Core of Evil (20 page)

‘You should take something for it,’ Daisy said, sensing an opening the way a cat can sometimes sense a mouse without even seeing it.

‘Oh,’ Sylvia said, ‘I don’t like the thought of sedatives.’

‘I was thinking more of something herbal,’ Daisy said casually. ‘A herbal tea, perhaps. I could make you some up. If you would like.’

‘Oh Daisy,’ Sylvia said gratefully, ‘you’re just killing me with kindness.’

There was a poem that Mark Lapslie had read once, while searching online for other people’s experiences of synaesthesia. It was on a website that noted, with some pride, that there were many artists, poets and musicians who were synaesthetic, although it then went on to admit that this might be because they were more likely to notice and even take advantage of their symptoms. The poem was by a nineteenth-century French writer named Baudelaire, and it stuck in Lapslie’s memory. It captured in a handful of words something that he wished he could achieve in his own life – a sense of the beauty and the majesty that synaesthesia could apparently provide.

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants Sweet like oboes, green like prairies, —And others corrupted, rich and triumphant That have the expanse of infinite things, Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense, Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

He remembered the poem again as he made the long drive, under a grey early-morning sky, from his cottage in Saffron Walden to the hospital outside Braintree where he was under the occasional care of the consultant neurologist.
The ecstasies of the mind and senses
. If only that were as true for him as it apparently was for Baudelaire.

Still, Baudelaire had been a syphilitic opium addict with a drink problem, so Lapslie felt justified in not taking his pronouncements too seriously.

He parked his car near the hospital and walked through the main entrance. Rather than wear a suit, he had chosen chinos, a plain shirt and a moleskin jacket. He’d booked a day’s leave for the appointment, and to meet an old friend later on.

The central atrium was tall and airy, surrounded by planters of ferns, with fountains plashing gently in the centre and stone benches all around. Walking through a set of double doors to one side of the atrium, he quickly found himself in the hospital proper: a maze of square corridors that smelled of disinfectant, their walls and linoleum scuffed and scarred by decades of hospital trolleys. The original, 1950s vintage, hospital was hidden behind the impressive new façade in the same way that the ladies of Baudelaire’s time used to hide their pox-ridden faces behind caked layers of make-up.

A handful of people were sat around a waiting area, waiting for the neurology outpatients clinic.
Lapslie sat and waited with them for his appointment, trying not to make judgements about them. After all, he was on leave, not on duty.

He had timed his arrival perfectly, and within five minutes his name was being called. The consulting room was small, anonymous, with white walls, a hospital trolley, a desk with a computer on it and a couple of chairs. It could have been any consulting room in any hospital or clinic, anywhere in the country.

The young man sitting at the desk was new to Lapslie. He was reading information off the computer screen as Lapslie entered, and he stuck out his hand without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘Hello. I’m Doctor Considine. I don’t think I’ve seen you before, have I?’

‘Mark Lapslie.’ He shook the doctor’s hand and sat down. ‘I’ve been seeing Doctor Lombardy for the past ten years or so.’

‘Doctor Lombardy retired about six months ago. A very clever man. Great loss to the hospital.’ He consulted the computer again. ‘I see you’re a synaesthete. We don’t get to see many synaesthetes here – estimates of its occurrence vary between six people in a million and three in a hundred, depending on how wide you want to draw the boundaries, but most of them either don’t know they have it or assume that everyone does. You, it appears, are in that small subsection for whom the effect of synaesthesia is
strong enough to cause problems in your day-to-day life. When was the last time you were seen here?’

‘A year ago.’

‘And has your condition changed in that time – got worse or got better?’

‘It’s stayed at the same level.’

‘Hmm.’ He tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I presume that Doctor Lombardy told you there is no treatment and no cure for synaesthesia? It’s something you just have to live with.’

Lapslie nodded. ‘He did tell me that. We decided that it was worth me coming back once a year or so to check whether there had been any major advances in the research.’

Dr Considine shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge. It’s still pretty much a puzzle. We know from magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, for instance, that synaesthetes such as yourself show patterns of activity that are different from people who are normal – for want of a better word – but we are still trying to work out what that difference means. It’s still a puzzle.’

‘One that’s affecting my career and my personal life,’ Lapslie said bitterly. ‘It’s easy to say there’s no treatment, but you don’t have to live with it. My career has stalled because I can’t socialise the way the others do. I’ve separated from my family because I can’t bear the continual taste in my mouth when they’re around. And I can’t watch television, or go to
see a film or a concert, for fear of suddenly throwing up. Runny egg yolks and chalky antacid tablets are bad enough, but a sudden rush of raw sewage or vomit down your throat can spoil your entire evening.’

‘I see.’ The doctor wrote a few notes on a pad in front of him. ‘And forgive me for asking this, but is there an up-side? Does the synaesthesia bring any benefits with it?’

‘I have a very good memory for people – I suspect that’s because I can associate their voices with particular flavours.’

‘Which makes me wonder – does my voice have a flavour to it?’

Lapslie laughed. ‘You’d be surprised how many people ask me that question, when they hear about my problem. No – not all sounds trigger flavours. I don’t know if it’s to do with pitch, or timbre, or what. Some voices do, but yours doesn’t. Sorry.’

‘Anything else? Any more benefits?’

Lapslie considered for a few seconds. ‘Strangely,’ he said, ‘I can usually tell when people are lying to me. It’s an unusual taste. Dry and spicy, but not in a curry way. More like nutmeg. It’s helped me investigating crimes before.’ To Considine’s raised eyebrow, he added: ‘I’m in the police.’

Considine frowned. ‘I can just about understand how sounds can be mistranslated into flavours somewhere in the brain,’ he said, ‘but lying isn’t a
sound
, it’s got to do with the content, the meaning of what’s being said. That’s a bit of a stretch.’

‘The way I rationalise it,’ Lapslie said, ‘when people lie, there’s a certain amount of stress in their voice, changing the way it sounds in subtle ways. Somehow, I’m picking up on that stress and tasting it.’

‘I presume you’ve been asked to take part in research projects? There are labs all over the country becoming interested in synaesthesia.’

‘I’ve been asked, and I’ve occasionally taken part in experiments, but it usually turns out that I’m just some glorified lab rat. I want to understand and control my problem, but the trouble is that most researchers want something else. They want to use the synaesthesia as a window into the way the brain operates.’

Considine nodded. ‘I can sympathise. There are psychiatric techniques you could use to try and help control the flood of sensations you are getting. Cognitive behaviour therapy, for instance, could help you weaken the connections between stimuli such as particular sounds and your habitual reactions to them. The tastes might stay, but your reactions could be modified. If you want, I can recommend you to a therapist.’

Therapy. Lapslie shook his head. It wasn’t for him.

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I think the problem is more deeply rooted than that. Changing the way I think won’t affect it.’

‘Then you’re just going to have to live with it.’

‘Thanks for your time.’

‘Come back in another year,’ Dr Considine said as Lapslie stood up to leave. ‘Who knows? By then we might actually know what synaesthesia is and how to suppress it.’

‘Who knows?’ Lapslie said as he left.

It had rained whilst he was in the hospital. Pools of water congregated along kerbs and in dips in the road. Driving out of the hospital grounds, he headed for the A120, but a small voice in the back of his mind told him that he wasn’t too far away from where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered in the forest outside Faulkbourne. Abruptly he turned right instead of left at a roundabout and quickly typed a new destination into his satnav system. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to take another look at the area. Get a feel for it during the daytime, rather than the early morning. See it when nobody else was there, rather than having it filled with policemen and Crime Scene Investigators.

Accelerating along the road, he let his mind drift, trying to analyse why he wanted to spend what remained of his day off investigating a murder. There was something unsatisfying about the crime. Something slightly out of the ordinary. He had investigated so many murders over the years that he was inured to them, to the sights and the smells, the reasons and the rationales, but this one didn’t seem
to fit into the usual channels. Partly it was too mannered, too organised. Poisoning was not a crime of passion, but one of meticulous planning. But then there was the blow to the back of the head and the dumping of the body, apparently still alive, in the forest. That spoke of haste, of the murderer panicking and leaving the body behind. The two just didn’t go together.

Unless …

Unless the murderer had been interrupted on their way to dump the body. Perhaps they had chosen a site where they could abandon it with no fear of detection, but something had happened on the way. The poison hadn’t worked properly: the supposed body had come back to life again. Lapslie felt his pulse pumping as the thoughts all tumbled together in his mind. The murderer – or, rather, the attacker at this point – pulls over on a deserted road to finish the job with a quick blow to the back of the skull with a handy tool – a spanner, or a wrench, or something – but why not keep on going once the victim was dead? Why dump the body there?

Was there an interruption? Did someone see the car, parked by the side of the road, and pull over to see whether the murderer needed any help? Did the murderer have to leave the body where it was in order to deal with this interruption?

The rain-laden clouds were dark overhead but there was blue sky off to one side. The sun shone
diagonally across the landscape, lighting it with a strange golden glow against the dark backdrop. It looked more like a stage set than a real place. Lapslie pushed the problem back in his mind, where his subconscious could chew on it, and set about enjoying the quietness of the drive.

Within half an hour he was heading along the same tree-lined road that he’d been on just a few weeks before. The rain had sluiced the air of dust, and the leaves seemed to glow with a preternatural light as the sun caught them. Shafts of brightness lanced through gaps in the trees, picked out by the moisture in the air. He slowed as he approached the bend in the road where the crash had occurred, pulled over and parked under the trees, his tyres biting deep into the loam.

Lapslie got out of the car and stood for a moment, breathing in the earthy dampness of the air. The CSI team had cleared up and left. Nothing remained of their presence apart from a churned-up area of ground where their tent had been, and some small scraps of yellow tape.

Turning, Lapslie gazed back along the length of the road he had just driven along. If he was right – and it was less of a theory, more of a hypothesis at the moment – the murderer had been driving along that road on their way to dump the body of their victim somewhere. For some reason they had stopped and their victim – who was not quite dead –
had taken the opportunity to attempt an escape. A quick tap to the back of the head, and the victim really was dead. The murderer wrapped her in plastic and left her there, rather than drive on to the spot where they actually wanted to leave the body.

First question – why did the murderer stop the car? Three immediate possibilities occurred to him – either the victim had shown signs of life and had to be dealt with immediately, or there had been something at the scene already that had forced the murderer to stop, or the car had developed a fault. Now, which of those possibilities was the most likely? If the victim had shown signs of life while the murderer was driving the car then they might have stopped and hit them hard enough to finish the job, but why dump the body there? Why not keep on driving to the place they had originally intended to dump it? Scratch that idea. If there had been something on the road – a car in trouble perhaps, then why stop? Or, if the murderer had been forced to stop – by a police presence clearing the scene, perhaps – then why dump the body in a place where there were people around? Again, why not just keep going? No, the more Lapslie thought about it, the more he believed that the murderer’s car had developed a fault.

In his mind’s eye, he could see it happening, playing out against the picturesque setting of the misty road. A lone car, driving carefully, trying not to
attract attention. A puncture, perhaps, or steam coming out of the radiator. The car draws quickly to a halt. The driver – a shadowy figure – gets out and checks the tyre, the bonnet, wherever the problem is. Unseen, the back door opens and a form crawls out, heading into the safety of the trees. The driver sees it, follows it across the bracken. A branch is picked up and descends abruptly: once, twice. The driver returns to the car and reluctantly makes a call to the emergency services. Before they can arrive, the driver takes a roll of plastic out of the back of the car and wraps the body up, piling bracken and earth on top to the best of their ability in order to keep it from being discovered. And then they wait for the AA, or the RAC, or whoever to arrive.