The Arsenic Labyrinth (22 page)

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.’

‘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.’

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.

‘Thanks for your help. I need to speak to Alex Clough,
see if she can cast any further light.’ She mustered a smile. ‘So, having done your detective work for the day, what will you be getting up to now?’

He shrugged. ‘An American writer has beaten me to it with a book about Ruskin’s Coniston years. It’s time for a change. I need to scout for another subject to write about, and …’

‘Yes?’

Colouring, he said, ‘As a matter of fact, Miranda and I are splitting up.’

After a pause she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s been on the cards for a while. Miranda doesn’t want to spend the best part of her life buried away in the countryside. Tarn Fold is a cul-de-sac and, as far as she’s concerned, that sums up the Lake District. It’s a nice place to spend a few days in summer, but slogging through a wet winter isn’t for her.’

‘I thought it was Miranda’s idea to move here. She talked you into it.’

‘I didn’t need much persuading. As for Miranda, she changed her mind. It happens, I suppose.’

Hannah wriggled out of the path of a couple of fat women who were coming into the coffee shop for a sit down, a drink, and maybe a muffin or two. Suddenly she wanted to prolong the conversation, but she couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t nosey or crass. Better leave it.

‘Thanks again for your help. Let’s keep in touch.’

He looked straight at her. ‘Yes, please.’

Striding back to Divisional HQ, Hannah tried to airbrush Daniel’s face out of her mind. It was a mistake to be distracted, she had more than enough on her plate. He might be out of a relationship, but she wasn’t. She and Marc had been together a long time. He wasn’t to blame that she felt there must be more to life than what she had. It was her fault. She could hear her dead mother’s gentle voice, urging her to count her blessings.

She called in Les Bryant and Bob Swindell and briefed them on the news about William Inchmore. Les scratched his armpit as he studied Edith’s handwritten confession.

‘Very helpful, that Professor Kind.’

‘He’s not a professor,’ she snapped, hoping that she hadn’t blushed.

‘Whatever. He’s as good at detective work as his old man.’

‘There’s no comparison,’ Hannah said. ‘Ben was a professional. Daniel is … an amateur.’

‘Shrewd, though.’ His face was straight, but he was teasing her, no question.

‘Yes.’ Her expression said
leave it.

With a wary glance at both of them, Bob Swindell launched into an update on the latest from Fern Larter’s team. It made sense for both sets of investigators to liaise closely together. If Di Venuto was right and Koenig was the caller who had given the tip-off about the Arsenic Labyrinth, it was hard to believe that there was no connection between his death and the cold case investigation.

‘Koenig’s mother was a prostitute from Barrow who took an overdose when he was a toddler and there’s no father’s name on his birth certificate. He had no other family and Social Services took him into care. He turned into a Walter Mitty. But people seem to have liked him and he didn’t have any scruples about taking advantage. He would pretend to be a hot-shot entrepreneur and charm older women into investing in get-rich-quick schemes put together on the back of an envelope. But he was nowhere near as smart as he thought he was, and that’s why he finished up in the nick. Eventually, he either wised up or turned over a new leaf. For a few weeks he worked in Windermere, but then he upped and left and started travelling. Since then, he’s spent several years on the Continent. There are gaps in the story at present, but as far as we can tell, he kept out of trouble.’

‘Until someone thumped him with a torch and chucked him in the lake,’ Les said.

‘He told his landlady he’d just come over from France, but a couple of receipts in his bag indicate he spent time in Wales before he moved back to the Lakes. He liked spending money, doesn’t seem to have been too hot at keeping hold of it. He was clueless, a fantasist. If he did kill Emma Bestwick, it’s a miracle he ever got away with it.’

Les’s cold had gone to his chest and he burst into a fit of coughing. When he’d recovered enough to speak, he said in a throaty wheeze, ‘But
why
would he want to kill her?’

‘He has no record of violence, all his crimes were about making money.’

‘Suppose someone paid him to murder Emma.’ Hannah said.

‘You’re assuming it
was
murder,’ Les objected. ‘If the guy was that much of a fuckwit, maybe her death was an accident.’

‘Then why arrange to meet in the middle of nowhere?’

‘We can’t answer that until we find something that links him with Emma.’

They turned to Bob, who shook his head. ‘Before Inchmore Hall burned down, Alex Clough was asked if Koenig had worked at the museum – as a volunteer guide, maybe – but she denied it. Of course, the records will now be ashes, so even if she was lying, we can’t prove it. But she’s in the clear for his murder. Her late father, too.’

‘Their alibis stack up?’ Hannah asked.

‘Alban fulfilled a speaking engagement in Grasmere on the night of Koenig’s death, addressing the Rotary Club on the topic of barghests and bogies of the Lakes. As for Alex, she went out for dinner with an old school chum and her husband at a swish restaurant in Cartmel. Plenty of witnesses, no chance that they could be mistaken.’

Hannah groaned. The Cloughs had been good suspects. They had money and either father or daughter could have afforded to provide Emma Bestwick with the funds she needed to set up on her own as a reflexologist. Not that Hannah had any idea why they might wish to do so. Unless Emma had somehow discovered the truth
behind William Inchmore’s death and needed to be kept quiet.

While Bob departed to photocopy Edith’s journal, Hannah picked Les’s brain on next steps. They decided she should speak again to Alex about Edith’s journal, though even if Alex knew the truth about William’s murder, there was no chance of her admitting it.

‘You think Alban will have confided in her?’

Les shook his head. ‘He sounds like a man who enjoyed keeping secrets. He’d have taken this one to his grave if Edith’s confession hadn’t come to light.’

‘Maggie’s arranged for me to call on Jeremy and Karen later this afternoon. What do you reckon to their alibis for the night of Koenig’s murder?’

A derisive snort. ‘Not much.’

Jeremy had told Maggie that he’d been upstairs in his study, marking student essays, while Karen watched TV and their children did their homework in their rooms. Monk Coniston was within walking distance of their house and, in any case, the mere fact that no vehicle had been seen in the car park didn’t mean that the murderer couldn’t have parked somewhere close by. Either husband or wife could have slipped out, committed the murder and then hurried back under cover of darkness. If a car had been used, it might have been accomplished inside thirty minutes. A return journey on foot would have taken a good hour. Jeremy or Karen might even have killed Koenig without the other realising what they had done. But what was the motive?

Same question for Francis and Vanessa Goddard. They lived even closer to where Koenig had been killed and Fern’s team hadn’t yet established whether they could provide credible alibis. Hannah couldn’t forget that Francis had once been her personal prime suspect. But even if he had had an affair with Emma, would he – or Vanessa, for that matter – first have bought her off and then resorted to hiring Koenig to kill her?

When she asked Les for his opinion, he pinched his nose and said, ‘Best take a closer look at Emma. What sort of woman was she? Might she have blackmailed someone? It would explain how she came into so much money.’

‘Alex was her lover. She’ll have understood her, if anyone did.’

‘Maybe.’ His expression was bleak and faraway and Hannah was sure he wasn’t thinking about Alex. ‘But sometimes it doesn’t help to be close to someone. You become blind to what’s going on inside their head. You think you understand them, when the fact is, you really don’t have a bloody clue.’

Alex Clough had taken refuge in a postcard-pretty cottage on the outskirts of Newby Bridge. It belonged to a fiercely protective friend called Mina, a spiky-haired woman in a Greenpeace T-shirt and mud-stained jeans whose hallway bookcase overflowed with magazines and guides to self-sufficiency. Mina made it clear that, if it was up to her, the police wouldn’t be allowed near Alex until she’d had time to mourn in peace. But Alex, though
pale and thinner than ever, was no longer the weeping wreck of the night before and she insisted that she was willing to talk to Hannah.

Even in grief she remained immaculate: black velvet jacket, white blouse and clingy dark trousers. Silently she listened as Hannah explained how her father and grandmother had conspired to cover up the truth about the murder of William Inchmore. When she denied all knowledge of the family’s secret, Hannah believed her. And if she was lying, it could never be proved. Nobody was left alive to prosecute. A mystery had been solved by Daniel’s discovery, that was all.

Alex pushed her hands deep into her pockets and strolled to the rain-flecked window that looked out over Mina’s large working garden, with its damp vegetable patch, hen coop and fruit trees. She pointed to a white bee hive in the distance, near the fence separating Mina’s land from a ploughed field.

‘If my father were here, he’d say that we should have told the bees everything that’s happened. Did you ever hear him recount the legend of Jenkins Syke? It was one of his favourite tales.’

Hannah shook her head, said nothing.

‘The Syke is a narrow beck not far from St Andrew’s Church. In olden days, folk said that if someone died, the bees must be told. The custom in these parts was to hang a black ribbon on the hives. The bees formed part of the community, and needed to be treated with respect. Failing to do so brought bad luck. The story goes that the coffin
bearing the body of a man called Jenkins slipped from the sled on which it was being carried along the old Coniston corpse road and fell into the stream. My father’s theory was that his family only had themselves to blame. They must have neglected to tell the bees of his passing.’ Her voice broke. ‘Perhaps I’d better go outside and put them in the picture.’

Hannah said softly, ‘What will you do next?’

Alex cleared her throat. ‘Time for a fresh start. The hall was only insured for a fraction of its value, the premiums were crippling. But something nice may be happening between Mina and me. Years ago, long before Emma came on the scene, Mina and I were close, but she and my father never hit it off. Now, well, who knows? We’ll take it one day at a time.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about Emma. Did she ever mention a man called Guy Koenig?’

Alex frowned. ‘Isn’t he …?’

‘You may have heard on the news, his body was found in the lake. He’d been hit on the head.’

‘And there’s a connection with Emma?’

‘We think so.’

Alex’s bewilderment surely couldn’t have been feigned. ‘His name meant nothing to me. If Emma knew him, she never told me.’

‘Any more ideas about how she came into so much cash?’

She lifted her head and stared into the distance. ‘It’s a mystery to me. I thought I knew her, but I was
deceiving myself. We all keep something back, don’t we, Chief Inspector? As Edith Inchmore did, as my father and grandmother did. As Mina and I are bound to do. Whatever the reasons, we never allow anyone else to know the whole of our personal history. I suppose we’re afraid of what they might think of us. But there’s more to it than that. We are terrified of what they might do with the knowledge.’

The rain was easing as Hannah drove past the Blawith Fells, through a landscape of muted greens and browns. Next stop was
chez
Erskine. She’d arranged to meet Maggie there. Jeremy needed to know about Edith’s journal, but she also wanted to seek out any connection between the Erskines and Guy Koenig. ‘At this Time’ was playing on the CD player and, like a detective in anguish, Elvis Costello wanted to know who are these people who keep telling us lies. When her in-car mobile rang and Terri’s number showed on the screen, she pulled on to the verge overlooking the lake. A chat with Terri demanded her full attention.

‘Just ringing to check you’re still OK for tonight.’

Shit
. She’d forgotten that Terri had arranged a
get-together
of girls they’d known in the sixth form. Love Rivals Reunited, Terri called it.

‘Actually …’

‘Oh, Hannah!’

‘Sorry. I mean, I’ll see what I can do, but we’re still working on this case out at Coniston. I’m on my way into
the village right now. We’ve solved one of the murders, but not the other.’

‘Fifty per cent success rate in the space of a few days sounds pretty good to me. Surely you’re entitled to a night off?’

‘I can’t promise to make it to the pizzeria for seven o’clock’

An exaggerated sigh gusted down the line. ‘You know something? I never thought I’d feel sorry for Marc. But I’m starting to think he leads a dog’s life. Never knowing from one moment to the next whether you’ll be around. No wonder he spends most of his time with his nose stuck in some musty old tome. You’d better watch out. If you don’t keep your eye on him, some other woman will start checking out his catalogue.’