A Suitable Vengeance (45 page)

“A form of chemotherapy? What exactly does it do?”

“Inhibits protein synthesis in cancer cells,” Malverd said. “Our hope is that it’ll prevent replication of oncogenes, the genes that cause cancer in the first place.” He nodded at the graph and pointed to the red line that descended it steeply, a sharp diagonal that indicated the percentage of inhibited tumour growth versus the time after the drug had been administered. “As you can see, it looks like a promising treatment. The results in mice have been quite extraordinary.”

“So it’s not been used on human subjects?”

“We’re years away from that. The toxicology studies have only just begun. You know the sort of thing. What amount constitutes a safe dosage? What are its biological effects?”

“Side effects?”

“Certainly. We’d be looking closely for those.”

“If there are no side effects, if there’s nothing to prove oncozyme a danger, what happens then?”

“Then we market the drug.”

“At some considerable profit, I should guess,” St. James noted.

“For a fortune,” Malverd replied. “It’s a breakthrough drug. No doubt about it. In fact, I should guess that oncozyme’s the story this Cambrey was writing. But as to its being a potential cause for his murder”—he paused meaningfully—“I don’t see how.”

St. James thought he did. It would have taken the form of a random piece of knowledge, a source of concern, or an idea passed on by someone with access to inside information. He asked, “What’s the relationship between Islington-London and Islington-Penzance?”

“Penzance is one of our research facilities. We have them scattered round the country.”

“Their purpose? More testing?”

Malverd shook his head. “The drugs are created at the research labs in the first place.” He leaned back in his chair. “Each lab generally works in a separate area of disease control. We’ve one on Parkinson’s, another on Huntington’s chorea, a new one dealing with AIDS. We’ve even a lab working on the common cold, believe it or not.” He smiled.

“And Penzance?”

“One of our three cancer locations.”

“Did Penzance produce oncozyme, by any chance?”

Malverd looked meditatively at the graph again. “No. Our Bury lab in Suffolk was responsible for oncozyme.”

“And you’ve said they don’t test the drugs at these facilities?”

“Not the sort of extensive testing we do here. The initial testing, of course. They do that. Otherwise, they’d hardly know what they’ve developed, would they?”

“Would it be safe to assume that someone at one of these associate labs would have access to results? Not only that local lab’s results but London’s results as well.”

“Of course.”

“And he or she might recognise an inconsistency? Perhaps some detail glossed over in the rush to market a new product?”

Malverd’s benign expression altered. He thrust out his chin and pulled it back as if adjusting his spinal cord. “That’s hardly likely, Mr. St. James. This is a place of medicine, not a science fiction novel.” He got to his feet. “I must get back to my own lab, now. Until we’ve a new man to take over Twenty-Five, I’m in a bit of a frazzle. I’m sure you understand.”

St. James followed him out of the office. Malverd handed the secretary both of the engagement diaries and said, “They were in order, Mrs. Courtney. I do congratulate you on that.”

She responded coldly as she took the diaries from him. “Mr. Brooke kept everything in order, Mr. Malverd.”

St. James heard the name with a rush of surprise. “Mr. Brooke?” he asked. It couldn’t be possible.

Malverd proved that it was. He led him back into the lab. “Justin Brooke,” he said. “Senior biochemist in charge of this lot. Bloody fool was killed last weekend in an accident in Cornwall. I thought at first that’s why you’d come.”

CHAPTER

22

B
efore he nodded at the constable to unlock the interrogation room’s door, Lynley looked through the small, thick-glassed window, a plastic tray of tea and sandwiches in his hand. Head bowed, his brother was sitting at the table. He still wore the striped sweatshirt that MacPherson had given him in Whitechapel, but whatever protection it had afforded him earlier was no longer adequate. Peter shook—arms, legs, head, and shoulders. Lynley had no doubt that every internal muscle was quivering as well.

When they had left him in the room thirty minutes before—alone save for a guard outside to make sure he did nothing to harm himself—Peter had asked no questions; he had made neither statement nor request. He merely stood, hands on the back of one of the chairs, glancing over the impersonal room. One table, four chairs, a dull beige linoleum floor, two ceiling lights only one of which worked, a red, dented tin ashtray on the table. All he had done before taking a seat was to look at Lynley and open his mouth as if to speak. His face limned entreaty upon every feature. But he said nothing. It was as if Peter were finally seeing how irreparable was the damage he had done to his relationship with his brother. If he believed that blood tied them inextricably to each other, that he could call upon that blood to save himself in some way, he apparently did not intend to mention the fact now.

Lynley nodded at the constable, who unlocked the door and relocked it once Lynley had entered. Always a sound of grim finality, Lynley found that the key grating upon metal was even more so now that it was being turned against the freedom of his own brother. He hadn’t expected to feel this way. He hadn’t expected to feel the desire to rescue or the exigent need to protect. For some delusional reason, he had actually believed that he would feel a closure had been reached once Peter finally faced the criminal implications of the lifestyle he’d chosen these past few years. But now that the justice system had caught Peter up, Lynley found himself feeling not at all righteously vindicated at having been the brother who had chosen the clean, the moral, the ethical life, the life guaranteed to make him society’s darling. Rather, he felt himself the hypocrite and knew beyond a doubt that if punishment were to be meted out to the greater sinner—the man who had been given the most and had therefore thrown the most away—he would be its rightful recipient.

Peter looked up, saw him, looked away. The expression on his face was not sullen, however. It was dazed by both confusion and fear.

“We both need something to eat,” Lynley said. He sat opposite his brother and placed the tray on the table between them. When Peter made no move towards it, Lynley unwrapped a sandwich, fumbling with the seal. The crinkling of the paper made that curious sound like fire eating wood. It was unusually loud. “The Yard food’s unspeakable. Either sawdust or institutional mush. I had these brought in from a restaurant down the street. Try the pastrami. It’s my favourite.” Peter didn’t move. Lynley reached for the tea. “I can’t recall how much sugar you use. I’ve brought a few packets. There’s a carton of milk as well.” He stirred his own tea, unwrapped his sandwich, and tried to avoid considering the inherent idiocy of his behaviour. He knew he was acting like a hovering mother, as if he believed that food was going to take the illness away.

Peter raised his head. “Not hungry.” His lips, Lynley saw, were cracked, raw from having been bitten during the half hour in which he’d been left alone. In one spot they had begun to bleed although already the blood was drying in a ragged, dark blot. Other blood—in the form of small, crusty scabs—ringed the inside of his nose, while dry skin caked his eyelids, embedding itself between his lashes.

“The appetite goes first,” Peter said. “Then everything else. You don’t realise what’s happening. You think you’re fine, the best you’ve ever been. But you don’t eat. You don’t sleep. You work less and less and finally not at all. You don’t do anything but coke. Sex. Sometimes you do sex. But in the end, you don’t even do that. Coke’s so much better.”

Lynley carefully placed his sandwich, untouched, onto the paper in which it had been wrapped. He was suddenly unhungry And wanting to be nothing more than unfeeling as well. He reached for his tea and circled his hands around it. A dull but comforting warmth emanated from the cup.

“Will you let me help you?”

Peter’s right hand gripped his left. He made no reply.

“I can’t change the kind of brother I was when you needed me,” Lynley said. “I can only offer you what I am right now, however little that may be.”

Peter seemed to withdraw at this. Or perhaps it was that the cold—within and without—was causing him to diminish in size, conserving energy, garnering whatever small resources he had left. When he finally answered, his lips scarcely moved. Lynley had to strain to hear him.

“I wanted to be like you.”

“Like me? Why?”

“You were perfect. You were my standard. I wanted to be like you. When I found I couldn’t, I just gave it up. If I couldn’t be you, I didn’t want to be anything.”

Peter’s words sounded the sure ring of finality. They sounded not only like the end of an interview that had barely begun, but also like the end of any possibility to put things right between them. Lynley sought something—words, images, a common experience—that would allow him to reach back through those fifteen years and touch the little boy he had abandoned at Howenstow. But he could find nothing. There was no way to go back and no way to make amends.

He felt leaden. He reached in his jacket pocket, brought out his cigarette case and lighter, and laid them on the table. The case had been his father’s, and the elaborately engraved
A
on the cover had worn through time. Portions of it had disappeared altogether, but the case was familiar to him, dear to him, nicked and dented with age though it was. He wouldn’t have considered replacing it with another. Staring at it—small rectangular symbol of everything he had run from, all the areas of his life he had chosen to deny, the welter of emotions he had refused to face—he found the words.

“It was knowing that she was sleeping with Roderick while Father was alive. I couldn’t stand that, Peter. It didn’t matter to me that they’d fallen in love, that they hadn’t set out to but that it just happened between them. It didn’t matter that Roderick had every intention of marrying her when she was free. It didn’t matter that she still loved Father—and I knew she loved him, because I saw how she acted with him even after she’d begun the affair with Roderick. Still, I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t abide my own blind ignorance. How could she love them both? How could she be devoted to one—take care of him, bathe him, read to him, see to him hour after hour and day after day, feed him, sit with him…all of that—and still sleep with the other? And how could Roderick go into Father’s bedroom—talk to him about his condition—and all the time know that he would be having Mother directly afterwards? I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t see how it was possible. I wanted life simple and it wasn’t. They’re savages, I thought. They have no sense of propriety. They don’t know how to behave. They have to be taught. I’ll teach them. I’ll show them. I’ll punish them.” Lynley took a cigarette and slid the case across the table to his brother. “My leaving Howenstow, my coming back so seldom, had nothing to do with you, Peter. You just turned out to be the victim of my need to avenge something which Father probably never even knew was happening. For what it’s worth—God knows it’s little enough—I’m sorry.”

Peter took a cigarette. But he held it in his fingers, unlit, as if to light it would be taking a step further than he wished to go.

“I wanted you to be there, but you weren’t,” he said. “No one would tell me when you’d be home again. I thought it was a secret for some reason. Then I finally realised that no one would tell me because no one knew. So I stopped asking. Then after a while, I stopped caring. When you did come home, it was easier to hate you so that when you left again—as you always did—it wouldn’t really matter.”

“You didn’t know about Mother and Trenarrow?”

“Not for a long time.”

“How did you find out?”

Peter lit his cigarette. “Parents’ Day at school. Both of them came. Some blokes told me then. ‘That chap Trenarrow’s been boffing your mum, Pete. You too daft to know it?’” He shrugged. “I pretended to be cool. I pretended I knew. I kept thinking they’d get married. But they never did.”

“I made certain of that. I wanted them to suffer.”

“You didn’t have that sort of control over them.”

“I did. I do. I knew where Mother’s loyalties lay. I used them to hurt her.”

Peter asked for no further explanation. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and watched its fragile plume of smoke rise. Lynley chose his next words carefully, feeling his way in a land that should have been old and familiar but was instead quite foreign.

“Perhaps we can make our way through this together. Not try to go back, of course. That’s impossible. But try to go on.”

“As restitution on your part?” Peter shook his head. “You don’t have to make anything up to me, Tommy. Oh, I know you think you do. But I chose my own path. I’m not your responsibility.” And then, as if he thought his final statement sounded petulant, he finished with, “Really.”

“None of this has anything to do with responsibility. I want to help. You’re my brother. I love you.”

Uttered so simply as a declaration of fact, the statement might have been a blow to his brother. Peter recoiled. His raw lips trembled. He covered his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. And then only, “Tommy.”