Core of Evil (30 page)

‘I’d rather not,’ Daisy said, but Eunice was striding off ahead.

Daisy glanced again at the church. Something about the way it squatted, alone but unrepentant, in the middle of the fields made her uneasy. It was as if it had been waiting for her. Waiting all these years for her to return, with dark thoughts mouldering in its heart.

Eunice had reached the dry-stone wall now, and was walking around to the lych gate entrance. Daisy followed, knowing that something was not right.

The graveyard was long overgrown with weeds and flowers. The gravestones had been eroded by the salt air and colonised by moss to the point where they were almost as rounded as boulders. Whatever
writing had been carved onto them was nothing but depressions in the granite, like memories that had faded until there was nothing left but the faint recollection that something had once been there and was now lost forever.

Eunice ran her hands across a gravestone that was tilting at an angle. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘the history of this place. The way it has stayed the same while everything around it – the countryside, the country, the world – has changed.’

But Daisy wasn’t listening. Around the corner of the church she had spotted a gravestone that had been set flat in the ground. She walked closer, feet unwilling to move but unable to stop. Protected, perhaps, by the bulk of the church, the letters carved into the slab were almost readable.

Madeline Poel
, it said, but that was impossible.

Because before she had been Daisy Winters, before she had been Violet Chambers, before she had been anyone, she knew that she had been Madeline Poel.

Find one old lady dead, Mark Lapslie thought sourly, and you get a desk and a Detective Sergeant; find thirteen of them and you get an entire incident room and so many staff it’s hard to remember their names. Even the DCS hadn’t been able to stop the investigation from ramping up, although the rumour was that he had tried several times. Apparently Rouse had attempted to claim that until the deaths were attributable to foul play then he couldn’t approve a murder investigation, but the fact that the Volvo 740 could now be used to link the corpse in the forest – which had undoubtedly been murdered – with the ones in the farmhouse meant that his objections were half-hearted and easily overcome by someone who still had a few friends at Scotland Yard.

Half of the room in the Chelmsford HQ was filled with desks, each loaded up with its own telephone and computer, each telephone connected to a headset with attached microphone, each computer networked into the police system. The other half was dominated by two perspex boards. The first one had
photographs of the victims blutacked all over it, along with notes written in wipeable pen. On any normal incident board there would be lines drawn between the photographs indicating connections: unbroken lines for the known connections and dotted lines for the ones where there was an indication but no corroborating evidence. On this board, there were no lines. Despite all of the constables manning the phones and the computers, nobody had yet established a connection between any of the victims. None of them had been to school together, none of them had lived in the same towns or villages, none of them had shared the same hobbies or subscribed to the same magazines. The only things they had in common were their sex – they were all female – their age – they were all over sixty – and their general geographical location – they all lived in the South or West of England. And, of course, the fact that they had all been murdered and mutilated.

Lapslie stood by the victims board, ignoring the flood of rust and salt and coconut that filled his mouth each time he came into the incident room and heard the chatter of people talking on telephones, talking to each other and typing away at keyboards. He kept shoving breath fresheners under his tongue to cover the melange of tastes, but it didn’t work. The problem was psychological, not physical. He tried to spend as much time as he could in the Quiet
Room, but he had to show his face to his staff, listen to their problems, brief them on new aspects of the case and generally be there as a figurehead. Emma Bradbury was doing the best she could to take the pressure off his shoulders, but he’d had a persistent headache for several days now and he was finding it difficult to eat. When he’d had a mouth full of conflicting flavours all day, the last thing he wanted was to add more to them.

It was driving him mad. This was why he’d taken leave of absence from the police in the first place; this, and having to split from Sonia and the kids.

He let his gaze scan across the photographs on the board. He’d never really thought about it before, but in the same way that all babies share similar features so all elderly people do as well. It was as if everyone is born the same and dies the same, and the bit in between is where we have the chance to distinguish ourselves from the rest. The correspondences were more marked than the differences: white hair, liver spots on the hands, skin that had sagged into set folds beneath the chin, eyebrows that had been pencilled in, bags beneath the eyes, faded, cloudy irises. Something told Lapslie that if he ever managed to catch his killer, he could put her photograph up there and it would just blend in with the rest.

Some of the photographs had names written in beneath them: Violet Chambers, of course; Daisy Winters; Deirdre Fincham; Alice Connell; Rhona
McIntyre; Kim Stothard; Wendy Maltravers – identified by a combination of medical records, dental records and clues found about their bodies. Not missing persons records, of course – although that was a key factor in identifying most murder victims, it was no help here. Each of the dead women was actually still out there as far as the system was concerned. They were all still claiming benefits, paying their Council Tax, receiving rent from the properties they had moved out of, filling out their tax returns and sending the occasional postcard or Christmas card to the neighbours they had left behind.

‘Everybody is dead who should be alive,’ he murmured to himself.

Where the first perspex board had no lines linking the photographs, the second one had nothing but lines drawn all over it, with cryptic notes written alongside the lines. It was a map of the financial arrangements: direct debits and standing orders, payments in and out. Each node on the board was an account in a bank or a building society, and each line showed money being transferred. And there was nothing, in that complex web of finance, to identify the spider in the middle. There was no central account to which the others drained their money. Every so often there was a dotted line leading away from the web, like an anchor line, marking where cash had been taken out
of one or other of the accounts – hundreds of pounds in most cases, sometimes thousands – but it was never in the same place.

On the other side of the board, a map of the Essex area had been blu-tacked in place. Red stickers marked where cashpoints had been used to remove money from the accounts. There were clusters of stickers, but nothing that would indicate that their killer lived in a particular place.

Lapslie caught the eye of one of the passing constables. ‘Who’s responsible for updating this board?’ he asked.

‘PC Swinerd, sir,’ the girl said in a smoke-filled voice.

‘Can you send them over?’ Lapslie asked. He wasn’t entirely sure he could remember who PC Swinerd was.

He turned out to be a blond lad with a receding hairline. ‘Sir?’ he said as he approached. His voice was gooseberries and cream.

‘These stickers – they’re not ordered in any particular way?’

He frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘There’s no numbering on them to indicate which ones were the earliest transactions and which were the latest ones.’

‘Trouble was, sir, I was putting the stickers on while the information was still trickling in. The banks haven’t been very co-operative, and we’re
having to keep getting warrants signed off for each victim’s accounts as they’re identified. Until all the transactions are shown we don’t know what the very first or very last transactions are, and so we can’t number the ones in between.’

‘And there are still six victims not identified?’

‘That’s right, sir.’

Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘We might never identify them, that’s the problem. Can you write numbers on these stickers – “1” for the first, and whatever the highest number is for the most recent. We can always change the numbers later, if more information comes in.’

‘Sir,’ the PC said. He looked sceptical, probably at the amount of work he was being asked to do, but he walked away without argument.

‘One more thing,’ Lapslie called after him. ‘Put green stickers on to mark where the victims’ houses were.’

‘Yes, sir,’ PC Swinerd called back.

Emma Bradbury walked in as PC Swinerd walked away. She caught Lapslie’s eye, and came over.

‘Boss, we’ve got preliminary autopsy results in from Doctor Catherall. She’s really pulled the stops out. Apart from the disfiguration on the right hand of all the victims, there’s no signs of violence, but the toxicology reports suggest that poison was involved in at least five of the deaths.’

‘Only five?’

‘The other bodies are too decayed. The reports point out that some poisons degrade over time to the point where they can’t be detected.’

‘So – what poisons did they detect?’ he asked.

Emma consulted her list. ‘Pyrrolizidine alkaloid,’ she read, stumbling over the words, ‘andromedotoxin, taxine, cyanogenic glucoside, a complex terpene that can’t be properly identified. And colchicine, of course, from Violet Chambers.’

‘No strychnine? No cyanide? No warfarin?’

‘Not so far. None of the classics.’

Lapslie thought for a moment, remembering back to the garden next to the house where all the bodies had been discovered. The Garden of Death, as he had thought of it.

‘Get back to Doctor Catherall,’ he said. ‘I want to know if any of those toxins can be obtained from common or garden plants. Remember that colchicine comes from the meadow saffron.’

‘Yes, boss. How could I forget?’

Lapslie looked around the incident room again as she walked off. Everyone seemed to be busily engaged in urgent activity. He left before the chatter and the clatter overcame him.

Sitting in the Quiet Room with the door closed, he gradually let himself relax. In his mind, a picture of the killer kept forming; vague, blurred, but definitely there. She was almost obsessively methodical, for instance. The way she had arranged the finances of
her victims indicated that she could keep a complex series of facts in her head at one time, and the way she sent postcards and Christmas cards after the event suggested that she kept detailed records. She didn’t just kill and move on. No, she kept the plates spinning, kept all of her victims alive. Did she, in some sense, believe that if she kept them alive then they weren’t really dead?

Bacon trickled across his tongue before he registered the knock on the door. He turned his head. Emma Bradbury was standing there. He gestured to her to enter.

‘Doctor Catherall says that all of the poisons can be easily made up from sufficient quantities of plants. She kept talking, and I couldn’t make notes fast enough, but I got the impression that some of the plants were common or garden – as it were – and others were rather more obscure. Specialist items, as it were.’

‘That house where the bodies were found is our killer’s base of operations, then,’ Lapslie said grimly. ‘She keeps going back there, not only to drop off fresh bodies but also to obtain her raw materials. I think that garden is our murder weapon.’

‘The garden?’

‘Get one of the constables to get in touch with a botanist. I want them to go through that garden and work out which plants are poisonous, which
part
is poisonous and what the poison is.’

Emma looked baffled. ‘Where do we get a botanist from?’

Lapslie shrugged. ‘A university or a garden centre, wherever. Get hold of Alan Titchmarsh, for all I care. Just get an expert in that garden. And make sure someone is keeping watch on that house. I want everyone who visits it checked out, postmen and door-to-door salesmen included.’

‘Yes, boss. Oh, and PC Swinerd was looking for you. He says he’s finished with the map.’

As Emma left, Lapslie took a deep breath and slipped another breath tablet into his mouth before leaving the Quiet Room and heading back to the incident room.

The perspex board with the financial spider’s web was still rotated so that the map showed, but there were green stickers amongst the red ones now, and the red stickers had numbers on them. Lapslie stood a little way away and just tried to take the information in. It hadn’t been obvious before, but now he could see there were clumps of red stickers around where the green ones were. It made sense: the killer got rid of a victim and moved into their house for a while, taking on their identity, and while she was there she had to take money out of whatever accounts she controlled. She may have used different cashpoints for safety, but she obviously didn’t want to travel too far. Or perhaps she couldn’t travel too far. Whatever the reason, she
stayed within a few tens of miles of what was, for a while, home.

There was one cluster that didn’t have a green sticker as its centre.

Lapslie moved closer, feeling excitement stirring within him. If the killer used her latest victim’s house as a base, then a cluster of red stickers with no green sticker might indicate where the latest victim was.

Or would be.

Squinting, he checked the numbers written on the red stickers in that clump. They were all high numbers. Quickly, he scanned the rest of the board. There were no higher numbers anywhere else. Those transactions were the most recent ones.

She was there! He’d located his killer.

He focused on the map behind the dots. East and north of London. The area that used to be known as the Tendring Hundreds – a name that lingered on in the name of the local council and the local newspapers. Clustered around the coast: Clacton, Frinton, Walton and Leyston.

He had her. Or, at least, he knew where she was.