Core of Evil (3 page)

The question caught Violet by surprise. ‘I’m … not sure,’ she said eventually. ‘I
think
I can.’ She tried to remember. There were flashes of memory, like images cut from photographs, of her hands holding cards, but there was no context, no background. The memories were isolated, barely connected to reality and able to be moved around at will throughout what little she could recall of her life.

And there was another memory, another image. A table. A long table, set for tea in a darkened room.

Push that memory away. Push it away
fast
.

‘I’m sure there’s a pack of cards somewhere,’ Daisy said, gesturing vaguely to the bureau. ‘Perhaps we could have a game later. Just a short one.’ She smiled hesitantly.

‘Perhaps,’ Violet said, still feeling unsteady after the intrusion of that unwelcome memory.

‘And then I could—’

Daisy stopped, her words gurgling into incoherence. Spittle flew from her lips, spraying the air. Her
lower lip suddenly glistened as saliva spilled across her dentures and down her chin. ‘Violet—!!’ Another explosion of spittle as she coughed. ‘What’s happening to me?’

Violet backed away, her heart fluttering lightly but rapidly. The world seemed suddenly bright and pin-sharp. She could see red streaks in the saliva as a thick glistening string of it dribbled out of Daisy’s mouth.

‘Not to worry,’ she heard herself saying. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

Daisy’s hands clutched at her throat, clawing the sagging parchment skin. Her lips were crimson, puffy. A deep flush spread across her throat and thick, guttural noises emerged from her mouth with every burst of spittle. ‘Gra – geh – helgh—!’

‘You know, I’m amazed how quickly the blistering has come on,’ Violet said, taking a deep breath to calm herself down. She backed away from Daisy and perched herself on the edge of the sofa. ‘I had expected it to take a lot longer. I wasn’t sure of the dose, of course, so I probably erred on the side of extravagance.’

She leaned forward and looked into Daisy’s eyes. Normally the whites were yellowed and the irises were a faded porcelain blue, but now they were heavily bloodshot and weeping profusely, the tears rolling down her cheeks to join the red river of saliva streaming from the gaping cave of her mouth.

‘I realise it must be alarming,’ Violet murmured as Daisy fell back into her armchair and her eyes rolled up in her head, ‘but it will all be over soon, I promise.’ She leaned forward and patted Daisy’s hand, which was clawing at the arm of the chair. One of Daisy’s eyes fixed on Violet with desperation. The other seemed to have taken on an independent life, and was pointed away toward the ceiling. She broke wind: a long, wet sound that seemed to last forever.

‘You’re probably wondering what has caused this,’ Violet went on, chatting to block out her reaction to what was happening. ‘Christmas rose sounds so charming, doesn’t it? Or winter rose, which it’s also referred to as in the gardening books. Black hellebore sounds much more forbidding, but I don’t suppose you would have drunk so much of the tea if I told you that it had black hellebore in it. Not just the flowers, but powdered root and bark as well. Funny, the different names that people give to the same things.’

Rolling over the lavender and boiled vegetable smell of the house came a darker, nastier smell. A smell of faecal matter, cloying with foul sickness. Violet winced and turned away on the sofa. It’ll all be over soon, she told herself. All over soon.

Daisy was sitting in a spreading pool of her own watery, bloody-soaked faeces now, squirming in it, convulsing in it, grinding it into her dress and the
fabric of the armchair. Violet was going to have to burn that chair in the back garden later, along with Daisy’s clothes and a lot of garden waste to cover the smell. And the remaining tea leaves, of course. She couldn’t leave those lying around. What if she forgot, and made herself another cup of tea while she was cleaning up!

Violet giggled to herself, covering her mouth politely with a delicate hand. Despite the mess, she really did enjoy this part of the game.

‘There are all kinds of horrible things in the Christmas rose,’ she said, watching to see whether Daisy could still hear her. ‘Helleborin and hellebrin are both like digitalis, which I’ve also used before, but there’s saporin and protoanemonin as well. It’s a very nasty cocktail.’

Daisy’s hands were both clutching at the armchair now, levering her body forward as if she was going to stagger upright and totter over to where Violet was sitting. Violet raised a hand to ward her off, but Daisy convulsed, falling backwards into the chair again as a thin waterfall of muddy vomit cascaded from her mouth and into her lap. Some of it splattered onto the floor. That, Violet thought ruefully, would be difficult to get out.

She decided not to use the Christmas rose again. It was certainly quick, and definitely easy to prepare, but it was too messy for her purposes. Cleaning up was bad enough at the best of times, without all
those bodily fluids to worry about. Foxglove, perhaps, or bryony. Or perhaps oleander. She liked the smell of oleander.

Daisy’s arms were flapping around now. The end was very close. Very close indeed.

‘Your throat will have closed up almost completely by now,’ Violet murmured, ‘and your heart will have slowed down quite dramatically. I don’t know whether you will suffocate before your heart actually stops beating of its own accord, but either way you will be dead within a minute or two. I don’t even know if you can still hear me, but if you can I’d like to tell you that you are a selfish, stupid old woman, and I’ve hated every single moment of the time I’ve spent with you. Apart, of course, from the last few minutes. Those I have enjoyed very much.’

Daisy was silent and motionless. Her eyes were dull and sunken, and the saliva dripped slowly from her slack mouth.

Violet leaned forward, trying to see whether her heart still fluttered in her chest, whether the blood still pumped sluggishly around her veins, but she couldn’t tell. She would come back later and check Daisy’s pulse, she decided. After she tidied up. And if Daisy wasn’t dead now, well, she would be within the hour.

It was going to be a long afternoon, and Violet found that she couldn’t immediately raise the energy
to get off the sofa. The light streaming through the window seemed to have a weight all its own. It held her down, sapping her strength and sending waves of languor flowing over her body. From where she sat she could see a slice of the smoky blue-grey sky imprisoned between the top of the window frame and the roofs of the terraced houses across the street. The sight didn’t quite provoke an image in her mind of a slate-grey sea eternally lapping at a stone causeway, but it provided an avenue through which the image could creep into her thoughts. Wave after wave after wave, battering against the stone, wearing it down a minuscule amount at a time.

Violet shook herself. If she wasn’t careful she would fall asleep, and she might lose half the afternoon that way. The seaside could wait: tidying came first.

Despite the fact that she had been visiting the house – often every day – for months now, Violet had a very good idea of what she had touched over the course of that time. The kitchen and bathroom would have to be scrubbed with bleach, of course, to remove any fingerprints or whatever else might give her presence away. The parlour and the dining room were less problematic: Violet had been careful about what she touched, and had often wiped down a handle or a surface while Daisy wasn’t paying attention. If she had noticed at all, she had just thought that Violet was helping keep the house tidy. Daisy’s
bedroom and the spare bedroom – used for storage for the past thirty-odd years – had nothing of Violet in them. No, removing traces of her passage through the house would be easy.

Cleaning up after Daisy’s messy death would take longer, and would be less pleasant, but there Violet didn’t have to be perfect. Old people were often incontinent, in her experience, and as long as all the obvious signs of diarrhoea and sickness were removed then the odd stain and the odd lingering smell would not be too disastrous. And besides, modern cleaning technology was marvellous.

Violet stood up and made her way into the hall. Her legs were unsteady – the relief of having got Daisy’s death out of the way, she assumed – and she leaned against the wall for a moment before pushing open the door to the dining room.

Daisy had always kept the dining room immaculate, in case she ever had to entertain, which meant that it had been used perhaps twice in the past ten years. The centrepiece of the room was a solid mahogany table with legs turned in spirals. Three silver candlesticks sat on the table, and prints of hunting scenes were spaced around the walls.

A folded wheelchair leaned incongruously against the far chimney breast. Behind it, a large sheet of grey plastic was folded on the carpet.

Violet had brought the wheelchair and the plastic sheet into the house a few days ago, whilst Daisy
was snuffling and murmuring in her sleep. Now she carried the sheet back into the parlour and looked around. Not the floor – she was going to have to scrub and hoover that pretty thoroughly. Perhaps the sofa.

Yes. She unfolded the plastic and draped it over the sofa until it was just a grey lump, like a shiny outcrop of stone. She could lift Daisy’s body – light as it was – onto the sofa, then take the chair out to the garden and clean the carpet thoroughly. Once she had done that she could undress Daisy, wash her down with flannels and towels which she could also take out into the garden, and then re-dress Daisy in some of her other clothes from upstairs. Then Daisy could be lifted into the wheelchair, covered with a blanket and wheeled out of the house and down the street: just another old lady out for a breath of fresh air, fast asleep and dreaming of the past.

Violet glanced over at Daisy. In the time since she had last looked, something mysterious and irrevocable had happened to the woman she had once called ‘dear’. What had once been loose flesh and jowls was now just a covering laid on top of an ancient skull. What had once been eyes that had looked out on eighty-odd years of history were now just dull buttons upon which dust was already beginning to settle. There was nothing there any more. The miracle had occurred once again: what had once been a woman named Daisy who had loved and lost
and lived was now just … just nothing. Skin and bone and a hank of hair. And everything that she had owned now belonged to Violet. Soon it would just be money.

It would have to be done carefully, of course. One step at a time. Nothing to cause suspicion. But given a few months, it would all be hers.

Once she had cleaned the house.

Because every journey started with a first step.

When Mark Lapslie’s mobile phone bleeped, the sound tasted to him like chocolate. Dark chocolate, bitter on his tongue and gritty between his teeth and on the inside of his cheeks.

It was still dark outside his bedroom window, but birds were beginning to chirp and there was a freshness to the air that told him it was almost dawn. He had been drifting for some time, dreaming of the days when his house had been full of life and laughter, so the shock of the sudden noise – and the sudden flood of flavour in his mouth – hadn’t disturbed him too much. Part of him had been expecting a call. He’d been tasting strawberries very faintly all day – a sign that something unplanned was about to happen.

The bleep was telling him that he had a message, rather than an actual incoming call. If it was a call the ring tone was an extract from Bruch’s 1st violin concerto and tasted more like mocha coffee. He gave himself a few minutes to wake up fully before he reached across and picked the mobile up from the bedside table.

Pls call DS Bradbury
, it said, followed by a mobile number.

Before dialling Detective Sergeant Bradbury, whoever he was, Lapslie padded into the bathroom and turned the shower on full. Catching sight of himself in the mirror above the sink, he winced. In his mind, he was twenty-five years younger, his hair wasn’t grey and his stomach didn’t bulge. Reflections kept catching him by surprise; the only reason he didn’t take a screwdriver to the mirror and remove it for good was that shaving would be almost impossible.

‘Hello?’ The voice was female, tainted with lemon and lime, the accent pure Estuary.

‘DS Bradbury? This is DCI Lapslie.’ He walked back into the bedroom so the cauliflower hiss of the shower didn’t drown out her voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Car crash, sir,’ she said succinctly.

‘Car crash?’ He took a breath. ‘Sergeant, I’m on indefinite sick leave. I don’t get called out on investigations any more.’

The voice was wary. ‘Understood, sir, but there’s something about the scene of the crash that, when it got called in, made your name jump up on the computer. When I tried to get a number for you I was told that you were on gardening leave, but it didn’t say why, and when I put a call in to Chief Superintendent Rouse, he gave me permission to ring you.’

‘Okay, what was it about the crash that made my name jump up on the computer?’

‘I’d rather not say, sir. It’s just … special.’

‘Give me a clue, at least.’

‘There was one person in the car, sir – the driver – and there was no other vehicle involved, but when the first responders got to the scene they found two bodies. One of them was the driver’s. The other had been there for some time.’

Interesting. That was almost worth being woken up for. ‘And?’

‘And there’s something about the state of the second body that apparently links to some old case you were involved in.’

‘An old case of mine?’ He cast his mind back quickly, thinking of anything odd, anything out of the ordinary in his career, but he could come up with nothing. No serial killers still on the loose, no bizarre cults, nothing. ‘What was strange?’

‘Sir, I’d really rather not say. It would be easier if you came on down.’

‘Where are you?’

There was a pause. Steam was drifting in from the bathroom, and Lapslie imagined the DS looking around her in the dark, trying to work out the local geography.