A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,163

damn, he was my son. He was a man."

"Whose main source of arousal was dressing like a woman."

"I never could break him. I did try."

"So this wasn't something recent?"

Shoving the keys into his pocket, Cambrey shook his head.

"He'd been doing it all his life, off and on. I'd catch him at it. Whip his arse. Push him buck naked into the street. Tie him to a chair and paint his face and make like I'd plan to cut off his cock. But nothing made a difference."

"Save his death," Lynley said.

Cambrey didn't seem to care about the implication behind Lynley's words. He merely said, "I protected the lad as best I could. I didn't kill him."

"The protection worked," St. James said. "People saw him as you wished him to be seen.

But in the end, he didn't need your protection because of the cross-dressing, but because of a story, just as you thought."

"It was the guns, wasn't it?" Cambrey asked. "Like I said."

St. James looked at Lynley as if wanting direction or perhaps permission to add to the man's mourning. An explanation of the "notes" Cambrey had found in Mick's desk would do it. Through their real meaning, nearly everything could be revealed. Not only cross-dressing, but dealing drugs as well.

Not only spending money frivolously instead of using it to upgrade the newspaper, but filtering much of it off in order to support a double life.

Every delusion, Lynley thought, deserved destruction.

Building anything on the foundation of a lie - be it a single relationship or an entire way of life - was to rely upon sand to remain unshifting. While the illusion of solidity might exist for a while, whatever was built would ultimately crumble.

The only question seemed to be at what point Harry Cam brey's inaccurate vision of his son ought to be laid to rest.

Lynley looked at the old man, studying the face that was creased with age and failure, jaundiced by ill health. He saw the stark bones of his chest pressing against his shirt, the ugly nicotine stains on his fingers, the arthritic curl of those fingers as he reached for a bottle of beer on a desk. Let someone else do the telling, he decided.

"We know he was working on a story about a drug called oncozyme," Lynley said.

St. James followed his lead. "He was spending time in London visiting a company called Islington and a biochemist there called Justin Brooke. Did Mick ever speak of Brooke?

Of Islington?"

Cambrey shook his head. "A drug, you say?" He still seemed to be adjusting to the fact that his previous idea about gunrunning had led nowhere.

"We need access to his files - here and in the cottage - if we're to prove anything," St.

James said. "The man who killed Mick is dead himself. Only Mick's notes can give us his motive and some sort of foundation to build a case against him."

"And if the killer found the notes and destroyed them? If they were in the cottage and he pinched them that night?"

"Too many other things have occurred that needn't have happened had the killer found the notes." Lynley thought about St. James' explanation once more: how Brooke tried to eliminate Peter because of something Peter must have seen or heard that evening in Gull Cottage; how he'd taken Deborah's cameras to get at the film. This second circumstance alone spoke more loudly than anything else in support of the existence of a piece of hard evidence. It had to be somewhere, however disguised. Brooke had known that.

Cambrev sooke. "He keot files in those cahinets" nodded in their direction - "and more at the cottage. The po lice're done with it and I've the key when you're ready to go there.

Let's get to work."

There were three cabinets of four drawers apiece. While the business of putting out a newspaper went on round them, Lynley, St. James, Deborah, and Cambrey began going through .the drawers one by one. Look for anything, St. James told them, that bore any resemblance to a report on oncozyme.

The name of the drug itself, a mention of cancer, a study of treatments, interviews with doctors, researchers, or patients.

The search began through folders, notebooks, and simple scraps of paper. They saw immediately that it would be no easy task. There was no logical manner in which Mick Cambrey had done his filing. It bore signs of neither organisation nor unity. It would take hours, perhaps days, to go through it all, for each piece had to be