Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  Walking away from the estate agents, Daisy identified three shops in the back streets that sold second-hand furniture, and would deliver. She needed things that looked used. Things that she might well have brought with her from somewhere else.

  Daisy and Sylvia met for coffee that afternoon. They talked for an hour and a half about inconsequential things: the play the night before, the weather, how lovely the town was. Towards the end, Sylvia told Daisy about her husband, and how he had been a part of the volunteer lifeboat crew for fifteen years until cancer took him away. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Daisy risked patting her hand gently and offering her a tissue. Daisy, in turn, explained how she had been a nurse for almost three decades, and how the demands of duty meant that she had never managed to find anyone to settle down with. Using elements of the story that had brought her to Leyston in the first place, she told Sylvia that her sister had been taken ill and that she had moved in with her to nurse her through her final days. It was a calculated risk, and Sylvia did ask what Daisy’s sister’s name was, but Daisy explained that her sister had been disabled for many years and rarely left the house. Sylvia seemed satisfied with the explanation.

  Sylvia insisted on paying for the coffee and the cakes. She used a debit card, which pleased Daisy no end. It meant she was solvent. It meant that she was even more of an attractive prospect than Daisy had originally thought. They parted on friendly terms, having exchanged addresses, and after Sylvia had invited Daisy round for tea the afternoon after next.

  Back at the hotel, she sat at the writing table over by the window. From her pocket, she produced the copy of the debit card slip that she had so carefully taken from Sylvia’s handbag when Sylvia had visited the ladies’ room, just before they left. Using a plain sheet of paper, she copied Sylvia’s signature again and again, first slowly and then getting faster and faster, until she could reproduce it perfectly.

  Daisy felt like celebrating, that night. Instead of eating in the hotel, she wandered out into the town and found a small restaurant that advertised locally caught seafood. Daisy had scampi and chips, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Even more, she enjoyed the fact that she wasn’t watching the people around her, just in case a likely prospect came in. She had found her prospect. Now she just had to follow through.

  The next morning, she told the desk clerk at the hotel that she would be leaving at the end of the week. For the rest of that day she visited various second-hand shops along the High Street, ordering furniture to be delivered and buying bits of bric-abrac, old books, cutlery, plates, dishes and cups, which she ferried back to her new flat on the bus in a wheeled shopping bag that she picked up for five pounds in a charity shop.

  Come the evening, Daisy was hungry, but instead of looking for somewhere to eat she found her footsteps turning towards the marina again. Something about the stillness of the water had soothed her, the day before, and she wanted to recapture that feeling. It only took her a few minutes to find the road again, and to walk along it until she found the bank of earth and the gate to the Yacht Club. Slowly she climbed up the shallow concrete steps, feeling the effort more then than she had the day before. At the top, she raised her eyes to take in the expanse of water.

  It wasn’t there. Instead, Daisy was confronted with a corrugated expanse of greenish-grey mud. She descended the steps on the other side of the bank, trying to work out what had happened. Had the tide gone out? It seemed too dramatic a change to have occurred in so short a time, but she supposed it was the only explanation.

  The boats that had sat so calmly in the water the day before were now canted drunkenly on the mud, their masts pointed at crazy angles. Seagulls stalked amid them, pecking at the oozing surface. Daisy could suddenly smell a rank, fish odour that made her nose wrinkle involuntarily.

  She walked to the edge of the concrete jetty and looked over into the mud. The sun had baked parts of it to a hard crust, riven by cracks through which glinted an unpleasant wetness. Rusty cans, bottles, pipes and unidentifiable but sharp-edged objects emerged from the mud as if they were part of something larger, buried underneath, that was attempting to pull itself back to land. Small insects skittered across the wet surface, searching for somewhere to lay their eggs. It was hard to believe that something so unpleasant could have been concealed by something so beautiful; that something looking and smelling so disgusting could lurk beneath the pure and glittering surface of the water.

  Daisy turned to go. She felt soiled. She would make sure that she never came back to the marina unless it was high tide.

  That night, Daisy dreamed of the red-haired girl again. She had been sleeping uneasily since she had gone to bed, repeatedly jerked to the edge of wakefulness by the distant electrical clash of bumper cars on the pier and the sounds of teenagers singing and shouting as they made their way along the esplanade. As time went on, as the pubs and clubs shut their doors and the pier emptied of people, her room grew quieter and she slipped deeper into unconsciousness like a rusty tin can sinking into mud. By midnight, she was oblivious to everything.

  In her dream, Daisy was in a dining room dominated by a large mahogany table. Place mats had been set out in front of each of the chairs: cork-backed, with laminated pictures of plants on the front. The room itself was dark, apart from candelabra on the table itself, but Daisy got the impression of curtains in the darkness; soft, velvety curtains, dropping in swoops and furls to the floor, muffling all noise.

  Daisy was sitting at one end of the table. The picture on her place mat was of a rhododendron bush. Looking to her left, with the slow, underwater motions of a dream, she could see that the place mat there had a picture of an azalea bush. The one on her right was a mountain laurel.

  ‘Did you know,’ said a girlish voice from the other end of the table, ‘that honey made by bees who have collected pollen from rhododendron bushes is actually poisonous? I read that in a book, I think.’

  Daisy looked up. A girl was sitting opposite her. She was about eight years old, and she had red hair and wore a flowery dress. She seemed dwarfed by the heavy mahogany chair she was perched on.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said Daisy.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the girl replied. ‘What’s yours?’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘I don’t remember either. Where are we?’

  ‘In my secret place. Do you like it?’

  ‘I don’t know, m’dear. I can’t really see it that well. What are we doing here?’

  ‘We’re having a tea party. We always have tea parties here.’

  With no particular surprise, Daisy saw that the place mat in front of the little girl now held a tea pot and two cups on saucers: small cups, small saucers, more fit for dolls’ houses than for people. With exaggerated care, the girl filled the two cups with steaming brown liquid, then slipped from her chair, picked one cup up by the saucer and carried it around the table to where Daisy was sitting.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said as she placed the cup down. ‘I made it myself.’

  ‘And what did you make it out of, m’dear?’ Daisy asked as the girl returned to her chair.

  ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice,’ the girl said. ‘Like I always do. You have to drink it.’

  ‘I’m not really thirsty.’

  ‘But you have to.’ It was less of a command; more a statement of fact.

  Daisy found her hand reaching out for the cup. She tried to pull it back, but her fingers closed around the warm china and she lifted it up towards her mouth. ‘I really don’t think—’

  ‘But you have to. It’s the game.’

  Daisy felt the steam from the tea turn into moisture on her upper lip. She could smell something bitter and unpleasant. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ The girl smirked.

  She could feel the cup in her fingers, feel the increasing heat transferring through to her skin. ‘It smells … familiar.’

  ‘It used to grow in your garden. It used to grow all over your garden. You made a dr
ink from the berries. Don’t you remember? The gardener called it “belladonna”.’

  The cup tipped back, and the liquid trickled into Daisy’s mouth. She tried to spit it out, but whatever was controlling her hand made her swallow, and swallow again.

  ‘Rabbits can eat it,’ the girl said primly, ‘and it doesn’t affect them. But if you eat the rabbits, you can be poisoned.’

  Daisy could feel a burning in her mouth, although the tea wasn’t that hot. Blisters were coming up on her tongue and lips, and her forehead was suddenly damp with sweat.

  ‘Apparently, witches used to use belladonna when they were dancing together at night. It made them think they were flying. My mummy says that witches aren’t real, but I know they are.’

  Daisy’s hands put the cup down on the table and folded themselves neatly in her lap, but the fingers were tingling and the palms were wet.

  ‘Roman ladies used belladonna in make-up, to make their skin look really white.’ The girl was leaning forward in her chair, her hands clenched on the arms, watching Daisy intently. ‘Your skin looks really white now, but I don’t think that’s make-up. I think that’s the belladonna working.’

  Her hands were completely numb, and the room was getting blurry and white. She could just see the girl’s outline, but the blurriness turned her fine features into a skull, a red-haired skull, grinning insanely at Daisy.

  ‘How does it feel?’ the girl screamed. ‘How does it feel?’

  Daisy shot upright in bed. For a moment she could still feel the blisters in her mouth and the growing burning in her throat, but the sheets were cool beneath her clutching hands and somewhere outside the window she could hear waves on sand. It had been a dream. It had only been a dream.

  The next morning, Daisy took longer than usual to get ready. She was feeling old and tired. Something about this town was sapping her strength; it was as if arriving there had awakened old ghosts and she had to try and lay them to rest if she was going to make any progress with Sylvia.

  She spent the morning pottering around the hotel and the town, and after lunch she took a taxi to Sylvia’s house. She had already checked where it was on a map of the town she had obtained from the Visitor Information kiosk, which was proving increasingly useful to her, and she knew that she could get a bus that would drop her off ten minutes’ walk away, but she wanted to arrive fresh. And besides, it gave the impression that she was used to travelling in some comfort, which would probably go down well with Sylvia.

  The house was high up, near the top of the knob of land that pushed out into the sea, north of the town, part of an estate that Daisy estimated had been built in the 1930s. It was well-proportioned and wide, built of red brick, with a garage and a small round window over the front door. It was detached from its neighbours, and set back from the road. As Daisy got out of the taxi and paid the driver, she could hardly take her eyes off it. Of all the houses she had ever lived in, or ever intended to, this was the best. She would enjoy living there, once she had got Sylvia out of the way.

  Sylvia was waiting by the front door. ‘A taxi,’ she said. ‘How extravagant.’

  ‘I couldn’t face the bus,’ Daisy replied, following Sylvia into the house. ‘What a lovely place you have here.’

  ‘Would you like a tour?’

  Sylvia showed Daisy around with pride. The house was immaculately kept, and there were obviously rooms that Sylvia just didn’t go into any more. The kitchen was huge, with wood-panelled cupboards, and the master bedroom had a view between the houses opposite to the sea. It was perfect.

  Well, not quite perfect. None of the fixtures or fittings would fetch more than a few thousand pounds, at best. Still, the house itself would be worth quite a bundle when Daisy finally got tired of it.

  The weather was warm enough that they took tea in the back garden. Sylvia kept it beautifully tidy, and they spent some time talking about the various flowers. Daisy commented particularly on the well-kept privet hedges, and the morning-glory vine that trailed up the rear of the house.

  Sitting in chairs out in the back garden, Daisy said, apropos of nothing: ‘It seems awfully quiet here. You must have good neighbours.’

  ‘I don’t really see that much of them,’ Sylvia admitted. ‘There’s a family on one side: they go out a lot, and we rarely talk. The man on the other side is a bus driver. He’s very quiet.’

  ‘What about the others? The other side of the road?’

  ‘Quite a few of them are new, over the past few years. It’s happening everywhere nowadays. It used to be that people would be in and out of each other’s houses, offering a hand, having cups of tea, borrowing sugar or milk. Now, people keep themselves to themselves. It’s a shame.’

  ‘It is,’ said Daisy. ‘Everyone needs friends. Life can be so terribly lonely otherwise.’

  They talked for a while about the changes they had seen during their lives, and how people today seemed less caring than they had twenty or thirty years ago. The nature of society had shifted, and they felt left behind. Part of the past.

  The talk turned to other things. Daisy ventured a comment about her own varicose veins, and how they made walking difficult sometimes.

  ‘I know,’ Sylvia said. ‘I had one hip replaced, ten years ago, and the other hip done a year after that. I swear that the surgeons put one in shorter than the other, but they won’t listen to me. “I’m the one who has to walk on it,” I told them, “and some days I feel like I’m walking in circles”, but they didn’t want to know. Told me it was impossible.’ Her face fell. ‘Sometimes I just can’t get comfortable at night, with these hips. I don’t think I’ve had a good night’s sleep since they put them in.’

  ‘You should take something for it,’ Daisy said, sensing an opening the way a cat can sometimes sense a mouse without even seeing it.

  ‘Oh,’ Sylvia said, ‘I don’t like the thought of sedatives.’

  ‘I was thinking more of something herbal,’ Daisy said casually. ‘A herbal tea, perhaps. I could make you some up. If you would like.’

  ‘Oh Daisy,’ Sylvia said gratefully, ‘you’re just killing me with kindness.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was a poem that Mark Lapslie had read once, while searching online for other people’s experiences of synaesthesia. It was on a website that noted, with some pride, that there were many artists, poets and musicians who were synaesthetic, although it then went on to admit that this might be because they were more likely to notice and even take advantage of their symptoms. The poem was by a nineteenth-century French writer named Baudelaire, and it stuck in Lapslie’s memory. It captured in a handful of words something that he wished he could achieve in his own life – a sense of the beauty and the majesty that synaesthesia could apparently provide.

  There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants Sweet like oboes, green like prairies, —And others corrupted, rich and triumphant That have the expanse of infinite things, Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense, Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

  He remembered the poem again as he made the long drive, under a grey early-morning sky, from his cottage in Saffron Walden to the hospital outside Braintree where he was under the occasional care of the consultant neurologist. The ecstasies of the mind and senses. If only that were as true for him as it apparently was for Baudelaire.

  Still, Baudelaire had been a syphilitic opium addict with a drink problem, so Lapslie felt justified in not taking his pronouncements too seriously.

  He parked his car near the hospital and walked through the main entrance. Rather than wear a suit, he had chosen chinos, a plain shirt and a moleskin jacket. He’d booked a day’s leave for the appointment, and to meet an old friend later on.

  The central atrium was tall and airy, surrounded by planters of ferns, with fountains plashing gently in the centre and stone benches all around. Walking through a set of double doors to one side of the atrium, he quickly found himself in the hospital proper: a maze of square corridors that s
melled of disinfectant, their walls and linoleum scuffed and scarred by decades of hospital trolleys. The original, 1950s vintage, hospital was hidden behind the impressive new façade in the same way that the ladies of Baudelaire’s time used to hide their pox-ridden faces behind caked layers of make-up.

  A handful of people were sat around a waiting area, waiting for the neurology outpatients clinic. Lapslie sat and waited with them for his appointment, trying not to make judgements about them. After all, he was on leave, not on duty.

  He had timed his arrival perfectly, and within five minutes his name was being called. The consulting room was small, anonymous, with white walls, a hospital trolley, a desk with a computer on it and a couple of chairs. It could have been any consulting room in any hospital or clinic, anywhere in the country.

  The young man sitting at the desk was new to Lapslie. He was reading information off the computer screen as Lapslie entered, and he stuck out his hand without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘Hello. I’m Doctor Considine. I don’t think I’ve seen you before, have I?’

  ‘Mark Lapslie.’ He shook the doctor’s hand and sat down. ‘I’ve been seeing Doctor Lombardy for the past ten years or so.’

  ‘Doctor Lombardy retired about six months ago. A very clever man. Great loss to the hospital.’ He consulted the computer again. ‘I see you’re a synaesthete. We don’t get to see many synaesthetes here – estimates of its occurrence vary between six people in a million and three in a hundred, depending on how wide you want to draw the boundaries, but most of them either don’t know they have it or assume that everyone does. You, it appears, are in that small subsection for whom the effect of synaesthesia is strong enough to cause problems in your day-to-day life. When was the last time you were seen here?’