A Suitable Vengeance

It hadn’t been easy for Lady Helen to uncover the truth that lay behind the list of prospects, St. James explained. The first dozen names she tried gave her nothing to go on, and more importantly no piece of leading information upon which she could hang any enquiry at all. The recipient of each one of her phone calls was tight-lipped to begin with, becoming even more so the moment she mentioned the name Michael Cambrey. Considering their reactions, that they had heard of Mick in some fashion or another was a fact beyond doubt. As was their determination to reveal nothing substantial about what their connection to Cambrey was. Had he interviewed them for a story? she would ask. Had he been seeking testimony of some sort? Had he visited their homes? Had he written them letters? No matter which tack she tried, the persona she adopted to try it, the subject matter she attempted to pursue, they were always one step ahead of her, as if the first person on the list had telephoned the rest and warned them of an impending call. Not even the mention of Cambrey’s murder was enough to jar an admission from anyone. Indeed, the few times she tried that as an opening gambit—posing as a reporter seeking information for a feature story on another journalist’s death—the result had been an even stonier reticence than her previous fabrications had inspired.

It was not until she reached the fifteenth name, that the direction of these fruitless conversations changed. For the fifteenth name belonged to Richard Graham. And he was dead. As was the sixteenth name, Catherine Henderford. And the seventeenth, Donald Highcroft. As well as the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth. All of them dead of cancer. Lung, ovarian, liver, intestinal. And all of them dead within the last two months.

“I went directly back to the first name on the list,” Lady Helen had said. “Of course, I couldn’t phone him myself, so I went to Chelsea and had Cotter do it for me. We invented the name of an organisation. Cancer Cooperative, something like that. Checking in to see how the patient was doing, Cotter said. Right down the list. They’d all had cancer. And those that were alive were all in remission, Simon.”

The two callers who had left their messages on the answering machine in Mick Cambrey’s flat had placed their calls about cancer as well. The exception being that they were willing, even eager, to talk to Lady Helen. They had phoned Mick’s number in answer to an advertisement that had run for months in the Sunday Times—“You CAN beat cancer!”—followed by a telephone number.

“It’s my wife,” one of the callers had said when Lady Helen phoned him. “One gets so desperate. We’ve tried diets, meditation, prayer, group therapy. Mind over matter. Every kind of drug. When I saw the advert, I thought what the hell. But no one returned my call.”

Because Mick never received it. Because Mick was dead.

“What was Mick doing, Simon?” Lady Helen had asked at the end of her story.

The answer was simple. He’d changed from journalist to merchant of dreams. He was selling hope. He was selling the possibility of life. He was selling oncozyme.

“He’d learned about oncozyme in his interview with Trenarrow,” St. James said to Lynley as they passed the Methodist church on their way up Paul Lane. The wind had picked up. The rain was beading his hair. “He followed the story to Islington-London where Brooke gave him more details. I should imagine the two of them hatched the scheme between them. It was simple enough, noble if one disregards the fact that they were probably making a fortune from the effort. They were providing cancer patients with a miracle drug, years before the drug would be legally approved and available for use. Look at the countless terminally ill people with nothing more to hang onto but the hope that something might work. Think of what people get involved with in an attempt to put themselves into remission: macrobiotic diets, laetrile, psychic healers. Mick was taking no risk that there’d be a lack of interest. Nor did he have to worry that people might not be willing to pay whatever price he was asking for the chance of a cure. He had only two problems. The first would be getting his hands on a steady supply of the drug.”

“Justin Brooke,” Lynley said.

St. James nodded. “For payments in cash initially. In cocaine later on, I expect. But once Mick had the oncozyme, he had to find someone who would administer it. Monitor the dosage. Assess the results. For part of the profits, of course. No one would take such a risk without some sort of payoff.”