Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Life’s like that,’ Lapslie said. ‘A series of choices, each of which has unfortunate consequences. You just have to do what seems best at the time. When will CSI get to the car?’

  ‘They were already on the road to another crime scene. They’re turning round and heading for Colchester now. That little Irish git says they’ll be there within the hour, which is probably about as long as it’ll take for us to get there.’

  The roads were relatively clear, Emma Bradbury didn’t seem inclined to talk, and Lapslie found his thoughts wandering as he drove. He was working on the assumption that someone – yet to be identified – had killed Violet Chambers and taken on her identity, writing postcards and Christmas cards to make people think that Violet was still alive while he, or she, presumably, plundered whatever money Violet had and rented her house out via an estate agent. According to Bradbury’s investigations, the money collected by the estate agents was paid into a separate account in Violet’s name from which occasional withdrawals were made in different locations. But as far as Lapslie could see, the money wasn’t enough to make it worthwhile killing Violet Chambers for. Perhaps as a crime of passion, a killing on the spur of the moment, but this had all the hallmarks of careful planning and execution. So why go to all that trouble just for a trickle of money?

  Lapslie shivered. Somehow, there was more to this crime than they had yet uncovered. He had the distinct impression that the body in the forest, the house that had been rented out and the abandoned car were just the tip of the iceberg. There was a lot more of this case hidden below the surface. And, like an iceberg, it was going to be cold and hard and very unpleasant.

  They arrived in Colchester less than an hour after they had set out. Bradbury guided Lapslie in through narrow streets with high stone walls alternating with wider, more modern roads flanked with warehouse-style superstores until they came to the street where the car had been abandoned.

  The CSI team had got there before them. Their van was parked near the Volvo and they were already deploying the yellow plastic tent that would keep their work isolated, although Lapslie was aware that the amount of time that had passed since the car had been abandoned meant that most of the evidence would have been blown away by the wind or washed away by rain.

  He glanced around, trying to get a sense of the place. They were in a wide street which curved away in either direction. On one side was a row of shops: a florists, a laundrette, a bookies and a couple of unidentifiable frontages that were closed or boarded up. A couple of the shops were selling things that were completely at variance with the signs above them. It was obviously the kind of place where property changed hands faster than the signs could keep up, if anyone bothered changing the signs in the first place. Above the shops were two storeys of flats: windows curtained even in the middle of the morning and grimy with dust and pollution. Overflow pipes projected from the flats like regularly spaced industrial gargoyles. The bricks beneath most of the pipes were green with moss in a sharp triangle, showing where water had dripped or poured on a regular basis over the years. Sheets of newspaper, yellow and crinkled, blew along the pavement and collected in corners. There was nobody about, and a deadness to the air, as if any sound was instantly swallowed up before it could go too far from its source. Even the light seemed grey and tired. The place felt like the end of the world had come early, and it had ended not with a bang but with a whimper.

  ‘ “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”’ Lapslie murmured as he got out of the car.

  ‘Sorry, boss?’ Bradbury said, getting out of the passenger side.

  ‘W. B. Yeats. It seemed apt. I was just wondering what kind of person we’re going to find at the end of all this.’

  Bradbury gave him a strange look, but said nothing. Together they walked across to where the tent was being erected around the boxy shape of a car.

  Sean Burrows was waiting for them. He was dressed in ordinary clothes, but he was holding the papery overalls that all the CSIs wore when they were carrying out their investigations. ‘You are aware,’ he said with painful sarcasm, ‘that we prioritise our work strictly on the basis of importance. An abandoned car that may or may not be connected to a nine-month-old death does not come high up that list.’

  ‘Not your call to make,’ Lapslie said. ‘Let me give you a couple of reasons why you should do this job as top priority. First: I outrank the investigating officers of all the other cases you have on your list. Second: I can get Chief Superintendent Rouse to give you a call and reprioritise your workload until your ears bleed. And third: I’m the only investigating officer who provides you with bacon rolls while you’re working.’

  Burrows stared at him for a few moments. ‘Sold to the man with the attitude,’ he said finally. ‘And can we have some sausage rolls mixed in this time? One of the guys is Jewish. Had to eat the roll and leave the bacon last time.’

  ‘Doesn’t he know what’s in the sausages?’ Bradbury asked.

  ‘He won’t ask and we won’t say,’ Burrows answered. ‘Trouble is that he can’t turn a blind eye to bacon.’

  ‘Can you find a local café and arrange for a regular delivery of rolls and tea?’ Lapslie asked Bradbury. She nodded, and walked away.

  The tent was up by this time, and Lapslie entered. The dull light from outside was enlivened by its translucent yellow walls, casting a macabre light over the dusty bronze car that sat in the centre. Three of Burrows’ people were starting work on the car: one taking photographs and measurements on the inside, one opening the boot while the third opened the bonnet and checked for the serial number inscribed on the engine.

  ‘Any clues as to what we’re looking for?’ Burrows asked.

  ‘Whatever we can find that will lead us to the driver,’ Lapslie answered.

  ‘You think this is the car that old lady’s body was dumped from?’

  ‘It’s the only candidate so far. And I have a suspicion that the old lady that was found in the forest isn’t the only body this car has seen.’

  Burrows nodded. ‘Volvos, you see. Lots of boot space, nobody ever pays attention to them and they’re very reliable. If you’re carting dead bodies around, a Volvo’s what you want.’

  ‘I sometimes worry,’ Lapslie said, ‘about what might happen if you guys ever decided to go freelance.’

  ‘We do talk about setting up a murder consultancy,’ Burrows admitted. ‘But we’d have to register for VAT and everything, and it’s just too much trouble.’

  The person who had opened the boot was gesturing to her colleague with the camera. He joined her and took photographs of whatever they had found, flooding the tent with the light from the flashgun. Burrows frowned, and walked across to join them. He glanced into the boot, then gestured Lapslie to join him.

  ‘What do you think – a body?’ Burrows asked.

  ‘That’s all I need right now,’ Lapslie said as he walked over towards the car: ‘one more body and no more murderers.’

  As he got closer to the car he could make out a faint smell of flowers and earth. For a moment he thought it was his synaesthesia reaction to a low-level sound somewhere outside, but when he reached Burrows’ side he realised that the smell was a real smell, and it was coming from the boot of the Volvo. The large space was filled with twigs, leaves and colourful petals, all carefully held together with twists of gardening wire.

  ‘Not exactly what I was expecting,’ Burrows said. ‘I’ll have them bagged up and identified.’

  Lapslie watched for a while as Burrows’ team painstakingly examined the Volvo. They fingerprinted the inside, and picked up samples of hair and lint from the seats. They were, Lapslie thought, like beetles crawling over the carcass of a dead animal, stripping it of whatever flesh it had left. It must have been his imagination, but the car seemed to shrink as they worked, as if the mystery it contained had bulked it out. It occurred to him that Violet Chambers’ body must have gone through a process very much like that
: plump and fleshy when she was first dumped in the forest beneath a few inches of earth, then progressively stripped of everything that made her human until she was just a collection of bones, tendons and mummified skin, at which time the various scavengers moved on to the next thing on their priority list.

  ‘Apart from the boot, which is covered with a layer of dirt, the car’s surprisingly clean,’ Burrows said. ‘It looks like it’s been vacuumed on a regular basis: possibly put through a valet service as well. There’s no fingerprints on the steering wheel: my guess is that whoever left it gave it a quick once-over with a J-cloth before they walked away. The outside’s been scoured by the elements as well. No chance of getting anything off the door handles.’

  ‘Good work,’ Lapslie said. ‘Keep going, and if you find anything, give me a ring.’

  ‘Sure,’ the CSM said. ‘It’s not as if I had anything else to do with my day.’

  Emma Bradbury was talking on her mobile when Lapslie walked out of the tent. She waved him over, flipping the phone shut as he arrived.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘I managed to get a Special Constable to do some legwork on the question you asked me,’ she said. ‘The one about whether any car mechanic or garage within fifty miles of the forest where Violet Chambers’ body was discovered had been called out to look at a Volvo with this licence plate.’

  ‘How did you manage that? I thought there was some unspoken moratorium on getting any help on this investigation.’

  ‘I just didn’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it turns out that a garage in Malden was called out three years ago to an isolated house in the countryside. This car was there, and it wouldn’t start. Turned out that the owner had left the interior lights on by mistake and the battery had run flat. All the mechanic had to do was jump-start it and it was okay.’

  ‘Who was the driver?’

  The name on the form is smudged. He can’t make it out. He remembers that she was a woman in her sixties, though.’

  Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘That address might well be where whoever murdered Violet Chambers is living. We need to proceed carefully. Notify Control that we’re on our way.’ He paused for a moment. ‘We’re potentially dealing with a murderer here. I think we might need an Armed Response Team.’

  Outside, the local police had cordoned off the tent with incident tape, looped around trees and lamp posts and attached to drainpipes. A small collection of people who lived, worked or shopped in the area had gathered, pressing themselves against the tape so they could get a better look at whatever was going on, which was presumably more interesting than anything else they had to do that day.

  Lapslie took a deep breath. The air itself seemed listless and insipid. Small flurries of wind, caught in shop doorways, drew up the dust into spirals that looked like invisible animals fighting. They were the most animated things about the scene.

  Emma was arguing into her mobile as they walked. Lapslie caught the occasional terse word and suppressed curse. Eventually she flipped it shut and turned to him. ‘It’s no-go on the firearms team,’ she said, face thunderous. ‘Apparently they’re unavailable. Some kind of counter-terrorism thing in Dagenham. Control reckons that it’ll be a day or so before they’re free, and even then there’s no guarantee that we can have them. Do you want to wait?’

  Lapslie shook his head. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he asked, ‘that we’ve had to fight for resources at every step of the way in this case? DCS Rouse tried to take you off the case, the uniforms at the crime scene were pulled away to cover a football match, of all things, the autopsy records were interfered with, and any request I make for additional manpower is turned down flat. Something’s going on in the background that I’m not privy to, and I don’t like it.’ He scowled. ‘No, I’m going to head over to that address, and I’m going to do it without armed backup. I won’t order you to come along, but I could do with the company.’

  She nodded. ‘Count me in,’ she said.

  Bradbury was about to say something else when her mobile rang. She turned away to talk, and Lapslie took the opportunity to phone DCS Rouse on his own mobile. Rouse’s PA answered, and Lapslie said: ‘This is DCI Lapslie. I need to talk to the boss.’

  ‘He’s … out at a meeting,’ the PA said, with only a momentary hesitation, but her voice was shaded with dry spice. She was lying. Lapslie had a sudden intuition that Mr Geherty from the Department of Justice was standing over her, listening in. He rang off without saying goodbye.

  ‘I’ve had Control check the address out,’ Bradbury said, flipping her own phone closed. ‘It’s listed as belonging to a Rhona McIntyre. No records of any incidents related to the address, and she’s clear as far as the system can tell. Council Tax is paid off every year, no outstanding mortgage. I’ve got someone back in the office trying to get a search warrant arranged, but –’ she shrugged ‘– I can’t help feeling there’ll be an unexpected delay.’

  ‘Just long enough for someone else to get there first,’ Lapslie said. ‘Okay – let’s go. We’re half way there already. And if we think there’s a crime about to be committed, we can go in without a warrant and explain ourselves afterwards.’

  They drove off in silence. Lapslie was glad to put Colchester behind him. He was sure there were some wonderfully historic and picturesque parts of the town to be seen, but there was something about that street that made him think of a whipped dog, too tired to fight, just clinging to existence.

  They took a different route out of town, past a series of roundabouts and a modernistic glass and metal station. That was the problem with architecture these days, Lapslie thought as he drove: it was all designed in sections that could be bolted together in a series of shapes. There was no overall coherence, no shape, no structure. Just a set of similar panels, abutting one another, all looking the same.

  The drive to the farmhouse took just over an hour, and Lapslie noticed as he drove that a number of road signs were pointing back towards the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered. Depending on where one was coming from, the road through the forest would be an obvious route to take if you were heading for the house. As, he suspected, the murderer was.

  There were two possibilities, as far as Lapslie could see. The first was that the murderer lived in the house and was returning there with the body for some reason. The other was that the murderer didn’t live there, but wanted to leave the body there anyway. The third possibility was that the house had nothing to do with the murder of Violet Chambers, but Lapslie didn’t want to think about that, partly because he desperately wanted there to be a break in the case but mostly because he could taste strawberries, even though the radio was off and Emma Bradbury wasn’t saying anything. He was in for a surprise, but whether it was going to be pleasant or unpleasant was still uncertain.

  Emma’s phone rang. After a few seconds of ‘Yes,’ and ‘Uh-huh,’ she disconnected the call and turned to Lapslie. ‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘The search warrant’s been turned down.’

  ‘Someone’s got it in for us,’ Lapslie said bitterly.

  The last few hundred yards were along a dirt track that showed little sign of ever having been maintained. Hawthorn hedges flashed past on either side. Through gaps in the hawthorn, Lapslie could see fields that had returned to nature: weeds and grasses predominating over whatever had once been planted there. If there was anyone still at the house, they weren’t farming any more. If they ever had.

  They found the house around a turn in the track. It was set in the middle of an overgrown grass lawn and was built of red brick, two storeys high, with tall windows and a large portico topped with a pointed wooden roof. The windows were all curtained.

  The car stopped in front of the house, on a mossy stone drive through which hardy weeds sprouted. Lapslie approached the portico. Two steps led up to the front door, vertical cracks running through the stone like frozen trickles of black water. Emma Bradbury was just behind him, and she touched his should
er before he could lift the doorknocker.

  ‘Boss,’ she said, ‘look over there.’

  He followed the direction she was pointing. Off to one side of the house, shielded by a low fence, was a garden. Unlike the drive and the surrounding fields, it appeared to be beautifully kept. Scarlet and mauve flowers burst open against a background of vivid green leaves. Lapslie could see berries of various kinds – red, blue, purple, black – hanging heavily from nodding stems.

  ‘Someone’s been here,’ Emma warned. ‘That garden has been maintained, and recently.’

  ‘It’s as if whoever lives here doesn’t care about the drive or the fields, but the garden is their pride and joy,’ Lapslie said. ‘Okay, let’s get on with it.’

  The door had been painted green at some time in the past, but sunlight and rain had faded it to the point where it was difficult to make out what shade it might originally have been. The wood of the door frame was crumbling along its sharp edges. A window, a few feet to the right of the door, was white with cobwebs, both inside and out. One of the panes of glass was cracked.

  He knocked once, twice; the echoes rolling thunderously through the house in search of anyone who might answer. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. Lapslie knocked again. The sounds joined the previous set of echoes, bouncing back and forth, rolling from room to room and from downstairs to upstairs and back. Still nothing.

  Stepping back, Lapslie twisted his body and swung a foot up at the door, his heel hitting it a foot or so below the lock. The wooden door frame splintered. He kicked again, and the door flew open, knocking a pile of letters against the wall. They scattered like snow.

  ‘Police!’ he called. ‘Come out where we can see you!’

  No movement, and no sound. Together, Lapslie and Bradbury entered the house.