Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

‘Erskine,’ she said quickly. ‘As a matter of fact, I used to know Jeremy rather well. Though not as well as I thought I did. He was my first husband.’

Daniel felt his cheeks burning. Hannah had forgotten to mention this. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘No problem, it was a long time ago. Jeremy went his way, I went mine. It wasn’t easy for a while, but in the end things worked out wonderfully well for me.’ She gestured towards the photographs. ‘It’s a long time since I last saw him. Time to bury the hatchet — and I don’t mean between his shoulder blades. Will you pass on my regards?’

He nodded. ‘Jeremy isn’t an expert in Ruskin by any chance?’

Vanessa fiddled with the publishers’ catalogues on her desk. ‘Not to my knowledge, but that shouldn’t stop him sharing his opinions with you. Jeremy believes he’s an expert in everything.’

* * *

‘So we have two bodies in the shafts below the labyrinth and both of them were buried there at different times — decades apart?’ Hannah said.

Grenville Jepson fiddled with his bright yellow bow-tie, a habit that irritated Hannah like a flea bite. The bow-tie was a fashion crime; she couldn’t believe that anyone would wish to draw attention to the thing.

‘No doubt about it, Detective Chief Inspector. No doubt about it whatsoever.’

He was a tiny man with a voice oddly high-pitched, verging on a squeak. This too got on her nerves. But Grenville was as capable as any forensic pathologist she’d ever met. He was never afraid to express a definite opinion, yet he didn’t shoot from the hip. Once he formed a conclusion, it took cross-examination worthy of Marshall Hall to shake it.

Les Bryant slurped loudly from a cup of water. ‘Could either of them have finished up there by accident? I mean, people are so bloody careless, aren’t they? If you’re wandering around an area riddled with mineshafts and you don’t look where you’re going, next thing you know, you’re arse over tip and …’

He made a throat-slitting gesture. Grenville turned his pointed nose up in distaste. The pathologist spent his working life in the company of the dead and decaying, but he prided himself on his refinement. He’d been known to hum Vivaldi while conducting a post-mortem.

‘With regard to the older corpse, I would say it is out of the question. As to the younger body, it seems highly improbable. The likelihood is that she was forced down the shaft, when either dead or unconscious, breaking an arm and a leg on her way to her resting place.’

‘And no doubt that the more recent deceased was Emma Bestwick?’ Hannah asked.

Grenville sat back in his chair, swinging his little legs back and forth. He took a packet of Polo mints out of his pocket and popped one in his mouth, as if to aid deliberation. It didn’t occur to him to offer them round.

‘Of course, we need to do further work on identification for the coroner’s benefit. There are no signs of surgical procedures, so we will have to fall back on dental records or DNA evidence. There is a sister, you said? Have the liaison officer take a swab from her. But off the record, this is not so much a working hypothesis, more a racing certainty. Everything fits. The clothing, the size of the bones.’

Hannah picked up a red marker pen and scribbled a couple of notes on the whiteboard. ‘How much older is the other corpse?’

‘If I were a betting man, I’d say by half a century, give or take. The contrast is stark. Virtually no clothing left, just a few skeletal remains and a tiny amount of skin around the finger ends. We have odds and ends yielding a few scraps of DNA, so identification may be possible one of these fine days. Already I can say with some confidence that the bones belong to a male rather than a female. The murder weapon is sure to be the knife found lying a couple of yards away from the corpse.’

‘Two murders fifty years apart, with both victims stuffed down neighbouring mineshafts?’ Maggie Eyre asked. ‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’

‘Frankly, I don’t agree. To my mind, it’s not at all surprising.’ Grenville crunched his mint noisily, disappointed by the DC’s naivete. ‘As you know, most murderers are lamentably lacking in originality and imagination. If one killer stumbles across an ideal location for the disposal of a body, hidden away in a remote corner of the fells, it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that years later, a second murderer might come up with the same bright idea.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Forgive me, DC Eyre, but this is more than mere supposition. Sixty years ago, the fells were lonely. Not like today, when they seem as crowded as Blackpool beach. One may speculate that the knife was taken to the scene with the express intention of killing the first victim. Regrettably, one presumes that even if we can pick up any identifying material from the knife or the soil surrounding the site where the body was dumped, the culprit is now safely interred in his grave as well.’

‘We ought to be glad,’ Hannah said. ‘Two crimes to clear up rather than one is a pain in the backside, but at least we don’t have to worry that we might have a serial killer prowling the Coniston fells.’

‘Unless …’ Grenville’s hand strayed to his bow-tie again, setting Hannah’s teeth on edge. ‘There is always the distant possibility that the first crime was committed by someone in his teens. He might have kept his secret safe for a long time. But what if your Ms Bestwick stumbled across it? There would be a temptation to repeat the success of the earlier crime. But this would require a suspect with the ability and the will to commit murder in, say, his sixties. Unlikely in the extreme, one hopes.’

‘Unlikely, yes.’ Hannah considered. ‘But not impossible.’

‘In my younger days, I read a little Ruskin.’ Alban Clough waved towards the calfskin-bound tomes surrounding them; a regal gesture, suggestive of a monarch acknowledging his subjects. ‘I suspect I am the only Clough who so much as glanced beyond the titles of works such as Fors Clavigera , let alone ploughed through the damn things. Nowadays, I lack the patience. You will only catch me returning to Ruskin if in search of a cure for insomnia.’

He and Daniel were in his private library at Inchmore Hall, ensconced in hard leather armchairs opposite a mahogany desk and chair. Glass cases, crammed with enough first editions to make Marc Amos’s tongue hang out, lined all four walls, leaving precious little space for the door and a small mullioned window looking out on to the frosty fells.

‘Even though Ruskin shared your love of myth?’

‘The dark sayings of nature , as he called them. But his tastes were classical compared with mine. My own love of ancient lore derives from nothing more sophisticated than a schoolboy’s wide-eyed fascination. I confess to a continuing frisson at the mere mention of Sunkenkirk Circle or the Fiend’s Fell.’

Daniel stretched in his chair and looked around. ‘This is an amazing place.’

Despite the stale air, for all the dust and the cobwebs, the idiosyncracies of Inchmore Hall had caught his fancy. To step over the threshold was like entering a time warp. A world of drowned churches and haunted mines, of sea ghosts and giants’ graves. Easy to forget that within walking distance was a modern murder scene, marked off with tape and crowded with men and women in white overalls, intent on discovering the names of the dead and how and why they had been killed.

‘Thank you, Mr Kind. In the company of an academic historian such as yourself — even a telly academic, if you will forgive me — I claim to be no more than a humble dabbler. A dilettante.’