The fresh air was a sudden relief, and she took a couple of deep breaths, gazing out into the dark, shadowy back garden as she did so. From a patio of pebbled concrete, criss-crossed with silvery snail tracks, a tongue of paving stones wound its way through big, unkempt bushes of various kinds. Tall fences on either side separated the house from its neighbours, and the far end of the garden gave on to a ten-foot brick wall, almost invisible in the murk at the bottom of the garden. Daisy had never been sure what was beyond that wall, even though she had lived there for over fifty years.
A metal dustbin sat in the centre of the concrete patio, its sides streaked red with rust that had leaked from the rivets and welds of its construction. Inside the bin were Daisy’s stained clothes, along with the cushion that she had been sitting on and the doilies that had been draped over the arms of her chair. The chair itself stood next to the bin, looking smaller in the open air than it had done in the dark parlour.
Tomorrow she would set the clothes in the bin on fire, accelerated by a splash of lighter fluid. The chair she would have to think about. She could either burn it where it stood, and risk leaving scorch marks on the concrete, or she could attempt to take it apart with a screwdriver and a small saw to a point where she could get the various parts into the burning bin. That might work.
The deliciously cool, fresh air reminded her that she needed a through draught to get the house to a state where she could work in it, so she turned around and walked back through the house and into the parlour. The smell was worse there, and Violet held her breath until she could undo the catch on the central sash window and push it up six inches or so. The sudden breeze through the house, from back to front, quickly cleared the air, and for a moment Violet had a strong image of the house itself slumping with relief as it exhaled a stale, rank breath and inhaled clean air again.
Turning away from the window, Violet’s gaze was caught, as it often had been while listening to Daisy’s interminable rambling stories, by the bureau opposite the fireplace. She had carried an image of that bureau around in her mind for months. Whenever she got the chance she had checked books on antiques in the local library, or browsed through them while standing by the shelves in the nearest bookshop. She was fairly sure it was mid-eighteenth century, and in very good condition. If she was careful, it could perhaps realise ten thousand pounds at auction. The barometer in the hall was almost certainly French, dating from the early nineteenth century. That could net something approaching two thousand pounds. The andirons on either side of the fire could fetch between three and five thousand pounds, depending on whether they were originals or merely good reproductions. And there was other stuff in the house, such as the dining room table, the silver candlesticks and a complete set of pristine Spode china that Daisy had shown her once, wrapped in newspaper and kept in a Queen Anne chest upstairs ‘for best’, as Daisy had put it.
All in all, Violet thought that there was about twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of furniture and nick-nacks in this house. They had all been in the family since before Daisy was born, bought by her father, her grandfather, his father and so on when they weren’t antiques but just ordinary items. Daisy had been widowed young, with no children, and so there was nowhere for them to go. And here they had stayed. To Daisy they were just a part of the house, but to Violet they were something else entirely. They were assets to be realised as cash as soon as possible.
And that was before she stripped Daisy’s estate of the small amount of pension that had accrued over the years, the various bonds and shares that she might have collected and, most important of all, the house. That wonderful unmortgaged 1950s house, in a quiet part of the city, ideal for commuters who wanted to be near work and yet isolated from it. Worth, according to an estate agent with whom Violet had once had an interesting chat, something in excess of a quarter of a million pounds.
Not that she would sell it straight away. No, that would raise too many questions. Although it had only taken a couple of glasses of brandy to persuade Daisy to sign power of attorney over to her, some months ago now, Violet was a little wary of exerting too much authority too soon. More haste, less speed, as they said. Best to wait until the dust had settled a bit.
Although it was late, she had one important job to do before she could slide between the sheets of her bed and gaze up at the ceiling of her room with the calm satisfaction that comes of a job well done. She had to clean the parlour.
Violet went into the kitchen and retrieved the plastic bag of cleaning utensils from the counter. Looking along the shelves in the shop, she had been bewildered by the sheer range of things that people used to clean their houses. How could anyone use that many products? And how was it that houses these days were so much dirtier and dustier than they were when Violet was a child, when all they had was beeswax polish and soapstone and coal tar soap?
And, of course, soda crystals.
She pulled the blue, rather plain box proudly from the bag. At least someone still made soda crystals.
Using hot water from the tap, she made up a strong solution of washing soda in a bucket from the conservatory, and set to work with a pair of rubber gloves and a brush, working the liquid into the parlour carpet and soaking up the brown residue – the remnants of Daisy’s blood and faeces – with a series of tea towels. The area where the chair had sat was almost unaffected, apart from splashes and drips that had found their way down through the upholstery. After half an hour the carpet around the edges was almost indistinguishable from the carpet in the centre, and the smell had transferred itself to the growing pile of tea towels. Carefully, she carried the towels out into the garden, threw them into the metal bin and sprinkled bleach over the top. Then she threw the rubber gloves in after them. They almost certainly wouldn’t melt properly in the fire, but at least any last trace of Daisy would be burned off them.
According to the clock in the parlour – reproduction ormolu, unfortunately, dating from the 1950s and worth less than ten pounds – it was almost midnight. The muffled sounds of the TV set from next door had vanished some time before. There was no sound now, apart from the slow creaks that resulted from any old house settling itself down for the night. Violet desperately craved sleep, but there was one more thing she had to do before she could surrender herself to the darkness. One last act to make the house hers.
Methodically, room by room, Violet collected up all the photographs of Daisy. There was one in a frame in the dining room, set high on the bookshelf: an old black and white picture with creased corners of a young woman with a beehive hairdo posing against a railing with a beach behind her. On the back, in spidery brown writing, were the words ‘Camber Sands, July, 1953’. It didn’t look much like the shrunken woman with the liver-spotted arms and baggy medical stockings that she had become, but then, it looked even less like Violet, so it couldn’t stay.
Violet held it for a moment, reluctant to let go. Camber Sands, July, 1953. The photograph had been taken by the young man Daisy had been seeing at the time. He had worked in a bank. They had seen each other for two years – ‘walked out’, Daisy had called it – until he was called up for National Service. He had promised to write, but he never did.
Another photograph rested on a small table in the hall: a colour picture of a group of four middle-aged ladies laughing in front of a hotel entrance. It had been taken in Mallorca some time in the 1980s; Daisy hadn’t been too sure of the year. Susan, Janice and Patricia. They’d worked together on the checkouts in a supermarket on the edge of town for a while, and all decided to go on holiday together. Patricia had met a widower and ended up spending most of her days and all of her nights with him. Daisy had been bitterly jealous.
And there was the wedding photograph, set on the white melamine bedside table where it would have been the first thing Daisy saw when she woke up and the last thing she saw at night. Black and white again, two people, formally posed. Daisy in a huge white Bo Peep dress foaming with lace, a wide-brimmed hat on her head, and beside h
er a taller man with short hair and a moustache, stiff in a formal morning suit. His name had been Peter, and Daisy hadn’t been able to talk about him without a tremor in her voice and tears forming in her watery eyes. He had been the love of her life, and he had died of an aneurysm in 1979 after twenty-one years of marriage.
They were all that was left of Daisy’s life, and so, despite the memories that sprang up whenever Violet looked at them – memories that weren’t hers but were becoming hers – the photographs went in the bin in the back garden. For burning.
The frames she kept, of course. They might bring in a few extra pounds.
After a quick bath to wash the remains of the day from her body, Violet changed Daisy’s bedding for a fresh set of sheets and blankets and slid naked into the bed. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, allowing the pillows and the mattress to gradually adjust themselves to the shape of her body. Or perhaps to allow her body to adjust itself to the indentation left by Daisy Wilson after however many years she had slept there.
The street lamp outside cast an orange glow across the ceiling. The alarm clock on the bedside table tocked loudly, regularly. Somewhere outside, a cat yowled, and then it was quiet apart from the normal background rumble of distant traffic that nobody in the city could ever get away from.
As Violet felt her body gradually grow limp, and as her thoughts flitted from image to image, never settling for long enough to feed, she realised that she could hear the soft hiss of blood in her ears, a susurration like waves lapping gently against a shingle beach. The cat yowled again, but this time it sounded more to her like the cry of a seagull as it floated above the waves the way she was floating on them. The room itself grew dim around her, and the cold orange glow of the street lamp became the warm light of the sun setting behind a watery horizon, casting a glittering path across the sea towards her floating body. She drifted there, alone and unafraid, letting the tide take her further and further out to sea, washing her clean of everything she had done, absolving her sins as it washed the dirt from her body. The light faded as the sun dipped further and further beneath the horizon. Darkness spread in from the edges of her vision, and she was asleep without knowing she was asleep.
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 bathroo
m 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.
Core of Evil Page 5
