‘The damn surgery won’t let me just phone up and order the tablets,’ Eunice said with some bitterness. ‘I have to drop the repeat prescription in to them with forty-eight hours’ notice. Apparently it’s all to do with that doctor who killed hundreds of his patients. The one with the beard and the glasses. Shipwell? Shipston? Can’t remember his name. Anyway, it’s such a pain.’
‘Perhaps I could help,’ Daisy said casually, as if she had not been planning this all the time. ‘I have to go past the surgery and the chemists when I go home. Would you like me to drop your repeat prescription in and then pick the tablets up when they are ready?’
‘I couldn’t ask you to do that,’ Eunice said.
‘It’s no trouble. It would make me happy if I could help in any way.’
Eunice gazed at Daisy for a few moments, then rummaged in her bag. ‘I’m nearly out,’ she said, pulling a green repeat prescription form out and ticking a box with a pen that lay beside the till. ‘Would you be a dear, and drop this in for me?’
‘Nothing would give me more pleasure,’ said Daisy, and she meant it. Another small takeover of Eunice’s life had occurred.
Jasper was wandering round the barn in some confusion. He was coughing, as if trying to retch something up, and going around in circles. Daisy made a mental note to double the amount of powder she used the next time she fed him. She wanted a quick reaction when she tried it on Eunice; not a slow, drawn-out death. She’d had enough of those. The last thing she wanted was Eunice waking up from a coma while Daisy was driving her to her last resting place. That would not only be embarrassing; it would be disastrous.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’ Eunice asked, gazing at Jasper with some worry. ‘He looks like he’s swallowed something he shouldn’t have.’
‘Probably just a hairball,’ Daisy said vaguely. ‘He’ll be all right in the morning.’
Eunice looked sorrowfully at the telephone beside the till. ‘It’s been very quiet,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember any calls for an age. Should I get the engineers to take a look at the line?’
‘Things go up and down,’ Daisy said. ‘There might be a glut of calls next week. Leave it until then: see what happens.’
‘You’re a brick,’ Eunice said. ‘I know I get paranoid sometimes, but you’re always there to bring me back to earth. I’m so glad you’re here.’
‘I’ll always be here,’ said Daisy. She gazed at the dog, who was still wandering around the barn as if he had lost something. ‘This place has become a second home to me. I feel as if I really belong.’
Daisy sipped her tea, and gazed at Eunice. She despised the woman more now than she had when she first met her. The six days the two of them had spent together had been nothing but a long monologue from Eunice concerning her past life, her friends, her lovers, her various accidental pregnancies, which had either ended naturally or been terminated unnaturally, and her relationship with her family. Daisy had volunteered very little information about herself, and Eunice had hardly noticed. Even when she had asked Daisy a question about where she had lived and what she had done in her life, she invariably ended up talking about herself. The up side of this was that Daisy had quickly gained a solid appreciation of Eunice’s life – the names, the dates, the significant moments. The down side was that, of all the women whose lives Daisy had taken over, Eunice’s was the one furthest from her own experience. Becoming Eunice was going to take a major effort.
Ah, but when it happened … when Eunice was dead, and had taken her place in Daisy’s tea party … that would be a moment to savour. Daisy let her mind wander, imagining Eunice’s form not as it was now, fleshy and sagging, but sitting proudly at the table with the others, reduced down to its essentials; the skin removed by nature to reveal the purity of what lay beneath. That would be a sight for sore eyes.
A tiny moth of worry began to eat away at the fabric of Daisy’s self-confidence. Violet Chambers’ body had been found, in its unmarked grave out in the forest. Daisy had been on her way to the tea party with Violet when her tyre had burst and she had been forced to abandon the body. Especially after it had come back to life and Daisy had smashed its skull in order to stop it from escaping, rendering it spoiled and useless for the tea party. The thing that was bothering her was, did the police have any clever way of tracing her car, and working out where she had been going? She rarely watched television, and never watched crime dramas, but Daisy had some vague understanding that the police had access to all kinds of scientific techniques that hadn’t existed in the past. Things that seemed more fantasy than reality. Could they discover her little hideaway, her paradise, her refuge? The thought made her feel uncomfortable. She shivered and scratched herself.
‘Are you okay?’ Eunice asked. ‘If you’re not feeling well, you should go home. I don’t want to catch anything!’
Forthright to the point of rudeness, that was Eunice. ‘I suddenly felt as if someone had just walked over my graves,’ Daisy murmured.
The thought nagged at her for the rest of the afternoon. Policemen, rummaging through everything that she held dear: the one thing that was constant through all the changing identities and the new homes. Her core. Her centre.
She couldn’t remember where the house had originally come from. The identity of the owner was buried back in the mists of Daisy’s past – and was, Daisy dimly recalled, still sitting at the head of the dinner table. All she knew was that she had inherited it from somewhere, and there was no mortgage outstanding on it. For as long as she paid the Council Tax on it – and she visited every month or so in order to pick up the letter from the local Council telling her how much to pay – she had assumed that it would remain safe. Undisturbed. She had deliberately switched the gas and electricity supplier several times, ensuring that the last time she closed the accounts without starting new ones up. That way there would be no reason for a computer glitch, or a gas leak, to start accruing costs on her account and eventually for bailiffs to get called in. That would have been a disaster. In fact, the last few times she had been at the house – the last time being six months before, with the body of the original Daisy Wilson – there had only been a few letters waiting for her. Long periods in which nothing happened at the house seemed to have caused the address to have dropped off even the most tenacious of postal marketing firms. Even the Reader’s Digest didn’t send letters there any more. Only that one occasion when she had, reluctantly, had to arrange for a mechanic to visit to start her Volvo had marred the isolation.
But now … Daisy couldn’t focus her thoughts on the accounts in front of her. The possibility that her guests might be disturbed, might even be removed, was making her tense and irritable. Twice she snapped at Jasper as he stopped near her and coughed.
Did she dare make a return visit? That was the question. When Eunice finally succumbed to the apricot kernels – assuming they worked their magic on Jasper first – then Daisy would have to dispose of the body somewhere. She quailed at the idea of just dumping it in a quarry or a wood, or throwing it off the Naze. That was not only clumsy and messy; it was also risky. Bodies disposed of like that were bound to surface, literally or metaphorically. A bad penny always turns up again; that was what they said. No, it was far safer to place bodies in a controlled environment, where the chances of passers-by finding them were so remote as to be discarded. And besides, Daisy had always taken great comfort in the notion that all of her victims – with the exception of poor Violet – were keeping each other company.
Despite her concerns, Daisy didn’t want to risk making a visit now. Going to the house to see whether the police had found it was like wandering around with a lighted match looking for a gas leak: the consequences of discovering the worst were likely to be worse still. No, she would wait until Eunice was safely dead, and then make a decision based on what had appeared in the newspapers, and what her intuition was telling her.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ Eunice asked. ‘Get some fresh air? You’re looki
ng a bit peaky.’
‘That would be nice,’ Daisy said. She had got about as far with the accounts as it was possible to go; not only sorting out for Eunice where all her money was going but also ensuring that Daisy herself had a list of account numbers and knew where all the relevant paperwork was kept. She would need that knowledge later.
‘Jasper!’ Eunice called. ‘Come on, you slugabed. Walkies!’
Jasper had retired to a corner of the barn where, at some stage in the past, a tartan blanket had been thrown down for him. Now it was matted and twisted into a mirror image of his shape, and he was nestled into it, tongue hanging out, panting for breath.
‘He’s looking a bit peaky too,’ Eunice said, concerned. ‘I hope he’s not coming down with something. He’s quite delicate, you know. Quite artistic, in his personality.’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Daisy said reassuringly. She thought she could see a trace of blue around the inside of the dog’s mouth as it panted. Perhaps she had overestimated the amount of grated apricot kernel necessary to kill an elderly dog, in which case she probably had enough left to kill Eunice several times over. ‘He’s probably tired out from rushing around.’ As if Jasper ever did anything as undignified as rushing around. ‘We should leave him here and check on him later.’
Together they set out, walking first along the lane towards the road where the bus dropped Daisy off every morning and picked her up every night, and then striking out along an established track that ran between fields. The sky was bright blue, and what little cloud existed was being pulled in different directions, combining and drifting apart as it moved. Daisy could smell the pungent aroma of the flowers that lined the fields on either side of them; bright gold, spindly, and nodding in the same faint breeze that pushed the clouds around.
Eunice strode ahead, swinging a walking stick manfully. Daisy found it a chore to keep up, but the exercise cleared her mind of her worries concerning the house where her victims sat in their eternal tea party.
‘I know all the walks around here,’ Eunice confided over her shoulder. ‘Some of them have remained unchanged for centuries, perhaps millennia. They say that some of these tracks follow the paths of ley lines, you know? One can imagine Roman soldiers walking across these very fields. Or druids, perhaps.’
Daisy was spending more time imagining Eunice twisted in agony and turning blue as the hydrocyanic acid burned its way through her body, but she merely said, ‘Yes, indeed,’ as they walked. Her shoes weren’t really ideal for this kind of thing.
They were walking up a slight incline, and at the top Eunice stopped and gazed, entranced, ahead. Daisy struggled to catch up. When she too crested the ridge at the top of the incline, she felt what little breath she had catch in her throat.
Ahead of them lay a church. An old church, made of grey stone, with a squat tower in its middle and an older structure, made of wood, attached to the end furthest from the large double doors that gave entry to the inside. It sat in the midst of a graveyard, separated from the surrounding fields by a dry-stone wall. A track led away towards some distant buildings.
‘St Alkmund’s Church,’ Eunice said. ‘No vicar, not since the 1970s. There’s a padre who cycles round every four weeks, as part of a rota of local old churches without their own vicars, but the attendance is small and it’s going down as people die off. Lovely architecture, though. Mainly Norman influence. Be a shame to lose it. Look at that wooden hut thing on the end: I remember reading somewhere that it dates from a previous church on the same site. Anglo-Saxon. Built without nails. Held together with wooden pegs, apparently. Let’s go closer.’
‘I’d rather not,’ Daisy said, but Eunice was striding off ahead.
Daisy glanced again at the church. Something about the way it squatted, alone but unrepentant, in the middle of the fields made her uneasy. It was as if it had been waiting for her. Waiting all these years for her to return, with dark thoughts mouldering in its heart.
Eunice had reached the dry-stone wall now, and was walking around to the lych gate entrance. Daisy followed, knowing that something was not right.
The graveyard was long overgrown with weeds and flowers. The gravestones had been eroded by the salt air and colonised by moss to the point where they were almost as rounded as boulders. Whatever writing had been carved onto them was nothing but depressions in the granite, like memories that had faded until there was nothing left but the faint recollection that something had once been there and was now lost forever.
Eunice ran her hands across a gravestone that was tilting at an angle. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘the history of this place. The way it has stayed the same while everything around it – the countryside, the country, the world – has changed.’
But Daisy wasn’t listening. Around the corner of the church she had spotted a gravestone that had been set flat in the ground. She walked closer, feet unwilling to move but unable to stop. Protected, perhaps, by the bulk of the church, the letters carved into the slab were almost readable.
Madeline Poel, it said, but that was impossible.
Because before she had been Daisy Winters, before she had been Violet Chambers, before she had been anyone, she knew that she had been Madeline Poel.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Find one old lady dead, Mark Lapslie thought sourly, and you get a desk and a Detective Sergeant; find thirteen of them and you get an entire incident room and so many staff it’s hard to remember their names. Even the DCS hadn’t been able to stop the investigation from ramping up, although the rumour was that he had tried several times. Apparently Rouse had attempted to claim that until the deaths were attributable to foul play then he couldn’t approve a murder investigation, but the fact that the Volvo 740 could now be used to link the corpse in the forest – which had undoubtedly been murdered – with the ones in the farmhouse meant that his objections were half-hearted and easily overcome by someone who still had a few friends at Scotland Yard.
Half of the room in the Chelmsford HQ was filled with desks, each loaded up with its own telephone and computer, each telephone connected to a headset with attached microphone, each computer networked into the police system. The other half was dominated by two perspex boards. The first one had photographs of the victims blutacked all over it, along with notes written in wipeable pen. On any normal incident board there would be lines drawn between the photographs indicating connections: unbroken lines for the known connections and dotted lines for the ones where there was an indication but no corroborating evidence. On this board, there were no lines. Despite all of the constables manning the phones and the computers, nobody had yet established a connection between any of the victims. None of them had been to school together, none of them had lived in the same towns or villages, none of them had shared the same hobbies or subscribed to the same magazines. The only things they had in common were their sex – they were all female – their age – they were all over sixty – and their general geographical location – they all lived in the South or West of England. And, of course, the fact that they had all been murdered and mutilated.
Lapslie stood by the victims board, ignoring the flood of rust and salt and coconut that filled his mouth each time he came into the incident room and heard the chatter of people talking on telephones, talking to each other and typing away at keyboards. He kept shoving breath fresheners under his tongue to cover the melange of tastes, but it didn’t work. The problem was psychological, not physical. He tried to spend as much time as he could in the Quiet Room, but he had to show his face to his staff, listen to their problems, brief them on new aspects of the case and generally be there as a figurehead. Emma Bradbury was doing the best she could to take the pressure off his shoulders, but he’d had a persistent headache for several days now and he was finding it difficult to eat. When he’d had a mouth full of conflicting flavours all day, the last thing he wanted was to add more to them.
It was driving him mad. This was why he’d taken leave of absence from the police in t
he first place; this, and having to split from Sonia and the kids.
He let his gaze scan across the photographs on the board. He’d never really thought about it before, but in the same way that all babies share similar features so all elderly people do as well. It was as if everyone is born the same and dies the same, and the bit in between is where we have the chance to distinguish ourselves from the rest. The correspondences were more marked than the differences: white hair, liver spots on the hands, skin that had sagged into set folds beneath the chin, eyebrows that had been pencilled in, bags beneath the eyes, faded, cloudy irises. Something told Lapslie that if he ever managed to catch his killer, he could put her photograph up there and it would just blend in with the rest.
Some of the photographs had names written in beneath them: Violet Chambers, of course; Daisy Winters; Deirdre Fincham; Alice Connell; Rhona McIntyre; Kim Stothard; Wendy Maltravers – identified by a combination of medical records, dental records and clues found about their bodies. Not missing persons records, of course – although that was a key factor in identifying most murder victims, it was no help here. Each of the dead women was actually still out there as far as the system was concerned. They were all still claiming benefits, paying their Council Tax, receiving rent from the properties they had moved out of, filling out their tax returns and sending the occasional postcard or Christmas card to the neighbours they had left behind.
‘Everybody is dead who should be alive,’ he murmured to himself.
Where the first perspex board had no lines linking the photographs, the second one had nothing but lines drawn all over it, with cryptic notes written alongside the lines. It was a map of the financial arrangements: direct debits and standing orders, payments in and out. Each node on the board was an account in a bank or a building society, and each line showed money being transferred. And there was nothing, in that complex web of finance, to identify the spider in the middle. There was no central account to which the others drained their money. Every so often there was a dotted line leading away from the web, like an anchor line, marking where cash had been taken out of one or other of the accounts – hundreds of pounds in most cases, sometimes thousands – but it was never in the same place.
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