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."
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 lexicological 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