Core of Evil (26 page)

She looked along the road ahead of the car, as it bent to the right, and then back along the direction she had come. There was nobody in sight. No other cars; no other people. She was alone.

What to do? Annie slumped against the side of the car, hearing the clicking and ticking of the engine as the hot metal cooled. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. So near to her goal, the safe refuge where all her friends ended up, and yet so far. So very far.

In part of her mind Annie knew that she could walk for help, but she couldn’t remember seeing any houses for the last few miles she had driven, and she had no idea how far ahead the next set of houses might be. She was old and tired: she could hardly
make more than few hundred yards before she would have to take a rest. The next best thing would be to flag someone down, but that could take all morning. And whether she went for help or waited there for it to arrive, the people who helped her would see Violet sitting in the passenger seat. They would ask if she was all right. They might offer her a drink of water. And they would realise, sooner rather than later, that she was dead.

And then it would all start to unravel. Every carefully woven thread of Annie’s life.

Whatever she did, she would have to get rid of Violet’s body first. For a moment she wondered whether she could manhandle the body into the boot of the car, but she rejected that thought. The spare tyre was probably somewhere in there, and if not the spare tyre then probably some tools or something else that would be needed. No, the boot was too much of a risk. She would have to get the body into the woods somehow, perhaps bury it beneath some bracken, and then come back later to collect it. And all that without making herself look as if she had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Annie nodded to herself. Hide the body, flag someone down, get them to change the tyre for her, then, when they had gone, retrieve the body and continue on her way. It was a plan.

She pushed herself away from the car and walked around the bonnet. The open passenger door registered
in her mind for a good few seconds before she realised the significance of what it meant. Then she noticed the empty passenger seat.

Violet’s body had gone.
Violet
had gone.

Annie looked wildly around. She was still alone. For a long moment she was convinced that she had left Violet’s body back at the house and somehow imagined that it had been sitting beside her for the past few hours; then she was sure that someone had come and taken the body from the car while she was distracted. It took a few moments before the truth sank in. Her cake had been a failure. Violet had still been alive when Annie put her in the car, albeit in something so close to a coma that Annie had been fooled into thinking she was dead. Somehow she had come back to consciousness, and escaped. Did she realise what had happened to her, or was she operating on instinct, just heading somewhere, anywhere, away from the unfamiliar confines of Annie’s Volvo?

Did it matter? Annie had to find her again. Find her, and kill her for sure.

And whatever happened, she was never using meadow saffron again.

A faint trail of bent grass led away from the car and into the dank green depths of the forest. Annie checked the road, forward and back, once more, just in case someone was approaching. The road was clear. She set off in pursuit of Violet.

The floor of the forest was covered in twigs and low shrubs which Annie couldn’t identify. The occasional fallen tree made barriers she had to manoeuvre around, but crushed flowers and disturbed patches of ground indicated to her where Violet had scrambled her way across the ground. Buttery light slanted down through the tops of the trees, and everywhere was hushed. Annie could hear her own footsteps shushing through the leaves, sounding almost as if she were making her way through thick snow. She could smell the deep, intoxicating scent of old wood and foliage, the world’s oldest and most profound perfume. The occasional insect buzzed past her, and a sudden flurry of activity in a bush showed where a small animal had suddenly heard her approach and made its escape.

She wasn’t looking for small animals. Her prey was much larger.

Annie stopped in a small clearing, listening. Somewhere across the other side she could hear a crashing sound, as if something was pushing its way heedless through bushes and shrubs.

Her breath was rasping in her throat now, and her legs were weak, but she kept on going. Low branches reached for her face, while roots clutched desperately at her ankles, trying to trip her up. Every so often she reached out to steady herself on a tree trunk, but the rough bark burned the palms of her hands.

Through a gap in the trees she caught sight of a
flash of artificial colour, stark against the natural greens and browns of the forest. A bright red: the same colour as the cardigan that Violet had been wearing when she died. And when she came back to life again. Annie slowed down, taking her time as she approached, shielding herself behind a large bush.

Violet was bent on all fours by a large oak tree. A string of saliva dropped from her mouth. She was panting: a harsh, almost mechanical sound. The skin on her hands and knees was muddy with dirt and blood from the numerous small scratches she had sustained as she fled. But now she was here; out of breath, out of time, out of options.

Annie crouched and picked up a fallen branch from the forest floor. She hefted it in her hand: it felt almost industrial in its density, like a crowbar, or a tyre iron. Her hand fitted perfectly around it, and for a moment she wondered why she kept going back to poison when physical violence could be so seductive. And then she envisaged the dining room table, and the silent faces around it, and she remembered.

Violet reached out a hand towards the oak tree, supporting her weight so she could stand. Concerned that she might try to get away again, Annie took a step forward from behind the bush.

She must have made a noise, because Violet turned her head and caught her in a wild-eyed stare. Her teeth were bared wildly.

Annie took another step, and swung the branch loosely by her side, ready to use it.

‘Why …?’ Violet mouthed, her eyes seeming to lose focus and then regain it again. ‘Why did you
do
this?’

‘Because I could,’ Annie said. ‘Because I have before and will again. Because it gets me what I want. And, above all else, because I just got tired of your constant complaining, your continual sneering at your neighbours, your old friends and me.’

She took two steps forward and raised the branch up above her.

Violet turned away, ready to scuttle to safety, but Daisy brought the branch crashing down on the back of her head. She didn’t know what she expected – a dramatic gout of blood perhaps, the skull crumbling beneath the branch like a snail stepped on in the garden, revealing the soft, grey, oozing flesh within, but there was none of that. Violet’s head merely changed shape, a depression appearing beneath the sparse grey hair. Annie was reminded of the duck eggs she had eaten as a child, boiled hard, their shells crushed in by a spoon. And Violet slumped gracelessly to the floor of the forest with a soft sigh, the air leaving her lungs for the last time, free of that old body forever.

Annie sat down beside her for a moment and rested, letting the muted sounds of the forest – the soft susurration of the wind in the leaves and the
calls of the birds – drain the tension and the tiredness from her bones. After a while, she reached across and checked Violet’s pulse, both in her stick-thin wrist and also in the leathery wattles of her neck, but there was nothing. The blood was still within those prominent purple veins.

Annie walked unsteadily back to the car, partly to retrieve the plastic sheet that she had brought with her from the house – the one she had laid Violet’s body on when she cleaned it – and partly to check whether anyone had stopped for the car. The road was clear, and might have been that way ever since her burst tyre had occurred. She popped the boot of the car, and pulled out the grey plastic sheet, then paused. What was she going to do? Walk back into the forest, wrap Violet’s body up and bury it as best she could? But the ground was hard, and difficult to dig without a shovel, and if she wanted to come back later to retrieve the body, how would she find it? At least the corner where she had stopped was reasonably memorable. Perhaps she could pull Violet’s body most of the way back and bury her just off the road. That way, locating her again would be easier. It also meant that she would be able to hear if someone stopped to help her.

Looking around, Annie saw a rotted tree trunk, lying half-buried in the soil, victim of some long-passed storm. Walking over to it, she reached out and gave one of the branches an experimental tug.
The trunk rolled over slightly, revealing moist ground, depressed where the trunk had lain, and pale white shoots beneath. She thought for a moment. If she could move this trunk out of the way then it would leave behind something similar to a half-dug grave. She could wrap Violet’s body in the plastic sheet, drag it back, lay it in the grave, then cover it over with leaves and earth. It would do, until she could come back again for it. It would do.

It took her ten minutes to move the rotten trunk out of the way and make it look as if it had always been where she put it. Rolling Violet’s body in the sheet, dragging her back to the side of the road and laying her in the scar took another five, as did the task of kicking twigs and loam and leaves over the top of the sheet.

Half way through, when the plastic-wrapped corpse was lying in the depression in the forest floor, but before she could cover it over, Annie heard the sound of a car engine, far away. She stopped. Of all the times to be offered help, this was the worst. Quickly she stepped back into the darkness of the forest. The car drew closer. She glanced out at her Volvo, checking that the doors were closed and the emergency lights were not flashing. Reassured, she moved further back into the forest, trying to become as one with the trees. The sound of the car engine changed as it approached the bend. For a moment she was terrified that it was about to stop, that the
driver had seen her car and was going to park and see if anyone needed help, but whoever was in the car was just changing down gears as they approached the bend. The car swept past, the driver just a blurred figure, then the engine noise changed again and the car accelerated away.

When she was sure that Violet’s body was completely covered, Annie stepped back to examine her handiwork. Apart from a bump in the forest floor, no different from so many others she could see around her, there was no sign that a human being rested there. No sign at all.

Annie returned to her car and sat quietly in the driver’s seat, letting the world pass her by. She kept casting glances over at the mound where Violet lay, half wondering whether she might see the ground move slightly, or a hand push itself out of the earth like a fat pink spider, but there was nothing. Nothing at all.

After a while she reached out and switched on the emergency lights. The clicking seemed incredibly loud to her, after so long sitting in the quiet. Perhaps someone would stop for her now.

Rooting around in her handbag, she brought out a mobile phone. She had bought it some years back from a branch of W. H. Smith in Brent Cross, having carefully established from the sales assistant that it worked on a ‘pre-pay’ basis, and she could charge it up with credit at most supermarkets or petrol
stations. She had forgotten which of her many identities had bought it, but as far as she knew there was no way it could be traced back to her. And she only used it sparingly.

She dialled a number for Directory Inquiries.

‘Good morning,’ Annie – Violet – said primly, ‘I would like a garage somewhere near the Thetford Forest. I’ve broken down, you see.’

‘I have three garages nearby,’ the voice on the other end of the phone said, ‘or I could put you through to the AA or the RAC.’

‘Could you put me through to the first local garage you have?’ Violet said.

Within a minute she had talked to a mechanic, told him where she was, told him what had happened and arranged for him to come and get her back on the road.

The mechanic turned up half an hour later in a big truck. He was a rather common man, of the kind that Violet had always preferred not to deal with, and he kept up a constant stream of chatter whilst he changed her tyre for her. Noticing the dirt on her hands, he asked her jokingly what she’d been doing. ‘I fell over,’ she said sharply.

She paid by cheque – using the chequebook and cheque card that she had found in the handbag, of course, and signing with Violet Chambers’ rather flowery signature. He waited until she had got in her car and driven off, just to check that the tyre
held up, and she had to decide whether to keep on going to where she had originally been heading – her special place, where all her friends waited for her – or to start the long drive back. She wasn’t going to disinter the body – the nameless body, as she was already thinking of it – while the mechanic was watching her, and she didn’t want to drive off, turn around, come back and do it all then. And without the body there was precious little point in heading to her special place. Reluctantly, she decided to go home. She could always come back another time for the body.

The journey took several hours, and although the tyre held up perfectly she was exhausted when she got back to the house. Violet’s house.
Her
house. She toasted some bread, ate it without butter or margarine, and went to bed. She was asleep within moments, and her last thought was that the body was spoiled now. Broken. It would not fit with the others at the tea party. She would leave it where it was.

And as the night moved on, and the shadows crawled across the ceiling, Violet slept.

And Daisy woke up.

The smell of the seaside drifted in through her window: salt, candy floss and decay. The flat tyre, the burial in the forest, the drive back to Violet’s house – that had all happened nearly a year ago now. She had been Violet for nine months, while she
found and befriended Daisy Wilson. Now she was Daisy Wilson. Soon she would be Eunice Coleman.