Path of Needles (26 page)

Alice smiled and kept after it. It was as if she were a child again, following her instincts, believing in magic. Anything could happen; if the last days had showed her nothing else, they had taught her that. She put a hand to her pocket and found the feather. It was there, it had been given to
her
. It was real; the bird had come to her, and that had meant something.

She could see the bird clearly now, fluttering from branch to branch, and she followed.

The little creature led Alice through the bluebell glades and onwards into denser woodland. She didn’t see the clearing with the white flowers and she didn’t see anyone else. After a while she stopped trying to keep the bird in view; it was difficult to see, and anyway, she could hear its song.

She took the feather from her pocket, looked at it, replaced it again.

They went on, Alice uncertain now as to whether the bird was really leading her or merely fleeing her. Eventually they turned, skirting the bottom of the lake and passing into the woodland on the other side. This was drawing closer to where the girl had been found, and Alice peered
into the trees. She hadn’t realised she had come this far. What did she think she was doing? But somehow she couldn’t just turn and leave the bird and go home again having understood nothing.

Anyway, the police still had a presence on this side of the lake; it would be safe – and surely no one involved would dare come back here. Alice breathed in and the air smelled fresh, redolent of new growth. It was all right, she
knew
this place. It was
her
place.

The bird began to sing again, high and insistent, and Alice ducked under a branch and headed up the slope once more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

‘So what you’re telling me,’ Heath said, laying down his hand on top of a stack of files, ‘is you’ve given the guy a new alibi. He was with this girl that night.’

‘It looks that way, sir,’ Dan said.

‘And all we have is a jealous schoolkid; not even the same girl who ended up dead.’

‘Sir.’

Heath drew a deep breath. ‘All right. Well, at least we know for sure.’ He shifted his gaze to look out of the window. ‘So we’ve still got to find the bastard.’

Cate kept quiet. Heath was right: she’d gone chasing a lead and found only a broken man. But that was progress of a sort wasn’t it? They’d closed off one line of enquiry. Now they had to find another way of catching the killer. She thought of Alice. What would she have said about this? Perhaps she too would have gone to the house expecting a villain: a wolf. But that wasn’t Matt Cosgrove.

She bit her lip. It was easy, in fairy tales. Villains wore
their evil on the outside, didn’t they? But before all this had happened, when Cosgrove still presumably had his looks – that’s when she could have believed he might be a murderer. Now, with his pallor and his thinness – now he was vindicated, the innocent man – his looks had gone. And they, the police, had done this.

‘So a schoolgirl’s got a crush.’ Heath spoke slowly, his gaze still miles away. Neither Dan nor Cate had moved; they both knew that Heath was thinking out loud. ‘And you say it was his wife who found the book.’

‘She did,’ said Dan. ‘She defended him to the hilt.’

‘Did she now?’

Dan simply waited.

‘She didn’t at the time though, did she? When Cosgrove got back late, when she got wind of the rumours – she obviously thought there was more to it than that, or she wouldn’t have come in to speak to us.’ He paused. ‘You don’t think the other girl – Chrissie – might have been around that night too? That she threw herself at him after the other one had gone?’

Cate frowned.

‘But we’ve been watching him,’ Heath continued. ‘We know
he
didn’t snatch Ellen Robertson or Teresa King.’

‘No.’

‘But someone else did.’

She watched the words being batted from Heath to Dan and back again, realised she was witnessing an old routine: Heath bouncing thoughts off a member of the
team. She wasn’t sure he was even taking them seriously himself.

‘The thing is,’ he continued, ‘while you were off talking to the guy, Intel turfed up another connection.’ He let them take that in. ‘It looks like Cosgrove and the third victim – Ellen Robertson – may have known each other. Both were members of the same gym, and according to what we know of the woman’s schedule, they would have been there at roughly the same time of day, late afternoon.’

Cate stared.

‘Odd, isn’t it?’

Her thoughts raced. Ellen had only just been married. According to her acquaintances, she’d been happy. Maybe she’d met Cosgrove, said hello over the treadmill – but more than that? She surely wouldn’t have had a relationship with him or anyone else.

But she’d left her friends behind, hadn’t she? She’d moved here to be with her husband. How much time would she have spent alone? Could she really have become so bored she’d started to see someone else so quickly?

‘Cate?’ Heath raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Thoughts?’

She sighed, shook her head. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ she said. ‘I suppose – it’s
possible
they might have met, become involved somehow. But after – I mean, it doesn’t really feel right. A quick fling, maybe: perhaps they just got carried away, made a mistake.’

‘And she winds up pregnant.’

She stared at him.

Heath pushed himself up but made no move to leave. Dan stood too, and so did Cate. ‘This is all supposition, Cate, you know that, don’t you? We can hardly go back to him now unless we want to be up on harassment charges. It’s all circumstantial. Anyway, what if it wasn’t
him?
’

There was something about the way he emphasised the word, and suddenly Cate realised what he meant.

‘We can still keep an eye on them.’ Heath headed for the door and Dan followed, but Cate remained where she was, staring at the whiteboard in front of her. There were names, times, dates, with lines connecting them like some strange family tree. And Mrs Cosgrove was there, her name written with the rest, a straight clear arrow connecting it with her husband’s.

Jealousy
, Cate thought.
Jealousy, not vanity
.

She gave a spurt of laughter. Almost from the very beginning, Alice had seen it: she had always said, albeit for the wrong reasons, that the killer must have been a woman. And yet – all the talk about fairy tales, and now they might have discovered a real connection, Cate felt as if they were making up stories.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The final slope was steep, taking Alice upwards, away from the lake. From here it wasn’t such a distance to the place Little Red had been found. The arboretum was away to her right, the collection of rare trees, each with an exotic name written at its foot, their novelty overshadowed now by bad memories. Ahead of her, if she kept going, she would reach open fields.

A sharp sound drew her head around; the blue bird was sitting in a low branch close by, and it was watching her. Black eyes, tightly curled claws. It turned and whirred away through the trees.

She slipped her hand into her pocket, took out the feather. It was crushed, and the curved edge was not so smooth any longer; there was nothing special about it now except its colour. But she had come this far. She replaced the feather and followed.

Now she couldn’t see the bird at all. She ducked under the branches, feeling them claw at her hair, and pulled
free. Her feet sank into the soft ground. When she listened, she could hear nothing; the bird had abandoned her. She probably couldn’t even find it again, and there would be nothing to do but go home, her hair a mess, her feet dirty, feeling foolish. At least she wasn’t the only one to be fascinated with the creature. The birdwatcher would have walked miles for a glimpse of what she’d seen. And yet it had felt as if there should be more.

She pressed on, battling the low, springy branches. She should get out of this thicket and go home. She was alone in the wood where a dead girl had been dumped, and the bird’s spell was broken; she didn’t feel safe any longer.

A dog barked somewhere up ahead and she jumped. There came a low whistle and the dog fell silent.

Alice looked behind her, in the direction of the lake. She couldn’t see the water from here, only more trees. Her heart beat rapidly.

The undergrowth rustled and the animal she’d heard emerged in front of her. The dog was squat and powerfully built, its body black, its eyes an even rich brown. She could hear it scenting for her and she realised she had seen it before; she even knew where, though it had been only once. It had been the last time she had followed the blue bird; she had followed its owner to the police cordon by the road.

‘He won’t bite,’ a voice called out, but it was not the voice Alice had expected to hear: it belonged to a woman, and it sounded friendly. She’d seen the dog with a man
last time, hadn’t she? The animal withdrew and Alice took a deep breath, pushed the undergrowth out of her way and stepped into a gap in the trees.

The woman standing there was older than Alice, and shorter, her hair dyed an improbable orange-brown. She sounded almost sheepish when she spoke again. ‘I know I shouldn’t be here,’ she said, ‘not really. I come for the berries, you know.’ She held something out. It was an old margarine tub, with little pellet shapes rattling inside it. ‘I come in from t’other road – from the south. There’s a hole in the wall. Can’t be bothered with the police an’ all. What would they want with me?’ She tilted back her head and let out a shrill laugh as if she’d said something funny.

Alice found the tension draining from her shoulders and she gave a small smile.

‘Cat got your tongue, love?’

She smiled fully this time. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Nice day for a walk, in’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘Duke won’t hurt you.’

‘No.’

The woman thrust the tub towards Alice. ‘Junipers,’ she said in explaination, and she tipped back her head and shook with mirth.

Alice glanced at the dog. It was facing away from her, completely uninterested. It let out a low grunt, like an old man settling into a comfortable chair.

‘I like my gin, me,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t know about you, love, but a tipple sets me right up. Our Gary, he says it’s bad for me, but I say with the juniper –
fresh
juniper, mind, not just what’s in there already – it’s like one of my five a day.’

‘Is that your son?’ asked Alice.

‘Ay, love, he is. Interfering things, sons. Have you got any?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’ The woman’s face re-formed into an expression of sympathy.

Alice stirred. ‘So that’s why you come here – for berries?’ She glanced around and saw a tree that stood apart from the others. It looked different too, its foliage a deeper, richer green, and it was smaller, only a little taller than Alice herself. There was a sign at its foot, but not like the ones in the arboretum: this was older, darkened, and she couldn’t read it. She remembered hearing somewhere that there was another arboretum, an older one, long since subsumed into the rest of the woods.

‘I planted one in my garden,’ said the woman, ‘and it grew, but it’s not nearly as fine as this. The berries wouldn’t flavour a cup of tea, never mind my gin. I know it’s not far from where— Well, it doesn’t do to talk about that, does it?’ She reached out, caught a berry between her thumb and forefinger and pulled. Her movements were awkward, her misshapen hands arthritic. The branch
clung on then let go, springing away, and the woman tried to roll the fat purple berry between her fingers.

‘It’s a
juniper
tree,’ Alice whispered under her breath.

‘Are you all right, love? You seem a bit out of it.’

‘Yes, I’m quite all right. Sorry. I’m a bit tired, that’s all.’

‘You should try gin – with juniper, of course. It’d set you right up.’

‘Maybe I will.’ Alice looked about as she spoke; she felt she had lost her bearings somehow, as if the woodland had changed around her.

‘As long as you’re not thinkin’ o’ gettin’ preggers.’

‘What? Oh – no, I’m not.’

‘Good. It brings it off, see,’ she said, ‘although it’s just an old wives’ tale. ’Course, I should know, being an old wife.’ She let out that laugh again, and Alice wished she would stop.

‘Not much on talking, are you, love? They used to give it to women in labour. It loosened ’em up, see, made it easier. But if you’re pregnant – same thing – not that you’d be drinking any gin, of course, if you was preggers, not these days.’

‘No. No, I wouldn’t.’ Alice managed a smile.

‘You should meet my Gary.’

‘Should I?’

‘He’s single. Are you single? Looks like you could do with someone. Take you out of yourself a bit.’

‘Oh.’ Alice remembered the man she’d seen walking the dog after Little Red had been found. She tried to
remember his face. Was he someone she’d want to see again? She didn’t want to think about it, not out here. ‘No,’ she lied, ‘no, I’m not single.’

‘Pity.’ The woman bent and picked up a plastic lid. She held the tub against her body while she pressed it down. The berries inside rolled back and forth. ‘Well, love, I’m done.’ She walked towards Alice and she felt the urge to back away, but resisted it; in a moment the stranger would be gone and she would be alone. She could look at the tree.

As she passed, though, the woman reached out and grasped Alice’s arm, and she looked down and saw gold, the glint of too many rings on the clawed fingers. She forced an uncertain smile. She could smell the old pink fleece the woman was wearing under her coat, a scent of dog and unwashed clothes.

‘You should get yourself a good man, love,’ the woman said, and then she let go and bustled away, the branches rustling as they closed behind her.

Alice stood in the clearing alone.
Get yourself a good man
, the woman had said. Hadn’t Alice told her she wasn’t single? So why had she said that? Or was she just being talkative, trying to say she should get another, better man – one like her son?

It didn’t matter; it was the tree that concerned Alice. Instead of going closer, though, she circled it, keeping her distance. There was something about it she didn’t like. The juniper was a small, dense conifer with a twisting
trunk. It wasn’t like the specimens in the newer arboretum. It was older; this
place
was older. Alice glanced around, noticing for the first time that there was a ring of bare earth running all the way around the tree.