Core of Evil by Nigel McCrery

expression.
    ‘Oh yes.’ Eve leant forward confidingly. ‘I was evacuated here during the war, you see, and while I was here my home in London was bombed during the blitz. My family was killed, so I stayed with the family I had been placed with.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
    ‘Oh, it was all such a long time ago, now. I was educated here, I married here and I brought up three children here.’
    The little spark of interest that had begun to flicker in Daisy’s breast guttered in a discouraging wind.
    ‘You have three children?’
    ‘Oh yes. They’ve all moved away, of course, but they still visit every week or so. One of them works in a bank, one works in computers and one is a school secretary. And they’ve given me so many lovely grandchildren.’
    ‘That’s wonderful,’ Daisy murmured, letting her gaze slide away from her travelling companion and alight again on the flat, green countryside that was rolling past the window. Children and grandchildren. Family. People who would notice if she vanished. People who would care.
    ‘Where does your cousin live?’ Eve asked brightly.
    Daisy paused for a moment before replying, just long enough to give the impression that she had thought the conversation was over. ‘Near the church,’ she replied vaguely. There was bound to be a church in Leyston.
    ‘Which church?’
    ‘The Methodist one, I believe.’ That should still be safe. How many Methodist churches were there likely to be?
    ‘Ah. I see.’ Eve subsided back into her seat, looking disappointed that her new friend didn’t want to continue their conversation.
    The train began to slow, and Daisy’s heart began to beat faster. It was always like this, coming into a new town, a new home, for the first time, but there was something else as well, a feeling that this time she really
was
coming home. It was something to do with the briny smell of the sea, the plaintive cries of the seagulls, the feeling of almost infinite space just beyond the bushes that lined the track. And then they were pulling into the tiny station, just two tracks separated by a platform between them.
    The train lurched to a halt, and Daisy was surprised, looking away from the window, to see the little old lady still sitting opposite her. She had almost dismissed her from her mind.
    ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said.
    ‘And you. I hope your cousin … you know.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    Daisy allowed the old woman to disembark first, then, as the woman scurried towards the metal and glass ticket barrier, so different from the solid redbrick one she had expected, she busied herself for a few moments with her suitcase, allowing some distance to grow between them before she moved off.
    Daisy walked out into the sunshine, and stopped to drink in the view. To her left, a row of three-storey houses with tall windows curved leisurely out of sight. To her right, a public house named, of course, The Station Hotel. And ahead of her, across a triangular green fringed with bushes, lay the North Sea, heaving and billowing like a grey-blue sheet that had been fastened between the buildings on either side and allowed to ripple in the wind. She walked towards the seafront, entranced. How long had it been since she had seen the sea? She couldn’t even remember. All the places, all the names and the faces were blended together in her mind. She knew she must have been to the seaside at some stage in her life, but she couldn’t remember when.
    Daisy took a look over her shoulder, a valedictory farewell to the life she was leaving behind, and found her vision filled with a block of flats in Victorian design: red brick, tall windows and a massive front door. She had walked around it to get from the modern glass ticket office to the green, but it looked so much like the older ticket office she had been expecting that she had to blink and look again, justto check she wasn’t imagining things. And then, noting the location of the flats in relation to the