A Suitable Vengeance

“No trouble, my lord.” Penellin pulled the files across the desk and opened the top one. It was a gesture of dismissal, the furthest he would ever go in asking Lynley to leave the office. “It’s as Nancy said. We spoke on the phone. If someone thinks I was in the village, it can’t be helped, can it? The neighbourhood is dark. It could have been anyone. It’s as Nancy said. I was at the lodge.”


“Dammit it all, we were standing right there when you walked in after two in the morning! You were in the village, weren’t you? You saw Mick. Neither you nor Nancy is telling the truth. John, are you trying to protect her? Or is it Mark? Because he wasn’t home either. And you knew that, didn’t you? Were you looking for Mark? Was he at odds with Mick?”

Penellin lifted a document from within the file. “I’ve started the initial paperwork on closing Wheal Maen,” he said.

Lynley made a final effort. “You’ve been here twenty-five years. I should like to think you’d come to me in a time of trouble.”

“There’s no trouble,” Penellin said firmly. He picked up another sheet of paper, and although he did not look at it, the single gesture was eloquent in its plea for solitude.

Lynley terminated the interview and left the office.

With the door closed behind him, he paused in the hall, where the old tile floor made the air quite cool. At the end of the corridor, the southwest door of the house was open, and the sun beat down on the courtyard outside. There was movement on the cobblestones, the pleasant sound of running water. He walked towards it.

Outside, he found Jasper—sometime chauffeur, sometime gardener, sometime stableman, and full-time gossip—washing down the Land Rover they’d driven last night. His trousers were rolled up, his knobby feet bare, his white shirt open on a gaunt chest of grizzled hair. He nodded at Lynley.

“Got it from ’un, did you?” he asked, directing the spray on the Rover’s windscreen.

“Got what from whom?” Lynley asked.

Jasper snorted. “’Ad it all this morning, we did,” he said. “Murder ’n police ’n John getting hisself carted off by CID.” He spat onto the cobblestones and rubbed a rag against the Rover’s bonnet. “With John in Nanrunnel ’n Nance lyin’ like a pig in the rain ’bout everthing she can…’oo’d think to see the like?”

“Nancy’s lying?” Lynley asked. “You know that, Jasper?”

“Course I know it,” he said. “Weren’t I down to the lodge at half ten? Din’t I go ’bout the mill? Wasn’t nobody home? Course she be lyin’.”

“About the mill? The mill in the woods? Has the mill something to do with Mick Cambrey’s death?”

Jasper’s face shuttered at this frontal approach. Too late Lynley remembered the old man’s fondness for hanging a tale on the thread of innuendo. In reply to the questions, Jasper whimsically chose his own conversational path.

“’N John never tol’ you ’bout them clothes as Nance cut up, did ’e?”

“No. He said nothing about clothes,” Lynley replied, and as bait he offered, “They can’t have been important, I suppose, or he would have mentioned them.”

Jasper shook his head darkly at the folly of dismissing such a piece of information. “Slicin’ um to shreds, she were,” he said. “Right back of their cottage. Came ’pon her, me and John. Caught her out and she cried like an ol’ sick cow when she saw us, she did. Tha’s important enough, I say.”

“But she didn’t talk to you?”

“Said nothin’. All them fancy clothes and Nance cuttin’ and slicin’. John went near mad ’en he saw her. Started into the cottage after Mick, ’e did. Nance stopped ’im. ’Ung onto ’is arm till John run outer steam.”

“So they were another woman’s clothes,” Lynley mused. “Jasper, does anyone know who Mick’s woman was?”

“Woman?” Jasper scoffed. “More like women. Dozens, from what Harry Cambrey do say. Comes into the Anchor and Rose, does Harry. Sits and asks everbody ’oo’d listen what’s to do ’bout Mick’s catting round. ‘She don’ give ’um near enough,’ Harry likes to tell it. ‘Wha’s a man to do when ’is woman’s not like to give him enough?’” Jasper laughed derisively, stepped back from the Rover, and sprayed the front tyre. Water splashed on his legs, freckling them with bits of mud. “The way Harry do tell it, Nance been keeping her arms and legs crossed since the babe were born. With Mick just suffering b’yond endurance, swelled up like to burst with nowheres to stick it. ‘Wha’s a man to do?’ Harry do ask. And Mrs. Swann, she do tell him, but—” Jasper suddenly seemed to realise with whom he was having this confidential little chat. His humour faded. He straightened his back, pulled off his cap, and ran his hand through his hair. “Anybody’d see the problem easy. Mick din’t want the bother o’ settling down.”

He spat again to punctuate the discussion’s end.