A Suitable Vengeance by Elizabeth George

  'Take the throne,' she said. 'Circa 1675. It was a good period for chairs if one doesn't mind a bit of excessive ornamentation.'

  'You're a collector?'

  'Takes one's mind off the job.' She sank into her own chair - a piece of wounded leather whose surface was cracked and wrinkled - and rooted through the papers on her desk until she found a small carton of chocolates which she presented to him. When he had made his selection, a process she watched with a good deal of interest, she took a chocolate herself, biting into it with the satisfaction of a discerning gourmet. 'Just read your piece on A-B-O secretors last week,' she said. 'I hardly thought I'd be having the pleasure of meeting you as well. Have you come about this Howenstow business?'

  'The Cambrey death actually.'

  Behind her large-framed spectacles, Dr Waters' eyebrows rose. She finished her chocolate, wiped her fingers on the lapel of her lab coat, and took a folder from beneath an African violet that looked as if it hadn't been watered in months.

  'Not the smallest indication of activity for weeks, and suddenly I've two corpses on my hands in less than forty-eight hours.' She flipped the folder open, read for a moment, then snapped it shut. She reached for a skull which grinned at them from one of the bookshelves and dislodged a paper clip from its eye socket. It had obviously been a demonstration piece in many previous explanations, for pen marks dotted it liberally and a large red X had at one time been drawn directly upon the squamosal suture. 'Two blows to the head. He took the more severe of the two here on the parietal region. A fracture resulted.'

  'Have you any idea of the weapon?'

  'I wouldn't say weapon so much as source. He fell against something.'

  'He couldn't have been struck?'

  She took another chocolate, shaking her head and pointing to the skull. 'Look at where the fracture would be, my good man. He wasn't overly tall - between five-eight and five-nine - but he'd have to be sitting for anyone to hit him there with enough force to kill him.'

  'Someone creeping up on him?'

  'Couldn't have happened. The blow didn't come from above. Even if it had, to have placed a blow there the killer would have had to stand in such a way that Cambrey would have seen him in his peripheral vision. He would have made an attempt to block the blow in some way and we'd have evidence on the body. Bruising or abrasions. But we've neither.'

  '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 kindly to turn round, then hit him in the front.'

  'Are we talking about an accident then? Cambrey stumbling on his own, failing, 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 leaned 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 post-mortem 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 front 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 nonetheless,' 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 recognized 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's 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 there. 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.'

  'Capable of functioning?'

  'Impaired, but capable. Enough to get out there and take a tumble. Four vertebrae were broken. Spinal cord was severed.' She removed her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose where they rested upon skin that was red and raw. Without them she looked curiously defenceless and somehow unmasked. 'Had he lived, he'd have been a quadriplegic. So I wonder if we say he was lucky to have died.' Her glance dropped unconsciously to St James' bad leg. She pulled back fractionally into her chair. 'I'm terribly sorry. Too many hours on the job.'

  Less-than-perfect life versus no life at all. It was always the question, certainly one that St James had asked himself many times in the years since his accident. He brushed off her apology by ignoring it altogether.

  'Did he fall? Or was he pushed?'

  'Forensic are combing both the body and the clothing to see if he may have grappled with someone.
But, as far as I can tell at the moment, it's a straightforward fall. He was drunk. He was at the top of a dangerous cliff. Time of death seems to be round one in the morning. So it was dark. And there was a heavy cloud cover last night as well. I'd say an accidental fall is a safe conclusion.'

  How relieved Lynley would be to hear that, St James thought. Yet even as Dr Waters gave her opinion he felt tugged by a reluctance to accept it. Appearances suggested an accident, to be sure. But, no matter the appearance of the death, Brooke's presence at the cliff-top in the middle of the night suggested a clandestine meeting that led to murder.

  Outside the dining room, what had that morning been a summer storm was growing into a tempest, with gale-force winds howling round the house and rain striking the windows in angry flurries. The curtains were drawn, so the noise was somewhat muted, but an occasional blast shook the windows with enough force that they rattled ominously, impossible to ignore. When this happened, St James found his thoughts torn from the death of Mick Cambrey and Justin Brooke and refastened upon the disappearance of the Daze. He knew that Lynley had spent the remainder of the day in a futile search for his brother. But the coastline was rugged and difficult to reach by land. If Peter had put the boat into a natural harbour somewhere to escape the worst of the storm, Lynley had not found him.

  'I didn't think to alter the menu,' Lady Asherton was saying in reference to the elaborate array of food with which they had been presented. 'So much has been happening, I've forgotten how to think straight. There were supposed to be at least nine of us here. Ten, if Augusta had stayed. It's a blessing she went home last night. Had she been here this morning when Jasper found the body . . .' She toyed with a spear of broccoli, as if suddenly aware how disjointed her comments actually sounded. Candlelight and shadows played against the turquoise dress she wore and softened the lines of worry that, with the advancing day, had grown more prominent between her eyebrows and from her nose to her chin. She hadn't mentioned Peter since first being told he was gone.

  'People 'ave to eat, Daze, and that's all there is to it,' Cotter said, although he'd touched no more of his food than had the others.

  'But we've not much heart for it, have we?' Lady Asherton smiled at Cotter, but her anxiety was palpable. It showed itself in her quick movements, in the fleeting glimpses she took of her older son who sat nearby. Lynley had been home only ten minutes prior to dinner. He had spent that time in the estate office making phone calls. St James knew he had not spoken to his mother about Peter, and he did not have the look of a man who intended to speak about Peter now. As if she realized this, Lady Asherton said to St James, 'How's Sidney?'

  'Sleeping now. She wants to go back to London in the morning.'

  'Is that wise, St James?' Lynley asked.

  'She doesn't appear to be willing to have it any other way.'

  'Will you go with her?'

  He shook his head, fingered the stem of his wineglass and thought about his brief conversation with his sister just an hour ago. Mostly he thought about her refusal to speak of Justin Brooke. Don't ask me, don't make me, she'd said, all the time looking ill, with her hair in soaked ringlets from a feverish dream. I can't, I can't. Don't make me, Simon. Please.

  'She says she'll do well enough taking the train up alone,' he said.

  'Perhaps she wants to speak to his family. Have the police contacted them?'

  'I don't know that he has any family. I don't know much about him at all.' Beyond the fact, he added silently, that I'm glad he's dead.

  His conscience had demanded the admission all day, ever since the moment when he'd held his sister in his arms on the top of the cliff, gazed down on Brooke's body, and known a moment of exultation that had its roots in his need for revenge. Here was justice, he'd thought. Here was retribution. Perhaps the hand of reprisal had been momentarily stayed after Brooke had attacked his sister on the beach. But the savagery of his assault upon her had called for an accounting. It had been made in full. He was glad of it. He was relieved that Sidney was free of Brooke at last. And the strength of his relief - so utterly foreign to what he had always believed was a civilized response to the death of another human being - disquieted him. He knew without a doubt that, given the opportunity, he himself could easily have done away with Justin Brooke.

  'At any rate,' he said, 'I think it's probably wise that she get away. No-one's asked her to stay. Officially, that is.' He saw that the others understood his meaning. The police had not asked to speak with Sidney. As far as they were concerned, Brooke's death was due to an accidental fall.

  The others mulled over this piece of information as the dining-room door opened and Hodge came into the room. 'A telephone call for Mr St James, my Lady.' Hodge had a way of making announcements with an intonation that suggested nothing less than impending doom: a phone call from fate, Hecate on the line. 'It's in the estate office. Lady Helen Clyde.'

  St James rose at once, grateful for an excuse to be gone. The atmosphere in the dining room was overhung with too many unspoken questions and scores of issues asking to be discussed. But everyone seemed determined to avoid discussion, preferring the growing tension to the risk of facing a potentially painful truth.

  He followed the butler to the west wing of the house, down the long corridor that led to the estate office. A single light burned upon the desk, creating a bright oval of illumination in the centre of which lay the telephone receiver. He picked it up.

  'She's disappeared,' Lady Helen said when she heard his voice. 'It looks as if she's taken herself off on a casual holiday because her ordinary clothes are gone - but none of her dressy clothes - and there's no suitcase in the flat.' 'You got inside?'

  'Sheer audacious fast-talking and the key was mine.'

  'You've missed your calling, Helen.'

  'Darling, I know. Con-man extraordinaire. It comes from spending my youth in finishing schools instead of university. Modern languages, decorative arts, dissembling and prevaricating. I was certain it would all be useful some day.'

  'No idea where she's gone?'

  'She's left behind her make-up and her fingernails, so—'

  'Her fingernails? Helen, what sort of business is this?'

  She laughed and explained the artificial nails to him. 'They're not what one would wear to do a bit of hiking, you see. Or mucking about. Or rock climbing, sailing, fishing. That sort of thing. So we think she's off in the country somewhere.'

  'Here in Cornwall?'

  'That was our first thought as well, and we've come up with fairly solid evidence, we think. She has Mick Cambrey's savings book - with some rather hefty deposits made to his account, by the way - and we've found two telephone numbers. One's for a London exchange. We phoned it and got a recording for a place called Islington Ltd, giving their business hours. I'll check into that in the morning.'

  'And the other number?'

  'It's Cornwall, Simon. We've tried it twice and got no answer. We thought it might be Mick Cambrey's.'

  St James pulled an envelope from the side drawer of the desk. 'Did you try directory enquiries?'

  'To compare it to Cambrey's number? He's ex-directory, I'm afraid. Let me give you the number. Perhaps you can do something more with it.'

  He jotted it down on the envelope, shoved it into his pocket. 'Sid's coming back to London tomorrow.' He told Lady Helen about Justin Brooke. She listened in silence, asking no questions and making no comment until he had completed the tale. He left nothing out, concluding with, 'And now Peter's gone missing as well.'

  'Oh no,' she said. Dimly in the background St James could hear music playing softly. A flute concerto. It made him wish he were sitting in her drawing room in Onslow Square, talking idly about nothing, with nothing more on his mind than blood or fibre or hair analyses associated with people he did not know and would never meet. She said, 'Poor Tommy. Poor Daze. How are they holding up?'

  'They're coping.' 'And Sid?'

  'She's taken it badly. Will you see to her, Helen? Tomorrow ni
ght? When she's back?'

  'Of course. Don't worry. Don't give it a thought.' She hesitated momentarily. Again the music came over the line, delicate and elusive, like a fragrance in the air. Then she said, 'Simon, wishing didn't make it happen, you know.'

  How well she knew him. 'When I saw him on the beach, when I knew that he was dead—' 'Don't be so hard on yourself.'

  'I could have killed him, Helen. God knows I wanted to.'

  'Which of us can say we've never felt the same? Towards someone at some time. It means nothing, my dear. You need some rest. We all do. It's been a dreadful time.'

  He smiled at her tone. Mother, sister, loving friend. He accepted the ephemeral absolution which she offered. 'You're right, of course.'

  'So go to bed. Surely we can depend upon nothing else happening before morning.'

  'Let's hope so.' He replaced the receiver and stood for a moment watching the storm. Rain lashed the windows. Wind tore at the trees. Somewhere a door banged open and shut. He left the office.

  He considered climbing the south-west stairway to spend the rest of the evening in his room. He felt drained of energy, incapable of thought, and unwilling to face the task of making polite conversation that deliberately avoided the topics foremost on everyone's mind. Peter Lynley. Sasha Nifford. Where they were. What they had done. Still, he knew that Lynley would be waiting to hear about Lady Helen's call. So he headed back towards the dining room.

  Voices drifting down the north-west corridor arrested his attention as he approached the kitchen. Near the servants' hall, Jasper stood conversing with a rugged-looking man who dripped water from a brimming sou'wester on to the floor. Seeing St James, Jasper motioned him over.