A Suitable Vengeance (37 page)

“Why?”

“Does the name Tina Cogin mean anything to you?” St. James asked in answer.

“Cogin?”

“Yes. A woman from London. Mick knew her apparently. I think he may have had the key to her flat.”

“Mick had the key to half a dozen flats, if I know him.” Cambrey pulled out a cigarette and left him to his papers.

An hour’s search through the past six months gleaned him nothing save hands that were stained with newsprint. As far as he could tell, Harry Cambrey’s conjecture about gunrunning was as likely a motive for his son’s death as was anything else the paper had to offer. He shut the cupboard doors. When he turned, it was to find Julianna Vendale watching him, a coffee cup raised to her lips. She’d left the word processor, coming to stand near a coffee maker that was bubbling noisily in the corner of the room.

“Nothing?” She put her cup down on the table and pushed a lock of long hair back from her shoulder.

“Everyone seems to think he was working on a story,” St. James said.

“Mick was always working on something.”

“Did most of his projects get into print?”

She drew her eyebrows together. A faint crease appeared between them. Otherwise, her face was completely unlined. St. James knew from his previous conversation with Lynley that Julianna Vendale was in her middle thirties, perhaps a bit older. But her face denied her age.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I wasn’t always aware of what his projects were. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find out he’d begun something and then let it die. He’d shoot out of here often enough, convinced he was hot on the trail of a feature he could sell in London. Then he’d never complete it.”

St. James had seen that himself in his perusal of the newspapers. Dr. Trenarrow had said Mick interviewed him for a story. But nowhere in the back issues of the paper was there a feature that in any way related to a conversation the two of them might have had. St. James related this to Julianna Vendale.

She poured herself another cup of coffee and spoke over her shoulder. “That doesn’t surprise me. Mick probably thought he was going to get a Mother Teresa piece out of it—Cornish Scientist Dedicates his Life to Saving Others—only to discover that Dr. Trenarrow’s no more on the path to heaven than the rest of us are.”

Or, St. James thought, the potential story was a ploy to get an interview with Trenarrow in the first place in order to gather information, and to pass it along with Trenarrow’s phone number to a needy friend.

Julianna was continuing. “That was largely his way, ever since he came back to the
Spokesman
. I think he was looking for a story as a means of escape.”

“He didn’t want to be here?”

“It was a step backwards for him. He’d been a free-lance journalist. He’d been doing quite well. Then his father fell ill and he had to chuck it all and come back to hold the family business together.”

“You couldn’t have done that?”

“I could have done, of course. But Harry wanted Mick to take over the paper. More than that, I should guess, he wanted him back in Nanrunnel permanently.”

St. James thought he saw the direction Harry Cambrey had intended things to move once Mick returned to Nanrunnel. Nonetheless, he asked, “How did you fit into the plans?”

“Harry made certain we worked together as much as possible. Then, I suppose, he just hoped for the best. He had great faith in Mick’s charm.”

“And you?”

She was holding her coffee cup between her hands, as if to keep them warm. Her fingers were long, she wore no rings. “He didn’t appeal to me. When Harry saw that, he started having Nancy Penellin come to do the books during our regular office hours instead of on weekends.”

“And as to developing the newspaper’s stature?”

She indicated the word processor. “Mick made the attempt at first. He started with new equipment. He wanted to update. But then he seemed to lose interest.”

“When?”

“Just about the time he made Nancy pregnant.” She lifted her shoulders in a graceful shrug. “After they married, he was gone a great deal.”

“Pursuing a story?”

She smiled. “Pursuing.”

They strolled across the narrow street to the harbour. The tide was out. Five sunbathers lay on the narrow strand. Near them, a group of small children dabbled their hands and feet in the water, shrieking with excitement as it lapped at their legs.

“Get what you need?” Cotter asked.

“Pieces, that’s all. Nothing seems to fit together. I can’t make a connection between Mick and Tina Cogin, between Tina Cogin and Trenarrow. It’s nothing more than conjecture.”

“P’raps Deb was wrong. P’raps she didn’t see Mick in London.”

“No. She saw him. Everything indicates that. He knew Tina Cogin. But as to how and why, I don’t know.”

“Seems ’ow and why’s the easiest part, ’cording to Missus Swann.”

“She’s not an admirer of Mick’s, is she?”

“She hated ’im, and there’s the truth.” Cotter watched the children playing for a moment. He smiled as one of them—a little girl of three or four—fell onto her bottom, splashing water on the others. “But if there’s truth to her talk about Mick Cambrey and women, then far’s I can see, looks to me that John Penellin did it.”

“Why?”

“It’s ’is daughter involved, Mr. St. James. A man’s not likely to let another man hurt ’is daughter. Not if it can be stopped in some way. A man does what ’e can.”

St. James recognised the bait and acknowledged the fact that their morning’s discussion was not yet concluded in Cotter’s eyes. But he had no need to ask the question which Cotter’s comment called for:
And what would you do?
He knew the answer. Instead he said, “Did you learn anything from the housekeeper?”

“Dora? A bit.” Cotter leaned against the harbour railing, resting his elbows on the top metal bar. “Great admirer of the doctor, is Dora. Works ’is fingers to the bone. Gives ’is life to research. And when ’e’s not doing that, ’e’s visiting folks at a convalescent ’ome outside St. Just.”

“That’s the extent of it?”

“Seems to be.”

St. James sighed. Not for the first time did he admit to the fact that his field was science, crime scene investigation, the analysis of evidence, the interpretation of data, the preparation of reports. He had no expertise in an arena that demanded insightful communication and intuitive deduction. More, he didn’t have the taste or the talent for either. And the further he waded into the growing mire of conjecture, the more frustrated he felt.

From his jacket pocket, he pulled out the piece of paper which Harry Cambrey had given him Saturday morning. It seemed as reasonable a direction to head in as any.
When you’re lost
, he thought mordantly,
you may as well head somewhere
.

Cotter joined him in studying it. “MP,” he said. Then, “Member of Parliament?”

St. James looked up. “What did you say?”

“Them letters. MP.”

“MP? No—” As he spoke, St. James held the paper to the sunlight. And he saw what the gloom of the newspaper office and his own preconceived notions had prevented him from realising before. The pen, which had skipped in the grease on other spots on the paper, had done as much again next to the words
procure
and
transport
. The result was an imperfectly formed loop for the letter
P
, not the number
I
at all. And the
6
, if the thought followed logically, had to be instead a hastily scrawled
C
.

“Good God.” He frowned, examining the accompanying numbers. Dismissing gunrunning and Ireland and every other side issue from his mind, it wasn’t long before he saw the obvious.
500. 55. 27500
. The last was the multiple of the previous two.

And then he recognised the first connection of the circumstances surrounding Mick Cambrey’s death. The position of the
Daze
had told him, bow to stern northeast on the rocks. He should have clung to that thought. It had been pointing to the truth.

He thought about the coastline of Cornwall. He knew without a doubt that Lynley’s party of men could scour every cove from St. Ives to Penzance, but it would be as limitedly useful an activity for them as it had been for the excise officers who had patrolled the same area for two hundred years. The coast was honeycombed with caves. It was scalloped by coves. St. James knew that. He did not need to clamber among the rocks and slither down the faces of cliffs to see what he knew quite well was already there, a haven for smugglers. If they knew how to pilot a boat among the reefs.

It could have come from anywhere, he thought. From Portgwarra to Sennen Cove. Even from the Scillys. But there was only one way to know for sure.

“What next?” Cotter asked.

St. James folded the paper. “We need to find Tommy.”

“Why?”

“To call off the search.”

CHAPTER

19

A
fter nearly two hours, they found him on the quay at Lamorna Cove. He was squatting on the edge, talking to a fisherman who had just docked his boat and was trudging up the harbour steps, three coils of greasy-looking rope dangling from his shoulder. He paused halfway, listening to Lynley above him. He shook his head, covered his eyes to examine the other boats in the harbour, and with a wave towards the scattering of buildings set back from the quay, he continued his climb.

Up above, on the road that dipped into the cove, St. James got out of the car. “Go back to Howenstow,” he told Cotter. “I’ll ride in with Tommy.”

“Any message for Daze?”

St. James considered the question. Any message for Lynley’s mother seemed a toss-up between relieving her mind about one set of circumstances only to fire her worries about another. “Nothing yet.”

He waited as Cotter turned the car around and headed back the way they had come. Then he began the descent into Lamorna, with the wind whipping round him and the sun warming his face. Below him, the crystalline water reflected the colour of the sky, and the small beach glistened with newly washed sand. The houses on the hillside, built by Cornish craftsmen who had been testing the strength of the southwestern weather for generations, had sustained no damage from the storm. Here, that which had been the ruin of the
Daze
might not even have occurred.

St. James watched as Lynley walked along the quay, his head bent forward, his hands deep in trouser pockets. The posture said everything about the condition of his spirit, and the fact that he was alone suggested either that he had disbanded the search altogether or that the others had gone on without him. Because they’d been at it for hours already, St. James guessed the former. He called Lynley’s name.

His friend looked up, raised a hand in greeting, but said nothing until he and St. James met at the land end of the quay. His expression was bleak.

“Nothing.” He lifted his head and the wind tossed his hair. “We’ve completed the circuit. I’ve been talking to everyone here as a last-ditch effort. I thought someone might have seen them getting the boat ready to sail, or walking on the quay, or stocking supplies. But no one in any of the houses saw a blasted thing. Only the woman who runs the cafe even noticed the
Daze
yesterday.”

“When was that?”

“Just after six in the morning. She was getting ready to open the cafe—adjusting the front blinds—so she can’t have been mistaken. She saw them sailing out of the harbour.”

“And it
was
yesterday? Not the day before.”

“She remembers it was yesterday because she couldn’t understand why someone was taking the boat out when rain had been forecast.”

“But it was in the morning that she saw them?”

Lynley glanced his way, flashed a tired but grateful smile. “I know what you’re thinking. Peter left Howenstow the night before, and because of that, it’s less likely he’s the one who took the boat. That’s good of you, St. James. Don’t think I haven’t considered it myself. But the reality is that he and Sasha could have come to Lamorna during the night, slept on the boat, then taken her out at dawn.”

“Did this woman see anyone on deck?”

“Just a figure at the helm.”

“Only one?”

“I can’t think Sasha knows how to sail, St. James. She was probably below. She was probably still asleep.” Lynley looked back at the cove. “We’ve done the whole coastline. But so far, nothing. Not a sighting, not a garment, not a sign of them.” He took out his cigarette case and flipped it open. “I’m going to have to come up with something to tell Mother. But God only knows what it’ll be.”

St. James had been placing most of the facts together as Lynley spoke. His thoughts elsewhere, he’d heard not so much the words as the desolation behind them. He sought to bring that to an immediate end.

“Peter didn’t take the
Daze
,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

Lynley’s head turned to him slowly. It looked like the sort of movement one makes in a dream. “What are you saying?”