The Arsenic Labyrinth by Martin Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

into the room. ‘If only.’
    He peered over her shoulder at the file photograph of Emma and sniffed. ‘Ms Ordinary, eh?’
    Harsh, but fair. Emma wasn’t plain, but neither were her looks special. The only extraordinary thing to have happened in her life was that she had disappeared without trace.
    ‘I don’t think she was a warm woman. Hardly any close friends.’
    ‘Boyfriends?’
    ‘She preferred other women.’
    ‘I suppose you’re expecting me to say that was just because she’d not met the right feller?’
    Hannah laughed. ‘Sid Thornicroft wondered if her disappearance was connected with her sex life.’
    ‘She’d met someone new and gone off with her?’
    ‘It was a theory. But we found no trace of any new friendships after she split up with Alexandra Clough.’
    He parked his rear on a corner of her desk. ‘No suggestion she was being stalked?’
    ‘Not by Alex Clough, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
    ‘I was wondering about men. Just because a woman isn’t available, doesn’t mean some dickhead won’t obsess about her.’
    ‘Sid Thornicroft thought that if she had been murdered, the likeliest candidate was a chap called Tom Inchmore. He worked as a handyman at the Museum of Myth and Legend and mooned after Emma. According to the Cloughs, it was simply because she treated him with kindness. But when Sid found he had a record of minor sexual offences, a lightbulb flashed in his brain.’
    ‘I’m guessing you weren’t Sid’s number one fan.’
    A throwaway remark by Ben Kind, in the pub one night, surfaced in her mind. Sid Thornicroft? So pedestrian, he never steps off the pavement. She shrugged.
    ‘What did Inchmore do?’
    ‘Two cautions as a teenager. Once for stealing an old woman’s undies off her washing line and once for peeping into a girls’ changing room at the gym of a local school. In Sid’s opinion, steps on the road to rape and murder.’
    ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
    ‘Yeah, well, I was sent to tease a confession out of Tom Inchmore.’
    She could see him now, an acne-ravaged young man with scruffy black hair and a furtive demeanour who spent too much time peering at her breasts and not enough mumbling answers to her questions. Tom was one of life’s losers; she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. His mother was dead and he lived with his grandmother, Edith Inchmore, a warty, bad-tempered old hag straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales . But Edith had more guts in her little finger than Tom had in his whole body. She simultaneously despised and protected him, engaging a lawyer to warn him not to answer questions and seize every opportunity to complain about police harassment. Hannah had conceived a grudging respect for her determination to safeguard what little was left of the family name. Edith was convinced the police were intent on stitching the lad up. And maybe the old witch wasn’t so far off the mark.
    ‘Any joy?’
    ‘None whatsoever. So Sid brought in the nastiest DC in the force to give Inchmore a hard time. But even he didn’t manage to beat out a confession.’
    ‘Run a criminal records check. See if Tommy’s been a good boy over the past ten years.’
    ‘Over the last five years, certainly.’
    ‘You reckon?’
    ‘He’s been dead that long.’
    ‘Oh yeah? How did that happen?’
    ‘Accident. No suspicious circumstances. He fell off aladder while he was fixing a tile on the roof of the house where he lived.’
    Yes, poor Tom Inchmore had been a loser right to the end.
    ‘So, if he did kill Emma, not much chance of finding what he did with the body.’
    ‘’Fraid not.’
    ‘No wonder Thornicroft gave up the unequal struggle?’
    ‘To concentrate on improving his golf handicap.’
    Les belched to show what he thought about golf. ‘Other theories?’
    ‘Emma might have gone for a walk and fallen into a tarn or down a ravine. It happens. But usually to over-adventurous visitors. Not to people born and bred in the