A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(42)

After a few minutes of listening to the sounds of crickets and a nightingale drifting in the window which Lynley had opened, Nancy Cambrey stood. She said, “Molly’s dropped off. I’ll just pop her upstairs,” and left them.

When they heard her movement on the floor above, it was Lady Helen who put into words what had been playing in the back of Lynley’s mind. She spoke in her usual, forthright manner.

“Tommy, where do you suppose John Penellin is? Do you think Nancy really spoke to him during the play? Because it seems to me that there’s something decidedly odd in the way she insisted that she’d talked to him.”

Lynley was sitting on the piano bench, and he pushed softly against three of the keys, producing a barely audible discordance. “I don’t know,” he replied. But even if he could ignore Helen’s intuitive remark, he could not forget his conversation with Nancy that afternoon or the aversion with which her father had spoken of Nancy’s husband.

The clock struck the half hour. Nancy returned to them. “I can’t think where Dad is,” she said. “You’ve no need to stay. I’ll be fine now.”

“We’ll stay,” Lynley said.

She pushed her hair behind her ears and rubbed her hands down the sides of her dress. “He must’ve just gone out a bit ago. He does that sometimes when he can’t sleep. He walks on the grounds. Often he does that before he goes to bed at night. On the grounds. I’m sure that’s where he’s gone.”

No one mentioned the wild improbability of John Penellin’s taking a walk on the grounds at half past two in the morning. No one even had to, for events conspired to prove Nancy a liar. Even as she made her final declaration, a car’s lights swept across the sitting room windows. An engine coughed once. A door opened and shut. Footsteps rang against the flagstones and, a moment later, on the porch. She hurried to the door.

Penellin’s voice came to the others clearly. It sounded sharp. “Nancy? What’re you doing here? It’s not Mark, is it? Nancy, where’s Mark?”

She reached out a hand to him as he came in the door. He took it. “Dad.” Nancy’s voice wavered.

At this, Penellin suddenly saw the others gathered in the sitting room. Alarm shot across his face. “What’s happened?” he demanded. “By God, you tell me what that bastard’s done to you now.”

“He’s dead,” Nancy said. “Someone…” She faltered at the rest of it, as if those few words reminded her of the horror that the sedative had allowed her to escape for a short time.

Penellin stared. He brushed past his daughter and took a step towards the stairway. “Nancy, where’s your brother?”

Nancy said nothing. In the sitting room, Lynley slowly got to his feet.

Penellin spoke again. “Tell me what happened.”

“Nancy found Mick’s body in the cottage after the play,” Lynley said. “The sitting room looked as if it had been searched. Mick may well have surprised someone in the act of going through his papers. Or in the act of robbery. Although,” he added, “that latter seems unlikely.”

Nancy grasped this idea. “It was robbery,” she said. “That’s what it was and no mistake. Mick was doing the pay envelopes for the newspaper staff when I left him this evening.” She tossed a look back over her shoulder at Lynley. “Was the money still there?”

“I saw only a five-pound note on the floor,” St. James answered.

“But surely Mick didn’t pay the staff in cash,” Lynley said.

“He did,” Nancy said. “It was always done that way on the newspaper. More convenient. There’s no bank in Nanrunnel.”

“But if it was robbery—”

“It was,” Nancy said.

Lady Helen spoke gently, bringing up the single point that obviated robbery as a motive. “But Nancy, his body…”

“The body?” Penellin asked.

“He’d been castrated,” Lynley said.

“Good God.”

The front doorbell rang shrilly. All of them jumped, a testimony to the state of their nerves. Still in the hallway, Penellin answered the door. Inspector Boscowan stood on the porch. Beyond him, a dusty car was parked behind the estate Rover that Lynley had earlier driven to and from Nanrunnel.

“John,” Boscowan said by way of greeting Penellin.

The use of Penellin’s given name reminded Lynley all at once that not only were Boscowan and Penellin of an age, but like so many others who lived in this remote area of Cornwall, they were also former schoolmates and lifelong friends.

Penellin said, “Edward, you’ve heard about Mick?”

“I’ve come to talk to you about it.”

Nancy gripped the newel post of the stairway. “To Dad? Why? He knows nothing about this.”

“I’ve a few questions, John,” Boscowan said.

“I don’t understand.” But Penellin’s tone was an admission that he understood only too well.

“May I come in?”

Penellin glanced into the sitting room, and Boscowan followed his gaze to see the others gathered there.

“Still here, my lord?” he asked.

“Yes. We were…” Lynley hesitated. Waiting for John to come home asked to be spoken, an inadvertent accusation he would not make.