Dark Mirror bak-10

by Barry Maitland

‘Yeah, sorry about that. We’re having a bit of trouble with the extractor fans.’

  ‘I’m after Dr Ringland. Is he in?’

  ‘Sure. Hang on.’

  Actually, Kathy rather liked the smell. The laboratories that she’d visited at the forensic science facilities were mostly odourless and not at all like the school labs she had fond memories of. What was the point of studying chemistry if there were no stinks and bangs?

  A rather handsome middle-aged man emerged after a moment, a worried frown on his face. ‘Yes? I’m Colin Ringland.’

  Kathy showed her ID. ‘Can I have five minutes of your time, Dr Ringland? Somewhere quiet?’

  He showed her down the corridor to a small tutorial room, with a whiteboard scrawled with diagrams of molecular structures. They sat at one end of a formica table.

  ‘I’m wondering if you ever met a PhD student at this university called Marion Summers.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that poor girl. I read the newspaper report, and her supervisor told me.’

  ‘Dr da Silva?’

  ‘That’s right. He said you’d contacted him.’

  ‘You know him well then?’

  ‘Yes, we live near each other and play squash regularly. In fact I originally assumed it was he who referred her to me, but it turned out she’d heard about my work from one of my students.’

  ‘So when did you meet her?’

  ‘I could check if you like, but it must have been about a month ago. She phoned and asked if she could see me about her research, then came over here and we talked for an hour or so. About a week later she followed up with some queries over the phone.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what you talked about?’

  ‘Poisons-arsenic specifically.’ He raised his hands. ‘Yes, I know. When I saw in the paper that Marion was believed to have been poisoned I wondered if I should contact you. I discussed it with Tony-Dr da Silva-who hadn’t heard about the poisoning part. He thought it was probably a bizarre coincidence and so I did nothing.’

  ‘What’s your involvement with arsenic?’

  ‘It’s my main research area, part of a joint research project with Jadavpur University in Calcutta and our engineering faculty here. Do you want me to go into details?’

  ‘Maybe an outline.’

  ‘It’s to do with trying to find an effective solution to the contamination of drinking water with arsenic in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Have you heard about that?’

  Kathy recalled what Sundeep had said. ‘Something, I think.’

  ‘Well, the Bengal basin is very densely populated, of course, and there has been a longstanding health problem because of a lack of access to clean water. People were relying on polluted river and pond water, and so in the 1970s UNICEF and the World Bank decided to fund a huge aid program to sink tube wells that would provide clean water from deep below the surface.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘Yes, enlightened Western aid to give the poor clean drinking water. What could be wrong with that? The trouble was that the whole region is sitting on thick layers of alluvial mud, and as the rainwaters soak through the mud they leach out naturally occurring arsenic and concentrate it deep down, right where the new wells were to draw their water.’

  ‘Wasn’t the water tested?’

  ‘Apparently not for arsenic. The geology was unusual and no one expected this. People began to get sick, but slowly. Arsenic is a heavy metal, like lead, and the body has trouble getting rid of it once it’s taken in. It gradually accumulates, and people began to show symptoms like blisters, cancers, gangrene and damage to the liver and kidneys. But they were also undernourished and sick with other things, and it took a long time to figure out what was wrong, and meanwhile they kept sinking new wells-over 900,000 in fact.

  ‘The result is that millions of people are now at risk; some estimates say as many as thirty million people across the whole region are slowly dying. It’s the biggest case of mass poisoning ever. The long-term solution has got to be more effective management of water on the surface-clean reservoirs, proper drains, and so on. But in the meantime they need a cheap and simple way of filtering out the arsenic from the wells. That’s what we’re working on.’

  ‘And to do that they need an expert on the chemistry of arsenic,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘But I don’t suppose it was the Bangladesh problem that Marion wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘Actually she was pretty interested; I showed her around the lab and we talked about the work. But no, you’re right, it was the basic chemistry of arsenic compounds and how they worked as poisons that interested her, in relation to the Pre-Raphaelites.’

  ‘That’s what I don’t really understand. Did she explain how it was relevant to her studies?’

  Ringland smiled. ‘You sound like Tony-he felt she was making far too much of this. He wanted her to concentrate on other things. Arsenic was used for all kinds of purposes in the nineteenth century, and certainly was a huge health problem. That’s what Marion was mainly concerned with. She said she was writing a paper.’

  ‘So she was knowledgeable about its use? I mean, properties, doses and so on?’

  ‘That’s what she wanted to speak to me about: the different compounds and their effects. Frankly, she didn’t have the basic grounding in chemistry. Typical arts student, having trouble with formulae, numbers. She did her best, trying to write it all down, but when I started getting into detail, your arsenates and arsenites and arsenides, your trioxide and your pentoxide, your arsphenamine…’ He saw the look on Kathy’s face and laughed. ‘Used for syphilis. Pretty brutal. Thank your lucky stars for antibiotics.’

  ‘I don’t have syphilis at the moment,’ Kathy said, and watched his face turn scarlet.

  ‘Oh God, no, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘And neither did Marion as far as I know, but I’ll check. Is that what she was interested in?’

  ‘Oh, anything to do with how the Victorians used the stuff-Fowler’s solution for warts, Gay’s solution for asthma, Frere Come’s arsenical paste for cancer…’

  ‘And where would you find arsenic these days?’

  ‘Well, somewhere like here, I suppose. We carry quite a bit of it. All under very secure conditions, of course. The university’s health and safety procedures are rigorous, believe me. But in any case, that wouldn’t be what killed Marion.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, nobody dies of arsenic poisoning in the UK these days. You’re not suggesting that, surely?’

  ‘We’re still doing tests.’

  ‘You’ll probably find it was some food toxin. It’s pretty scary what gets into our food.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. All the same, I’d like to be certain that the poison couldn’t have originated from here.’

  Dr Ringland looked at her as if she was being obtuse. ‘But why? I mean, you surely don’t think she was poisoned by someone working here in the lab, do you?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that. I just wanted to be sure she couldn’t have got hold of something herself while she was visiting.’

  ‘Oh no, no chance of that.’

  ‘What about Dr da Silva, has he been in here?’

  Colin Ringland raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Sure, I have shown him around, and he’s called in to see me a couple of times when I was working.’

  ‘Could he have got a sample of the chemicals for her?’

  He choked back a laugh. ‘Utterly impossible. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  He took Kathy into the working areas, showing her the locked storage rooms and cabinets and explaining the security arrangements of keys, alarms, cameras and inventory checks. By the end of it she had to admit it seemed highly unlikely that Marion or anyone else from outside could have helped themselves to the laboratory stocks of arsenic.

  •

  After trying Dr da Silva’s phone numbers without success, Kathy went back to the office of the Department o
f European Literature and spoke to the secretary, Karen.

  ‘Dr da Silva? I saw him earlier.’ She went over to the window and said, ‘Yes, his car’s there.’

  Kathy looked down into the street and saw a red BMW sports car on a meter. ‘That’s nice. I didn’t think lecturing paid that well.’

  ‘Family money,’ Karen sniffed. Her tone was sharp with disapproval, and she turned away to consult her computer. ‘He’s giving a lecture at the moment, another twenty minutes to go. LT108. You could catch him when he comes out.’

  ‘Thanks, Karen.’

  Kathy found lecture theatre LT108, its red LECTURE IN PROGRESS light illuminated, and opened the door. She found herself at the top of a steeply raked auditorium, packed with students, and took a seat halfway down towards the lecturer’s dais. A tall, dark-complexioned man was speaking. He was in his mid-forties, Kathy guessed, and spoke with a cultured drawl. His manner was confident and lively, and he emphasised his points with forceful gestures of his hands. From time to time, as he turned to his notes, he would sweep his long black hair back from his brow. His audience was attentive, especially the women, Kathy thought, and she wasn’t surprised, for his voice, appearance and manner were all quite compelling. She could see what Tina had meant.

  When the lecture finished, Kathy worked her way down to the front against a stream of departing students. A couple of girls had cornered the lecturer, talking animatedly, and he was smiling as he replied, collecting his papers and moving towards the door. He spotted Kathy, and put a hand up to hold the door open for her. His face was a little fleshier and older than it had seemed from a distance.

  ‘Dr da Silva, I’m Detective Inspector Kathy Kolla,’ she said, showing him her ID, and watching his expression freeze. But she was used to that. She held out her hand and he shook it cautiously.

  ‘You want to talk about Marion?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Terrible. We’re all shocked. We just can’t believe it.’

  ‘Of course. Is there somewhere we can go?’

  He led her to his room, a comfortable corner office with a large window. Books covered every inch of the walls. On the shelf facing her when she sat down were multiple copies of a thick volume, its title- Dante Gabriel Rossetti -printed in sumptuous Gothic script, as was the author’s name, Anthony da Silva.

  ‘Apparently it was on the radio that someone probably put something in her lunch, is that right?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what we suspect.’

  He pursed his lips with distaste. ‘I can’t understand how anyone could do that. There are some very sick people around. I suppose you have to deal with them every day.’ He gave her a sympathetic smile.

  ‘We have to consider the possibility that her attacker knew her in some capacity, so we’re speaking to her friends and work colleagues. How long have you known her?’

  ‘Um, it must be about three years. I first came across her in her honours year, and she’d be almost two years into her doctorate now.’

  ‘So you must have got to know her quite well?’

  ‘Well, academically, yes. I met with her on average, what-every couple of weeks during term time?’

  ‘How about socially?’

  ‘Oh not really. We bumped into each other from time to time-departmental drinks, open lectures, that sort of thing. And she came to our house once. Jenny, my wife, put on a little party for my doctoral students. She likes to do that occasionally, check them out.’ He gave a faint smile.

  ‘And you phoned each other frequently?’

  He stared at Kathy for a moment, and she wondered if he was going to deny it. Then he said, ‘Well, yes, if she had a query about something in her work, or I had to change a meeting, that kind of thing.’

  His reply was guarded, and Kathy sensed he wasn’t being completely open. ‘Have you been to her home?’

  ‘No. I don’t know where she lived, to be honest. I suppose the office will have the address.’

  ‘You don’t know if she shared with someone?’

  ‘Sorry, no idea.’

  ‘What about her friends, other people she went around with?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t say.’

  ‘I’ve just been speaking to Dr Ringland.’ Kathy saw the surprise register briefly. ‘He told me about Marion’s interest in arsenic poisoning. Can you enlarge on that for me?’

  ‘Oh… yes, of course. That is rather strange, isn’t it, in the light of what’s happened?’ He paused, as if debating how to go on. ‘She was studying the Pre-Raphaelites for her PhD. How much do you know about them?’

  ‘They were a group of nineteenth-century English painters, weren’t they?’

  ‘And poets, yes. The 1840s and ’50s, the first avant-garde movement in art, something of a sensation at the time-young men breaking the mould, that kind of thing. Their program was to reform art by going back to the fifteenth century, before it was corrupted, hence their name.’ He was interrupted by his phone ringing. ‘Excuse me.’ He picked it up. ‘Hello? Colin, hi, we were just talking about you. I’m sitting here with Inspector Kolla now… Yes, sure… You still on for tonight?… Great. I’ll call you back later. Bye.’

  He smiled at Kathy. ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’

  ‘The Pre-Raphaelites.’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, they and their circle-wives, lovers, models-were a fairly sickly lot. I don’t know if they were more so than the average Londoners of that period, but it’s a striking feature of their story. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Lizzie Siddal was a chronic invalid; she died of an overdose of the laudanum she was medicating herself with. His lover Janey, William Morris’s wife, was also sickly, and Rossetti himself eventually went barking mad, sharing his house in Chelsea with a menagerie of kangaroos, wombats and armadillos.’

  He was more relaxed now, slipping into the familiar account he might have entertained students or dinner guests with many times before.

  ‘Now, it’s conceivable that arsenic had something to do with all that. One of the revolutionary things about the Pre-Raphaelite painters-Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt and the others-was their use of the vivid new pigments that the chemical industry had recently developed, especially a brilliant green called Emerald Green, or Paris Green, made from arsenic. People were shocked by the blazing colour of their paintings, made possible by these new pigments-later the Impressionists used the same colours to achieve their dazzling effects-but they were quite dangerous. The painters absorbed the pigment through their skin, they breathed its fumes and held paintbrushes loaded with it in their mouths. It’s said that arsenic poisoning from Emerald Green was the cause of Monet’s blindness and Van Gogh’s madness. It was Cezanne’s favourite colour, and he developed severe diabetes, a symptom of chronic arsenic poisoning.’

  It was developing into a lecture, and Kathy interrupted. ‘How does Marion fit in?’

  ‘Ah, well, yes. Marion found all this rather fascinating. Too fascinating, really.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It seems a little churlish to criticise her scholarship at a time like this.’

  ‘I’d appreciate a frank opinion; I believe you’re the world expert on this subject.’

  Da Silva chuckled, letting her know he recognised outrageous flattery when he heard it, and didn’t mind in the least.

  ‘Marion was one of the brightest doctoral students I’ve ever had. She was extremely serious about her work, applied herself very diligently. She was quite passionate about her ideas. Rather too much so. It is a classic trap for a scholar to become too attached to a pet theory before all the evidence is in. Marion could be quite headstrong, and ambitious too, desperate to break new ground, achieve new insights. It sometimes made her rather extravagant in her formulations. I had to keep trying to rein her in.’

  ‘Can you tell me what her particular ideas about arsenic were?’

  ‘Oh…’ He flapped a hand, his sigh almost a groan. ‘She tried to extend what was probably just their
ignorance about the dangers of paint pigments into a whole philosophy. She speculated that the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a fascination with death, especially tragic, premature death, and that this was mixed up with their notions of romantic love and sexual freedom. Well, they certainly did have tangled sex lives, but Marion blew it out of all proportion. She was obsessed.’

  ‘It does sound ambitious.’

  ‘Quite impossible. Absurdly broad for a doctoral thesis.’ He leaned forward, punching the point home with his index finger, and Kathy saw another side to him, pugnacious and domineering. ‘She was wandering off into areas in which she had no expertise-forensic medicine, psychology, chemistry, you name it.’ He gave a snort. ‘The provisional title of her thesis was Sex and Death: A Pre-Raphaelite Discourse. You see what I mean?’ He spread his hands. ‘Somewhat melodramatic.’

  ‘But they were pretty melodramatic, the Pre-Raphaelites, weren’t they?’

  He smiled at Kathy indulgently. ‘Well, yes, but Marion was writing an academic treatise, not a novel. That was our compromise title. Her first efforts were even more lurid-“lust” figured prominently, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Was there much lust in Marion’s life, would you say?’

  He held Kathy’s eye for a moment, then said, very deliberately, ‘I have absolutely no idea. She never talked about her private life.’

  ‘Did she have a job, apart from her studies? Some source of income?’

  Again, he couldn’t say, and his mood changed, becoming impatient and bored. He checked his watch.

  ‘What were your movements last Tuesday, Dr da Silva?’

  He frowned. ‘I was working at home. I’m preparing a paper for a conference in the States, and the deadline is coming up. There are too many interruptions here, so I stayed at home to get it finished.’

  ‘Was anyone with you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ nine

  T he phone went as Kathy slid behind the wheel. Her heart sank as she recognised Nicole’s voice. ‘Oh, hi.’

  ‘You didn’t ring me back. How did it go this morning?’

  ‘Not too well, I’m afraid. It didn’t work out as I’d hoped.’

  ‘You sound harassed.’