A Suitable Vengeance (16 page)

“You’re worried about the cottage,” he said. “Don’t. I shan’t be putting you out on the street. We’ll work things out, Mick and I.”

She felt sweat break out on the back of her neck in spite of his gentle declaration. It was the nightmare she feared, coming face to face with him, having to discuss the situation, having to create excuses. Worse, just ten feet away, Mrs. Swann had raised her head from the money box, her interest no doubt piqued by the mention of Mick’s name.

“I’ll have the money,” she stammered. “I’ll get it. I will.”

“You’re not to worry, Nancy,” Trenarrow said, more insistently. “And you’ve no need at all to go begging Lord Asherton for help. You should have spoken to me.”

“No. You see…” She couldn’t explain without giving offence. He would not understand why she could go hat in hand to Lynley but not to him. He wouldn’t realise that a loan from Lynley carried no burden of unwelcome charity because he gave without judgement, in friendship and concern. And nowhere else in Nancy’s life could she expect that sort of help without a companion assessment of the failure of her marriage. Even now she could feel the manner in which Dr. Trenarrow was evaluating her situation. Even now she could sense his pity.

“Because a rise in the rent isn’t—”

“Please.” With a small cry, she brushed past him, hurrying out of the school yard and into the street. She heard Dr. Trenarrow call her name once, but she kept going.

Rubbing arms that were sore from heaving pint glasses and working the taps all night, she scurried down Paul Lane towards the mouth of Ivy Street which led into the twisting collection of alleys and passageways that comprised the heart of the village. These were narrow inclines, cobbled and tortuous little streets too cramped for cars. During the day, summer holiday makers came here to photograph the picturesque old buildings with their colourful front gardens and crooked slate roofs. At night, however, the entire area was illuminated only by oblongs of light from cottage windows. Darkly shadowed and inhabited by generations of cats who bred in the hillside above the village and fed by night in rubbish bins, it was not a place for lingering.

Gull Cottage was some distance into the maze of streets. It sat on the corner of Virgin Place, looking like a whitewashed matchbox, with bright blue trim on its windows and a lavishly blooming fuchsia growing next to its front door. Blood-red flowers blown from this plant covered the ground nearby.

As Nancy approached the cottage, her steps faltered. She could hear the noise from three houses away. Molly was crying, screaming, in fact.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly midnight. Molly should have been fed, should have been fast asleep by now. Why on earth was Mick not seeing to the child?

Exasperated that her husband could be so selfishly deaf to his own daughter’s cries, Nancy ran the remaining distance to the cottage, threw open the garden gate, and hurried to the door.

“Mick!” she called. Above her, in the only bedroom, she could hear Molly’s screaming. She felt an edge of panic, picturing the baby’s face, red with rage, feeling her small body tense with fright. She shoved open the door.

“Molly!”

Inside, she ran for the stairs, took them two at a time. It was insufferably hot.

“Molly-girl! Pet!” She flew to the baby’s cot and picked her daughter up to find that she was wet to the skin, reeking of urine. Her body was feverish. Tendrils of auburn hair curled limply on her skull. “Love, lovely girl. What’s happened to you?” she murmured as she sponged her off and changed her and then cried out, “Michael! Mick!”

With Molly against her shoulder, Nancy went back down the stairs, her feet striking the bare wood noisily as she headed for the kitchen at the rear of the cottage. Feeding the baby was foremost on her mind. Still, she allowed herself to give vent to a small eruption of anger.

“I want to speak with you,” she snapped at the closed sitting room door. “Michael! D’you hear? I want a word. Now!”

As she spoke, she saw that the door was neither latched nor locked. She pushed it open with her foot.

“Michael, you can damn well answer me when—”

She felt the hairs bristling along the length of her arms. He was lying on the floor. Or someone was lying there, for she could just see a leg. Only one. Not two. Which was curious unless he was sleeping with one leg drawn up and the other splayed out in complete abandon. Except, how could he be asleep? It was hot. So hot. And the noise which Molly had been making…

“Mick, are you playing some pawky joke on me?”

There was no reply. Molly’s crying had faded to an exhausted whimper, so Nancy took a step into the room.

“That’s you, isn’t it, Mick?”

Nothing. But, she could see it was Mick. She recognised his shoe, a frivolous high-topped red plimsole with a strip of metallic silver round the ankle. It was a new purchase of his, something that he didn’t need. It costs too much money, she’d say to him. It bleeds off the chequebook. It takes away from the baby…Yes, it
was
Mick on the floor. And she knew what he was up to at the moment, pretending to be asleep so that she couldn’t rant at him for ignoring the baby.

Still, it didn’t seem like him not to hop to his feet, laughing at his ability to frighten her with another one of his practical jokes. And she
was
frightened. Because something wasn’t right. Papers blanketed the floor, far more than represented Mick’s usual mess. The desk drawers were open. The curtains were drawn. A cat yowled outside, but in the cottage, there was no sound, and the heavy, hot air was foul with the smell of faeces and sweat.

“Mickey?”

Her hands, her armpits, the back of her knees, the inside of her elbows. She was sticky and wet. Molly stirred in her arms. Nancy forced herself forward. An inch. Then another. Then an entire foot. Six inches after that. And then she saw why her husband had not heard Molly’s cries.

Although he lay motionless on the floor, he was not pretending to be asleep at all. His eyes were open. But they were glazed and fixed and as Nancy watched, a fly walked across the surface of one blue iris.

Before her, his image seemed to swim in the heat, animated by a force external to his body. He should move, she thought. How can he be that still? Is it some sort of trick? Can’t he feel the fly?

Then she saw the other flies. Six or eight. No more. They usually kept residence in the kitchen and pestered her while she cooked their meals. But now they buzzed and circled round her husband’s hips where Mick’s trousers were torn, where they were open at the waist, where they were jerked down brutally to give someone access…to allow someone to carve…

She was running with no sense of direction and no clear purpose. Her only thought was to get away.

She flung herself out of the cottage, through the gate, and into Virgin Place, the baby once again wailing in her arms. Her foot caught on a cobblestone and she nearly fell, but she staggered three steps, crashed against a rubbish bin, and righted herself by grabbing onto a cottage rainspout.

The darkness was complete. Moonlight struck the roofs and the sides of buildings, but these cast long shadows into the street, creating yawning ebony pools into which she dashed, heedless of the uneven pavement, of the small scurrying rodents who foraged in the night. The mouth of Ivy Street was up ahead, and she lunged for it and for the safety of Paul Lane which lay just beyond it.

“Please.” Her mouth formed the word. She couldn’t hear herself say it. And then, breaking through the rasping noise of her lungs, came voices and laughter, joking on Paul Lane.

“All right, I believe you. So find Cassiopeia,” a man’s pleasant voice said. Then he added, “Oh, for God’s sake, at least you can manage the Big Dipper, Helen.”

“Really, Tommy, I’m only trying to get my bearings. You’ve all the patience of a two-year-old. I can—”

Blessing
. She reached them, crashed into them, fell to her knees.

“Nancy!” Someone took her arm, helped her back to her feet. Molly was howling. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

It was Lynley’s voice, Lynley’s arm round her shoulders. He seemed like salvation.

“Mick!” she cried and pulled violently on the front of Lynley’s jacket. Having said at last what needed to be said, she began to scream. “It’s Mick! It’s Mick!”

Lights went on in the cottages round them.

St. James and Lynley entered together, leaving the three women standing just inside the garden gate. Mick Cambrey’s body was on the sitting room floor, not more than twenty feet from the front door. The two men went to it and stood staring down, frozen momentarily into inaction by horror.

“Good God,” St. James murmured.

He had seen many grisly sights during his time on the scenes-of-crime team at New Scotland Yard, but the mutilation of Cambrey’s body struck him forcefully, the sort of maiming that lay at the heart of every man’s fear. Averting his eyes, he saw that someone had thoroughly searched the sitting room, for all the drawers had been pulled from the desk, correspondence and envelopes and stationery and countless other papers had been tossed round the room, broken picture frames had their backings torn off, and near a worn blue sofa, a tattered five-pound note lay on the floor.

It was an automatic reaction, born of his brief career with the police, fostered by his devotion to forensic science. Later, he would wonder why he even gave it sway, considering the disunity it provoked among them. “We’re going to need Deborah,” he said.

Lynley was squatting by the body. He jumped to his feet and intercepted St. James at the front door. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t be thinking of asking her…That’s madness. We need the police. You know that as well as I do.”

St. James pulled open the door. “Deborah, would you—”

“Stay where you are, Deborah,” Lynley interposed. He turned back to his friend. “I won’t have it. I mean that, St. James.”

“What is it, Tommy?” Deborah took a single step.

“Nothing.”

St. James regarded the other man curiously, trying and failing to understand the nature of his admonition to Deborah. “It’ll take only a moment, Tommy,” he explained. “I think it’s best. Who knows what the local CID are like. They may ask for your help anyway. So let’s get some pictures in advance. Then you can phone.” He called over his shoulder. “Will you bring your camera, Deborah?”

She began to come forward. “Of course. Here—”

“Deborah, stay there.”

His explanation had seemed rational enough to St. James’ own ears. But, rife with urgency, Lynley’s response to it did not.

“But the camera?” Deborah asked.

“I said stay there!”

They were at an impasse. Deborah raised a querying hand, looked from Lynley to St. James.

“Tommy, is there something…?”

Touching her arm lightly, Lady Helen stopped her and came to join the two men. “What’s happened?” she asked.

St. James replied. “Helen, get me Deborah’s camera. Mick Cambrey’s been murdered and I want to photograph the room before we telephone the police.”

He said nothing more until he held the camera in his hands. Even then, he looked it over thoroughly, studying its mechanism in a silence that he knew was growing more tense and unpleasant with every moment he allowed it to continue. He told himself that Lynley’s main concern was that Deborah not be allowed to see the body or do the photographing herself. Indeed, he was sure that had been his friend’s original intention when he insisted that she stay outside. He had misunderstood St. James’ asking for Deborah. He had thought St. James wanted her to take the pictures herself. But that misunderstanding had dissolved into dispute. And no matter that much of the dispute remained unspoken, the fact that it had occurred at all charged the atmosphere with elements bleak and nasty.

“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.