Core of Evil (13 page)

‘About Violet Chambers …?’ Lapslie prompted.

‘She was here when we moved in, twenty years or so ago. Her and her husband – Jack. He died a few years later. Heart attack, the doctors said. Went quick, whatever it was. One moment he was
weeding the garden, next he keeled over like he’d been shot.’

‘And Mrs Chambers?’

‘She stayed on in the house. Mortgage was paid off. I suppose she could have moved away, but they had no children. She seemed to manage okay. Pottered down to the shops once a week. We offered to help, but she was a bit stand-offish. Didn’t like to socialise. I think she thought she’d married beneath her when she married Jack. I don’t think we ever saw inside the house. Not once, in twenty years. That’s why it seemed so odd.’

Emma leaned forward. ‘What seemed odd?’

Mrs Halloran arrived from the kitchen with a tray which she put down on a small table between the armchairs. ‘Well, one day she popped a note through our door saying she’d had to go away,’ Mrs Halloran said. ‘Which was unusual, as she’d never bothered telling us about anything like that before. Apparently her sister had been taken ill. We didn’t even know she had a sister. She said she was going to look after her. We never saw her again – not that we ever saw her much when she was there. But the next thing we knew, someone else was moving into the house.’ She looked up, eyes meeting Lapslie’s as she poured the tea. ‘We presumed she died.’

‘She did,’ Lapslie confirmed.

‘And what about the sister?’

‘I really don’t know.’ Lapslie glanced across at
Emma, hoping she could pick up the story. Mrs Halloran’s face, so close to his, was mildly off-putting.

‘There’s some question about the estate,’ Emma took over smoothly. ‘We’re just making routine inquiries. You say she kept herself to herself, and you very rarely saw her. Did she have any visitors that you noticed?’

Mrs Halloran handed Lapslie a cup of tea. ‘I can’t really say.’

‘There was someone,’ Mr Halloran said suddenly.

His wife eyed him. ‘Was there?’

‘A woman. Saw her a couple of times leaving the house. Thought she was a home help or something, although come to think of it she was a bit old to be a home help.’

Mrs Halloran frowned as she handed Emma her cup of tea. Emma looked at it as if she had never seen one before. Perhaps it was the bone china that was putting her off. ‘Now you come to mention it, I think I might have seen her once. She was carrying something out of the house. I assumed she was from the social services.’

‘Did you know her name?’ Lapslie asked.

‘Oh no. We never got to talk to her.’

Lapslie slurped his tea back quickly. ‘Thanks for your help. If you remember anything else …’ He made to get up, but something in Mr Halloran’s eyes kept him sitting.

‘Didn’t we get a Christmas card?’ he asked his wife.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I think I still have it.’ She headed for the back half of the room. ‘Give me a moment and I’ll find it.’

‘She keeps everything,’ Mr Halloran confided. ‘We’ve got Christmas and birthday cards dating back to when we were married.’

‘And the card – that was sent
this
Christmas?’ Emma asked.

‘That’s right.’

Emma glanced over at Lapslie. He knew what she was thinking. Violet Chambers had died somewhere in the region of nine months before. When people had been cheerily singing Christmas carols and exchanging presents, when they had been watching the Queen’s Speech or sleeping off a surfeit of turkey, Violet Chambers’ body had been slowly decomposing, returning the stuff of which she had been made to nature. Small animals had been burrowing through her innards.

So who had sent the card?

After a few moments rummaging in a cardboard box, Mrs Halloran returned triumphantly, holding not only a Christmas card but a postcard as well. ‘I’d forgotten this,’ she said, waving it in her husband’s face. ‘It arrived a week or so after she left.’

Lapslie looked at the Christmas card first. Mass produced for some charity, the picture on the front
was so generically festive as to be laughable. Some people, he reflected, went through years studying graphic arts at college with high hopes of working in advertising or magazine design, only to end up churning out endless paintings of robins and snowmen and snow-laden branches. Probably in July, so the cards could be ready in time. What happened to these people? Did they eventually die of a broken heart, their dreams of a high-profile career dashed, or did they end up committing suicide, depressed by all the production-line festivity they had to create? He’d have to ask Dr Catherall whether she had a glut of dead graphic artists in her mortuary come the autumn.

Thinking of Dr Catherall made him realise that he needed to talk to her about the results of the tests she had ordered on the samples from Violet Chambers’ body.

All that was written in the interior of the Christmas card was a signature, appended to the usual meaningless printed message. The writing was cursive, rounded, done with a fountain pen. The postcard had, to all appearances, been written with the same fountain pen. It was a plain, white card with no picture on it. The Hallorans’ address was written on one side, and the message on the other simply said: ‘Dear David and Jean. I don’t know how long I will be away, but I suspect it might be some time. I have let the house out while I’m gone – I was
worried that it would be empty, but at least this way I know it will be looked after, and I’ll get some (much needed!) income. Take care, Violet.’ The stamp on the front was a standard first-class stamp, and the postmark was blurred into incoherence.

‘And this is the only communication you’ve had since she left?’

‘That’s right,’ Mrs Halloran said.

‘What about the writing? Is it Violet Chambers’?’

‘I really wouldn’t know. I don’t think she ever wrote to us when she was here.’

Lapslie passed the two items to Emma. As she examined them, Lapslie asked: ‘I don’t suppose you kept the envelope the Christmas card came in, by any chance?’

‘Why would we?’ Mr Halloran replied, genuinely surprised.

‘No reason,’ Lapslie sighed. ‘No reason at all.’ He made as if to get up. ‘Well, we won’t take up any more of your time. Thanks for the tea.’

‘A couple more questions, if I might,’ Emma said, still sitting. Lapslie sank down heavily in his chair again. ‘Do you have any photographs of Violet Chambers?’

Mrs Halloran shook her head. ‘No, my dear. I can’t think of any reason why we might.’

Emma nodded. ‘What about her appearance, then? Was there anything out of the ordinary about her? Any distinguishing features?’

As both the Hallorans considered, Lapslie nodded at Emma. Good question.

‘There was a scar,’ Mrs Halloran said eventually.

‘On her neck,’ Mr Halloran confirmed. He tapped his own neck, just below the Adam’s apple. ‘Just here.’

‘Thanks,’ Lapslie said again. He glanced over at Emma. ‘If there’s nothing else …?’

She shook her head, and they left, taking some time to disengage themselves from the Hallorans’ hospitality. For one horrible moment Lapslie thought they were going to be invited to stay for lunch, but fortunately it didn’t happen.

Walking back to Emma’s car, Lapslie said, ‘That was good thinking about the distinguishing features. I’d forgotten about the scar on the corpse’s neck. Diphtheria, wasn’t it?’

‘Breathing tube inserted when she was young,’ Emma confirmed. ‘At least, according to the pathologist. It gives us some additional faith that the body is Violet Chambers.’

‘Were we in any doubt?’

‘Well, all we had were the dentures.’ Stopping to unlock her car, she said: ‘Where do we go from here, sir?’

Lapslie looked up and down the road, thinking. ‘The estate agents near the station – the ones that have been renting Violet’s house to the Wetheralls since she disappeared. At the very least, they can tell
us where the rent is being paid to.’ He sighed. ‘I feel as if we’re getting more and more information without making any progress. We know that Violet Chambers died in the middle of a forest. Someone must have left her there, even if they weren’t responsible for her death – and we still don’t know how she died. We can assume that the same person sent the postcard and the Christmas card to the Hallorans. There might be more cards floating around as well, if she had other friends. Either way, it looks as if someone is trying to keep Violet Chambers alive, at least in people’s minds. Why? What’s in it for them? I can’t imagine that the rent coming in from the house is enough to justify the risk, no matter how nice this area is.’

‘Then how do we proceed, sir?’

‘That, Detective Sergeant Bradbury, depends on two things: what we find out from the estate agents, and whether the good Doctor Catherall has managed to establish a cause of death yet.’

They found the nearest station within ten minutes. It was just off a crossroads of shops, wine bars and restaurants. There were three estate agents’ premises within a short walk of one another, and Lapslie and Emma had to check all three before they struck lucky. Lucky, Lapslie reflected, was a relative term. According to the girl they talked to, the house had been put up for rent less than a year before. She hadn’t been working there when the house had come
onto their books, but according to the computer files – which she consulted with rather bad grace after repeated prompting from Lapslie – the owner, a Mrs Violet Chambers – had completed most of the paperwork by post. The rent money – minus the standard cut taken by the estate agents – was paid regularly into a building society account. And that was that.

They drove back in silence from Ipswich, each concerned with their own thoughts. As they hit the motorway, Lapslie’s mobile bleeped. The taste of chocolate in his mouth made him realise that they hadn’t eaten lunch yet.

The message on the mobile’s screen said:
You may wish to revisit the mortuary. I believe I have established the cause of Violet Chambers’ death. It is not –

The message stopped there. Trust Dr Catherall to avoid the contractions and short cuts of texting and over-run the number of characters allowed in a message. A few seconds later, with another beep, a second message – or, rather, the continuation of the first – appeared.

– exactly what I had been expecting. I will be working late. Arrive whenever convenient. Jane Catherall.

‘Head back to Braintree,’ he said, deleting the messages. ‘Doctor Catherall’s found something. And if you know of any decent pubs on the way, stop off. I could do with a bite to eat.’

Following a quick cheese and ham baguette at a white-washed pub just off the A12, they made good time. Emma brought the Mondeo to a halt in the mortuary’s car park just short of three in the afternoon.

‘Do you want me to come in, sir?’

Lapslie considered for a moment. Emma didn’t particularly like standing around listening to technical talk: that had become clear last time. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Check the building society account the rent is paid into. I want to know who’s spending that money. I’ll get a car from the station to pick me up.’

Dan, the mortuary attendant, let him in when he buzzed. Lapslie quickly strode ahead and pushed his way through the double doors, eager to discover what Dr Catherall had found out.

The mortuary tables were empty. Dr Catherall was over by a small autoclave, leafing through a sheaf of pink paper, her polio-ravaged body dwarfed by the size of the tables, the cabinets that lined the room, the air-conditioning pipes in the ceiling. The ever-present background smell, cloying and faecal, made his throat tighten. He forced the reaction down. How did she ever get used to it?

‘Doctor Catherall?’

She looked up from the papers she was reading. He had forgotten how mild and blue her eyes were. ‘Ah, Detective Chief Inspector.’

‘Mark.’

‘Mark it is, then.’

‘You texted me.’

‘I did. A hateful thing, texting. It encourages lazy writing and imprecision of thought. It is, however, too useful to lose.’

Impatiently, he cut through her stream of consciousness. ‘What else have you found?’

‘You will remember,’ she started, placing the papers down on top of a cabinet, ‘that the body had been subject to slow, anaerobic decomposition and to a certain amount of animal activity. This made the examination problematic, to say the least. There were, however, no immediate signs of heart attack, stroke or exposure as far as I could tell. Given the fact that the body was found in a shallow grave in the middle of a forest, with no obvious means of transport around, wrapped tightly in plastic sheeting and with the fingers on the right hand removed by a pair of sharp, opposed blades, like a pair of chef’s shears, I am inclined to rule out natural causes.’

She smiled. Lapslie just sighed quietly to himself. God save him from pathologists who liked to give lectures.

‘Now, apart from the damage to the back of the skull, which could have resulted from the car crash that excavated her body, there are no signs of pre-mortem attack – no fractures, no stab wounds, nothing that would account for a sudden collapse.’

‘Doctor, you’ve spent the past few minutes listing every possible thing that
didn’t
kill her, with the exception of a freak meteor shower and an attack by crocodiles. If I don’t find out soon what actually did the job then I’m going to strap you to one of those spare tables and prod you with your own surgical instruments until you tell me.’

She had the good grace to laugh. ‘Very well. You will recall that we found the corpses of several small animals nestled within her chest cavity. This started me thinking. What could have caused them to die, and die so quickly that they could not escape? To cut to the chase, I tested the poor lady’s stomach contents – at least, what remained of them – for toxins. And I found some.’

‘
Poison!
’ That was the last thing Lapslie was expecting.

‘Indeed. To be more precise, her stomach lining, liver and kidneys were saturated with colchicine – a drug used in small doses to treat gout.’

Lapslie shook his head slowly. ‘So she accidentally overdosed on her own medicine? In the middle of a forest?’