Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

'To Cornwall,' she said and nodded at the index card. 'What have you there?'

Deborah examined it. 'Two telephone numbers. Perhaps one is Mick Cambrey's. Shall I copy them?'

'Do.' Lady Helen came to look over her shoulder. 'I'm beginning to admire her. Here I am, so attached to my appearance that I wouldn't even consider venturing anywhere without at least one vanity case crammed to the brim with cosmetics. And there she is. The all-or-nothing woman. Either casual to a fault or dressed to…' Lady Helen faltered.

Deborah looked up. Her mouth felt dry. 'Helen, she couldn't have killed him.' Yet, even as she said it, her discomfort grew. What, after all, did she know about Tina? Nothing really, beyond a single conversation which had revealed little more than a weakness for men, an affinity for nightlife, and a concern about ageing. Still, one could certainly sense evil in people, no matter their attempts to disguise it. One could certainly sense the potential for rage. And none of that had been present in Tina. Yet, as she considered Mick Cambrey's death and the very fact of his presence in Tina Cogin's life, Deborah had to admit that she wasn't so sure.

She reached blindly for the folder as if it contained a verification of Tina's lack of guile. Prospects was printed across the tab. Inside, a clip held together a sheaf of papers.

'What is it?' Lady Helen asked.

'Names and addresses. Telephone numbers.'

'Her client list?'

'I shouldn't think so. Look. There are at least a hundred names. Women as well as men.' 'A mailing list?'

'I suppose it might be. There's a savings book as well.' Deborah slid this out of its plastic folder.

'Tell all,' Lady Helen said. 'Is her lifestyle profitable? Shall I change my line of work?'

Deborah read the list of deposits, flipped back to the name. She felt a rush of surprise. 'This isn't hers,' she said. 'It belongs to Mick Cambrey. And, whatever he was doing, it was wildly profitable.'

'Mr Allcourt-St James? This is a pleasure.' Dr Alice Waters rose from her chair and shooed off the lab assistant who had shown St James to her office. 'I thought I recognized you at Howenstow this morning. Hardly the time for introductions, however. What brings you to my den?'

It was an apt choice of words, for the office of Penzance CID's forensic pathologist was little more than a windowless cubicle on the verge of being overcome by bookshelves, an ancient roll-top desk, a medical-school skeleton wearing a Second World War gas mask, and several stacks of scientific journals. All that remained of the floorspace was a trail that led from the doorway to the desk. A chair sat next to this – curiously out of place and intricately carved in a design of flowers and birds that was more suggestive of a country house dining room than a department of forensic pathology – and after offering St James her hand in a cool, firm shake she waved him into it.

'Take the throne,' she said. 'Circa 1675. It was a good period for chairs if one doesn't mind a bit of excessive ornamentation.'

'You're a collector?'

'Takes one's mind off the job.' She sank into her own chair – a piece of wounded leather whose surface was cracked and wrinkled – and rooted through the papers on her desk until she found a small carton of chocolates which she presented to him. When he had made his selection, a process she watched with a good deal of interest, she took a chocolate herself, biting into it with the satisfaction of a discerning gourmet. 'Just read your piece on A-B-O secretors last week,' she said. 'I hardly thought I'd be having the pleasure of meeting you as well. Have you come about this Howenstow business?'

'The Cambrey death actually.'

Behind her large-framed spectacles, Dr Waters' eyebrows rose. She finished her chocolate, wiped her fingers on the lapel of her lab coat, and took a folder from beneath an African violet that looked as if it hadn't been watered in months.

'Not the smallest indication of activity for weeks, and suddenly I've two corpses on my hands in less than forty-eight hours.' She flipped the folder open, read for a moment, then snapped it shut. She reached for a skull which grinned at them from one of the bookshelves and dislodged a paper clip from its eye socket. It had obviously been a demonstration piece in many previous explanations, for pen marks dotted it liberally and a large red X had at one time been drawn directly upon the squamosal suture. 'Two blows to the head. He took the more severe of the two here on the parietal region. A fracture resulted.'

'Have you any idea of the weapon?'

'I wouldn't say weapon so much as source. He fell against something.'

'He couldn't have been struck?'

She took another chocolate, shaking her head and pointing to the skull. 'Look at where the fracture would be, my good man. He wasn't overly tall – between five-eight and five-nine – but he'd have to be sitting for anyone to hit him there with enough force to kill him.'

'Someone creeping up on him?'

'Couldn't have happened. The blow didn't come from above. Even if it had, to have placed a blow there the killer would have had to stand in such a way that Cambrey would have seen him in his peripheral vision. He would have made an attempt to block the blow in some way and we'd have evidence on the body. Bruising or abrasions. But we've neither.'

'The killer may have been too fast for him.'

She turned the skull. 'Possibly. But that wouldn't explain the second blow. Another fracture, less severe, in the right frontal region. For your scenario, the killer would have hit him in the back of the head, asked him kindly to turn round, then hit him in the front.'

'Are we talking about an accident then? Cambrey stumbling on his own, failing, and then later someone coming to the cottage, finding the body, and mutilating it for the sheer enjoyment of castration?'

'Hardly.' She replaced the skull and leaned back in her chair. The light from the ceiling winked against her spectacles and shone in her hair, which was short, straight and artificially blue-black. 'Here's the scenario as I've worked it out. Cambrey's standing, having a conversation with the killer. It grows into an argument. He takes a tremendous blow on the jaw – there was heavy bruising of the submaxilla and that was the only significant bruising on the body – which sends him falling back against an object perhaps four and a half feet from the floor.'

St James thought about the sitting room in Gull Cottage. He knew Dr Waters had been there herself. She would have done a preliminary examination of the body there on Friday night. And, no matter one's determination to wait for post-mortem results before formulating an opinion, she would have begun developing ideas the moment she saw the corpse. 'The mantel?'

She cocked an affirmative finger at him. 'Cambrey's weight increases the velocity of his fall. The result is our first fracture. From the mantel, then, he falls again, but slightly to the side this time. And he hits the front region of his skull on another object.'

'The hearth?'

'Most likely. This second fracture is less severe. But it makes no difference. He died within moments because of the first. Intracranial haemorrhage. He couldn't have been saved.'

'The mutilation was done after death, of course,' St James said reflectively. 'There was virtually no blood.'

'A mess nonetheless,' Dr Waters commented poetically.

St James tried to picture the events as Dr Waters had laid them out. The conversation, the escalation into argument, the evolution of anger to rage, the blow itself. 'How long would you estimate the mutilation took? If someone were in a frenzy, running to the kitchen, finding a knife, perhaps with a knife already-'

'There was no frenzy involved. Depend upon that. At least not when the mutilation occurred.' He saw that she recognized his confusion. She answered as if in anticipation of his questions. 'People in frenzies tend to hack and stab, over and over. You know the sort of thing. Sixty-five wounds. We see that all the time. But in this case it was just a couple of quick cuts. As if the killer had nothing more in mind than making a statement on Cambrey's body.'