and St. James.

“Was he a drinker, my lord?”

“I didn’t know him that well. But he was drinking last night. We all were.”

“Drunk?”

“He didn’t appear to be. Not when I last saw him.”

“And when was that?”

“When the party broke up. Round midnight. Perhaps a bit later.”

“Where?”

“In the drawing room.”

“Drinking?”

“Yes.”

“But not drunk?”

“He could have been. I don’t know. He wasn’t acting drunk.” Lynley recognised the intention behind the questions. If Brooke had been drunk, he fell to his death. If he had been sober, he was pushed. But Lynley felt the need to excuse the death as an accident, whatever Brooke’s condition last night. “Drunk or sober, he’d never been here before. He wasn’t familiar with the lay of the land.”

Boscowan nodded, but nothing in his manner suggested conviction. “No doubt the postmortem will tell the tale.”

“It was dark. The cliff’s high.”

“Dark if the man went out in the night,” Boscowan said. “He could have done so this morning.”

“How was he dressed?”

Boscowan’s shoulders lifted, a partial acknowledgement of the accuracy of Lynley’s question. “In his evening clothes. But no one’s to say he wasn’t up until dawn with one member of the party or another. Until we have a time of death, we can be certain of nothing. Except the fact that he’s dead. And we’re certain of that.” He nodded and joined his men by the trolley.

“A thousand and one questions he’s not asking, St. James,” Lynley said.

The other man listed them. “Who saw him last? Has anyone else gone missing from the estate? Who was here at the party? Who else was on the grounds? Is there any reason why someone might want to harm him?”

“Why isn’t he asking?”

“He’s waiting for the postmortem, I should guess. It’s to his advantage that this be an accident.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got his man for Cambrey’s murder. And John Penellin couldn’t have killed Brooke.”

“You’re implying there’s a connection.”

“There is. There must be.” A blur of movement on the drive outside caught their attention. “Jasper,” St. James noted.

The old man was trudging through puddles, heading towards the west wing of the house.

“Let’s see what he has to say,” Lynley said.

They found him just outside the servants’ hall where he was shaking the rain off a battered sou’wester. He did the same to an antique mackintosh and hung both on a wall peg before he struggled out of dark green gumboots that were caked with mud. He nodded curtly at Lynley and St. James, and when he was quite ready, followed them back to the smoking room, where he accepted a whisky to ward off the cold.

“Nowheres to be found,” he told Lynley. “But ’r boat’s gone from Lamorna Cove.”

“It’s what?” Lynley said. “Jasper, are you certain?”

“Course I be certain. ’Tain’t there.”

Lynley stared at the fox on the overmantel and tried to understand, but all that came to mind were details. They refused to coalesce. The family’s thirty-five-foot sloop was docked at Lamorna. Peter had been sailing since he was five years old. The weather had been promising a storm all day. No one with any sense or experience would have taken a boat out. “It must have broken loose of its mooring somehow.”

Jasper made a sound of derision, but his face was blank when Lynley swung towards him again. “Where else did you check?”

“Ever’place. ’Tween Nanrunnel and Treen.”

“Trewoofe? St. Buryan? Did you go inland?”

“Aye. A bit. No need t’ go far, m’lord. If the lad be on foot, someone’s like to see him. But no one makes the claim.” Jasper pulled on his jaw, rubbing his fingers through the stubble of his beard. “Way I see, either him and the lady’s in hiding round here or they got a ride direct soon’s they left Howenstow. Or they took the boat.”

“He wouldn’t have done it. He knows better than that. He’s not entirely…” Lynley stopped. There was no need for Jasper to hear the worst of his fears. No doubt the man knew every one of them already. “Thank you, Jasper. Make sure you get something to eat.”

The old man nodded and headed for the door. He paused at the threshold, however. “John Penellin got took last night, I hear.”

“Yes. He did.”

Jasper’s mouth worked, as if he wished to say more but was hesitant to do so.

“What is it?” Lynley asked.

“He oughtn’t take blame for nobody, you ask me,” Jasper said and left them.

“What more does Jasper know?” St. James asked when they were alone.