Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

‘Oh yeah?’

‘He isn’t convinced it is an ancient legend. He thinks Alban Clough may have invented it himself.’

‘Invented it?’ Les sat up straight, like a puppet whose string she’d jerked. ‘How?’

‘It helps if you own a museum and people believe you’re the fount of all wisdom on local mythology. How difficult can it be? Legends are mostly vague, no one can date them precisely. Even if you know when the first published account appeared, the story may have been around for generations. But Daniel hasn’t managed to find a single mention of this supposed curse before the 1950s.’

‘Not looking hard enough?’ A mischievous smirk. ‘C’mon. He’s a historian. A professor or summat. Sort of bloke who likes everything cut and dried.’

‘Even so. When I first met Alban Clough, he waxed lyrical about the eternal nature of legends. I’m beginning to think he was taking the piss.’

‘What would he have to gain?’

‘Good question. I want you to find out the answer.’

Les puffed out his cheeks. ‘You’ve got a lot of faith in this Daniel Kind.’

‘Not relevant.’ As soon as she’d snapped the words, she regretted them. No need to be defensive, no need at all. ‘I mean, we have a problem here. We may have identified one of our corpses, but nobody has a clue about the other. All we know is that someone bunged an unknown man down the shaft at least fifty years ago. Alban Clough has spent all his life in that neighbourhood. He knows the fells and he knows their legends. Suppose …’

Mission Impossible interrupted her. She snatched up her mobile. ‘What is it?’

‘Hannah?’ Lauren Self, not accustomed to being greeted so abruptly. ‘Do you know your phone’s on divert? You need to get back to Coniston right away. There’s been a development.’

‘ID on our male victim?’

‘No, it’s getting worse, not better. We have another body.’

Back in Coniston, Hannah headed straight for the incident room. The suspected contemporary murder of an unknown male was a separate inquiry from her investigation into the long ago deaths of the people retrieved from the underworld of Mispickel Scar. Different team, different SIO. But Lauren had instructed them to liaise closely, and the sooner the better, to see if connections could be made between the two cases.

The ACC had appointed DCI Fern Larter to head the latest inquiry. Large and jolly with dyed red hair, Fern had a fondness for unsuitably short skirts and a flair for giving good quote. The Press adored her. After the fiasco of the Rao trial, she’d taken Hannah out for a fish and chip supper and helped repair her shattered self-confidence over a couple of bottles of Mateus Rose. Fern didn’t do sophistication; it was one of the things Hannah liked about her.

‘Help yourself,’ Fern said, waving to a packet of chocolate chip cookies on the table.

‘Better not.’

‘Go on, be a devil.’ Fern started chomping. ‘They aren’t fattening, promise.’

‘Get thee behind me, Satan. So what have you got so far?’

Fern pointed a stubby forefinger at a whiteboard in the corner of the room. Names of people and places were scrawled over it in marker pen of bilious green hue and half a dozen post-it notes had been stuck around the edges. Her team had been busy, knowing that the first 24 hours of a murder inquiry are the most crucial.

‘The body was found at seven o’clock this morning. A couple of elderly tourists whose idea of getting up an appetite for breakfast is an early morning walk in the cold and drizzle. Weird, or what?’ Fern laughed noisily and treated herself to another cookie. ‘Anyway, they were walking along the shore from the pier at Monk Coniston when they spotted a bag of rags just under the surface in shallow water. Only it wasn’t a bag of rags, but a dead man.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘He was clubbed on the head. Chances are, the weapon was a torch. We’ve found one that someone chucked into the lake near the pier. They didn’t hurl it far enough and it drifted back to shore. We need to match up the bloodstains and matted hair on the torch with the victim, but it’s a formality. Looks like the killer panicked and tried to weight the body down with a couple of house bricks, but didn’t tie them securely. A twenty pound boulder would have done the trick, but we’re not talking a professional hitman here. It’s possible someone disturbed the murderer and that’s why the job was left half done. Lucky for us. At least one murder victim spent twenty years on the bed of the same lake before divers dredged her up.’

Another thing about Fern, she was a mine of information, a unanimous choice to captain the division’s pub quiz team.

‘When was he killed?’

‘Still waiting on Jepson, but the signs are, within the past 48 hours. You know how it works when someone is dumped into the water? The lungs fill up and the body loses its buoyancy. As it decomposes, gases start to inflate the corpse again and it comes back up. Timing depends on water temperature and stuff like that. The warmer the water, the sooner the body will rise.’

Hannah reached into her memories of a long-ago seminar on forensics. ‘Didn’t someone once tell me Coniston Water is bitterly cold?’

‘Dead right, if the murderer had bothered to row the body out in a boat and bung it overboard a hundred metres from the shore, it would have taken much longer for it to be found. By the time we’d dug the victim out of the silt, he’d have been unrecognisable. As it is, we have a clear idea of what he looked like before the side of his head was bashed in.’ Fern grinned. ‘Quite tasty, provided you use a bit of imagination.’

‘Have you managed to ID him?’

‘We have a promising lead. A woman called Welsby who runs a B amp;B on Campbell Road called in here yesterday to report her boyfriend missing. She’d only known him for about a week. He arrived on her doorstep as a paying guest and wormed his way into her bed in next to no time. Two nights ago, he said he was going away on business, but he went out around seven and didn’t come back to collect his bag. Causing poor Sarah Welsby to sob her heart out to the PC on the desk yesterday morning. At first he reckoned she was a neurotic time waster, but the moment he heard about the man in the lake, he had second thoughts.’

‘Sounds like the chap used Sarah as a meal ticket, then got bored and did a runner.’

‘We’ve found a taxi driver who was supposed to pick him up from the village at nine that evening — but he never showed. Which is where the plot thickens. You don’t mind if I have another biscuit? I missed out on lunch and I’m starving.’

‘I’ll join you, make you feel better.’

Mouth full, Fern made an appreciative noise. ‘This chap was known to Sarah Welsby as Robert L. Stevenson. The taxi was hired by someone called Pirrip. His destination was a posh hotel in Ullswater. He was booked into a de luxe suite for one night only. Not quite what he’d suggested to Sarah. And when we went through his bag, we found an old cheque book in the name of Guy Koenig.’

‘A con man with a love of Victorian literature, huh?’

‘Yeah, he’ll have nicked the name Pirrip out of Great Expectations . Not often you come across a corpse with a highly developed sense of irony. He didn’t expect to finish up bobbing under Coniston Water, that’s for sure. We’ve done a check and hey presto! Guy Koenig is known to us. Plenty of previous, but nothing recent. A string of convictions on charges of deception. He served sentences in Preston and Haverigg. And this will make you prick up your ears.’

Hannah finished her biscuit. ‘Keep talking, the suspense is unbearable.’

Fern beamed, showing a lot of closely packed white teeth. ‘Guy Koenig came out of prison for the last time just over ten years ago. A few weeks before your Emma Bestwick disappeared.’