The Arsenic Labyrinth

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Orange-yellow flames writhed like dancers in the night sky as Hannah approached Inchmore Hall. Heart pounding, she’d broken speed limits travelling twenty miles on dark, twisting roads. When she pulled up on the grass verge fifty yards short of the drive, an inferno was raging.

Fire frightened her, she hated its savagery, wanted to shut her ears to its hoarse, greedy roar. She’d never forgotten attending her first arson as a DC. An attack on a supermarket left a security man with cruel burns and a face ruined forever. The arsonist, a bored shelf-stacker, told her later that fire was exciting and passionate, it turned him on like nothing else. He’d licked his lips as he spoke of hot and fast flames, ripping through the building, out of control. Nondescript, spotty, and eighteen years old, he was the most dangerous young man Hannah had ever met.

Gritting her teeth, she slammed shut the car door. The fire was loud and wild, a monster holding the hall captive, glorying in its power to consume and destroy. The wooden gables were blackened and about to crumble, the blinds at the windows had burnt to nothing. The temperature had sunk below zero, but the night was dry, just when a downpour would have answered prayers. Beyond a cordon, firefighters were striving to tame the beast. From the other side of the road, a huddle of spectators gawped at the spectacle. When Hannah pushed through, a small man in an over-sized ski jacket gave her a dirty look, outraged by the presumptuousness of a latecomer to the evening show. Half a dozen teenagers were giggling, one was taking pictures with her mobile. This was better than Guy Fawkes Night.

Smoke was poisoning the air and as Hannah reached tall gateposts topped with stone pineapples, she had to fight for breath. She wrapped her scarf around her face to protect her mouth and sinuses from the acrid stench. As she moved forward, she felt the heat on her cheeks.

The old mansion was dying before her eyes, suffocating in the clutches of the raging creature. As she watched, a timber beam fell to the gravelled drive with a deafening crash. A nanosecond of near-silence, then the group of onlookers let out a collective gasp.

Hannah spotted Maggie Eyre, in fleece, jeans and leather boots, talking to a grey-haired fire officer and two uniformed PCs on the lawn. Their eyes met and, with a quick word to the men, Maggie hurried down the drive to meet her.

‘So much for your quiet evening down the pub?’ Hannah had to shout to make herself heard above the din.

‘We’d arranged to meet friends, but Dave’s gone off on his own.’ Maggie started coughing. ‘I had to stop and see if there was anything I could do.’

‘Anyone inside?’

‘Not sure. It’s still too dangerous for anyone to force their way in, even with breathing apparatus and cutting equipment. For all anyone knows, Mr Clough and his daughter are out tonight. I hope to God they are, because we’ve seen nobody and anyone trapped won’t have stood a chance. Their lungs will have choked with fumes inside minutes.’

Hannah’s eyes were stinging. ‘Any idea what happened?’

‘Flames were seen by a passer-by who dialled 999, but even though the station is close by, the fire was so fierce that by the time the first fire engine arrived, they could tell it was going to be a long night. No clue on cause yet, God knows whether this is accident or arson, but I’ve been talking to the fire officer in charge. He says his boss had a row with Alban Clough about the need to upgrade safety precautions in the Museum. In the end, the old man threw him out. It’s with the legal people to take action right now. Too few smoke alarms, let alone a decent sprinkler system. As for the candles …’

In her mind, Hannah heard Alban’s sonorous complaints about the pettifoggery of the bureaucrats. No need for m’learned friends to bother now. The fire had done their work for them.

‘Alban Clough’s a law unto himself.’

‘They reckon Inchmore Hall is a deathtrap. This was a disaster waiting to happen.’

‘We need to …’

‘My God! My God!’

A woman had burst through the cordon and was clattering up the driveway. Alex Clough, in a suede coat and high heels. Thank God she had not been roasted to a cinder inside her blazing home. She wasn’t dressed for sprinting and as she drew level with Hannah and Maggie, she stumbled and sank to the ground.

‘Is your father inside?’ Hannah bellowed.

‘I don’t know! He was at home this evening. Unless he managed to get out …’

She looked up and saw the look on the two women’s faces. Breathing hard, she hauled herself back on to her feet.

‘I must try to save him!’

Hannah rushed to her side and grasped her hand. In part to comfort, in part to restrain. ‘You can’t go in there.’

Alex began to sob. ‘My father, my father, my father …’

She repeated the words time after time, even as Hannah and Maggie put their arms around her so that they could lead her to a safer place. Somewhere to wait and watch while the only home she’d ever known burned to ashes.

Hannah wasn’t answering her mobile, so Daniel sent her a text asking her to contact him urgently. I know name of 2nd body. If that didn’t prompt a call, nothing would. After what he had read, he couldn’t sleep, so he stayed up all night in his favourite chair, smoothing out the tangles in his mind. When Miranda came downstairs in the blue-striped rugby shirt she wore to bed, she told him he looked knackered. He mumbled something unintelligible, his thoughts far away. They exchanged desultory small talk over toast and coffee in their gleaming new kitchen. He wasn’t in the mood to explain what he had discovered. Hannah, he wanted to save it for Hannah.

She called back five minutes after Miranda departed on a shopping trip to Kendal. It was not long after nine, but he heard her stifling a yawn even as she said hello. She sounded as tired as he felt

‘Sorry, long night. Inchmore Hall went up in a ball of flame.’

He swore. ‘What happened?’

‘Remember Manderley ablaze in the final reel of Rebecca?’ She’d told him once that in her teens this was a favourite film, she’d even had a brief crush on Olivier. ‘I could have sworn I saw Mrs Danvers’ crazy face at the window. But this time there wasn’t a happy ending. Alban Clough was inside. He didn’t stand a chance.’

He pictured the old man as he’d last seen him. Smiling slyly, enjoying the thrill of private knowledge, protesting ignorance of the second body buried below the Arsenic Labyrinth. Of course, he was lying, but that was nothing new. He’d lived a lie for fifty years, hugged his secret close, to the very end.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Sorry. I was thinking …’

‘This text you sent me. What have you found out?’

‘The dead man you discovered when you went in search of Emma Bestwick. His name was William Inchmore.’

‘William? How can you be sure?’

‘Because I’ve read about his murder.’

‘Read about it? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’

‘He was stabbed to death with a bread knife, wasn’t he?’

A sharp intake of breath, then a long pause as she absorbed his news. She hadn’t mentioned to him how the man had been killed. Even though she confided in him more than she should, there were limits. And the information hadn’t been released to the media. When she spoke again, her tone was wry.

‘Tell you what, Daniel. You must have inherited the detective gene. So what exactly is this you’ve been reading?’

‘The murderer’s account of the crime.’

‘If you tell me you bought it in Marc’s shop, I’ll scream.’

‘No need, the story is in a private journal purchased by Jeremy Erskine’s historical society. Not that Jeremy has ever read it. I’m the first.’

‘And who is the author? Not Alban Clough, surely?’

‘No, although he knew exactly what had happened. His mother was the mistress of William Inchmore. William used the Arsenic Labyrinth as a trysting place, that’s where he made love to Betty Clough.’

‘Are you saying that Betty murdered him?’

‘No, that was Edith Inchmore, William’s wife. When she learned about the affair, she lured him to the Labyrinth and went up there herself with a knife. What she didn’t know was that Alban was hiding out up there. He witnessed her crime, but he didn’t move a muscle to stop her. He kept quiet as he watched Edith kill his mother’s lover.’

They arranged to meet at a new Bavarian coffee bar in the heart of Kendal. Daniel parked in the multi-storey at Westmorland Shopping Centre and fished a tote bag out of the boot. None of the passers-by in Stricklandgate gave him a second glance, nobody guessed that the bag held a confession to murder.

He’d pieced together the Inchmores’ story from Edith’s journal. After George wrecked the family business, his son set about ruining their name. What William lacked in wealth, he more than made up for in swaggering self-confidence and raffish good looks. He spent his early adult years sleeping around and squandering what was left of the family fortune at the racecourse, while drifting from job to job. With Inchmore Hall sold to the Cloughs and his parents dead, he had little to keep him in Coniston and during a spell selling silk stockings in Yorkshire, he met and married Edith Sharpe. A plain spinster whose acid tongue belied a dread of being left on the shelf, she was quick to fall under his spell. Above all, she had the inestimable advantage of a father who had made a packet from a leather business in Bradford. William didn’t see marriage as an impediment to philandering and gambling, but rather as a means of funding his favourite activities. He faked a heart condition to escape military service and spent the war years selling cosmetics and petrol on the black market. A fortnight before VE Day, he was arrested, and although he managed to talk his way out of a prison sentence, old man Sharpe cut off his daughter’s allowance and made Yorkshire County Cricket Club the main beneficiary of his estate. Edith stood by her husband and never spoke to Daddy again but, after failing to make a go of various improbable business ventures, William was forced to return to Coniston and go cap in hand to Armstrong Clough and ask for work.

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 naive 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.’