A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  'Angus,' he said to the man at the head of the group.

  He was Detective Inspector Angus MacPherson, a hefty Scot who habitually wore old worsted suits that looked as if they doubled at night as his pyjamas. He nodded at Lynley and walked to the bed. The other officer followed him, removing a small notebook from her shoulder bag and a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of her rumpled puce blouse. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, MacPherson's partner. St James knew them both.

  'What hae we here?' MacPherson murmured. He fingered the bed sheet and looked over his shoulder as the rest of the team crowded into the room. 'Ye havena moved anything, Tommy?'

  'Just the sheet. She was covered when we got here.'

  'I covered her,' Peter said. 'I thought she was asleep.'

  Sergeant Havers raised an expressive, disbelieving eyebrow. She wrote in her notebook. She looked from Lynley, to his brother, to the corpse on the bed.

  'I went to buy eggs. And bread,' Peter said. 'When I got back—'

  Lynley stepped behind his brother, dropping his hand to Peter's shoulder. It was enough to still him. Havers glanced their way again.

  'When you got back?' She spoke entirely without inflection.

  Peter looked at his brother as if for guidance. First his tongue then his teeth sought his upper lip. 'She was like that,' Peter said.

  Lynley's fingers whitened on his brother's shoulder. It was obvious that Sergeant Havers saw this, for she exhaled in a brief, knowing snort - a woman who possessed no affinity for Thomas Lynley and no fellow-feeling for his situation. She turned back to the bed. MacPherson began speaking to her in a low, quick voice. She jotted down notes.

  When MacPherson had completed his preliminary inspection, he joined Peter and Lynley. He drew them to the far corner of the room as the forensic pathologist took over, pulling on surgical gloves. The pathologist probed, touched, poked and examined. In a few minutes, it was over. He murmured something to Havers and made way for the scenes-of-crime officers.

  St James watched them begin to gather the evidence, his every sense alive to the presence of Sidney's silver bottle on the floor. The water glass on the packing crate was placed in a bag and marked. The tarnished spoon likewise. A fine residue of powder, which St James himself had not seen in his first inspection of the fruit packing crate, was carefully brushed from its surface into a container. Then the crate was inched to one side, and the bottle itself was plucked from the floor. When it, too, had been dropped into a bag, the twenty-four hours had begun.

  St James signalled to Lynley that he was going to leave. The other man joined him.

  'They'll be taking Peter in,' Lynley said. ‘I’ll go with him.' And then, as if he believed that his intention to accompany his brother in some way negated his prior determination to let Peter stand on his own, he went on to say, 'I must do that much, St James.'

  'That's understandable.'

  'Will you tell Deborah for me? I've no idea how long I'll be.'

  'Of course.' St James thought how to phrase his next question, knowing that Lynley, upon hearing it, would leap to a conclusion which might make him refuse. Still, he had to have the details, and he had to have them without Lynley's knowing why. He led into it cautiously. 'Will you get me some information from the Yard? As soon as they have it?'

  'What sort of information?'

  'The post-mortem. As much as you can. As soon as you can.'

  'You don't think that Peter—?'

  'They're going to rush things through for you, Tommy. It's the most they can do, all things considered, and they'll do it. So will you get the information?'

  Lynley glanced at his brother. Peter had begun to shake. MacPherson rooted through the pile of clothing on the floor until he found a striped sweatshirt which he handed over to Havers who inspected it with deliberate slowness before passing it on to Peter.

  Lynley sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck. 'All right. I'll get it.'

  In the back of the taxi spinning towards St Pancras, St James tried to remove every thought of his sister from his mind, replacing her image with an unsuccessful attempt to formulate some sort of plan of action. But he could come up with nothing other than a host of memories, each one more importunate than the last, making its own demand that he save her.

  He had stopped briefly in Paddington to deliver Lynley's message to Deborah. There, he had used her telephone, ringing his sister's flat, her modelling agency, his own home, knowing all along that he was duplicating Lady Helen's earlier efforts, knowing and not caring, not even thinking, doing nothing but trying to find her, seeing nothing but the silver bottle on the floor and the intricate scrollwork of initials that identified it as Sidney's.

  He was aware of Deborah standing nearby, watching and listening. She was alone in the flat - Helen having gone her way to do what she could with the messages on Mick's answering machine and the file marked Prospects - and he could read her concern in the fine tracery of lines that appeared on her brow as he continued to dial, continued to ask for his sister, continued to meet with no success. He found that, more than anything, he wanted to keep from Deborah the true nature of his fear. She knew Sasha was dead, so she assumed his concern revolved only round Sidney's immediate safety. He was determined to keep it that way.

  'No luck?' Deborah asked, when he finally turned from the telephone.

  He shook his head and went to the table upon which they had left the material they'd gathered from Mick Cambrey's flat. He sorted it, stacked it, tapped it into a neat pile which he folded and put into his jacket pocket.

  'Can I do anything?' she asked. 'Anything at all? Please. I feel so useless.' She looked stricken and afraid. 'I can't believe someone would actually want to hurt Sidney. She's just gone off somewhere, Simon. Hasn't she? She's in agony over Justin. She needs to be alone.'

  He heard the penultimate statement and knew it for the truth. He had seen his sister's grief in Cornwall and had felt the inchoate fury which that grief provoked. Still, she had gone and he had allowed her to do so. Whatever fell upon Sidney now was in large part his responsibility.

  'There's nothing you can do,' he said. He started for the door. His face was impassive. He could feel each feature settle until he wore a perfectly insensate mask. He knew that Deborah wouldn't understand such a reaction to her offer. She would read it as rejection, seeing it, perhaps, as an adolescent retaliation for everything that had passed between them since her return. But that couldn't be helped.

  'Simon. Please.'

  'There's nothing more to be done.' 'I can help. You know I can.' 'There's no need, Deborah.' 'Let me help you find her.' 'Just wait here for Tommy.'

  'I don't want—' She stopped. He could see a pulse beating in her throat. He waited for more. There was nothing. Deborah took in a slow breath, but she didn't look away. 'I'll go to Cheyne Row.'

  'There's no point to that. Sidney won't be there.'

  'I don't care. I'm going.'

  He had neither the time nor the wish to argue with her. So he left, forcing himself back to his original purpose in returning to London. He hoped that a visit to Islington-London might somehow reveal the truth behind Mick Cambrey's death and that this additional death in Whitechapel were somehow tied to the previous two. For tying them together would serve as a means of exonerating Sidney. And tying them together meant a pursuit of the ghost of Mick Cambrey. He was determined to incarnate this spectre from Cornwall. Islington-London seemed to offer the final opportunity of doing so.

  But in the back of the taxi he felt his weary mind lose the battle against images that attacked his calm, forcing him back to a time and a place he thought he had left behind for ever. There, he saw them as they had appeared at the hospital, distorted faces emerging out of the fugue created by alternating states of consciousness and by the drug that deadened his most immediate suffering. David and Andrew in hushed consultation with the doctors; his mother and Helen, riven by sorrow; Tommy, driven by guilt. And Sidney. Just seventeen years old, with a butc
hered-up haircut and earrings that looked like communication satellites. Outrageous Sidney, reading to him from the most ridiculous of the London dailies, laughing uproariously at the worst of their gruesome and titillating stories. She was always there, never missing a day, refusing to allow him to sink into despair.

  And then later in Switzerland. He remembered the bitterness with which he had looked at the Alps from his hospital window, loathing his body, despising its weakness, confronting for the very first time the inescapable reality of never being able to walk with ease in those mountains - or any others - again. But Sidney was with him, bullying, shouting, harassing him back to health, stubbornly insisting he would live to old age even when he prayed each night that he might die.

  Remembering all this, he fought against the facts that nagged at his consciousness: Sidney's presence in Soho, the nature of her relationship with Justin Brooke, her easy access to drugs from the life she led, the people she knew, and the work she did. And while he tried to convince himself that she did not know - could not possibly have known - Mick Cambrey, and thus could not be involved in his death in any way, he could not dismiss the fact that Deborah had told him Sidney had seen Tina Cogin that day in her flat. Sidney herself had talked about seeing Peter assaulting a woman in Soho, a woman whose description was identical to Tina's. Even though it was tenuous enough to be disregarded as meaningless, the connection was there. He could not overlook it. So he wondered where she was and what she had done, while twenty-five years of mutual history cried out that he find her before the police.

  Islington-London was an unprepossessing building not far from Gray's Inn Road. A small, gated courtyard set the structure back from the street, and it was crammed with half a dozen small cars and a minivan with the letters ISLINGTON spread across a map of Great Britain and white stars scattered here and there in all three countries, obviously indicating the location of branch offices. There were ten in all, as far north as Inverness, as far south as Penzance. It appeared to be quite an operation.

  Inside the lobby, the sound from the street was muted by thick walls, thick carpet, and a muzak track currently playing an all-strings rendition of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. Handsome sofas lined the walls beneath large modern canvases in the style of David Hockney. Across from these a receptionist, who couldn't have been more than an erstwhile fifth-form student who'd decided not to continue at school, tapped away at a word processor with impossibly long magenta-coloured fingernails. Her hair was dyed to match.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she appeared to see St James approach, for she did not turn from her word processing screen. Rather she wiggled her fingers vaguely in the direction of a stack of papers on her desk and popped her chewing gum before saying, 'Take an application form.'

  ‘I’ve not come about a job.'

  When the girl didn't respond, St James noticed that she was wearing the small kind of headset earphones that are usually attached to a tape recorder either giving dictation or blaring out rock-and-roll music that, mercifully, no-one else has to hear. He repeated his statement, louder this time. She looked up, removing the headset hastily.

  'Sorry. One gets used to the automatic response.' She pulled a ledger towards her. 'Have an appointment?'

  'Do people generally have appointments when they come here?'

  She chewed her gum more thoughtfully for a moment and looked him over as if searching for hidden meanings. 'Generally,' she said. 'Right.'

  'So no-one would come to make a purchase?'

  The gum snapped in her mouth. 'The sales force goes out. No-one comes here. There's the odd telephone order, isn't there, but it's not like a chemist's shop.' She watched as St James took the folded materials from his jacket pocket and produced the photograph of Mick Cambrey. He gave it to her, his hand making contact with her talon nails which, glistening wetly, grazed his skin. She wore a tiny gold musical note glued on to the nail of her ring finger, like a piece of odd jewellery.

  'Has this man had an appointment to see anyone?' he asked.

  She smiled when her eyes dropped to the picture. 'He's been here all right.'

  'Lately?'

  She tapped her nails on the desk top as she thought. 'H'm. That's a bit difficult, isn't it? A few weeks past, I think.'

  'Do you know who he saw?' 'His name?'

  'Mick - Michael - Cambrey.'

  'Let me check.' She opened the ledger on her desk and scanned several pages - an activity which seemed to allow her the opportunity of showing off her fingernails to their best advantage, since every time she turned a page, she used a new nail to guide her eyes down the column of times and names.

  'A visitor's log?' St James asked.

  'Everybody signs in and out. Security, you know.'

  'Security?'

  'Drugs research. You can't be too careful. Something new comes out and everyone in the West End's hot to try it with drinks that night. Ah. Here it is. He's signed into Project Testing, Department Twenty-Five.' She flipped back through several more pages. 'Here he is again. Same department, same time. Just before lunch.' She slipped back several months. 'Quite a regular, he was.'

  'Always the same department?'

  'Looks that way.'

  'May I speak to the department head?'

  She closed the ledger and looked regretful. 'That's a bit rough. No appointment, you see. And poor Mr Malverd's balancing two departments at once. Why don't you leave your name?' She shrugged noncommittally.

  St James wasn't about to be put off. 'This man, Mick Cambrey, was murdered on Friday night.'

  The receptionist's face sharpened with immediate interest. 'You're police?' she asked; and then, sounding hopeful, 'Scotland Yard?'

  St James gave a moment's thought to how easily it could all have been managed had Lynley only come with him. As it was, he removed his own card and handed it over. 'This is a private endeavour,' he told her.

  She glanced at the card, moved her lips as she read it, and then turned it over as if more information might be printed on the back. 'A murder,' she breathed. 'Just let me see if I can reach Mr Malverd for you.' She punched three buttons on the switchboard and pocketed his card. 'Just in case I need you myself,' she said with a wink.

  Ten minutes later, a man came into the reception area, swinging shut a heavy panelled door behind him. He introduced himself as Stephen Malverd, offered his hand in an abbreviated greeting, and pulled on his earlobe. He was wearing a white lab coat which hung below his knees, directing attention to what he wore upon his feet. Sandals, rather than shoes, and heavy argyle socks. He was very busy, he said, he could spare only a few minutes, if Mr St James would come this way . . .

  He strode briskly back into the heart of the building. As he walked, his hair - which sprang up round his head wild and unruly like a pad of steel wool - fluttered and bounced, and his lab coat blew open like a cape. He slowed his pace only when he noticed St James' gait, but even then he looked at the offending leg accusingly, as if it too robbed him of precious moments away from his job.

  They rang for the lift at the end of a corridor given over to administrative offices. Malverd said nothing until they were on their way to the building's third floor. 'It's been chaos round here for the last few days,' he said. 'But I'm glad you've come. I thought there was more involved than I heard at first.'

  'Then, you remember Michael Cambrey?'

  Malverd's face was a sudden blank. 'Michael Cambrey? But she told me—' He gestured aimlessly in an indication of the reception area and frowned. 'What's this about?'

  'A man named Michael Cambrey visited Project Testing, Department Twenty-Five, several times over the past few months. He was murdered last Friday.'

  'I'm not sure how I can help you.' Malverd sounded perplexed. 'Twenty-Five isn't my regular patch. I've only stepped in briefly. What is it that you want?'

  'Anything you - or anyone else - can tell me about why Cambrey was here.'

  The lift doors opened. Malverd didn't exit at once. He appeared to
be trying to decide whether he wanted to talk to St James or merely to dismiss him and get back to his own work.

  'This death has something to do with Islington? With an Islington product?'

  That certainly was a possibility, St James realized, although not in the manner that Malverd obviously thought. 'I'm not sure,' St James said. 'That's why I've come.'

  'Police?'

  He took out another card. 'Forensic science.'

  Malverd looked moderately interested at this piece of information. At least, his expression indicated, he was talking to a fellow. 'Let's see what we can do,' he said. 'It's just this way.'

  He led St James down a linoleum-tiled corridor, a far cry from the reception and administration offices below. Laboratories opened to either side, peopled by technicians who sat on tall stools at work areas that time, the movement of heavy equipment, and the exposure to chemicals had bleached from black-topped to grey.

  Malverd nodded at colleagues as they walked, but he said nothing. Once he removed a schedule from his pocket, studied it, glanced at his watch, and cursed. He picked up speed, dodged past a tea cart round which a group of technicians gathered for an afternoon break, and in a second corridor he opened a door. 'This is Twenty-Five,' he said.

  The room they entered was a large, rectangular laboratory, brightly illuminated by long ceiling tubes of fluorescent lights. At least six incubators sat at intervals on a worktop that ran along one wall. Interspersed among them, centrifuges squatted, some open, some closed, some humming at work. Dozens of pH meters lay among microscopes, and everywhere glass-fronted cabinets held chemicals, beakers, flasks, test tubes, pipettes. Among all these accoutrements of science, two technicians copied the orange digital numbers which flickered on one of the incubators. Another worked at a hood, from which a glass cover had been pulled down to protect cultures from contamination. Four others peered into microscopes while another prepared a set of specimens on slides.

  Several of them looked up as Malverd led St James towards a closed door at the far end of the lab, but none of them spoke. When Malverd rapped once sharply upon that door and entered without waiting for a reply, the few who had given him their attention lost interest.