Martin Edwards - The Arsenic Labyrinth

As Sarah chattered nineteen to the dozen, he contented himself with an occasional murmur of assent while concentrating on his food. The first mouthful of fat, succulent, pork and leek sausage, smeared with runny egg, made him sigh with pleasure and when he complimented her on the quality of her home-made marmalade her round face glowed.

‘The Germans aren’t up yet.’ She put on a half-shocked look.

‘Young love, eh?’

She fiddled with strands of her disorganised hair. ‘A distant memory for me, Rob, I’ll be honest.’

He put down his knife and fork and bestowed on her his undivided attention. ‘A woman like you must have — um, admirers, I’m sure.’

‘Admirers?’ She gave her habitual, self-deprecating, tinkly laugh. ‘Joking, aren’t you?’

He shook his head and neither of them said anything for a while. He felt an urge to resume eating before the bacon rashers cooled, but at last she said in a tone of contrived brightness, ‘So what will you be up to today?’

‘Catching up with the past.’

He said it on the spur of the moment. He’d returned to the Lakes in haste, without an agenda in mind. Life was a fast-flowing river, you could never guess where the current might take you. Yet the moment he uttered the words, he knew where he had to go.

‘You were late back last night,’ Hannah mumbled as she chewed the last of her breakfast.

Marc Amos pulled a stool from beneath the breakfast bar and sat down beside her. He was still in his white gown, smelling of lemon soap; she was aware of his nakedness underneath the towelling. After all these years, he still turned her on. When he’d joined her under the duvet at midnight, she’d been half asleep, but she relished his warmth next to her and she’d have responded if he’d been in the mood. At one time his lust was as predictable as sunrise. But all he did was whisper goodnight and roll over and away from her. Within two minutes he was snoring.

‘Sorry, should have phoned. Leigh and I got caught up talking to the agent. By the time we’d got rid of him, the two of us were dying for a bite to eat, so we went to a bistro and chewed over the business plan. Next time I looked at my watch, it was half past ten and I didn’t want to disturb you. Thought you might be in bed. Don’t suppose you made any more toast?’

She shook her head. Marc had a flair for camouflaging thoughtlessness as care and consideration. ‘I’ll be off in a minute. You know where the toaster is.’

‘Don’t you want to hear about the business plan?’

She spotted the trap. If she reminded him that police officers started work long before second-hand bookshop owners with obliging staff, he’d put on his mournful look and say she was always too busy, and they needed to talk more. One thing he never wanted to talk about was her miscarriage at the end of last summer. She’d become pregnant by accident, but after losing the baby she felt suffocated by grief. While he’d never said as much, she knew the prospect of fatherhood frightened Marc. Or perhaps it was the prospect of taking on responsibility for another human life.

‘Fire away.’

His eyes widened; he’d not expected her to show interest. She ought to do better, she told herself with a pang of guilt, instead of getting hung up on Marc’s blind spots. A relationship was a two-way thing.

‘Sedbergh’s close to the motorway and developing a reputation as England’s book town. Leigh’s doubled her turnover in eighteen months, so an upmarket cafe is crucial. We’ll formalise our partnership and divide the premises between us. Half for books, half for people to browse over coffee and a snack.’

They chatted for five minutes before she had to go. It was a long time since she’d seen him so energised about the fortunes of the shop. For Marc, books were objects of beauty, to be loved, not just read. Catching up with tax returns and stock inventories came a poor second to the surge of joy at finding a rare first edition at a fair. Leigh Moffat had, beneath her demure exterior, a shrewd brain; he was right, together they made a good combination. But Hannah caught herself wondering whether that was all they made.

Listening in her Lexus to Rufus Wainwright’s mournful vocals on ‘Go Ask Shakespeare’, she told herself not to be so stupid. Jealousy was Marc’s vice, not hers. For years he’d suspected her sergeant, Nick Lowther, of lusting after her. Wrong and unfair. And it wasn’t as if Marc had always been a one-woman man. In the early days of their relationship, he’d had a fling with Leigh’s younger sister Dale.

These last few weeks, Marc seemed to have lost interest in sex, which was akin to Casanova taking up celibacy. She’d experienced a flutter of paranoia when he passed on gossip that Vicky, a skinny graduate who was working in the shop supposedly to pay off her student debts, had squandered her earnings on a spectacular boob job. Was he secretly hoping she might follow suit? All things considered, she’d rather worry about his running off with Leigh.

A red light loomed and she stamped on her brake. That was the trouble with being a detective. You wound up suspecting everybody and everything.

The rain had died away overnight, but Guy knew the Lakes well enough to wrap up warm and prepare for the worst. A fortnight before their final row, Megan had paid to kit him out in the wet-weather gear that walking in Snowdonia demanded. He’d said he would reimburse her when the big futures deal came through, but obviously her behaviour rendered the promise null and void. It served her right that there was no big futures deal. When he said he planned a walk, Sarah filled a flask and insisted on lending him her mobile phone and a torch.

Outside, the wind’s edge scraped his cheeks like a blade. At the head of the lake, he sat on a bench and read a couple of chapters from a dog-eared David Copperfield that he’d picked up from a charity shop. Small children squealed while their anorak-clad mothers prattled about soap operas and celebrity scandals.

This time last year, he’d still been in Rome, squashed into a one-bedroom apartment with Farfalla and her one-year-old, Bianca. He’d met her the day Maryell, the wealthy American widow whose suite at the Boscolo Palace he’d shared, discovered that he wasn’t a celebrated English artist after all. He’d told Farfalla that he was a spy working for the British government. At the time he was reading The Woman in White and he amused himself by telling her that it was his sourcebook for deciphering top secret codes. Trouble was, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one leading a double life. Farfalla meant ‘butterfly’ and she lived up to her name. All the time she was supposedly waitressing on the Via Cavour, she was sleeping with a minicab driver who made a fortune fleecing tourists new to the city. Guy knew it couldn’t last. Language was a barrier, and then there was the child. Farfalla decided to move in with her fancy man, and forty-eight hours later Guy was chatting up Megan by the check-in desk at Fiumicino airport. She’d walked out on her job as a nanny when the kids’ father wanted her to perform services never mentioned in the contract she’d signed with the agency.

Guy stuffed the book into his pocket and contemplated the inky water. Those cold depths had been the resting place of Donald Campbell, who sacrificed his life in quest of speed, his boat somersaulting as he strained to reach 300 miles per hour. Guy remembered seeing black and white footage of Campbell before the accident. A suave, Brylcreemed Englishman, cigarette in hand. A charmer, a ladies’ man, the sort of chap Guy might have become, had he been a couple of generations older. After thirty-odd years, the wreck of Bluebird was found and lifted from the bottom of the lake, tail fin intact, still proudly bearing the Union Jack. Campbell’s remains were recovered at last. It was right and proper that the dead should receive a decent burial.