Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

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.'