A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  He spat again to punctuate the discussion's end.

  St James and Lady Helen heard Harry Cambrey before they saw him. As they climbed the narrow stairway - ducking their heads to avoid capriciously placed beams in the ceiling - the sound of furniture being shoved on a bare wooden floor was followed by a drawer being viciously slammed home, and that was followed by a raw curse. When they knocked on the door, a hush fell inside the room. Then footsteps approached. The door jerked open. Cambrey looked them over. They did the same of him.

  Seeing him, St James was reminded of the fact that he'd undergone heart surgery the previous year. He looked all the worse for the experience, thin, with a prominent Adam's apple and a skeletal collarbone meeting in two knobby points beneath it. His yellow skin suggested a dysfunctioning liver, and at the corners of his mouth red sores cracked his lips and spotted them with dried blood. His face was unshaven, and the fringe of grey hair at the crown of his head crinkled out from his scalp, as if he'd been brought hastily awake and hadn't taken the time to comb it.

  When Cambrey stepped back to let them pass into the office, St James saw that it was one large room with several smaller cubicles opening along one wall and four narrow windows above the street that ran up the hill towards the upper reaches of the village. Aside from Harry Cambrey, no-one else was there - an odd circumstance for a place of business, particularly a newspaper. But at least one of the reasons for the absence of employees lay upon worktops, upon desks, upon chairs. Notebooks and files had been taken from storage and strewn here and there. Harry Cambrey was engaged in a search.

  He'd obviously been working at it for some hours and with no particular method, considering the state of the room. A series of military-green filing cabinets had drawers which gaped open, half-empty; a stack of computer disks sat next to a word processor which was switched on; across a layout table the current edition of the newspaper had been shoved aside to make way for three stacks of photographs; and the drawers of each one of the five desks in the room had been removed. The air was musty with the smell of old paper, and since the overhead lights had not been switched on the room possessed a Dickensian gloom.

  'What do you want?' Harry Cambrey was smoking a cigarette which he removed from his mouth only to cough or to light another. If he were concerned about the effect of his habit upon his heart, he did not show it.

  'No-one's here but yourself?' St James asked as he and Lady Helen picked their way through the debris.

  'I gave them the day off.' Cambrey eyed Lady Helen from head to toe as he made his reply. 'And your business?'

  'We've been asked by Nancy to look into what's at the root of Mick's murder.'

  'You're to help? The two of you?' He made no attempt to hide his inspection of them, taking in St James' leg-brace with the same effrontery he used to examine Lady Helen's summer frock.

  'The pursuit of news is a dangerous profession, isn't it, Mr Cambrey?' Lady Helen said from the windows, which was as far as she'd got in her circuit of the room. 'If your son's been murdered because of a story, what difference does it make who brings his killer to justice, so long as it's done?'

  At this, Cambrey's factitious bravado disappeared. 'It's a story,' he said. His arms hung limp and lifeless at his sides. 'I know it. I feel it. I've been here since I heard, trying to find the lad's notes.'

  'You've come up with nothing?' St James asked.

  'There's little enough to go on. Just trying to remember what he said and what he did. It's not a Nanrunnel story. It can't be. But that's the limit of what I know.'

  'You're sure of that?'

  'It doesn't fit with how he's been these last months, that he'd be working on a Nanrunnel story. He was off here and there all the time, tracking down a lead, doing research, interviewing this person, locating that one. It wasn't a village story. Couldn't have been.' He shook his head. 'It would have been the making of this paper once we got it in print. I know it.'

  'Where did he go?'

  'London.'

  'But with no notes left behind? Isn't that curious?'

  'There're notes all right. Here. What you see.' Cambrey flung his arm out to encompass the office's disarray. 'But nothing I figure would cause the lad's death. Reporters don't lose their lives over interviews with army men, with the local MP, with bedridden invalids, with dairy farmers in the north. Journalists die because they have information worth dying over. Mick's not got that here.'

  'Nothing unusual among all this material?'

  Cambrey dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out. He massaged the muscles of his left arm and, as he did so, his eyes slid towards one of the desks. St James read his answer in the latter action.

  'You've found something.'

  'I don't know. You may as well have a look. I can make nothing from it.' Cambrey went to the desk. From beneath the telephone he took a piece of paper which he handed to St James. 'Tucked to the back of the drawer,' he said.

  The paper was grease-splodged, originally a wrapper for a sandwich from the Talisman Cafe. The writing was faint. The dull light in the room and the points at which the pen had skipped through grease made it difficult to read, but St James could see that it consisted mostly of numbers.

  1 k 9400

  500 g 55ea

  27500-M1 Procure/Transport

  27500-M6 Finance

  St James looked up. 'Is this Mick's writing?'

  Cambrey nodded. 'If there's a story anywhere, that's it. But I don't know what it's about or what that lot means.'

  'But there must be notes somewhere that use the same numbers and references,' Lady Helen said. 'M1 and M6. Surely he means the motorways.'

  'If there're notes here using the same set of numbers, I've not found them,' Cambrey said.

  'So they're missing.'

  'Pinched?' Cambrey lit another cigarette, inhaled, coughed. 'I heard the cottage'd been searched.'

  'Has there been any indication of a break-in here?' St James asked.

  Cambrey looked from them to the room itself. He shook his head. 'Boscowan sent a man to tell me about Mick round four-fifteen this morning. I went to the cottage, but they'd already taken the body away and they wouldn't let me in. So I came here. I've been here ever since. There'd been no break-in.'

  'No sign of a search? Perhaps by one of the other employees?'

  'Nothing,' he said. His nostrils pinched. 'I want to find the bastard that did this to Mickey. And I won't stop the story. Nothing'll stop it. We have a free press. My boy lived for that, died for that as well. But it won't be in vain.'

  'If he died for a story in the first place,' St James said quiedy.

  Cambrey's face grew dark. 'What else is there?' 'Mick's women.'

  Cambrey removed the cigarette from his mouth in a movement that was slow, studied, like an actor's. His head gave a tiny nod of approbation. 'They're talking like that about Mickey, are they? Well, now, why should I doubt it? Men were jealous of his easy way, and women were the same if he didn't choose them.' The cigarette went back to his mouth. It created a haze through which Cambrey squinted. 'He was a man, was Mick. A real man. And a man has his needs. That tight wife of his had ice between her legs. What she denied him, he found somewhere else. If there's faulty it's Nancy's. Turn away from a man and he'll seek another woman. There's no crime in that. He was young. He had needs.'

  'Was there anyone special he saw? More than one woman? Had he taken up with anyone new?'

  'Couldn't say. It wasn't Mickey's way to boast about it when he did a new woman.'

  'Did married women sleep with him?' Lady Helen asked. 'Women from the village?'

  'Lots of women slept with him.' Cambrey pushed aside papers on the desk-top, lifted the glass that covered it, and removed a photograph which he passed to her. 'See for yourself. Is this the kind of man you'd say no to if he asked you to spread your legs, missy?'

  Lady Helen drew in a quick breath to respond, but in an admirable demonstration of self-control she didn't do so. Nor did she look
at the picture which she handed to St James. In it, a shirtless young man stood on the deck of a yacht, one hand on a spar as he adjusted the rigging. He was square-jawed and nice-looking, but slender like his father, not possessed of the rugged body or features that naturally came to mind when one hears the words a real man. St James turned over the photograph. Cambrey prepares for America's Cup - the lad's on his way had been written facetiously across it. It was written in the same hand as was the note from the desk.

  'He had a sense of humour,' St James noted.

  'He had everything.'

  'May I keep the photograph? This note as well?'

  'Do what you like. They're nothing to me without Mick.' Cambrey examined the office. Defeat was in the set of his shoulders; it lined a weary path across his face. 'We were on our way. The Spokesman was going to be the biggest paper in South Cornwall. Not just a weekly any longer. I wanted it. Mick wanted it. We were on our way. All of us.'

  'Mick got on well with the staff? No troubles there?'

  'They loved him. He'd made good on his own. Come back to the village. He was a hero to them, what they wanted to be.' Cambrey sharpened his voice. 'You can't think that someone on the staff would kill him. No-one from this office would have laid a hand on my son. They had no reason. He was changing the paper. He was making improvements. He was—'

  'Getting ready to give someone the sack?'

  'Bloody hell, who?'

  St James looked at the desk closest to the window. A framed photograph of two young children sat on it. 'What was his relationship with your copy-editor? Is it Julianna Vendale?'

  'Julianna?' Cambrey removed his cigarette, licked his lips.

  'Was she one of his women? A former lover? Or the female half of an office seduction, about to be given the sack for not co-operating in Mick's quest to have his needs met?'

  Cambrey barked a laugh, refusing to react to the manner in which St James had used his own words about his son to arrive at a more-than-logical and less-than-savoury motive for murder. No noble journalist going to his death over information or the protection of a source, but a squalid little episode of sexual harassment ending in a very sexual crime.

  'Mick didn't need Julianna Vendale,' Cambrey said. 'He didn't have to go begging for what was spread out before him - hot, wet, and willing - everywhere he turned.'

  In the street once more, they headed in the direction of the harbour car-park where Lady Helen had left the estate Austin. St James glanced at her as they walked. During the final minutes in the newspaper office, she'd said nothing, although the tension in her body and the fixed expression on her face articulated her reaction to Mick Cambrey's life and his death - not to mention his father - better than any words. The moment they left the building, however, she gave vent to disgust. She marched towards the carpark. St James could barely manage the pace. He only caught snatches of her diatribe.

  'Some sort of sexual athlete . . . more like his score-keeper than his father . . . time to put a newspaper out since they were so busy getting their needs met? . . . every woman in Cornwall ... no wonder to me - absolutely no wonder at all - that someone cut ... I'd even consider doing it myself. . .' She was quite out of breath when she reached the car. So was he.

  They leaned against it, directing their faces into a breeze that was pungent with the odours of kelp and fish. In the harbour just beneath them, hundreds of gulls circled above a small skiff, its morning catch flickering silver in the sun.

  'Is that what you thought of me?' Lady Helen asked abruptly.

  St James couldn't have been more surprised by the question. 'Helen, for God's sake—'

  'Is it?' she demanded. 'Tell me. I want to know. Because, if it is, you can walk all the way back to Howenstow.'

  'Then, how can I answer? I'll say of course not. You'll say I'm just saying that so I don't have to walk back to Howenstow. It's a no-win situation for me, Helen. I may as well start hobbling on my way right now.'

  'Oh, get in,' she sighed.

  He did so before she could change her mind. She joined him but didn't start the car at once. Instead she gazed through the dirty windscreen to the crusty walls of the harbour quay. A family walked together upon it, mother guiding an infant in a faded blue pushchair, father holding a toddler by the hand. They looked inordinately young to be parents.

  'I kept telling myself to consider the source,' Lady Helen finally said. 'I kept saying: He's mourning, he can't know what he's saying, he can't hear what it sounds like. But I'm afraid I lost myself entirely when he asked me if I'd have spread my legs for Mick. I always wondered what that expression seeing red meant. Now I know. I wanted to throw myself at him and tear out his hair.'

  'He didn't have much.'

  That broke the tension. She laughed in resignation and started the car. 'What do you make of that note?'

  St James removed the paper from his shirt pocket and turned it to the formal printing stamped diagonally across the front. 'Talisman Cafe. I wonder where that is?'

  'Not far from the Anchor and Rose. Just up Paul Lane a bit. Why?'

  'Because he couldn't have written this in the newspaper office. It hardly makes sense to use a sandwich paper with so much blank paper lying about. So he must have written it somewhere else. In the cafe or elsewhere if he'd taken the sandwich out. Actually, I was hoping the Talisman Cafe was in Paddington.' He told her about Tina Cogin.

  Lady Helen nodded her head at the note. 'Do you think this has to do with her?'

  'She's involved somehow, if Deborah's correct in her assumption that it was Mick Cambrey she saw in the hall outside that flat. But, if the Talisman Cafe is here in Nanrunnel, Mick must have worked this up locally.'

  'With a local source? A local killer as well?'

  'Possibly. But not necessarily. He was in and out of London. Everyone agrees to that. I can't think it would be that difficult to trace him back to Cornwall, especially if he did his travelling by train.'

  'If he did have a local source of information, whoever it is could be in danger as well.'

  'If the story is the motive for his murder.' St James returned the paper to his jacket pocket.

  'I'd say it's more likely the other: payment for seducing another man's wife.' Lady Helen pulled out on to the Lamorna Road. It rose in a gentle slope past tourist flats and cottages, veering east to display the bright sea. 'It's more workable as a motive, considering what we know about Mick. Because how would a man feel, coming upon evidence that he cannot deny, evidence that tells him the woman he loves is giving herself to another man.'

  St James turned away. He looked at the water. A fishing boat was chugging towards Nanrunnel, and even at this distance he could see the lobster-baskets hanging from its sides. 'He'd feel like killing, I expect,' he replied. He felt Lady Helen look towards him and knew she realized how he had taken her words. She would want to speak in order to ease the moment. He preferred to let it go and indicated that by saying to her, 'As to the other, Helen. What you asked about us, about how I felt when you and I were lovers ... Of course not. You know that. I hope you always have.'

  'I've not been down here in several years,' Lynley said as he and St James went through the gate in the Howenstow wall and began their descent into the woodland. 'Who knows what condition we'll find the place in, if it's not a ruin altogether? You know how it is. A few seasons abandoned and roofs cave in, beams rot, floors disintegrate. I was surprised to hear it was still standing at all.'

  He was making conversation and he knew it, in the hope that by doing so he could vanquish the legion of memories that were waiting on the plain of his consciousness, ready to assault him, memories that were intimately associated with the mill and tied to a portion of his life from which he had walked away, making an obstinate vow - never to think of it again. Even now, as they approached the building and saw the tiles of its roof-line emerge through the trees, he could feel the first tentative foray of a recollection: just an image of his mother striding through the woods. But he knew that she
was merely an illusion, trying her luck against his protective armour. He fought her off by pausing on the path, taking his time and lighting a cigarette.

  'We came this way yesterday,' St James was answering. He walked on ahead for a few paces, stopping when he glanced back and saw that Lynley had fallen behind. 'The wheel's overgrown. Did you know?'

  'I'm not surprised. That was always a problem, as I recall.' Lynley smoked pensively, liking the concrete feel of the cigarette between his fingers. He savoured the sharp taste of the tobacco and the fact that the cigarette in his hand gave him something to which he might attend with more concentration than was necessary.

  'And Jasper thinks someone's using the mill? For what? Dossing?'

  'He wouldn't say.'

  St James nodded, looked thoughtful, walked on. No longer able to avoid it through idle conversation or cigarette-smoking or any other form of temporizing, Lynley followed.

  Oddly enough, he found that the mill wasn't very much changed since he had last been there, as if someone had been caring for it. The exterior needed paint - patches of whitewash had worn completely through to the stone -and much of its woodwork was splintered, but the roof was all of one piece, and aside from a pane of glass that was missing from the single window on the upper floor the building looked sturdy enough to stand for another hundred years.