Core of Evil (6 page)

Lapslie took a deep breath. These things happened. Sometimes it was difficult to disentangle personal from professional. God knew, he’d had enough experience of that himself over the years.

‘Okay. We’ll leave it there. Get your boyfriend home, get a bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee inside you and I’ll see you back at the office later.’

‘Thanks, boss.’ She nodded, waiting until Lapslie had started to move away before she moved back towards her car. Lapslie took a few steps more, until he heard the
clunk
of her car door closing, then he
turned and watched as she gunned the car to life and pulled away. He stood for a couple of seconds, watching it go, wondering whether to take things any further or just forget about it.

And just as he realised that there was another car, a black Lexus with a tinted windscreen, parked in the trees a hundred yards or so down the road, it too gunned its engine to life, quietly pulled out of the tree line and drove away after DS Bradbury.

It was dark by the time Violet returned to the house that had once belonged to Daisy but now belonged to her. The thin wash of cloud that had given the sky its texture and depth during the day now gave the night an oppressive closeness, like sheets of sackcloth pinned from one side of the street to the other and sagging in the middle under their own weight.

She turned the ignition key and let the Volvo’s engine die away. Something inside the bonnet whirred for a few seconds more, then it, too, gave way to the silence of the night. Violet just sat there, sinking back into the seat and letting the nervous tension drain out of her body.

Lights were on all the way down the street. Behind those lit windows, families were boiling pasta and heating up sauce, watching TV, telling stories to excitable children or sitting quietly and reading a book. Life went on – if repeating the same old routine, night after night, was life.

Tiredness had wormed its way into Violet’s joints. Every time she turned her head slightly she could feel
the tendons and muscles pulling tight across her neck. Sometimes, when she felt like this, she had the worrying thought that all she had to do was keep turning her head further and further and the tendons would snap, one by one, like the horsehair on an old violin bow.

She shook herself.
Come on, Violet
, she thought,
focus. You still have a job to do. This was only the first step.

She climbed out of the car, locked the door and took a look around her. Nobody was watching. No curtains were twitching. She was safe.

Violet had parked a few hundred yards down the street from her new house, of course – just opposite a patch of waste ground where children played football at the weekends – and now she walked slowly along the pavement to that familiar front door, with its crazy-paving paint and its tape-bandaged letter box. She paused for a moment, gazing at the drooping geraniums. Those would have to go, she thought. Too dreary. Too drab. Too meaningless.

Perhaps she could plant a nice Christmas rose before she left. In memory of Daisy.

Smiling, she inserted her key into her lock and walked into her house.

The smell hit her as soon as she entered. Older now, and fouler, undercut by the acridity of bleach and overlaid by Daisy’s favourite lavender perfume,
but still lurking there like some old, mangy dog in the undergrowth. Air fresheners and pot-pourri could only do so much, but there was obviously more cleaning required. Quickly, Violet walked along the hall – slipping her thin cotton gloves on as she did so – then through the tiny kitchen and out into the conservatory. She flicked the latches on the back door, top and bottom, and opened it as far as it would go.

The fresh air was a sudden relief, and she took a couple of deep breaths, gazing out into the dark, shadowy back garden as she did so. From a patio of pebbled concrete, criss-crossed with silvery snail tracks, a tongue of paving stones wound its way through big, unkempt bushes of various kinds. Tall fences on either side separated the house from its neighbours, and the far end of the garden gave on to a ten-foot brick wall, almost invisible in the murk at the bottom of the garden. Daisy had never been sure what was beyond that wall, even though she had lived there for over fifty years.

A metal dustbin sat in the centre of the concrete patio, its sides streaked red with rust that had leaked from the rivets and welds of its construction. Inside the bin were Daisy’s stained clothes, along with the cushion that she had been sitting on and the doilies that had been draped over the arms of her chair. The chair itself stood next to the bin, looking smaller in the open air than it had done in the dark parlour.

Tomorrow she would set the clothes in the bin on fire, accelerated by a splash of lighter fluid. The chair she would have to think about. She could either burn it where it stood, and risk leaving scorch marks on the concrete, or she could attempt to take it apart with a screwdriver and a small saw to a point where she could get the various parts into the burning bin. That might work.

The deliciously cool, fresh air reminded her that she needed a through draught to get the house to a state where she could work in it, so she turned around and walked back through the house and into the parlour. The smell was worse there, and Violet held her breath until she could undo the catch on the central sash window and push it up six inches or so. The sudden breeze through the house, from back to front, quickly cleared the air, and for a moment Violet had a strong image of the house itself slumping with relief as it exhaled a stale, rank breath and inhaled clean air again.

Turning away from the window, Violet’s gaze was caught, as it often had been while listening to Daisy’s interminable rambling stories, by the bureau opposite the fireplace. She had carried an image of that bureau around in her mind for months. Whenever she got the chance she had checked books on antiques in the local library, or browsed through them while standing by the shelves in the nearest bookshop. She was fairly sure it was mid-eighteenth
century, and in very good condition. If she was careful, it could perhaps realise ten thousand pounds at auction. The barometer in the hall was almost certainly French, dating from the early nineteenth century. That could net something approaching two thousand pounds. The andirons on either side of the fire could fetch between three and five thousand pounds, depending on whether they were originals or merely good reproductions. And there was other stuff in the house, such as the dining room table, the silver candlesticks and a complete set of pristine Spode china that Daisy had shown her once, wrapped in newspaper and kept in a Queen Anne chest upstairs ‘for best’, as Daisy had put it.

All in all, Violet thought that there was about twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of furniture and nick-nacks in this house. They had all been in the family since before Daisy was born, bought by her father, her grandfather, his father and so on when they weren’t antiques but just ordinary items. Daisy had been widowed young, with no children, and so there was nowhere for them to go. And here they had stayed. To Daisy they were just a part of the house, but to Violet they were something else entirely. They were assets to be realised as cash as soon as possible.

And that was before she stripped Daisy’s estate of the small amount of pension that had accrued over the years, the various bonds and shares that she
might have collected and, most important of all, the house. That wonderful unmortgaged 1950s house, in a quiet part of the city, ideal for commuters who wanted to be near work and yet isolated from it. Worth, according to an estate agent with whom Violet had once had an interesting chat, something in excess of a quarter of a million pounds.

Not that she would sell it straight away. No, that would raise too many questions. Although it had only taken a couple of glasses of brandy to persuade Daisy to sign power of attorney over to her, some months ago now, Violet was a little wary of exerting too much authority too soon. More haste, less speed, as they said. Best to wait until the dust had settled a bit.

Although it was late, she had one important job to do before she could slide between the sheets of her bed and gaze up at the ceiling of her room with the calm satisfaction that comes of a job well done. She had to clean the parlour.

Violet went into the kitchen and retrieved the plastic bag of cleaning utensils from the counter. Looking along the shelves in the shop, she had been bewildered by the sheer range of things that people used to clean their houses. How could anyone use that many products? And how was it that houses these days were so much dirtier and dustier than they were when Violet was a child, when all they had was beeswax polish and soapstone and coal tar soap?

And, of course, soda crystals.

She pulled the blue, rather plain box proudly from the bag. At least someone still made soda crystals.

Using hot water from the tap, she made up a strong solution of washing soda in a bucket from the conservatory, and set to work with a pair of rubber gloves and a brush, working the liquid into the parlour carpet and soaking up the brown residue – the remnants of Daisy’s blood and faeces – with a series of tea towels. The area where the chair had sat was almost unaffected, apart from splashes and drips that had found their way down through the upholstery. After half an hour the carpet around the edges was almost indistinguishable from the carpet in the centre, and the smell had transferred itself to the growing pile of tea towels. Carefully, she carried the towels out into the garden, threw them into the metal bin and sprinkled bleach over the top. Then she threw the rubber gloves in after them. They almost certainly wouldn’t melt properly in the fire, but at least any last trace of Daisy would be burned off them.

According to the clock in the parlour – reproduction ormolu, unfortunately, dating from the 1950s and worth less than ten pounds – it was almost midnight. The muffled sounds of the TV set from next door had vanished some time before. There was no sound now, apart from the slow creaks that resulted from any old house settling itself down for
the night. Violet desperately craved sleep, but there was one more thing she had to do before she could surrender herself to the darkness. One last act to make the house hers.

Methodically, room by room, Violet collected up all the photographs of Daisy. There was one in a frame in the dining room, set high on the bookshelf: an old black and white picture with creased corners of a young woman with a beehive hairdo posing against a railing with a beach behind her. On the back, in spidery brown writing, were the words ‘Camber Sands, July, 1953’. It didn’t look much like the shrunken woman with the liver-spotted arms and baggy medical stockings that she had become, but then, it looked even less like Violet, so it couldn’t stay.

Violet held it for a moment, reluctant to let go. Camber Sands, July, 1953. The photograph had been taken by the young man Daisy had been seeing at the time. He had worked in a bank. They had seen each other for two years – ‘walked out’, Daisy had called it – until he was called up for National Service. He had promised to write, but he never did.

Another photograph rested on a small table in the hall: a colour picture of a group of four middle-aged ladies laughing in front of a hotel entrance. It had been taken in Mallorca some time in the 1980s; Daisy hadn’t been too sure of the year. Susan, Janice and Patricia. They’d worked together on the checkouts in
a supermarket on the edge of town for a while, and all decided to go on holiday together. Patricia had met a widower and ended up spending most of her days and all of her nights with him. Daisy had been bitterly jealous.

And there was the wedding photograph, set on the white melamine bedside table where it would have been the first thing Daisy saw when she woke up and the last thing she saw at night. Black and white again, two people, formally posed. Daisy in a huge white Bo Peep dress foaming with lace, a wide-brimmed hat on her head, and beside her a taller man with short hair and a moustache, stiff in a formal morning suit. His name had been Peter, and Daisy hadn’t been able to talk about him without a tremor in her voice and tears forming in her watery eyes. He had been the love of her life, and he had died of an aneurysm in 1979 after twenty-one years of marriage.

They were all that was left of Daisy’s life, and so, despite the memories that sprang up whenever Violet looked at them – memories that weren’t hers but were
becoming
hers – the photographs went in the bin in the back garden. For burning.

The frames she kept, of course. They might bring in a few extra pounds.

After a quick bath to wash the remains of the day from her body, Violet changed Daisy’s bedding for a fresh set of sheets and blankets and slid naked into
the bed. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, allowing the pillows and the mattress to gradually adjust themselves to the shape of her body. Or perhaps to allow her body to adjust itself to the indentation left by Daisy Wilson after however many years she had slept there.

The street lamp outside cast an orange glow across the ceiling. The alarm clock on the bedside table tocked loudly, regularly. Somewhere outside, a cat yowled, and then it was quiet apart from the normal background rumble of distant traffic that nobody in the city could ever get away from.

As Violet felt her body gradually grow limp, and as her thoughts flitted from image to image, never settling for long enough to feed, she realised that she could hear the soft hiss of blood in her ears, a susurration like waves lapping gently against a shingle beach. The cat yowled again, but this time it sounded more to her like the cry of a seagull as it floated above the waves the way she was floating
on
them. The room itself grew dim around her, and the cold orange glow of the street lamp became the warm light of the sun setting behind a watery horizon, casting a glittering path across the sea towards her floating body. She drifted there, alone and unafraid, letting the tide take her further and further out to sea, washing her clean of everything she had done, absolving her sins as it washed the dirt from her body. The light faded as the sun dipped
further and further beneath the horizon. Darkness spread in from the edges of her vision, and she was asleep without knowing she was asleep.