A Suitable Vengeance

St. James and Lady Helen heard Harry Cambrey before they saw him. As they climbed the narrow stairway—ducking their heads to avoid capriciously placed beams in the ceiling—the sound of furniture be-ing shoved on a bare, wooden floor was followed by a drawer being viciously slammed home, and that was followed by a raw curse. When they knocked on the door, a hush fell inside the room. Then footsteps approached. The door jerked open. Cambrey looked them over. They did the same of him.

Seeing him, St. James was reminded of the fact that he’d undergone heart surgery the previous year. He looked all the worse for the experience, thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a skeletal collar bone meeting in two knobby points beneath it. His yellow skin suggested a dysfunctioning liver, and at the corners of his mouth, red sores cracked his lips and spotted them with dried blood. His face was unshaven, and the fringe of grey hair at the crown of his head crinkled out from his scalp, as if he’d been brought hastily awake and hadn’t taken the time to comb it.

When Cambrey stepped back to let them pass into the office, St. James saw that it was one large room with several smaller cubicles opening along one wall and four narrow windows above the street that ran up the hill towards the upper reaches of the village. Aside from Harry Cambrey, no one else was there, an odd circumstance for a place of business, particularly a newspaper. But at least one of the reasons for the absence of employees lay upon work tops, upon desks, upon chairs. Notebooks and files had been taken from storage and strewn here and there. Harry Cambrey was engaged in a search.

He’d obviously been working at it for some hours and with no particular method, considering the state of the room. A series of military green filing cabinets had drawers which gaped open, half-empty; a stack of computer disks sat next to a word processor which was switched on; across a layout table, the current edition of the newspaper had been shoved aside to make way for three stacks of photographs; and the drawers of each one of the five desks in the room had been removed. The air was musty with the smell of old paper, and since the overhead lights had not been switched on, the room possessed a Dickensian gloom.

“What do you want?” Harry Cambrey was smoking a cigarette which he removed from his mouth only to cough or to light another. If he were concerned about the effect of his habit upon his heart, he did not show it.

“No one’s here but yourself?” St. James asked as he and Lady Helen picked their way through the debris.

“I gave them the day off.” Cambrey eyed Lady Helen from head to toe as he made his reply. “And your business?”

“We’ve been asked by Nancy to look into what’s at the root of Mick’s murder.”

“You’re to help? The two of you?” He made no attempt to hide his inspection of them, taking in St. James’ leg brace with the same effrontery he used to examine Lady Helen’s summer frock.

“The pursuit of news is a dangerous profession, isn’t it, Mr. Cambrey?” Lady Helen said from the windows, which was as far as she’d got in her circuit of the room. “If your son’s been murdered because of a story, what difference does it make who brings his killer to justice, so long as it’s done?”

At this, Cambrey’s factitious bravado disappeared. “It’s a story,” he said. His arms hung limp and lifeless at his sides. “I know it. I feel it. I’ve been here since I heard, trying to find the lad’s notes.”

“You’ve come up with nothing?” St. James asked.

“There’s little enough to go on. Just trying to remember what he said and what he did. It’s not a Nanrunnel story. It can’t be. But that’s the limit of what I know.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“It doesn’t fit with how he’s been these last months, that he’d be working on a Nanrunnel story. He was off here and there all the time, tracking down a lead, doing research, interviewing this person, locating that one. It wasn’t a village story. Couldn’t have been.” He shook his head. “It would have been the making of this paper once we got it in print. I know it.”

“Where did he go?”

“London.”

“But with no notes left behind? Isn’t that curious?”

“There’re notes all right. Here. What you see.” Cambrey flung his arm out to encompass the office’s disarray. “But nothing I figure would cause the lad’s death. Reporters don’t lose their lives over interviews with army men, with the local MP, with bedridden invalids, with dairy farmers in the north. Journalists die because they have information worth dying over. Mick’s not got that here.”

“Nothing unusual among all this material?”

Cambrey dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out. He massaged the muscles of his left arm, and as he did so, his eyes slid towards one of the desks. St. James read his answer in the latter action.