A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,65

trying to find the lad's notes."

"You've come up with nothing?" St. James asked.

"There's little enough to go on. Just trying to remember what he said and what he did. It's not a Nanrunnel story. It can't be. But that's the limit of what I know."

"You're sure of that?"

"It doesn't fit with how he's been these last months, that he'd be working on a Nanrunnel story. He was off here and there all the time, tracking down a lead, doing research, interviewing this person, locating that one. It wasn't a village story. Couldn't havej>een."

He shook his head. "It would have beefr4he^Haking of this paper once we got it in print.

I know it."

"Where did he go?"

"London."

"But with no notes left behind? Isn't that curious?"

"There're notes all right. Here. What you see." Cambrey flung his arm out to encompass the office's disarray. "But nothing I figure would cause the lad's death. Reporters don't lose their lives over interviews with army men, with the local MP, with bedridden invalids, with dairy farmers in the north. Journalists die because they have information worth dying over. Mick's not got that here."

"Nothing unusual among all this material?"

Cambrey dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out. He massaged the muscles of his left arm, and as he did so, his eyes slid towards one of the desks. St. James read his answer in the latter action.

"You've found something.''

"I don't know. You may as well have a look. I can make nothing from it." Cambrey went to the desk. From beneath the telephone, he took a piece of paper which he handed to St.

James. "Tucked to the back of the drawer," he said.

The paper was grease splodged, originally a wrapper for a sandwich from the Talisman Cafe. The writing was faint.

The dull light in the room and the points at which the pen had skipped through grease made it difficult to read, but St. James could see that it consisted mostly of numbers.

-M1 Procure/Transport

-M6 Finance

St. James looked up. "Is this Mick's writing?"

Cambrey nodded. "If there's a story anywhere, that's it. But I don't know what it's about nor what that lot means."

"But there must be notes somewhere that use the same numbers and references," Lady Helen said. "Ml and M6. Surely he means the motorways."

"If there're notes here using the same set of numbers, I've not found them," Cambrey said.

"So they're missing."

"Pinched?" Cambrey lit another cigarette, inhaled, coughed. "I heard the cottage'd been searched."

"Has there been any indication of a break-in here?" St.James asked.

Cambrey looked from them to the room itself. He shook his head. "Boscowan sent a man to tell me about Mick round :15 this morning. I went to the cottage, but they'd already taken the body away and they wouldn't let me in. So I came here. I've been here ever since. There'd been no break-in."

"No sign of a search? Perhaps by one of the other em- I ployees?"

"Nothing," he said. His nostils pinched. "I want to find the bastard that did this to Mickey. And I won't stop the story. Nothing'11 stop it. We have a free press. My boy lived for that, died for that as well. But it won't be in vain."

"If he died for a story in the first place," St. James said quietly.

Cambrey's face grew dark. "What else is there?"

"Mick's women."

Cambrey removed the cigarette from his mouth in a movement that was slow, studied, like an actor's. His head gave a tiny nod of approbation. "They're talking like that about Mickey, are they? Well now, why should I doubt it? Men were jealous of his easy way and women were the same if he didn't choose them." The cigarette went back to his mouth.

It created a haze through which Cambrey squinted. "He was a man, was Mick. A real man. And a man has his needs. That tight wife of his had ice between her legs. What she denied him, he found somewhere else. If there's fault, it's Nancy's. Turn away from a man and he'll seek another woman. There's no crime in that. He was young. He had needs."

"Was there anyone special he saw? More than one woman? Had he taken up with anyone new?"

"Couldn't say. It wasn't Mickey's way to boast about it when he did a new woman."

"Did married women slrep-wlth him?" Lady Helen asked.

"Women from the village?"

"Lots of women slept with him." Cambrey pushed aside papers on the desk top, lifted the glass that covered it, and removed a photograph which he passed to her.