A Suitable Vengeance

'Someone creeping up on him?'

'Couldn't have happened. The blow didn't come from above. Even if it had, to have placed a blow there the killer would have had to stand in such a way that Cambrey would have seen him in his peripheral vision. He would have made an attempt to block the blow in some way and we'd have evidence on the body. Bruising or abrasions. But we've neither.'

'The killer may have been too fast for him.'

She turned the skull. 'Possibly. But that wouldn't explain the second blow. Another fracture, less severe, in the right frontal region. For your scenario, the killer would have hit him in the back of the head, asked him kindly to turn round, then hit him in the front.'

'Are we talking about an accident then? Cambrey stumbling on his own, failing, and then later someone coming to the cottage, finding the body, and mutilating it for the sheer enjoyment of castration?'

'Hardly.' She replaced the skull and leaned back in her chair. The light from the ceiling winked against her spectacles and shone in her hair, which was short, straight and artificially blue-black. 'Here's the scenario as I've worked it out. Cambrey's standing, having a conversation with the killer. It grows into an argument. He takes a tremendous blow on the jaw – there was heavy bruising of the submaxilla and that was the only significant bruising on the body – which sends him falling back against an object perhaps four and a half feet from the floor.'

St James thought about the sitting room in Gull Cottage. He knew Dr Waters had been there herself. She would have done a preliminary examination of the body there on Friday night. And, no matter one's determination to wait for post-mortem results before formulating an opinion, she would have begun developing ideas the moment she saw the corpse. 'The mantel?'

She cocked an affirmative finger at him. 'Cambrey's weight increases the velocity of his fall. The result is our first fracture. From the mantel, then, he falls again, but slightly to the side this time. And he hits the front region of his skull on another object.'

'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 nonetheless,' 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 recognized 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's 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 there. 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 death 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.

'I didn't think to alter the menu,' Lady Asherton was saying in reference to the elaborate array of food with which they had been presented. 'So much has been happening, I've forgotten how to think straight. There were supposed to be at least nine of us here. Ten, if Augusta had stayed. It's a blessing she went home last night. Had she been here this morning when Jasper found the body…' She toyed with a spear of broccoli, as if suddenly aware how disjointed her comments actually sounded. Candlelight and shadows played against the turquoise dress she wore and softened the lines of worry that, with the advancing day, had grown more prominent between her eyebrows and from her nose to her chin. She hadn't mentioned Peter since first being told he was gone.