Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

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?'