The Arsenic Labyrinth

by Martin Edwards

  What prompted Armstrong Clough, a businessman with a nose as hard as Helvellyn, to offer a job to a slacker who hadn’t even made a success out of petty crime? Armstrong was the sort of Englishman who, during the Thirties, argued that Oswald Mosley talked a lot of sense and that Hitler was the sort of leader any nation worth its salt required. War might have changed his tune, but he remained, if Edith’s journal was any guide, an old-fashioned bully contemptuous of altruism.

  Only one explanation occurred. It must have amused Armstrong to have an Inchmore at his beck and call. Long ago, Albert Clough had to jump when Sir Clifford Inchmore said jump. Now the Cloughs owned the hall and the Inchmores depended upon their goodwill. Armstrong might be a miserable old bugger with a gammy leg, while William was a dashing ladies’ man, but it was Armstrong who possessed the money, the mansion and the gorgeous bride, while William had to make do with a cottage in a back street and poor, unlovely Edith. A very satisfactory arrangement. The only snag was that William’s roving eye soon fell on Betty. A naïve and neglected woman whose son was growing up and whose husband was often away from home was easy prey for an accomplished Lothario.

  It was bound to end in tears. William was reckless and left a handful of letters from Betty imperfectly concealed at the bottom of his sock drawer, where Edith chanced upon them. The correspondence made it clear that Betty’s conscience tormented her and that she wanted to end the affair, but that William was determined to have her leave Armstrong and extract a hefty sum from him as the price of hushing up the scandal, so that the two of them could run away together. A ludicrous and desperate plan, but Edith knew her husband well enough to realise that he was capable of trying to carry it out, with disastrous consequences for them all. She’d grown accustomed to his infidelities, but this was one betrayal too many. The prospect of being abandoned to penury and forced through shame to leave a village she had come to love was intolerable. She had to act.

  She schooled herself in the art of imitating Betty’s girlish handwriting and penned a note asking William to come to Mispickel Scar the following afternoon. The letters revealed that the loneliness of the site of the old arsenic works made it a favourite venue for the lovers’ couplings. The prospect of William meeting his death in the same spot appealed to Edith’s uncompromising sense of justice. She had discovered that Betty arranged for her notes to William to be left in his desk by a young messenger called Vinny who worked at the company’s office in Yewdale Road.

  Vinny was a simple-minded lad from Liverpool, one of scores of kids who had come as evacuees to Coniston at the start of the Second World War. He’d been billeted at the hall and, after his parents were killed during the Blitz, he was left without a family and any reason to return home when the hostilities came to an end. Vinny had a dog-like devotion to Betty Clough, and she persuaded her husband to employ him out of charity. She was popular in the village for her generous spirit and good works, although Edith confided to her diary her suspicion that so far as Vinny was concerned, Betty had an ulterior motive. Yet Edith harboured no more than a superficial resentment of her husband’s lover. She understood how easy it was to succumb to William’s charm.

  What Edith didn’t realise was that someone else knew about Betty’s affair. Young Alban Clough detested his father, who regarded him as a good-for-nothing dreamer with no head for business, but he didn’t care to think of his mother sleeping with an Inchmore. At his father’s insistence, Alban lent a hand in the office. He soon learned that Vinny was acting as go-between. He persuaded Vinny to let him read some of the letters Betty entrusted to him and seized every opportunity, while William was out gallivanting, to snoop round his room. That was how he’d found the letter Edith had placed in her husband’s desk. Much more familiar with his mother’s hand than William, he recognised it at once as a forgery. Curiosity piqued, he’d trekked up to Mispickel Scar and found a hiding place, overlooking the remains of the labyrinth, an hour before the time stipulated in Edith’s message. Waiting to watch what would happen.

  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.’

  JOURNAL EXTRACT

  Men never paid much attention to me. I felt awkward in their company, though I flatter myself that in my youth the fullness of my figure attracted an occasional covetous glance. When William, handsome, dashing William, poured flattery on me like honey, I was in Heaven. I let him have his will, I abandoned all my natural restraint. The slow realisation that it was my father’s money, rather than my soft flesh and my caresses, stirring the fire in his loins spread bitterness through me like a cancer. After his death, I renounced intimacy with the opposite sex and kept myself to myself, accepting near-solitude as the price for having evaded the gallows.

  I have forgotten what it is to have men casting me a sideways look, as they wonder about the body concealed beneath layers of clothing. They prefer not to think about my flesh. Candidly, neither do I.

  That is why it came as a shock to be spied upon for a second time.

  A hot July afternoon. I do not care for heatwaves, they make me sweat and struggle for breath. I prefer to go upstairs and lie down. On this occasion, with forecasters talking of temperatures in the nineties, I take a bath to cool down and on returning to my bedroom, consider my wardrobe, searching for clothing that is light and airy.

  Suddenly, in the dressing table mirror, I glimpse a reflection. A face, staring in through the window. A face – another! – that once I had loved. But all too easily in my case, it seems that love can turn to scorn.

  On this occasion I am not naked, I have the benefit of a fluffy white towel. But I shriek with anger and charge across the room like an old, enraged sow. I need to close the window I had opened to admit a breath of air and draw the curtains to preserve my modesty.

  My wrath frightens him. I see terror whiten his stupid face as he jumps away from me. But when you are standing on top of a tall and unsteady ladder, there is nowhere safe for you
to jump to.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  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 …’