Emma shrugged. ‘Not for me to judge. Oh, you asked me to trace where the rent from Violet’s house was going, sir. Turns out it’s going into an account opened some years ago in the name of J. Chambers.’
‘Jack Chambers?’ He remembered the name from the interview with the elderly couple living opposite what had been Violet’s house. ‘Violet Chambers’ husband?’
‘That’s right. According to the bank, when he died, back in 1984, she had the account transferred across into her name. And she used it intermittently right up until we know she died, ten months ago. And, bizarrely, she’s been using it since as well.’
‘Someone’s been taking money out of the account? That would certainly track with theft being a motive, but I can’t imagine it’s a whole load of money. What is it – a few hundred pounds a week?’
Emma nodded. ‘Something like that, sir. I’ve known murders happen for less.’
‘In the heat of the moment, yes, but this has the hallmarks of something longer term. Something premeditated. I can’t see anyone taking a risk like that for a few hundred pounds a week. How has the money been taken out? Cashpoint, debit card or cheque?’
Emma consulted a sheet of paper in her hand. ‘All of the amounts taken out have been cashpoint withdrawals from a variety of banks scattered around London, Essex, Norfolk and Hertfordshire. No cashpoint machine was ever used more than once, as far as I can tell.’
Lapslie leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. ‘All right, let’s summarise where we’ve got to. The crime scene where we discovered the body is a bust – the evidence has just been washed, carried or blown away over the past ten months. The body is a bust – we can’t say for sure how she died, and there’s no trace evidence. The victim’s background is a bust – there’s nothing there that could give any cause for murder, apart from this trickle of rent. The only thing we’ve got is this woman who may have been seen going in and out of Violet Chambers’ house before she died, and that may be completely innocent. We could spend the next few months tracking down a chiropodist, if we’re not careful. So what’s left? Where do we go from here?’
‘The nature of the crime itself. Poison is generally a woman’s weapon, and the fact that it may have been administered in the form of food indicates a domestic setting – something casual. The murderer was known to the victim, and trusted enough for her to take a slice of cake or whatever it was that the murderer had baked.’
‘Okay – it’s something to be going on with. Set up a house-to-house in the neighbourhood around Violet Chambers’ place. Ask anyone if they remember Violet having any regular visitors in the month or so before she disappeared. Check local shops to see if they recall any women who appeared around that time and then vanished again. Pharmacies and off-licences might be a good place to start. Check with the local surgery as well – whoever this woman was, if there was a woman, she might have taken Violet to an appointment at some stage. Or made one herself.’
‘Will do. Anything else?’
Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘Yes – run a check into unsolved poisonings. See if this … colchicine … has been used before. It’s a long shot, but we might strike lucky. I can’t imagine it’s a common poison, all things considered.’
Emma nodded, and headed off. The door swung shut behind her, and Lapslie was cut off from the noise of the office. Cut off from all noise apart from the sound of his own breathing and the rustle of his clothes as he moved. And if he kept very still, then even that was hushed to the point of silence.
Silence. The blessed state that he craved above all else, and so very rarely achieved.
When Lapslie explained his synaesthesia to most people, they either didn’t believe it or they were fascinated. They asked him questions about how it felt, and they sympathised – as much as they could – but they never really understood. Not even the doctors and the psychiatrists, who spent their time reading textbooks and devising experiments to help them understand what synaesthesia implied about the way the brain worked. They never appreciated how it felt to be constantly battered by sensations you weren’t expecting. Constantly ambushed by unplanned floods of flavour – some pleasant, some sickening, but all of them unwelcome.
How could you explain that you could never listen to the radio? Never watch the television? Never attend a sporting event or a concert, for fear that a stray taste provoked by an unexpected sound could make you throw up? How could you tell them that you couldn’t spend your evenings in the pub with the lads because the raucous atmosphere was like a stream of rancid fat in your mouth, masking the taste of the beer, the whisky or whatever else you tried to use to cover it up with? He’d got a reputation in the force for stand-offishness, for being remote and aloof. The truth was, he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t join in. He felt as if he was slowly going mad.
Even eating out was difficult. When they first started seeing each other, he and Sonia had tried to go out for the occasional meal, but they’d had to look for restaurants with no background music. Even then the murmur of other people’s conversations underpinned the whole meal, from starter to coffee, with the flatness of blood. No matter what main course he ordered, the meat always tasted raw. After a while, they stopped going out entirely, apart from on Sonia’s birthday, when Lapslie steeled himself for an unpleasant evening. And, frankly, that just wasn’t fair on her.
It wasn’t only one way, either. Over the years, Lapslie had found himself eating blander and blander food, if only because his working life was a morass of clashing flavours. Sitting in a silent house, eating rice or pasta, was the ultimate in luxury for him.
A quiet house. A house without a wife, without children.
Sonia had tried to understand. Not one for going out much herself – her job as a nurse took up most of her time, and resting took much of the remainder – she valued the peace they had together. They went for long walks in the woods. He read, sitting quietly in an armchair, while she did needlepoint and crosswords.
A little island of peace and contentment, which had lasted until precisely the moment when Sonia unexpectedly fell pregnant. With twins.
Lapslie loved his children desperately. He also hated them; or, rather, he hated the constant noise, the squalling when they were young and the shouting and arguing when they were older. Earplugs helped; working late in the office and going out for long walks alone helped even more, but that just put more strain on Sonia, who had to look after the children and the house by herself. And slowly he found himself losing touch with them. Watching from a distance as they got on with life without him.
He couldn’t now remember whether it was he or Sonia who had suggested splitting up. They had obviously both been thinking about it for some time, and when one of them broached the subject, almost in passing, the other leaped on it. ‘A trial separation’, they had called it. And, as with many of the trials that Lapslie had been involved with over the years, it was getting increasingly rancorous and there seemed to be no sign of it ever ending. They were still in contact, but they were drifting apart. Through no fault of his, and no fault of hers, they were just drifting apart.
He sighed. Better go and see what the Superintendent wanted.
He chose a route to his office – one of the few actual offices in the entire building – that minimised the number of people he had to pass on the way. ‘Office’ was a bit of a misnomer – in fact, it was just a section of the office ‘floorplate’, as they called it, separated off by frosted glass panels – but at least it was something. When he arrived outside, the Super’s personal assistant glanced up at him from her desk. She was frowning. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I was caught up.’
‘He’s got someone with him, but he’ll be free in a moment.’
Lapslie stepped away from the desk and over to a nearby notice board. While he waited, he let his gaze flicker across union notices, fire alarm reminders and cards offering rooms to rent and
laundry services. So much information, these days, he thought. So many signs everywhere to read. How could any ordinary person keep all that information in their head without going mad?
A sudden increase in noise made him turn his head. Superintendent Rouse stood in the doorway of his office, saying goodbye to two men. They were both in their late thirties, short-haired, and wearing black suits with a subtle pinstripe. The Superintendent was, as usual, in full uniform.
The two men moved away, and the Superintendent bent to have a quick word with his PA. As the men passed Lapslie one of them turned his head slightly. Lapslie glanced sideways, and the two gazes met with a noticeable jolt. The man raised his eyebrows slightly, involuntarily, as if he recognised Lapslie. Then he was gone, and Lapslie was left with his interest heading one way and his body heading another.
When he turned his attention back towards the way his body was moving, the Superintendent had re-entered his office. His PA gestured Lapslie in. ‘Ten minutes, then he has to leave for another meeting.’
He knocked and entered. The Superintendent had sat behind his desk and was rearranging a sheaf of paper. The desk was placed so that the office’s window was to his right, and the light cast one side of his face into a flattering glow and the other into sharp and craggy relief. His face had once been memorably, if uncharitably, described by a young DS as looking like a bag full of spanners. He was older than Lapslie by a few years, a battle-scarred veteran of police politics and in-fighting who had worked his way up the ranks, regardless of prejudice and the old-boy system, to a position of relative authority. Despite the fact that he was Lapslie’s boss, and obviously had one eye on the next job in line, Lapslie liked him.
‘Mark, thanks for popping along.’
‘I understand you wanted an update on the Violet Chambers case, sir?’
Rouse’s gaze flickered down to the sheaf of notes in front of him. They were hand-written. Lapslie had often seen Rouse make similar notes in meetings, a contemporaneous record of what was being said to remind him later, something between a set of personal minutes and a stream of consciousness. Had he made the notes during the meeting that had just finished? And, if so, why was he consulting them now?
‘That’s the woman whose body was found in the woods? Quite decayed?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Has the coroner been able to establish a cause of death?’
‘It’s a toss-up,’ Lapslie replied, moving across to the window and gazing out at the surrounding landscape of office blocks and, off to one side, an elevated slice of road visible between two buildings. ‘She was poisoned, but she was also bludgeoned on the back of the head. It’s going to be impossible to determine which one caused her death.’
‘But it’s murder?’
‘Either that or the most elaborate suicide I’ve ever seen.’
His gaze dropped to the car park below. He could see his own car, parked off to one side. There were too many Mondeos for him to be able to tell where Emma had parked. He could hear the Superintendent making notes as they talked.
‘Any suspects?’
‘Not as yet. We’ve finished processing the crime scene – or at least, the location where the body was found. We have yet to establish whether she was killed there. We’re currently checking into Violet Chambers’ background, in case there’s something in her past that would explain her murder.’
Two figures had just left the building, far below. They were heading for the spaces reserved for visitors.
‘Do you think there’s a realistic chance that you can catch whoever is responsible?’
He shrugged. ‘Too early to tell, sir. We’ve not run out of leads yet, if that’s what you mean. Not quite.’
The two figures down in the car park had separated now, and were moving either side of a black car. It was difficult to tell from where Lapslie was standing, but it might have been a Lexus.
The scratching of the pen stopped for a moment. ‘I was wondering whether the relatively low chances of success in this particular case mean that you should scale down the investigation. Concentrate on something else, where you’re more likely to make an arrest.’
As the car below them started off and drove out of the car park, Lapslie turned to meet Superintendent Rouse’s gaze. ‘Are you suggesting that I should let the case drop, sir?’
‘I would never suggest we let a case drop, Mark. I’m merely asking whether our priorities are arranged correctly.’
‘I think it’s too early to tell,’ he said, knowing he was prevaricating. There was a strange flavour in his mouth: something like nutmeg, although he couldn’t quite place it. He’d tasted that flavour before. Usually it was during an interrogation, when some toerag was lying to him about their whereabouts, or trying to convince him that the top-of-the-range BMW they’d been trying to get into at three in the morning had been loaned to them by a friend whose name they had temporarily forgotten. It was the taste of lies; or, at the very least, it was the flavour of evasion. Of someone saying one thing to avoid saying another. But why would Superintendent Rouse be evading his question?
‘I can let you know in a few days whether I think there’s any realistic prospect of a conviction,’ he said.
Rouse nodded. ‘I think we may be devoting too many resources to this problem,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘It’s an old case, and there’s precious little evidence. Perhaps we should scale down the team.’
‘The team,’ Lapslie said levelly, ‘is one Detective Chief Inspector who’s been pulled back from sick leave and one Detective Sergeant who has an attitude problem. Unless you want to swap Emma Bradbury for Mary from the canteen, it’s hard to see how much less effective the team could be.’
‘Very well,’ Rouse said, avoiding Lapslie’s gaze. ‘We’ll keep things the way they are. For the moment.’ Putting his pen down, he leaned back in his state-of-the-art chair and gazed at Lapslie, smiling slightly. ‘We’ve both come a long way, haven’t we, Mark?’
‘Since Kilburn CID, back in the eighties? Since those nights we spent arresting crack dealers and Yardies and breaking up three-day-long raves? It’s like another world now.’
‘I’m surprised you keep going – especially with your problems. Have you thought about taking early retirement?’
He shrugged. ‘Who hasn’t at our age? Watching the sun rise from your desk for the tenth time in a month? Finding out that an overtime ban means that all the hours you’ve been putting in are for free? And knowing that my particular … problems …aren’t enough to get me pensioned off, but they are enough to stop me getting promoted again? The thought has crossed my mind more than once.’
‘Then why stay around?’
Sighing, Lapslie turned to gaze out of the window again, not at the car park this time but out past the elevated section of road, towards the nearest thing to a horizon one could see from this office. ‘Where would I go?’ he asked, more to himself than to Rouse. ‘What exactly would I do? I’d be yet another retired cop in a land full of them. I just haven’t got the energy to set myself up in business as a security consultant, or head up the investigation branch at one of the big banks. I’m a cop, sir. That’s what I do. That’s all I can do.’
‘What about—’
‘Sonia? She’s not coming back. Neither are the kids.’ And this time it wasn’t a sound, but the memory of a sound, that filled his mouth with the taste of vanilla. The memory of his children playing in the back garden, calling each other silly names, screaming as they chased each other around the car. The memory of them calling to him as they ran through the woods, their voices hanging directionless on the wind. The memory of them crying as they fell over and grazed a knee, and laughing as they tried to catch birds on the lawn. Odd how time could freeze around a few moments, projecting them backwards and forwards through his memories. For Lapslie, his children were always the age they were when they left. He couldn’t really remember how they had looked when they were born, or when they were crawling around th
e house. And, despite the occasional visits and the photographs that Sonia sent through, he found it hard to keep a grip of what they looked like now. It was their faces on those last few days, playing in the garden, running through the woods, that he would always remember.
‘It’s a shame’.
‘That it is,’ he said heavily. ‘That it is.’
‘If there’s anything I can do to help …’
He nodded. ‘Thanks for the offer,’ he said. ‘But what about you? Is your star still in the ascendant? Are you still managing to keep your grip on the greasy pole?’
Rouse smiled, and for a moment the years dropped away and he looked much like he had back in Kilburn, all those years ago. ‘I’m considering my options,’ he said judiciously. ‘There’s an offer on the table from the Serious Organised Crime Agency for me to take over their counter-terrorist section. And I’ve heard that there’s a team being put together to look at the security implications of the London Olympics. Either of those would suit me.’
‘On promotion, of course.’
‘Of course. There’s only two directions to go on the greasy pole – up or down. Staying still isn’t an option.’ Rouse gazed up at him, and his eyes crinkled in what might have been the beginnings of a smile, or the beginnings of a worried frown. ‘Let’s do lunch soon. We should talk about the future. Your future. I’ll get my PA to arrange it.’
He turned his eyes back to the notes in front of him and started writing. It was a dismissal. Lapslie glanced once more out of the window and then left the office, closing the door behind him. He felt slightly floaty, slightly disconnected from the world.
Outside, he paused by the PA’s desk.
‘Those two men who left just before I went in,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn I recognised one of them. I think we were on a course together at Sandridge. Who were they?’
The PA consulted her computer. ‘They were visitors from the Department of Justice,’ she said. ‘Mr Geherty and Mr Wilmington. Which one was your friend?’
‘Oh, I didn’t say he was my friend,’ Lapslie said quietly. ‘Thanks for your help.’
Core of Evil Page 13
