A Suitable Vengeance

“Bloody hell, who?”


St. James looked at the desk closest to the window. A framed photograph of two young children sat on it. “What was his relationship with your copy editor? Is it Julianna Vendale?”

“Julianna?” Cambrey removed his cigarette, licked his lips.

“Was she one of his women? A former lover? Or the female half of an office seduction, about to be given the sack for not cooperating in Mick’s quest to have his needs met?”

Cambrey barked a laugh, refusing to react to the manner in which St. James had used his own words about his son to arrive at a more-than-logical and less-than-savoury motive for murder. No noble journalist going to his death over information or the protection of a source, but a squalid little episode of sexual harassment ending in a very sexual crime.

“Mick didn’t need Julianna Vendale,” Cambrey said. “He didn’t have to go begging for what was spread out before him—hot, wet, and willing—everywhere he turned.”



On the street once more, they headed in the direction of the harbour car park where Lady Helen had left the Rover. St. James glanced at her as they walked. During the final minutes in the newspaper office, she’d said nothing, although the tension in her body and the fixed expression on her face articulated her reaction to Mick Cambrey’s life and his death—not to mention his father—better than any words. The moment they left the building, however, she gave vent to disgust. She marched towards the car park. St. James could barely manage the pace. He only caught snatches of her diatribe.

“Some sort of sexual athlete…more like his scorekeeper than his father…time to put a newspaper out since they were so busy getting their needs met?…every woman in Cornwall…no wonder to me—absolutely no wonder at all—that someone cut…I’d even consider doing it myself…” She was quite out of breath when she reached the car. So was he.

They leaned against it, directing their faces into a breeze that was pungent with the odours of kelp and fish. In the harbour just beneath them, hundreds of gulls circled above a small skiff, its morning catch flickering silver in the sun.

“Is that what you thought of me?” Lady Helen asked abruptly.

St. James couldn’t have been more surprised by the question. “Helen, for God’s sake—”

“Is it?” she demanded. “Tell me. I want to know. Because if it is, you can walk all the way back to Howenstow.”

“Then how can I answer? I’ll say of course not. You’ll say I’m just saying that so I don’t have to walk back to Howenstow. It’s a no-win situation for me, Helen. I may as well start hobbling on my way right now.”

“Oh, get in,” she sighed.

He did so before she could change her mind. She joined him but didn’t start the car at once. Instead, she gazed through the dirty windscreen to the crusty walls of the harbour quay. A family walked together upon it, mother guiding an infant in a faded blue pushchair, father holding a toddler by the hand. They looked inordinately young to be parents.

“I kept telling myself to consider the source,” Lady Helen finally said. “I kept saying, he’s mourning, he can’t know what he’s saying, he can’t hear what it sounds like. But I’m afraid I lost myself entirely when he asked me if I’d have spread my legs for Mick. I always wondered what that expression seeing red meant. Now I know. I wanted to throw myself at him and tear out his hair.”

“He didn’t have much.”

That broke the tension. She laughed in resignation and started the car. “What do you make of that note?”

St. James removed the paper from his shirt pocket and turned it to the formal printing stamped diagonally across the front. “Talisman Cafe. I wonder where that is.”

“Not far from the Anchor and Rose. Just up Paul Lane a bit. Why?”

“Because he couldn’t have written this in the newspaper office. It hardly makes sense to use a sandwich wrapper with so much blank paper lying about. So he must have written it somewhere else. In the cafe or elsewhere if he’d taken the sandwich out. Actually, I was hoping the Talisman Cafe was in Paddington.” He told her about Tina Cogin.

Lady Helen nodded her head at the note. “Do you think this has to do with her?”

“She’s involved somehow, if Deborah’s correct in her assumption that it was Mick Cambrey she saw in the hall outside that flat. But if the Talisman Cafe is here in Nanrunnel, Mick must have worked this up locally.”

“With a local source? A local killer as well?”

“Possibly. But not necessarily. He was in and out of London. Everyone agrees to that. I can’t think it would be that difficult to trace him back to Cornwall, especially if he did his travelling by train.”

“If he did have a local source of information, whoever it is could be in danger as well.”