Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  She smiled. Lapslie just sighed quietly to himself. God save him from pathologists who liked to give lectures.

  ‘Now, apart from the damage to the back of the skull, which could have resulted from the car crash that excavated her body, there are no signs of pre-mortem attack – no fractures, no stab wounds, nothing that would account for a sudden collapse.’

  ‘Doctor, you’ve spent the past few minutes listing every possible thing that didn’t kill her, with the exception of a freak meteor shower and an attack by crocodiles. If I don’t find out soon what actually did the job then I’m going to strap you to one of those spare tables and prod you with your own surgical instruments until you tell me.’

  She had the good grace to laugh. ‘Very well. You will recall that we found the corpses of several small animals nestled within her chest cavity. This started me thinking. What could have caused them to die, and die so quickly that they could not escape? To cut to the chase, I tested the poor lady’s stomach contents – at least, what remained of them – for toxins. And I found some.’

  ‘Poison!’ That was the last thing Lapslie was expecting.

  ‘Indeed. To be more precise, her stomach lining, liver and kidneys were saturated with colchicine – a drug used in small doses to treat gout.’

  Lapslie shook his head slowly. ‘So she accidentally overdosed on her own medicine? In the middle of a forest?’

  ‘I have no idea how she got into the middle of a forest,’ Dr Catherall replied with asperity, ‘but she certainly did not overdose on her medicine. Firstly, she was not suffering from gout, nor was there any evidence she had ever done so. Secondly, her stomach contents indicate that the poison was not administered in the form of tablets, which is how colchicine is most often given, but in what I can only describe as its raw form.’

  Lapslie was beginning to feel like the straight man in a double act, feeding Dr Catherall lines so she could get to a punch-line. ‘You’re going to have to explain that, as well.’

  ‘Colchicine is derived from the seeds of a plant known as the meadow saffron, otherwise known as the autumn crocus, although, strangely enough, it is not actually a crocus. Despite the passage of time, there are still traces of seeds in the stomach. My best guess – and it really is a guess – is that she somehow ingested enough meadow saffron to provide a lethal dose of colchicine.’

  ‘Accidentally?’

  She shook her head. ‘I really cannot see how. For a start, meadow saffron does not grow anywhere within fifty miles of where she was found. And besides, there were enough traces of other substances in the stomach contents that I can be reasonably certain that the plant was administered in the form of a cake.’

  It took a few moments for Lapslie to fully understand what he was being told. He understood the individual words, but putting them all together in the form of a sentence, even one as convoluted as Dr Catherall preferred, took him to a place he really didn’t want to go. Despite the coldness of the room he could feel a prickly kind of heat across his neck and upper arms. This was deliberate. Worse than that, this was planned as some kind of domestic event.

  ‘Let’s be clear, Doctor,’ he said finally. ‘You know what you’re saying?’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Colchicine overdoses of the size I believe occurred here are particularly painful and protracted. If done deliberately, it verges on torture, I would say.’

  Silence filled the room.

  ‘This now becomes a murder investigation,’ Lapslie said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As Daisy Wilson awoke from a deep sleep, troubled by dreams of a long dining table around which faceless figures sat in uneasy silence, she rose through a series of previous identities like a balloon floating up through layers of cloud.

  For a while she was Alice Connell, a former librarian in Epping, living alone but for a white cat in a small house near a canal. She liked walking along the canal in the afternoons just to be able to see other people and to smile at them. Sometimes the cat would walk along with her. Then Alice was left behind and she was Jane Winterbottom, an obsessive collector of Victorian hairbrushes who kept her collection in her flat on the bottom floor of a Victorian block in Chelmsford and who had nobody to whom she could show it. Jane, too, receded into the distance, and she was Violet Chambers, a widowed old lady living in a house too big for her, too proud to make friends with her neighbours, sitting at her living room window and watching the world pass her by. And then Violet was falling away, and she was Daisy Wilson, an old woman with ulcerated legs, dreaming of her glory days as a dancer in West End shows.

  And as Daisy emerged from sleep, the cocoons of her previous existences sloughing away from her, she dimly remembered that there had been others as well, others before Alice Connell. The names were vague now, but she could just make out the dim outlines of stolen memories: an old, cobbled street somewhere in south London with rusted tram lines running down the centre; a familiar seat in a public house with a half pint of Irish stout set on the table; a grey room with a grey metal bed; a powder-blue eiderdown coat; a tortoiseshell comb; an Aga. No faces, no names, just snatches of things seen and half-remembered. Fragments of too many lives; a pile of different jigsaw puzzles, fallen to the floor and mixed together, never to be undone.

  And behind all of those, a long dining table, set with bone china cups, and those silent figures. Those silent, waiting figures.

  She lay there for a while, the sunlight playing on the ceiling of her room, letting her mind idly sort through the fragments until she could reassemble herself. Daisy Wilson. She was Daisy Wilson, and she was establishing a new life in a small seaside town named Leyston-by-Naze, on the east coast. She needed a place to live, she needed to make some friends, and she needed some money. Those were the priorities of the day.

  Eventually, she got up out of bed and gazed out of the window of her hotel room. It was still early. There was barely any differentiation between the water and the clouds; one blended into the other in a continuous sheet of grey. Only a large container ship, crawling infinitesimally right to left, marked the location of the horizon.

  Daisy washed, dressed, left her room and headed down to the restaurant where she had eaten on the previous night. The tables had been stripped and reset for breakfast, with small pots of jam, saucers of butter and steel cutlery stark against white linen. The ghosts of old coffee rings were still visible on the linen. Small signs marked which tables were reserved for which rooms. She located the table for room 241 – set for one – and sat down. Within a few moments, a tired-looking young girl in a black skirt and white blouse came over to her.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am. Would you like tea or coffee?’

  Daisy considered for a moment. Was she a tea or a coffee person? ‘Tea, please,’ she said eventually.

  ‘And would you be wanting a cooked breakfast?’

  Less of a hesitation this time. ‘No, thank you. Just toast, please.’

  ‘Fruit juice?’

  ‘Yes please – grapefruit, if you have it.’

  ‘If you want cereal, it’s on the table over by the window.’

  ‘Thank you, m’dear.’

  The waitress left. As Daisy waited for the toast to arrive, she glanced around at the other hotel patrons. The couple from the night before – the man in the suit and the woman in the shawl – were just finishing their breakfasts. They were still failing to find any topics of conversation. The florid man with the flat cap was absent, but a family of four – mother, father and two children, both girls – were making a big production number over swapping knives, buttering toast and cutting up fried breakfasts so that the children could eat them. The girls were dressed in identical outfits: white cloth patterned with green leaves and vines, like something one might use as a curtain. Daisy wondered if their mother had made the clothes herself.

  ‘Your toast, ma’am. Tea’s on the way.’

  The waitress had reappeared by Daisy’s side. She placed the toast on the table, then headed over to
help the family sort out the mess they were making.

  Daisy felt a prickle on the back of her neck. Turning casually, she saw an elderly woman enter the restaurant. She was elegant, with a long green dress cinched in at the waist and covered with a long cardigan made of wool. The necklace circling the corrugated skin of her neck might have been pearl. Daisy would have to get closer to be able to tell for sure.

  Daisy tracked her progress across the room. Knowing in her heart that the woman was probably on holiday, which more or less ruled her out as a prospect, Daisy was nevertheless unable to stop herself. It was like those lions one saw on wildlife documentaries: an antelope walks past and the lions look up, watching the animal move, calculating the line of least effort between them and their prey. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t hungry, it just matters that they are lions and the thing going past is an antelope. Instinct overrules everything.

  Her heart beat a little faster as the woman seemed to be heading for a table with a single setting, but slowed as she bypassed it in favour of a table set for two. The woman sat down, and a few moments later a man in a cream-coloured jacket, walking with a cane, entered the room and followed her.

  Probably for the best. One should never foul one’s own nest, isn’t that what they said?

  The tea arrived and she poured herself a cup, breathing in the rich, aromatic steam. It was a blended tea, half Ceylon and half Darjeeling, as far as Daisy could tell. She was good with tea. She had, after all, made enough of it, over the years, including her own special blends.

  Daisy spread a thin layer of butter over the toast and took a delicate bite while she considered her options. At some stage she would have to visit an estate agents and arrange to rent a property in the area. After all, she couldn’t live at the hotel for ever. A predator needed a trap, and the hotel was too public, too exposed. The problem was that she knew little about the town: where the best areas for retired folk were, which were the noisy public houses and which were the quiet ones, and so on. Her usual tactic was to buy as many local papers as the area could support and read through them a few times, getting a feel for wherever she had ended up. She had found, through long experience, that the classified advertisements and the announcements provided a lot of useful background information, not the least of which was the section devoted to forthcoming funerals or the anniversaries of deaths. After all, one had to start somewhere, and widows were easy prey.

  Finishing her toast, Daisy got up to leave. Nobody in the restaurant bothered watching her go, and that was the way she liked it.

  Outside the hotel, the weather was warm despite the grey, cloudy sky. The tide was on its way in, creeping slowly up the sandy shoreline. Off to her right, the pier jutted out into the water; a bridge heading into nowhere. Pulling her cardigan closer about her, she turned left and walked along the sea front. Ahead of her the esplanade curved away to the left, hiding all but the next row of houses, bars and hotels and making it appear as if the sea lapped directly against the buildings. Far away in the distance the shore curved back into sight again, rising into a knob of land that towered above the town – the Naze itself, named, she assumed, from the French nez, meaning ‘nose’, which is what it actually resembled.

  As she walked, she realised that she had turned left with deliberate purpose, as if she was heading for somewhere in particular, but when she examined her motives she realised that she didn’t really know where she was going. She had approached the hotel from the other direction the day before, and when she had gone for her evening walk she had turned right, back towards the station. Now, heading in an unknown direction, she had the distinct feeling that there was something familiar around the curve of the road: something that she wanted to see, if only she knew what it was.

  A few steps, and she could see further around the bend. And there was a public garden: a small walled area on the corner between the esplanade and what she thought might be the High Street. As she approached, she saw that it had benches around the edge, and was planted with rows of brightly coloured flowers. It was a small oasis of calm amid the seaside bustle.

  Rather than keep on going around the corner and into the High Street, Daisy cut through the garden. With practised eye, she identified the plants that she passed. Over by the brick wall of the next building, pennyroyal plants were reaching upward, their little bursts of pink and white blossom separated by stretches of stem. Next to them, Daisy spotted the dark red, five-petalled flowers of a row of delphiniums reaching toward her. Both of them were poisonous, although the essential oil would have to be extracted from the pennyroyal first: a fussy process that Daisy would rather not have to do again. There were other plants in the garden as well, but she had less interest in those. They might have looked nice, they might even have smelled nice, but they had no practical purpose. They couldn’t be used to kill anyone.

  It reminded her of her own garden. She smiled for a moment, recalling the dark scents and the glistening flowers that she had left behind. When she had taken Dais—no, she was Daisy – when she had taken the body away and left it where nobody would find it, she had taken the opportunity to tend her garden, to remove some of the weeds that were growing up around the mulch and to cut back some of the more extravagant growths. It made her feel calm. It made her feel centred, somehow.

  Leaving the garden behind her, she turned into the far end of the High Street.

  The road was long, and lined with shops of various kinds. Every second one appeared to be selling something to do with the beach: swimwear, sticks of rock, inflatable rings and mattresses, towels – all the paraphernalia of a day by the sea. In between these holiday-specific shops were the ones she would expect to find in any small town: newsagents and banks, florists and shoe shops, bakeries and butchers: the kinds of shops that, in some bigger towns, had been rendered obsolete by hypermarkets and telephone banking, but managed to survive in places such as this like barnacles clinging to rocks while the tide of progress tried to wash them away.

  She popped into the first newsagents she came to and bought one of the three local papers that were sitting on the lowest shelf. A few yards along the High Street she found another newsagents, and she bought the second of the local papers. Buying three local papers in one shop probably didn’t count as suspicious behaviour, but she didn’t like leaving a trail, even if that trail was only one of memories. Daisy far preferred to slip unnoticed through people’s minds; just one more little old lady living her life one day at a time.

  A little further along the road, she found a W. H. Smith. There she bought the third local paper, and managed to get a plastic bag to go along with it. Now, with all three in her possession, she needed to find somewhere to sit down and read them. For a moment she hovered on the verge of turning around and heading back to the public garden she had discovered, but she knew the intoxicating smell of the pennyroyal and the delphiniums would just distract her. A café would do just as well.

  Walking further along the High Street, Daisy found herself turning left into a shop doorway before she knew what she was doing. It was only when the burnt sugar smell of candy floss hit her that she looked up and realised she was in a gift shop. What had made her think this was a café? Smiling vaguely, she backed out and kept walking, looking around more carefully this time.

  She almost missed the place across the road. It was part of a building that extended from one street corner to another, built out of the same red brick and with the same buff adornments on the corners. The building had once been a large post office: it still was, at one end, but the other end had been converted into a genteel coffee shop advertising gateaux and pastries, espresso and cappuccino on a chalk board pinned to the red brick wall.

  She entered the coffee shop and looked around. It had the same kind of dated feel as her hotel: backward looking, rather than forward, with lace doilies on the tables and sepia-tinged photographs in frames on the wall. A perfect place to sit and read. She found an empty table and perched herself on a chair. Having
established from the plastic-covered menu on the table that she could, in fact, order tea as well as coffee, she asked the waitress for a pot and then spread the first local paper, the Tendring Gazette, over the table.

  Dismissing the headlines, which involved accusations of fraud in the Council and blocked inquiries into the sale of school fields in the vicinity, she concentrated on the later pages. The local stuff.

  There were small news paragraphs of course. One of them, headlined ‘Milk and Beer Taken’, reported on how thieves had broken into a local garage and stolen a bottle of beer and a bottle of milk from a fridge, drunk them both, and then smashed the milk bottle, which Daisy decided summed up perfectly the parochial approach of local newspapers to events. The world might be heading for ecological disaster, nations might be at war, but as long as one local journalist was on the job, no case involving a stolen milk bottle would go unreported. Another paragraph reassured readers that a horse that had been stuck in mud had been freed by fire-fighters. It wasn’t until page twenty-two that Daisy found a section headed ‘Neighbourhood News’, which listed the activities of various local organisations such as the Fuchsia Club, the Bridge Club and, of most interest to her, the Widows’ Friendship Club. Anyone who was a member of a club, of course, was, by definition, bound to know people there, but Daisy knew that she could quite easily befriend one of the widows, separate her from the flock and gradually take over her life. The other widows might wonder from time to time what had become of their friend, but they would probably only make cursory attempts to check she was all right. Once a couple of telephone calls had been missed, once a few knocks on the door had gone unanswered, they would give up. It was human nature.