Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

‘And Edith went along with it?’

‘What choice did she have? She protested that Betty would raise the hue and cry, but Alban knew his mother better. Betty might have had an affair with one of her husband’s employees, but she’d never intended to run off with him and desert the family. She’d behaved badly, but she was intelligent. She knew William was a rascal, and that he enjoyed the idea of cuckolding the man whose family had usurped his own.’

Hannah leafed through Edith’s journal. Daniel had bookmarked several of the most revealing passages and he watched as she read a few sentences. Her concentration was intense. He found himself wanting to reach across the table and stroke her hair. Sucking in air, he forced himself to think about the crime that had brought them here.

‘Why did she write all this down, do you think?’

‘She reckoned it helped her make sense of everything that had happened in her life. She kept contemporaneous diaries, but they are full of trivia. It was only in the last months before she died that she felt able to write down what drove her to kill her husband, and what happened afterwards.’

‘Did Alban tell Betty about the murder?’

‘Edith never knew exactly what passed between mother and son. Alban told her to leave everything to him and she had to agree. He was offering her hope, and once she’d calmed down, she decided she didn’t want to hang. My guess is that Alban didn’t tell Betty the truth in so many words. How much she figured out for herself, who knows? We’re talking about the years just after the Second World War, don’t forget. Stiff upper lips were still in fashion. Respectable families often left a great deal unsaid. They preferred to keep skeletons safely locked up in their cupboards.’

Hannah drained her mug. ‘Alban would never have employed Tom Inchmore if Betty hadn’t insisted. You suppose, after all those years, she still felt guilty about her affair with William?’

‘You bet. The murder knotted Betty, Edith and Alban together for the rest of their lives. Alban knew what villagers are like. If word got out she’d been having it off with her husband’s sidekick in a remote corner of the fells, she’d be regarded as a shameless hussy to her dying day. To protect his mother’s good name, he had to protect Edith as well. Easy enough to take some money and make it look like William had been on the fiddle and done a runner to avoid being caught. Armstrong went apeshit, but Betty persuaded him not to involve the police, so the make-believe theft was never subjected to proper scrutiny.’

‘And the supposed curse of Mispickel Scar?’

‘Alban invented it to discourage people from venturing to the scene of the crime. Must have amused him to concoct a legend of his very own. He was helped by a rock fall that made it unlikely the corpse would ever be discovered. Edith refers to it in her journal as an act of God. Talk about moving in mysterious ways. Alban didn’t bargain for the possibility that, decades later, someone else might commit murder within a few yards of where Edith stabbed William.’

‘And last night Alban died.’

‘Coincidence?’

She told him what she’d told Fern. ‘There’s nothing so far to suggest suicide.’

‘Maybe he was distracted by worry that his secret was out. He’d devoted his life to the museum. If he was afraid that wagging tongues and financial pressures would force him to shut the doors of the hall, he’d have lost his reason for living.’

‘How could he know you’d stumbled across the truth?’

‘Stumbled?’ He switched on an ironic grin. ‘I was expecting you to congratulate me on great detective work.’

She laughed; a musical sound. ‘Stumbled is right, I think. Mind you, your Dad once told me all the best detectives are lucky. Now, tell me how Alban found out.’

He described meeting Geraldine at Sylvia’s bungalow. ‘Geraldine was devoted to the Cloughs and kept in touch with Alban after his mum died. When Sylvia asked her to gather up the auction lots for me to take away, she must have spotted Edith Inchmore’s private papers. She wouldn’t have had time to read them but my guess is,

she spoke to Alban on the phone and mentioned that I’d taken them away.’

‘He couldn’t know that Edith had written about the murder.’

‘No, but he’d known her all his life. He must have feared that she might have written about her crime as a sort of catharsis. What he didn’t know was that Edith had another guilty secret. Something she kept hidden even from him.’

Hannah frowned at the cramped handwriting. ‘What could make her guiltier than murdering her own husband?’

‘Blaming herself for the death of her grandson.’

She stared at him. ‘Tom Inchmore fell off a ladder.’

‘After he’d been peeping through his grandmother’s bedroom window. He was a hopeless lad, pathetic, you told me so yourself. He wanted to see the old lady disrobing for her bath. Edith heard a noise and looked round. When she saw his face pressed against the window, she rushed towards him in a state of rage and horror. He lost his balance and broke his neck on the paving stones below.’

Men never paid much attention to me. I felt awkward in their company, though I flatter myself that in my youth the fullness of my figure attracted an occasional covetous glance. When William, handsome, dashing William, poured flattery on me like honey, I was in Heaven. I let him have his will, I abandoned all my natural restraint. The slow realisation that it was my father’s money, rather than my soft flesh and my caresses, stirring the fire in his loins spread bitterness through me like a cancer. After his death, I renounced intimacy with the opposite sex and kept myself to myself, accepting near-solitude as the price for having evaded the gallows.

I have forgotten what it is to have men casting me a sideways look, as they wonder about the body concealed beneath layers of clothing. They prefer not to think about my flesh. Candidly, neither do I.

That is why it came as a shock to be spied upon for a second time.

A hot July afternoon. I do not care for heatwaves, they make me sweat and struggle for breath. I prefer to go upstairs and lie down. On this occasion, with forecasters talking of temperatures in the nineties, I take a bath to cool down and on returning to my bedroom, consider my wardrobe, searching for clothing that is light and airy.

Suddenly, in the dressing table mirror, I glimpse a reflection. A face, staring in through the window. A face — another! — that once I had loved. But all too easily in my case, it seems that love can turn to scorn.

On this occasion I am not naked, I have the benefit of a fluffy white towel. But I shriek with anger and charge across the room like an old, enraged sow. I need to close the window I had opened to admit a breath of air and draw the curtains to preserve my modesty.

My wrath frightens him. I see terror whiten his stupid face as he jumps away from me. But when you are standing on top of a tall and unsteady ladder, there is nowhere safe for you to jump to.

At the door of Kaffee Kirkus, Hannah shook Daniel’s hand with careful formality. She’d written out a receipt for the journal, which she’d promised to return to Jeremy once the police were done with it. Once they’d stopped talking about Edith Inchmore and the deaths for which she’d been responsible, their conversation stuttered, as though they were both too embarrassed to venture on to risky ground.

She gripped his hand for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. The story of her life; she was always reluctant to let go. He intrigued her; she felt seized by an urge to learn more about him. Like his father, he had an open manner that made you feel as though you understood what made him tick, but in truth you didn’t have a clue. The important things, the personal things, Ben Kind always kept under lock and key. His son was just the same.