Alice nodded. ‘Stoppered with the girl’s toe, yes. In Italy, anyway. That’s where that variant came from, I think.’
‘Variant?’
‘That’s right. Fairy tales date back centuries. They’re from the folk tradition; they were never really meant to be written down. They were passed from mouth to mouth, usually by women – there was a whole tradition of oral storytelling. It’s wonderful, really – each teller would add their own detail, put their own experiences into the tales they told, and each listener – well, they could hear something different in it each time too, according to their own background and experiences. It’s fascinating. And yet the stories have something that remains essentially theirs, you know? They’re powerful. Some say it’s because they’re archetypal, that—’
‘So a variant is …?’
Alice smiled. ‘Sorry. I get carried away on the subject. It’s my specialism. My – enthusiasm, I suppose. Whenever the tale is told, it’s a little different, you see, and each different telling is called a variant.’ She paused. ‘So in this particular version, the huntsman had to send back a bottle of blood. In other variants he had to send back different things. It gets pretty gruesome’ – her eyes flicked to the table – ‘in other versions, the stepmother demands the lungs and liver, and she has them boiled in salt water and eats them. In another she wants the heart – always popular, the heart – and in another, I believe it’s her intestines and a blood-soaked shirt. You have to remember, some of these stories came from brutal times. Life and death – they were close, you know? They weren’t hidden away from us by undertakers and hospitals or—’ Alice glanced at the picture and looked away. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’ Cate was staring at her. ‘So you think there’s actually something in this? That the body was posed to resemble a children’s story?’
‘Oh, they weren’t for children,’ said Alice, ‘not originally. It was only afterwards that they were gathered together by people like the Grimms, and even they put a warning on the original book to say that they weren’t really suited to children. It’s just that people wanted to read them in that way, and market pressures dictated—Sorry, I’m going on again. What I’m saying is, the tales changed over time; they became neutered. But this …’ She frowned. ‘It’s going back to the dark side of folk tales, isn’t it? Not some safe, anodyne telling – it’s real.’ She paused. ‘They were red in tooth and claw.’
‘What?’
‘Fairy tales.’ Alice spoke more slowly, her voice sober. ‘The real fairy tales, red in tooth and claw, that’s how I think of them.’
Cate was staring into space. After a moment she realised Alice was watching her and she tried to smile; she failed. ‘I need to go into this in more depth,’ she said, ‘go through each aspect of the MO and work out how it relates to the stories. I’ll need to get something together I can take to the team. MO means modus operandi.’
‘I know what it means,’ said Alice. ‘I watch TV.’ She nodded towards the table. ‘Do you want another cup of tea?’
*
Alice went through each item in turn, responding to prompts from Cate. After a time the policewoman removed her hat, revealing straight brown hair, cut short and aggressively pinned down with clips. She made notes as they went. They started with the obvious: Snow White was a king’s daughter, hence the crown. Of course, that could also have been a coincidence, a remnant of the dance the girl had been to the night before, but they went with it. The black hair – Snow White’s mother had wished for a child with hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow. Alice glanced back at the photograph as she said this and Cate repositioned it in front of them. This time Alice found it easier, and she looked at it for a while, noting the viciously black hair – it seemed obvious now that the colour was from a bottle. The lipstick too looked as if it was from another era – a harsh red the colour of pillar boxes. She squinted. Hadn’t the colour bled a little onto the girl’s face? There was no way the girl would have applied it like that. Of course, it had probably been smeared afterwards. She frowned. She didn’t want to think about how that might have happened. The face in the photograph was pale, death bringing a pallor that had faded her cheeks and paled even her eyes, which were wide open and staring.
Cate explained the traces of bleach that had been found on her skin.
Alice reached for the picture as if to pick it up, then drew her hand back.
‘Not easy to look at,’ Cate said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not.’
They were silent for a while. Then Alice asked, ‘Do you think that’s why he did it?’
‘What?’
‘To make a story of her. Like he distanced himself from this somehow, from the reality of what he was doing.’
‘Possibly,’ Cate said. Then, in a noncommittal voice, ‘Are you all right to continue?’
Alice drew a deep breath. She thought, running through the story in her mind. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘So Snow White’s real mother dies, and the king marries again. The stepmother is vain – very vain – and she possesses a magic mirror. It tells her she’s the most beautiful woman in the land.’ She gestured towards the picture. ‘I’m assuming that’s a looking-glass in Snow—I mean, in that girl’s hand.’
Cate nodded.
‘So it fits, although really it should be the stepmother’s. Okay. Gradually, Snow White grows more beautiful, and the stepmother becomes more and more jealous. Eventually the child overtakes the mother in looks and the queen orders her killed.
‘The huntsman takes her into the woods. Now, the most common variant of “Snow White” is the German, because of the way the Grimms collected it and wrote it down. In that, she demands he brings back the lungs and liver. But Snow White is so beautiful the huntsman can’t kill her – lucky for her, he lets her go, and he brings back the lungs and liver of a boar instead. Here though we have the Italian variant – the bottle and her toe. Again, so far, it fits.’
‘All right.’
‘So Snow White wanders through the forest, lost and scared, until she finds the cottage where the dwarves live. Again, the dwarves are really famous because of the German version – “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”. They let her stay, and she takes care of the house for them. But the witch – the queen – still has her mirror, and it tells her that Snow White’s alive, and she can’t bear the thought that somewhere, someone is alive who is more beautiful than she.’
‘Vanity,’ murmured Cate.
‘Vanity. Exactly. And so she disguises herself as a pedlar and goes off to kill her. First she gives her some stay-laces, and draws them so tight the girl faints, but she doesn’t die. Failure to kill her number one. Then she tries a poisoned comb.’ She peered into the picture. ‘Did you find a comb anywhere?’
Cate frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’ She reached into the folder and examined more photographs without Alice seeing them. ‘I don’t see one.’
‘Well, after that, in this variant anyway, she gets Snow White to eat a poisoned apple. In the Italian, I think it’s a poisoned cake. Whichever it is, this time she’s done it: a piece lodges in the girl’s throat and she falls down as if she’s dead. That’s where this story appears to end. In the fairy tale, of course, there’s the handsome prince, the apple is jolted from her throat and she’s revived and they live happily ever after.’
Cate laid a photograph down on the table. In it was the girl’s hand, the fingers curled inwards around their bloody tips. A little distance away, amid the grey mulch of other people’s rubbish, was a half-eaten apple.
‘There we have it,’ Alice said, and frowned. She pulled the photograph towards her. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Her hands – why did he do that to her hands?’
‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me.’
Alice shook her head.
‘I suppose it’s only a story,’ said the policewoman. ‘Whoever did this might have had reasons of their own that had nothing to do with
it.’
‘No,’ said Alice slowly. ‘There’s something.’ She stayed that way for a while, running her finger across the table, close to the picture, but without touching it. Then she snapped her fingers. ‘She did housework for them,’ she said. ‘She looked after the dwarves. She scrubbed the floors and cleaned their clothes.’ Her voice faltered. ‘He could be saying she worked her fingers to the bone. All the same, as a comparison, it’s too much. What was done to her …’
‘I agree,’ said Cate, ‘but this girl – her mother said she’d painted her nails before the dance. They’d argued over the colour of the nail polish. Maybe this is because nails like hers wouldn’t have fitted the story, they wouldn’t have been suitable for that work, not practical, and not appropriate for the role at that point. A vanity.’ Her voice went quiet.
It was Alice who continued. ‘That could be it. Or he could just have been cruel.’
Cate shook her head as if rousing herself. ‘I could smell bleach,’ she said. ‘It was on her hands, too. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.’
‘You smelled it? You mean – you saw her like this, for real? You were there?’
Cate sighed. ‘I was one of the first on the scene.’
Alice thought she was going to say more, but she did not. She shifted her gaze past the policewoman to the window, where she could see into her back garden. ‘Was the apple poisoned?’ she asked.
Cate frowned. ‘We don’t know yet.’ She followed Alice’s gaze, then turned to her. ‘Wait – there was a poison bottle.’ She explained the ridges on the bottle that had been sent to the girl’s mother.
Alice nodded. ‘The mother,’ she said, ‘is she really her mother, I wonder? Or could she have been a stepchild? Only, in the story – at least, in most versions of it – it’s Snow White’s stepmother who’s the cause of everything. She’s the one who’s jealous, who tries to do away with her stepdaughter.’
‘I’ll check,’ Cate said. ‘It’s an interesting thought.’
‘Of course, in the original versions of fairy stories, it was often the real mother who was the villain. People like the Grimm brothers softened that, though. It was part of making the tales safer, less frightening, more suitable for children. They often turned the mother into a stepmother, distancing her, and those versions are much better known.’ She paused. ‘Of course, if it turns out the girl was adopted or from a previous marriage, you’ve got something more complex on your hands. It means this girl wasn’t picked at random. Whoever did this might have been watching her, finding out about her.’
Cate nodded, but she was miles away, lost in concentration. ‘I’ll look into it.’
Alice subsided. She glanced back at the window, suddenly remembering the blue bird, and it struck her afresh how odd it had been. She was used to burying herself in fairy tales; now it seemed they were stepping out of the woods, walking in through the door and into her life.
She shifted her thoughts back to the story the photographs had told, the story of the beautiful girl who finds her prince. And her mouth fell open.
‘What?’ asked Cate. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s just – the girl was at a dance, wasn’t she, the night it happened? I saw it on the news. She was made the springtime queen or something. They made a big thing of it, how tragic it was.’
‘Yes,’ said Cate, ‘I saw – and yes, she was. She was wearing the crown when we found her.’
Alice slapped her hand down on the table. ‘Why didn’t I think of it before?’ she said. ‘I’m such an idiot—’
‘What have you seen?’
‘It’s the crown,’ Alice said. ‘It wasn’t just because Snow White was the daughter of a king, it’s more than that. She went to the dance and she won the contest; she was made a beauty queen.’
‘And?’
Alice let out a short laugh. ‘She was crowned,’ she said, ‘the fairest – don’t you see? Chrissie Farrell was chosen because she was the fairest of them all.’
CHAPTER NINE
Cate headed towards the police station, walking quickly across the parking area towards the personnel entrance at the side of the building. The folder was clasped under her arm and she felt conscious of its weight. The words written there were running through her mind, almost as if they were whispering to her. She glanced down and saw the scattering of cigarette butts at the foot of the steps, pictured Heath scowling as he paced back and forth. Would he really listen to a story like this? She wasn’t sure. She’d had to get permission to show the crime-scene photograph to Alice, but it was DI Grainger she’d obtained it from, not the SIO. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Would Heath think she’d deliberately avoided him? But then, perhaps she had. She’d never seen the man without that harsh look, his mouth pulled down at the corners even when his expression was neutral. And there was no way he’d have forgotten the way she and Stocky had charged in at the fly-tipping site, possibly trampling crucial evidence underfoot.
But surely he would have to listen now? Her information threw a completely new light on the case. Chrissie had been made part of a story, its threads deliberately laid, and that could change their whole approach to the investigation. If what Alice had suggested was true, it could even implicate new suspects – as she had said, the mother was often the villain when it came to fairy tales. They were full of family relationships that had gone wrong, become twisted. Wasn’t that how many of them began? A wicked stepmother, jealous of her daughter’s beauty – when Cate thought of that she couldn’t help thinking of the photograph that had been cut in two, the one with Mrs Farrell wearing that ridiculous dress, white to her daughter’s yellow, but like her daughter’s, all the same. Just what had the woman been trying to prove?
Another image of Angie Farrell rose before her. Cate half closed her eyes, saw the woman’s fixed stare, her confusion; her pain. Could she really imagine she had been involved, other than through leaving her daughter alone that night? Surely the girl’s mother was too ruined to have done such a thing?
But the fact remained that someone had singled Chrissie out, and perhaps that someone had known she was going to be crowned that night.
The fairest of them all.
Cate clutched the folder closer to her chest as someone emerged from the main entrance, the one used by the public, and almost collided with her as the woman rushed down the steps. Cate felt the petite young woman’s lank, unwashed hair against her hand, caught a glimpse of hooded eyes, a sallow complexion. She thought for a moment of creatures confined to dark spaces, scurrying out into daylight, an act of inordinate courage. Someone’s in trouble, she thought, as she went around to the side door, tapped in the keycode, pushed it open and stepped into the lift. She shifted her feet impatiently as it began to rise.
As she headed towards the incident room, she saw PC Stockdale at his desk, and he was watching her. She went up to him and started, ‘Len, you won’t believe what I found out. I went to speak to—’
He opened his mouth, but Cate didn’t give him a chance to cut in. ‘I was right,’ she said, ‘it was staged, just as I thought. I went to see a lecturer from the university and she knew all about it. We went through everything—’ She indicated the folder she held.
He didn’t even glance at it. ‘Easy, tiger. Don’t tell me you’re still chasing fairy tales.’
‘But it fits, Len: the crown, the hair, the nails …’
He let out a spurt of air. ‘The magic godmother, the dwarves – you been off with the fairies, Cate? Hope you haven’t been imbibing fairy dust – there are laws about that sort of thing, you know.’
Cate waved his comments away. ‘But this is it, Len, I’m telling you. She even knew about the toe.’
‘Whoa – wait a minute.’ His expression changed. ‘You told someone about the toe? That’s confidential information, Cate, you heard the SIO. That information was to be withheld, from the press, witnesses, from everybody.’
‘That’s just it: I didn’t tell her about it; it she t
old me. It is the old fairy story, or a version of it, anyway. She knew exactly what we should be looking for. The stepmother in the tale tells a huntsman to go out and kill her daughter, right? And he’s to send back a bottle of blood stoppered with her toe as proof she’s dead.’
He frowned. ‘Okay, I admit that’s weird. I’d be careful how you tell Heath, though. He’ll rip you a new one if he thinks you’ve been blabbing about the toe. And I’d give him half an hour, if I were you.’ His thin-lipped expression gave way to a slow smile. ‘Looks like they’ve got the bastard.’
‘What?’ Cate was startled. She had the evidence they needed to break this case. It was neat: it worked. It could be a real opening in her career – and it would give Chrissie Farrell the justice she deserved.
‘It’s Cosgrove,’ Stocky said, settling back in his chair. ‘He only lied about his alibi, didn’t he? His wife’s been in: seems he didn’t go straight home that night – he didn’t get back until the early hours. She couldn’t give him away quick enough. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and all that.’ He relished this last, rolling the words around in his mouth.
Cate looked at him blankly. Hell hath no fury – yes, she could understand that, but with Mrs Farrell in mind, not this Mrs Cosgrove. She remembered the woman who had brushed by her as she approached the station, her downcast eyes and sallow skin. Had that been the teacher’s wife? She didn’t look full of sound and fury – if anything, she had looked defeated.
‘What do you mean, a woman scorned? Why’d she change her mind – has he admitted to seeing Chrissie?’
Stocky shrugged. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘but the wife’s certainly heard the rumours.’
Cate felt misgivings at that. As far as she knew, no one had managed to trace that particular story to its roots; even if it looked the most likely option, she didn’t quite trust it. She looked at Stocky now, the satisfaction in his face, and wondered how far it was prompted by thoughts of his own children, the things he’d do to anyone who harmed them. But perhaps her own scepticism was just rooted in her desire to be the one whose instincts were right. Vanity. She sighed. Neither she nor Len Stockdale were important here, she had to remember that; the important thing was Chrissie Farrell. She drew a breath. ‘So what now, Len? Are they bringing him in?’
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