A Suitable Vengeance

“You’ve found something.”


“I don’t know. You may as well have a look. I can make nothing from it.” Cambrey went to the desk. From beneath the telephone, he took a piece of paper which he handed to St. James. “Tucked to the back of the drawer,” he said.

The paper was grease splodged, originally a wrapper for a sandwich from the Talisman Cafe. The writing was faint. The dull light in the room and the points at which the pen had skipped through grease made it difficult to read, but St. James could see that it consisted mostly of numbers.



1 k 9400

500 g 55ea

27500-M1 Procure/Transport

27500-M6 Finance



St. James looked up. “Is this Mick’s writing?”

Cambrey nodded. “If there’s a story anywhere, that’s it. But I don’t know what it’s about nor what that lot means.”

“But there must be notes somewhere that use the same numbers and references,” Lady Helen said. “M1 and M6. Surely he means the motorways.”

“If there’re notes here using the same set of numbers, I’ve not found them,” Cambrey said.

“So they’re missing.”

“Pinched?” Cambrey lit another cigarette, inhaled, coughed. “I heard the cottage’d been searched.”

“Has there been any indication of a break-in here?” St. James asked.

Cambrey looked from them to the room itself. He shook his head. “Boscowan sent a man to tell me about Mick round 4:15 this morning. I went to the cottage, but they’d already taken the body away and they wouldn’t let me in. So I came here. I’ve been here ever since. There’d been no break-in.”

“No sign of a search? Perhaps by one of the other employees?”

“Nothing,” he said. His nostils pinched. “I want to find the bastard that did this to Mickey. And I won’t stop the story. Nothing’ll stop it. We have a free press. My boy lived for that, died for that as well. But it won’t be in vain.”

“If he died for a story in the first place,” St. James said quietly.

Cambrey’s face grew dark. “What else is there?”

“Mick’s women.”

Cambrey removed the cigarette from his mouth in a movement that was slow, studied, like an actor’s. His head gave a tiny nod of approbation. “They’re talking like that about Mickey, are they? Well now, why should I doubt it? Men were jealous of his easy way and women were the same if he didn’t choose them.” The cigarette went back to his mouth. It created a haze through which Cambrey squinted. “He was a man, was Mick. A real man. And a man has his needs. That tight wife of his had ice between her legs. What she denied him, he found somewhere else. If there’s fault, it’s Nancy’s. Turn away from a man and he’ll seek another woman. There’s no crime in that. He was young. He had needs.”

“Was there anyone special he saw? More than one woman? Had he taken up with anyone new?”

“Couldn’t say. It wasn’t Mickey’s way to boast about it when he did a new woman.”

“Did married women sleep with him?” Lady Helen asked. “Women from the village?”

“Lots of women slept with him.” Cambrey pushed aside papers on the desk top, lifted the glass that covered it, and removed a photograph which he passed to her. “See for yourself. Is this the kind of man you’d say no to if he asked you to spread your legs, missy?”

Lady Helen drew in a quick breath to respond, but in an admirable demonstration of self-control, she didn’t do so. Nor did she look at the picture which she handed to St. James. In it, a shirtless young man stood on the deck of a sailboat, one hand on a spar as he adjusted the rigging. He was square-jawed and nice looking, but slender like his father, not possessed of the rugged body or features that naturally come to mind when one hears the words a real man. St. James turned over the photograph. Cambrey prepares for America’s Cup—the lad’s on his way had been written facetiously across it. It was written in the same hand as was the note from the desk.

“He had a sense of humour,” St. James noted.

“He had everything.”

“May I keep the photograph? This note as well?”

“Do what you like. They’re nothing to me without Mick.” Cambrey examined the office. Defeat was in the set of his shoulders, it lined a weary path across his face. “We were on our way. The Spokesman was going to be the biggest paper in South Cornwall. Not just a weekly any longer. I wanted it. Mick wanted it. We were on our way. All of us.”

“Mick got on well with the staff? No troubles there?”

“They loved him. He’d made good on his own. Come back to the village. He was a hero to them, what they wanted to be.” Cambrey sharpened his voice. “You can’t think that someone on the staff would kill him. No one from this office would have laid a hand on my son. They had no reason. He was changing the paper. He was making improvements. He was—”

“Getting ready to give someone the sack?”