Ken McClure - Tangled Web

He caught sight of a letter bearing a Barclays Bank logo and recalled what Mary had said about Dawes being a hired hand rather than the prime mover in the cloning affair. He pulled it out: it was a bank statement for February in the name of Ranulph Joseph Dawes and gave details of a cheque account with a current balance of £740.16. Gordon glanced down the list of entries for the past month and saw nothing untoward. The largest figure paid in over the period had been, £1511.34 — presumably Dawes’s last salary cheque, and the largest single outgoing had been £500, paid by standing order to the woman in Felinbach from whom he was renting the house. At least the rental for the place was reasonable, he thought.

Gordon returned the statement to the drawer but, again bearing in mind what Mary had suggested, he started looking for anything else connected with Dawes’ financial affairs. He found a current Visa bill and scanned through the entries. Nothing exciting, he concluded; petrol, off license, petrol, Interflora, petrol, a shop in Llandudno. The total came to £137.27. He was about to put the bill back in the drawer when the figures at the top of the page caught his attention. The previous balance had been £2725.14 but a credit payment for that amount had been received on the 17 of the month. Dawes had paid off the entire sum owing on his credit card last month. That was more interesting, he thought, and continued his search with renewed vigour. Dawes had clearly not paid the bill from funds in his cheque account — at least not the one he’d found details of, so maybe he had another account? Maybe he had several?

He carried out an exhaustive search of all the drawers but found nothing else to do with money save for an electricity bill and a plastic wallet containing mobile phone bills. Thinking back to the hiding place where he’d found the key to Thomas’s lab, Gordon took a look underneath the desktop but found he wasn’t going to be that lucky twice. But Dawes had lived here alone and was out at work all day; it was certainly conceivable that he might have felt the need to hide away secret or valuable items. It was just a question of where.

Gordon hadn’t seen any signs of a safe on his tour but it was possible that the safe itself might be hidden, not that finding one would do him much good if he didn’t have access to the key or combination. He supposed he could look behind the pictures on the walls, like they did in films, but first he thought he’d take a look in some of the more obvious and mundane hiding places — under things, on top of things, behind things.

The house had central heating and was equipped with old-fashioned iron radiators and large bore piping. Gordon looked behind the two radiators in the study, thinking that this might be a possible place to hide something. He found nothing but did notice that a piece of rag had been stuffed into what seemed to be a hole in the floor near the valve of the radiator below the window.

He felt a twinge of excitement as he bent down to pull out the rag. The hole was large enough to get his hand into so he reached down inside, spreading his fingers out to make contact with anything that might be lying there. He was disappointed when it really seemed to be just a hole, not a secret hiding place after all.

He withdrew his hand and crouched down, close to the floor to see if he could see into it by finding the right angle for the light. He was almost directly on top of it when he suddenly had to recoil as he breathed in a lungful of fumes that made him feel as if his chest was on fire. He rolled away, coughing and spluttering, his eyes watering as he stumbled his way to the back door and staggered outside to gulp in fresh air.

‘When he’d finished cursing and had calmed down sufficiently to think clearly again, he realised that he must have come across the fumes that had made Mrs Marsh so ill, the ones that had made him suspicious when he realised that the house had been rented by Dawes. Now he knew that had been right to doubt the story about furniture stripping. He recognised the smell, not least because he’d come across it in the recent past. It had been in the PM room at Ysbyty Gwynedd; he’d been watching French perform the PM examination on Anne-Marie Palmer. The smell was hydrochloric acid.

Gordon went back into the house and returned to Dawes’ study. He replaced the rag in the hole in the floor, keeping his face well away from it and then opened a window to help clear away the lingering smell — or at least replace it with that of moss and wet earth from the garden. He slumped back down in the desk chair for a few moments, thinking about what he had to do now.

He was quite sure about the smell. It was the acid that had been used on Anne-Marie’s body and it was coming from a cellar below. In the course of her cleaning, Blodwyn Marsh must have removed the rag from the hole in the floor and breathed in the fumes just as he had done. He would have to go down there and investigate.

The door to the cellar, as Gordon found after a brief search, was located in a small pantry leading off the kitchen and it was no great surprise to find it locked. Nor was it any great surprise to find that the key was nowhere to be seen. There was a hook in the wall by the door, but no key. The door itself did not seem all that substantial and moved quite a bit in the frame when Gordon pushed and pulled the handle so he reckoned that he had three choices. He could search for the key; he could stop now and suggest to the police that it might be a good idea to take a look at the house, or he could simply put his shoulder to the door. Choice number three won by a clear margin. The door parted company with its lock at the third attempt and swung back to judder off the stone cellar wall.

Gordon found an old-fashioned, brass light switch on the wall and clicked it on before pausing at the head of the stairs for a moment. He could smell acid in the air but it was nowhere near as strong as it had been by the hole in the floor. He went down slowly, giving his eyes time to get accustomed to the gloom, as there was only one light bulb to illuminate a pretty big cellar. Although it was unshaded, he doubted if it were more than forty watts.

The smell of dampness, evident upstairs, was much stronger down here and was mixed with the smell of old wood from the stairs and of course, acid fumes. He took out some paper tissues from his pocket and held them over his nose as a precaution as he made his way over to the area he reckoned would be directly below the radiator upstairs. It was dark there because it was a good way away from the light bulb but when he got closer, Gordon could see that there was a workbench there with two modern Anglepoise lamps sitting on it. He clicked them on to illuminate the rough bench like an island in the darkness.

At the side of the bench was a heavy porcelain sink mounted on a frame constructed of thick wooden stilts. It had a loose polystyrene cover on it but it was quite clear to Gordon that this was what held the acid. He took the tissues away from his face for a moment, gingerly testing the air at this location and found to his surprise that the fumes still weren’t as strong he’d anticipated. The lid, although light, seemed to contain them quite well. This posed the question of why they had been so strong upstairs.

Gordon was pondering this when the question answered itself, thanks to a gust of wind outside. There was a wall ventilator mounted in the stonework below the bath — a simple iron grid leading to the outside. Every so often the wind would gust through it, sending an up draught that caught the polystyrene lid and raised it a little. Fumes would escape and be wafted directly upwards to where the hole in the floor was located. It was a very localised concentration of the fumes. Both he and Blodwyn Marsh had just been unlucky to be near the hole when the wind had blown.