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 or 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 four-fifteen 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 nostrils 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 quiedy.

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 faulty 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 yacht, 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 came 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?'

'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 co-operating 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.'

In the street once more, they headed in the direction of the harbour car-park where Lady Helen had left the estate Austin. 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 carpark. St James could barely manage the pace. He only caught snatches of her diatribe.

'Some sort of sexual athlete… more like his score-keeper 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