Path of Needles (21 page)

No
, thought Cate, it wasn’t any use. They were too late, always too late. Maybe if someone had seen the girl earlier – she remembered the abandoned form lying on the ground, her pale dress, its delicate material too diaphanous to protect anyone against the dark hillside on this cold night.

*

When the witnesses had left, Cate found Dan again. He was still at the edge of the site, making sure no one unauthorised crossed the line. ‘Your friend gone?’ he asked.

Cate shook her head. ‘Alice is still going over the scene with Heath.’

‘Ah – is she? Which one?’

‘Which what?’

He pointed ahead of them and a little to the right, upwards to where the other light still shone. Cate had put it out of her mind; she had been too preoccupied, though now she thought of it, she’d heard footsteps up there too, hadn’t she? The hard echoing of footsteps on a wooden platform, way above the moat.

‘They found something else up there. I’m not sure what.’

‘Another victim?’

He shook his head.

Cate took a deep breath. ‘All right. I won’t be long.’

She felt Dan’s eyes on her back, but he didn’t say anything as she headed into the dark once more. Heath hadn’t ordered her away from the scene, had he, not specifically? He’d told her to look after the witnesses and she’d done that; she had listened to the woman’s story and taken her details. Now she was simply seeing what else she could do.

Once she’d passed the light coming from the first scene, it was easier to see the second. Cate felt exposed as she crossed the ditch via the wooden bridge, her footsteps rapping loud on its surface. She caught a brief glimpse of light and shadows in the moat below, and then she turned away and faced the steps that would take her up the side of the motte. They were steep, looming above her in the dark. At the top were more lights, and voices; she couldn’t see their source from here, or make out the words.

The sound of her footsteps announced her approach long before she reached the summit.

The platform was wide and flat and cold and larger than she remembered. A sharp breeze swept over the top, bringing with it a strange taint, and for a moment she thought not of death but of a childhood memory: the van that used to come round the houses when she was young, selling its wares to all the mothers along the street. Then the thought was gone.

A huddle of SOCOs were grouped around something on
the floor. One of them was kneeling on the wooden panels as they bent over a small object that glittered in their lights. It was gold, bright gold; Cate stepped forward and saw it was a dish, and she breathed in and caught a mouthful of that stench, an acrid tang that caught the back of her throat. There was something inside it that she couldn’t make out. A part of a body, maybe? She could see only that it was dark, some stinking, viscous substance with small objects floating in it. That was all; there was nothing else to show who the girl had been or who she was supposed to be, what story she had become.

She looked out across the landscape, the roads mapped out by orange pinprick lights, houses by their yellow windows, the fields nothing but darkness. She could see for miles and it struck her that anyone up here would be exposed too; anyone could be out there now, looking up at them. Even the killer might be there, watching. She shivered before taking her leave of the SOCOs and letting them get on with their work; the girl and the things left with her passing on to others, her story becoming part of someone else’s, at least for a time.

*

Dan was still there when Cate returned, but Alice had not come back. She squinted across the scene and thought she caught sight of her contact with a taller figure, Heath, emerging from the moat and heading for the bridge. She might have met them there if she’d been a little longer; now she wasn’t sure if that would have been a good thing.
She listened for their footsteps on the wooden stair, but wasn’t sure if she could make them out.

She frowned. If Alice and Heath were looking at the same thing she’d seen, would they view it the same way? It was like Alice had said, everything was a variant, different things noticed or interpreted differently. Why on earth had the dish been placed there, and why hadn’t it been with the girl?

What came into her mind though was not a golden bowl but an image on a page, an illustration from a storybook she’d had when she was young. On it was a beautiful girl with golden hair, and she was clutching a rose to her breast. It was ‘Beauty and the Beast’, wasn’t it? There had been a merchant, and his daughter – the youngest, it was always the youngest – had asked him to bring back a rose from his travels, just a single rose, while her sisters demanded rich dresses and jewels. Unfortunately for the merchant, when he saw such a flower it had been in the Beast’s garden, and plucking it had landed him in deeper trouble than her sisters’ demands ever had.

This girl had a rose, and its thorns, wrapped around her body.

She tried to remember the rest of the story: Beauty had gone to live with the monster, had feasted in his splendid castle. Was that feast served in golden bowls? Possibly – probably. But then why the stinking mess left in the bowl here, tonight? Was the killer saying the feasting had turned foul? Why?

She shifted her feet, impatient for them to return. Why had Heath kept Alice with him and not her? She wished she could hear what they were saying. Perhaps he was angry that she had brought her contact here – and she could understand that. He’d obviously recognised the need for Alice’s input, but that didn’t change matters: he’d told Cate to watch her. Perhaps now he wanted to observe Alice’s behaviour without her being there to interfere, to spoil it somehow. She frowned and wrapped her jacket around herself more tightly. Whatever the reason, it felt like Heath didn’t entirely trust either of them. And why should he? He hadn’t wanted Alice at any more crime scenes, and she had known that, and yet she had brought her along without so much as checking with him first.

She looked up to see two shapes heading towards her: Alice and Heath, almost as if they’d materialised from the dark.

Heath didn’t acknowledge Cate’s presence; instead he said, low and quiet, to Alice, ‘Thank you, Ms Hyland.’ He held out his hand and she shook it. Then he walked back the way he’d come.

Cate found herself reluctant to speak.

‘It’s another classic one,’ said Alice. Her voice was sombre but calm.

‘Beauty and the Beast?’

‘No,’ Alice sounded surprised, ‘not that. It’s “Sleeping Beauty”. It’s obvious really, when you know the story. She’s surrounded by thorns – and the cap, the dish; she’s even
got a rose. In some variants that was her name, Briar Rose.’

This girl had a name
, Cate thought.
They all had names
. She pushed the thought away. When the police
knew
her name, they could call her something else; until then, Briar Rose would be the way they referred to her, like Snow White and Little Red, their lives reduced to nothing but characters. It wasn’t Alice’s fault.

‘He wants a full briefing in the morning,’ Alice continued. ‘I’m to come down to the station. I’ll cancel my morning lecture.’

Cate swallowed down her questions and her pride. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Thank you, we appreciate that. I’ll get you home now and pick you up early tomorrow.’

Alice stared at the castle for a long moment, lost in her own thoughts, then she caught her breath and turned to Cate. ‘All right.’ Her voice was faint, as if exhaustion had caught up with her at last. ‘Actually, no – there’s no need to fetch me. I’ll meet you there.’

‘Oh? You sure?’

‘It’ll be easier for me to drive. I can head straight into Leeds afterwards, maybe make my late-morning tutorials.’

Cate stared at her. ‘But you don’t have a car.’ Her tone was half surprised, half accusing, and she moderated it. ‘Do you?’

Alice frowned, then smiled as if she were humouring a child. ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘The train’s usually easier, but – I don’t live in the nineteenth century, you know, much as I might give that impression. I just don’t park it
at the house; it looks messy, and the road’s pretty narrow. People complain.’

Cate drew a deep breath. ‘Well, if you’re sure.’ Why should it be so surprising that Alice should have a car? It wasn’t exactly unusual. Still, she couldn’t put it out of her mind, though she realised it had simply never occurred to her. Did she think Alice had sprung out of her fairy tales – that she didn’t really live in the real world? Of course she had a car, and it didn’t matter anyway. Yes, it was likely these girls had all been lured into someone’s vehicle, but
millions
of people had vehicles; the idea was ridiculous. If it wasn’t for Cate Alice would be at home now, oblivious to events at the castle or in the wood or anywhere else. She’d never have been anywhere near this case if Cate hadn’t dragged her into it, changed her from someone who turned white at a crime-scene photograph to someone who leaned over a dead body without blinking.

And she’d kept her off the list of visitors to the lake.

Watch her, Heath had said. Was that what he had been doing tonight, watching her? Was he watching Cate, too?

But Alice was turning, taking her arm. ‘We should go,’ she said, gesturing towards the car park. ‘I don’t think they need us any more, do you?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

When Cate arrived at the station Alice was already sitting in Heath’s office, cradling a mug in her hands and breathing in the steam. Heath saw Cate in the doorway and gestured towards another chair. It wasn’t until after she’d sat down that she realised she’d been seated with Alice, as if she were just another outsider, rather than with her senior officer.

Alice, though, looked up and smiled, and Cate smiled back. She reminded herself that if Heath recognised the need for Alice’s input, it could only be a good thing for her. He might have felt some annoyance at the way she’d brought her along the night before, but that would surely pass; the important thing was the knowledge she could impart, that they did their best for the murdered girls. If Heath had ignored her at the crime scene it wouldn’t be fair to blame her contact. And Alice
was
helping them: she had no need to do so if she had anything to hide.

‘Ms Hyland was giving me her insights into the way the body was posed,’ Heath said.

Alice nodded. ‘I was just saying, I don’t think there’s all that much to tell from the body itself, or I don’t think so. I went over some variants of “Sleeping Beauty” last night when I got in, and apart from the fact that she was in a gown and had obviously been attractive, I don’t think there’s anything I can tell from that.’

Had obviously been attractive
. She was starting to talk like a policewoman, Cate thought.

‘It’s the other objects that had been left that give it away. To explain what I mean, I’ll run through the story, if that’s all right. Sleeping Beauty’s mother – the queen – can’t have children. One day she’s walking by a lake, and a fish jumps out. It’s going to die, but the queen takes pity on it and puts it back into the water. In return the fish says it’ll grant her deepest wish – she will have a child. That child is Sleeping Beauty. Hence the contents of the bowl.’ She paused. ‘Fairy tales are often like that – random acts of kindness leading to a reward. It’s often more integral than this, part of the moral of the story.’

‘Wait,’ said Cate. ‘Fish?’ She remembered the van that had gone around the houses when she was small, the fish-man selling his wares. Of course: that had been the smell coming from the golden bowl.

Heath waved Alice on, making a rolling motion with his hand.

‘Anyway, the parents are proud, they have this big
christening and they decide to invite the fairies. The problem is that there are thirteen fairies and only twelve gold dishes for them to eat from. So they don’t invite them all.’

‘The dish was gold,’ said Heath, and he clicked his fingers; Cate jumped in her seat. ‘There was something else,’ he said. ‘We didn’t see it at first because it was hidden underneath the dish. The SOCOs found a silver bracelet, a small one – too small to have fitted the victim.
Really
small, apparently – like something that might be given to a child.’

‘Silver?’ asked Cate. ‘It sounds like a christening gift.’

‘So that would fit the story too,’ Alice said. ‘Now, you probably remember this part: the fairies come along and bestow gifts. Beauty, musicianship, that sort of thing – oh, and they’re all wearing their best red caps and shoes – but the thirteenth fairy, the bad fairy, she turns up wearing a
black
cap.

‘So then she casts the spell – the one that says the girl will live to her fifteenth year, but then she’ll prick her finger on a spindle and die.’

‘The woman we found was older than fifteen,’ interrupted Heath.

‘She was. And there wasn’t a spindle; it’s odd, that, don’t you think? You’d imagine that would have been the easiest thing to leave, to pinpoint the fairy tale. The last scene was obvious, Little Red. Maybe whoever this is got tired of making it easy for you.’

Heath frowned, waved at her to continue once more.

‘Okay, so the other fairies do their best to commute the sentence, so to speak. Instead of dying, Sleeping Beauty – who is also called Aurora, or Briar Rose – will fall asleep for a hundred years. When she does, the whole castle falls asleep with her, and a forest of thorns grows up around it. There were thorns around the body, too, weren’t there?’

‘Something else is a bit odd,’ said Cate. ‘If she was supposed to be a princess, royalty – why dump her at the bottom of a ditch? What’s he trying to say? It would have made more sense for her to be at the centre of the castle. Unless he’s trying to make a point, to show contempt for the body.’ It made her think of Stocky’s words, what felt like a long time ago:
It’s all about vanity
.

Heath cleared his throat. ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Corbin: it’s a fuck-up. Excuse the language, Ms Hyland.’

Alice waved the apology away while Cate said, ‘Sir?’