Core of Evil by Nigel McCrery Read Free Book Online Page B

opened it as far as it would go.
    The fresh air was a sudden relief, and she took a couple of deep breaths, gazing out into the dark, shadowy back garden as she did so. From a patio of pebbled concrete, criss-crossed with silvery snail tracks, a tongue of paving stones wound its way through big, unkempt bushes of various kinds. Tall fences on either side separated the house from its neighbours, and the far end of the garden gave on to a ten-foot brick wall, almost invisible in the murk at the bottom of the garden. Daisy had never been sure what was beyond that wall, even though she had lived there for over fifty years.
    A metal dustbin sat in the centre of the concrete patio, its sides streaked red with rust that had leaked from the rivets and welds of its construction. Inside the bin were Daisy’s stained clothes, along with the cushion that she had been sitting on and the doilies that had been draped over the arms of her chair. The chair itself stood next to the bin, looking smaller in the open air than it had done in the dark parlour.
    Tomorrow she would set the clothes in the bin on fire, accelerated by a splash of lighter fluid. The chair she would have to think about. She could either burn it where it stood, and risk leaving scorch marks on the concrete, or she could attempt to take it apart with a screwdriver and a small saw to a point where she could get the various parts into the burning bin. That might work.
    The deliciously cool, fresh air reminded her that she needed a through draught to get the house to a state where she could work in it, so she turned around and walked back through the house and into the parlour. The smell was worse there, and Violet held her breath until she could undo the catch on the central sash window and push it up six inches or so. The sudden breeze through the house, from back to front, quickly cleared the air, and for a moment Violet had a strong image of the house itself slumping with relief as it exhaled a stale, rank breath and inhaled clean air again.
    Turning away from the window, Violet’s gaze was caught, as it often had been while listening to Daisy’s interminable rambling stories, by the bureau opposite the fireplace. She had carried an image of that bureau around in her mind for months. Whenever she got the chance she had checked books on antiques in the local library, or browsed through them while standing by the shelves in the nearest bookshop. She was fairly sure it was mid-eighteenthcentury, and in very good condition. If she was careful, it could perhaps realise ten thousand pounds at auction. The barometer in the hall was almost certainly French, dating from the early nineteenth century. That could net something approaching two thousand pounds. The andirons on either side of the fire could fetch between three and five thousand pounds, depending on whether they were originals or merely good reproductions. And there was other stuff in the house, such as the dining room table, the silver candlesticks and a complete set of pristine Spode china that Daisy had shown her once, wrapped in newspaper and kept in a Queen Anne chest upstairs ‘for best’, as Daisy had put it.
    All in all, Violet thought that there was about twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of furniture and nick-nacks in this house. They had all been in the family since before Daisy was born, bought by her father, her grandfather, his father and so on when they weren’t antiques but just ordinary items. Daisy had been widowed young, with no children, and so there was nowhere for them to go. And here they had stayed. To Daisy they were just a part of the house, but to Violet they were something else entirely. They were assets to be realised as cash as soon as possible.
    And that was before she stripped Daisy’s estate of the small amount of pension that had accrued over the years, the various bonds and shares that shemight have collected and, most important of all, the house. That wonderful unmortgaged