On the other side of the board, a map of the Essex area had been blu-tacked in place. Red stickers marked where cashpoints had been used to remove money from the accounts. There were clusters of stickers, but nothing that would indicate that their killer lived in a particular place.
Lapslie caught the eye of one of the passing constables. ‘Who’s responsible for updating this board?’ he asked.
‘PC Swinerd, sir,’ the girl said in a smoke-filled voice.
‘Can you send them over?’ Lapslie asked. He wasn’t entirely sure he could remember who PC Swinerd was.
He turned out to be a blond lad with a receding hairline. ‘Sir?’ he said as he approached. His voice was gooseberries and cream.
‘These stickers – they’re not ordered in any particular way?’
He frowned. ‘Sir?’
‘There’s no numbering on them to indicate which ones were the earliest transactions and which were the latest ones.’
‘Trouble was, sir, I was putting the stickers on while the information was still trickling in. The banks haven’t been very co-operative, and we’re having to keep getting warrants signed off for each victim’s accounts as they’re identified. Until all the transactions are shown we don’t know what the very first or very last transactions are, and so we can’t number the ones in between.’
‘And there are still six victims not identified?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘We might never identify them, that’s the problem. Can you write numbers on these stickers – “1” for the first, and whatever the highest number is for the most recent. We can always change the numbers later, if more information comes in.’
‘Sir,’ the PC said. He looked sceptical, probably at the amount of work he was being asked to do, but he walked away without argument.
‘One more thing,’ Lapslie called after him. ‘Put green stickers on to mark where the victims’ houses were.’
‘Yes, sir,’ PC Swinerd called back.
Emma Bradbury walked in as PC Swinerd walked away. She caught Lapslie’s eye, and came over.
‘Boss, we’ve got preliminary autopsy results in from Doctor Catherall. She’s really pulled the stops out. Apart from the disfiguration on the right hand of all the victims, there’s no signs of violence, but the toxicology reports suggest that poison was involved in at least five of the deaths.’
‘Only five?’
‘The other bodies are too decayed. The reports point out that some poisons degrade over time to the point where they can’t be detected.’
‘So – what poisons did they detect?’ he asked.
Emma consulted her list. ‘Pyrrolizidine alkaloid,’ she read, stumbling over the words, ‘andromedotoxin, taxine, cyanogenic glucoside, a complex terpene that can’t be properly identified. And colchicine, of course, from Violet Chambers.’
‘No strychnine? No cyanide? No warfarin?’
‘Not so far. None of the classics.’
Lapslie thought for a moment, remembering back to the garden next to the house where all the bodies had been discovered. The Garden of Death, as he had thought of it.
‘Get back to Doctor Catherall,’ he said. ‘I want to know if any of those toxins can be obtained from common or garden plants. Remember that colchicine comes from the meadow saffron.’
‘Yes, boss. How could I forget?’
Lapslie looked around the incident room again as she walked off. Everyone seemed to be busily engaged in urgent activity. He left before the chatter and the clatter overcame him.
Sitting in the Quiet Room with the door closed, he gradually let himself relax. In his mind, a picture of the killer kept forming; vague, blurred, but definitely there. She was almost obsessively methodical, for instance. The way she had arranged the finances of her victims indicated that she could keep a complex series of facts in her head at one time, and the way she sent postcards and Christmas cards after the event suggested that she kept detailed records. She didn’t just kill and move on. No, she kept the plates spinning, kept all of her victims alive. Did she, in some sense, believe that if she kept them alive then they weren’t really dead?
Bacon trickled across his tongue before he registered the knock on the door. He turned his head. Emma Bradbury was standing there. He gestured to her to enter.
‘Doctor Catherall says that all of the poisons can be easily made up from sufficient quantities of plants. She kept talking, and I couldn’t make notes fast enough, but I got the impression that some of the plants were common or garden – as it were – and others were rather more obscure. Specialist items, as it were.’
‘That house where the bodies were found is our killer’s base of operations, then,’ Lapslie said grimly. ‘She keeps going back there, not only to drop off fresh bodies but also to obtain her raw materials. I think that garden is our murder weapon.’
‘The garden?’
‘Get one of the constables to get in touch with a botanist. I want them to go through that garden and work out which plants are poisonous, which part is poisonous and what the poison is.’
Emma looked baffled. ‘Where do we get a botanist from?’
Lapslie shrugged. ‘A university or a garden centre, wherever. Get hold of Alan Titchmarsh, for all I care. Just get an expert in that garden. And make sure someone is keeping watch on that house. I want everyone who visits it checked out, postmen and door-to-door salesmen included.’
‘Yes, boss. Oh, and PC Swinerd was looking for you. He says he’s finished with the map.’
As Emma left, Lapslie took a deep breath and slipped another breath tablet into his mouth before leaving the Quiet Room and heading back to the incident room.
The perspex board with the financial spider’s web was still rotated so that the map showed, but there were green stickers amongst the red ones now, and the red stickers had numbers on them. Lapslie stood a little way away and just tried to take the information in. It hadn’t been obvious before, but now he could see there were clumps of red stickers around where the green ones were. It made sense: the killer got rid of a victim and moved into their house for a while, taking on their identity, and while she was there she had to take money out of whatever accounts she controlled. She may have used different cashpoints for safety, but she obviously didn’t want to travel too far. Or perhaps she couldn’t travel too far. Whatever the reason, she stayed within a few tens of miles of what was, for a while, home.
There was one cluster that didn’t have a green sticker as its centre.
Lapslie moved closer, feeling excitement stirring within him. If the killer used her latest victim’s house as a base, then a cluster of red stickers with no green sticker might indicate where the latest victim was.
Or would be.
Squinting, he checked the numbers written on the red stickers in that clump. They were all high numbers. Quickly, he scanned the rest of the board. There were no higher numbers anywhere else. Those transactions were the most recent ones.
She was there! He’d located his killer.
He focused on the map behind the dots. East and north of London. The area that used to be known as the Tendring Hundreds – a name that lingered on in the name of the local council and the local newspapers. Clustered around the coast: Clacton, Frinton, Walton and Leyston.
He had her. Or, at least, he knew where she was.
He turned around to face the incident room. ‘All right – pay attention!’ he yelled, cutting across the general commotion and, for the first time in a long time, causing a flare in his mouth that didn’t correlate to any known fruit, vegetable or meat. The taste of his own voice, shouting. ‘There’s a good chance our killer is located on the east coast, somewhere in Essex. That’s where all the most recent financial transactions have taken place, but none of the victims so far identified have had houses there. I want a list of all hotels and guest houses along that stretch of coast, running back, oh, twenty miles inland, and I want to know if they have rente
d rooms for more than two weeks to a lone woman over sixty. I want every estate agent in that area contacted and I want a list of all flats or houses that have been rented out in the past six months to a lone woman over sixty. And I want it now. Remember, this woman is probably stalking her next victim while you’re working. She’s getting to know her, taking over her life, finding out everything she can before she poisons her. She might be slipping that poison into a cup of tea right now. We don’t have any time to waste. Get on with it!’
Emma Bradbury had come in while he was shouting. Now, as the noise in the incident room suddenly ramped up, she crossed the room to where he was standing.
‘There’s always the chance that one of the unidentified victims has a house in that area,’ she said. ‘The murder might already have happened.’
‘And a meteorite might suddenly wipe out this police station in a freak accident,’ he riposted. ‘But we still come in every day. We live our lives regardless. We can’t plan for what might or might not happen. If we’re lucky, we’ll find her. If we’re not, we won’t. That’s how it goes.’
She looked at him appraisingly. ‘He said you never give up,’ she said softly, as if vocalising some internal thought.
‘Who said?’
Emma’s face suddenly tightened. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Just a conversation I was having. Canteen talk.’
Lapslie stared at her for a few moments more, aware that something was going on but unsure what it was. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s crack on. Keep the team on their toes – I want updates every hour on how that list is going.’
Emma nodded, and walked away. Before Lapslie could move, one of the PCs in his team – Swinerd, he thought – approached.
‘Message from the Chief Superintendent,’ he said. ‘Could you pop up to his office?’
Acting on a sudden impulse, Lapslie walked across to the window. The incident room was on the fifth floor, and he could see down into the car park. It was filled with the kinds of cars that police officers drove when they were off-duty; sporty cars: Ford Mondeos, Peugeot 406s and Saab 95s, all in nondescript colours. No Volkswagens, no Skodas, no Minis, and definitely no Volvos, which policemen generally referred to as Belgranos. It was similar to the auto factory car parks one could see from the train sometimes; row upon row of similar vehicles extending to the horizon.
And a black Lexus, parked at the end of one row. Its engine was idling; Lapslie could see vapour drifting up from the exhaust.
He looked around the incident room, feeling as if he was bidding it goodbye in some strange way. Everyone was working hard, heads down, headsets on, lips moving as they spoke into the microphones. Nobody was looking at him.
He walked out of the room, unnoticed.
The lift up to the floor where Rouse’s office was located seemed to take an age to arrive. When the doors opened, it was empty. He was glad. The last thing he wanted was to make small talk when he was on his way to something that felt like it might be his execution.
Part of him wanted to press the button for the ground floor, walk out of the lift, through the security door that led into the car park and just keep on going, walking away, leaving it all behind, but he couldn’t do that. He needed to know what was going on. As Emma had said, he never gave up.
Rouse’s PA told him he could go straight in, but his gaze was fixed on the man who was standing by Rouse’s desk. Alone. The DCS was notable by his absence.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie?’ said the man. ‘Please come in.’ His voice was like disturbed earth, or leaf mould. He was still wearing that black suit with the subtle pinstripe. His hair was sandy, brushed straight back off his forehead. The bare scalp that was revealed was covered with small freckles.
Lapslie leaned over the PA. ‘Is there a key to this office?’ he asked. ‘We might need to leave some sensitive stuff on the desk and pop out for a while.’
‘Er … yes,’ she said, reaching into a drawer and bringing out a Yale key. She held it out uncertainly towards him.
‘Thanks.’ He took the key from her. ‘I’ll bring it back later, I promise.’ Turning to the office, he said: ‘Mr Geherty, of the Department of Justice’s Prisoner Rehabilitation Unit, I presume?’
Geherty had the grace to look a little abashed. ‘You’ve been doing your homework.’
‘I don’t like being followed around. And I don’t like thieves.’
‘We haven’t been following you, Mr Lapslie, we’ve been following your investigation. It’s been an education for us all. Shame it’s got to stop.’
‘It stops when we catch the murderer,’ Lapslie said.
‘It stops when our Minister says it stops,’ Geherty responded. ‘And we’re not thieves, by the way.’
‘You broke into Doctor Catherall’s mortuary and you took the information off her computer.’
‘We’re Civil Servants, and the mortuary belongs to the Civil Service. No problems there, surely? And I think you’ll find that there’s no information missing from Doctor Catherall’s computer. We merely copied it and left. We just want to be kept apprised of your progress.’
‘I’m intrigued. Your department deals with integrating serial killers and other undesirables into society when they’ve served their sentences. Does that mean the killer of these women is one of yours? Did you give her a new identity and a new place to live, only to find that she’s returned to her old habits?’
‘Old habits die hard, and you can’t teach a dog new tricks. Clichés, all of them, but there’s a grain of truth in there.’ Geherty shrugged. ‘These people spend most of their lives in prison, but when their time is up they have to be reintegrated. We prepare them. We teach them how to survive in a world that’s moved on in the ten, or twenty, or thirty years that have passed since they were incarcerated. We get them houses and we get them jobs as waiters, or travel agents, or on the perfume counter in Debenhams. And we evaluate them, trying to determine whether they have actually changed, or whether there’s still a core of evil within them. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. That’s the way it goes. When it goes wrong, we have to clear up the mess.’
‘ “A core of evil”,’ Lapslie said. ‘You don’t blame society or upbringing, then?’
Geherty shook his head. ‘Oh, I’ve looked into the eyes of men who have killed more people than I’ve ever known. I’ve looked into the eyes of women who have banged nine-inch nails into the skulls of their victims with hammers. I have seen evil, Mr Lapslie. Society isn’t blameless, and neither is upbringing, but in the end they are catalysts. If the evil isn’t there to begin with, they have nothing to work with.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Lapslie said, ‘is why you can’t just arrest them, put them on trial and bang them up when they’re found guilty. Why all the Secret Squirrel palaver?’
‘Because some of them aren’t even supposed to have been released,’ Geherty said, checking his watch. ‘You know what it’s like in prison. They say we’re almost up to capacity; in fact, we passed capacity years ago. For every person who’s sent to jail, one has to be released. Sometimes we do it by commuting sentences, or arranging for criminals to get parole when they technically shouldn’t, but that’s only nibbling at the problem. The real issue is the lifers cluttering up the system. The murderers who can’t be released, either because there would be a public outcry or because some judge somewhere has said that life means life, and the Minister either can’t or won’t interfere.’
Something that Dom McGinley had told him suddenly echoed in Lapslie’s head. Something about the child-killer, Myra Hindley, not having died of a chest infection at all, but living her life under a new identity somewhere in Wales.
‘So you release them anyway,’ he said bitterly.
‘We have to. We take all the precautions we can, but life is life. Things go wrong.’
‘And my killer?’
Geherty looked at his watch again. ‘Time ticks away,’ he said.
‘Satisfy my cu
riosity. Who is she?’
‘You’ve met her. Don’t you remember? You were assigned to ACPO, profiling major criminals. Actually, we were considering offering you a job, but that medical condition of yours stopped us. You interviewed a number of lifers, looking to see if there was any psychological test that could be applied to tell whether someone was likely to become a killer or not. And you interviewed her.’
The taste of lychees, almost impossibly sweet and decadent in his mouth, like something rotting in treacle. ‘Madeline … Poel?’
‘Madeline Poel,’ Geherty confirmed.
‘Broadmoor. What – twenty years ago.’ He remembered a middle-aged woman, small and birdlike. She had been very polite, very old-fashioned, and her voice had tasted of lychees. ‘It was back towards the end of the Second World War. Her grandmother had gone mad and killed all of Madeline’s sisters and brothers in the back garden of their house, snipping their fingers off with a pair of garden secateurs and watching them bleed to death. Madeline only survived because her mother came back from the local factory where she was working. The police were called, and while they were making their way over, Madeline made a drink for her grandmother out of some of the berries in the garden. She told her grandmother that it was sarsaparilla, but it was something toxic. Her grandmother died before the police could take her away. Everyone thought it was an accident, just Madeline trying to be helpful, but over the next few years Madeline started acting stranger and stranger and ten or twelve old ladies in the village died in exactly the same way. It was as if she’d decided that all old ladies were dangerous, and she had to get rid of them. The logic of a girl who’d been driven insane by watching her family killed in the most horrific way by the woman who was meant to be protecting them. After a while someone cottoned on, and she was sent away. Committed to Broadmoor.’ His mouth was flooding with that dry, metallic taste as his voice got louder. ‘She died fifteen years ago of a heart attack – at least, that’s what the newspapers said – but she never died at all! Is that what you’re telling me? You actually released her into society?’
Core of Evil Page 24
