Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  An oily film covered the surface of the coffee, reflecting the sunlight from the kitchen window in murky rainbows. Daisy swirled the jug around, hoping to mix it in, but the oil just circulated like something alive.

  Daisy poured a mug of coffee for Eunice – a mug rather than a cup because she wanted the dose to be as high as possible. She debated putting milk in the mug, but she didn’t want to dilute the poison any further. Eunice alternated in the way she took her coffee; sometimes with milk, sometimes without, depending on how she was feeling. She always took it with sugar, however, so Daisy carefully stirred two large spoonfuls into the drink.

  Placing the mug of coffee on a tray, Daisy was just about to take it upstairs when a thought struck her. Biscuits! If Eunice had a biscuit with her coffee, it might mask whatever aftertaste was left by the apricot kernels.

  When she got to the bedroom, Eunice was sitting upright. She was looking brighter than she had before.

  ‘You’re a marvel,’ she said to Daisy. ‘I really don’t know what I would do without you. Now that poor Jasper is gone, I’m not sure how I’ll survive. He gave me the strength to keep going.’

  ‘Leave everything to me,’ Daisy said. ‘Let me be your strength. Now, drink your coffee and sleep for a while. I’ll check on you later.’

  Daisy watched for a while, but Eunice just rested her head back against the headboard and closed her eyes. Daisy didn’t want to push her into drinking the coffee; knowing Eunice as she now did she knew that the woman just got more and more stubborn if she felt she was being ordered around. She had to want to drink the coffee herself.

  Daisy left her alone, and wandered along to the back bedroom, where Eunice kept her clothes on a long metal rail that she had painted, at some earlier time, in a gypsy-like pattern of red and yellow flowers on a glossy black background. A full-length mirror had been propped against one wall. Daisy ran her hands along the clothes: frilled blouses, long skirts, kaftans and all kinds of what Daisy considered to be ‘artistic’ clothes. She would have to get used to them, though. When she became Eunice Coleman, she would have to wear clothes like that. Not because anyone would mistake her for Eunice, but because she was going to become Eunice and Eunice wore different clothes from Daisy, just as she moved differently and talked differently. It was as simple as that.

  After half an hour, Daisy went to check on Eunice. The woman was asleep again, breathing heavily through her mouth. The coffee mug was empty.

  On a whim, Daisy returned to the back bedroom. Selecting some clothes from the rack that she thought might just fit her, she held them up against her body and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She glanced at the door. It was a risk, but she wanted to see what she looked like. She wanted to practise being Eunice.

  She stripped quickly and dressed herself in the new clothes. They were on the large side, but she could take them in. And besides, artistic people wore baggy clothes, did they not?

  Daisy felt edgy in Eunice’s clothes while the woman was still in the house. She moved quietly along the landing and peered around the bedroom door, just to check on the progress of the poison.

  The bed was empty.

  Daisy rushed into the room, checking the other side of the bed just in case Eunice had fallen out and was lying hidden, but there was nobody there. Eunice had vanished.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Standing in Detective Chief Superintendent Rouse’s office, Mark Lapslie gazed into the mild brown eyes of Martin Geherty. The expression on Geherty’s face was calm, almost clinical, as he stared back at Lapslie.

  Lapslie wondered where DCS Rouse had gone. Geherty was inhabiting Rouse’s office as if he owned it. Perhaps, given his senior position in the Department of Justice, he did. But whatever the reason, Rouse wasn’t around to support his subordinate. He’d obviously made his choice on how best to climb the slippery pole of promotion. And, not for the first time in his career, Lapslie was on his own.

  ‘We’re not giving you a choice, DCI Lapslie,’ Geherty said with surprising gentleness. ‘You can drop the investigation now, of your own volition, or you can have it dropped for you, but either way we are taking over, and we are going to recover Madeline Poel ourselves.’

  ‘And what makes you think you can have my investigation dropped?’ Lapslie said, although he already knew the answer.

  ‘You’ve already got a reputation for instability, thanks to this neurological condition of yours. We can have you removed on medical grounds. Any evidence you’ve amassed will just … go missing. Misfiled somewhere. It happens all the time.’

  Lapslie walked across to the window and gazed out. Far below, the black Lexus was still idling impatiently. ‘You arranged things that I’d get picked for this case from the start, didn’t you?’

  He saw Geherty nod, reflected in the glass of Rouse’s office window. ‘We did. Our psychologists put together a list of key elements of any crime that Madeline Poel was likely to commit. Based on her history and her mental state, they felt that she would be likely to murder elderly ladies who reminded her of her abusive grandmother, probably poisoning them using something natural, like berries or mushrooms, given that’s the way she killed her grandmother in the first place. They also felt that she was likely to mutilate them in some way, probably by cutting their fingers off – visiting upon them the same mutilation her grandmother carried out on her brothers and sisters. There was a strong chance that she would keep changing identities – running further and further away from the child who had seen those terrible things, and running also from the knowledge that she was, in some horrible way, repeating the crimes of her grandmother. Based on that profile, we arranged for the police computer to throw your name up if any crime that met at least one of those criteria was reported. We wanted you to be put in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Why? Just so you could take it away from me at the last moment?’

  ‘No – because you had the best chance of finding her for us. You had actually met Madeline Poel. You had talked to her.’

  ‘So had your psychologists.’

  Geherty shrugged. ‘But they couldn’t take part in an investigation without giving the game away. You were the only person who could look for Madeline Poel without knowing he was looking for her.’

  ‘And yet you kept trying to stop me – taking away my resources, making things as difficult as you could. Either you wanted me to find her or you didn’t.’

  ‘We wanted you to find her, but only you. We didn’t want the full force of the law descending on wherever she’s hiding. You had to be made to walk a fine line – just enough resources to find her, but not to get to her before us.’

  ‘That’s madness,’ Lapslie said levelly.

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  Lapslie turned away from the window to face Geherty. ‘It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? You start off by covertly preparing murderers for release into an unsuspecting society, then you have to cover up their crimes when they fall back on their natures, and then … what, exactly? You’ve already faked their deaths and constructed new identities for them, so you can’t just rearrest them and try them again. That would give the whole game away. Do you end up having to kill them as well, just so the knowledge about this whole prisoner rehabilitation programme doesn’t get out? Is that right? Is that just?’

  Geherty shrugged. ‘Fortunately it’s never gone that far. There are places we can put them, if they slip back to their old ways. The US Government are happy to let us add one or two people to the roster at one of the paralegal detention centres they run, for instance, so long as we turn a blind eye to whatever extraordinary rendition flights touch down for refuelling at our airports. It’s … convenient.’

  ‘And it’s evil.’

  ‘No,’ he said patiently. ‘What they do is evil. What we do is pragmatic. If it becomes known that we deliberately release murderers into society under new identities having faked their deaths, i
t would bring the Government down. The Minister now, and Home Secretaries for the past twenty years, would be called to account for their actions in the Old Bailey. You cannot imagine the fallout, both politically and socially. It must not be allowed to happen.’

  ‘“Let justice prevail, though the heavens fall”,’ Lapslie quoted softly.

  Geherty’s lips pursed: the first sign of strong emotion that Lapslie had noticed. ‘I studied Classics at Oxford, DCI Lapslie. I can find a quote to match any occasion or opinion as well. And you’re wasting time that I could be spending recovering Madeline Poel.’

  ‘What about the thirteen women she’s already killed? And what about the woman she’s probably stalking now? Don’t they deserve anything?’

  Geherty flicked his head, as though dislodging a fly. ‘They are dead, and they had no family or close friends. There’s nobody left to get closure, and Madeline Poel will be punished by us for what she has done. What else is there?’

  ‘The fact that you’re even asking the question is proof that you’re not qualified to answer it,’ Lapslie said.

  Geherty slipped his hand in his jacket pocket and removed a sheet of paper which had been folded, twice, into a long rectangle. ‘This is a letter from DCS Rouse to you, relieving you of your responsibility for this case.’ He held it out to Lapslie.

  ‘It doesn’t take force until I read it,’ Lapslie said, and turned to walk out of the office.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Geherty snapped. ‘If I have to follow you out there are a dozen witnesses out there who will see me handing this letter over.’

  ‘The first step is always the hardest,’ Lapslie said, and shut the door behind him as he exited the office. Turning, he quickly locked the door using the key he had taken from Rouse’s PA earlier.

  The door handle twisted as Geherty tried to open the door, then twisted again, more violently. Lapslie could hear the lock straining as Geherty threw his weight against it. He wasn’t cursing or shouting, just calmly putting all his energy into trying to break the lock.

  DCS Rouse’s PA was watching, open-mouthed, from her desk.

  ‘I don’t know how he got into the building,’ Lapslie said to her earnestly, ‘but we need to keep him there until the psychiatric nurses arrive.’ He leant across, lifted the receiver from her phone and pressed the button that he knew would connect it to the one in Rouse’s office. Behind the locked door, which was shaking furiously, a phone began to ring. ‘Keep it ringing until he answers,’ Lapslie continued, ‘and then leave the phone off the hook. I want to block the line.’ Seeing the look in the PA’s eyes, he added, ‘He’s known for making obscene calls from the phones of important people. Try not to listen – it’ll just upset you. I’ll go for help.’

  He moved quickly away, taking the key with him.

  As he got to the lobby, Emma Bradbury was emerging from a lift.

  ‘Boss, I was just looking for you.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The lists of lone elderly women in the Essex coast area that you requested have been coming in from all the hotels and estate agents and whatever that we’ve been calling. They’re arriving by fax and email and just dictated over the phone. I’ve had one of the constables cross-check the list as it’s been growing with the names of the dead bodies. One of them sprung straight out – Daisy Wilson. She apparently rented a flat in Leyston-by-Naze two months ago, even though she’s lying dead on a slab in Doctor Catherall’s mortuary.’

  Lapslie nodded. ‘It’s where she was brought up. It’s where all this started. What drove her to go back?’

  Emma looked like he’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. ‘How do you know that’s where she was brought up?’

  ‘No time to explain. I’ll drive down there now. Text me the address, then clear up the loose ends here and meet me in Leyston-by-Naze. And don’t tell anyone else where I’m going, or why.’

  As Emma Bradbury walked away Lapslie headed out of the building and straight for his car. He reckoned he had no more than five minutes to get out of the car park before Geherty managed to get out of Rouse’s office or Rouse returned and ordered the door broken down. Reaching his car, he tossed the key to Rouse’s office away, gunned the engine to life and swept out of the car park, programming the satnav for Leyston-by-Naze with one hand as he steered with the other. His mobile rang eight or nine times in the next fifteen minutes, but he ignored it. Eventually, when he was on the A12 and heading east, it bleeped to indicate an incoming text message, and he tasted bitter chocolate. That would be Emma Bradbury texting Daisy Wilson’s address through to him. Or DCS Rouse suspending him. Either way, he kept driving. Time to check the message later, when he was closer to his goal. While he still thought he had a career, he needed to find Madeline Poel.

  He kept checking his rear view mirror as he drove, half-expecting to see a black Lexus keeping pace with him, but the cars behind him were anonymous and amorphous, blurred together into a general haze. His mind kept skipping between two poles; the one being Martin Geherty, hopefully still locked in DCS Rouse’s office, the other being the one interview he’d had with Madeline Poel long ago.

  He could hardly remember her now. He’d been working on his Masters Degree in Criminal Psychology, having been given time off from the police. His thesis was that there were certain key traits of a criminal personality that could be detected by a simple questionnaire, and he was talking to as many criminals as he could in order to try and determine what they were. His synaesthesia was helping, although he would never admit that in his final dissertation; there were certain key flavours that kept coming up when he heard criminals’ voices, like base notes in perfume.

  Madeline Poel had been small and polite, he remembered, but she hadn’t liked to talk about what had happened that day at the tea party. She had been diagnosed as borderline psychopathic, with a score of thirty-two on the revised Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist. She had actually offered him tea, he remembered, although there was nothing on the table in the interview room. When he said yes, just to see what happened, she poured him an invisible cup of tea from an invisible pot, then added invisible milk and invisible sugar. All the time he watched her, waiting for her to realise what she was doing, but she continued the charade, even asking him why he wasn’t drinking.

  When he had read in the newspapers that she had died of a heart attack he had felt relieved and sad at the same time. Relieved, because he had felt when he talked to her that she would never be able to function normally in society. Sad, because underneath it all she had been friendly and talkative. And because she had offered him tea.

  ‘Everybody is dead who should be alive,’ he whispered, ‘and those who are alive should be dead.’

  Colchester came and went, and the car drove on. Signs for Clacton and Frinton passed by. The car screamed across roundabouts with as minimal deviation from a straight line as Lapslie could manage. The landscape was flat and coloured in great swathes: the brown of ploughed earth, the green of fields that had been left to recover naturally and the eye-aching yellow of flowering rape plants. The sky near the horizon was a deeper blue, reflecting the unseen ocean. He passed tractors, overtaking them on straight stretches of road when there was nothing ahead. Signs for Walton-on-the-Naze flashed past, advertising the sports centre, the pier, the sea front. And then there was only Leyston ahead: the end of the land, the end of the trail.

  Lapslie stopped in a lay-by and checked his mobile. There were several voicemails waiting for him, but he ignored them in favour of the one text, from Emma. It was an address in Leyston-by-Naze, followed by a simple message: World is ending here – don’t answer phone.

  The satnav guided him past the station and down a hill towards the centre of town. Suddenly there was nothing on his right apart from a low stone wall and the implacable sea, but then houses intervened again and he was dropping down into the town, past a tea room, a bingo hall and a seafood restaurant, and along the High Street with its collection of butchers and bakers and
newsagents alternating with tattoo parlours and shops selling inflatable rings, beach balls and candy floss. He braked to a halt at a set of traffic lights, and heard sand crunch beneath his tyres.

  The High Street petered out in a rash of fish-and-chip shops and pubs, and he found himself emerging into the other side of Leyston-by-Naze: past a long recreation ground and signs for the marina. The road was on a level with the esplanade now, running parallel to it and towards the looming mass of the Naze itself, the gnarled cliff face that towered above the town. This area, leading away from the town centre, was more residential, with detached and weather-beaten houses set back from the road in gardens filled with hardy, cactus-like plants that could stand the salt and the storms, and inhabited by retired and weather-beaten residents who revelled in their semi-isolation.

  The satnav directed him to a road that lay in the shadow of the Naze, curled back on itself and falling gently back towards the town. A cool breeze blew off the sea, taking the edge off the warmth of the afternoon. He parked just down the street. The house was on a corner: a white-washed two-storey building with leaded glass windows and ivy trailing up the sides. He approached on foot, aware that he should be accompanied by Emma Bradbury at the very least, and a full Armed Response Team at best, but also aware that the option was no longer open to him. He was on his own, trying to resolve a situation despite the circumstances.

  As far as he could tell from the two front doors, nestled side by side, the house had been divided into flats: one upstairs, one down. The bell for the upstairs flat was labelled with a name he didn’t recognise. That left the downstairs flat as belonging to Madeline Poel, masquerading as Daisy Wilson.

  He rang the bell, and waited.

  When there was no response he took a small tool from his pocket, a kind of Swiss Army knife called a Leatherman that had been recommended to him years ago by Dom McGinley, looked around to check that nobody was watching from the street, and used its folding knife attachment to force his way into the downstairs flat. It was, he decided, just the icing on the cake as far as his career was concerned. And, if push came to shove, he could always claim that he thought a crime was in progress – which it probably was. Somewhere.