The Arsenic Labyrinth (10 page)

‘Blame it on the boll weevils,’ Giselle Feeney said. ‘There was a huge outbreak of them in the States. They decimated the cotton crops and all at once, arsenic was the most popular poison you could find. In the late nineteenth century, it became the key ingredient in lethal pesticides. Farmers couldn’t get enough of it to control the boll weevils. And that wasn’t all. William Morris used it to create new dyes and paints. The military used arsenic to make their bullets more brittle. Before penicillin, doctors prescribed arsenical compounds for the treatment of syphilis – yuck. As for arsenic’s aphrodisiac properties, you really don’t want to know. Or do you?’

Hannah laughed and dodged the question. ‘Versatile stuff.’

They were lounging on the L-shaped leather sofa in Giselle’s fourth floor apartment, high above the River
Kent. Her living room was so high-tech, with its plasma screen home cinema and gleaming sound system, that it wasn’t easy to guess that she was a forensic archaeologist. At least until you spotted the framed photograph of Giselle in Wellington boots standing in the middle of a mediaeval burial chamber on a Scottish island.

For a woman who liked to joke that her career lay in ruins, Giselle was doing fine. She might be wearing her boyfriend’s Newcastle United shirt and a pair of Primark loafers, but she could have afforded Calvin Klein.
Big-boned
, bouncy and ferociously bright, she’d given up university lecturing to set up her own consultancy. Her clients ranged from regeneration planners, required by law to survey ancient sites about to disappear forever beneath housing estates or retail parks, to police forces and the Ministry of Defence. She and Hannah had worked together once before, when fragments of a dead man kept turning up in different parts of the north of England. Giselle had reconstructed the body much as her colleagues might reassemble a clay pot. Her skill she ascribed to a youth spent putting together two-thousand-piece jigsaws. She was a nationally renowned authority on burial practices through the millennia and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much everything else, but Hannah liked the way she didn’t allow her academic expertise to blind her to the priorities of criminal investigation. She’d expected Giselle to know about arsenic labyrinths, and she wasn’t disappointed.

‘Mine owners down in Devon and Cornwall couldn’t
believe their luck. All of a sudden, a by-product they’d struggled to dispose of was in big demand. They heated up the arsenic to extract it from the ore and made a fortune in the process. A hundred feet in, the arsenic would have cooled and left dirty white crystalline deposits on the wall. Each month the works would be shut down and the door into the labyrinth opened. They’d send boys in to scrape the arsenic off the walls. As for health and safety, the kids shoved cotton wool up their nostrils and smeared clay over their skin.’

‘Lovely.’

‘The good old days, huh? You can imagine a mine owner in Coniston might fancy breaking the monopoly of the Cornish businesses. Never mind the plumes of sulphur spewing out of the chimney, or the occasional death by poisoning. Occupational hazards. But the arsenic wasn’t plentiful enough. The venture failed and brought down the copper-mining business with it. After that, everyone gave the place a wide berth.’

‘Excellent place to hide a body.’

‘Do you really expect to find this woman at Mispickel?’

Hannah shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. So you’re on board?’

‘Listen, arsenic may have gone out of fashion with murderers who want to get away with it. Too easy to detect with Marsh’s test. But it’s lethal stuff. One level teaspoon will kill four people. Six, if the arsenic’s refined. Taxidermists used to love arsenic, because it kills off the
bacteria that hasten decomposition. But I’ve heard of museums that have to keep preserved rhinos stored under lock and key, because the toxicity of the arsenic makes them too dangerous to display in public. Dumping a body underneath the Arsenic Labyrinth strikes me as a pretty good idea. Creepy, too. Am I on board? Try and keep me away.’

Jeremy Erskine frowned at Hannah, as though she were a dense pupil who had handed in the wrong homework. His voice was loud and musical and she was sure he loved the sound of it.

‘Candidly, Chief Inspector, this is shoddy journalism. The reporter simply wants to make a name for himself. There was no good reason to write about my
sister-in
-law’s disappearance, he didn’t have a shred of fresh evidence. All he’s done is tear open old wounds. It took years for my wife to come to terms with what happened, and now thanks to this ghastly publicity, she’s back to square one.’

They were in the conservatory at the back of the Erskines’ immaculate home. From their armchairs, Hannah and Maggie Eyre could see a neatly kept winter garden bounded by a ring of oaks and sycamores. A ladder led up to a wooden tree house and the misty tops of the Langdale Pikes loomed in the distance. Outside it was freezing, but the conservatory was so snug it might have been midsummer. On the other side of the sliding doors to the main house, a boy and a girl in matching tee
shirts and Nike trainers sprawled on the Axminster carpet and watched TV.

Jeremy was sitting with his wife on a wicker sofa. They were a good-looking couple, tanned and trim after a New Year spent sand-skiing in the dunes of Dubai. Jeremy was in his early forties, tall with a long jaw and flecks of grey around the temples, Karen a cool blonde in a pink
short-sleeved
shirt and black leather trousers. The bronzed skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones; unlike her sister, she didn’t carry a surplus ounce. Jeremy took hold of his wife’s hand, as if to comfort her in a moment of distress, but Hannah guessed it would take more than a newspaper article to rattle Karen Erskine.

‘You gave Tony Di Venuto short shrift when he spoke to you about Emma.’

‘You’d do the same in my shoes. He was appallingly persistent, wanted to come here to interview us, if you please. I said it was out of the question. A disgraceful intrusion. Frankly, I was on the point of making a formal protest to his editor. I thought there were laws to protect us from that sort of behaviour these days. Don’t
hardworking
middle class people have a right to privacy?’

Hannah stared at Karen. ‘Aren’t you curious about what happened to your sister?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But this publicity isn’t about discovering the truth.’

‘If the anonymous caller is telling the truth, then …’

‘What evidence do you have that he isn’t a figment of a fevered imagination?’ Jeremy interrupted. ‘My
understanding was that a court of law requires proof.’

‘We’re not in a court of law.’ Hannah fought the instinct to snap that he wasn’t teaching Year 8 kids either. ‘Mr Di Venuto has no reason to lie to us. Wasting police time is a serious offence, as he and his editor are well aware.’

‘He’s out to cause trouble and sell newspapers. Quite irresponsible.’

‘It would be irresponsible for us to ignore what he has told us.’

‘Is this what we pay our taxes for?’

‘We’ll survey the site before deciding what action to take. Of course, we’ll keep you both informed. DC Eyre will act as liaison officer.’

Maggie gave a brisk nod. The Eyres were a farming family and Hannah knew few people as down to earth as her DC. Jeremy’s pomposity was perfectly calculated to get up Maggie’s nose, but her equable expression yielded no hint of distaste. Learning to hide your true feelings when interviewing witnesses was a step on the road to becoming a good police officer.

Jeremy turned to his wife. ‘Sorry, darling. Seems as though we have no say in the matter. All we can do is let events take their course.’

Karen’s sharp chin jutted forward. ‘This isn’t ever going to end, is it, Chief Inspector? If you don’t find a body, we’ll be at the mercy of anyone who wants to speculate about Emma and make a few quid on the side. And if by some miracle you do, that will just be the start. There’ll need to be an inquest, a funeral, you’ll be looking for this
man who made the phone call. The media will turn it into a circus. It will be impossible for us to grieve in private.’

Would Karen grieve? She was certainly restraining her curiosity about her sister’s fate.

‘You have nothing to fear from the media, surely?’

‘That’s just where you’re wrong!’ Karen grasped her husband’s hand. ‘The head at Grizedale retires in the summer. The deputy isn’t up to the job and the Governors have made it clear they would prefer to recruit internally. Jeremy is the obvious choice. He’s a first class historian and the results of his students are outstanding, half of them stroll into Oxford or Cambridge. He has marvellous ideas for raising the College’s profile, making it the leading independent in the North. But how will the governors react if our name features in a murder case? Parents care about these things. The sort of people who pay for their children to attend Grizedale don’t want to be associated with a high profile criminal investigation, even indirectly. This could ruin Jeremy’s career progression. Have you stopped to consider that?’

No, it had never crossed Hannah’s mind. Her mother had taught in the state sector and Hannah went to the local comprehensive. Hannah didn’t begrudge others the right to educate their kids privately, but she couldn’t imagine doing it herself. Combing through rival prospectuses, weighing up which school might offer the best prospect of glittering prizes, treating education as one more luxury purchase, along with the Scandinavian hi-fi and designer kitchen?

‘What do you believe happened to Emma, Mrs Erskine?’

Karen must have anticipated the question, but its bluntness threw her off balance. As if to cover her discomfort, she mimicked her husband’s truculence.

‘Well … don’t you think that if I knew that, I’d have mentioned it sooner?’

‘I’m not asking for hard evidence. Supposition is fine. You must have a theory?’

‘Emma was an unhappy person,’ Jeremy said before his wife could answer. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I deplore homophobia as much as the next man, but it’s a sad fact that many gay men and women lead unfulfilled lives. My impression is that she’d never found love. Above all, she was jealous of Karen.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Karen had a baby, Karen had a nice house, Karen was married to someone who adored her. She was younger and prettier and slimmer than Emma. My wife’s too
kindhearted
to say so, but the jealousy had been there since they were kids. As the years passed, it became a festering sore.’

‘You didn’t get on?’

‘I hardly knew her. There was no ill will, we did our best, we invited her to our wedding. She was in Liverpool at the time, but she made an excuse and the best she could do by way of a present for her only close living relative was to send a few Marks & Spencer gift vouchers. When our daughter Sophie was christened, we even invited her to
be godmother, but it was the same old story. She said she didn’t believe in organised religion. As if that mattered.’

‘Was there ever a row between the two of you, Mrs Erskine?’

A shake of the blonde head. ‘We were always civil to each other. Emma always kept her feelings buttoned up.’

‘You were sure she envied you?’

Karen shrugged. ‘Emma never quite fitted in anywhere. Sad, really. I thought she might go abroad when she tired of Merseyside. Instead, she came back to the Lakes. She told me she felt homesick, but it was city living that she was sick of. There was nothing for her here.’

‘You met her at the museum, I believe?’

‘When she returned, Jeremy and I were determined to make an effort.’

‘Blood’s thicker than water, don’t forget,’ Jeremy sounded as though he wanted to make Hannah write it out one hundred times after school.

‘Was there any suggestion that she live with you?’

‘Good Heavens, no.’ Jeremy looked as startled as if she’d asked him to open up his home to an asylum seeker. ‘At the time we had a tiny semi in Ambleside, near Rothay Park. Very different from this place, I can assure you. I’d started teaching history at Grizedale College, but this was long before I was promoted to head of year. To have taken in Emma would have been impossible, even if she’d suggested it. Which, of course, she did not. She rented a bed-sit for a while and then moved in with the Goddards.’

‘Yes, I was going to ask you about that.’ Hannah made a show of scratching her head. ‘I know it’s a small world, but … it does seem amazing, that, of all the places where she might have found a roof over her head, she finished up with your ex-wife and her new husband?’

‘The Lakes
is
a small world, Chief Inspector, haven’t you noticed? Thirty miles across, and a population less than Bolton.’

‘Even so.’

Jeremy sucked in a breath. ‘Vanessa and I met and married not long after I qualified as a teacher. She was a librarian, full of ideals about educating the disadvantaged, people who had never opened a book in their lives. I taught at a comprehensive on the Furness Peninsula. Plenty of deprivation in that neck of the woods, since the steelworks closed and shipbuilding went out of fashion. When you meet Vanessa, Chief Inspector, you see a middle-aged woman with an unsightly birthmark on her face, so you may find this difficult to understand – but I found her passion thrilling.’

‘No, I don’t find that so difficult to understand,’ Hannah said softly and for a moment, despite everything, she warmed to him.

‘Within weeks, we were walking down the aisle. Looking back, it was a mistake. I was young, naïve. Vanessa and I could have been such good friends, but … when I met Karen, I realised she was the woman for me.’

‘Love at first sight,’ Karen said with a complacent smile. ‘It knocked the breath out of both of us.’

‘Vanessa took our break-up very hard. She blamed Karen for seducing me, but that was unfair. It was my fault, if you like. My decision, I take full responsibility.’

He gave a defiant nod and then lifted his head, so Hannah could see that the nobility of his profile matched his character. The admiration in Karen’s eyes depressed her. It wasn’t his adultery that made her cringe, it was his conceit.