'Damn it all, we were standing right there when you walked in after two in the morning! You were in the village, weren't you? You saw Mick. Neither you nor Nancy is telling the truth. John, are you trying to protect her? Or is it Mark? Because he wasn't home, either. And you knew that, didn't you? Were you looking for Mark? Was he at odds with Mick?'
Penellin lifted a document from within the file. 'I've started the initial paperwork on closing Wheal Maen,' he said.
Lynley made a final effort. 'You've been here twenty-five years. I should like to think you'd come to me in a time of trouble.'
'There's no trouble,' Penellin said firmly. He picked up another sheet of paper and, although he did not look at it, the single gesture was eloquent in its plea for solitude.
Lynley terminated the interview and left the office.
With the door closed behind him, he paused in the hall, where the old tile floor made the air quite cool. At the end of the corridor, the south-west door of the house was open, and the sun beat down on the courtyard outside. There was movement on the cobblestones, the pleasant sound of running water. He walked towards it.
Outside, he found Jasper – sometime chauffeur, sometime gardener, sometime stableman and full-time gossip -washing down the Land-Rover they'd driven last night. His trousers were rolled up, his knobbly feet bare, his white shirt open on a gaunt chest of grizzled hair. He nodded at Lynley.
'Got it from 'un, did you?' he asked, directing the spray on the Rover's windscreen.
'Got what from whom?' Lynley asked.
Jasper snorted. "Ad it all this morning, we did,' he said. 'Murder 'n police 'n John getting hisself carted off by CID.' He spat on to the cobblestones and rubbed a rag against the Rover's bonnet. 'With John in Nanrunnel 'n Nance lyin' like a pig in the rain 'bout everything she can… 'oo'd think to see the like?'
'Nancy's lying?' Lynley asked. 'You know that, Jasper?'
"Course I know it,' he said. 'Weren't I down to the lodge at half-ten? Didn't I go 'bout the mill? Wasn't nobody home? 'Course she be lyin'.'
'About the mill? The mill in the woods? Has the mill something to do with Mick Cambrey's death?'
Jasper's face shuttered at this frontal approach. Too late Lynley remembered the old man's fondness for hanging a tale on the thread of innuendo. In reply to the question, Jasper whimsically chose his own conversational path.
" ‘N John never tol' you 'bout them clothes as Nance cut up, did 'e?'
'No. He said nothing about clothes,' Lynley replied, and as bait he offered, 'They can't have been important, I suppose, or he would have mentioned them.'
Jasper shook his head darkly at the folly of dismissing such a piece of information. 'Slicin' urn to shreds, she were,' he said. 'Right back of their cottage. Came 'pon her, me and John. Caught her out, and she cried like an ol' sick cow when she saw us, she did. Tha's important enough, I say.'
'But she didn't talk to you?'
'Said nothin'. All them fancy clothes and Nance cuttin' and slicin'. John went near mad 'en he saw her. Started into the cottage after Mick, 'e did. Nance stopped 'im. 'Ung on to 'is arm till John run outer steam.'
'So they were another woman's clothes,' Lynley mused. 'Jasper, does anyone know who Mick's woman was?'
'Woman?' Jasper scoffed. 'More like women. Dozens, from what Harry Cambrey do say. Comes into the Anchor and Rose, does Harry. Sits and asks everybody 'oo'd listen what's to do 'bout Mick's catting round. "She don' give 'urn near enough," Harry likes to tell it. "Wha's a man to do when 'is woman's not like to give him enough?'" Jasper laughed derisively, stepped back from the Rover and sprayed the front tyre. Water splashed on his legs, freckling them with bits of mud. 'The way Harry do tell it, Nance been keeping her arms and legs crossed since the babe were born. With Mick just suffering b'yond endurance, swelled up like to burst with nowhere to stick it. "Wha's a man to do?" Harry do ask. And Mrs Swann, she do tell him, but-' Jasper suddenly seemed to realize with whom he was having this confidential little chat. His humour faded. He straightened his back, pulled off his cap, and ran his hand through his hair. 'Anybody'd see the problem easy. Mick din't want the bother o' settling down.'
He spat again to punctuate the discussion's end.
St James and Lady Helen heard Harry Cambrey before they saw him. As they climbed the narrow stairway – ducking their heads to avoid capriciously placed beams in the ceiling – the sound of furniture being shoved on a bare wooden floor was followed by a drawer being viciously slammed home, and that was followed by a raw curse. When they knocked on the door, a hush fell inside the room. Then footsteps approached. The door jerked open. Cambrey looked them over. They did the same of him.
Seeing him, St James was reminded of the fact that he'd undergone heart surgery the previous year. He looked all the worse for the experience, thin, with a prominent Adam's apple and a skeletal collarbone meeting in two knobby points beneath it. His yellow skin suggested a dysfunctioning liver, and at the corners of his mouth red sores cracked his lips and spotted them with dried blood. His face was unshaven, and the fringe of grey hair at the crown of his head crinkled out from his scalp, as if he'd been brought hastily awake and hadn't taken the time to comb it.
When Cambrey stepped back to let them pass into the office, St James saw that it was one large room with several smaller cubicles opening along one wall and four narrow windows above the street that ran up the hill towards the upper reaches of the village. Aside from Harry Cambrey, no-one else was there – an odd circumstance for a place of business, particularly a newspaper. But at least one of the reasons for the absence of employees lay upon worktops, upon desks, upon chairs. Notebooks and files had been taken from storage and strewn here and there. Harry Cambrey was engaged in a search.
He'd obviously been working at it for some hours and with no particular method, considering the state of the room. A series of military-green filing cabinets had drawers which gaped open, half-empty; a stack of computer disks sat next to a word processor which was switched on; across a layout table the current edition of the newspaper had been shoved aside to make way for three stacks of photographs; and the drawers of each one of the five desks in the room had been removed. The air was musty with the smell of old paper, and since the overhead lights had not been switched on the room possessed a Dickensian gloom.
'What do you want?' Harry Cambrey was smoking a cigarette which he removed from his mouth only to cough or to light another. If he were concerned about the effect of his habit upon his heart, he did not show it.
'No-one's here but yourself?' St James asked as he and Lady Helen picked their way through the debris.
'I gave them the day off.' Cambrey eyed Lady Helen from head to toe as he made his reply. 'And your business?'
'We've been asked by Nancy to look into what's at the root of Mick's murder.'
'You're to help? The two of you?' He made no attempt to hide his inspection of them, taking in St James' leg-brace with the same effrontery he used to examine Lady Helen's summer frock.
'The pursuit of news is a dangerous profession, isn't it, Mr Cambrey?' Lady Helen said from the windows, which was as far as she'd got in her circuit of the room. 'If your son's been murdered because of a story, what difference does it make who brings his killer to justice, so long as it's done?'
At this, Cambrey's factitious bravado disappeared. 'It's a story,' he said. His arms hung limp and lifeless at his sides. 'I know it. I feel it. I've been here since I heard, trying to find the lad's notes.'
'You've come up with nothing?' St James asked.