The Arsenic Labyrinth Read online

  Tonight Sarah was a different woman. Her hair was done in a shaggy perm – rather 1980s, but never mind – and the jewelled tunic and black fitted trousers made her figure look svelte. The eye shadow and blusher were laid on with a trowel, but gold peep-toe shoes with kitten heels gave her feet a dainty look. Her toenails were painted a delicate pink. Relief washed through Guy as she locked the front door of the Glimpse and took his arm. This meal was a worthwhile investment – you had to speculate to accumulate – but it was a welcome bonus that she looked good on his arm.

  The age difference didn’t bother him, he was ready for a mature woman after the let-down of Megan. Once he’d lavished compliments on her appearance, Sarah did most of the talking. She’d long fancied a makeover, she said, she was fed up of being a couch potato and feeling hot with embarrassment whenever she listened to style gurus on What Not to Wear. Next week she might sign up with an exercise class

  She’s excited, he thought, she knows what’s going to happen. The evening air was cold and crisp, the moon high. Words from a song bobbed in his memory. Tonight’s the night, everything’s gonna be all right. As he hummed the tune, he couldn’t help congratulating himself on his decision to return to Coniston. He’d laid Emma’s ghost and soon he’d lay Sarah. If he played his cards right, he could set himself up very nicely, thank you. How wise he had been not to take things in a rush. He’d hate Sarah to think that he was interested in nothing more than a quick bunk-up, or how much money he might sponge off her before it was time to move on. This was a two-way thing, he was putting the fun back into her life.

  The restaurant was owned by a chef with attitude and staffed by kohl-eyed blondes who shimmied between the tables as though on a catwalk. Guy commented on the finer points of the menu with just the right amount of savoir faire; his final touch was to order a bottle of Bolly. Sarah’s protest that champagne always went to her head he dismissed with a masterful smile.

  ‘The pleasure is mine,’ he said, as they clinked glasses and toasted friendship. ‘It’s so good of you to sacrifice your evening to keep a lonely businessman company.’

  ‘I’d only be watching EastEnders.’

  When he shook his head in amiable disbelief, she said, ‘Well, actually, some nights I spend quite a lot of time on the computer, rather than watching the telly.’

  ‘Doing your accounts?’

  ‘Not really.’ She sipped the champagne. ‘To be honest, I used to go in for internet dating.’

  ‘My goodness.’

  ‘Don’t look so startled. It was a complete wash-out. The lies that people tell, you wouldn’t credit it. Strapping six foot tall company directors turn out to be fat little bald blokes with bad breath.’

  He clicked his tongue at such flagrant deception. ‘You’ve given all that up?’

  ‘Mmmmm.’ She gulped down the rest of her drink, watched happily as he poured her some more. ‘My guilty secret these days is that I like a bit of a flutter.’

  ‘A bit of harmless fun.’

  She fingered the rim of her glass. ‘You know something, Rob? I’ve never seen the inside of a bookies’ or a casino in my life. But betting is different online. I mean, it’s so much less threatening. After all, nothing’s certain in life, is it? Life is one big gamble, really.’

  This struck him as rather profound, as well as a thought process to be encouraged. He steered the conversation adroitly to the world of business, and how much money might be made by combining investment know-how with access to ready cash. She explained that she’d never done anything more adventurous with her cash than open an account with the Halifax. His intake of breath made her turn pale.

  ‘Whatever you do with your money carries a degree of risk. Even stashing it under the floorboards isn’t as safe as you may think.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Forget the danger of burglars.’ He leaned across the table, wagging a finger to emphasise his warning. ‘What if inflation slashes the value of your nest egg? It’s like putting a match to a wad of twenty pound notes.’

  ‘I never thought of it like that. But you’re familiar with investments. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘It’s not that difficult. The secret’s in the timing. Trust me, I’m a financial adviser.’

  They were both still chuckling when the starters arrived. Tucking into his devilled oysters, he let the conversation slide to the topic of Sarah’s grievance about her divorce settlement. Her former husband’s lawyer had been smarter than hers and while Don’s earnings must be handsome these days, she was left to scrimp and save. Or rather, just scrimp. No problem, he decided as the pigeon marinated in liquorice was served. The Glimpse had potential for conversion into flats if she ever needed to downsize. She could fund a foray into the futures market by taking out a second mortgage.

  He settled back in his chair. Sarah’s round face looked pretty in the candlelight. He felt her knee touch his and returned the pressure. Everything was working out fine.

  Sarah had already made one notable investment. New black lingerie. Basque, suspenders, the full caboodle. Once Guy had stripped her of it, she wanted him to turn off the bedroom light, but he refused.

  ‘I like looking at you.’

  Her skin was white, her face pink with champagne and excitement. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Promise.’

  She started to say something self-deprecating about her bulging tummy and the sag of her breasts, but he put a hand over her mouth and whispered in her ear.

  ‘No more words, OK?’

  Happiness lit the pale blue eyes as her head moved in assent. He felt her lips moisten his palm as he surveyed her body with the care of a great artist examining a model. Of course she could not compare to Megan, let alone lithe Farfalla, but the soft undulations of her doughy flesh were not unappealing. He meant to give her a night to remember. Gently, he took hold of her wrists and brought them up over her head. She made an inarticulate sound as he manoeuvred her into position. It was a rattle of contentment, she was ready to submit to whatever he wanted.

  He smiled down at her. For a moment he was tempted to take advantage of her defencelessness and wrap his fingers around her white throat, just for the hell of it, just because he could. But he wouldn’t do it. Tonight she was the safest woman in the world. He wouldn’t betray her trust.

  He’d been lying in the coffin again and when he woke, it was pitch dark. Sarah’s plump buttocks were hot against his. He eased away from her and squinted at the digits on the clock radio.

  Christ, still only 3.25. A long time until sunrise. Even lying here next to his newly acquired lover, he felt so alone. This must be how Al Pacino felt in Insomnia. He’d often wondered about the life of a detective. Maybe he could try it out after he moved somewhere else. How about checking into a country retreat as an ex-cop, someone who’d left the force under a cloud after being framed by a ruthless enemy? On second thoughts, perhaps not. Better to spend a few weeks blending in with the scenery.

  His mouth was dry, his head throbbed and there was an uncomfortable nagging in his gut. Too late he’d remembered that although he liked champagne, it didn’t like him. The sex had been good, but the trouble with pleasure was that it was over in a trice. Only pain lingered.

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but he knew he would fail. Hard as he tried to shut them out, images from the past were crowding into his head. In his mind, he was back up on the Coniston Fells, standing over the prostrate form of Emma Bestwick.

  After hitting her, he only had one thought. How to dispose of Emma, so that she would not be found. It was one thing for her to go missing, quite another for the corpse to be discovered and a murder inquiry launched. In the hue and cry, his name would soon come up on the list of suspects. Emma had agreed to keep their meeting secret and he’d taken care to avoid being seen on his way to Mispickel Scar, but the police’s first step would be to check on local people with a criminal record. None of his convictions w
ere for violence, but that would cut no ice if he lacked an alibi for the time of death. He needed breathing space, time to plan his escape.

  Emma must disappear. The fells were pitted with mine-workings, but he needed to choose a place off the beaten track. Not easy, since pot-holers rushed down where wise walkers feared to tread. His options were limited, he didn’t have the strength to carry her far. His only hope was to hide her in one of the shafts close to the Arsenic Labyrinth.

  Even after ten years, the memory of that dreadful journey made him sweat like a pig. Tears had half-blinded him and he’d shivered with cold and fear as he lugged the dead weight of the woman along the rocky terrain. His heart was pounding, his muscles screamed, he wanted to fling himself down and weep and wail and beat his fists against the stony ground. He’d come here hoping to do good, but everything had gone wrong.

  God knew how he’d managed it, but at last he’d reached the old footings, all that remained of the old labyrinth. Not far away was a narrow slit in the ground, barely large enough for the body of a full-grown woman. A deep, dark hole – he’d once dropped a stone down it and never even heard it hit bottom.

  His knees were ready to buckle, but with a last effort he thrust Emma into the gap at his feet. He had to ease himself into the opening and use his boots to force the body past a rocky ledge that obstructed the shaft below ground level. He needed to make sure that she could not be seen from above. One more heave and the job would be done. He heard a crack, perhaps a bone in the leg breaking.

  Suddenly, a faint sound came from the depths beneath his feet.

  ‘Aaaaaaah.’

  Oh sweet Jesus.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed in Sarah Welsby’s darkened room, the same horror clutched his throat as ten years before, at the moment he thrust Emma Bestwick out of sight.

  She hadn’t died when she banged her skull on the ground. It was a terrible mistake. She was still alive as he pushed her down, down, down. Into the blackness of her underground tomb.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Blame it on the boll weevils,’ Giselle Feeney said. ‘There was a huge outbreak of them in the States. They decimated the cotton crops and all at once, arsenic was the most popular poison you could find. In the late nineteenth century, it became the key ingredient in lethal pesticides. Farmers couldn’t get enough of it to control the boll weevils. And that wasn’t all. William Morris used it to create new dyes and paints. The military used arsenic to make their bullets more brittle. Before penicillin, doctors prescribed arsenical compounds for the treatment of syphilis – yuck. As for arsenic’s aphrodisiac properties, you really don’t want to know. Or do you?’

  Hannah laughed and dodged the question. ‘Versatile stuff.’

  They were lounging on the L-shaped leather sofa in Giselle’s fourth floor apartment, high above the River Kent. Her living room was so high-tech, with its plasma screen home cinema and gleaming sound system, that it wasn’t easy to guess that she was a forensic archaeologist. At least until you spotted the framed photograph of Giselle in Wellington boots standing in the middle of a mediaeval burial chamber on a Scottish island.

  For a woman who liked to joke that her career lay in ruins, Giselle was doing fine. She might be wearing her boyfriend’s Newcastle United shirt and a pair of Primark loafers, but she could have afforded Calvin Klein. Big-boned, bouncy and ferociously bright, she’d given up university lecturing to set up her own consultancy. Her clients ranged from regeneration planners, required by law to survey ancient sites about to disappear forever beneath housing estates or retail parks, to police forces and the Ministry of Defence. She and Hannah had worked together once before, when fragments of a dead man kept turning up in different parts of the north of England. Giselle had reconstructed the body much as her colleagues might reassemble a clay pot. Her skill she ascribed to a youth spent putting together two-thousand-piece jigsaws. She was a nationally renowned authority on burial practices through the millennia and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much everything else, but Hannah liked the way she didn’t allow her academic expertise to blind her to the priorities of criminal investigation. She’d expected Giselle to know about arsenic labyrinths, and she wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Mine owners down in Devon and Cornwall couldn’t believe their luck. All of a sudden, a by-product they’d struggled to dispose of was in big demand. They heated up the arsenic to extract it from the ore and made a fortune in the process. A hundred feet in, the arsenic would have cooled and left dirty white crystalline deposits on the wall. Each month the works would be shut down and the door into the labyrinth opened. They’d send boys in to scrape the arsenic off the walls. As for health and safety, the kids shoved cotton wool up their nostrils and smeared clay over their skin.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘The good old days, huh? You can imagine a mine owner in Coniston might fancy breaking the monopoly of the Cornish businesses. Never mind the plumes of sulphur spewing out of the chimney, or the occasional death by poisoning. Occupational hazards. But the arsenic wasn’t plentiful enough. The venture failed and brought down the copper-mining business with it. After that, everyone gave the place a wide berth.’

  ‘Excellent place to hide a body.’

  ‘Do you really expect to find this woman at Mispickel?’

  Hannah shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. So you’re on board?’

  ‘Listen, arsenic may have gone out of fashion with murderers who want to get away with it. Too easy to detect with Marsh’s test. But it’s lethal stuff. One level teaspoon will kill four people. Six, if the arsenic’s refined. Taxidermists used to love arsenic, because it kills off the bacteria that hasten decomposition. But I’ve heard of museums that have to keep preserved rhinos stored under lock and key, because the toxicity of the arsenic makes them too dangerous to display in public. Dumping a body underneath the Arsenic Labyrinth strikes me as a pretty good idea. Creepy, too. Am I on board? Try and keep me away.’

  Jeremy Erskine frowned at Hannah, as though she were a dense pupil who had handed in the wrong homework. His voice was loud and musical and she was sure he loved the sound of it.

  ‘Candidly, Chief Inspector, this is shoddy journalism. The reporter simply wants to make a name for himself. There was no good reason to write about my sister-in-law’s disappearance, he didn’t have a shred of fresh evidence. All he’s done is tear open old wounds. It took years for my wife to come to terms with what happened, and now thanks to this ghastly publicity, she’s back to square one.’

  They were in the conservatory at the back of the Erskines’ immaculate home. From their armchairs, Hannah and Maggie Eyre could see a neatly kept winter garden bounded by a ring of oaks and sycamores. A ladder led up to a wooden tree house and the misty tops of the Langdale Pikes loomed in the distance. Outside it was freezing, but the conservatory was so snug it might have been midsummer. On the other side of the sliding doors to the main house, a boy and a girl in matching tee shirts and Nike trainers sprawled on the Axminster carpet and watched TV.

  Jeremy was sitting with his wife on a wicker sofa. They were a good-looking couple, tanned and trim after a New Year spent sand-skiing in the dunes of Dubai. Jeremy was in his early forties, tall with a long jaw and flecks of grey around the temples, Karen a cool blonde in a pink short-sleeved shirt and black leather trousers. The bronzed skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones; unlike her sister, she didn’t carry a surplus ounce. Jeremy took hold of his wife’s hand, as if to comfort her in a moment of distress, but Hannah guessed it would take more than a newspaper article to rattle Karen Erskine.

  ‘You gave Tony Di Venuto short shrift when he spoke to you about Emma.’

  ‘You’d do the same in my shoes. He was appallingly persistent, wanted to come here to interview us, if you please. I said it was out of the question. A disgraceful intrusion. Frankly, I was on the point of making a formal protest to his editor. I thought there were laws to protect us from that sort of behaviour these da
ys. Don’t hardworking middle class people have a right to privacy?’

  Hannah stared at Karen. ‘Aren’t you curious about what happened to your sister?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But this publicity isn’t about discovering the truth.’

  ‘If the anonymous caller is telling the truth, then …’

  ‘What evidence do you have that he isn’t a figment of a fevered imagination?’ Jeremy interrupted. ‘My understanding was that a court of law requires proof.’

  ‘We’re not in a court of law.’ Hannah fought the instinct to snap that he wasn’t teaching Year 8 kids either. ‘Mr Di Venuto has no reason to lie to us. Wasting police time is a serious offence, as he and his editor are well aware.’

  ‘He’s out to cause trouble and sell newspapers. Quite irresponsible.’

  ‘It would be irresponsible for us to ignore what he has told us.’

  ‘Is this what we pay our taxes for?’

  ‘We’ll survey the site before deciding what action to take. Of course, we’ll keep you both informed. DC Eyre will act as liaison officer.’

  Maggie gave a brisk nod. The Eyres were a farming family and Hannah knew few people as down to earth as her DC. Jeremy’s pomposity was perfectly calculated to get up Maggie’s nose, but her equable expression yielded no hint of distaste. Learning to hide your true feelings when interviewing witnesses was a step on the road to becoming a good police officer.

  Jeremy turned to his wife. ‘Sorry, darling. Seems as though we have no say in the matter. All we can do is let events take their course.’

  Karen’s sharp chin jutted forward. ‘This isn’t ever going to end, is it, Chief Inspector? If you don’t find a body, we’ll be at the mercy of anyone who wants to speculate about Emma and make a few quid on the side. And if by some miracle you do, that will just be the start. There’ll need to be an inquest, a funeral, you’ll be looking for this man who made the phone call. The media will turn it into a circus. It will be impossible for us to grieve in private.’