Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘I said, I hope he didn’t frighten you.’

  ‘I’m quite unfrightenable,’ Daisy said, staring at this apparition as if it had arisen from the sand in answer to her unspoken prayers.

  ‘Good for you,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Eunice. Eunice Coleman.’

  ‘Daisy Wilson.’

  ‘And are you a visitor to this benighted town, or do you have the misfortune to live here?’

  Daisy couldn’t help smiling at the woman’s forthright manner. ‘I moved here recently.’

  ‘Then you have my condolences.’

  The small bundle of fur and teeth that had rushed past earlier suddenly rushed past again, heading across the sand at breakneck speed in pursuit of the shadow of one of the gulls that hung in the air above them.

  ‘That’s Jasper,’ said Eunice. ‘Named for Jasper Johns, the artist.’

  ‘Is he famous?’ Daisy asked. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  The woman looked at her strangely. ‘You’ve never heard of Jasper Johns?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be telling me you’ve never heard of Jackson Pollock.’

  ‘I never have.’

  ‘Joan Miró?’

  ‘Her neither.’

  ‘Joan Miró was a him, not a her.’ Eunice shook her head grimly. ‘What is the world coming to?’

  ‘Are you an artist?’ Daisy asked, feeling as if she’d been drawn into a conversation that was spiralling out of her control.

  ‘I run an art gallery and craft centre,’ Eunice said, as if that were the same thing. ‘Not that people around here are that interested in arts. Keeps me occupied. Stops me from going doolally.’

  ‘What kind of arts and crafts do you have?’

  Eunice shrugged. ‘Paintings I’ve picked up along the way. Some pottery. A couple of wall hangings. Nothing as tedious as embroidery. That’s not art, that’s just fiddling about. I do classes as well, or I would if anyone cared enough to come along. Coffee and cakes. All sorts. I’ve got a converted barn just out of town, next to the house. Off the beaten track, though. Not on the main tourist routes.’

  ‘It sounds rather fun,’ Daisy said with as much conviction as she could pull together. ‘You must tell me where it is.’

  ‘I’ve got a map. Somewhere.’ Eunice rummaged around in her bag and pulled out a handful of leaflets. ‘Printed them myself.’

  And Daisy could tell. They had been put together on a computer of some kind, but there were too many different fonts crammed too close together. ‘It’s … very impressive,’ she said finally.

  ‘No it’s not. That’s the problem. I can do art, I can do craft, but I can’t do advertising. I don’t know how people think. No head for business. Accounts just leave me cold. Don’t understand cashflow; don’t understand the lingo.’

  ‘You need someone to help you out.’

  Eunice shrugged. ‘I used to have someone to do that, but they left. I have a tendency to speak my mind, you know. Some people respond badly to that. Good riddance to them, I say. Problem is, I seem to have burned my bridges. Nobody here wants to help out any more.’

  If Daisy had believed in God, she would have put this meeting down to divine providence. As it was, she could only think that when one door closed, another door opened. ‘I was looking for something to do in my spare time,’ she said without even thinking. ‘Perhaps I could help you out. Design some proper leaflets, get some advertising put up around town, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Eunice looked doubtful. ‘Why on earth would you want to?’

  ‘It’ll stop me getting bored.’ She looked at the leaflet. ‘Should I pop in tomorrow? We could talk it over.’

  A smile broke out on Eunice’s face. Suddenly she looked ten years younger. ‘That would be wonderful. There’ll be coffee and cake waiting. There’s always coffee and cake, just in case. Mostly it just goes to the birds. The cake, that is. Not the coffee. Ta-ta.’ She stomped off, her dog following on behind. Beneath the fringed hem of her skirt and the legwarmers it looked as if she were wearing what Daisy could only describe as ‘pixie boots’.

  What a strange woman. And yet, what an interesting prospect. Her stream-of-consciousness way of talking would probably drive Daisy to distraction after a short time, but perhaps a short time was all she needed. If she didn’t have much of a grasp of business then she would probably welcome Daisy taking control of that side of things, and if she didn’t have any friends in the town then she wouldn’t be missed if she disappeared. And a barn! Daisy didn’t want to get her hopes up – it was probably rat-infested and falling down – but that kind of property was always in demand for conversion into luxury apartments. If nothing else, there was the land.

  Feeling a lot happier than she had when she first set foot on the beach, Daisy set off for a celebratory cup of coffee. Not at the post office café, however. Too much chance of seeing Sylvia there now. No, she would have to find somewhere else.

  The next day, after a dreamless night, Daisy checked the location of Eunice’s arts and crafts barn on her local map. The bus to Clacton went close by, and Daisy set off. It would have been more convenient with a car, of course. Having more or less consigned her Volvo to the past, and having now lost the chance of Sylvia’s Fiat, Daisy decided as a matter of some priority to find a car she could use – one with no history that could tie it back to her in the event that anything went wrong. Perhaps Eunice had a car.

  The bus journey took half an hour or so, and left Daisy with a ten-minute walk along a rutted country lane. A hand-lettered sign advertising, rather grandly, Arts and Crafts Centre had come loose from its fixings, and now pointed vaguely up to the clouds. But it was a glorious day, and Daisy could still smell the sea. She had a good feeling about this.

  At the end of the track was a rather grand house, probably dating from the last century: five bedrooms at least, possibly more. Daisy gazed up at it, enraptured. What a prospect for developing into a bed and breakfast establishment. Not hers, of course. That would mean settling down and putting her name on paper in too many places. But someone with vision would pay a lot of money for that house.

  Beside the house was a barn: large, long, with a slate roof. The entrance had been closed off with a new addition: a glass and wood double door, open now to provide ventilation to the inside. Daisy approached gingerly and put her head around the jamb. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello? Who’s that?’

  Daisy entered the barn. Inside it was surprisingly light and airy. Some considerable effort had been put into painting it and separating areas with partitions on which were hung paintings in various styles. Pots and sculptures sat on pedestals around the space. The floor was covered in cork tiles. Eunice Coleman was sitting behind an L-shaped bench by the door. To her right was a till. In front of her was an open book of black and white photographs which she had been leafing through.

  ‘It’s Daisy. Daisy Wilson.’

  Eunice’s face lit up with recognition. Whatever happened, Daisy reflected as she entered, she would never have any problem in telling what Eunice felt. Every emotion seemed to hit her face and her voice before it actually crossed her mind.

  ‘The woman from the beach! I was worried you might have been being polite, and you weren’t going to come.’

  ‘I would never do that,’ Daisy said virtuously. ‘If I say I will do something then I will do it, come hell or high water.’

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  Eunice busied herself at a small area at the back of the barn, where four round tables and a handful of chairs were clustered near a serving hatch, behind which Daisy could just make out an urn of hot water and some cakes under transparent perspex domes. Daisy looked around while Eunice prepared the coffee. Appearances had been deceiving: the paintings were badly hung, and the sculptures were covered in dust. There were also piles of newspaper and boxes of odds and ends stacked up in the corners. Eunice was apparently one of those people who considered clearing up to be not onl
y hard work but also difficult as well, in the same way that a crossword puzzle is difficult.

  The two of them sat down at one of the tables and talked. Or, rather, Eunice talked and Daisy alternately listened and let her mind drift.

  It seemed that Eunice had led quite a free and easy life. The daughter of a well-off family in the Home Counties, she had studied at St Martin’s College of Art in London when she was younger, and had lived in various communes and communities for the following twenty years or so, drifting into and out of relationships with both men and women, acting as muse for some artists and model for others, taking soft drugs and generally living the kind of vacuous and unproductive life that Daisy thoroughly disapproved of, although she didn’t tell Eunice this. On the death of her father, Eunice had inherited quite a lot of money, and rather than move back to the family home (or ‘mansion’ as she inadvertently referred to it at one stage) she had arranged for it to be sold, then bought a house close to the sea in the Tendring area with one of her many lovers, with a view to settling into a bucolic farming lifestyle. Farming turned out to be hard work, however; her lover left and she had stayed. Men had come and gone over the intervening time, and those of a practical bent had helped her get the house and barn into some kind of order, turning it into an arts and crafts centre that she was certain would attract patrons and become, in the fullness of time, a mirror image of the artistic communities she had been a part of when she was much younger and much more beautiful. And now she was alone, apart from the occasional passing tourist.

  By the time Daisy left she had offered to help Eunice turn the Arts and Crafts Centre into a going concern. She had also developed a venomous hatred for Jasper the dog, who seemed to have as little brain as his mistress without her appealing flashes of sentiment.

  Daisy returned the next day and started on clearing the rubbish out of the barn. Most of the boxes were filled with packing material or odd things that Eunice had picked up over the years. These she threw straight out. The newspapers were also old: both local and national papers dating back several months or, in the case of one pile hidden at the back, several years. Daisy could tell how old they were just by the colour and the texture of the paper: in the conditions of the barn, anything dating back more than a few weeks was yellow and stiff.

  It was while she was clearing a pile of newspapers near the till that Daisy caught sight of a headline that almost made her heart stop.

  Body of Pensioner Found in Forest

  Glancing over to where Eunice was oblivious to the world, looking through yet another book of black and white photographs, Daisy bent closer to the newspaper and read quickly through the article.

  The body of a 68-year-old woman was discovered yesterday in a forest near Ipswich. The corpse had been wrapped in plastic sheets and buried in a shallow grave.

  According to police, pensioner Violet Chambers was discovered by accident when a car came off the road near where she had been buried. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash.

  Violet Chambers had not been reported missing, and police are still investigating why her disappearance had not been noticed before. Sources in the forensic team have said that the body looked as if it had been in the forest for many months.

  The words on the newspaper seemed to dance in front of Daisy’s eyes.

  Violet Chambers. They had found Violet Chambers.

  It was the first of her victims to be found. The first link in a long chain of evidence.

  One mistake. Just one mistake, and it could ruin everything.

  She glanced up at Eunice. She would have to move quickly. She needed to get herself established, burrow in and disappear. She needed to take on a cloak of respectability.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Eunice asked, looking over at Daisy. ‘You look as if you’ve swallowed something nasty.’

  ‘Not me,’ Daisy said. ‘Not yet.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The trouble with maps, Mark Lapslie decided, was that they demystified everything.

  He was sitting in the Quiet Room, back in the police HQ in Chelmsford. He had an Ordnance Survey map of the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been found spread over the desk, and he was attempting to trace where the car that dumped her body might have been heading.

  The forest had seemed so daunting when he was walking through it, waiting for Emma Bradbury to phone back. He’d had the impression that it might have gone on for miles, rolling across the English countryside like a dark stain, ancient and unyielding. There might have been patches of ground in there upon which man had never trod. There might have been monsters. Now, looking at it on the map, he could see that it only covered a few square miles and was bounded on each side by roads, caged in by progress. Somehow, splayed out on paper for all to see, it had lost its enchantment. ‘Here there be dragons’, the old maps used to say, but the whole point of maps was that they removed all the places the dragons were hiding, making them accessible to any fool with a car and a pair of walking boots.

  Jesus, he was feeling cynical. Perhaps it was the effects of meeting up with Dom McGinley. The man hadn’t phoned back yet, and Lapslie wasn’t even sure he would. The two of them had a certain amount of respect for one another, the same kind of respect that the last two dinosaurs to die probably had, but that didn’t mean McGinley would actually do him any favours. It was a long shot, but long shots sometimes worked.

  Which was why Lapslie was bent over the Ordnance Survey map, tracing his finger along the road where Violet Chambers’ body had been found. The interesting thing was that the road cut through the centre of the forest. Anyone going to any of the big towns in the vicinity would almost certainly have taken the major roads on either side. They were better lit and they were faster. The road through the forest didn’t really go anywhere apart from a small set of villages.

  A knock on the door of the Quiet Room sent the taste of bacon trickling through his mouth. He looked up. Emma Bradbury was standing outside, holding a piece of paper. He gestured to her to enter.

  ‘Boss, we’ve got a break,’ she said as the door swung open, her words undercut by the sound of chattering from the open-plan office outside. The smoky taste of the bacon hadn’t quite faded from Lapslie’s mouth before it was joined by lemon from Bradbury’s voice and dried blood from the raised level of conversation. And there was strawberry mixed in there as well: a bizarre melange of flavours that could only have been matched in real life by a child mixing their dinner and dessert up on the same plate.

  ‘Great,’ he said, wincing and swallowing to try and get rid of the incompatible tastes. ‘What’s happened? And close the door for God’s sake – I’m virtually having a four-course meal in here.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She entered the room and shut the door behind her. ‘The car that had a flat tyre – the one we thought might have been carrying the body of Violet Chambers …’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘We’ve found it.’

  ‘We?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, a copper in Colchester. It had been parked up near the station for quite a while – legally, but nobody had moved it, and it was looking like it had been abandoned. The council were about to tow it away, but this copper who was passing checked it against that call you put out. When he realised that we were looking for the car, he called it in.’

  ‘Good man.’ Lapslie leaned back in his chair. ‘Colchester’s, what, twenty miles away? Okay – I want a full CSI team down there. I want every inch of that car examined in situ.’

  Bradbury looked sceptical. ‘I know you’ve been out of the loop for a while, boss, but it’s more usual to move suspect vehicles to a CSI garage so they can be taken apart under controlled conditions.’

  ‘Thanks for reminding me of standard procedure, but the evidence might be more to do with the place it’s parked than the car itself. I know it’s been there a while, but there could be a footprint in dried mud, or something fallen out of the car when the driver got out. We can get
it to a garage later, but for now I want the whole place treated as a crime scene – car and parking space and all.’

  ‘Okay.’ She nodded. ‘You want to head out there and see it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bradbury looked at her watch. ‘Almost lunchtime. We could stop for something on the way.’

  The abstract mix of flavours was still lingering in Lapslie’s mouth, dominated by the taste of Bradbury’s voice. ‘Thanks,’ he said sourly, ‘but I’ve already eaten.’

  Lapslie insisted that they took his car rather than Bradbury’s. It went against police protocol for a superior to drive around someone further down the food chain than them, but the last thing he wanted at that time was marmalade from her Mondeo’s engine purr added to the stuff already in his mouth. Surprised, she agreed.

  While they were driving, Bradbury was on her mobile getting the CSI team arranged. It took her five separate calls, plus the possibly empty threat of Lapslie phoning the Detective Chief Superintendent’s office and getting him to reprioritise their work, to move his case up their list. At one point Lapslie could taste blackberry wine, very faintly, across the back of his tongue, and he guessed that Bradbury was talking to Sean Burrows, the Crime Scene Manager who had previously been called out to the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been found. He was concentrating on driving, so he didn’t catch everything that Bradbury said, but judging by the harsh tone of voice she used she was pressing the point home quite heavily that this was an important case.

  Eventually she put the mobile back in her pocket. ‘I’ve been asked to tell you,’ she said, ‘that by prioritising this case above the rest of CSI’s workload you’ve potentially threatened the investigation into two other suspicious deaths, and you can expect calls from the DCS within the next hour.’