Core of Evil (31 page)

He turned around to face the incident room. ‘All right – pay attention!’ he yelled, cutting across the general commotion and, for the first time in a long time, causing a flare in his mouth that didn’t correlate to any known fruit, vegetable or meat. The taste of his own voice, shouting. ‘There’s a good chance our killer is located on the east coast, somewhere in Essex.
That’s where all the most recent financial transactions have taken place, but none of the victims so far identified have had houses there. I want a list of all hotels and guest houses along that stretch of coast, running back, oh, twenty miles inland, and I want to know if they have rented rooms for more than two weeks to a lone woman over sixty. I want every estate agent in that area contacted and I want a list of all flats or houses that have been rented out in the past six months to a lone woman over sixty. And I want it
now
. Remember, this woman is probably stalking her next victim while you’re working. She’s getting to know her, taking over her life, finding out everything she can before she poisons her. She might be slipping that poison into a cup of tea right now. We don’t have any time to waste. Get on with it!’

Emma Bradbury had come in while he was shouting. Now, as the noise in the incident room suddenly ramped up, she crossed the room to where he was standing.

‘There’s always the chance that one of the unidentified victims has a house in that area,’ she said. ‘The murder might already have happened.’

‘And a meteorite might suddenly wipe out this police station in a freak accident,’ he riposted. ‘But we still come in every day. We live our lives regardless. We can’t plan for what might or might not happen. If we’re lucky, we’ll find her. If we’re not, we won’t. That’s how it goes.’

She looked at him appraisingly. ‘He said you never give up,’ she said softly, as if vocalising some internal thought.

‘Who said?’

Emma’s face suddenly tightened. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Just a conversation I was having. Canteen talk.’

Lapslie stared at her for a few moments more, aware that something was going on but unsure what it was. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s crack on. Keep the team on their toes – I want updates every hour on how that list is going.’

Emma nodded, and walked away. Before Lapslie could move, one of the PCs in his team – Swinerd, he thought – approached.

‘Message from the Chief Superintendent,’ he said. ‘Could you pop up to his office?’

Acting on a sudden impulse, Lapslie walked across to the window. The incident room was on the fifth floor, and he could see down into the car park. It was filled with the kinds of cars that police officers drove when they were off-duty; sporty cars: Ford Mondeos, Peugeot 406s and Saab 95s, all in nondescript colours. No Volkswagens, no Skodas, no Minis, and definitely no Volvos, which policemen generally referred to as Belgranos. It was similar to the auto factory car parks one could see from the train sometimes; row upon row of similar vehicles extending to the horizon.

And a black Lexus, parked at the end of one row. Its engine was idling; Lapslie could see vapour drifting up from the exhaust.

He looked around the incident room, feeling as if he was bidding it goodbye in some strange way. Everyone was working hard, heads down, headsets on, lips moving as they spoke into the microphones. Nobody was looking at him.

He walked out of the room, unnoticed.

The lift up to the floor where Rouse’s office was located seemed to take an age to arrive. When the doors opened, it was empty. He was glad. The last thing he wanted was to make small talk when he was on his way to something that felt like it might be his execution.

Part of him wanted to press the button for the ground floor, walk out of the lift, through the security door that led into the car park and just keep on going, walking away, leaving it all behind, but he couldn’t do that. He needed to know what was going on. As Emma had said, he never gave up.

Rouse’s PA told him he could go straight in, but his gaze was fixed on the man who was standing by Rouse’s desk. Alone. The DCS was notable by his absence.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie?’ said the man. ‘Please come in.’ His voice was like disturbed earth, or leaf mould. He was still wearing that black suit with the subtle pinstripe. His hair was sandy,
brushed straight back off his forehead. The bare scalp that was revealed was covered with small freckles.

Lapslie leaned over the PA. ‘Is there a key to this office?’ he asked. ‘We might need to leave some sensitive stuff on the desk and pop out for a while.’

‘Er … yes,’ she said, reaching into a drawer and bringing out a Yale key. She held it out uncertainly towards him.

‘Thanks.’ He took the key from her. ‘I’ll bring it back later, I promise.’ Turning to the office, he said: ‘Mr Geherty, of the Department of Justice’s Prisoner Rehabilitation Unit, I presume?’

Geherty had the grace to look a little abashed. ‘You’ve been doing your homework.’

‘I don’t like being followed around. And I don’t like thieves.’

‘We haven’t been following you, Mr Lapslie, we’ve been following your investigation. It’s been an education for us all. Shame it’s got to stop.’

‘It stops when we catch the murderer,’ Lapslie said.

‘It stops when our Minister says it stops,’ Geherty responded. ‘And we’re not thieves, by the way.’

‘You broke into Doctor Catherall’s mortuary and you took the information off her computer.’

‘We’re Civil Servants, and the mortuary belongs to the Civil Service. No problems there, surely? And I think you’ll find that there’s no information missing
from Doctor Catherall’s computer. We merely copied it and left. We just want to be kept apprised of your progress.’

‘I’m intrigued. Your department deals with integrating serial killers and other undesirables into society when they’ve served their sentences. Does that mean the killer of these women is one of yours? Did you give her a new identity and a new place to live, only to find that she’s returned to her old habits?’

‘Old habits die hard, and you can’t teach a dog new tricks. Clichés, all of them, but there’s a grain of truth in there.’ Geherty shrugged. ‘These people spend most of their lives in prison, but when their time is up they have to be reintegrated. We prepare them. We teach them how to survive in a world that’s moved on in the ten, or twenty, or thirty years that have passed since they were incarcerated. We get them houses and we get them jobs as waiters, or travel agents, or on the perfume counter in Debenhams. And we evaluate them, trying to determine whether they have actually changed, or whether there’s still a core of evil within them. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. That’s the way it goes. When it goes wrong, we have to clear up the mess.’

‘ “A core of evil”,’ Lapslie said. ‘You don’t blame society or upbringing, then?’

Geherty shook his head. ‘Oh, I’ve looked into the
eyes of men who have killed more people than I’ve ever known. I’ve looked into the eyes of women who have banged nine-inch nails into the skulls of their victims with hammers. I have seen evil, Mr Lapslie. Society isn’t blameless, and neither is upbringing, but in the end they are catalysts. If the evil isn’t there to begin with, they have nothing to work with.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Lapslie said, ‘is why you can’t just arrest them, put them on trial and bang them up when they’re found guilty. Why all the Secret Squirrel palaver?’

‘Because some of them aren’t even supposed to have been released,’ Geherty said, checking his watch. ‘You know what it’s like in prison. They say we’re almost up to capacity; in fact, we passed capacity years ago. For every person who’s sent to jail, one has to be released. Sometimes we do it by commuting sentences, or arranging for criminals to get parole when they technically shouldn’t, but that’s only nibbling at the problem. The real issue is the lifers cluttering up the system. The murderers who can’t be released, either because there would be a public outcry or because some judge somewhere has said that life means life, and the Minister either can’t or won’t interfere.’

Something that Dom McGinley had told him suddenly echoed in Lapslie’s head. Something about the child-killer, Myra Hindley, not having died of a
chest infection at all, but living her life under a new identity somewhere in Wales.

‘So you release them anyway,’ he said bitterly.

‘We have to. We take all the precautions we can, but life is life. Things go wrong.’

‘And my killer?’

Geherty looked at his watch again. ‘Time ticks away,’ he said.

‘Satisfy my curiosity. Who is she?’

‘You’ve met her. Don’t you remember? You were assigned to ACPO, profiling major criminals. Actually, we were considering offering you a job, but that medical condition of yours stopped us. You interviewed a number of lifers, looking to see if there was any psychological test that could be applied to tell whether someone was likely to become a killer or not. And you interviewed her.’

The taste of lychees, almost impossibly sweet and decadent in his mouth, like something rotting in treacle. ‘Madeline … Poel?’

‘Madeline Poel,’ Geherty confirmed.

‘Broadmoor. What – twenty years ago.’ He remembered a middle-aged woman, small and birdlike. She had been very polite, very old-fashioned, and her voice had tasted of lychees. ‘It was back towards the end of the Second World War. Her grandmother had gone mad and killed all of Madeline’s sisters and brothers in the back garden of their house, snipping their fingers off with a pair of
garden secateurs and watching them bleed to death. Madeline only survived because her mother came back from the local factory where she was working. The police were called, and while they were making their way over, Madeline made a drink for her grandmother out of some of the berries in the garden. She told her grandmother that it was sarsaparilla, but it was something toxic. Her grandmother died before the police could take her away. Everyone thought it was an accident, just Madeline trying to be helpful, but over the next few years Madeline started acting stranger and stranger and ten or twelve old ladies in the village died in exactly the same way. It was as if she’d decided that all old ladies were dangerous, and she had to get rid of them. The logic of a girl who’d been driven insane by watching her family killed in the most horrific way by the woman who was meant to be protecting them. After a while someone cottoned on, and she was sent away. Committed to Broadmoor.’ His mouth was flooding with that dry, metallic taste as his voice got louder. ‘She died fifteen years ago of a heart attack – at least, that’s what the newspapers said – but she never died at all! Is that what you’re telling me? You actually
released
her into society?’

‘Because we didn’t think she posed a threat any more. And because we needed the space.’ Geherty suddenly looked tired. ‘It was before my time.’

‘That’s no excuse.’

‘That’s not an excuse – that’s an explanation. Her death was faked – we even made up a tombstone at a church near where she grew up – and a new identity was created for her. We got her a job waitressing in Ipswich, and a nice flat. And we watched her – extensively for three months, then intermittently after that. And then, when she thought we weren’t watching carefully enough, she vanished. Turns out she’d spent several months crafting a new identity, and she just slipped out of the one we’d created for her and into the one she’d created for herself. We’ve been looking for her ever since.’

‘And I’m looking for her now. We should work together.’

Geherty shook his head. ‘The only reason you’re looking for her is because we asked Chief Superintendent Rouse to bring you in on the case. You’d known her. You’d talked to her. If anyone had an insight into how her mind worked, it was you.’

‘So let me catch her.’

‘You’ve located her. That’s all we need. If you arrest her now, she goes to court and it all spills out. If we catch her, she vanishes. Forever.’

‘That’s not justice.’

‘No, but it’s
just
.’

Lapslie gazed at Geherty. ‘I can’t let that happen,’ he said.

Geherty nodded. ‘I’m not asking you to,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you. Or rather, Detective Chief Inspector
Rouse is currently taking a call from my Minister telling him to put a stop to this case. It’s over. We’ll take it from here.’

‘Over my dead body,’ Lapslie snapped.

‘No – over your dead career,’ Geherty said, and smiled.

‘Are you feeling better?’ Eunice’s voice boomed from the kitchen.

Sitting in Eunice’s sparse front room with a cup of tea clutched in her hands, Daisy’s stomach was churning. All she could see in her mind was the graveyard.

The churchyard and the gravestone.

The gravestone with the name on it: Madeline Poel.

‘I’m … not sure,’ Daisy said. It sounded to her as if her voice was coming from a long way away. Or perhaps a long time ago. Something was wrong with her ears: everything sounded muffled, distant, unimportant. Her hands were trembling.

‘Perhaps I should call the doctor?’

‘No.’ She swallowed, trying to ease the feeling in her ears, but it would not shift. ‘No, I’ll be fine. I think it was just the sun.’

Daisy did not want to think about Madeline Poel, but now that she had seen the name on the gravestone she found that she could not stop. She felt
dizzy and breathless, the way she imagined Eunice’s dog, Jasper, was feeling now, with his food dosed with poison. Unbidden, unwelcome, faces were appearing in her mind. Faces and names.

So many names.

Before Daisy Wilson there had been Violet Chambers, and before Violet Chambers there had been Annie Moberley, and before Annie Moberley there had been Alice Connell, and before Alice Connell there had been Jane Winterbottom, and before Jane Winterbottom there had been Deirdre Fincham, and before Deirdre Fincham there had been Elise Wildersten, and before Elise Wildersten there had been Rhona McIntyre, and before Rhona McIntyre there had been someone whose name was now lost to the past, and another before her, and another before her, all just shadows in the darkness now, but before all of them, at the very beginning of it all, there had been Madeline Poel.