A Suitable Vengeance

St. James was on the stairs, climbing up to the newspaper office. Deborah followed, Lynley behind her.

“You know,” she went on, pausing briefly on the landing, “I was worried for a time about the scope for my photographs in Cornwall. Don’t ask me why. I’m a creature of habit, I suppose, and my habit has been to do most of my work in London. But I love it here, Tommy. There’s a photograph everywhere. It’s grand. Truly. I’ve thought that from the first.”

At her words, Lynley felt shamed by his earlier doubts. He paused on the steps. “I love you, Deb.”

Her expression softened. “And I you, Tommy.”

St. James had already opened the door of the newspaper office. Inside, two telephones were ringing, Julianna Vendale was typing at a word processor, a young photographer was cleaning half a dozen camera lenses lined up on a desk, and in one of the cubicles three men and a woman leaned into a circle of conversation. Harry Cambrey was among them. Advertising and Circulation was painted in faded black letters on the upper half of the wood and glass door.

Harry Cambrey saw them and left his meeting. He was wearing suit trousers, a white shirt, a black tie. As if in the need to explain this, he said, “Buried him this morning. Half past eight.”

Odd, Lynley thought, that Nancy hadn’t mentioned it. But it explained the acceptance with which she had greeted their presence. There was a degree of finality to burial. It didn’t end sorrow, but it did make easier the acknowledgement of loss.

“Half a dozen coppers hanging about in the graveyard,” Cambrey continued. “First thing they’ve done besides trying to stick the killing on John Penellin. And isn’t that a thought? John killing Mick.”

“Perhaps he had a motive after all,” St. James said. He handed Mick Cambrey’s set of keys to his father. “Mick’s dressing. Would a man be driven to kill another man over that?”

Cambrey’s fist closed over the keys. He turned his back on his employees and lowered his voice. “So. Who knows about it?”

“You covered up well. Nearly everyone sees Mick exactly as you painted him. A real man’s man, an insatiable womaniser.”

“What the hell else could I do?” Cambrey asked. “God damn, he was my son. He was a man.”

“Whose main source of arousal was dressing like a woman.”

“I never could break him. I did try.”

“So this wasn’t something recent?”

Shoving the keys into his pocket, Cambrey shook his head. “He’d been doing it all his life, off and on. I’d catch him at it. Whip his arse. Push him buck naked into the street. Tie him to a chair and paint his face and make like I’d plan to cut off his cock. But nothing made a difference.”

“Save his death,” Lynley said.

Cambrey didn’t seem to care about the implication behind Lynley’s words. He merely said, “I protected the lad as best I could. I didn’t kill him.”

“The protection worked,” St. James said. “People saw him as you wished him to be seen. But in the end, he didn’t need your protection because of the cross-dressing, but because of a story, just as you thought.”

“It was the guns, wasn’t it?” Cambrey asked. “Like I said.”

St. James looked at Lynley as if wanting direction or perhaps permission to add to the man’s mourning. An explanation of the “notes” Cambrey had found in Mick’s desk would do it. Through their real meaning, nearly everything could be revealed. Not only cross-dressing, but dealing drugs as well. Not only spending money frivolously instead of using it to upgrade the newspaper, but filtering much of it off in order to support a double life.

Every delusion, Lynley thought, deserved destruction. Building anything on the foundation of a lie—be it a single relationship or an entire way of life—was to rely upon sand to remain unshifting. While the illusion of solidity might exist for a while, whatever was built would ultimately crumble. The only question seemed to be at what point Harry Cambrey’s inaccurate vision of his son ought to be laid to rest.

Lynley looked at the old man, studying the face that was creased with age and failure, jaundiced by ill health. He saw the stark bones of his chest pressing against his shirt, the ugly nicotine stains on his fingers, the arthritic curl of those fingers as he reached for a bottle of beer on a desk. Let someone else do the telling, he decided.

“We know he was working on a story about a drug called oncozyme,” Lynley said.

St. James followed his lead. “He was spending time in London visiting a company called Islington and a biochemist there called Justin Brooke. Did Mick ever speak of Brooke? Of Islington?”

Cambrey shook his head. “A drug, you say?” He still seemed to be adjusting to the fact that his previous idea about gunrunning had led nowhere.