Core of Evil (15 page)

She almost missed the place across the road. It was part of a building that extended from one street corner to another, built out of the same red brick and with the same buff adornments on the corners. The building had once been a large post office: it still was, at one end, but the other end had been converted into a genteel coffee shop advertising gateaux and pastries, espresso and cappuccino on a chalk board pinned to the red brick wall.

She entered the coffee shop and looked around. It had the same kind of dated feel as her hotel: backward looking, rather than forward, with lace doilies on the tables and sepia-tinged photographs in frames on the wall. A perfect place to sit and read. She found an empty table and perched herself on a chair. Having established from the plastic-covered menu on the table that she could, in fact, order tea as well as coffee, she asked the waitress for a pot and then spread the first local paper, the
Tendring Gazette
, over the table.

Dismissing the headlines, which involved accusations of fraud in the Council and blocked inquiries into the sale of school fields in the vicinity, she concentrated on the later pages. The local stuff.

There were small news paragraphs of course. One of them, headlined ‘Milk and Beer Taken’, reported on how thieves had broken into a local garage and stolen a bottle of beer and a bottle of milk from a fridge, drunk them both, and then smashed the milk bottle, which Daisy decided summed up perfectly the parochial approach of local newspapers to events. The world might be heading for ecological disaster, nations might be at war, but as long as one local journalist was on the job, no case involving a stolen milk bottle would go unreported. Another paragraph reassured readers that a horse that had been stuck in mud had been freed by fire-fighters. It wasn’t until page twenty-two that Daisy found a section headed ‘Neighbourhood News’, which listed the activities of various local organisations such as the Fuchsia Club, the Bridge Club and, of most interest to her, the Widows’ Friendship Club. Anyone who was a member of a club, of course, was, by definition, bound to know people there, but Daisy knew that she could quite easily befriend one of the widows, separate her from the flock and gradually take over her life. The other widows might wonder from time to time what had become of their friend, but they would probably only make cursory attempts to check she was all right. Once a couple of telephone calls had been missed, once a few knocks on the door had gone unanswered, they would give up. It was human nature.

The next page listed local churches and services, and Daisy made a mental note of their locations and the types of activity they undertook. She didn’t want to stumble into anything evangelical, after all. Still, she was pleased to see that there were plenty of Methodist churches. Her spur-of-the-moment story on the train the day before was safe.

Three pages of death notices followed, and Daisy read through them all in detail. The words were much the same, as if they all followed a small number of templates, and she sneered to herself at all the various euphemisms employed. ‘Died peacefully.’ ‘Passed away unexpectedly.’ ‘Taken from us in the prime of life.’ All ridiculous. How many of the notices covered up days of messy, agonised and undignified writhing on the part of the dear departed? How many of the fond remembrances covered up neglect, abuse, even murder?

Her tea arrived, late, and Daisy poured a cup, added milk and took a sip. It was stewed. The girl had obviously left it somewhere and forgotten about it. What was the world coming to? If she was that careless, perhaps Daisy should come back one day and slip something into one or two sugar bowls whilst nobody was watching: a fine sprinkling of white powder that would be undetectable when it dissolved in tea or coffee, but which would cause agonising convulsions hours later.

She wouldn’t, of course. That would draw too much attention. But it was nice to dream.

Towards the back of the paper, the
Gazette
had ten pages of property adverts. The first eight pages were houses and flats for sale, but the last two covered rental properties. She scanned them with as much care, and as much emotion, as she had read the death notices. The going rate seemed to be between five hundred and seven hundred pounds per month: not a rate she wished to sustain, but something she could manage while looking for a proper house that she could slide into. An occupied house. A house that would soon be hers.

Finally, Daisy came to the classified ads. She loved looking through these sections. It was like getting a small glimpse through the curtains and into somebody’s life. Just a small glimpse, open to all sorts of interpretation, as you were walking past. What to make of: ‘Family-tree historian seeks f, to form a new branch and dig up some roots together’? Would he ever get his wish? Was the ‘Tall, medium-built postman, cat owner, seeks compatible female’ giving away too much information?

And then there was ‘Happy, lively lady, 50s, seeks male companion and escort for boot fairs, garden centres, etc.’ That one looked promising. If she was advertising in the newspaper then it implied she had given up on clubs, or church, or any of the other ways mature women made friends. And that meant she was likely to be isolated. Daisy made a careful mental note of the response number at the bottom of
the ad. She was familiar with the process: it varied little from town to town. The number would be a message line run by a company on behalf of the newspaper. Verbal messages could be left, or text messages could be sent. The text messages were preferable as far as Daisy was concerned: if she wanted to lure this woman out into the open and befriend her, she would have to identify her. And that meant she would have to arrange a date at some convenient location, and observe from afar when the woman turned up and waited in vain for her erstwhile paramour to arrive.

Erstwhile paramour. The words made her smile. She’d never had a paramour, erstwhile or otherwise, and had no intention of ever acquiring one, but she knew enough about the relationship between men and women to send a convincing text message.

The remaining two papers – the
Leyston Recorder
and the
Walton and Leyston Post
– were much of a muchness with the
Tendring Gazette
. The story of the horse stuck in mud appeared in both of them, while the one about the stolen bottles of milk and beer was in the
Recorder
but not the
Post
. Of the three, Daisy decided that the
Tendring Gazette
probably had the most to offer. Already it had yielded several leads.

She left enough money on the table to cover the cost of the tea, but without leaving more than a few
pence as a tip. Waitressing of that low quality did not deserve a reward.

Leaving the coffee shop, Daisy continued right along the High Street, as much to reconnoitre the area as for any other reason. Across the other side she could see, in the distance, the Bingo Hall where, the night before, she had caught her first scent of prey. The type of shop between her and the Bingo Hall was shifted slightly away from the holidaymakers and towards the more utilitarian: a hairdressers, an ironmongers, and so on. Coming up to a corner with a florists on one side and a Visitor Information kiosk on the other, she paused. The road off to the right led away from the High Street, away from the sea front and from Daisy’s hotel, but she decided on a whim to take a wander and see what was down there.

The road curved away to the right, and all Daisy could see for the first few minutes as she walked along were detached and weatherworn houses on either side. The gaps between the paving stones were caked with sand, brought in from the beach by wind and by storm, she presumed.

After a few hundred yards, the houses on the right-hand side gave way to an earth bank, taller than she was and covered with grass and more sand. Every so often, concrete steps led up the side of the bank, vanishing into mystery at the top.

Ahead, the road came to an abrupt stop at a wire-mesh gate. A sign hanging from it read, ‘Leyston
Yacht Club’ in large letters, and then in smaller letters underneath, ‘Members Only’.

Daisy took a few more steps towards the gate. A yacht club might be a useful thing to know about. At the very least, it would give her an immediate social veneer. She knew little about boats, but she was sure she could learn. A few hours in the company of a yachtswoman, or even a few hours spent in the same room, and she would be moving and talking as if she had been on boats all her life.

Daisy turned away from the Yacht Club, and gazed absorbedly at the grass bank to her right. It lay there, the faint wind-stirred movements of grass on its flanks like the slow, deep breaths of some recumbent beast. From somewhere beyond the bank she could hear the screeching of gulls, like screaming children. The sound made her unaccountably nervous: she had never had children, never even felt the touch of a man’s hand, but something about that sound made her want to scream.

The nearest set of steps was only a few yards away, and with mounting nervousness she walked up them, taking small bird-steps.

As her head rose above the top of the bank, the first thing she saw was a line of houses, far in the distance, and then, as she reached the top, her breath suddenly fluttered within her chest as she saw the stretch of calm water that lay between her and them. The bank dropped down on the other side to a
concrete dock, and the water stretched from the dock all the way across to the far side, a misty grey-blue surface, a wash of colour.

It was a marina, a place for boats to tie up, and there were hundreds of them there, hulls painted white and bows sharp and somehow cruel to Daisy’s eyes. Somewhere nearby there must have been a channel or a river that led to the North Sea, allowing the boats access. Now they sat still, watchful, waiting for their owners to come and untie them and take them out into the rough ocean.

Daisy walked down the steps on the other side and up to the edge of the dock: slow, unwilling steps, as if something were pulling her forward against her will, or something were pushing her back from a long-sought goal.

Bending down, she could see her reflection in the water: a figure, outlined by blue sky, one hand resting on the dock, the other reaching out to touch the water.

But it wasn’t her.

The figure looking up at her from the water of the marina was a young girl with red hair, tied back in a pony tail. She was wearing a checked dress. There was something covering the front of the dress: a stain, like jam, or fruit juice.

Or blood.

Daisy staggered to her feet, backing away from the edge of the concrete. Whatever she had seen in the
water was wrong. So very wrong. And it had perverted everything around her as well. She hadn’t noticed before, but it was obvious to Daisy now that the concrete had crumbled in places and cracked in others, and the various chains and rings that had been set into the concrete were leaking orange rust. The boats looked sorry for themselves; behind the cruelly curved bows their hulls were dirty and their ropes hung limp.

Above the boats, and between them, seagulls either hung precariously upon the breeze or bobbed on the water, hoping for a morsel of food to float past. Their cries were making Daisy panicky, and she turned away and ran up the concrete stairs of the bank as fast as she could.

Catching her breath at the bottom of the bank, she composed herself and walked back the few hundred yards to the High Street. Somehow, it felt as if she had crossed between two worlds.

Daisy was keeping her eye out for a library, and found one a little further down the High Street. It was a single-storey building, built out of a sandy stone. Once her breathing had returned to normal, she went inside.

The library was bright and airy, built on two levels with a ramp in between. Daisy spent ten minutes or so wandering around, familiarising herself with the layout. Fiction at one end, non-fiction at the other, with a space in the middle for the sadly omnipresent
internet terminals and DVDs. Books seemed almost to be a secondary concern for libraries, these days.

A door leading out of the library led not, as she might have expected, back to the street but to a courtyard nestled between the library and the building behind it. Roses had been planted in pots, and benches artfully positioned around. A few people were sitting out there, reading books they had brought out of the building.

Within moments, Daisy had identified three women over sixty sitting alone, reading.

With studied indifference, she went back into the library and wandered along the shelves until she found a book entitled
Leyston-by-Naze: A Personal History
. Always good to know something about the place you were going to be living in. Daisy had lived in some anonymous towns in her time, and she was quite looking forward to somewhere that actually did have a history. She took the book outside, found a bench with nobody sitting on it and started to read, making sure that she was scrunched up enough at one end that someone could sit comfortably at the other. If she was lucky, they could strike up a conversation. If she was really lucky, the other person would be an elderly widow with no friends and no social life.

For the first ten minutes or so, Daisy paid little attention to the book. She was more concerned with the comings and goings within the courtyard; the
little courtesies, the way small customs appeared to have sprung up amongst the regulars. But after a while, as nobody came to sit with her, she began to get absorbed into the book.

It had been written by a local historian, and privately printed as far as she could tell. There was certainly something less than professional about the typeface and the way the pages were cut. The author knew his subject, however, and he could turn a good phrase. Daisy actually found herself becoming interested in the details of how the beaches of Leyston had become a key source of hardcore aggregate for the building industry, and how the local station had been a marshalling yard for transporting the broken rocks into London. Who would have guessed?

Other chapters dealt with Leyston during the war, and then the expansion of Leyston as part of the Tendring Hundreds area. History seemed to have pretty much bypassed the town for a long time; small events took on a greater significance, just because there was so little else that happened. Daisy already knew that, of course – any town where the theft of a milk bottle and a beer bottle made headlines in the local paper was not making its mark on history – but the book’s author had to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to come up with interesting stories.