The Arsenic Labyrinth Read online

  ‘The usual checks were made?’

  ‘Mountain rescue, helicopters, the lot. An elderly neighbour gave us a lead. Her kitchen looked out towards the fells and when she was taking her washing off the line one afternoon, she said she caught sight of Emma, making her way up a rough track that meanders towards the fells. When we couldn’t find any wet-weather clothes in the bungalow, we thought we were on to something. She might have got into difficulties and broken a leg or worse. But the witness was scatty and couldn’t put a date or time on the observation. Besides, Emma was more into yoga than yomping. Nobody knew what was in her wardrobe, so we couldn’t check what might be missing. The search of the fells came up with zilch. It’s hard enough seeking a needle in a haystack when you’re sure the needle is waiting to be found. The weather was against us too. Gales, thunderstorms, landslides, the whole apocalyptic bit.’

  Les sighed. ‘What about Emma’s dark secrets?’

  ‘Her cupboard seemed bare of skeletons.’

  ‘That’s suspicious, for a start. Everyone has dark secrets.’

  ‘Even you, Les?’

  He scowled. ‘Never you mind. How about yourself?’

  ‘If only. They might make me more fascinating.’

  ‘What’s up, Hannah?’ He bent towards her. ‘Feeling unloved?’

  His insight shocked her. Swallowing hard, she told herself to take care. This was the danger of working with good detectives. Time for a diversion.

  ‘Lauren bollocked me for not alerting the media about our continuing active interest in Emma’s case. To appease Di Venuto, of course.’

  He sniggered. ‘So she’s happy for you to reopen the inquiry?’

  ‘You know what she’s like. If something photographs well or merits briefing the media, she’ll throw resources at it like confetti.’

  He slid off her desk. ‘Best let you get on with it, then. Shout if you need me.’

  As the door closed behind him, Hannah groaned. She mustn’t let her problems with Marc spill over into her work. Things would sort themselves out. Into her head came the voice of a dead man, Ben Kind, when a row with an odious colleague the week after her promotion to DS drove her to the brink of tears.

  ‘Stop putting yourself down. All you need is more confidence in yourself. Trust me, I’m a policeman.’

  Remembering Ben led her to thinking about his son. What was Daniel Kind up to these days? The other night, with Marc out book-hunting and nothing worthwhile on the box, she’d searched against his name on the internet, but found no recent mention of him. Presumably he’d settled down with his pretty girlfriend to live the dream in Brackdale. Maybe one of these days they’d bump into each other again.

  She picked up Emma’s photograph again and forced her mind back to the unfinished business of the misper investigation. She still believed Emma to be dead, but yearned to be proved wrong. Maybe if they ever met, the two of them would find they had things in common. Things bubbling beneath the surface that nobody else suspected.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Families fascinated Hannah. She studied them as others might scrutinise exotic fish in an aquarium. Some glittered and charmed, others bared sharp teeth, all seemed mysterious to her. Supposedly, your sister should be your best friend, but she’d met dozens of sisters who hated the sight of each other. First time around, Hannah hadn’t met Karen Erskine. This time she intended to speak to her and her husband – but not yet. She wanted to feel her way back into Emma Bestwick’s life and it made sense to start with people she’d interviewed before.

  Last time, she’d spent hour after hour trawling through lists of Emma’s school contemporaries, teachers, people she’d worked with. Most of their recollections of her were fuzzy. She hadn’t made a lasting impression, nobody had bothered to keep in touch. Les was right. Ms Very Ordinary Indeed.

  Francis and Vanessa Goddard had given Emma a roof over her head before she came into money. In the early days of the inquiry, Hannah had wondered if Francis had developed an unhealthy interest in their paying guest. Ben Kind had trained her to suspect everyone, but there was no evidence to justify pointing a finger at Francis and in the end Hannah had concluded that what you saw with Francis was what he was. A man in love with his wife. As for Vanessa, she’d been married before. And Jeremy, her first husband, had left her to marry Emma’s sister. The Lake District, for all its millions of visitors from the four corners of the globe, remained at heart a gathering of tightly knit communities with everyone seemingly connected to everyone else.

  The Goddards hadn’t moved house in the past decade and Hannah phoned to make an appointment. With druggies, you never gave advance warning, because by the time you showed up they would have disappeared. But the Goddards were going nowhere and it made sense to observe the courtesies. Hannah needed witnesses on her side if this was to be any more than a wild goose chase.

  Vanessa Goddard snatched up the receiver on the second ring. She sounded relieved when Hannah announced herself. Not a universal reaction.

  ‘I thought it might be the school,’ she explained in the breathless voice that Hannah remembered. ‘Christopher, my boy, was under the weather this morning, a tummy bug. He attends the prep school at Grizedale College, you know. I wasn’t sure whether to send him, especially in such dreadful weather, but Francis keeps saying we can’t wrap him up in cotton wool. When the phone went, I thought it might be the nurse, to say I needed to bring him home and put him to bed.’

  Obviously I’ve never lived, Hannah thought, never having been a doting mother. Though if I hadn’t miscarried …

  She said quickly, ‘It’s ten years since Emma Bestwick disappeared. You may have seen the coverage in the local press.’

  A sigh. ‘Yes, it brought the memories flooding back. We’ve been expecting someone would get in touch.’

  ‘You won’t remember, but I was the officer who interviewed you and your husband.’

  ‘It’s not something you forget in a hurry. We’re just normal people, we don’t have much to do with the police. So they’ve made you a Chief Inspector? My goodness. I suppose I should feel honoured.’

  Hannah didn’t think Vanessa Goddard was taking the mickey. She remembered her as a friendly, talkative woman who lived on her nerves, but she’d have felt more flattered if Vanessa hadn’t sounded startled by her promotion.

  ‘These days I’m in charge of the county’s Cold Case Review Team.’

  ‘I read about it. Don’t you specialise in unsolved murders, DNA, that sort of thing?’ An intake of breath. ‘Has a body been found?’

  ‘No, no. We are taking another look at the case, that’s all. First things first. I presume you never heard anything from Emma after we last met?’

  ‘Not a word.’ The answer was so quiet that Hannah had to strain to hear.

  ‘I wonder if I could come over and speak to you and your husband about Emma.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We have to consider if anything was overlooked last time.’

  ‘Such as?’ Not frosty, just puzzled.

  ‘Anything that might lead us to Emma.’

  ‘But what good will it do?’

  Hannah stifled the urge to snap. ‘Don’t you want to find out what happened to her, Mrs Goddard?’

  ‘I’m not a detective,’ Vanessa said. ‘Do you recall, when we last met, I told you I believed she was still alive?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. Ten years is a long time. Too long for Emma to disappear without making contact with anyone she cared about. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that she won’t be coming back. She must be dead, nothing else makes sense.’ A pause. ‘To be honest, Chief Inspector, I’d rather not know the horrid details of whatever happened to her. I prefer to remember her as she was.’

  Hannah gritted her teeth. Perhaps you do. But that option isn’t open to me.

  * * *

  As Guy strode out of the pub, the sun sneaked out of hiding. He followed the steep and n
arrow road by the side of the building. Beyond the fell gate, the road became a rough cart track, running alongside the deep gill of Church Beck. Rain had swelled the stream and below the old stone miners’ bridge the crash of the waterfall was louder than he remembered. Light skipped on the cascade.

  The sun scurried back behind a dark cloud as he surveyed the broad plain. How bleak was his valley. Heaps of spoil from the quarries reared up beyond the trickling stream. On the right, a row of old labourers’ cottages; above them the red-grey Yewdale Fells. The whitewashed buildings, once occupied by officials of the mining companies, were now given up to a hostel and a centre for mountaineers. Ahead, the fells towered above patches of wilderness. Their names drifted back to mind. Raven Tor, on the left, and further on, splitting two troughs of land, Kernal Crag and Tongue Brow.

  Men had quarried here since Roman times and the fell-sides bore the wounds to prove it. Coppermines Valley fascinated him, every pockmarked inch. He imagined explosions echoing around the fells when gunpowder blasted a fresh tunnel or shot-hole. Megan had complained he was superficial, thinking of his taste for little luxuries, but she was mistaken, as usual. He liked to look beneath the surface of things, every now and then. He’d trade a dozen pretty Buttermeres, a score of jam-packed Amblesides, for the moody desolation of this acned valley.

  Even on a February afternoon, a few diehard walkers were out and about. Not wanting company, he zigzagged away from recognised pathways and through the bracken. His boots struck a fragment of rusty track on which mine wagons once trundled and he stopped to rub his aching calves. Christ, he was out of condition. Once he’d roamed the fells for hours without so much as tweaking a muscle. How many times had he scrambled over these ice-smoothed rocks and the scree, clambering along the hidden trails leading to the blackness of Levens Water?

  Blobs of rain spattered his jacket. He stumbled on the slippery ground and realised he was out of practice at drinking strong beer. His throat was sore, his head buzzing. It had drizzled that afternoon ten years ago. He could see the stone cairn where he had met Emma Bestwick for the one and only time.

  In his mind, he pictured her, a tall, solidly built woman encased in a wax jacket. Fine strands of hair escaped from her hood; in other circumstances he might have caressed them. The long pull up the old track had left her short of breath and she didn’t speak when he apologised for bringing her out on such a miserable day. Until he saw her approaching, he’d feared she wouldn’t come. She was taking a risk, meeting a man she didn’t know in such a quiet spot. Nobody else was in sight. Perhaps beneath the quiet exterior she had a wild and reckless streak. Of course she understood his insistence on secrecy. When he offered his hand, she didn’t respond, but her tense half-smile never flickered as he explained what he believed she ought, in all conscience, to do. For five minutes he convinced himself that he could persuade her to change her mind and make everything all right.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Her voice was as sharp as a shard of glass. He’d miscalculated, this woman was determined not to compromise. She was immune to reason, let alone charm. He’d taken such pains to be sympathetic. OK, there was something in it for him, but he wasn’t simply doing this for his own selfish ends. For once in his life he was playing the Good Samaritan and repaying past kindness. She ought to meet him half way, surely that wasn’t too much to ask?

  ‘But if …’

  ‘I promised to listen, it was the least I could do. But I’ve made my decision. There’s no going back.’

  ‘If you’ll only …’

  ‘No more, please. Arguing will only make matters worse.’

  ‘You gave your word!’

  She shrugged, so what?

  The sheer bloody unfairness of it made his temples throb. He hated being rebuffed, especially by a woman. Growing up without parents had made him want to be wanted, but despite his taking such trouble, she hadn’t moved an inch. Not a fucking inch.

  He seized her arm, but she was stronger than he’d expected and she shrugged free of him with as much scorn as if he were one of those beggars who used to hang around the Colosseum, pestering for cash.

  ‘How dare you touch me!’ She hissed with disdain.

  Even in the cold and wet, his skin burned with outrage. Who was she to treat him like a piece of shit? She ought to be glad to do as he asked. That was the deal with women. You acted kind and sensitive and they owed you something in return.

  He strove for calm, despite her provocation. ‘You made a promise. There’s no going back on it.’

  She stared at him, defiance mixing with a grimace of triumph.

  ‘I won’t be bullied. Can’t you understand? I changed my mind. It’s that simple, there’s no more to be said.’

  She turned to leave and he reached for her again. This time she was ready to dodge his grasp, but in twisting away she caught her toe on a stone and lost her footing. A moment later, she was lying on the floor and he was bending over her. It was akin to conquest. Adrenaline surged through him. She was at his mercy, he could do whatever he wanted.

  ‘Wait. I haven’t finished talking.’

  She didn’t utter another word as she lifted herself up. All she did was show her teeth in contempt, as if he were a flea-ridden mongrel. That said everything. To her, he wasn’t a smart, sophisticated intermediary, someone with whom she could do business. She could see right through him, see the man he was, deep inside.

  ‘Listen to me!’ he shouted.

  She spat in his face.

  He brought his hand down to slap her, but she dodged out of reach. In so doing, she slipped on the icy ground. As she tumbled, she hit her head on a small boulder. The cracking of her skull sounded like a rifle shot.

  Guy blinked the dampness away, told himself it was rain, not tears. For a decade, he’d blocked out every detail of his brief encounter with Emma Bestwick. But here there was no escaping her.

  He couldn’t see a living soul. Even in summer, when the hills were alive with the sound of walkers, few people bothered with this unlovely cleft in the landscape. Within a radius of two or three miles, there were so many more rewarding walks and climbs. No shimmering tarns and breath-snatching vistas at Mispickel Scar. Even in the height of summer, it was chill and eerie. After the miners left, nobody else had much reason to explore its nooks and crannies, seldom lit by sun filtering through the crags. Ten years ago, he’d loved coming here on his own, it was the one place where he wasn’t seized by the compulsion to become someone else. And then Emma Bestwick stole it from him, transformed it into forbidden territory, a place to which he dared not return. Until today.

  Picking his way with exaggerated care, he crossed a centuries-old packhorse way, chiselled by hand from solid rock. Breathing hard, limbs hurting. He felt like one of those lumbering beasts of burden, saddle-bags stuffed with ore, though he’d barely climbed a thousand feet. A gash in the rocks loomed up. A sign bore the word DANGER in tall red letters. He read the warning underneath.

  Proceed no further. This route is unsafe and fatal accidents have occurred.

  Fatal accidents? Too right.

  Impossible to stop now. How had he managed to drag Emma here? Fear and terror must have endowed him with strength.

  Something puzzled him. He halted in mid-stride, trying to fathom what was wrong. The profile of the landscape was not as he remembered. At first he thought he must be lost. Ten years was a long time, it was easy to become confused in the absence of landmarks. The stone cairn was far below and out of sight.

  Every inch of his last journey to Mispickel Scar was logged in his brain. From a distance, the crags and the ground below looked unchanging, eternal. But nature kept moving on. Nothing stayed the same forever.

  There had been a landslide. Part of the rockface had collapsed, burying a section of the old track. Mispickel Scar was notoriously unstable. From the archives of memory, he retrieved climbers’ talk of a terrifying landslip engulfing the site of the old works, half a century or more ago. History had
repeated itself.

  A pile of debris, crude and unstable, covered the ground in the depression between the sheer faces of the crags. As he clambered up and over the obstacle course, he peered round, trying in vain to spot a familiar pillar of stone, perched so precariously beside the pathway that nobody could ever be sure what kept it standing. Walkers knew it as the Sword of Damocles.

  Shit, where’s the Sword gone?

  The first time he’d reached this point and stepped past the Sword, he’d thought of the scene in Lost Horizon, when in the midst of the snowy wastes, the travellers suddenly pass into the green and pleasant land of Shangri-La. But Mispickel Scar wasn’t somewhere people lived forever. Quite the reverse. He hauled himself up on to the slippery stone connecting the rocks and gazed down towards the ancient workings.

  Jesus Christ.

  The sight snatched his breath away. At last he’d solved the puzzle that had tormented him ever since reading Tony Di Venuto’s article – why hadn’t she been found? Even in this God-forsaken spot, people would descend the most dangerous holes in the ground. After he’d done what he had to do, he’d lugged chunks of rubble to block the access to the shaft, but none would have deterred anyone intent on entering the old miners’ tunnels. He’d assumed it was inevitable that Emma’s body would turn up eventually, discovered by some adventurous explorer. Her death would be put down as an accident. Now the reason why her disappearance remained a mystery lay before his eyes.

  The Sword had collapsed into the midst of the stones scattered below, breaking into two and bringing with it a mass of smaller rocks. The opening of the shaft was no longer visible. There wasn’t a clue to suggest it had ever been there.

  He stood rooted to the spot, letting the wind graze his cheeks. His nose was running and he wiped it with his sleeve. If someone wanted to know why he’d come back here, he could offer no answer. So often he did things that seemed logical at the time, but impossible to rationalise later. Yet he was sure it was right to return. He needed to pay his respects.