A Suitable Vengeance

Her lips whitened, even as she smiled and made a polite effort to take his questions as a joke, something which Malverd’s tone made difficult. She pushed her way past him and went behind her desk where she took out a leather volume and handed it over. “We always keep records, Mr. Malverd. I think you’ll find everything in perfect order.”


“I hope so,” he said. “It’ll be the first thing that is. I could do with some tea. You?” This to St. James, who demurred. “See about it, will you?” was Malverd’s final comment to Mrs. Courtney, who fired a look of nuclear quality in his direction before she went to do his bidding.

Malverd opened a second door which led to a second room, this one larger than the first but hardly less crowded. It was obviously the office of the project director and it looked the part. Old metal bookshelves held volumes dedicated to biomedicinal chemistry, to pharmacokinetics, to pharmacology, to genetics. Bound collections of scientific journals vied with these for space, as did a pressure reader, an antique microscope, and a set of scales. At least thirty leather notebooks occupied the shelves nearest the reach of the desk, and these, St. James assumed, would contain the reported results of experiments which the technicians in the outer lab carried out. On the wall above the desk, a long graph charted the progress of something, using green and red lines. Below this in four framed cases hung a collection of scorpions, splayed out as if in demonstration of man’s dominion over lesser creatures.

Malverd frowned at these latter objects as he took a seat behind the desk. He gave another, meaningful glance at his watch. “How can I help you?”

St. James removed a stack of typescript from the only other chair in the room. He sat down, gave a cursory look at the graph, and said, “Mick Cambrey evidently came to this department a number of times in the last few months. He was a journalist.”

“He was murdered, you said? And you think there’s some connection between his death and Islington?”

“Several people feel he might have been working on a story. There could be a connection between that and his death. We don’t know yet.”

“But you’ve indicated you’re not from the police.”

“That’s right.”

St. James waited for Malverd to use this as an excuse to end their conversation. He had every right to do so. But it seemed that their previously acknowledged mutual interest in science would be enough to carry the interview forward for the moment, since Malverd nodded thoughtfully and flipped open the engagement diary in what appeared to be an arbitrary selection of date. He said, “Well. Cambrey. Let’s see.” He began to read, running his finger down one page and then another much as had the receptionist a few minutes before. “Smythe-Thomas, Hallington, Schweinbeck, Barry—what did he see him for?—Taversly, Powers…Ah, here it is: Cambrey; half past eleven”—he squinted at the date—“two weeks ago Friday.”

“The receptionist indicated he’d been here before. Is his name in the diary other than that Friday?”

Cooperatively, Malverd flipped through the book. He reached for a scrap of paper and made note of the dates which he handed to St. James when he had completed his survey of the diary. “Quite a regular visitor,” he said. “Every other Friday.”

“How far back does the book go?”

“Just to January.”

“Is last year’s diary available?”

“Let me check that.”

When Malverd had left the office to do so, St. James took a closer look at the graph above the desk. The ordinate, he saw, was labelled tumour growth, while the abcissa was called time-post injection. Two lines marked the progress of two substances: one falling rapidly and bearing the identification drug and the other, marked saline, rising steadily.

Malverd returned, cup of tea in one hand and engagement diary in the other. He tapped the door shut with his foot.

“He was here last year as well,” Malverd said. Again, he copied the dates as he found them, pausing occasionally to slurp a bit of tea. Both the lab and the office were almost inhumanly quiet. The only sound was the scratching of Malverd’s pencil on paper. At last he looked up. “Nothing before last June,” he said. “June second.”

“More than a year,” St. James noted. “But nothing to tell us why he was here?”

“Nothing. I’ve no idea at all.” Malverd tapped the tips of his fingers together and frowned at the graph. “Unless…it may have been oncozyme.”

“Oncozyme?”

“It’s a drug Department Twenty-Five’s been testing for perhaps eighteen months or more.”

“What sort of drug?”

“Cancer.”

Cambrey’s interview with Dr. Trenarrow rose instantly in St. James’s mind. The connection between that meeting and Cambrey’s trips to London was finally neither conjectural nor tenuous.