A Suitable Vengeance

“The killer may have been too fast for him.”


She turned the skull. “Possibly. But that wouldn’t explain the second blow. Another fracture, less severe, in the right frontal region. For your scenario, the killer would have hit him in the back of the head, asked him to kindly turn round, then hit him in the front.”

“Are we talking about an accident, then? Cambrey stumbling on his own, falling, and then later someone coming to the cottage, finding the body, and mutilating it for the sheer enjoyment of castration?”

“Hardly.” She replaced the skull and learned back in her chair. The light from the ceiling winked against her spectacles and shone in her hair, which was short, straight, and artificially blue-black. “Here’s the scenario as I’ve worked it out. Cambrey’s standing, having a conversation with the killer. It grows into an argument. He takes a tremendous blow on the jaw—there was heavy bruising of the submaxilla and that was the only significant bruising on the body—which sends him falling back against an object perhaps four and a half feet from the floor.”

St. James thought about the sitting room in Gull Cottage. He knew Dr. Waters had been there herself. She would have done a preliminary examination of the body there on Friday night. And no matter one’s determination to wait for autopsy results before formulating an opinion, she would have begun developing ideas the moment she saw the corpse. “The mantel?”

She cocked an affirmative finger at him. “Cambrey’s weight increases the velocity of his fall. The result is our first fracture. From the mantel, then, he falls again, but slightly to the side this time. And he hits the right frontal region of his skull on another object.”

“The hearth?”

“Most likely. This second fracture is less severe. But it makes no difference. He died within moments because of the first. Intracranial haemorrhage. He couldn’t have been saved.”

“The mutilation was done after death, of course,” St. James said reflectively. “There was virtually no blood.”

“A mess none the less,” Dr. Waters commented poetically.

St. James tried to picture the events as Dr. Waters had laid them out. The conversation, the escalation into argument, the evolution of anger to rage, the blow itself. “How long would you estimate the mutilation took? If someone were in a frenzy, running to the kitchen, finding a knife, perhaps with a knife already—”

“There was no frenzy involved. Depend upon that. At least not when the mutilation occurred.” He saw that she recognised his confusion. She answered as if in anticipation of his questions. “People in frenzies tend to hack and stab, over and over. You know the sort of thing. Sixty-five wounds. We see that all the time. But in this case, it was just a couple of quick cuts. As if the killer had nothing more in mind than making a statement on Cambrey’s body.”

“With what sort of weapon?”

She lingered over her box of chocolates again. Her hand hesitated before pushing them aside with a look that combined both regret and determination. “Anything sharp. From a butcher knife to a pair of good scissors.”

“But you’ve found no weapon yet?”

“Forensic are still working through the cottage. Imaginative lot, they are. Testing everything from kitchen knives to the safety pins used on the baby’s nappies. They’re tearing apart the village as well, looking in dustbins and flower gardens, busy earning their salaries. It’s a waste of time.”

“Why?”

She flipped a thumb back and forth over her shoulder as she answered his question, quite as if they were standing in the village and not several miles away in Penzance. “We have the hills behind us. We have the sea in front of us. We have a coastline honeycombed with thousands of caves. We have disused mines. We have a harbour filled with fishing boats. We have, in short, an infinite number of places in which one could deposit a knife with no one’s being the wiser for decades as to how it got here. Just think of the fishermen’s fillet knives. How many of those must be lying about?”

“So the killer might even have gone prepared to do this bit of work.”

“Might. Might not. We’ve no way of telling.”

“And Cambrey hadn’t been tied up?”

“According to Forensic, nothing indicates that. No fragments of hemp, nylon, or anything else. He was very fit, actually. As to the other—the Howenstow business this morning—that’s appearing to be quite another matter.”

“Drugs?” St. James asked.

She looked immediately interested. “I couldn’t say. We’ve only done the preliminaries. Is there something—”

“Cocaine.”

She made a note to herself on a pad of paper. “Not surprising, that. What people put into their bodies in the name of excitement…silly fools.” She gave a moment over to what was apparently a dark consideration of drug use in the country. Rousing herself, she went on. “We’ve done a blood-alcohol on him. He was drunk.”