Core of Evil (27 page)

And there were more people than ever at the tea party.

After four hours in the House of Death, as he had come to think of it, Mark Lapslie couldn’t take any more. He walked outside, legs feeling as weak as if he’d run a cross-country race. He couldn’t even think straight. Those faces – those ruined, rotted faces – would haunt his thoughts forever.

Four local police cars and a CSI van were parked outside the farmhouse. The van didn’t belong to Sean Burrows’ team; they were still working on the Volvo. Lapslie had, however, rung Burrows on his mobile to tell him that it wasn’t just one murder they were working on now but thirteen, and the Volvo was now the most important evidence they had, as it may well have been used to move the bodies from wherever they had been killed to where they had been fated to spend the rest of their time. In the House of Death.

Looking back up at the red brick of the farmhouse, he could see a resemblance to a skull that he hadn’t remarked on before. The upper windows were like dark, vacant sockets; the portico was the
hollow nasal passage; the cracked steps were the top and bottom rows of teeth; and the crumbling brickwork was the bone itself, worn down by the passing of the years. It was pure fancy, of course – after four hours in that house, with the twelve bodies sat around the table, frozen into their perpetual tea party, everything he saw was going to remind him of skulls, skeletons and dry, rotting flesh.

Emma Bradbury was resting on the bonnet of his car, one booted foot up on the front bumper. She was smoking a cigarette.

‘If I did that to your car,’ he said, ‘you’d deck me.’

‘Sorry, boss.’ She straightened up and threw her cigarette on the ground, stubbing it out with her toe. ‘It’s just—’

‘Yeah. I know.’

The wind was cool on his face after the stuffiness of the house, and he breathed deeply, taking it into his lungs and flushing as much of the moribund air of the house as he could. That air had been laden with particles that had drifted from the corpses as they slowly slumped into deliquescence. Knowing that something of them remained within his mouth, his nose, his lungs, that it coated his suit as well, made Lapslie feel soiled.

‘I need a shower,’ Emma said, mirroring his thoughts.

‘I feel the same way, but we’ve got to stay here and focus the investigation. The entire house needs
to be examined. We’re going to need to pull Sean Burrows’ team in to cover it once they’ve finished with the Volvo. And frankly I don’t see Jane Catherall managing all those autopsies this side of Christmas. She’s going to need extra help.’

Emma turned to look at the house. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘From the outside there’s no sign of what we found. With crack houses, or brothels, there’s something about the outside that gives them away, if you know what you’re looking for, but this … You’d expect something that looked like a haunted house, all leaning sideways with stuff growing up the walls, but this place just looks old. It looks like my gran’s place.’

‘Still waters run deep,’ Lapslie said, looking back at the house. Somehow the fresh air and the sunshine had blown away that resemblance to a skull that he had noticed. It was just a house again. Just an ordinary farmhouse.

‘They’re going to be like Violet Chambers, aren’t they?’ Emma asked. ‘When we discover their identities we’re going to find that they’re not listed as being missing. As far as Social Services, and the Inland Revenue, and the Department of Health and everyone else is concerned, they’re not dead. Somewhere in England, they’re still walking around, claiming benefits and taking the income from whatever properties they own. Someone out there is pretending to be them.’

‘They’re just puppets,’ Lapslie agreed. ‘Manipulated by their murderer. But isn’t that the cleverest thing of all? If the thing that trips most murderers up is disposing of the body, then why increase the risk by scattering your bodies around? Why not keep them all together, somewhere isolated, where nobody will ever go, and then make sure that they won’t be looked for by keeping their identities alive? Like Violet Chambers, I guarantee they’ll all have no families and no close friends. They’ll have been living solitary lives, alone and unremarked, until someone came along. Someone who befriended them and wriggled into their lives, then killed them and took on their identities.’ He shook his head. ‘So many identities, and whoever it is has to keep them all alive, because the income is still coming in. The pensions, the rents, the investments - everything. So much to juggle.’

‘Where do we start?’ Emma said simply.

Lapslie thought for a while. ‘The Volvo will be a bust,’ he said eventually. ‘It led us here, and there may be evidence inside it linking it to some of the bodies, but it’s still listed as being owned by Violet Chambers. I think our murderer just adopted it. Spoils of war. They probably do this with every victim: strip them of what’s useful, then sell the rest. Unless there’s some trace of the murderer in the car – and I think they’re too clever for that – then it’s a dead end.’

‘The house?’ Emma said, indicating it with her head.

‘Similar. It will belong to one of those corpses. Probably the one that’s been there the longest. What was the name – Rhona McIntyre? She’ll be the one at the head of the table. The mortgage is paid off on the house, and our murderer makes sure the Council Tax is paid every year. Flawless.’

‘Can’t we trace the payment on the Council Tax?’

Lapslie shrugged. ‘We can and we will, but I guarantee it’ll have been paid from the account of one of the other women around that table. It’s an unbreakable circle. The murderer is using each of the accounts to pay bills on the other ones, and taking cash out when they need it. They never pay for anything themself. There’s no trail back to them.’

‘Are you sure they’re all women, boss? Some of those bodies are so decayed it’s difficult to tell from just looking at them.’

‘So far it’s all to do with women: Violet Chambers, Rhona McIntyre, the woman who was seen leaving Violet’s house, the more identifiable of those bodies.’ He sighed. ‘Don’t you feel it? The poison, the precision, the planning … and the choice of victims … I guarantee the murderer’s a woman as well.’

Emma gazed around. ‘So what now?’

‘Now we leave the CSIs to do their stuff here. I’ll
make some calls and arrange to get as many spare pathologists drafted in to help as we can.’ He frowned. ‘What
is
the collective noun for a group of pathologists, I wonder? We can’t call them “a murder of pathologists”. That’s already been taken for crows. “An incision of pathologists”?’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. I want you to check into the background of this house. Find out when Rhona McIntyre was last seen, what her background was, what happened to her and especially whether anyone else was seen with her just before she was last seen. Talk to anyone who lives nearby. Go into the nearest village and talk to the publicans. Local stores. Anyone. Just get me some background on Rhona McIntyre.’

‘And when I’ve finished with that, some time next week?’

‘Then you can have a rest.’

Emma looked around. ‘I haven’t got a car.’

‘Get one of the local constables to drive you around. It’ll make them feel useful, and who knows? They may have some information about the house, or the owner.’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a friend in the area. I’ll give him a ring.’

Emma walked off, pulling her mobile from her pocket, and Lapslie just stood there for a while, looking away from the house. It was located in a valley: the ground rose gradually up, dark and
imposing, on two sides, making the place feel claustrophobic. Behind him was the dirt track he had driven in on, and in front of him was … the garden.

He walked over to the gap in the fence that gave access. The fence was well maintained, compared to the rest of the farm, and the plants, as far as he could see, weren’t anywhere near as overgrown as the fields he had passed on the way. It looked as if whoever was visiting the house wasn’t just planting corpses.

He walked through the gate, and it was as if he had walked through some kind of invisible curtain. The scents of the plants hit him like a rich and heady perfume. He felt giddy, but he breathed it in gladly, replacing the stench of old, dead flesh with the mixed aroma of pennyroyal, delphiniums, foxglove, corn cockle and countless others that he remembered from childhood, or from Sonia’s attempts at growing borders in their back garden. Hydrangea and hyacinth, rhododendron and tansy: the garden was a riot of smells and colours. There were shrubs and trees as well: yew and peach, privet and eucalyptus. Small blue flowers hung beside large red ones, bell-shaped yellow flowers drooped over flat pink ones. It was chaos, and yet Lapslie could almost see some kind of plan to it. There was logic there, but not the kind of logic he could understand. Or wanted to.

He stood for a moment with his eyes closed, letting the scents rather than the sights guide him.
For him it was the aromatic equivalent of standing in the middle of a factory, with the clashing of machines, and the shouting, and the tannoys and whatever else causing his olfactory senses to overload with synaesthesic signals. If he turned his head he could almost make out a pattern. The plants to the right of the gate were more floral; the plants to the left spicier, earthier, richer in tone. Ahead of him were more medicinal scents. It wasn’t a random selection: these plants had been carefully chosen to tell some kind of story.

He opened his eyes and looked around. Selecting a low bush, he knelt and examined it. Some of the lower branches had been pruned back: the marks of the shears were still visible. The roots of the plants had been bedded in compost as well. Yes, the garden was maintained, looked after on a regular basis.

On a whim, he walked along the rows. When Dr Catherall had mentioned that Violet Chambers had been poisoned with colchicine, which was derived from a plant known as the meadow saffron, he had looked it up in a gardening book that Sonia had left behind when she moved out. A single stem splitting into three or four foot-long leaves that canted up at a sharp angle. Pink or white or purple flowers appearing in autumn. All parts of the plant poisonous. And there it was, nestled between two plants he couldn’t identify: a whole row of meadow saffron.

He looked around with fresh eyes, and a cold feeling in his stomach. Twelve dead bodies in the house, plus one found in the woods, and at least one poisoning. Was it too much to suspect that they had
all
been poisoned? And what were the odds that they had all been poisoned with toxins extracted from plants in this garden?

The House of Death, and now the Garden of Death. What the hell was he up against here? What kind of person could take it upon themselves to cultivate an entire garden of poisonous plants? It had yet to be proved, of course, but Lapslie knew he was right.

‘ “The strongest poison ever known, came from Caesar’s laurel crown”,’ he quoted softly, and shook his head.

Emerging from the garden and heading towards his car, he noticed that the vans had arrived to take the bodies away to the pathology lab. One of the bodies was being carried down the steps of the house as he watched, swathed in green polythene sheeting. Presumably it was so fragile that trying to get it into a body bag would have risked breaking it in half.

A red Jaguar was just pulling away from the house. From his position Lapslie could see Emma Bradbury in the passenger seat, but he couldn’t make out the driver’s face. Maybe it was whoever she’d had in her car when they’d first found Violet Chambers’ body in the forest.

Leaving the House of Death receding in his rear view mirror, Lapslie followed the pathology van along winding country roads until it joined the B101. Within half an hour they were on the motorway, heading for Jane Catherall’s mortuary. The van drove sedately: not as slow as a funeral procession, but not pushing the speed limit either. It was as if the driver was acknowledging, even in passing, that death could not be hurried. Or perhaps he was frightened that the bodies might disintegrate if he hit a bump too fast.

Lapslie kept pace with the van for its entire journey. He could have accelerated past it and got to the mortuary with half an hour or more to spare, but it would have accomplished nothing, and he felt, as the driver presumably did, that the corpses in the back of the van deserved some kind of respect. Or an escort, at the very least.

Eventually they were driving along Braintree’s familiar streets. Lapslie slowed as the van pulled off the road and into an unremarkable tarmac drive that led around the back of the mortuary. He parked in what he now thought of as his usual place.

Before he could buzz the door, his mobile rang: Bruch’s 1st violin concerto.

‘Lapslie.’

‘Mr Lapslie! Nice to hear your voice!’

He tasted mustard and vinegar across the back of his tongue. ‘McGinley? I was beginning to think you were never going to get back to me.’

He imagined Dom McGinley the way he’d last seen the man: sprawled behind a table in a pub, his stomach pushing his polo shirt out into a smooth curve, a pint of Guinness in front of him, and chuckling.

‘You asked a favour, and then did me a favour in return before I could say anything. I owed you one, and I don’t like owing people anything. I try and clear my debts as quickly as possible.’

‘Very laudable,’ Lapslie said. ‘So what have you got for me?’

‘You were asking about a man named Geherty, at the Department of Justice.’

‘Yeah.’ Lapslie thought back to the black Lexus that had turned up in the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered, and again outside his police station. He thought back to the two men who had walked out of Chief Superintendent Rouse’s office as he was walking in, and had glanced at him as if they recognised him. And he remembered the way that Jane Catherall’s office had been searched, and files copied from her hard disk. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, ‘I was, wasn’t I? What have you found?’

‘I put out some feelers, and asked some friends of mine who work for the Department of Justice who he is. It wasn’t easy – the bloke keeps his head down, but I eventually struck lucky. He’s Assistant Director of the PRU.’