A Suitable Vengeance (23 page)

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.”

“If the story is the motive for his murder.” St. James returned the paper to his jacket pocket.

“I’d say it’s more likely the other, payment for seducing another man’s wife.” Lady Helen pulled out onto the Lamorna Road. It rose in a gentle slope past tourist flats and cottages, veering east to display the bright sea. “It’s more workable as a motive, considering what we know about Mick. Because how would a man feel, coming upon evidence that he cannot deny, evidence that tells him the woman he loves is giving herself to another man.”

St. James turned away. He looked at the water. A fishing boat was chugging towards Nanrunnel, and even at this distance he could see the lobster baskets hanging from its sides. “He’d feel like killing, I expect,” he replied. He felt Lady Helen look towards him and knew she realised how he had taken her words. She would want to speak in order to ease the moment. He preferred to let it go and indicated that by saying to her, “As to the other, Helen. What you asked about us, about how I felt when you and I were lovers…Of course not. You know that. I hope you always have.”

“I’ve not been down here in several years,” Lynley said as he and St. James went through the gate in the Howenstow wall and began their descent into the woodland. “Who knows what condition we’ll find the place in, if it’s not a ruin altogether. You know how it is. A few seasons abandoned and roofs cave in, beams rot, floors disintegrate. I was surprised to hear it was still standing at all.”

He was making conversation and he knew it, in the hope that by doing so he could vanquish the legion of memories that were waiting on the plain of his consciousness, ready to assault him, memories that were intimately associated with the mill and tied to a portion of his life from which he had walked away, making an obstinate vow never to think of it again. Even now, as they approached the building and saw the tile of its roofline emerge through the trees, he could feel the first tentative foray of a recollection: just an image of his mother striding through the woods. But he knew that she was merely an illusion, trying her luck against his protective armour. He fought her off by pausing on the path, taking his time about lighting a cigarette.

“We came this way yesterday,” St. James was answering. He walked on ahead for a few paces, stopping when he glanced back and saw that Lynley had fallen behind. “The wheel’s overgrown. Did you know?”

“I’m not surprised. That was always a problem, as I recall.” Lynley smoked pensively, liking the concrete feel of the cigarette between his fingers. He savoured the sharp taste of the tobacco and the fact that the cigarette in his hand gave him something to which he might attend with more concentration than was necessary.

“And Jasper thinks someone’s using the mill? For what? Dossing?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

St. James nodded, looked thoughtful, walked on. No longer able to avoid it through idle conversation or cigarette smoking or any other form of temporising, Lynley followed.

Oddly enough, he found that the mill wasn’t very much changed since he had last been there, as if someone had been caring for it. The exterior needed paint—patches of whitewash had worn completely through to the stone—and much of its woodwork was splintered, but the roof was all of one piece, and aside from a pane of glass that was missing from the single window on the upper floor, the building looked sturdy enough to stand for another hundred years.

The two men climbed the old stone steps, their feet sliding into shallow grooves which spoke of the thousands of entries and exits made during the time that the mill was in operation. Its paint long ago faded and storm-washed to nothing, the door hung partially open. Its wood was swollen from seasons of rain, so the door no longer fit neatly into position. It gave way with a shriek at Lynley’s push.

They entered, paused, took stock of what they saw. The bottom floor was nearly empty, illuminated by streaky shafts of sunlight that gained access through gaps in the shuttered windows. Against a far wall, some sacking lay in a disintegrating heap next to a stack of wooden crates. Beneath one of the windows, a stone mortar and pestle were cobwebbed over, while nearby a coil of rope hung from a peg, looking as if it hadn’t been touched in half a century. A small stack of old newspapers stood in one corner of the room, and Lynley watched as St. James went to inspect them.

“The
Spokesman
,” he said, picking one up. “With some notations in the text. Corrections. Deletions. A new design for the masthead.” He tossed the paper down. “Did Mick Cambrey know about this place, Tommy?”

“We came here as boys. I expect he hadn’t forgotten it. But those papers look old. He can’t have been here recently.”

“Hmm. Yes. They’re from a year ago April. But someone’s been here more recently than that.” St. James indicated several sets of footprints on the dusty floor. They led to a wall ladder that gave access to the mill loft and the gears and shafts which drove its great grindstone. St. James examined the ladder rungs, pulled on three of them to test their safety, and began an awkward ascent.

Lynley watched him make his slow way to the top, knowing quite well that St. James would expect him to follow. He could not avoid doing so. Nor could he any longer avoid the force of reminiscence that the mill—and more so, the loft above him—provoked. For after ages of searching, she’d found him up there, where he had hidden from her and from the knowledge that he had come upon unexpectedly.

Dashing up through the garden from the sea, he’d only had a glimpse of the man passing before a first floor window, a glance that gave him the impression of height and stature, a glance in which he saw only his father’s paisley dressing gown, a glance in which he hadn’t bothered to think how impossible it was that his father—so ill—would even be out of bed, let alone sauntering round his mother’s bedroom. He didn’t think of that, only felt instead a sunshot bolt of joy as the words
cured cured cured
sang out in his mind and he ran up the stairs—pounded up the stairs calling to them both—and burst into his mother’s room. Or at least tried to. But the door was locked. And as he called out, his father’s nurse hurried up the stairs, carrying a tray, admonishing him, telling him he would awaken the invalid. And he got only as far as saying, “But Father’s…” before he understood.

And then he called out to her in a such savage rage that she opened the door and he saw it all: Trenarrow wearing his father’s dressing gown, the covers on her bed in disarray, the clothing discarded hastily on the floor. The air was heavy with the pungent odour of intercourse. And only a dressing room and bath separated them from the room in which his father lay dying.

He’d flung himself mindlessly at Trenarrow. But he was only a slender boy of seventeen, no match for a man of thirty-one. Trenarrow hit him once, a slap on the face with his open palm, the sort of blow one uses to calm an hysterical woman. His mother had cried, “Roddy, no!” and it was over.

She had found him in the mill. From the one small window in the loft, he watched her coming through the woodland, tall and elegant, just forty-one years old. And so very beautiful.

He should have been able to maintain his poise. The oldest son of the earl, after all, he should have possessed the strength of will and the dignity to tell her that he’d have to return to school and prepare for exams. It wouldn’t matter whether she believed him. The only object was to be off, at once.

But he watched her approach and thought instead of how his father loved her, how he shouted for her—“Daze! Darling Daze!”—whenever he walked into the house. His life had revolved round making her happy, and now he lay in his bedroom and waited for the cancer to eat away the rest of his body while she and Trenarrow kissed and clung and touched and…

He broke. She climbed the ladder, calling his name. He was more than ready for her.

Whore, he screamed. Are you crazy? Or just so itchy that anyone will do? Even someone with nothing more on his mind than sticking you a good one and laughing about it with his mates in the pub when he’s done. Are you proud of that, whore? Are you fucking proud?

When she hit him, the blow came completely by surprise because she had stood there, immobile, and accepted his abuse. But with his last question, she struck him so hard with the back of her hand that he staggered against the wall, his lip split open by her diamond ring. Her face never changed. It was blank, carved in stone.

You’ll be sorry! he screamed as she climbed down the ladder. I’ll make you sorry! I’ll make both of you sorry. I will!

And he had done so, over and over again. How he had done so.

“Tommy?”

Lynley looked up to find St. James watching him over the edge of the loft.

“You might want to see what’s up here.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He climbed the ladder.

It had only taken a moment for St. James to evaluate what he found in the loft. The mill shaft, its tremendous gears, and its grindstone took up much of the space, but what was left gave mute evidence of the use to which the mill had been put most recently.

In the centre of the room stood a rusting card table and one folding chair. This latter held a discarded T-shirt, long ago metamorphosed from white to grey, while on the surface of the former an antique postage scale measured the weight of a tarnished spoon and two dirty razor blades. Next to this was an open carton of small plastic bags.

St. James watched as Lynley joined him and inspected these items, his features becoming more settled as he reached his own inescapable conclusion.