A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,136

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