Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  He nodded. ‘Well, let’s see.’

  The two of them moved towards the group. Small twigs and branches snapped underfoot, and Lapslie wasn’t sure whether the sour smell in his nostrils was due to the sounds or the crash or both. Dawn had shaded across into morning now, and the scrap of sky that he could see through the tent flap was clear and blue. All around him he could taste birds and animals moving around.

  They walked past the first group of CSIs, and Lapslie couldn’t help glancing across at the figure on the ground: a man, crumpled up like his car, wearing a dark suit that was glossy with congealing fluid. A bloody write-off, to use Emma’s phrase.

  The second group was clustered around something on the ground, no more than ten feet or so away from the first body. As Lapslie approached they seemed to tense, possessive of their find.

  ‘DCI Lapslie,’ he said firmly. ‘What have you got?’

  The Crime Scene Manager stood, brushing his gloved hands on his coveralls. Lapslie had seen him at other crime scenes, years ago: a small man, mid-fifties, with a paunch pushing out the fabric of his coveralls and a quiff of white hair standing straight up from his head.

  ‘We appear to have a dead body,’ he said in a disconcertingly thick Irish accent, the final words sounding to Lapslie almost like ‘deed baady’. His voice tasted the way Lapslie imagined blackberry wine would taste: musty and thin.

  ‘Not connected to the crash?’

  ‘Connected, but not in the way you mean. Take a look.’

  There, rearing up from a pile of earth, ferns and leaves, was a corpse. And this was a corpse, more like a skeleton to which things had been added rather than a body from which things had been subtracted. The face was all sharp cheekbones and hollow eye sockets, the head twisted to one side and the jawbone gaping open as if in some terrible, silent agony. Whatever skin remained was as dull and as grey as the hair that was spread out around the skull. Its arms were stretched out behind it, as thin and as dry as the twigs that surrounded them. What Lapslie could see of the fingers clutched in vain at the loam of the forest.

  And most bizarrely of all, the body was surrounded by dirt-encrusted plastic sheeting, bunched to form two huge wings, one at each shoulder.

  Half-aware of the banter between the CSI team members, Lapslie knelt down by the body, checking first that he wasn’t disturbing anything that hadn’t already been disturbed. All corpses looked old, of course, but this one looked like it was actually the corpse of someone old. The bottom half was still buried in the ground, the plastic tightly wrapped around hips and legs, but the torso was slanted up at an angle of about thirty degrees. The arms looked as if they were supporting the weight of the body, but that was just an illusion caused by the fact that they were hanging down, the bony knuckles resting on the ground. Although the material of the clothes had been stiffened and faded by the passing of the seasons, it seemed as if the corpse had been wearing a blouse, a cardigan and a pair of slacks in some dark material.

  He leant forward to check around the back of the skull. Difficult to be sure without touching it, but there looked to be some evidence of damage. It might have been caused by predators, but it might also have been caused by an act of violence. Whatever the cause, this was certainly a suspicious death. People, in Lapslie’s experience, did not wrap themselves in plastic before calmly lying down to die.

  Without disturbing the twigs or the dirty plastic sheeting around the body, Lapslie made a close examination of the area around where the hands rested. The body was actually half-buried in a trench of some kind. Somehow, the trench had been disturbed – the ground around it was churned up and the ferns partially ripped out – and the body had been pushed up and out like a moth from a chrysalis. The fingers were half-buried in the loam, and—

  Wait. The ground beneath the fingers was covered with a layer of detritus – leaves as skeletal as the body – and some of them appeared to pass entirely under the fingers, almost as if …

  Lapslie leant closer. The scent of damp and decay filled his nostrils, but bizarrely he could taste something decadently fragrant in his mouth, like lychees.

  He was right. The fingers weren’t complete. The ends were missing from about the second knuckle onwards. Although it looked at first sight as if the rest of the fingers were embedded in the earth, he could see that the ends rested on the leaves, rather than poking through them.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind a memory that had been asleep for a long time began to stir. Hadn’t he talked to someone about a case like this once? Hadn’t he written something about it? Not a case he was working on as a policeman, he was sure, but something else. Something that was almost a sideline.

  ‘Is this why you called me?’ he asked DS Bradbury, who was standing behind him. ‘The fingers? They look as if they’ve been removed.’

  ‘I noticed them when I first saw the body,’ she said. ‘When I radioed the details in, the Duty Officer typed them into the computer system. As soon as he typed the stuff in, a message flashed up with your name attached. Apparently you’ve seen this kind of thing before – a body with missing fingers.’

  ‘Not as far as I can remember. Not a body, at any rate …’ And yet, there was something. The taste of lychees, and a vague memory of someone telling him about missing fingers.

  He deliberately moved the memory to one side. He could worry about that later. For now he was back at work, for the first time in a long time, and he had a body in the here-and-now to worry about, not something vague in the past. A body that was pushing itself out of the ground as if possessed by some restless spirit.

  But what had disturbed it? What had forced the earth to give birth to its dead?

  Lapslie’s head was turning toward where the wreck of the car sat, outside the marquee, before his mind had even formulated the obvious conclusion.

  He rocked back on his heels. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘We never joke,’ the Crime Scene Manager said, coming over towards him.

  ‘Are you seriously telling me that the body was buried here in plastic sheets for some ungodly length of time, undisturbed by anything, before that car came along and just scooped it up out of the ground?’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything, serious or otherwise, until we’ve collated all the evidence, photographed the entire scene and assessed it all back at the lab.’ He shook his head, lips twisted into a grimace. ‘But if I were a betting man, which I am, I’d put a pony on that being the final conclusion. Bizarre as it may seem, I think that car crash managed to excavate a murder victim.’

  Which might, Lapslie thought, explain the damage he thought he’d spotted to the back of the skull.

  He glanced over his shoulder to where the other group of CSIs were attempting to slide the dead businessman into a large vinyl body bag without disturbing it too much. ‘We owe you a vote of thanks,’ he said to the body, a kind of final valediction as ‘he’ turned to ‘it’, a person becoming a thing to be moved around, cut up and pored over. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we might never have found her. Whoever she is.’

  He straightened up and turned to the CSM. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Burrows,’ he said. ‘Sean Burrows.’

  ‘Well, Sean, I think you’ve got a busy day ahead of you. I’ll make sure to get a supply of bacon rolls and coffee sent up.’

  ‘That,’ the CSM said with a heartfelt sigh, ‘would be most welcome.’

  Emma Bradbury was standing over to one side. Glancing between Lapslie and Burrows, she smiled. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘Now we talk to the first responders,’ he replied.

  The two of them exited the marquee and walked back towards the road in silence. As they emerged from the tree line, Emma glanced down at the skid marks left by the car.

  ‘Look at that,’ she said, pointing. ‘See the darker and lighter stripes in the rubber?’

  Lapslie looked closer. She was right, there were indeed streaks where the rubber appeare
d to be embossed into the road’s surface, and areas between them where the fine structure of the road could be seen. ‘What’s the cause of that?’

  ‘ABS,’ she said gloomily. ‘Anti-lock Brake System – pulses the brakes automatically to maintain grip on the road. That car had everything, and the bastard trashed it.’

  Walking on, they found the uniformed policeman still talking to the paramedics. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said as the paramedics melted backwards, ‘but can we shift the car and open up the road yet? It doesn’t get particularly busy, this time of day, but there’s no easy alternative route.’

  Lapslie considered for a moment. The crash was just a red herring as far as he was concerned. The old woman’s body intrigued him more. ‘Get the car out of here and shipped back to the garage so they can test the brakes and whatever. When it’s gone, get the local authority to cordon off about fifty feet of one side of the road next to the trees and set up temporary traffic lights for traffic on the other side.’

  ‘You sure that’s necessary, sir?’ Emma said from beside him.

  ‘No,’ he replied firmly. ‘As my old Superintendent said, when in doubt – cover it.’ He turned his attention to the policeman: a young man in a cap that kept threatening to slide forward over his head. ‘You are?’

  ‘Henson,’ muttered Emma from beside him. ‘I’ve already talked to him.’

  ‘Were you first on the scene, Henson?’ he said, ignoring Emma.

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘Me and PC Rhodes. He’s manning the other barrier. The one you came in through.’

  ‘What about this road, then? Does it see many accidents?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not a blackspot, but the corner can come up on you fast if you’re not paying attention. We get called out here a couple of times a year.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Last time was probably before Christmas – maybe five or six months back. Maybe a little bit more.’

  ‘When you were here last, did you see any churned-up areas of earth? Anything that looked as if something had been buried?’

  Henson shook his head. ‘Nothing like that, I’m sure.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lapslie said. ‘We may be in touch later.’

  The PC turned away to rejoin the paramedics. Lapslie looked up and down the road. From where he stood, in the centre of the curve, he could see in both directions: long stretches of trees on either side forming a tunnel with their interlaced branches.

  Not a bad sight, if it was your last.

  Emma glanced down the road towards where he had left her car. ‘Well, if that’s all, boss …’

  ‘We need to establish who she is, as a matter of priority,’ Lapslie mused, only half-hearing his sergeant. ‘We can come at it from two directions. A search of the body might throw up a purse, a receipt, a scrap of paper, a bus pass or something with her name and address on it. I didn’t see a handbag anywhere around the body, but the search might turn it up somewhere in the long grass. I’ll keep in touch with the CSIs and the pathologist, but you can cover the other direction. Once we’ve got an approximate age and a likely range of dates for the death, I want you to check through the missing persons records and pull out anything that fits. With luck, we can narrow it down. And then, when we know how she died, we can start pulling everything together.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ Emma muttered. ‘Look, sir, I’d like to make a move, if you don’t mind. I’ve been here since about three a.m., and I could do with a shower and a change of clothes.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lapslie conceded, ‘you crack on. I’ll hang around and wait for the pathologist to turn up. He should have been here by now.’

  ‘“She”, sir. Apparently the local pathologist is a Doctor Jane Catherall. I’ve called her twice, but no response. CSI claim she’s always turning up late to crime scenes.’

  ‘I’ll get the number off them and try again. You can go. Check in with me later.’

  Emma nodded gratefully, and walked off. Lapslie watched her go, the material across the seat of her designer trousers pulling diagonally in one direction and then the other as she walked. Women in the police force had a rough time of it: most of the time they were forced to come across as more laddish than the lads, protective coloration in the tight-knit boys’ club of the police. Emma was no exception, but Lapslie suspected that underneath was a schoolgirl vulnerability. Perhaps he ought to reach out: make sure she understood that he was not taking her at face value. And he probably owed her an explanation of his time away from the police; a period that had so abruptly come to an end with her call.

  He found himself following Emma before he had even made a conscious decision to move. Perhaps now was a good time to start building bridges.

  She reached her Mondeo a few seconds before he did. As he approached, formulating the words of praise in his mind, he could hear her talking. He assumed for a moment that she was making a call on her mobile, but then she moved to one side and he realised that she was speaking to someone sitting in the passenger seat of the car, someone who was rubbing their eyes as if they’d just woken up.

  ‘I can have you back in—’ she was saying, and then she saw Lapslie. The skin around her eyes tightened, and her gaze flickered from side to side as if she was automatically looking for a way out.

  ‘Sir – was there something else?’ she asked, sliding sideways to block Lapslie’s view of her passenger.

  Lapslie stepped sideways, but Emma’s companion had turned his head away so that all Lapslie could see through the open passenger window was an ear with a small gold earring and a tousled mane of hair.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ Lapslie snapped, all the praise he had been about to deliver sliding out of his mind like rain off a windowpane.

  Emma stepped away from the car, walking around Lapslie so he had no choice but to turn away from the car.

  ‘You brought someone with you tonight,’ he said, stating rather than asking.

  ‘Sir.’ Not giving anything away.

  ‘This is a crime scene. We’re professionals, doing a job. You don’t just bring spectators along. What’s going on?’

  ‘Difficult to explain, sir.’ Her gaze slipped away from him. ‘Although not as difficult as explaining it to his wife,’ she muttered. ‘I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Emma—’ He used her first name, trying to break through the barriers she had thrown up. ‘Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.’

  She sighed, and looked away. ‘I was … with a friend when the call came in about the body. The extra body. We were in a hotel. His car was back in a car park near the club where we met. I wanted him to take a cab, but he wanted to … well, to come along with me. I honestly thought there wouldn’t be much to see, just a pile of clothes or a tramp who’d had a heart attack. I thought we’d be clear inside an hour. Didn’t plan on this turning into a crime scene.’ Her gaze switched back to meet Lapslie’s. ‘He never got out of the car, boss. I promise you that.’

  Lapslie took a deep breath. These things happened. Sometimes it was difficult to disentangle personal from professional. God knew, he’d had enough experience of that himself over the years.

  ‘Okay. We’ll leave it there. Get your boyfriend home, get a bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee inside you and I’ll see you back at the office later.’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’ She nodded, waiting until Lapslie had started to move away before she moved back towards her car. Lapslie took a few steps more, until he heard the clunk of her car door closing, then he turned and watched as she gunned the car to life and pulled away. He stood for a couple of seconds, watching it go, wondering whether to take things any further or just forget about it.

  And just as he realised that there was another car, a black Lexus with a tinted windscreen, parked in the trees a hundred yards or so down the road, it too gunned its engine to life, quietly pulled out of the tree line and drove away after DS Bradbury.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was dark by the time Violet returned to the house that ha
d once belonged to Daisy but now belonged to her. The thin wash of cloud that had given the sky its texture and depth during the day now gave the night an oppressive closeness, like sheets of sackcloth pinned from one side of the street to the other and sagging in the middle under their own weight.

  She turned the ignition key and let the Volvo’s engine die away. Something inside the bonnet whirred for a few seconds more, then it, too, gave way to the silence of the night. Violet just sat there, sinking back into the seat and letting the nervous tension drain out of her body.

  Lights were on all the way down the street. Behind those lit windows, families were boiling pasta and heating up sauce, watching TV, telling stories to excitable children or sitting quietly and reading a book. Life went on – if repeating the same old routine, night after night, was life.

  Tiredness had wormed its way into Violet’s joints. Every time she turned her head slightly she could feel the tendons and muscles pulling tight across her neck. Sometimes, when she felt like this, she had the worrying thought that all she had to do was keep turning her head further and further and the tendons would snap, one by one, like the horsehair on an old violin bow.

  She shook herself. Come on, Violet, she thought, focus. You still have a job to do. This was only the first step.

  She climbed out of the car, locked the door and took a look around her. Nobody was watching. No curtains were twitching. She was safe.

  Violet had parked a few hundred yards down the street from her new house, of course – just opposite a patch of waste ground where children played football at the weekends – and now she walked slowly along the pavement to that familiar front door, with its crazy-paving paint and its tape-bandaged letter box. She paused for a moment, gazing at the drooping geraniums. Those would have to go, she thought. Too dreary. Too drab. Too meaningless.

  Perhaps she could plant a nice Christmas rose before she left. In memory of Daisy.

  Smiling, she inserted her key into her lock and walked into her house.

  The smell hit her as soon as she entered. Older now, and fouler, undercut by the acridity of bleach and overlaid by Daisy’s favourite lavender perfume, but still lurking there like some old, mangy dog in the undergrowth. Air fresheners and pot-pourri could only do so much, but there was obviously more cleaning required. Quickly, Violet walked along the hall – slipping her thin cotton gloves on as she did so – then through the tiny kitchen and out into the conservatory. She flicked the latches on the back door, top and bottom, and opened it as far as it would go.