Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  An old, unpleasant smell hung in the air, and Lapslie had to fight the urge to brush it aside as he moved. The hall was dark; a faded carpet running its length. Various doors led off the hall. They were all shut.

  He approached the closest room – the one whose window he had noticed to the right of the front door – and pushed it open. It whispered against carpet as it swung back. The smell of something deeply unpleasant suddenly intensified.

  Light from the cobwebbed window filtered into the room, illuminating a long dining table set for dinner. Fine porcelain tea cups were placed at every setting. A matching tea pot sat in the centre.

  Twelve people sat quietly at the table. They didn’t react to Lapslie’s entrance: no turning heads, no expressions of surprise, nothing.

  ‘Police,’ Lapslie repeated. ‘DCI Lapslie. Who owns this house?’

  Nobody moved.

  Emma Bradbury strode across to the window and brought her hand down, brushing the cobwebs away. Light flooded in.

  Lapslie took a step back. Emma gasped. ‘Oh good Christ,’ she said flatly.

  The twelve people sat around the table were all women, and they were all dead. They had been placed in order of death. The body closest to Emma was the freshest, but even so, its raddled flesh had sagged away from the bones, bloated and fly-blown, green and purple and grey. Her eyelids had shrivelled back against empty sockets. The body closest to Lapslie was the oldest: no more than a skeleton whose flesh had been gradually replaced with cobwebs. All of them were ruined things that once may have been beautiful.

  ‘What the hell are we dealing with?’ Emma whispered.

  ‘ “Why this is Hell,”’ Lapslie murmured softly, ‘ “nor are we out of it.”’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  That night, her ceiling dappled with moonlight reflected off the sea, Daisy lay awake. Her sheets were clammy beneath her, and she could feel every fold in the cotton against her old, wrinkled skin. No matter what position she curled into, she could not find that elusive door to sleep.

  It was the newspaper report that was bothering her. The report of the discovery of Violet Chambers’ body. The first mistake she had ever made, and it was going to come back to haunt her. She knew it would.

  The shock of seeing that newspaper headline had sent her into a panic. Eunice had made her a cup of tea and sat with her, not really understanding what had driven Daisy into such a state, but Daisy was frozen, her mind circling around and around like a fly orbiting a light bulb.

  And in her mind, the wet smack of the branch as it hit Violet’s head, caving the bone in. The blood, matting the grey hair. The long gasp as she exhaled her last breath.

  And as she relived the memories, as she went back to the time before the branch hit Violet’s skull, when she was driving along that country road with Violet Chambers slumped in the passenger seat, she slipped slowly and inadvertently into the long dark tunnel of sleep and the memories turned surreptitiously into dreams.

  The sun shining through the leaves made patterns like black lace on the road. She maintained a steady forty-five miles an hour in her Volvo – not fast enough to attract anyone’s attention; not slow enough to annoy people sufficiently that they would remember her, and the car, for more than the few moments that it took for them to overtake her.

  She had carefully manoeuvred Violet’s dead body into the car before dawn that morning, using the wheelchair she had brought in specifically for that purpose. Fortunately the driveway led all the way up to the front door, so she didn’t have to wheel the body down to the road, as she occasionally had before. The tricky bit, as always, had been the moment when she had to slide the body from the wheelchair into the passenger seat, but the arm on the wheelchair folded down and the application of a little strength, and the passing of a noisy refuse lorry, had made the job easier.

  A tartan blanket over Violet’s lap completed the illusion that she was merely asleep. Her eyes were closed, and a little tape laid sticky side out across her gums ensured that her mouth wouldn’t gape open at an inopportune moment, such as when they were parked at traffic lights. A thin length of white cotton hidden in the folds of her neck and knotted behind the head rest stopped her head from lolling in an ungainly fashion onto her chest. All in all, Daisy thought as she gazed sideways at Violet from the driver’s seat, she looked better now than she had in real life. She certainly didn’t look like someone who had ingested a fatal dose of meadow saffron only twelve hours before.

  Half an hour after eating the cake into which Daisy had carefully grated several meadow saffron roots, Violet had suffered a series of convulsions while she was sitting in the back garden. Daisy had watched with pleasure as white foam had trickled from Violet’s mouth and her lips and skin turned blue. Sweat trickled along the prominent folds in her skin that gave her such a disapproving look all the time. Her hands clutched at the arms of her deck chair, locking on with such force that Daisy had to later use a kitchen knife to prise them off. And then, after a sudden and violent arching of the back, she had subsided, head slumped forward and eyes hooded, breathing her last, few, shallow breaths.

  ‘Of all the women I have ever poisoned,’ Daisy had said to her, ‘you have been the most arrogant, the most insensitive and the most stand-offish. You seem to believe that you can look down at everyone else because your father had a big house and didn’t have to work for a living. In fact, you are a sad, deluded old woman who is dying alone and unmourned. Nobody will know, or care, that you have gone.’

  Perhaps her eyelids flickered. Daisy would never know for sure, but she liked to believe that Violet had heard that last valediction, and seen the essential truth in it, before she died. Befriending Violet had been one of the most difficult jobs Daisy had ever done – although she was calling herself Annie then. Annie Moberley. Violet had been stand-offish, suspicious and snobbish, and it was only because Daisy – Annie – hated to break off half way through that she had persevered. She had first met Violet in the local supermarket, where it was obvious that Violet was shopping for one, and wasn’t buying the cheapest cuts of meat and the ‘reduced items’ that pensioners, in Annie’s experience, usually selected. They got chatting on the third or fourth occasion that they bumped into each other, and soon she was popping around for coffee. Soon after that, she was collecting Violet’s prescriptions for antiinflammatories from the local surgery.

  Violet had been an odd mix. She desperately wanted some human contact, but at the same time she wanted to be able to look down on whoever she was with. For Annie, who automatically looked down on all her victims, the next few months had been amongst the most tiring she could recall, as the two of them vied for dominance without Violet ever consciously realising that a battle was going on.

  In the hours that Annie spent driving Violet’s body through the early morning she daydreamed about the next few months; of how she was going to progressively strip the house of any expensive items it contained, and raid Violet’s building society account of whatever money it contained. And, from small clues that Violet had let slip, she suspected it contained rather a lot. She would take on Violet’s identity, like slipping on an old overcoat, letting her current one fall away, and become lost in the past. And then, when she grew tired, she would move on, looking for another victim. Although perhaps one less supercilious this time. Annie had felt for a while that Violet was treating her more as an unpaid companion than a friend, and towards the end more as an unpaid servant than a companion.

  The car slipped through forests and past industrial estates as the darkness gave way to daylight. After some unquantifiable time, Annie knew that she was nearing her destination: the place where all of her friends eventually came to visit, and did not leave.

  A sudden bang from beneath the car startled Annie from her dreams. The steering wheel jerked in her hands, and the car began to drag itself towards the trees just as they were coming up to a bend. Panicking, she slammed her foot on the brakes, and the Volvo slewed violently to a halt, half o
n the road and half on the grassy verge.

  Annie turned the ignition key with a shaking hand. The engine died away. Silence filled the forest.

  Eventually, when she could breathe again, when the fluttering of the blood in her neck and her temples had faded, she got out of the car. The front tyre on the side where Violet was sitting was deflated and forlorn, appearing half-melted on the road. She felt panic wash through her. What did one do with a flat tyre? She supposed one had to change it, but how was she supposed to get it off? And where was the spare tyre kept? Was there even a spare tyre in the car? Any tools?

  She looked along the road ahead of the car, as it bent to the right, and then back along the direction she had come. There was nobody in sight. No other cars; no other people. She was alone.

  What to do? Annie slumped against the side of the car, hearing the clicking and ticking of the engine as the hot metal cooled. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. So near to her goal, the safe refuge where all her friends ended up, and yet so far. So very far.

  In part of her mind Annie knew that she could walk for help, but she couldn’t remember seeing any houses for the last few miles she had driven, and she had no idea how far ahead the next set of houses might be. She was old and tired: she could hardly make more than few hundred yards before she would have to take a rest. The next best thing would be to flag someone down, but that could take all morning. And whether she went for help or waited there for it to arrive, the people who helped her would see Violet sitting in the passenger seat. They would ask if she was all right. They might offer her a drink of water. And they would realise, sooner rather than later, that she was dead.

  And then it would all start to unravel. Every carefully woven thread of Annie’s life.

  Whatever she did, she would have to get rid of Violet’s body first. For a moment she wondered whether she could manhandle the body into the boot of the car, but she rejected that thought. The spare tyre was probably somewhere in there, and if not the spare tyre then probably some tools or something else that would be needed. No, the boot was too much of a risk. She would have to get the body into the woods somehow, perhaps bury it beneath some bracken, and then come back later to collect it. And all that without making herself look as if she had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

  Annie nodded to herself. Hide the body, flag someone down, get them to change the tyre for her, then, when they had gone, retrieve the body and continue on her way. It was a plan.

  She pushed herself away from the car and walked around the bonnet. The open passenger door registered in her mind for a good few seconds before she realised the significance of what it meant. Then she noticed the empty passenger seat.

  Violet’s body had gone. Violet had gone.

  Annie looked wildly around. She was still alone. For a long moment she was convinced that she had left Violet’s body back at the house and somehow imagined that it had been sitting beside her for the past few hours; then she was sure that someone had come and taken the body from the car while she was distracted. It took a few moments before the truth sank in. Her cake had been a failure. Violet had still been alive when Annie put her in the car, albeit in something so close to a coma that Annie had been fooled into thinking she was dead. Somehow she had come back to consciousness, and escaped. Did she realise what had happened to her, or was she operating on instinct, just heading somewhere, anywhere, away from the unfamiliar confines of Annie’s Volvo?

  Did it matter? Annie had to find her again. Find her, and kill her for sure.

  And whatever happened, she was never using meadow saffron again.

  A faint trail of bent grass led away from the car and into the dank green depths of the forest. Annie checked the road, forward and back, once more, just in case someone was approaching. The road was clear. She set off in pursuit of Violet.

  The floor of the forest was covered in twigs and low shrubs which Annie couldn’t identify. The occasional fallen tree made barriers she had to manoeuvre around, but crushed flowers and disturbed patches of ground indicated to her where Violet had scrambled her way across the ground. Buttery light slanted down through the tops of the trees, and everywhere was hushed. Annie could hear her own footsteps shushing through the leaves, sounding almost as if she were making her way through thick snow. She could smell the deep, intoxicating scent of old wood and foliage, the world’s oldest and most profound perfume. The occasional insect buzzed past her, and a sudden flurry of activity in a bush showed where a small animal had suddenly heard her approach and made its escape.

  She wasn’t looking for small animals. Her prey was much larger.

  Annie stopped in a small clearing, listening. Somewhere across the other side she could hear a crashing sound, as if something was pushing its way heedless through bushes and shrubs.

  Her breath was rasping in her throat now, and her legs were weak, but she kept on going. Low branches reached for her face, while roots clutched desperately at her ankles, trying to trip her up. Every so often she reached out to steady herself on a tree trunk, but the rough bark burned the palms of her hands.

  Through a gap in the trees she caught sight of a flash of artificial colour, stark against the natural greens and browns of the forest. A bright red: the same colour as the cardigan that Violet had been wearing when she died. And when she came back to life again. Annie slowed down, taking her time as she approached, shielding herself behind a large bush.

  Violet was bent on all fours by a large oak tree. A string of saliva dropped from her mouth. She was panting: a harsh, almost mechanical sound. The skin on her hands and knees was muddy with dirt and blood from the numerous small scratches she had sustained as she fled. But now she was here; out of breath, out of time, out of options.

  Annie crouched and picked up a fallen branch from the forest floor. She hefted it in her hand: it felt almost industrial in its density, like a crowbar, or a tyre iron. Her hand fitted perfectly around it, and for a moment she wondered why she kept going back to poison when physical violence could be so seductive. And then she envisaged the dining room table, and the silent faces around it, and she remembered.

  Violet reached out a hand towards the oak tree, supporting her weight so she could stand. Concerned that she might try to get away again, Annie took a step forward from behind the bush.

  She must have made a noise, because Violet turned her head and caught her in a wild-eyed stare. Her teeth were bared wildly.

  Annie took another step, and swung the branch loosely by her side, ready to use it.

  ‘Why …?’ Violet mouthed, her eyes seeming to lose focus and then regain it again. ‘Why did you do this?’

  ‘Because I could,’ Annie said. ‘Because I have before and will again. Because it gets me what I want. And, above all else, because I just got tired of your constant complaining, your continual sneering at your neighbours, your old friends and me.’

  She took two steps forward and raised the branch up above her.

  Violet turned away, ready to scuttle to safety, but Daisy brought the branch crashing down on the back of her head. She didn’t know what she expected – a dramatic gout of blood perhaps, the skull crumbling beneath the branch like a snail stepped on in the garden, revealing the soft, grey, oozing flesh within, but there was none of that. Violet’s head merely changed shape, a depression appearing beneath the sparse grey hair. Annie was reminded of the duck eggs she had eaten as a child, boiled hard, their shells crushed in by a spoon. And Violet slumped gracelessly to the floor of the forest with a soft sigh, the air leaving her lungs for the last time, free of that old body forever.

  Annie sat down beside her for a moment and rested, letting the muted sounds of the forest – the soft susurration of the wind in the leaves and the calls of the birds – drain the tension and the tiredness from her bones. After a while, she reached across and checked Violet’s pulse, both in her stick-thin wrist and also in the leathery wattles of her neck, but there was nothing. The blood was still
within those prominent purple veins.

  Annie walked unsteadily back to the car, partly to retrieve the plastic sheet that she had brought with her from the house – the one she had laid Violet’s body on when she cleaned it – and partly to check whether anyone had stopped for the car. The road was clear, and might have been that way ever since her burst tyre had occurred. She popped the boot of the car, and pulled out the grey plastic sheet, then paused. What was she going to do? Walk back into the forest, wrap Violet’s body up and bury it as best she could? But the ground was hard, and difficult to dig without a shovel, and if she wanted to come back later to retrieve the body, how would she find it? At least the corner where she had stopped was reasonably memorable. Perhaps she could pull Violet’s body most of the way back and bury her just off the road. That way, locating her again would be easier. It also meant that she would be able to hear if someone stopped to help her.

  Looking around, Annie saw a rotted tree trunk, lying half-buried in the soil, victim of some long-passed storm. Walking over to it, she reached out and gave one of the branches an experimental tug. The trunk rolled over slightly, revealing moist ground, depressed where the trunk had lain, and pale white shoots beneath. She thought for a moment. If she could move this trunk out of the way then it would leave behind something similar to a half-dug grave. She could wrap Violet’s body in the plastic sheet, drag it back, lay it in the grave, then cover it over with leaves and earth. It would do, until she could come back again for it. It would do.

  It took her ten minutes to move the rotten trunk out of the way and make it look as if it had always been where she put it. Rolling Violet’s body in the sheet, dragging her back to the side of the road and laying her in the scar took another five, as did the task of kicking twigs and loam and leaves over the top of the sheet.

  Half way through, when the plastic-wrapped corpse was lying in the depression in the forest floor, but before she could cover it over, Annie heard the sound of a car engine, far away. She stopped. Of all the times to be offered help, this was the worst. Quickly she stepped back into the darkness of the forest. The car drew closer. She glanced out at her Volvo, checking that the doors were closed and the emergency lights were not flashing. Reassured, she moved further back into the forest, trying to become as one with the trees. The sound of the car engine changed as it approached the bend. For a moment she was terrified that it was about to stop, that the driver had seen her car and was going to park and see if anyone needed help, but whoever was in the car was just changing down gears as they approached the bend. The car swept past, the driver just a blurred figure, then the engine noise changed again and the car accelerated away.