Path of Needles (24 page)

The
alarm
. Cate frowned. The teacher, Matt Cosgrove, had been trying to set an alarm when he’d been held up at the dance, hadn’t he? An alarm that wouldn’t set properly, that kept going off. She shook her head. It was a spurious connection: as Heath said, she could find suspicion anywhere if she looked hard enough. And he was right, there was no real link: the Robertsons’ alarm hadn’t been set because Ellen had been at home, inside, supposedly safe. Cosgrove’s hadn’t set because –
why
, exactly? Had they ever even asked?

There could have been any number of reasons. He might have put the number in wrongly, or not hit the right buttons to activate it. Maybe something had been distracting him, making him clumsy. Or there might have been windows or doors left open; something to trigger any movement sensors dotted around the building.

Or maybe someone was still inside
. That would have tripped the movement sensors too.

She rubbed her forehead. There couldn’t have been anyone there, could there? The girl she’d questioned, Hayley Moorhouse, had said she was the last, that she was only still there because her boyfriend had been sick in the toilets. And she’d waved to Mr Cosgrove as she’d left; yes, that was it, because her father had been waiting outside in the car and he’d been angry. She could still see
the way he’d fidgeted through the interview, picking at his fingernails.

He went ballistic about the time as it was.

No. There was something wrong with that picture. The man had been impatient, yes, but Hayley hadn’t said that, had she? She’d said something else. She’d told Cate how he’d waited, and – she couldn’t remember the words, but she could remember the look the girl had given her father. It had been too apologetic, too respectful to go with those words.

He went ballistic about the time as it was.

Then she remembered: it hadn’t been Hayley Moorhouse who’d said that, it had been someone else, another girl, one who quite possibly harboured feelings of jealousy towards Chrissie Farrell. It had been Sarah: Sarah Brailsford.

Cate closed her eyes. She felt sick. She had spoken to the girl herself, and there was something there that she had missed. She could feel it: something she should have seen.
He went ballistic about the time as it was
. Why so? According to all accounts the dance had finished on time, and Hayley had corroborated that; she’d been held up, but everyone else had left. If Sarah left on time, why would her father have been so angry? Unless he’d set some early curfew on his child. But she had appeared to Cate to be an outgoing, confident young woman; someone who’d been hoping for a shot of the other girls’ tequila, not wrapped in cotton wool. She’d struck her as someone her
peers would be glad to gather into their clique – except Chrissie Farrell, maybe.

And why was that, exactly?

She remembered something else the girl had said when she had pushed her, applied a little pressure; and she remembered the way she’d looked away when she said it.

I thought he liked me too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Alice picked out the
Green Fairy Book
from her shelf. Somewhere within its pages was the blue bird’s tale. First, though, she reached for another book and leafed to an old poem by Charles Perrault, a collector of fairy tales born in seventeenth-century France. The lines were his own addition to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, his variant of the story influenced by his own moralistic interpretation of the tale:

The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are

Of every sort, and every character.

Some of them mild and gentle-humour’d be,

Of noise and gall and rancour wholly free;

Who tame, familiar, full of complaisance

Ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance;

With luring tongues, and language wond’rous sweet,

Follow young ladies as they walk the street,

Ev’n to their very houses, nay, bedside,

And, artful, tho’ their true designs they hide,

Yet ah! These simpering Wolves! Who does not see

Most dangerous of Wolves indeed they be?

She stared at the page, not sure why she had thought of it. Then she leaned back in her chair and glanced out at the apple tree, as if by turning her thoughts to the blue bird she could conjure it from the air. And maybe she had: maybe she’d imagined the whole thing, its improbable brightness, its heartfelt song.

There are no rules when it comes to the blue bird.

Of course she hadn’t imagined it. Birdwatchers were trawling the region for the creature, Bernard Levitt among them with his half-focused eyes, his vague smile; impossible to forget his name when he’d spelled it for her so carefully. Then there was the feather, so carefully placed in her pocket each time she changed her clothes, as if it were some kind of talisman. She didn’t need to touch it to know it was there; she had run her fingers across its edge so many times she didn’t like to look at it too closely; by now it was probably a sorry, bedraggled thing.

Alice smiled ruefully, opened the book and started to read. The words flowed like comfort from the page.

*

The story of the blue bird began, as many fairy tales do, in grief, with a king mourning for his dead queen. As many kings were, he was easily comforted in the form of a new wife. This one also brought with her a stepdaughter,
Turritella, who was far less lovely than Fiordelisa, the king’s own child, reflecting her less-than-lovely personality.

Despite the queen’s manoeuvring, Prince Charming fell madly in love with Fiordelisa – the more beautiful and deserving of the two. He would not accept the rich gifts sent in the name of the uglier daughter, and when he heard that Fiordelisa was to be locked away in a tower, out of sight, he begged to be allowed a few precious moments with her.

But Prince Charming was tricked. They met only in darkness, so he could not know that Turritella had been sent to him instead. Under the delusion of speaking to his love, he proposed marriage. When the day of the wedding came, though, he refused to honour the promise of his hand.

Unusually, in this story, it was the wicked sister who had a fairy godmother; in revenge for the prince’s refusal, she cursed him. He was transformed into a blue bird, in which form he would have to live for seven years.

The bird hid away in a fir tree to escape the hungry eagles, but by night he emerged and searched the castle for Fiordelisa. At last, following the sound of her laments, he found her, and the prince sang so sweetly to his love that all who heard him thought the woodland inhabited by a spirit.

Unfortunately the queen discovered the princess and her avian suitor. She set a trap for him, surrounding his fir tree with sharp blades, so that when he emerged he
was cut to ribbons. His life was saved only by an enchanter who persuaded the fairy godmother to change him back into a man; but unless he agreed to the unpleasant marriage, he would once again become a bird.

What happened next changed everything: the king died, and the people of the country demanded that Fiordelisa become queen. When the stepmother resisted, they killed her. Despite all Turritella’s efforts the new queen found Prince Charming and they were at last united, though not before one final footnote: the ugly sister, Turritella, tried to interfere yet again, and to stop her once and for all, the happy couple had the enchanter transform her into a big brown owl, who flew away, hooting dismally.

*

Alice sat back and smiled over the twists and turns the story had taken, the description of Prince Charming under the fairy godmother’s spell:
He had a slender body like a bird, covered with shining blue feathers, his beak was like ivory, his eyes were bright as stars, and a crown of white feathers adorned his head
.

She glanced towards the window. The blue bird she had seen had no white crown, but it had been beautiful. Poor Bernard Levitt in his flimsy hide: he had wanted to see it so badly. As in fairy tales, sometimes blessings fell to those who had never sought them. Take the unassuming Fiordelisa. She was so much more deserving than the nasty Turritella, who for all her scheming was turned into that big brown owl. And owls had their own share of stories;
they were often seen as a bad omen, or even thought to be spirits. Perhaps the story was really saying that the girl was killed. Worse things happened in many stories. And in fairy tales, birds were seldom what they seemed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Sarah Brailsford sat at the kitchen table, her face contracted into a frown, wiping the condensation from a glass of juice with her fingers. Cate took a glass from her mother too and said thanks. ‘I appreciate you arranging for us to see you,’ she said, not to Sarah but to her mother. ‘We don’t want to interrupt Sarah’s schoolwork.’

The woman almost managed a smile; she was distracted. ‘I need to get her back soon,’ she said. ‘And I need to go into work myself.’

‘Of course. This won’t take long. As I told you on the phone, there were just a couple of things I’d been looking into around the dance, and I was hoping Sarah could help.’ She turned towards the girl. Sarah glanced across the table towards her, but she stopped short of actually looking at Cate.

‘Sarah, you mentioned to me before that you got in late, that your dad wasn’t happy about it. Can you tell me what time that was?’

Sarah’s mother shot her a hard look, which she ignored. ‘Sarah?’

The girl looked up, away again. She bit her lip.

‘How did you get home?’

‘Why is this relevant?’ asked Mrs Brailsford.

Cate turned on her best smile. ‘I’m trying to work out which of the girls must have been there last, so I can piece together a timeline – who was still there, what they may have seen, and so on. It’s quite routine.’

She turned back to Sarah, but it was her mother who spoke.

‘She got a taxi. We’ve got a friend works for the cab firm, so we trust them. She has their number, and we gave her the fare. She was to call home though, if there were any problems – weren’t you, Sarah?’

She gave her mother a slight nod.

‘And so Sarah’s father – your husband, Mrs Brailsford – he was waiting up, just in case he needed to bob out and fetch her?’

‘That’s right. Look, we always make sure she’s safe—’

‘Of course you do. That’s not in question. So, just to check – what time did you get back, Sarah?’

This time the girl spoke, muttering the words, rubbing her hand across her mouth.

‘
What
did you say?’ her mother asked.

‘About one,’ Sarah repeated. ‘Maybe a bit after. Dad went nuts. He’d have woke you if you hadn’t had one o’ them sleeping pills.’

‘My pills are none of your business, young lady—’

‘That’s what Dad said, about what time I got in. Said it were best you didn’t know.’ Sarah sneered.

Mrs Brailsford took a deep breath and Cate held up a hand, stopping her. ‘If you were that late, Sarah, you must have been one of the last there. So you must have seen Mr Cosgrove locking up – he had some trouble with the alarm, I believe.’

She didn’t answer.

‘We did speak to another girl who was there until around twelve, but – and this is the odd thing, Sarah – she didn’t see you. She said no one else was there at all besides her, her boyfriend and Mr Cosgrove.’

‘What is this?’ said Mrs Brailsford.

Cate kept her focus on the daughter. ‘So where were you, Sarah? If you were there, why didn’t Hayley see you? What exactly were you doing?’

‘Now wait a—’

Sarah pushed her glass away, slopping juice across the table, scraping back her chair. ‘Shut up, Mum. Just shut
up
.’

‘Don’t you speak—’

But Sarah had turned to Cate, her face screwed up, in fury or misery, Cate wasn’t sure which. The girl’s voice came in dry gasps. ‘I wanted to see him, all right? I just wanted to see him after, to
talk
. After what— I mean, I
knew
he liked me, he had to like me. I
knew
he did. That stupid cow, she didn’t even
care
about him.’

Mrs Brailsford was listening open-mouthed. For a moment Cate couldn’t think of what to say either; her heart raced. Her palms were slippery. ‘Mr Cosgrove. You waited behind to see him?’

‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’ Now Sarah looked sulky, but her cheeks flamed. There were tears in her eyes, though they didn’t fall.

‘So, what, you made yourself scarce until everyone else had gone? Somewhere Hayley didn’t see you?’ Cate paused. ‘Mr Cosgrove – he was trying to set the alarm, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because you were still inside.’

‘I hid,’ she said. ‘I was behind the stage. There’s a little room there, behind the curtains. I stopped in there. I wanted to see him, only that dimwit, Hayley – she was still there. I heard her go, though, saying bye like she didn’t have a care in the world, all the time she was stuffing me up. And he said bye too, and so I looked out.’

Cate felt prickling down her back, the touch of light fingers. She took a breath. ‘And what did you see?’

‘What do you think I saw? I saw
him
. He had the keys in his hand, only he wasn’t doing anything. He was just looking outside, staring for ages and ages, like he was watching something. Then he started fiddling with the alarm and it got kind of funny. I watched for a bit, thought it would make him laugh, you know, when he knew – but then—’

‘Then?’

‘He turned round and he saw me.’ Her face screwed up
again, and this time the tears
did
fall. ‘He saw me and he just looked like – like he—’