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 realized 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 a 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 this 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.'
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?'
