A Suitable Vengeance (43 page)

“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.

Peter looked at his brother as if for guidance. First his tongue then his teeth sought his upper lip. “She was like that,” Peter said.

Lynley’s fingers whitened on his brother’s shoulder. It was obvious that Sergeant Havers saw this, for she exhaled in a brief, knowing snort, a woman who possessed no affinity for Thomas Lynley and no fellow-feeling for his situation. She turned back to the bed. MacPherson began speaking to her in a low, quick voice. She jotted down notes.

When MacPherson had completed his preliminary inspection, he joined Peter and Lynley. He drew them to the far corner of the room as the forensic pathologist took over, pulling on surgical gloves. The pathologist probed, touched, poked, and examined. In a few minutes, it was over. He murmured something to Havers and made way for the scenes-of-crime officers.

St. James watched them begin to gather the evidence, his every sense alive to the presence of Sidney’s silver bottle on the floor. The water glass on the packing crate was placed into a sack and marked. The tarnished spoon likewise. A fine residue of powder, which St. James himself had not seen in his first inspection of the fruit packing crate, was carefully brushed from its surface into a container. Then the crate was inched to one side, and the bottle itself was plucked from the floor. When it, too, had been dropped into a sack, the twenty-four hours had begun.

St. James signaled to Lynley that he was going to leave. The other man joined him.

“They’ll be taking Peter in,” Lynley said. “I’ll go with him.” And then, as if he believed that his intention to accompany his brother in some way negated his prior determination to let Peter stand on his own, he went on to say, “I must do that much, St. James.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Will you tell Deborah for me? I’ve no idea how long I’ll be.”

“Of course.” St. James thought how to phrase his next question, knowing that Lynley, upon hearing it, would leap to a conclusion which might make him refuse. Still, he had to have the details, and he had to have them without Lynley’s knowing why. He led into it cautiously. “Will you get me some information from the Yard? As soon as they have it?”

“What sort of information?”

“The postmortem. As much as you can. As soon as you can.”

“You don’t think that Peter—”

“They’re going to rush things through for you, Tommy. It’s the most they can do, all things considered, and they’ll do it. So will you get the information?”

Lynley glanced at his brother. Peter had begun to shake. MacPherson rooted through the pile of clothing on the floor until he found a striped sweatshirt which he handed over to Havers who inspected it with deliberate slowness before passing it on to Peter.

Lynley sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “All right. I’ll get it.”

In the back of the taxi spinning towards St. Pancras, St. James tried to remove every thought of his sister from his mind, replacing her image with an unsuccessful attempt to formulate some sort of plan of action. But he could come up with nothing other than a host of memories, each one more importunate than the last, making its own demand that he save her.

He had stopped briefly in Paddington to deliver Lynley’s message to Deborah. There, he had used her telephone, ringing his sister’s flat, her modelling agency, his own home, knowing all along that he was duplicating Lady Helen’s earlier efforts, knowing and not caring, not even thinking, doing nothing but trying to find her, seeing nothing but the silver bottle on the floor and the intricate scrollwork of initials that identified it as Sidney’s.

He was aware of Deborah standing nearby, watching and listening. She was alone in the flat—Helen having gone her way to do what she could with the messages on Mick’s answering machine and the file marked
prospects
—and he could read her concern in the fine tracery of lines that appeared on her brow as he continued to dial, continued to ask for his sister, continued to meet with no success. He found that, more than anything, he wanted to keep from Deborah the true nature of his fear. She knew Sasha was dead, so she assumed his concern revolved only round Sidney’s immediate safety. He was determined to keep it that way.

“No luck?” Deborah asked, when he finally turned from the telephone.

He shook his head and went to the table upon which they had left the material they’d gathered from Mick Cambrey’s flat. He sorted it, stacked it, tapped it into a neat pile which he folded and put into his jacket pocket.

“Can I do anything?” she asked. “Anything at all? Please. I feel so useless.” She looked stricken and afraid. “I can’t believe someone would actually want to hurt Sidney. She’s just gone off somewhere, Simon. Hasn’t she? She’s in agony over Justin. She needs to be alone.”

He heard the penultimate statement and knew it for the truth. He had seen his sister’s grief in Cornwall and had felt the inchoate fury which that grief provoked. Still, she had gone and he had allowed her to do so. Whatever fell upon Sidney now was in large part his responsibility.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. He started for the door. His face was impassive. He could feel each feature settle until he wore a perfectly insensate mask. He knew that Deborah wouldn’t understand such a reaction to her offer. She would read it as rejection, seeing it, perhaps, as an adolescent retaliation for everything that had passed between them since her return. But that couldn’t be helped.

“Simon. Please.”

“There’s nothing more to be done.”

“I can help. You know I can.”

“There’s no need, Deborah.”

“Let me help you find her.”

“Just wait here for Tommy.”

“I don’t
want
—” She stopped. He could see a pulse beating in her throat. He waited for more. There was nothing. Deborah took in a slow breath, but she didn’t look away. “I’ll go to Cheyne Row.”

“There’s no point to that. Sidney won’t be there.”

“I don’t care. I’m going.”

He had neither the time nor the wish to argue with her. So he left, forcing himself back to his original purpose in returning to London. He hoped that a visit to Islington-London might somehow reveal the truth behind Mick Cambrey’s death and that this additional death in Whitechapel were somehow tied to the previous two. For tying them together would serve as a means of exonerating Sidney. And tying them together meant a pursuit of the ghost of Mick Cambrey. He was determined to incarnate this spectre from Cornwall. Islington-London seemed to offer the final opportunity of doing so.

But in the back of the taxi, he felt his weary mind lose the battle against images that attacked his calm, forcing him back to a time and a place he thought he had left behind forever. There, he saw them as they had appeared at the hospital, distorted faces emerging out of the fugue created by alternating states of consciousness and by the drug that deadened his most immediate suffering. David and Andrew in hushed consultation with the doctors; his mother and Helen, riven by sorrow; Tommy, driven by guilt. And Sidney. Just seventeen years old, with a butchered-up haircut and earrings that looked like communication satellites. Outrageous Sidney, reading to him from the most ridiculous of the London dailies, laughing uproariously at the worst of their gruesome and titillating stories. She was always there, never missing a day, refusing to allow him to sink into despair.

And then later in Switzerland. He remembered the bitterness with which he had looked at the Alps from his hospital window, loathing his body, despising its weakness, confronting for the very first time the inescapable reality of never being able to walk with ease in those mountains—or any others—again. But Sidney was with him, bullying, shouting, harassing him back to health, stubbornly insisting he would live to an old age even when he prayed each night that he might die.

Remembering all this, he fought against the facts that nagged at his consciousness: Sidney’s presence in Soho, the nature of her relationship with Justin Brooke, her easy access to drugs from the life she led, the people she knew, and the work she did. And while he tried to convince himself that she did not know—could not possibly have known—Mick Cambrey and thus could not be involved in his death in any way, he could not dismiss the fact that Deborah had told him Sidney had seen Tina Cogin that day in her flat. Sidney herself had talked about seeing Peter assaulting a woman in Soho, a woman whose description was identical to Tina’s. Even though it was tenuous enough to be disregarded as meaningless, the connection was there. He could not overlook it. So he wondered where she was and what she had done, while twenty-five years of mutual history cried out that he find her before the police.

Islington-London was an unprepossessing building not far from Gray’s Inn Road. A small, gated courtyard set the structure back from the street, and it was crammed with half a dozen small cars and a minivan with the letters ISLINGTON spread across a map of Great Britain and white stars scattered here and there in all three countries, obviously indicating the location of branch offices. There were ten in all, as far north as Inverness, as far south as Penzance. It appeared to be quite an operation.

Inside the lobby, the sound from the street was muted by thick walls, thick carpet, and a Muzak track currently playing an all-strings rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Handsome sofas lined the walls beneath large, modern canvases in the style of David Hockney. Across from these a receptionist, who couldn’t have been more than an erstwhile fifth form student who’d decided not to continue in school, tapped away at a word processor with impossibly long magenta-coloured fingernails. Her hair was dyed to match.