Core of Evil (7 page)

For the next few hours Violet was lost in a slow kaleidoscope of dreams, sometimes surfacing enough to be aware of where she was, sometimes submerged in the moments and the memories, attempting to make some sense of their fragmentary chaos.

Rising from depths of sleep where she had been lost and stumbling in an art gallery full of portraits of people she did not know, she found herself on a beach of pebbles in various shades of grey and ochre. Somewhere out in the darkness, waves crashed on shingle, rattling as they withdrew and then crashing again, relentlessly, mindlessly, over and over again.

Tock
.

Startled, she turned around. Nothing was moving. The pebbles ranged away from her in all directions. Somewhere over to her left there was a sketchy indication of a breakwater, but that was the only thing to stand out in this otherwise featureless place.

Tock
.

She turned again, in a full circle. There was nothing to see but pebbles and darkness, nothing to hear now but the waves.

Tock
.

That had come from the ground, by her feet. Glancing down, she was shocked to see a pebble move. Rounded by the sea, dark red in colour, it
suddenly lurched towards her on tiny feet. Violet backed away rapidly, faster than the pebble could move. It had tiny claws which it waved at her, and she could almost swear that it had a tiny face between the claws, a wizened little face with two eyes buried in puffy, criss-crossed flesh.

Tock. Tock-Tock
.

Behind her now. She turned again, heels catching in the shingle. Two more pebbles were scuttling toward her, waving their minuscule claws. One had a little curl of grey hair hanging between its eyes.

Terrified, she edged backwards.

Something moved beneath her heels.

Tock-Tock. Tock
.

The shingle heaved beneath her. She felt herself tumbling, screaming as she fell into their claws, into their tiny, tiny claws—

Violet jerked awake, heart racing, breath rasping in her throat. The bedroom was black, washed with amber from the street lamp.
Tock, tock, tock
, went the alarm clock, one
tock
for every two thumps of her heart. She lay there, gradually relaxing back into the bed, until sleep claimed her once again. Deep, dreamless, anonymous sleep.

She woke, as she usually did, at half past seven in the morning. The street outside was as busy as she had ever seen it. Every few minutes a front door closed behind someone in a suit or smart clothes, heading for the bus stop or the station. She stood in
the window, one of Daisy’s dressing gowns wrapped around her. She loved watching people. Their unconscious grimaces and their little sideways glances when they thought nobody was looking fascinated her. They always had, ever since she was a child.

A man, still half asleep, yawned as he locked his front door behind him, covering his mouth with the back of his left hand while he manipulated his keys with his right. Violet raised her own left hand to her mouth, touching her lips against the skin on the back in the same way he did, counting the seconds silently, feeling her breath tickle the fine hairs on her skin, until he lowered his hand and turned to leave. A woman on one side of the street carrying a thin briefcase on a strap over her shoulder cast sideways glances at the door of a house on the other side, hoping someone was going to come out. Violet practised those same darting looks under half-closed eyelids, knowing and yet not knowing that she was doing it.

Yes, she loved watching people. But even more than that, she loved
being
them.

Breakfast was a slice of toast with butter and a smear of marmalade along with a cup of tea – made with Daisy’s teabags, not the tea leaves she had brought with her the day before. After breakfast she set a match to the items in the metal bin in the back garden and, while they burned, set to work searching the house.

She started at the bottom – literally. The cellar hadn’t seen light for many years. The cobwebs hanging from the crude wooden rafters were so burdened with dust they looked like grey chiffon scarves. Apart from a patina of coal dust that glittered in the light from the naked bulb there was nothing for Violet in that dark, dead place. She didn’t even go all the way down the stairs. At the back of her mind there was a nagging fear that her feet might sink into the coal dust up to the ankles, and all she would hear would be the dry rustling of thousands of insect carcasses crushed beneath her soles.

The parlour was old, familiar territory, but she searched it anyway, just in case she had missed something along the way. The bureau was stacked with crockery, cutlery, glassware, old music manuscripts and cuttings from newspapers dating back twenty years or more. The newspaper cuttings she threw on the bonfire; the rest of it looked worthless, but might fetch a few pounds somewhere. If not, she could always donate them to charity. One had to do one’s part, but charity did begin at home.

The kitchen yielded nothing unexpected. Violet had spent so many hours in there, boiling the kettle for one of Daisy’s endless cups of tea, retrieving biscuits from the cupboard (‘Arrowroot, m’dear – helps my digestion!’) and grilling the occasional fish finger or, if it was a special occasion, piece of cod,
that she knew the contents of every cupboard and drawer like she knew the pattern of freckles on her arm. There were a couple of Apostle teaspoons that bore further investigation, to judge by their hallmarks, but nothing else. Nothing that would give her purchase on Daisy’s bank accounts or other financial assets.

The dining room was just that: it contained the dining table and a rosewood cabinet in which the best china and silverware were stored. There was nowhere for any paperwork to be kept, but Violet paused in the doorway, wanting to leave but unable. The dining table pulled her back. The black dining table.

Violet shook her head convulsively. No time for dilly-dallying. ‘Take time by the forelock’, as the old adage went.

She quickly headed up the stairs and gave the bathroom and the front bedroom – her bedroom – a thorough going over. The bathroom didn’t take long, but the bedside cabinets contained piles of letters and postcards that Daisy had, presumably, lain in bed reading. These Violet put to one side. She already knew everything that was in them from the endless monologues that she had encouraged with brandy and the occasional weak infusion of flowers from her garden – the names and addresses of old friends, the background details of Daisy’s previous life that could be dropped in conversation or used to deflect
questions – but it was worth going through them, just in case. One could never be too careful.

Finally, Violet turned her attention to the back room. The storage room. Previously, when Daisy was alive, she had only been able to stand in the doorway and look around, but she was pretty sure that most of Daisy’s paperwork was kept there. What little paperwork Daisy had, anyway. That’s why she had left it until last.

There was a truckle bed against one wall, and bookcases flanking the door, but Violet’s attention was fixed immediately on the desk that sat beneath the window. The chair in front of it was, disconcertingly, a 1970s-vintage secretary’s swivel chair with upholstery patterned in a psychedelic swirl of green and blue. Heaven alone knew where Daisy had got it from – or indeed why. With some qualms, Violet sat in the chair and methodically went through the desk drawers.

And it was all there. Building society statements, showing that Daisy was in the black to the tune of several thousand pounds. Mortgage details – and it turned out to be the case, as Violet had strongly suspected but needed to confirm – that the mortgage was freehold and had been paid off many years before. The deeds on the house. An insurance policy on thick parchment that had been taken out in the 1930s and would, presumably, pay out a pretty penny now, if Violet wasn’t intending to keep Daisy alive – at least,
as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Some premium bonds that might be worth investigating, and perhaps cashing in. Some certificates almost certainly inherited or acquired by Daisy’s deceased husband that gave Daisy shares in companies that, to judge by their names (Amalgamated Nickel Engineering, Imperial Celluloid), had probably gone to the wall many years beforehand. Still, she put them to one side. Best to be sure. For all she knew, Amalgamated Engineering might have changed its name to British Steel and the shares could be worth millions now.

She leaned back in her chair and gazed out of the window. From this perspective she could see the entire length of the garden: unkempt, overgrown but potentially quite attractive. She might spend some time out there later on, trimming the bushes with her secateurs. Perhaps plant a few nice flowers in the borders as well. And while she was at it, there were people who would come in and spring-clean the house. The wallpaper and paintwork were old-fashioned, to be sure, and the kitchen could certainly do with bringing into the twenty-first century with a new cooker, new refrigerator and new cupboards and work surfaces, but those were big jobs that would require careful planning. And they might not be necessary.

Once she had finished searching the house – and it suddenly occurred to her that she needed to take a quick look in the attic, just to be absolutely sure she
hadn’t missed anything – Violet decided that she would take a wander down to the High Street. She could treat herself to a cup of tea and a steak pie and some new potatoes in one of the department stores, and then take a slow walk along the row of estate agents. What she needed was one slightly down at heel, one that specialised in lets and sub-lets rather than actual sales. And – although this might require some careful observation from a seat in a coffee shop – one that dealt more with what Violet thought of as the lower end of the social spectrum. Immigrants. Students, perhaps. If the rent was set low enough – and Violet wasn’t greedy, far from it – then she was sure that tenants wouldn’t mind an old-fashioned kitchen and some faded wallpaper. It was probably better than they were used to.

The best thing was, the estate agents would make all the arrangements, choose the tenants, collect the rent and just forward it to wherever she wanted, after taking their cut, of course. And Violet didn’t begrudge them their cut, considering the load they were taking off her shoulders.

Streamers of smoke drifted up past the window. Somewhere down below, on the concrete patio, Daisy’s clothes were burning away to ashes. Violet didn’t like using the word ‘evidence’ – it sounded so harsh – but she was comforted to think that soon the events of the previous day would have vanished into the air.

And soon, after the house had been sorted out and whatever assets were in the house had been converted to cash, so would Violet.

The drifting smoke drew her gaze up into the sky: a deep cloudless azure that seemed to go on for ever and ever. She wished that, when she brought her gaze back down again, instead of overgrown bushes and thin trees she might see a glorious stretch of turquoise water, with the wind blowing spume off the crests of the waves and distant container ships breaking the straight line of the horizon.

And she decided there and then that she’d had enough of the small towns she had been hiding in for so long. She longed for the seaside, and that’s where she would go next.

As she was descending the stairs, the telephone rang. Without even thinking, she picked it up off the table in the hall and said, brightly, ‘Hello. Daisy Wilson speaking.’

The mortuary was located between a park and a fire station on the outskirts of Braintree: a nondescript two-storey building that looked as if it had originally been intended as a temporary measure but now just sat there, set back from the road, fading further and further from people’s minds. It was, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie decided as he pulled off the road and parked in one of the designated spaces, the closest thing to an architectural blind spot it was possible to get.

He wasn’t in the best of moods. The morning before, after Emma Bradbury had driven off from the forest where the body had been discovered, Lapslie had hung around, waiting for the forensic pathologist to arrive. The press had turned up in the early afternoon, just before Jane Catherall, tipped off, he suspected, by one of the paramedics. By the time he had dealt with them and spent half an hour on the phone to the Crime Scene Manager she had already departed with the bodies, leaving him furious. Some mix-up in the admin had resulted in most of the
uniformed police being pulled away from the crime scene in order to cover a local football match. And Superintendent Rouse had not called back. All in all, it had been a frustrating day.

Emma’s Mondeo was two spaces across from his car. This time, it was empty. No strange men in the passenger seat, waiting for her to return and whisk them away.

The front door had a push-button combination lock. He’d known the combination once, but he’d forgotten it several times over the years, so he did what he usually did: buzzed the intercom. It was a good minute before anyone answered.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie,’ he said, bending down to the level of the intercom. Why was it they were always installed by dwarves? Or did the installers expect lots of school parties to visit the mortuary unaccompanied?

The door buzzed, and he pushed it open.

Despite the summer sun outside, the building was pleasantly cool. The hallway was carpeted with tiles that had, over the course of the years, picked up so many coffee stains they were piebald. The walls were plastered and painted in a muted shade of blue. A young man wearing a white coat over jeans and a T-shirt was waiting for him.

‘DCI Lapslie?’

He handed his warrant card across. The man inspected it carefully, although Lapslie was pretty
sure he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a proper warrant card and a Scotland Yard gym membership.

‘This way, please.’

He led Lapslie down a corridor and gestured for him to go ahead through a set of double doors. The temperature dropped appreciably as Lapslie pushed the doors open, and he became aware of a strong smell, like bleach that had been poured down a blocked drain and allowed to fester. The smell was so strong, so cloying that he could taste it at the back of his throat. His synaesthesia momentarily went into reverse; the taste of the disinfectant, or cleaner, or whatever it was, overlaid on the smell of decay filled his head with deep, sonorous chimes. It didn’t happen very often, and he staggered slightly, one hand to his forehead, disoriented.