Core of Evil (25 page)

‘I’ve had Control check the address out,’ Bradbury said, flipping her own phone closed. ‘It’s listed as belonging to a Rhona McIntyre. No records of any incidents related to the address, and she’s clear as far as the system can tell. Council Tax is paid off every year, no outstanding mortgage. I’ve got someone back in the office trying to get a search warrant arranged, but –’ she shrugged ‘– I can’t help feeling there’ll be an unexpected delay.’

‘Just long enough for someone else to get there first,’ Lapslie said. ‘Okay – let’s go. We’re half way there already. And if we think there’s a crime about to be committed, we can go in without a warrant and explain ourselves afterwards.’

They drove off in silence. Lapslie was glad to put Colchester behind him. He was sure there were some wonderfully historic and picturesque parts of the
town to be seen, but there was something about that street that made him think of a whipped dog, too tired to fight, just clinging to existence.

They took a different route out of town, past a series of roundabouts and a modernistic glass and metal station. That was the problem with architecture these days, Lapslie thought as he drove: it was all designed in sections that could be bolted together in a series of shapes. There was no overall coherence, no shape, no structure. Just a set of similar panels, abutting one another, all looking the same.

The drive to the farmhouse took just over an hour, and Lapslie noticed as he drove that a number of road signs were pointing back towards the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered. Depending on where one was coming from, the road through the forest would be an obvious route to take if you were heading for the house. As, he suspected, the murderer was.

There were two possibilities, as far as Lapslie could see. The first was that the murderer lived in the house and was returning there with the body for some reason. The other was that the murderer didn’t live there, but wanted to leave the body there anyway. The third possibility was that the house had nothing to do with the murder of Violet Chambers, but Lapslie didn’t want to think about that, partly because he desperately wanted there to be a break in the case but mostly because he could taste strawberries,
even though the radio was off and Emma Bradbury wasn’t saying anything. He was in for a surprise, but whether it was going to be pleasant or unpleasant was still uncertain.

Emma’s phone rang. After a few seconds of ‘Yes,’ and ‘Uh-huh,’ she disconnected the call and turned to Lapslie. ‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘The search warrant’s been turned down.’

‘Someone’s got it in for us,’ Lapslie said bitterly.

The last few hundred yards were along a dirt track that showed little sign of ever having been maintained. Hawthorn hedges flashed past on either side. Through gaps in the hawthorn, Lapslie could see fields that had returned to nature: weeds and grasses predominating over whatever had once been planted there. If there was anyone still at the house, they weren’t farming any more. If they ever had.

They found the house around a turn in the track. It was set in the middle of an overgrown grass lawn and was built of red brick, two storeys high, with tall windows and a large portico topped with a pointed wooden roof. The windows were all curtained.

The car stopped in front of the house, on a mossy stone drive through which hardy weeds sprouted. Lapslie approached the portico. Two steps led up to the front door, vertical cracks running through the stone like frozen trickles of black water. Emma Bradbury was just behind him, and she touched his shoulder before he could lift the doorknocker.

‘Boss,’ she said, ‘look over there.’

He followed the direction she was pointing. Off to one side of the house, shielded by a low fence, was a garden. Unlike the drive and the surrounding fields, it appeared to be beautifully kept. Scarlet and mauve flowers burst open against a background of vivid green leaves. Lapslie could see berries of various kinds – red, blue, purple, black – hanging heavily from nodding stems.

‘Someone’s been here,’ Emma warned. ‘That garden has been maintained, and recently.’

‘It’s as if whoever lives here doesn’t care about the drive or the fields, but the garden is their pride and joy,’ Lapslie said. ‘Okay, let’s get on with it.’

The door had been painted green at some time in the past, but sunlight and rain had faded it to the point where it was difficult to make out what shade it might originally have been. The wood of the door frame was crumbling along its sharp edges. A window, a few feet to the right of the door, was white with cobwebs, both inside and out. One of the panes of glass was cracked.

He knocked once, twice; the echoes rolling thunderously through the house in search of anyone who might answer. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. Lapslie knocked again. The sounds joined the previous set of echoes, bouncing back and forth, rolling from room to room and from downstairs to upstairs and back. Still nothing.

Stepping back, Lapslie twisted his body and swung a foot up at the door, his heel hitting it a foot or so below the lock. The wooden door frame splintered. He kicked again, and the door flew open, knocking a pile of letters against the wall. They scattered like snow.

‘Police!’ he called. ‘Come out where we can see you!’

No movement, and no sound. Together, Lapslie and Bradbury entered the house.

An old, unpleasant smell hung in the air, and Lapslie had to fight the urge to brush it aside as he moved. The hall was dark; a faded carpet running its length. Various doors led off the hall. They were all shut.

He approached the closest room – the one whose window he had noticed to the right of the front door – and pushed it open. It whispered against carpet as it swung back. The smell of something deeply unpleasant suddenly intensified.

Light from the cobwebbed window filtered into the room, illuminating a long dining table set for dinner. Fine porcelain tea cups were placed at every setting. A matching tea pot sat in the centre.

Twelve people sat quietly at the table. They didn’t react to Lapslie’s entrance: no turning heads, no expressions of surprise, nothing.

‘Police,’ Lapslie repeated. ‘DCI Lapslie. Who owns this house?’

Nobody moved.

Emma Bradbury strode across to the window and brought her hand down, brushing the cobwebs away. Light flooded in.

Lapslie took a step back. Emma gasped. ‘Oh good Christ,’ she said flatly.

The twelve people sat around the table were all women, and they were all dead. They had been placed in order of death. The body closest to Emma was the freshest, but even so, its raddled flesh had sagged away from the bones, bloated and fly-blown, green and purple and grey. Her eyelids had shrivelled back against empty sockets. The body closest to Lapslie was the oldest: no more than a skeleton whose flesh had been gradually replaced with cobwebs. All of them were ruined things that once may have been beautiful.

‘What the hell are we dealing with?’ Emma whispered.

‘ “Why this
is
Hell,”’ Lapslie murmured softly, ‘ “nor are we out of it.”’

That night, her ceiling dappled with moonlight reflected off the sea, Daisy lay awake. Her sheets were clammy beneath her, and she could feel every fold in the cotton against her old, wrinkled skin. No matter what position she curled into, she could not find that elusive door to sleep.

It was the newspaper report that was bothering her. The report of the discovery of Violet Chambers’ body. The first mistake she had ever made, and it was going to come back to haunt her. She knew it would.

The shock of seeing that newspaper headline had sent her into a panic. Eunice had made her a cup of tea and sat with her, not really understanding what had driven Daisy into such a state, but Daisy was frozen, her mind circling around and around like a fly orbiting a light bulb.

And in her mind, the wet
smack
of the branch as it hit Violet’s head, caving the bone in. The blood, matting the grey hair. The long gasp as she exhaled her last breath.

And as she relived the memories, as she went back to the time before the branch hit Violet’s skull, when she was driving along that country road with Violet Chambers slumped in the passenger seat, she slipped slowly and inadvertently into the long dark tunnel of sleep and the memories turned surreptitiously into dreams.

The sun shining through the leaves made patterns like black lace on the road. She maintained a steady forty-five miles an hour in her Volvo – not fast enough to attract anyone’s attention; not slow enough to annoy people sufficiently that they would remember her, and the car, for more than the few moments that it took for them to overtake her.

She had carefully manoeuvred Violet’s dead body into the car before dawn that morning, using the wheelchair she had brought in specifically for that purpose. Fortunately the driveway led all the way up to the front door, so she didn’t have to wheel the body down to the road, as she occasionally had before. The tricky bit, as always, had been the moment when she had to slide the body from the wheelchair into the passenger seat, but the arm on the wheelchair folded down and the application of a little strength, and the passing of a noisy refuse lorry, had made the job easier.

A tartan blanket over Violet’s lap completed the illusion that she was merely asleep. Her eyes were closed, and a little tape laid sticky side out across her
gums ensured that her mouth wouldn’t gape open at an inopportune moment, such as when they were parked at traffic lights. A thin length of white cotton hidden in the folds of her neck and knotted behind the head rest stopped her head from lolling in an ungainly fashion onto her chest. All in all, Daisy thought as she gazed sideways at Violet from the driver’s seat, she looked better now than she had in real life. She certainly didn’t look like someone who had ingested a fatal dose of meadow saffron only twelve hours before.

Half an hour after eating the cake into which Daisy had carefully grated several meadow saffron roots, Violet had suffered a series of convulsions while she was sitting in the back garden. Daisy had watched with pleasure as white foam had trickled from Violet’s mouth and her lips and skin turned blue. Sweat trickled along the prominent folds in her skin that gave her such a disapproving look all the time. Her hands clutched at the arms of her deck chair, locking on with such force that Daisy had to later use a kitchen knife to prise them off. And then, after a sudden and violent arching of the back, she had subsided, head slumped forward and eyes hooded, breathing her last, few, shallow breaths.

‘Of all the women I have ever poisoned,’ Daisy had said to her, ‘you have been the most arrogant, the most insensitive and the most stand-offish. You seem to believe that you can look down at everyone
else because your father had a big house and didn’t have to work for a living. In fact, you are a sad, deluded old woman who is dying alone and unmourned. Nobody will know, or care, that you have gone.’

Perhaps her eyelids flickered. Daisy would never know for sure, but she liked to believe that Violet had heard that last valediction, and seen the essential truth in it, before she died. Befriending Violet had been one of the most difficult jobs Daisy had ever done – although she was calling herself Annie then. Annie Moberley. Violet had been stand-offish, suspicious and snobbish, and it was only because Daisy – Annie – hated to break off half way through that she had persevered. She had first met Violet in the local supermarket, where it was obvious that Violet was shopping for one, and wasn’t buying the cheapest cuts of meat and the ‘reduced items’ that pensioners, in Annie’s experience, usually selected. They got chatting on the third or fourth occasion that they bumped into each other, and soon she was popping around for coffee. Soon after that, she was collecting Violet’s prescriptions for antiinflammatories from the local surgery.

Violet had been an odd mix. She desperately wanted some human contact, but at the same time she wanted to be able to look down on whoever she was with. For Annie, who automatically looked down on all her victims, the next few months had
been amongst the most tiring she could recall, as the two of them vied for dominance without Violet ever consciously realising that a battle was going on.

In the hours that Annie spent driving Violet’s body through the early morning she daydreamed about the next few months; of how she was going to progressively strip the house of any expensive items it contained, and raid Violet’s building society account of whatever money it contained. And, from small clues that Violet had let slip, she suspected it contained rather a lot. She would take on Violet’s identity, like slipping on an old overcoat, letting her current one fall away, and become lost in the past. And then, when she grew tired, she would move on, looking for another victim. Although perhaps one less supercilious this time. Annie had felt for a while that Violet was treating her more as an unpaid companion than a friend, and towards the end more as an unpaid servant than a companion.

The car slipped through forests and past industrial estates as the darkness gave way to daylight. After some unquantifiable time, Annie knew that she was nearing her destination: the place where all of her friends eventually came to visit, and did not leave.

A sudden
bang
from beneath the car startled Annie from her dreams. The steering wheel jerked in her hands, and the car began to drag itself towards the trees just as they were coming up to a bend. Panicking, she slammed her foot on the brakes, and
the Volvo slewed violently to a halt, half on the road and half on the grassy verge.

Annie turned the ignition key with a shaking hand. The engine died away. Silence filled the forest.

Eventually, when she could breathe again, when the fluttering of the blood in her neck and her temples had faded, she got out of the car. The front tyre on the side where Violet was sitting was deflated and forlorn, appearing half-melted on the road. She felt panic wash through her. What did one do with a flat tyre? She supposed one had to change it, but how was she supposed to get it off? And where was the spare tyre kept? Was there even a spare tyre in the car? Any tools?