A Suitable Vengeance

St. James replied. “Helen, get me Deborah’s camera. Mick Cambrey’s been murdered and I want to photograph the room before we telephone the police.”


He said nothing more until he held the camera in his hands. Even then, he looked it over thoroughly, studying its mechanism in a silence that he knew was growing more tense and unpleasant with every moment he allowed it to continue. He told himself that Lynley’s main concern was that Deborah not be allowed to see the body or do the photographing herself. Indeed, he was sure that had been his friend’s original intention when he insisted that she stay outside. He had misunderstood St. James’ asking for Deborah. He had thought St. James wanted her to take the pictures herself. But that misunderstanding had dissolved into dispute. And no matter that much of the dispute remained unspoken, the fact that it had occurred at all charged the atmosphere with elements bleak and nasty.

“Perhaps you might wait out here until I’m done,” St. James said to his friend. He walked back into the house.



St. James took the photographs from every angle, working his way carefully round the body, stopping only when he had run out of film. Then he left the sitting room, pulled the door partially closed behind him, and returned to the others outside. They had been joined by a small crowd of neighbours who stood in a hushed group a short distance from the garden gate, heads bent together, voices murmuring in speculation.

“Bring Nancy inside,” St. James said.

Lady Helen led her across the front garden and into the cottage where she hesitated only a moment before directing Nancy towards the kitchen, an oblong room with an odd, sloping ceiling and a grey linoleum floor sporting great black patches of wear. She sat her down on a chair that stood at one side of a stained pine table. Kneeling by her side, she looked closely at her face, reached for her arm and held her thin wrist between her own fingers. She frowned, touching the back of her hand to Nancy’s cheek.

“Tommy,” Lady Helen said with a remarkable degree of calm, “ring Dr. Trenarrow. I think she’s going into shock. He can deal with that, can’t he?” She prised the baby from Nancy’s grasp and handed her to Deborah. “There must be baby milk in the refrigerator. Will you see to warming some?”

“Molly…” Nancy whispered. “Hungry. I…feed.”

“Yes,” Lady Helen said gently. “We’re seeing to her, dear.”

In the other room, Lynley was speaking into the telephone. He placed a second call and spoke even more briefly, but the altered formal sound of his voice was enough to tell the others that he was speaking to the Penzance police. After a few minutes, he returned to the kitchen with a blanket which he wrapped round Nancy in spite of the heat.

“Can you hear me?” he asked her.

Nancy’s eyelids fluttered, showing nothing but white. “Molly…feed.”

“I’ve got her right here,” Deborah said. She was crooning to the baby in a far corner of the kitchen. “The milk’s warming. I expect she likes it warm, doesn’t she? She’s a pretty baby, Nancy. I can’t imagine a prettier one.”

It was the right thing to say. Nancy relaxed in her chair. St. James nodded gratefully to Deborah and went back to the sitting room door. He pushed it open and stood on the threshold. He spent several minutes studying, thinking, evaluating what he saw. Lady Helen finally joined him. Even from the doorway, they could see the nature of the material that lay in disorder across the floor, upon the desk, against the legs of furniture. Notebooks, documents, pages of manuscripts, photographs. At the back of his mind, St. James heard Lady Asherton’s words about Mick Cambrey. But the nature of the crime did not support the conclusion he otherwise might have naturally drawn from a consideration of those words.

“What do you think?” Lady Helen asked him.

“He was a journalist. He’s dead. Somehow those two facts ought to hang together. But the body says no a thousand times.”

“Why?”

“He’s been castrated, Helen.”

“Heavens. Is that how he died?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

A knock at the door precluded reply. Lynley came from the kitchen to admit Roderick Trenarrow. The doctor entered wordlessly. He looked from Lynley to St. James and Lady Helen, and then beyond them to the sitting room floor where, even from where he stood, Mick Cambrey’s body was partially visible. For a moment, it appeared that he might step forward and attempt to save a man who was beyond all rescue.

He said to the others, “Are you certain?”

“Quite,” St. James replied.