Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

It was bound to end in tears. William was reckless and left a handful of letters from Betty imperfectly concealed at the bottom of his sock drawer, where Edith chanced upon them. The correspondence made it clear that Betty’s conscience tormented her and that she wanted to end the affair, but that William was determined to have her leave Armstrong and extract a hefty sum from him as the price of hushing up the scandal, so that the two of them could run away together. A ludicrous and desperate plan, but Edith knew her husband well enough to realise that he was capable of trying to carry it out, with disastrous consequences for them all. She’d grown accustomed to his infidelities, but this was one betrayal too many. The prospect of being abandoned to penury and forced through shame to leave a village she had come to love was intolerable. She had to act.

She schooled herself in the art of imitating Betty’s girlish handwriting and penned a note asking William to come to Mispickel Scar the following afternoon. The letters revealed that the loneliness of the site of the old arsenic works made it a favourite venue for the lovers’ couplings. The prospect of William meeting his death in the same spot appealed to Edith’s uncompromising sense of justice. She had discovered that Betty arranged for her notes to William to be left in his desk by a young messenger called Vinny who worked at the company’s office in Yewdale Road.

Vinny was a simple-minded lad from Liverpool, one of scores of kids who had come as evacuees to Coniston at the start of the Second World War. He’d been billeted at the hall and, after his parents were killed during the Blitz, he was left without a family and any reason to return home when the hostilities came to an end. Vinny had a dog-like devotion to Betty Clough, and she persuaded her husband to employ him out of charity. She was popular in the village for her generous spirit and good works, although Edith confided to her diary her suspicion that so far as Vinny was concerned, Betty had an ulterior motive. Yet Edith harboured no more than a superficial resentment of her husband’s lover. She understood how easy it was to succumb to William’s charm.

What Edith didn’t realise was that someone else knew about Betty’s affair. Young Alban Clough detested his father, who regarded him as a good-for-nothing dreamer with no head for business, but he didn’t care to think of his mother sleeping with an Inchmore. At his father’s insistence, Alban lent a hand in the office. He soon learned that Vinny was acting as go-between. He persuaded Vinny to let him read some of the letters Betty entrusted to him and seized every opportunity, while William was out gallivanting, to snoop round his room. That was how he’d found the letter Edith had placed in her husband’s desk. Much more familiar with his mother’s hand than William, he recognised it at once as a forgery. Curiosity piqued, he’d trekked up to Mispickel Scar and found a hiding place, overlooking the remains of the labyrinth, an hour before the time stipulated in Edith’s message. Waiting to watch what would happen.

Hannah was slipping on her raincoat when the phone summoned her back from the door. Tempted to ignore it, she hesitated and was lost. Fern Larter greeted her, in cheery mood. Her mouth was full, it sounded as if she was munching her way through a packet of her favourite prawn cocktail flavoured crisps.

‘Progress update. We’ve found a couple of teenagers who saw someone behaving suspiciously at Monk Coniston at about the right time. The kids were going for a romantic walk in the drizzle. Young love, eh? They heard someone in the vicinity of the pier and then caught sight of a figure hurrying off through the trees. Wearing a hooded anorak and Wellingtons.’

‘Do you have any more to go on?’

‘Are you kidding? Might have been a youngster, could have been a woman, but then again, it might have been a man. And blah, blah, blah. Of course they didn’t catch sight of anything useful like a face. I suppose we ought to be grateful to them. If they disturbed the killer, that’s why he or she made such a hash of dumping the body in the lake.’

‘And the house-to-house continues?’

‘Yeah, even with so little to go on, we may jog memories. There must be a chance someone else saw this character. The kids at Monk Coniston say there weren’t any vehicles in the car park, which argues that whoever they saw arrived on foot.’

‘Someone local, then?’

‘Yeah, narrows it down.’ Fern sighed. ‘So what’s this about Alban Clough being burned to a cinder? Not suicide, by any chance?’

‘Initial indications are, the fire started by accident. Chances are, we’ll never know exactly what happened, but the pathologist and the chief fire officer have come up with a working theory. They think Alban was lighting candles on the second floor landing when he lost his footing. He fell down the steps and fractured his ankle, while the candles fell on to a pile of cardboard boxes that were sitting on the wooden floor. So he couldn’t move when the place went up in flames. The hall was a tinder box, waiting for a spark.’

‘Bugger.’ Fern wasn’t one of life’s sentimentalists. ‘I was wondering if he’d been smitten by remorse.’

‘I don’t think Alban’s conscience ever troubled him.’

‘Tell you what, your life and mine would be easier if it turned out he murdered both Emma Bestwick and Guy Koenig.’

‘He doesn’t really match your description, such as it is.’

Fern grunted. ‘ID evidence is usually a load of bollocks, in my book.’

Hannah glanced at her watch. ‘Thanks for the update, but I’d better go. Late for a meeting.’

‘All right. Have fun.’

Kaffee Kirkus was crammed with Saturday morning shoppers sheltering from the drizzle, but Daniel found a table wedged next to the steamy front window. He wiped a patch of the glass so that he could look out for Hannah. Behind the counter, two skinny girls, one with dreadlocks and studs in her eyebrows, the other with a Mohican haircut, chatted loudly in between serving espressos and blueberry muffins. The world was getting smaller; he might as easily be sitting in Seattle as Stricklandgate. Even the slanting rain seemed much the same.

Edith Inchmore hated crowds and noise. She’d bared her soul in her journal, confided intimacies to the page that she could never have spoken. Daniel felt like her confidant, her confessor. He pictured her as tall, erect, disapproving, difficult to warm to, yet somehow admirable in refusing to be smothered by the shroud of guilt. She was forthright, old-fashioned, hostile to change. Coniston she loved, and she’d never tried to escape. Perhaps it was a way of expiating her sin, to live in sight of the fells that hid the body of the man she had killed.

He spotted Hannah in the throng on the pavement outside. She was looking out for him, her face set in its familiar searching mould. A fierce curiosity, an urge to keep asking questions, was something they shared. Perhaps it was how to avoid giving too much of themselves away. Moving into the warmth of the coffee bar, she wriggled through the scrum and waved when he caught her eye.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting. A colleague rang as I was on my way out.’

She was panting and he guessed she’d raced all the way from the police station. He queued to buy them each a latte and by the time he rejoined her, she’d recovered enough to muster a grin. Warming her hands on the chunky mug, she listened to what he’d discovered about Edith Inchmore’s crime. It felt good, having her attention focused on him.

‘So Alban let her kill his mother’s boyfriend before announcing his presence? He was lucky Edith didn’t knife him for good measure.’

He lifted the journal from the bag and put it on the table between them. ‘According to this, her first instinct was to kill herself as well. She had nothing left to live for. She’d sunk so deep into despair that she didn’t have any sort of plan about disposing of the body. If not for Alban, she would have marched down the fell and given herself up to the nearest policeman. But he wrested the knife from her and persuaded her that she could get away with murder. He had it all worked out. He’d shove the corpse and the knife down the mine shaft, and hope they would never be found.’