Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  CORE OF EVIL

  Nigel McCrery

  Published in Great Britain in 2007 by Quercus

  This edition first published in 2009 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2007 by Nigel McCrery

  The moral right of Nigel McCrery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 84916 646 1

  Print ISBN 978 1 84724 384 3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  CORE OF EVIL

  Nigel McCrery worked as a policeman, until he left the force to study at Cambridge University. He has created and written some of the most successful television series of the last ten years – his credits include Silent Witness, New Tricks, Born & Bred, All the King’s Men and Back-Up. He is also the author of five internationally bestselling Sam Ryan mysteries. Nigel lives in North London.

  ‘One of the most memorable monsters in modern crime fiction … few readers will put this book down’

  Daily Express

  ‘McCrery mixes in an adage-spouting pensioner, conspiracy theories about shadowy government agencies, and most amusingly of all, a cop with an unusual detection tool … “Arsenic and Old Lace” runs wonderfully amok’

  Time Out

  ‘A fast-moving, original and often genuinely frightening novel’

  Birmingham Post

  ‘A fast-paced, very British crime thriller … Lapslie’s condition provides an interesting angle and the tight plotting and intriguing back story of the killer keep the reader hooked’

  Buzz

  ‘Nigel McCrery, a former policeman, introduces an excellent new detective, Mark Lapslie … [in] his highly original novel’

  Daily Mail

  Also by Nigel McCrery

  Tooth and Claw

  Scream

  For Nelly with all my love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With grateful thanks to: Andrew Lane, for help and assistance; John Catherall, for allowing me to borrow some of his physical characteristics; Robert Kirby, for brokering a deal so tirelessly; Nic Cheetham, for having faith in me; and the irrepressible Gillian Holmes, my long-suffering editor. Sylvia Clarke, Eve Wilson and Iris Cannon, who taught me in various ways how to write and, more importantly, how not to write.

  PROLOGUE

  Summer, 1944

  ‘Granny, what are these?’ shouted Kate.

  Iris Poel sighed. The sun was a white-hot eye in the centre of a bright blue sky, staring at the back of her neck. Her head felt leaden, and it hurt when she moved. The prickling of sweat on her arms and back made her feel as if ants were crawling all over her skin.

  ‘What are what, darling?’ she said for the hundredth time that morning. Putting her secateurs down, she turned away from the rose bush that she was pruning and looked over to where her granddaughter was supposed to be playing with her brothers and sisters.

  ‘These.’ Kate was standing over by a shrub on the other side of the garden. It was covered in glossy leaves and small red berries. Kate was cradling a cluster of the berries in her hand.

  ‘Leave those berries alone,’ Iris said sharply. ‘They’re poisonous.’

  ‘I know that, but what is it?’ Kate repeated.

  ‘It’s called a daphne,’ Iris snapped, feeling spikes of pain lance through her temples with each word. ‘Now leave the berries alone and go back to your game.’

  ‘That game is boring,’ Kate proclaimed with the weariness that only a six-year-old child can manage. She turned away and ran across the garden to where Iris had set out a low table for the children, covered with a white cloth. An entire toy tea set was arranged on the table, along with plates of cakes and biscuits.

  Nobody was sitting at the table. Three of them were kneeling on the grass playing with Kate’s dolls. Two more were running around a small tree that Iris had planted in the middle of the garden the previous spring. The rest were probably in the house – Iris’s daughter-in-law’s house. Or rather, her son’s house, but Frank was in Africa, fighting for his King and his country, and Judith went to work in a factory every day, making parts for aircraft. And Iris was left to look after the children. Every day. Every single day that God sent to try her.

  Iris sighed, and turned back to the rose bush. There were dark splodges on a couple of the leaves. She snipped them off. It looked like blackspot, and there was no point taking chances.

  ‘Are these blackberries?’

  Iris jerked her head around. ‘Kate, I thought you were supposed to be having a tea party with your friends?’

  ‘That tea tastes funny,’ Kate said. ‘Are these blackberries, Granny?’ She was closer to Iris now, gazing up at a yew tree that cast a little shade across the lawn.

  ‘No, they’re not. Leave them alone.’ The pain in her head intensified. ‘That tea, as you call it, is sarsaparilla. You like sarsaparilla.’

  ‘I don’t like that sarsaparilla.’

  Iris’s hand was shaking, holding the secateurs. She closed her eyes. She had spent all morning making those cakes and biscuits. She had put the best tablecloth on the table as well, just to make it look nice, and the girl was ruining it.

  Iris looked over at the table, and the food that was going to waste. Wasps were crawling on the jam tarts.

  Iris closed her eyes, but she could still feel the sun glaring down on her. The pounding in her head was making her sick. It felt as if something was coiling and uncoiling in her stomach. She couldn’t keep still; her fingers were twitching and her head kept flicking left or right, like she had seen something out of the corner of her eye.

  She took a deep breath, and opened her eyes again. The garden was too bright; the incandescently blazing sunshine made her eyes ache.

  She reached out with the secateurs for another leaf that was showing signs of blackspot.

  ‘Granny!’ Kate yelled.

  Iris’s hand jerked, and the secateurs cut through the stem of the rose. The plant toppled into Iris’s face. A thorn caught her cheek as she turned her head, catching the skin just below her eye and ripping a long graze.

  The pain seemed to rip through her soul.

  ‘You stupid child!’ Iris shouted. Kate stepped backwards in shock. ‘Look what you’ve done!’

  Iris lashed out and caught Kate’s shoulder with her hand, dragging her closer. ‘Do you know how long I spent making those cakes, you ungrateful little bitch? I’ll teach you to wander around the garden touching stuff you shouldn’t when you ought to be having a tea party with your sisters and brothers.’

  The words were spilling uncontrollably from her mouth like a stream of vomit, and she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t know where it was all coming from. All of the boys and girls were staring solemnly at her. Her head was pounding, and the shimmering heat in the garden was making her disoriented and nauseous.

  ‘You want to disobey me? I’ll show you what happens when you disobey me.’

  Before she knew what
was happening, Iris had closed the secateurs on the thumb of Kate’s right hand. The child screamed, eyes distended with horror. She tried to pull herself away, but Iris’s grip was too strong.

  The handles of the secateurs were held apart by a powerful spring, and Iris had to put all her effort into forcing them together. The blades sliced through Kate’s thumb like they had through the rose stem. The thumb fell away. Bright blood spurted across the glossy green leaves.

  The pitch of Kate’s screams went up and up. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she started jerking.

  Iris closed the secateurs on the girl’s index finger, and brought the sharp blades together. The finger swung down, but a flap of skin still held it on to the palm. Iris cut again and the finger vanished.

  The next three fingers were easier. Kate’s hand looked so small when she had finished.

  Iris turned around. The other children were rooted to the spot. Their gaze was fixed on Iris as if they couldn’t believe what they had seen, and they were waiting to see how the trick had been done.

  Iris straightened up and concentrated on the nearest girl. Her name was Madeline.

  ‘Come here, Madeline,’ she said calmly, although the inside of her head was a raging torrent of incoherent thoughts. ‘Come here now, or I will come and get you …’

  CHAPTER ONE

  The sky above the rooftops was a misty grey-blue, a wash of unbroken colour from one end of the street to the other. Hidden behind the half-cloud, the sun was just a brighter patch in an already bright sky. No shadows darkened the pavement or the road. Something about the diffuse light made the cars, houses and lamp posts seem as if they had been cut out and placed onto a perfect picture of the street, barely connected to reality, able to be repositioned at will.

  The delicate, almost translucent quality of the sky put Violet in mind of the duck eggs she used to collect as a child: a colour so unusual, so textured, that it almost seemed like the product of a deliberate act, rather than the randomness of nature.

  Now where had that thought come from? She remembered the duck eggs perfectly – the weight of them in her hand, heavier than chicken eggs, and she also recalled the way tiny scraps of feather would still be stuck to their shells – but she couldn’t quite place when or where. The detail was there, but the background was absent.

  She tucked the thought away. There were more important things to worry about today. She had a job to do.

  As she toiled along the street from where she had parked her car, pushing her wheeled shopping bag ahead of her, she kept casting glances up into the sky. No aeroplanes, no helicopters – just a deep, translucent blue. For a moment the world was timeless. With a small effort she felt as if she could be six again, or sixteen, rather than sixty.

  But the effort would have been too much. That’s what happened when you got old. Things that were easy were suddenly hard. Energy that had once seemed boundless was something to conserve in miserly fashion.

  With relief she realised that she had arrived at the front door of number 26. She stopped for a moment to gather her breath. There was a chill in the air, but the long walk from where she had parked her car had left her feeling hot and flustered.

  She glanced at the front of the house. The paint was cracked in a pattern of small scales across the top half of the door, where the sun caught it every morning. Scratches marred the surface around the keyhole. The letterbox had been repaired with sticky tape on more than one occasion. The bricks were a faded red, pitted with small holes and scabbed areas, and the mortar holding them together was powdery.

  Her gaze wandered to the small front garden, barely large enough to accommodate the dustbin and a few tired geraniums in pots. Weeds had found their way through the paving slabs and around the circular metal cover that led down to the coal cellar. The bottom few bricks of the garden wall were half-hidden by dusty cobwebs and old snail shells layered one upon another like an outbreak of boils.

  It really was time to move on.

  The seaside, perhaps. She could do with some fresh air, and a change of scenery.

  One of the geraniums was badly overgrown and dehydrated. A few of its leaves were brown and wilted, giving up their life so that the other leaves could soldier on. Violet reached into her shopping bag and removed the small pair of secateurs she always carried with her. Taking one of the dying leaves, dry and papery, in her hand, she snipped it off close to the stem, then repeated the pruning with the others. There, wasn’t that better?

  Making a mental note to bring a jug of water out later to moisten the soil, she pushed the shopping bag up to the front door and delved into her handbag for the key to the door. Slotting it into the lock she forced the stiff mechanism round and pushed the door open.

  Darkness, and the smell of old lavender and boiled vegetables reached out to embrace her.

  ‘Dear – I’m back!’ she called.

  No answer. She moved into the house and shut the door behind her. ‘Daisy? I said I’m back!’

  The small hall was carpeted in linoleum patterned with small diamonds. Stairs to the left led up to the bathroom and the bedrooms, while the walls were papered in a floral pattern that looked almost as tired as the geraniums outside. A barometer hung opposite the stairs, massive and pendulous. According to the indicator there was a change ahead.

  The house had an air of neglect, of something that was sagging into dust and decay. Violet could tell the first time she walked in that nobody visited any more. That nobody cared any more.

  She pushed the shopping bag ahead of her, past the parlour and the dining room, and pushed open the door to the kitchen. Bordered by slide-door cupboards and melamine-covered work surfaces, it was more like a split-off section of the hall than a room in its own right. Tucked to one side by the cooker, just next to a china teapot, was the kitchen’s sole concession to the modern age – a cordless electric kettle. A small refrigerator wheezed asthmatically in one corner, next to the door that led out into the conservatory. It gave the impression that it was about to fall over and die at any moment, but it had been working away for the nine months that she had been visiting the house, and for many years beforehand. It would almost certainly outlast Daisy Wilson.

  Placing her handbag on the corner of the kitchen counter, she folded the handle of the shopping bag down and unzipped it. She hadn’t picked up much shopping – the important items she had collected from her own flat that morning – but Daisy didn’t seem to need much to keep going. In her experience, older people could subsist perfectly well on cups of tea, slices of bread, boiled carrots and the occasional biscuit.

  Slipping on a pair of thin cotton gloves that she always kept in her coat pocket, she unpacked the bag. Bread, butter, bleach, rubber gloves, tea towels and a caddy of tea leaves that rustled as she put it down on the counter.

  She reached across, switched the kettle on at the mains and clicked the button down to boil the water. The initial whoosh settled down into a steady murmuring as the water heated up. She opened the top of the tea caddy and let the smell of the leaves drift up to her nose. She closed her eyes and mouth, and breathed in. Dry, slightly spicy, and overlaid with the delicate floral notes of the Christmas rose petals and leaves that had been mixed in with the Darjeeling. Perfect.

  The fragrance was mesmerising. For a long moment, she wasn’t in the kitchen at all. She was standing in her own garden – her private, secret garden, not the one belonging to the ground-floor flat she rented – breathing in the mixed scents of the foxgloves, the delphiniums and the corn cockles.

  No. That thought needed to be tucked away as well. She had a job to do. Once today was over, she could relax for a while. Go away. Move away. By the sea. A change was as good as a rest, they said.

  While the kettle was talking to itself she walked back into the hall and took her coat off. Before placing it on one of the hooks just behind the door – so reminiscent, she always thought, of a row of butchers’ hooks waiting for the meat to be hung from them – she took
a look around the hall, committing it to memory. The lino. The wallpaper. The stairs. The whole thing so rooted in the 1950s, when the street had been built to replace ones lost to Hitler’s bombs, that it was almost possible to hear the laughing voices of Children’s Hour drifting on a wave of static from the speaker of a bakelite radio set.

  She shook herself. Stay in the present, Violet, she told herself. Stay focussed.

  She pushed open the door of the parlour. The curtains were half-closed, and in the turquoise light of that strange sky the room could have been underwater. The fireplace dominated the room on one side: cold now, as it had been for some years, and flanked by two metal andirons. A massive bureau dominated the other side of the room: the marquetry almost invisible in the dim, aquatic light. Over in the window recess a television set stood mute.

  Daisy was sitting in the armchair with the curved wings, grey hair still curled from her last visit to her hairdresser. Her eyes, nestled in puffy, criss-crossed flesh, were closed. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

  ‘Daisy?’ Violet reached forward to shake her parchment hand. ‘Daisy?’

  Daisy jerked awake with a cry. She flinched away from Violet like a dog expecting to be struck.

  ‘It’s only me. I’m back from the shops.’

  Daisy was still twisted in her chair. She gazed suspiciously up at Violet. Slowly the suspicion receded, and she smiled. ‘I was only resting my eyes,’ she muttered.

  ‘You dropped off,’ Violet said, moving across to the window, beside the television, and pushing the curtains open.

  ‘I was thinking. Remembering.’

  ‘I’m making a cup of tea.’ Violet turned and smiled at Daisy. ‘I was remembering too, walking up the road. Duck eggs. Do you remember duck eggs?’

  Daisy laughed. ‘I haven’t had a duck egg in an age. Not since the War. Used to have them all the time, then. Blue, they were. Tasty as well.’