Path of Needles

by Alison Littlewood

  Cate closed the file and pushed herself up from her seat. She didn’t need to make a note of the address; the place was engraved in her mind, that simple white square. As she left the building she saw Stocky doing his endless paperwork; he saw her and tossed his head, but he didn’t stop her and she didn’t wait for him to do so. She wasn’t sure if his gesture had been meant as an apology or a greeting or something else, but she didn’t look back as she slipped out of the door.

  Her mind raced as she pulled out of the car park and headed for Newmillerdam, forcing herself to drive at a steady pace. There were too many things she didn’t want to think about: she knew Stocky would think she was mad going off like this, but then, he already did. Heath would put it down to insubordination, have her disciplined. She didn’t think she could handle that, the smear on her record; it would be as if her ambitions – her dreams – were already finished. She had heard of it happening to other people, cautionary tales; she had never thought she might one day be counted among them. When she’d heard the stories, she’d thought they’d been stupid. Was she being stupid, now? Probably.

  She gripped the wheel tighter. She had seen the dead birds, held them in her hands. It had to mean something.

  She kept on down the road, passing cars travelling in the other direction – familiar makes and models that spoke of a world that still knew normalcy, domestic ordinariness.

  What are you doing?

  The road came up on the left, unseen until the last second; she slammed on the brakes, hauled the wheel around. She squeezed her eyes shut involuntarily as the tyres dry-slid across the earth before gripping, then looked up to see dust settling on the windscreen. This could hardly be called a road at all; it was simply an opening in the fence and a gap between the trees with a track worn into it, narrower than she’d expected, and darker too.

  So much for the two neat lines she’d seen on the plan. The rutted earth appeared to head directly into a broad oak that stood in its path. She stared at it a moment longer, narrowing her eyes, dimly realising that she could hear something through the glass: birdsong.

  There was a faint double pathway, about the width of car tyres, leading around the oak and into the wood.

  Cate pressed down on the accelerator and the car rocked into motion, jouncing over the uneven ground. There was a dip where the track skirted the tree, and she caught her breath; she could too easily imagine the vehicle getting stuck here and having to call for someone to tow it out. The long grass was full of hidden twigs which tapped and pinged against the undercarriage. This wasn’t a lane anyone would venture down accidentally. It looked like part of the wood; it was hard to see how a vehicle could get through at all. She accelerated harder as she turned the wheel, anxious to keep up the momentum, and the car headed upwards once more and she glimpsed a structure ahead of her through the trees.

  There was a shed at the end of the track. It was hard to make out, but the shade of green it had been painted was just a little too bright, too strident against the woodland. As she approached she saw there was older paint showing through in patches, green and brown and the nondescript grey of old wood, edged by a metal framework that was blotched with rust.

  She pulled up at the side of it. The shed was large and long, big enough to keep a car inside, easily big enough for a workshop. Ahead of it, under the first of the trees, another car was parked. Cate thought she had seen it before.

  She stayed sitting behind the wheel for a long moment. There was no movement, no one there that she could see. She turned to look at the shed. It was a patchwork thing, the boarding irregular, although it had been maintained after a fashion. The roof was reinforced by corrugated-metal panels, some long since rusted, some still streaked with silver. A fresh coat of bitumen ran in a low strip around the bottom. There was a large window set into the side, the glass intact but coated in a fine net of cobwebs.

  Cate opened the door and stepped out.

  At once birdsong swelled around her, underlined by the constant susurration of branches shifting in the breeze. She smelled the woodland air, an accumulation of growth and decay and fresh sap; beneath it something else, at once sweet and bitter. She could almost taste it: rotting vegetation, maybe, or a dead animal lying in a ditch, being steadily dismantled by maggots or beetles.

  She went to the parked car first. It was empty. The colour of the aged Volvo was almost masked by a fine layer of dust. She knew she had seen it before, an ordinary car on an ordinary drive on an ordinary street. She could picture it there, imagined the way he would carefully wash off each speck of grime after visiting this place. Would he have to wash it inside too? She peered into the passenger window, checking for traces of anything that looked like blood or hair, but she couldn’t see anything. The back of her neck prickled and she glanced around, but there was nothing, no sign of the driver or anyone else.

  She turned to the outbuilding. The window was dark, reflecting the sky, a lacing of light and fine leaves that was surprising, for a moment, in its beauty. From here she had a better view of the front and she noticed for the first time the roll of barbed wire that was blocking the door.

  She stared at it. So the shed was secure, no one there; but then, it could be some kind of trick. Maybe he was inside it after all, had somehow pulled the wire up to the door after he’d gone in, making it look like the place was empty. But if he was in there, wouldn’t she have seen a light as she pulled up? Or had the sound of her engine warned him of her approach?

  Of course, he might be watching her now, not from inside the shed but out there, in the woods. She looked around at the trees and saw only a silent circle. All she would hear was the movement of air in the branches, the ever-present birdsong and her own breathing. She had to take a look; she couldn’t keep standing here, just waiting for something to happen.

  She went to the side of the shed, keeping an eye on the door as she passed it. Before she reached the window she listened again, trying to hear any movement from inside. Then she stepped in front of the glass, cupped her hands around her face and peered in.

  The shed was empty. There was only the low hulked shape of a table, its outline softened by fabric that had been draped over it. There were objects under the covering, bulking it out in shapes she couldn’t recognise. Behind that were shelves filled with everyday workshop detritus: tins of paint with bent and spattered lids, slivers of cut-off wood, hand-tools – a hammer, an assortment of screwdrivers, pliers. The cloth covering the table was blotched with what was probably old paint.

  She stretched, tried to see further inside. There wasn’t much else that she could make out. A pile of twisted and broken metal leaned against one wall and she thought at once of birdcages, an empty aviary. Next to that, half lost in shadow, was what appeared to be a welder’s mask. The visor was mottled, as though splashed with something that had stuck and smeared and not been cleaned away. Cate squinted. If she could see it more closely – but she couldn’t, could she?

  She took a half-step back, took a deep breath. She tried to decide if that smell – the unpleasant smell – was stronger here. Now she wasn’t even sure she could smell it at all, or if the taint in the air merely came from the sour taste at the back of her throat.

  She walked around the shed slowly, still listening for any sounds, walking through tufts of grass, loose stones and pieces of old wood, fragments of concrete. There were no other windows. She finished at the front of the structure and looked at the door, which was made of wood and set flush into its frame in a neat finish. The barbed wire kept her from going too close, but now she could see the padlock that fastened it; it looked large and strong and new.

  She examined the wire, a wide roll; it too appeared to be new. The wire had been fastened to a long plank of wood at its base with large staples. She bent and grabbed the end of the wood, shifting it outwards. The wire came with it, roiling with the motion, and she jerked her head away from the sharp points.

  Now she could edge between the wire and the door
, but she saw at once that wasn’t any use: she would never break that padlock, not without the right equipment. She took hold of it, feeling the metal cold and heavy in her hands. It was a combination lock, and grime clung to the crevices, but it hadn’t rusted, and didn’t look brittle. The door had a small rusted keyhole set into it. She pulled back on the padlock. The door didn’t even rattle in its frame: it was obviously mortice-locked too.

  She let the padlock fall back and it clanged against the wood, an incongruous sound. She looked about her, sure the noise would have brought someone, caused something to change, but it had not.

  That was it, as far as she could come. She had no way inside, no search warrant and no back-up. There was nobody in danger to justify her breaking in, nobody here at all that she could see. She flicked another brief glance over her shoulder.

  She went back around to the window and scanned the interior once more, the tools and the old metal and the stains on the table. Then she focused on an object sitting towards the end of one of the shelves. It was shiny, new-minted; that was the reason she’d noticed it. She couldn’t make out what it was, not from this angle, but it chimed with something in the back of her mind. She leaned against the wall, momentarily closing her eyes. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t come to the surface; it was just another dead-end she could connect with nothing.

  She took a deep breath. Then she walked away from the hut and into the trees. She scanned the ground until she found what she wanted.

  The sound of the window shattering was an insult that rang into the clear air. It resolved into the sprinkling of fragments of glass before fading into silence. The smell assaulted her at once, much more strongly: old blood and heat and darkness, and Cate’s throat convulsed, rejecting it. She staggered back, spun around. No one had come; no one had seen.

  She was still holding the rock and she used it to break away the glass teeth jutting from the wooden frame. She would just take a look; it wouldn’t take long. Then she would know. If there was nothing here she needn’t even report back. No one need know what she had done – breaking procedure, ignoring orders. This would be dismissed as nothing more than mindless vandalism, an anonymous prank.

  She took off her jacket and spread it across the window frame, covering the sharp edges, then she gripped its edge and pulled herself up. She got her waist across it, the wood digging into her ribcage. She moved quickly, swinging her leg around; once she’d got her knee onto the sill it was easy to edge across and into the drop. She fell hard on to the floor, landing in a crouch.

  She stayed there, one hand braced against the cold concrete, while her breathing slowed. She shifted her fingers against the floor. It was damp, clammy, and a little sticky. She drew back her hand.

  She straightened, breathed in. For a second the stench was too much: too thick and too real in her mouth; then, almost at once, it became easier. When it had been mingled with the sweet air of outside, the scent of other places and other possibilities, she had recoiled; now it was all there was. It coated the back of her throat.

  Despite the light from the window, Cate still couldn’t make out what the shapes on the table were. The cloth covering them was made of canvas that was spattered and grimy. She didn’t want to touch it. She was no longer sure the stains it bore were paint.

  She edged along the wall to her left, not wanting to touch anything. Other scents were coming through beneath the meat stink: paint thinner and woodstain, the earthy scent of plant pots, the sharper note of sweat, and something chemical: bleach. She reached the shelves on the opposite wall and saw there was a large container of the stuff, much bigger than the one she used at home. Why so much? She became conscious of her own breathing, coming short and fast; her rapid heartbeat.

  The next item on the shelf was a battered cardboard box with a picture of a bird on it. Cate leaned in, caught the dusty scent of seed. Further along was a glass bottle, an old one with a myriad tiny bubbles caught in it. It was half full of some kind of liquid. There was nothing to identify its contents.

  She edged between the shelves and the table until she reached the object she’d glimpsed through the window. It looked quite ordinary at first. It had a short wooden handle into which shining metal had been set, like a small garden fork, but there the resemblance ended. The prongs had been hammered and filed out of recognition so that they were shaped into short, close-set spikes. They looked sharp. Cate reached out a finger to test them, pulled back before she touched it. She knew at once what it was and what it had been used to do. She turned, slowly, looked at the table, imagined a girl lying there. The object was a claw – he had made a claw, and used it to tear open the flesh of Teresa King’s belly. She squinted at it: she thought she could see something dark caught in the indentations where the metal was set into its wooden handle.

  Cate spun back, fixing her eyes on the cloth covering the table. It had moved, she was sure of it. Her breath became ragged and she forced herself to be silent. She took a step, the canvas twitched again and she choked back a spurt of laughter; she looked down and saw where the cloth hung to the floor, where her foot had caught it. There was nothing there, no one inside the shed but her, and she should get out, now, call for back-up. She glanced at the window, narrowing her eyes against the glare. If someone came, she’d be trapped in here – but there was something else she wanted to see.

  On the side wall, almost lost in shadow, she could see patches, too regular and too ordered to have been formed by stains or damp. She moved closer. She thought she knew what they were, but it wasn’t until she was up close that she could see the photographs pinned to a noticeboard. There were people in them, women she recognised: Chrissie Farrell, her beauty framed by that black hair and a golden crown, her skin paled by a too-bright camera flash. Teresa King, her crumpled form covered by a virulent red hood. Ellen Robertson, lying on the ground, though no flash had been used and the picture was grainy, the girl almost lost in shadow.

  The next picture was different. It didn’t show a dead girl. It showed someone alive, her bearing serene, walking across a clearing sprinkled with white flowers. It was Alice Hyland. Fingers of cold reached down Cate’s back. She had seen Alice walking in just such a way, wearing just such an expression: she could almost have taken the picture herself.

  Thank God, she thought.

  She strode to the window, reached for her jacket, felt for her mobile. Then she paused; she had to catch her breath, think about what she was going to say. And more than anything else, she wanted to be outside when she did it, away from this place, clean air on her skin and in her lungs.

  She braced herself against the edge of the table and climbed out of the window, almost spilling to the ground in her haste. It didn’t matter; she was in the wood again, and everything was as quiet as before. She grabbed her jacket from the ledge and took a few steps until she stood under the edge of the trees. She could hear the soft whisper of leaves, the piercing notes of birds. She took a few deep breaths and started to feel better. She would call Heath, get some help, have him bring the team.

  As she began to do so, she stared at the ground. There were flowers growing there; she recognised ragged robin, celandines. Her eyes widened. Another plant was growing among them, taller than the rest, a froth of small white flowers standing proud above its leafy stems. It looked a little like parsley, but its stems were blotched with purple.

  Alice gathered herself. She made the call and prepared herself to wait.

  Heath was short with her on the phone, but he listened, and now he was on his way. At least they had time. Levitt might have been watching Alice Hyland, but they had snatched her out of his reach; she knew the police had gone to fetch her, albeit for all the wrong reasons. And whatever the girl had been put through, at least that meant she was safe.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Alice stood in front of the lean-to. She felt a long way from the police, from her own home, and yet she had a sense that she was supposed to be here. The structure in front of her w
as nothing like the one in her dream but somehow it felt the same. She couldn’t see inside it, but she could picture the book as clearly as if it were in front of her, its wooden pages like something that had grown. There was something she was supposed to find there, something she was supposed to understand; still, she didn’t want to go inside.

  She looked around and saw only the trees, silent now. Even the constant noise of birdsong had ceased. There was no one there, and after all, she would only be a moment. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to move. The thought flashed into her mind that she should go back, find the police, bring them here. Then a small bright shape flew down and perched over the doorway and looked at her. That decided it: if the blue bird was unafraid, she must be alone. It surely wouldn’t have come here for anyone else.

  She went to the doorway and looked in. The walls were neatly woven of branches and sunlight filtered through them in a soft glow. It was soothing. The latticework curved around so that it felt natural, more like a cave than a room, and it charmed her. It was as if part of her was still in that other place, the one she’d seen in her dream; the place that belonged only to stories. She took a step forward, breathing in the fragrant scent of cut wood, relishing the cool shade. There was nothing inside but a couple of chairs; it was as she had thought: the place was empty. She walked in, looking more closely at the way it had been made. Someone had cut thick supports which arched over her head, bound together where they met the trunk and the lowest branches of the oak tree. Between them smaller twigs had been woven or tied, and there were flashes of colour among them: the wilting heads of wild flowers, just beginning to droop. The floor rustled, shifting under her feet. It was made of bulrushes, which must have been gathered by the lake. It smelled like springtime.