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. eight
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…’
