Path of Needles (13 page)

The policeman asked her to stand aside while the others went through. They each had to give their name, and she saw the birdwatcher waving his binoculars at the end of their strap. ‘Oh yes,’ he was saying, ‘considerable excitement.’ Alice presumed he was talking of the blue bird rather than the murder, although when she looked across the car park she saw people gathering there, milling at the edge of the road, whispering to each other. Considerable excitement, indeed. The dead girl in the woods would be the talk of the area for years. If people knew Alice had seen the body they would probably camp out on her doorstep to hear her story. And all the girl would be known as would be Red Riding Hood or Little Red, her own name forgotten; unwittingly and unwillingly she would be placed at the heart of stories of her
own, new stories, mutating and growing each time they were told, just as the folk tales originally had.

At least the birdwatcher didn’t appear to care, and nor did the man with the dog, or anyone else; they were already leaving, heading away towards the car park or along the road. The policeman turned back to her and offered to get someone to take her home, and she muttered that it didn’t matter; she would make her own way back. A wave of exhaustion washed over her. At least for now, she was finished: no more police dragging her into things that didn’t concern her, showing her things she didn’t want to see. She put her head down and walked away, following the road, just another walker heading towards home.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Alice woke early. For a while she lay there and stared at the ceiling, but that wasn’t what she was seeing. It was as if her mind hadn’t yet adjusted from the sights and impressions of the day before; images rose before her eyes, faded and were replaced with others, none of them pleasant. She got up and put her hand to her head. A thought occurred to her and she caught her breath, rushed downstairs in her bare feet, checked the front door and then the back. She stayed there leaning against the cold, hard wood, and shook her head. Of course she’d locked it, she probably didn’t even have any need to lock it. The things she’d seen … they didn’t happen, not really, hardly ever. Not outside stories.

She looked around the familiar kitchen. The walls were pale yellow and sunshine slid down them in buttery streaks. It was all right. Her things were exactly where she had left them, the world was behaving itself again, everything in its place. Everything was still out of kilter,
though; her home was still here, but it felt as if she herself had changed. She still had that sense of dislocation she’d felt in the woods.

When she turned to the window, she saw the sky had broken. The grey sheet that had stretched over the woods the day before was shattered, slashed with light; the tops of the trees were in constant movement, sending back golden glimmers. It was right that it had changed, right that the woods should echo her mood when her own sweet cottage did not.

Alice sighed. She flicked the switch on the kettle, heard the hiss and crackle of the element doing its work, though she already knew she’d never be able to sit and relax over a cup of tea. She saw her satchel in its usual place in the corner, a foreign object. It was fat with assignments from her latest class. She had several days before she had to hand them back, but she could at least make a start, let the day pass in familiar and comforting activity.

Alice quickly showered and dressed before sitting down at the kitchen table with a mug of camomile at her side. She picked up the papers and leafed through them. The assignment had been on gender in fairy tales, the roles women take for themselves or are given: the wicked stepmother; the innocent, usually dead, real mother; the youngest daughter, beautiful and destined to have everything. The ugly sister, who was not. Alice grimaced, wondering whether Chrissie Farrell would be dead now
if she had been born ugly. She pushed the thought away. Fairy tales were hers:
hers
. She couldn’t let the things she had seen ruin them for her. She had loved them since she was a little girl, listening to the stories at her mother’s knee. Her mother, who couldn’t always remember what Alice looked like when she came to visit now. She sighed. She often wondered who her mother thought she was, what impressions she formed of her, when each time she saw her was like the first.

Now it was Alice who told her mother stories; they were all she could offer, recounted incidents from the years they’d spent together, the funny and the dramatic and the inconsequential and the sad all mixed up together, hoping they would connect with something in her mind and make her
remember
, because her mother’s memories were gone, and with them part of her life. The reality of their days had been turned into nothing but words, and she never knew if her mother really understood or believed them.

It was something else she didn’t want to think about. She took one of the papers from the pile. Ironically, it was Larissa Horbury’s, a girl destined to have everything if ever there was one: she was blonde, pretty, confident, and she knew the world belonged to her. Her work was entirely unoriginal. Alice pushed her essay aside and found another, this one printed on mauve paper, the student’s name handwritten with fanciful circles dotting every ‘i’. Alice found herself staring at the wall. Had it become so routine so
quickly, this class? And yet, shouldn’t that be a comfort to her now?

She forced herself to read a couple of lines. Fairy tales stripped, wrapped, assigned a time and a place, analysed and finally put away in a box, transformed into a number, 57 per cent perhaps, or 65.

The second dead girl’s face flashed into Alice’s mind and she shook her head. Death wasn’t like that in fairy tales, not really. Heads were chopped off clean. There was no blood spatter, no DNA. And it was never difficult to find the killer; everyone knew who was the witch, who the princess – they showed it on their faces, the evil displayed in ugliness or disfigurement, the maidens always beautiful and good, retaining their looks even when they were dead.

Alice frowned. That had made her think of Snow White. Perhaps she was turning into a detective after all, making connections she hadn’t consciously thought of? She closed her eyes and thought of Chrissie Farrell, her beautiful face. In the story, Snow White had been so beautiful the huntsman had decided not to kill her, but it hadn’t been that way for the girl. The real Chrissie was frozen now, alive only in photographs –
Who is the fairest of them all?
– and cameras, like mirrors, tell only the truth. Chrissie, youthful and lovely, had been crowned at the dance. She would stay beautiful for ever now, never grow old like her mother or her friends, never lose her looks: a life caught behind a glass picture frame instead of a glass coffin.

The immortal beauty: a heavenly ideal for any prince. Love was never in the offing for Snow White, not really, at least until everyone believed her to be dead. Lovely to look upon and never answering back. Alice wrinkled her nose. What she saw in her mind’s eye, though, was another girl, clothed in the red of spilled blood, lying helpless and lifeless amid the fallen trees: the girl given over to the way of needles, who had wandered so far from the path she never would find her way back. But what was she trying to tell her? What had the killer meant to say? Alice thought back to the crime-scene photographs that had been spread on this very table when this all began. The beauty queen – Chrissie – had had her eyes wide open, staring up as if to meet someone’s gaze, her dead beauty left to be seen and admired. Perhaps the killer too had wanted admiration:
Look. This is what I can do
. Little Red had been different, her face downturned as if in shame, a bad girl to the end.

The beauty queen and the whore. Had the roles been forced upon them?

How many variants of these tales had there been since the beginning of the world? And now these girls – displayed for others to find them and draw their own conclusions – they were variants too, intended for their stories to be deduced, puzzled over, teased from them.

She pushed the papers aside. This wasn’t helping. In the past she’d loved to unearth the early tales, the ones steeped in violence and intensity; she’d always discerned
a certain wild magic in their rawness. Now she had a pang of nostalgia for the clean, sanitised versions, the pastel-painted fables that said girls who don’t stray from the path won’t get eaten. Chrissie Farrell didn’t appear to have done anything to deserve her fate other than to be beautiful. Little Red—

Little Red
. Had the second victim really been a prostitute? It didn’t fit the image of the kind of fairy tale most people would know. Alice closed her eyes and thought of her own image of the character: not so much beautiful as cheekily pretty, black curls framing apple cheeks and shining eyes. And her mother, standing in a doorway, bending to kiss her daughter’s face and straighten her hood. Little Red skipping towards the deep black forest, where danger lurked and wolves walked as men. A
red
hood.

It struck Alice now that she’d at least have dressed her child in something that might pass beneath notice. Instead she’d been sent into the forest in a red cloak that would mark her out like a spotlight: the wood that was full of beasts and huntsmen and madness and things hidden in the dark, waiting for innocent flesh, ready to feast on blood and kisses alike. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have sent her at all. Why send her daughter to such a place? She could have gone herself, sent her father or a woodsman, anyone except Little Red.

No, it was the mother who had sent her child away, with only a few words to protect her:
Don’t leave the path
.
But surely she had already known what Little Red was going to do: she had known it as soon as she called out those words and planted the idea in her mind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The incident room was full for the early briefing. Heath didn’t acknowledge anyone or catch their eye as he walked in; he simply began, updating, outlining progress and listing actions to be taken. The atmosphere was quiet, tense. Cate had seen Len Stockdale on her way in, though he wasn’t here now; he was probably already heading out on the beat. He hadn’t greeted her, had just nodded from across the room, his expression one of quiet interest.

He would have been especially interested now, as the SIO turned to the subject of Matt Cosgrove.

‘DI Grainger spoke to Cosgrove about the night of the dance, when the first victim went missing. He claims not to have been anywhere afterwards except home; says he was merely confused about what time he got in. He says he stayed until the end of the night – we do have corroboration for that – but then he had trouble setting the alarm. It kept going off and he had to unset it and start over; ended up checking the building a couple of
times to make sure nothing was amiss. We’ve no corroboration for that part, no call-out registered at the alarm company, no reports made of any problems, but if Cosgrove just unset the thing and started over, there’s nothing amiss in that.

‘However, since we questioned him the first time, Cosgrove’s barely been out of the house – and we know this, since we’ve had him under surveillance. There’s no way he managed to get out, kidnap this new victim and dump her.’

The SIO looked up, scanned the room. His expression was sombre, but his eyes were bright.

‘We have to find out who she is. You all know what you’re doing – Dan, Missing Persons. Laughlin, chase Forensics. The scene’s remaining cordoned until further notice. Start questioning anyone who’s been around in the woods. Question anyone you can find, in fact. If there’s any CCTV at the car parks, I want DS Searl in Intel checking it till his eyes bleed. Got that?’

Everyone nodded.

‘Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? There’s a killer out there. And I’m not getting any younger, that’s for fucking sure.’

They rose to escape, then Heath said, ‘A quick word, PC Corbin.’

She followed him towards his office, ignoring the curious looks cast in her direction. He didn’t speak until they were inside, the door closed.

‘You’re doing some good work, Corbin, but I want you to be careful.’

‘Sir?’

‘This expert of yours. Where’d you find her again?’

‘Through the university. She runs a course in—’

‘Folklore, right. So she knows all about this stuff. Yet she wandered off into the woods, straight after looking at a dead body: went for a walk. A
walk
. Don’t you find that strange? A killer dumps a body in the woods and she gets one sniff of the scene and charges off into the trees.’

‘I think she was probably confused, sir. It takes people in different ways.’

‘What does?’

‘Their first body.’

Heath drew himself up, a clear signal for her to leave. ‘Well, let’s hope this isn’t her
first
body, Corbin. Let’s hope it’s her
only
body, hmm?’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dan Thacker presented Cate with a stack of paperwork. He saw the look on her face and gave a mock-smile. ‘This stuff accumulates pretty fast,’ he said. ‘I want you to go through it, make sure you’re up to speed on everything. Then you might see some actual action.’

She took it from him.

‘You’re going to need our details too – mobile numbers and such. And we’ll need yours. We don’t tend to use radio – we don’t go through the Comms suite. We talk too much.’ He smiled, and this time she smiled back.

‘I think that’s about it, apart from remembering names. Oh, and don’t let Paulson push you around. Don’t let him tell you his name’s Richard, either – we all just call him Paulo.’

‘And Heath?’

Dan gave a wry shrug. ‘Heath is “sir”,’ he said, and he left her to get started on the pile.

She couldn’t help being disappointed; she could feel
the buzz running around the incident room and here she was catching up on old news. At the top of the stack was the forensic pathology report for Chrissie Farrell. Cate shook her head to clear it. Dan was right, she needed to be up on whatever the team knew, and they still needed to find out what had happened to Chrissie. They
had
to find out.