Path of Needles

by Alison Littlewood

  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?’

  ‘Why would he leave half the clues way across the site? I think he messed up, that’s why. He didn’t mean to leave the girl in the ditch. I think he went to the platform first and set up the dish and the bracelet before going back for the body. Then either he got disturbed or he got spooked. He might have thought he’d been spotted – I’ve got people going door-to-door on Manygates, see if that turns anything up. Certainly he didn’t count on how difficult it would be to get the girl up to the keep.’ He looked at Cate. ‘You saw those steps?’

  Dumbly, she nodded. Why hadn’t she seen it? The steps had been hard enough late at night when she wasn’t carrying anything. And the killer had never split a scene before; he had created his tableaux in a single place.

  Alice was nodding too, as if she had seen it all along.

  Cate exclaimed, ‘Her dress was dirty. I don’t think that would have been deliberate – it did look as if there’d been some difficulty moving her.’

  ‘All right, so he has a plan, to emulate the princess in the castle, only he can’t carry it off, or something gets in the way. It begs the question: why he didn’t dump her at night?’

  They fell silent and again Cate mentally kicked herself. Heath had something – the others had all been posed at night, hadn’t they? This was an important change – so why? The castle might have been an inescapable choice to meet the demands of the story, but with its elevation it was the most exposed scene yet. She remembered getting out of the car and turning to see the houses of Manygates Lane looking back at her. Maybe he had been disturbed; maybe he’d looked out at those same houses and panicked. Certainly it would have been easier in darkness.

  ‘You know,’ said Alice, ‘there’s another thing that’s been troubling me. I can’t seem to get my head around it.’

  Heath waited. It was Cate who asked, ‘What?’

  ‘She was woken by the prince,’ said Alice, ‘in the story. It’s the part everyone knows: Sleeping Beauty is woken with a kiss.’

  ‘And?’ Heath said.

  ‘Well, the girl at the castle last night was – didn’t you say she was supposed to be alive when she was found? That someone tried to give her the kiss of life?’

  Heath’s cheek twitched. Cate straightened in her chair.

  ‘But instead of waking, she died. It’s like – the killer is saying something. Laughing at you, maybe; making some kind of point. Only I can’t work out what, or how.’

  Cate stared: there was something she was supposed to see. Like the killer is saying something – laughing at you. Yes, that was how it felt. She looked back at Heath.

  He thought before he spoke. ‘The killer couldn’t have known the girl was going to die at that particular time. If he’d strangled her, she’d be dead already. If she was poisoned – he’d have to be some sort of poisons expert to get the dosage right, and even then, I doubt it could be made to work. And how would he even know when she’d be found?’ He looked at Cate, then Alice. ‘No, I don’t think she was supposed to be left alive, not really. And I’m not sure she was; I think the witness got confused, scared maybe, thought he’d felt a pulse when there wasn’t one. If she was alive, I don’t think it was deliberate. I think whoever this is has started to slip, to make mistakes, and that’s all the better for us. It could be the way we catch him.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Alice, ‘that’s it, isn’t it? Or it could be.’ Her eyes were shining. ‘He didn’t dump her at night. Why not? Anyone could have caught him. If he did use poison—’

  Heath made a sound in the back of his throat. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘He mistimed it,’ Alice said. There was a note of triumph in her voice. ‘That’
s it! He could have planned to dump her at night, or at least when it was a bit darker; he still needed her to be found. But the poison worked quicker than he thought. If he wanted any chance of her death being witnessed, he had to rush it.’

  ‘Hence the scrambled scene,’ said Heath.

  Cate swallowed. She opened her mouth to say, ‘We don’t know—’ but Alice was speaking again.

  ‘There is one other thing,’ she said, and she pulled a face. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I got back last night. I don’t know if it’s relevant or not – I hope it’s not. In some variants of the story, Sleeping Beauty wasn’t woken by a kiss at all. That’s just the popular version, the one that became acceptable, that got made into films and put into books, because the original story – it was much harsher, more violent.’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Heath.

  ‘In early variants the girl sleeps on, even after the prince has arrived. He sees her and falls in love with her all right, but not in the way you’d think. He doesn’t kiss her; at least, he doesn’t just kiss her.’

  They stared.

  ‘It’s another variant you could interpret as belonging to older stories yet – stories of myth and renewal of the earth. Sleeping Beauty – or Aurora, which means “the dawn” – gets pregnant by the prince while she’s asleep. She gives birth to twins called Sun and Moon. And one of the babies sucks a splinter from her mother’s finger, waking her at last. So the dawn returns, with the cycle of birth and life, and everything is renewed.’

  ‘In which case the whole thing about the kiss doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s a coincidence.’ Heath looked at Alice, but she had nothing else to tell.

  Then a fist hammered on the door and Dan walked in. ‘We know who she is,’ he said. ‘She was reported missing. Her husband is here. He’s waiting outside.’

  *

  The man was called Ben Robertson, and Cate could see from the look on his face that he knew: he was trying to cling to what little hope he had, but he’d heard what they’d found at Sandal Castle, and that hope was fading. His wife was called Ellen, he said; they had been recently married and they were trying for a child. He glanced around when he said this, as though asking them if it was real, if it was still going to happen. No one answered.

  He stared down at the floor between his feet and his eyes went distant. Cate knew he was looking at the future he had built in his mind, the one he could still almost see.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as tears welled in his eyes.

  He was a solicitor, and worked in one of the new high-rise offices on the outskirts of Leeds. He had left Ellen behind at the house that morning, and he hadn’t said goodbye because he hadn’t wanted to wake her.

  ‘It has a burglar alarm,’ he said, bewildered, as if that should have taken care of everything. ‘And the doors were locked, I locked up behind me when I left. I know I did.’ His eyes hazed over as if doubt had entered for the first time. ‘I did.’

  The house hadn’t been locked when he’d returned. The alarm hadn’t been set. The house was empty.

  ‘I got home and she wasn’t there – but her car was there, her mobile phone. Her coat was there.’ He went on recounting the things she’d left behind, as if they could coalesce around his wife and bring her back.

  ‘She must have opened the door,’ he said at last, and a note of something else entered his voice, annoyance maybe, an irritation both everyday and domestic, as if she’d left her dressing gown over a chair or forgotten to bring in the milk; as if everything was normal. Then it was gone and the tears fell, shining on his cheeks, making him look much younger.

  When he found the empty house he’d waited for her to come home, and when she didn’t, he’d started to make calls: her parents, her friends, but none of them had heard from her, and so he’d called the police. Early this morning, he’d heard it on the radio, what had been found just a few miles away from their home, and he’d come straight to the station.

  Slowly, he pulled a photograph from his pocket. Instead of passing it to Heath, he gave it to Cate, looking at her as though she’d understand, as though she could fix this.

  She saw a happy woman, her face framed by a wedding veil, the white gauze setting off her smile. She recognised her at once – but perhaps she was wrong; she hadn’t spent much time with the body. She passed the picture to Heath and he examined it. She saw the look in his eyes. Eventually, he met Robertson’s gaze. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Alice sat through the tutorials, her mind drifting. She couldn’t concentrate. One of her students was going through her idea for her dissertation, reciting a textbook feminist theory of ‘Cinderella’. For a moment she felt disorientated, as if she were back in Heath’s office, trying to theorise about how someone had taken a young woman and killed her. She drew a deep sigh, then realised her student had paused, was waiting for a response.

  ‘Good work,’ she said automatically. ‘You’re on the right lines. Now I’d like you to take that theory and apply it to some different tales, put your own ideas and opinions into it. I don’t want you to refer to a textbook for this one. Just have a good think about where the theory fits and where it doesn’t.’

  The girl nodded and gathered her papers. Alice pressed her lips together; she would probably be on the internet as soon as she left the room, scouring websites for other people’s ideas and how she could use them.

  She felt a sudden pain in her forehead and pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. She tried to remember a time when she liked this job, when she’d enjoyed sharing her knowledge of the tales she loved. And she had loved them, ever since she’d shared them with her mother. She frowned. That thought didn’t help.

  Was that why she clung to these stories so much? Because it was a way back to her childhood, the way they had both used to be? But the truth was, happy endings didn’t happen. The more time passed, the easier it was for it all to slip away; that was what had happened to her mother, everything leaving her word by word, betrayed by her own mind. There had been no wicked witch, no wolf, no dragon. Not until now.

  Alice roused herself. She couldn’t dwell on this, not any longer. It was almost time for the next tutorial and she had to concentrate on her work, be a good teacher. She had to continue to encourage her students to discover these tales for themselves, to form their own theories; to make them see.

  And then Alice thought of what she had said to her last student to make her do just that, and she started to remember, and to see how blind she had been.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The briefing was quieter than the last, the mood more sombre, as if everyone knew they were facing something larger than they had first thought, something that wasn’t going to be wrapped up and delivered any time soon.

  But it has to be, thought Cate. The look in Ben Robertson’s eyes said that it had to be. They couldn’t allow this to happen to anyone else.

  ‘Quiet,’ said Heath, although nobody had been talking, and everyone sat a little straighter in their seat. He was running through the initial reports, his voice as rough as it always had been, but lower. His manner was quiet too, and his movements slow, as if deliberating every motion.

  ‘There was a cut on her finger,’ he said. ‘That was one of the first things they found. It’s not a severe cut, but the girl in the story pricked her finger, so we suspect it was done purposefully to point up the “Sleeping Beauty” scenario.’

  The name of the fairy tale seemed odd coming from someone as bluff and matter-of-fact as Heath. Even the humour had gone. Perhaps it was a sign, thought Cate, of how seriously he had begun to take her theory, of how seriously he had begun to take Alice. He had called Cate into his office just before the briefing and asked her to take on the role of Alice’s liaison officer. She had practically been doing the job anyway; now he obviously wanted to be able to call on the lecturer’s expertise at any moment while making sure she wasn’t overwhelmed by
the things she saw. Unless he just wanted her to be in a better position to keep an eye on her, of course.

  Cate felt a stab of guilt. Alice surely did need the extra support. She had sounded so sure of herself while talking Heath through her way of seeing, but she was a civilian, and she was probably putting a brave face on it. And now, because of Alice, she herself had been given an additional role to play; although of course that wasn’t the important thing.

  Heath continued, ‘She’d also had a blow to the head, though that’s not what killed her. It may have been a means of overpowering her, initially. And like Teresa King, there were ligature marks on her wrists.

  ‘The full toxicology screen is still in progress, but there was partially digested plant material in her digestive tract that has been identified as poison hemlock, or Conium maculatum. It’s fairly common, and contains extremely toxic alkaloids – apparently it’s fairly widely known as being a poisonous plant. It is likely that this was the cause of death.

  ‘Now, there’s more. Poison hemlock causes what they call ascending paralysis – in other words, it freezes the victim from the lower limbs upwards: first her feet, then her legs … eventually it reaches the lungs and you get respiratory arrest. It’s fast-acting and there are no side-effects like with many poisons – no vomiting, frothing at the mouth and so on. It would have been relatively clean, almost as if she was falling asleep from the feet upwards.’

  Sleeping Beauty, thought Cate.

  ‘There were other signs of force besides the bruising to her wrists. It wasn’t obvious at first, but inspection under ultraviolet has shown up bruising around her mouth and abrasions on her gums, so it could be that she was forced to eat the hemlock.

  ‘There are sheets coming round – more information about the plant. Apparently it’s supposed to look a bit like parsley. I wouldn’t know; I’m not a fucking chef. If you see anything suspicious, watch out for the purple blotches on the stems – they’re known as Socrates’ blood, since he died of hemlock poisoning. Read it, memorise it. Don’t fucking eat any.’