A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(39)

“Perhaps you might wait out here until I’m done,” St. James said to his friend. He walked back into the house.



St. James took the photographs from every angle, working his way carefully round the body, stopping only when he had run out of film. Then he left the sitting room, pulled the door partially closed behind him, and returned to the others outside. They had been joined by a small crowd of neighbours who stood in a hushed group a short distance from the garden gate, heads bent together, voices murmuring in speculation.

“Bring Nancy inside,” St. James said.

Lady Helen led her across the front garden and into the cottage where she hesitated only a moment before directing Nancy towards the kitchen, an oblong room with an odd, sloping ceiling and a grey linoleum floor sporting great black patches of wear. She sat her down on a chair that stood at one side of a stained pine table. Kneeling by her side, she looked closely at her face, reached for her arm and held her thin wrist between her own fingers. She frowned, touching the back of her hand to Nancy’s cheek.

“Tommy,” Lady Helen said with a remarkable degree of calm, “ring Dr. Trenarrow. I think she’s going into shock. He can deal with that, can’t he?” She prised the baby from Nancy’s grasp and handed her to Deborah. “There must be baby milk in the refrigerator. Will you see to warming some?”

“Molly…” Nancy whispered. “Hungry. I…feed.”

“Yes,” Lady Helen said gently. “We’re seeing to her, dear.”

In the other room, Lynley was speaking into the telephone. He placed a second call and spoke even more briefly, but the altered formal sound of his voice was enough to tell the others that he was speaking to the Penzance police. After a few minutes, he returned to the kitchen with a blanket which he wrapped round Nancy in spite of the heat.

“Can you hear me?” he asked her.

Nancy’s eyelids fluttered, showing nothing but white. “Molly…feed.”

“I’ve got her right here,” Deborah said. She was crooning to the baby in a far corner of the kitchen. “The milk’s warming. I expect she likes it warm, doesn’t she? She’s a pretty baby, Nancy. I can’t imagine a prettier one.”

It was the right thing to say. Nancy relaxed in her chair. St. James nodded gratefully to Deborah and went back to the sitting room door. He pushed it open and stood on the threshold. He spent several minutes studying, thinking, evaluating what he saw. Lady Helen finally joined him. Even from the doorway, they could see the nature of the material that lay in disorder across the floor, upon the desk, against the legs of furniture. Notebooks, documents, pages of manuscripts, photographs. At the back of his mind, St. James heard Lady Asherton’s words about Mick Cambrey. But the nature of the crime did not support the conclusion he otherwise might have naturally drawn from a consideration of those words.

“What do you think?” Lady Helen asked him.

“He was a journalist. He’s dead. Somehow those two facts ought to hang together. But the body says no a thousand times.”

“Why?”

“He’s been castrated, Helen.”

“Heavens. Is that how he died?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

A knock at the door precluded reply. Lynley came from the kitchen to admit Roderick Trenarrow. The doctor entered wordlessly. He looked from Lynley to St. James and Lady Helen, and then beyond them to the sitting room floor where, even from where he stood, Mick Cambrey’s body was partially visible. For a moment, it appeared that he might step forward and attempt to save a man who was beyond all rescue.

He said to the others, “Are you certain?”

“Quite,” St. James replied.

“Where’s Nancy?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on to the kitchen where the lights shone brightly and Deborah chatted about babies as if in the hope that doing so would keep Nancy anchored in the here and now. Trenarrow tilted Nancy’s head and looked at her eyes. He said, “Help me get her upstairs. Quickly. Has anyone telephoned her father?”

Lynley moved to do so. Lady Helen helped Nancy to her feet and urged her out of the kitchen as Dr. Trenarrow led the way. Still carrying the baby, Deborah followed them. In a moment, Trenarrow’s voice began asking gentle questions in the bedroom upstairs. These were followed by Nancy’s querulous replies. Bed springs creaked. A window was opened. The dry wood of the sash grated and shrieked.

“There’s no answer at the lodge,” Lynley said from the telephone. “I’ll ring on to Howenstow. Perhaps he’s gone there.” But after a conversation with Lady Asherton, John Penellin was still unaccounted for. Lynley frowned at his watch. “It’s half past twelve. Where can he possibly be at this time of night?”

“He wasn’t at the play, was he?”

“John? No. I can’t say the Nanrunnel Players hold any charms for him.”

Above them, Nancy cried out. As if in response to this single demonstration of anguish, another knock thudded against the front door. Lynley opened it to admit the local police, represented in the person of a plump, curly-haired constable in a uniform that took its distinction from large crescents of sweat beneath the arms and a coffee stain on the trousers. He looked about twenty-three years old. He didn’t bother with any immediate introductions nor with any of the formalities inherent to a murder investigation. It was obvious within seconds that, in the presence of a corpse, he was in over his head and delighted to be there.