A Suitable Vengeance (46 page)

Lynley said nothing more until his brother lowered his hand. He was alone in the interrogation room with Peter solely because of Inspector MacPherson’s compassion. MacPherson’s partner, Sergeant Havers, had protested vociferously enough when Lynley had asked for these few minutes. She had cited regulations, procedures, Judge’s Rules, and civil law until MacPherson had silenced her with a simple “I dae know the law, lass. Gie me credit for that, if ye will,” and sent her to sit by a phone and await the results of the toxicological analysis of the powder they had found in Peter’s Whitechapel room. After which, MacPherson himself had lumbered off, leaving Lynley at the interrogation room’s door, and saying, “Twenty minutes, Tommy” over his shoulder. So in spite of what needed to be said about the years of suffering he and Peter had caused each other, there was little enough time for gathering information and none at all for restoring the relationship they had destroyed. That would have to wait.

“I need to ask you about Mick Cambrey,” Lynley said. “About Justin Brooke as well.”

“You think I killed them.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. The only thing that matters is what Penzance CID think. Peter, you must know I can’t let John Penellin take the blame for Mick’s death.”

Peter’s eyebrows drew together. “John’s been arrested?”

“Saturday night. You’d already left Howenstow when they came for him, then?”

“We left directly after dinner. I didn’t know.” He touched a finger to the sandwich in front of him and pushed it aside with a grimace of distaste.

“I need the truth,” Lynley said. “It’s the only thing that’s going to help anyone. And the only way to get John released—since he doesn’t intend to do anything to help himself—is to tell the police what really happened on Friday night. Peter, did you see Mick Cambrey after John went to Gull Cottage?”

“They’ll arrest me,” he mumbled. “They’ll put me on trial.”

“You’ve nothing to fear if you’re innocent. If you come forward. If you tell the truth. Peter, were you there? Or did Brooke lie about that?”

Escape was well within Peter’s reach. A simple denial would do it. An accusation that Brooke had lied. Even a manufactured reason why Brooke might have done so since the man himself was dead and couldn’t refute it. Those were the possibilities of response. As was a decision to help a man who had been part of their extended family for Peter’s entire life.

Peter licked his dry lips. “I was there.”

Lynley didn’t know whether to feel relief or despair. He said, “What happened?”

“I think Justin didn’t trust me to see to things on my own. Or else he couldn’t wait.”

“For the coke?”

“He’d had a stash with him at Howenstow.” Briefly, Peter related the scene that had occurred between Sidney and Justin Brooke on the beach. “She threw it in the water,” he concluded. “So that was that. I’d already phoned Mark about getting some more, but I didn’t have enough money and he wouldn’t trust me for it, not even for a few days.”

“So instead you went to Mick?” A positive answer would be the first fissure in the tale Brooke had told. But it was not forthcoming.

“Not for coke,” Peter said, unconsciously corroborating the first part of Brooke’s story. “For cash. I remembered he did the pay envelopes for the newspaper on alternate Fridays.”

“Did you know Mick was a cross-dresser as well?”

Peter smiled wearily. There was an element of grudging admiration in it, a ghost of the little boy he had been. “I always thought you’d make a decent detective.”

Lynley didn’t tell him how little of his own talent for inference and deduction had gone into the discovery of Mick Cambrey’s second life in London. He merely said, “How long have you known?”

“About a month. I bought from him occasionally in London when my other sources were dry. We’d meet in Soho. There’s an alley near the square where deals go down. We’d meet in a club there. I’d buy a gram, half a gram, less. Whatever I could afford.”

“That seems damn risky. Why not meet at your flat? At his?”

Peter shot him a look. “I didn’t even know he had a flat. And I sure as hell didn’t want him to see mine.”

“How would you get in touch? How would you make the arrangements?”

“Like I said. Sometimes my other sources went dry. So I’d phone him in Cornwall. If he was due to come to London, we’d set up a buy.”

“Always in Soho?”

“Always the same place. At this club. That’s where I found out about the cross-dressing.”

“How?”

Peter’s face coloured as he related the story of how he had waited an hour for Mick Cambrey to appear at Kat’s Kradle; how a woman approached him when he went to the bar for matches; how they had three drinks together; how they finally went outside. “There’s a bit of an alcove there,” Peter said. “It’s private, more or less. I was drunk as hell by then. I didn’t know what I was doing, much less care, so when she started rubbing against me, really feeling me up, I was willing all right. Then when things had gone as far as she wanted them to go, she started laughing. Laughing and laughing like a crazy woman. I saw it was Mick.”

“You couldn’t tell before that?”

Peter gave a rueful shake of his head. “Mick looked good, Tommy. I don’t even know how he did it. But he looked damn good. Sexy. He probably could have fooled his own father. He sure as hell fooled me.”

“And when you saw the woman was Mick?”

“I wanted to beat the shit out of him. But I was too drunk. I took a swing. We both fell. At least, I know we ended up on the ground somehow. And then, of all people, Sidney St. James showed up out of nowhere—Christ, it was like a nightmare. She was with Brooke. He pulled me off Mick and Mick took off. I didn’t see him again until Friday night in Nanrunnel.”

“How did you find out Mick dealt cocaine in the first place?”

“Mark told me.”

“But you didn’t try to get cocaine from him in Nanrunnel?”

“He wouldn’t sell there. Only in London.”

“He wasn’t in London all that often, was he? Who were his buyers?”

“There’s a whole network, Tommy. Dealers know the buyers. Buyers know the dealers. Everyone knows everyone. You get a number. You ring it. You make arrangements.”

“And if your caller turns out to be from the Met’s drug squad?”

“Then you’re busted. But not if you’re smart. And not if you know how to set up your network. Mick knew how to do that. He was a journalist. He knew how to establish good sources. He just looked for a different kind of source once he started dealing. He had hundreds of connections.”

That was true, Lynley thought. It would have been simple for a man in Mick Cambrey’s position. “What happened between you on Friday night? The neighbours heard a row.”

“I was getting desperate. Mark picked up on that in the afternoon and obliged me by raising his price. I didn’t have the cash, so I went to see Mick to borrow some. He said absolutely not. I promised I’d be good for it. I swore that I’d have it back in a week.”

“How?”

Peter stared at his bitten fingernails. Lynley saw that he was struggling with his conscience, choosing how far to go, and costing out the consequences. “Things from Howenstow,” he finally said. “The silver. I thought I could sell a few pieces in London and no one would be the wiser. At least not for a while.”

“Is that why you went to Cornwall in the first place?” Lynley waited for the answer and tried to remain indifferent to the idea of his brother’s selling what had been part of their family for generations merely to feed his drug addiction.

“I don’t know why I went to Cornwall. I wasn’t thinking straight. One minute I was going there to make a buy from Mark. The next it was to pinch a bit of silver to take back to London. The next it was to get some money from Mick. That’s what it’s like. You don’t even know what you’re doing after a while. It’s like being dizzy.”

“And when Mick refused to lend you the money?”

“It was stupid. I threatened to let it out in the village what he was up to in London. The cross-dressing. The drug dealing as well.”

“I take it that didn’t convince him to hand over a few pounds?”

“Not at all. He just laughed. He said if I wanted money I should threaten him with death, not blackmail. People pay a hell of a lot more to stay alive than to have a secret kept, he said. That’s where the real money is. And all the time he kept laughing. Like he was egging me on.”

“What was Brooke doing?”

“Trying to get us both to shut up. He could tell I was crazy. I think he was scared that something weird would go down.”

“But you didn’t shut up?”

“Mick kept after me. He said that if I wanted to put his dirty linen on the table, that he’d be willing to spread mine out as well. He said you and Mother might find my return to drug use of interest. But as to that, I didn’t even care.” Peter bit at his thumbnail, anxious little nibbling bites. “It didn’t matter to me if he told you since you’d guessed I was using again anyway. As for Mother…nothing mattered to me except getting high. You don’t know what it feels like to be willing to do anything just to get your hands on some coke.”

It was a damning admission. Lynley only thanked the luck of the moment that neither MacPherson nor Havers was there to hear it. The former, he knew, might well take it as a meaningless slip of the tongue. The latter, however, would pounce upon it like a starving mongrel.

“I just exploded at that point,” Peter said. “It was that or start to beg.”

“Is that when Brooke left?”

“He tried to get me to go as well, but I said no. I said I wanted to finish what I’d started with the little pouffe.”

Again, the damning choice of words. Lynley felt himself wince inwardly. “What happened then?”

“I called Mick every foul name I could think of. I raved. Screamed. I was strung out and mad and I
needed
…” He picked up his cup of tea, swallowed a large mouthful. A trickle of the liquid dripped down his chin. “I ended up begging and snivelling for just fifty quid. He threw me out.”

Peter’s cigarette had gone untouched in the ashtray. It had burnt to nothing, creating a perfect cylinder of grey ash. He tapped it with the broken nail of his index finger. It dissolyed into a wispy pile. He said:

“The money was still there when I left him, Tommy. You’ve no cause to believe that. But the money was there. And Mick was alive.”

“I believe you.” Lynley tried to make his words ring with the assurance that his personal belief was all that would be necessary to restore Peter to the safety of his family. But that was nothing more than irresponsible fantasy. For as things stood now, once Peter’s story was relayed to the Penzance police, he would surely stand trial. And once his extensive drug use was revealed to a jury, his position would be perilous at best, no matter Lynley’s earlier avowals of the inherent value of telling the truth.

Peter seemed to take comfort from his brother’s words. He seemed to feel an encouragement to continue, a fragile bond between them that allowed for revelation. “I didn’t take them, Tommy. I wouldn’t have done that.” Lynley looked at him blankly. Peter went on. “Her cameras. I didn’t take them. I didn’t. I swear it.”

The fact that Peter had been willing to sell off the family silver made it hard to believe he’d suddenly developed a conscience when it came to Deborah. Lynley avoided a direct reply. “What time did you leave Mick on Friday?”

Peter considered the question. “I went to the Anchor and Rose and had a pint,” he said. “It must have been about a quarter to ten.”

“Not ten o’clock? Not later?”

“Not when I arrived.”

“Were you still there at ten?” When Peter nodded, Lynley asked, “Then why did Justin hitchhike back to Howenstow alone?”

“Justin?”

“Wasn’t he there in the pub?”

Peter looked at him in some confusion. “No.”

Lynley felt a measure of relief at this. It was the first exonerating piece of information that his brother had offered. And the fact that he had offered it, so completely unconscious of its importance, told Lynley that in this instance his brother was telling the truth. It was a detail to be checked upon, a blemish on Brooke’s story, the vague promise that the case against Peter could indeed be broken by a barrister in court.

“What I don’t understand,” Lynley said, “is why you left Howenstow so suddenly. Was it the row we had in the smoking room?”

Peter smiled briefly. “Considering how many other rows we’d had, one more would hardly have made me turn tail, would it?” He looked away. At first Lynley thought he was fabricating a story, but he saw the spots of colour on his brother’s face and realised he was embarrassed. “It was Sasha,” he said. “She wouldn’t let up on me. She kept insisting we come back to London. I’d taken a matchbox from the smoking room—the silver piece that usually sits on the desk—and once she knew I couldn’t get any money from Mick or some dope from Mark, she wanted to bring the box back to London and sell it here. She was in a rush. She wanted the coke bad. She used a lot, Tommy. All the time. More than me.”

“Did you make the buy? Is that where you got whatever she took this afternoon?”

“I couldn’t find a buyer. Everyone knows the box’s hot. I’m surprised I wasn’t arrested.”