A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(77)

“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 none the less,” 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 recognised 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 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 here. 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 deaths 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.