Core of Evil (29 page)

On the sixth day, Daisy rested. She needed to give some thought to her next steps, but more than that, she needed Eunice to realise how empty her life was when Daisy wasn’t there. Using the excuse that she needed to do some work on the designs for the Arts and Crafts Centre leaflets, she stayed at home. But before she left the barn, she turned the ringer volume on Eunice’s telephone down to zero. Eunice would be able to make outgoing calls with no problems, but if anyone tried to ring in then Eunice wouldn’t be able to hear the phone. It was crude, but it would help to make her feel even more isolated from her few
remaining contacts. And after a couple of weeks of Eunice failing to answer her phone, people would stop calling. It was so simple, it was perfect.

The next day, Daisy returned to the barn. Eunice was pathetically glad to see her.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you have no idea how boring it is here. I’ve been going gaga. Thank heavens I’ve had Jasper to keep me company.’

‘Actually,’ Daisy said, ‘I brought some food in for Jasper. I cooked some chicken yesterday for my dinner, and I thought he might fancy the leftovers. Would that be all right?’

‘You are so very thoughtful,’ Eunice said. Jasper just eyed her warily from his position by his mistress’s side. ‘Jasper really appreciates the way you look after him.’

Daisy took her bag into the kitchen area at the back of the barn and put the chicken on a saucer. A translucent jelly had congealed around the pieces, making them glossy and brown. Looking around to check that Eunice wasn’t watching, she took a tupperware container from her bag and, pulling the lid off, sprinkled a teaspoon of the grey powder on top and then mixed it in with the jelly. With luck, Jasper would not suspect a thing.

Returning to the barn, she set the saucer down by the side of the counter. The dog trotted across to sniff at it. He looked up at Daisy, then back at the food. He sniffed again. Bending his head, he snuffled
the chunks of meat and jelly and poison up into his wrinkled little mouth.

‘There’s a good dog,’ said Daisy.

At lunchtime, Daisy made a cup of tea. Eunice took a packet of pills from her bag and, as she had done every lunchtime that Daisy had been there, pushed a small blue and red torpedo-shaped pill from its blister pack and popped it in her mouth, swigging it down with a mouthful of tea. The blister pack looked like it was mostly used up.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ Daisy said, ‘but are they vitamin pills?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Eunice said. ‘Atorvastatin, I think it’s called. It lowers cholesterol. Prescription drug, from my doctor.’

‘It must be awful, going into town all the time to get new prescriptions.’

‘The damn surgery won’t let me just phone up and order the tablets,’ Eunice said with some bitterness. ‘I have to drop the repeat prescription in to them with forty-eight hours’ notice. Apparently it’s all to do with that doctor who killed hundreds of his patients. The one with the beard and the glasses. Shipwell? Shipston? Can’t remember his name. Anyway, it’s such a pain.’

‘Perhaps I could help,’ Daisy said casually, as if she had not been planning this all the time. ‘I have to go past the surgery and the chemists when I go home. Would you like me to drop your repeat
prescription in and then pick the tablets up when they are ready?’

‘I couldn’t ask you to do that,’ Eunice said.

‘It’s no trouble. It would make me happy if I could help in any way.’

Eunice gazed at Daisy for a few moments, then rummaged in her bag. ‘I’m nearly out,’ she said, pulling a green repeat prescription form out and ticking a box with a pen that lay beside the till. ‘Would you be a dear, and drop this in for me?’

‘Nothing would give me more pleasure,’ said Daisy, and she meant it. Another small takeover of Eunice’s life had occurred.

Jasper was wandering round the barn in some confusion. He was coughing, as if trying to retch something up, and going around in circles. Daisy made a mental note to double the amount of powder she used the next time she fed him. She wanted a quick reaction when she tried it on Eunice; not a slow, drawn-out death. She’d had enough of those. The last thing she wanted was Eunice waking up from a coma while Daisy was driving her to her last resting place. That would not only be embarrassing; it would be disastrous.

‘Do you think he’s all right?’ Eunice asked, gazing at Jasper with some worry. ‘He looks like he’s swallowed something he shouldn’t have.’

‘Probably just a hairball,’ Daisy said vaguely. ‘He’ll be all right in the morning.’

Eunice looked sorrowfully at the telephone beside the till. ‘It’s been very quiet,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember any calls for an age. Should I get the engineers to take a look at the line?’

‘Things go up and down,’ Daisy said. ‘There might be a glut of calls next week. Leave it until then: see what happens.’

‘You’re a brick,’ Eunice said. ‘I know I get paranoid sometimes, but you’re always there to bring me back to earth. I’m so glad you’re here.’

‘I’ll always be here,’ said Daisy. She gazed at the dog, who was still wandering around the barn as if he had lost something. ‘This place has become a second home to me. I feel as if I really belong.’

Daisy sipped her tea, and gazed at Eunice. She despised the woman more now than she had when she first met her. The six days the two of them had spent together had been nothing but a long monologue from Eunice concerning her past life, her friends, her lovers, her various accidental pregnancies, which had either ended naturally or been terminated unnaturally, and her relationship with her family. Daisy had volunteered very little information about herself, and Eunice had hardly noticed. Even when she had asked Daisy a question about where she had lived and what she had done in her life, she invariably ended up talking about herself. The up side of this was that Daisy had quickly gained a solid appreciation of Eunice’s life –
the names, the dates, the significant moments. The down side was that, of all the women whose lives Daisy had taken over, Eunice’s was the one furthest from her own experience. Becoming Eunice was going to take a major effort.

Ah, but when it happened … when Eunice was dead, and had taken her place in Daisy’s tea party … that would be a moment to savour. Daisy let her mind wander, imagining Eunice’s form not as it was now, fleshy and sagging, but sitting proudly at the table with the others, reduced down to its essentials; the skin removed by nature to reveal the purity of what lay beneath. That would be a sight for sore eyes.

A tiny moth of worry began to eat away at the fabric of Daisy’s self-confidence. Violet Chambers’ body had been found, in its unmarked grave out in the forest. Daisy had been on her way to the tea party with Violet when her tyre had burst and she had been forced to abandon the body. Especially after it had come back to life and Daisy had smashed its skull in order to stop it from escaping, rendering it spoiled and useless for the tea party. The thing that was bothering her was, did the police have any clever way of tracing her car, and working out where she had been going? She rarely watched television, and never watched crime dramas, but Daisy had some vague understanding that the police had access to all kinds of scientific techniques that hadn’t existed in
the past. Things that seemed more fantasy than reality. Could they discover her little hideaway, her paradise, her refuge? The thought made her feel uncomfortable. She shivered and scratched herself.

‘Are you okay?’ Eunice asked. ‘If you’re not feeling well, you should go home. I don’t want to catch anything!’

Forthright to the point of rudeness, that was Eunice. ‘I suddenly felt as if someone had just walked over my graves,’ Daisy murmured.

The thought nagged at her for the rest of the afternoon. Policemen, rummaging through everything that she held dear: the one thing that was constant through all the changing identities and the new homes. Her core. Her centre.

She couldn’t remember where the house had originally come from. The identity of the owner was buried back in the mists of Daisy’s past – and was, Daisy dimly recalled, still sitting at the head of the dinner table. All she knew was that she had inherited it from somewhere, and there was no mortgage outstanding on it. For as long as she paid the Council Tax on it – and she visited every month or so in order to pick up the letter from the local Council telling her how much to pay – she had assumed that it would remain safe. Undisturbed. She had deliberately switched the gas and electricity supplier several times, ensuring that the last time she closed the accounts without starting new ones up. That way
there would be no reason for a computer glitch, or a gas leak, to start accruing costs on her account and eventually for bailiffs to get called in. That would have been a disaster. In fact, the last few times she had been at the house – the last time being six months before, with the body of the original Daisy Wilson – there had only been a few letters waiting for her. Long periods in which nothing happened at the house seemed to have caused the address to have dropped off even the most tenacious of postal marketing firms. Even the
Reader’s Digest
didn’t send letters there any more. Only that one occasion when she had, reluctantly, had to arrange for a mechanic to visit to start her Volvo had marred the isolation.

But now … Daisy couldn’t focus her thoughts on the accounts in front of her. The possibility that her guests might be disturbed, might even be
removed
, was making her tense and irritable. Twice she snapped at Jasper as he stopped near her and coughed.

Did she dare make a return visit? That was the question. When Eunice finally succumbed to the apricot kernels – assuming they worked their magic on Jasper first – then Daisy would have to dispose of the body somewhere. She quailed at the idea of just dumping it in a quarry or a wood, or throwing it off the Naze. That was not only clumsy and messy; it was also risky. Bodies disposed of like that were
bound to surface, literally or metaphorically. A bad penny always turns up again; that was what they said. No, it was far safer to place bodies in a controlled environment, where the chances of passers-by finding them were so remote as to be discarded. And besides, Daisy had always taken great comfort in the notion that all of her victims – with the exception of poor Violet – were keeping each other company.

Despite her concerns, Daisy didn’t want to risk making a visit now. Going to the house to see whether the police had found it was like wandering around with a lighted match looking for a gas leak: the consequences of discovering the worst were likely to be worse still. No, she would wait until Eunice was safely dead, and then make a decision based on what had appeared in the newspapers, and what her intuition was telling her.

‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ Eunice asked. ‘Get some fresh air? You’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘That would be nice,’ Daisy said. She had got about as far with the accounts as it was possible to go; not only sorting out for Eunice where all her money was going but also ensuring that Daisy herself had a list of account numbers and knew where all the relevant paperwork was kept. She would need that knowledge later.

‘Jasper!’ Eunice called. ‘Come on, you slugabed. Walkies!’

Jasper had retired to a corner of the barn where, at some stage in the past, a tartan blanket had been thrown down for him. Now it was matted and twisted into a mirror image of his shape, and he was nestled into it, tongue hanging out, panting for breath.

‘He’s looking a bit peaky too,’ Eunice said, concerned. ‘I hope he’s not coming down with something. He’s quite delicate, you know. Quite artistic, in his personality.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Daisy said reassuringly. She thought she could see a trace of blue around the inside of the dog’s mouth as it panted. Perhaps she had overestimated the amount of grated apricot kernel necessary to kill an elderly dog, in which case she probably had enough left to kill Eunice several times over. ‘He’s probably tired out from rushing around.’ As if Jasper ever did anything as undignified as rushing around. ‘We should leave him here and check on him later.’

Together they set out, walking first along the lane towards the road where the bus dropped Daisy off every morning and picked her up every night, and then striking out along an established track that ran between fields. The sky was bright blue, and what little cloud existed was being pulled in different directions, combining and drifting apart as it moved. Daisy could smell the pungent aroma of the flowers that lined the fields on either side of them; bright
gold, spindly, and nodding in the same faint breeze that pushed the clouds around.

Eunice strode ahead, swinging a walking stick manfully. Daisy found it a chore to keep up, but the exercise cleared her mind of her worries concerning the house where her victims sat in their eternal tea party.

‘I know all the walks around here,’ Eunice confided over her shoulder. ‘Some of them have remained unchanged for centuries, perhaps millennia. They say that some of these tracks follow the paths of ley lines, you know? One can imagine Roman soldiers walking across these very fields. Or druids, perhaps.’

Daisy was spending more time imagining Eunice twisted in agony and turning blue as the hydrocyanic acid burned its way through her body, but she merely said, ‘Yes, indeed,’ as they walked. Her shoes weren’t really ideal for this kind of thing.

They were walking up a slight incline, and at the top Eunice stopped and gazed, entranced, ahead. Daisy struggled to catch up. When she too crested the ridge at the top of the incline, she felt what little breath she had catch in her throat.

Ahead of them lay a church. An old church, made of grey stone, with a squat tower in its middle and an older structure, made of wood, attached to the end furthest from the large double doors that gave entry to the inside. It sat in the midst of a graveyard,
separated from the surrounding fields by a dry-stone wall. A track led away towards some distant buildings.

‘St Alkmund’s Church,’ Eunice said. ‘No vicar, not since the 1970s. There’s a padre who cycles round every four weeks, as part of a rota of local old churches without their own vicars, but the attendance is small and it’s going down as people die off. Lovely architecture, though. Mainly Norman influence. Be a shame to lose it. Look at that wooden hut thing on the end: I remember reading somewhere that it dates from a previous church on the same site. Anglo-Saxon. Built without nails. Held together with wooden pegs, apparently. Let’s go closer.’