Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

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 were 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.

‘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.’