Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  The next page listed local churches and services, and Daisy made a mental note of their locations and the types of activity they undertook. She didn’t want to stumble into anything evangelical, after all. Still, she was pleased to see that there were plenty of Methodist churches. Her spur-of-the-moment story on the train the day before was safe.

  Three pages of death notices followed, and Daisy read through them all in detail. The words were much the same, as if they all followed a small number of templates, and she sneered to herself at all the various euphemisms employed. ‘Died peacefully.’ ‘Passed away unexpectedly.’ ‘Taken from us in the prime of life.’ All ridiculous. How many of the notices covered up days of messy, agonised and undignified writhing on the part of the dear departed? How many of the fond remembrances covered up neglect, abuse, even murder?

  Her tea arrived, late, and Daisy poured a cup, added milk and took a sip. It was stewed. The girl had obviously left it somewhere and forgotten about it. What was the world coming to? If she was that careless, perhaps Daisy should come back one day and slip something into one or two sugar bowls whilst nobody was watching: a fine sprinkling of white powder that would be undetectable when it dissolved in tea or coffee, but which would cause agonising convulsions hours later.

  She wouldn’t, of course. That would draw too much attention. But it was nice to dream.

  Towards the back of the paper, the Gazette had ten pages of property adverts. The first eight pages were houses and flats for sale, but the last two covered rental properties. She scanned them with as much care, and as much emotion, as she had read the death notices. The going rate seemed to be between five hundred and seven hundred pounds per month: not a rate she wished to sustain, but something she could manage while looking for a proper house that she could slide into. An occupied house. A house that would soon be hers.

  Finally, Daisy came to the classified ads. She loved looking through these sections. It was like getting a small glimpse through the curtains and into somebody’s life. Just a small glimpse, open to all sorts of interpretation, as you were walking past. What to make of: ‘Family-tree historian seeks f, to form a new branch and dig up some roots together’? Would he ever get his wish? Was the ‘Tall, medium-built postman, cat owner, seeks compatible female’ giving away too much information?

  And then there was ‘Happy, lively lady, 50s, seeks male companion and escort for boot fairs, garden centres, etc.’ That one looked promising. If she was advertising in the newspaper then it implied she had given up on clubs, or church, or any of the other ways mature women made friends. And that meant she was likely to be isolated. Daisy made a careful mental note of the response number at the bottom of the ad. She was familiar with the process: it varied little from town to town. The number would be a message line run by a company on behalf of the newspaper. Verbal messages could be left, or text messages could be sent. The text messages were preferable as far as Daisy was concerned: if she wanted to lure this woman out into the open and befriend her, she would have to identify her. And that meant she would have to arrange a date at some convenient location, and observe from afar when the woman turned up and waited in vain for her erstwhile paramour to arrive.

  Erstwhile paramour. The words made her smile. She’d never had a paramour, erstwhile or otherwise, and had no intention of ever acquiring one, but she knew enough about the relationship between men and women to send a convincing text message.

  The remaining two papers – the Leyston Recorder and the Walton and Leyston Post – were much of a muchness with the Tendring Gazette. The story of the horse stuck in mud appeared in both of them, while the one about the stolen bottles of milk and beer was in the Recorder but not the Post. Of the three, Daisy decided that the Tendring Gazette probably had the most to offer. Already it had yielded several leads.

  She left enough money on the table to cover the cost of the tea, but without leaving more than a few pence as a tip. Waitressing of that low quality did not deserve a reward.

  Leaving the coffee shop, Daisy continued right along the High Street, as much to reconnoitre the area as for any other reason. Across the other side she could see, in the distance, the Bingo Hall where, the night before, she had caught her first scent of prey. The type of shop between her and the Bingo Hall was shifted slightly away from the holidaymakers and towards the more utilitarian: a hairdressers, an ironmongers, and so on. Coming up to a corner with a florists on one side and a Visitor Information kiosk on the other, she paused. The road off to the right led away from the High Street, away from the sea front and from Daisy’s hotel, but she decided on a whim to take a wander and see what was down there.

  The road curved away to the right, and all Daisy could see for the first few minutes as she walked along were detached and weatherworn houses on either side. The gaps between the paving stones were caked with sand, brought in from the beach by wind and by storm, she presumed.

  After a few hundred yards, the houses on the right-hand side gave way to an earth bank, taller than she was and covered with grass and more sand. Every so often, concrete steps led up the side of the bank, vanishing into mystery at the top.

  Ahead, the road came to an abrupt stop at a wire-mesh gate. A sign hanging from it read, ‘Leyston Yacht Club’ in large letters, and then in smaller letters underneath, ‘Members Only’.

  Daisy took a few more steps towards the gate. A yacht club might be a useful thing to know about. At the very least, it would give her an immediate social veneer. She knew little about boats, but she was sure she could learn. A few hours in the company of a yachtswoman, or even a few hours spent in the same room, and she would be moving and talking as if she had been on boats all her life.

  Daisy turned away from the Yacht Club, and gazed absorbedly at the grass bank to her right. It lay there, the faint wind-stirred movements of grass on its flanks like the slow, deep breaths of some recumbent beast. From somewhere beyond the bank she could hear the screeching of gulls, like screaming children. The sound made her unaccountably nervous: she had never had children, never even felt the touch of a man’s hand, but something about that sound made her want to scream.

  The nearest set of steps was only a few yards away, and with mounting nervousness she walked up them, taking small bird-steps.

  As her head rose above the top of the bank, the first thing she saw was a line of houses, far in the distance, and then, as she reached the top, her breath suddenly fluttered within her chest as she saw the stretch of calm water that lay between her and them. The bank dropped down on the other side to a concrete dock, and the water stretched from the dock all the way across to the far side, a misty grey-blue surface, a wash of colour.

  It was a marina, a place for boats to tie up, and there were hundreds of them there, hulls painted white and bows sharp and somehow cruel to Daisy’s eyes. Somewhere nearby there must have been a channel or a river that led to the North Sea, allowing the boats access. Now they sat still, watchful, waiting for their owners to come and untie them and take them out into the rough ocean.

  Daisy walked down the steps on the other side and up to the edge of the dock: slow, unwilling steps, as if something were pulling her forward against her will, or something were pushing her back from a long-sought goal.

  Bending down, she could see her reflection in the water: a figure, outlined by blue sky, one hand resting on the dock, the other reaching out to touch the water.

  But it wasn’t her.

  The figure looking up at her from the water of the marina was a young girl with red hair, tied back in a pony tail. She was wearing a checked dress. There was something covering the front of the dress: a stain, like jam, or fruit juice.

  Or blood.

  Daisy staggered to her feet, backing away from the edge of the concrete. Whatever she had seen in the water was wrong. So very wrong. And it had perverted everything around her as well. She hadn’t noticed before, but it was obvious to Daisy now that the concrete had crumbled in places and cracked in others, a
nd the various chains and rings that had been set into the concrete were leaking orange rust. The boats looked sorry for themselves; behind the cruelly curved bows their hulls were dirty and their ropes hung limp.

  Above the boats, and between them, seagulls either hung precariously upon the breeze or bobbed on the water, hoping for a morsel of food to float past. Their cries were making Daisy panicky, and she turned away and ran up the concrete stairs of the bank as fast as she could.

  Catching her breath at the bottom of the bank, she composed herself and walked back the few hundred yards to the High Street. Somehow, it felt as if she had crossed between two worlds.

  Daisy was keeping her eye out for a library, and found one a little further down the High Street. It was a single-storey building, built out of a sandy stone. Once her breathing had returned to normal, she went inside.

  The library was bright and airy, built on two levels with a ramp in between. Daisy spent ten minutes or so wandering around, familiarising herself with the layout. Fiction at one end, non-fiction at the other, with a space in the middle for the sadly omnipresent internet terminals and DVDs. Books seemed almost to be a secondary concern for libraries, these days.

  A door leading out of the library led not, as she might have expected, back to the street but to a courtyard nestled between the library and the building behind it. Roses had been planted in pots, and benches artfully positioned around. A few people were sitting out there, reading books they had brought out of the building.

  Within moments, Daisy had identified three women over sixty sitting alone, reading.

  With studied indifference, she went back into the library and wandered along the shelves until she found a book entitled Leyston-by-Naze: A Personal History. Always good to know something about the place you were going to be living in. Daisy had lived in some anonymous towns in her time, and she was quite looking forward to somewhere that actually did have a history. She took the book outside, found a bench with nobody sitting on it and started to read, making sure that she was scrunched up enough at one end that someone could sit comfortably at the other. If she was lucky, they could strike up a conversation. If she was really lucky, the other person would be an elderly widow with no friends and no social life.

  For the first ten minutes or so, Daisy paid little attention to the book. She was more concerned with the comings and goings within the courtyard; the little courtesies, the way small customs appeared to have sprung up amongst the regulars. But after a while, as nobody came to sit with her, she began to get absorbed into the book.

  It had been written by a local historian, and privately printed as far as she could tell. There was certainly something less than professional about the typeface and the way the pages were cut. The author knew his subject, however, and he could turn a good phrase. Daisy actually found herself becoming interested in the details of how the beaches of Leyston had become a key source of hardcore aggregate for the building industry, and how the local station had been a marshalling yard for transporting the broken rocks into London. Who would have guessed?

  Other chapters dealt with Leyston during the war, and then the expansion of Leyston as part of the Tendring Hundreds area. History seemed to have pretty much bypassed the town for a long time; small events took on a greater significance, just because there was so little else that happened. Daisy already knew that, of course – any town where the theft of a milk bottle and a beer bottle made headlines in the local paper was not making its mark on history – but the book’s author had to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to come up with interesting stories.

  At least, that was what Daisy thought until she turned a page to find a chapter about sensational crimes in the Tendring Hundreds area. To illustrate it, there was a photographic reprint of the front page of a newspaper dating from the 1940s. The headline said, simply, ‘Local Woman in Murder Tragedy’.

  And beneath the headline was a black and white photograph of the girl whose reflection she had seen in the water of the marina.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once upon a time, before he had made Detective Chief Inspector, Mark Lapslie’s office had been a small, rectangular room in a monolithic 1950s building on the outskirts of Chelmsford, with a grim view across the police station car park and plaster-board walls that showed signs of continual overpainting in a variety of colours. Triangular pieces of sticky tape, yellowing with age, had adorned the walls, though the posters and photographs they had secured had long since been removed. Angular metal conduits, studded with rivets, had been fixed along the skirting board at some stage in the past to take electrical cables and sockets; more conduits had been added at waist height at a later date to take computer network cables. The building had no air conditioning, but the policemen and women who had worked there had quickly learned which windows to open and which to leave shut in order to create a continual cool flow of air through the corridors. In winter, Lapslie had kept cartons of milk out on the window ledge. A lady with a trolley used to come through, once at eleven o’clock and once again at three, selling sticky buns and stewed tea. Another lady with a trolley would come through half an hour later to empty the out-trays on the desks and deliver any new post.

  Now, Lapslie had a desk on the eleventh floor of an open-plan office in an architecturally award-winning office block built only a few years before in the redeveloped town centre. Incoming post was scanned in and delivered electronically to the computers on every desk. Outgoing mail had been replaced with outgoing email. The windows were coated with metallic film, for security and energy efficiency, and they couldn’t be opened. Nobody was allowed to stick anything to the walls, and the notice boards were pruned once a month for offensive or out-of-date items. All of the electrical and ethernet cabling ran under the raised floor. So did the ventilation: small, circular vents every few yards provided an almost unnoticeable flow of fresh air. The chairs were state-of-the-art, like black sculptures: plastic mesh on a metal frame, promoting comfort and coolness. A cafeteria in the basement sold venti lattes and almond croissants at grossly inflated prices. A chalkboard sign on one wall compared their grossly inflated prices with those of other coffee bars in the locality and came to the conclusion that the coffee there was just cheap enough that it made no sense to go out for one,unless you just wanted a walk. They had a gymnasium, a dry-cleaners and a hairdressers actually on the premises.

  And Lapslie hated it. He hated it with a passion beyond telling. The noise of thirty or so officers and civilians of various ranks, all talking to one another, talking to themselves or talking on the telephone was distracting beyond measure. To Lapslie it had been like having the taste of blood in his mouth for the entire working day. Following a letter from his doctor to the Assistant Chief Constable, Lapslie had been allowed to use one of the Quiet Rooms – usually set aside for confidential discussions – as a surrogate office if he needed a break. The rest of the time, he wore earplugs.

  Still, there were some consolations. Shortly after the force had moved in, some of the lower-ranking officers had discovered that if they covered the floor-based ventilation grilles in a line at the same time, leaving the last one uncovered, then the resulting air pressure out of that vent could quite easily lift a skirt high above the waist on any passing woman. That had kept them amused for a while, until a circular came round forbidding the practice.

  Now he sat in the Quiet Room, reading through Dr Catherall’s final autopsy report. He’d spent several weeks chasing her to get it finished, and eventually, and with bad grace, she had complied.

  There was no doubt – Violet Chambers had been murdered. The cause of death was uncertain – she had certainly been poisoned, but she also appeared to have been struck on the back of the head. Either could have been the fatal occurrence, although the dirt under her fingernails matched the ground in the vicinity, meaning that she had still been alive when she had been dumped in the forest. The fingers on the right hand had been removed by a sharp, bladed object like a pair of scisso
rs, but that had been done at some stage after Violet Chambers had died, and so blood loss could be ruled out.

  Lapslie put down the autopsy report and picked up the report on the area where the body had been found. Tests on the plastic in which she had been wrapped were inconclusive: it was a standard make, available from any large DIY store, and both time and weather had erased any fingerprints that might have been there. And, based on some complicated calculations involving insect pupae and moss, it had been definitively established that her body had lain there for more than eight but fewer than ten months before having been so rudely excavated by a crashing car.

  Which still left the two big questions: who had killed her, and why?

  Something moved in his peripheral vision, and he twisted around. Emma Bradbury was standing just outside the glass door to the Quiet Room, waving at him. She was wearing a pinstripe trouser-suit offset by an orange sash tied around her waist. He gestured her to enter. She pushed the door open, and Lapslie could immediately taste blood as the susurration of the open-plan office washed over him, as if he’d suddenly bitten his tongue.

  ‘What’s up, Emma?’

  ‘Message from the Super, sir. Could you give him an update on the case? Apparently his PA has been trying to get hold of you, but you haven’t been at your desk.’ The saltiness of the blood receded, replaced by lemon and grapefruit. For a moment the two tastes combined in his mouth: something exotic, like lemongrass, only deeper and more intense. Emma closed the door behind her.

  ‘An update on this case? The Violet Chambers one?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Bit beneath his level of interest, surely?’