Dark Mirror (10 page)

Kathy smiled. ‘How did Marion put up with that?’

‘She could handle it. He’s supposed to be a world authority on the Pre-Raphaelites, so I suppose she didn’t have much choice.’

‘And Marion was particularly keen on that period.’

‘Oh yes. The way she talked about Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it sounded like he was the only man she’d ever really loved.’

‘But he’s dead?’

Tina nodded. ‘Yeah, over a hundred years ago. Sad, really—for Marion I mean.’

‘What did you do for Marion, exactly?’

‘Library searches, mostly.’ Tina’s expression softened as she explained, as if this was a part of her life that had gone well. ‘I wasn’t looking at the main Pre-Raphaelite literature—that’s what she was working on. But she wanted me to poke around the edges: old newspapers, memoirs, court records, books, diaries—anything really—by people who might have seen them from another angle, like doctors, lawyers, relatives, other writers and painters. She gave me lists of key words to work from. Marion said the most important thing was the choice of key words.’

‘Can I see them?’

The girl looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think they’ll mean much, but okay.’ She got to her feet and went to her room, returning with a folded sheet of paper. ‘This was the original list. From time to time she’d add new words. This is a copy; you can keep it.’

‘Thanks.’ Kathy scanned the words, mostly names that meant little to her:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal
Jane (Janey) Burden/Morris
Fanny Cornforth
Annie Miller
Lena Wardle
George Wardle
Madeleine Smith
James Smith
H. Haverlock
Poison
Arsenic
Laudanum
Suicide/suicide pact
Ophelia
The Awakening Conscience
Guenevere

Kathy pointed to the words
Poison
and
Arsenic
and asked Tina, ‘Why these?’

‘Oh, it comes up all the time, you’d be surprised. The Victorians used arsenic for all kinds of stuff.’ She caught the puzzled look on Kathy’s face, and said, ‘You think she was deliberately poisoned by someone, don’t you?’

‘It seems probable. Can you think of anyone who would have hated her that much?’

Tina shook her head. ‘I just can’t believe this,’ she whispered, and tears began to dribble down her cheeks.

Kathy dug a packet of tissues from her pocket. ‘Here . . . I’ll leave you my phone number. You might remember something that will help us get to the bottom of this. We may also need to speak to you later to get a formal statement.’

She looked up as Jummai approached with a tray and three mugs. ‘Sorry, Jummai, I have to go. Thanks for your help. Will you stay with Tina for a bit?’

‘Yes, and I will pray for Marion,’ Jummai said, as Kathy left.

K
athy’s nose led her to the information counter of the laboratories. It began at the front door to the street, a faint chemical smell reminiscent of the swimming pool, and built up to something more like an attack on the Western Front.

A man in a white coat answered her ping on the counter bell. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m after . . .’ Kathy had to stop to clear her throat with a cough.

‘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, Frère 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 of 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?’