Authors: Alison Littlewood
It was only when Cate stood on the very edge of the hole that she could see the thing that had become entwined in the roots, so darkened by time that it looked like a natural outgrowth of the tree. It silenced her.
The thing was a child. Tree roots had meandered between its ribs, sending tendrils into the space where its heart had been. Everything was the same colour, as if the child had become tree, and tree, child. Its face was turned away from her sight, as if it had been burrowing into the ground like some woodland animal. The skull had cracked, half hidden by the soil that clung to the bone. It was not clear if the damage had been inflicted deliberately or by the pressures of the earth.
There was nothing else, nothing to suggest it had been posed, nothing at all except the ragged strips of cloth in which it had been wrapped.
Cate heard someone approach and stand at her side. They didn’t speak, and for a moment she didn’t look at them. She imagined it would be Dan, but when she turned, it was Heath.
He met her eye, gave a slight nod. Then he put a hand on her shoulder.
The touch surprised her and she drew away. His hand fell to his side; she couldn’t tell if he was irritated. His expression didn’t change.
‘So. We found something.’
She nodded.
‘Your friend – Hyland – was right. There
is
more going on here. The body in that hole – it didn’t land there yesterday. How old is that tree, do you think? We’re going to have to cut it off her.’
‘Her?’
‘The pathologist thinks it’s female, but we can’t be sure yet. We can’t even turn the head to see if the teeth are missing. But it is possible that this is where they came from, even if they were removed before it was buried. The ground hadn’t been disturbed when we got here; no one’s been digging here recently.’ He paused. ‘She had an alibi, you know.’
At first, she wasn’t sure who she meant; it was Alice who’d sprung into her mind. Then she realised. ‘Mrs Cosgrove?’
‘She was at work all day when the Robertson woman was taken. Her colleagues vouched for her. She went out for lunch and, lucky her, met a friend; she paid her share on credit card. It looks tight. And this body—’
He didn’t need to explain the rest. The child’s body looked as if it had been there for years; it could be at least as old as Mrs Cosgrove or her husband. And the police had no one else. This find –
Alice’s
find – had blown everything wide open.
Alice
. Again, she was in the middle of everything. How had she known about the tree, really? Her story of following the bird was ridiculous. But then, how could the girl be connected to this body, other than by her knowledge of the fairy story? Alice was younger than either of the Cosgroves. It didn’t make sense.
She looked up to find Heath watching her. This time she noticed the lines around his eyes, the strain about his lips.
‘Ms Hyland told me the story of the juniper tree,’ he said, echoing Cate’s thoughts. ‘Strange, isn’t it? This body is obviously earlier than the others. If it
is
connected to a story, like them, this could be our killer’s first victim. And if it is – it seems his reasoning must have been different. If we can find how or why the child was killed …’ His voice sounded weary, but it had an edge to it.
‘It was lucky Alice Hyland found the tooth,’ he said, ‘hmm? Anyone else might have assumed it was nothing but a coincidence.’
*
Cate left Heath and went to catch up with Dan. He wasn’t waiting by the perimeter, though four white-hooded SOCOs were gathered nearby. She approached, searched each of their faces and frowned. He wasn’t among them.
She found the register of attendees to the scene and scanned the list, saw that she was right: he had already gone. There was nothing left for her to do here, and she felt hollowed out, exhausted.
She signed herself out, but instead of heading straight for the car park, she found herself veering towards the place where Little Red had been discovered. Two bodies found in the same stretch of woodland – that wasn’t what they’d come to expect. She wondered if there might be some similarity in the scenes that they’d missed. Had a particular type of tree once stood where Little Red had been dumped? She didn’t think so.
Cate reached the edge of the arboretum. It was quiet
here, and still. It looked as if more of the fallen trees had been cleared away, but she couldn’t be certain; perhaps the wardens had abandoned their work here for a while.
She walked across the space. At first she couldn’t see any sign that the girl had been there. There was nothing to see, but how many people would come and stand here anyway, telling her story once again? It was like Alice had said:
It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the stories, would it? Without that she’d be nothing but a dead girl dumped in the woods. At least this way someone cares
.
Yes, they cared. Had been made to care.
Alice
had been made to care.
She frowned. Yes, Alice had been made to care, had been made to share her expertise, to get involved.
What else had she said?
You need to look at old cases. This might have been happening for years.
And lo and behold, they
had
found another body, the proof that Alice was right once again, proving her the expert. They had found the body because Alice had led them to it. She hadn’t even done it through deduction or clues; no, she’d gone straight there, inventing that wild story about the bird, as if it would explain everything.
Cate frowned. That dreamy look on the girl’s face – making her seem dazed, overwhelmed by everything – was that for real? Did she really live so deeply in her fantasies, or was she just making herself appear stupid when she was in fact very clever?
She shook her head. She knew some murderers would try to insinuate themselves into an investigation, follow everything that happened, but Alice hadn’t done that: it was she who’d dragged Alice into it. When Alice had first seen a crime-scene photograph, the shock had been genuine. It certainly wasn’t something she’d wanted to look at. Was it?
Cate took a deep breath. She had to get herself together. She opened her eyes, let them slip out of focus and saw the hazy memory of a dead girl lying on the ground: Teresa King. She remembered the photograph sitting in pride of place next to the television, a mother and her daughter wearing the same dress and almost the same smile. A husband crying for his wife, for a child who would never be born. She owed it to all of them to
think
.
And then she saw something else lying on the ground, something that might have been waiting for her to find it. She stepped forward, crossing the imagined line where the crime scene had begun.
There was a dead bird lying in front of her. It was large and black, its feathers still shining. It was a crow or a rook, Cate wasn’t sure which. It looked intact. There was no spray of feathers to show where a predator had caught it, no injuries that she could see. There was a low buzzing though, and a fly rose from the body before settling again, crawling in amid the gloss-dark feathers. The bird had huge claws, the skin dry and wrinkled, closed on nothing.
It was
always
about the bird
.
She stared at it; then she roused herself, rubbed her eyes and turned in a slow circle, looking at the trees that stood around her. It felt as if there was something else she should see, something she should understand, but there was nothing. She turned and began to walk away, towards the car park and normality and traffic and houses and paperwork, things that made sense.
She stopped. There was another dead bird in her path. This one was a robin, its claws tight and delicate as a dead spider. Like the crow, there was nothing to show how it had died. Ignoring her distaste, she took out an evidence bag and slid the creature into it. It must have been dead for a while, was cold in her hands, its body a small centre of firmness beneath soft feathers.
*
Cate pulled out of the Newmillerdam car park and on to the road, where she quickly picked up speed. She turned left, in the opposite direction to the police station; they wouldn’t miss her for a while yet.
Soon she was on an open road with woodland on one side and fields spreading away on the other. She opened the window, gasping in the scent of wheat, the harsher tang of oilseed rape. The route to Ryhill felt familiar, as if it was somewhere she was supposed to be. It wasn’t long before she saw the row of red-brick houses at the edge of the village and slowed for the turning that led in the direction of the Heronry. It was both a lifetime and no time at all since she’d been there last.
The road dipped and she glanced into the trees, shadows flickering across her vision. The clearing came up on her left. There were no other cars, no one here that she could see. The area had been cleared since the body was taken, and not only of Chrissie’s remains; there was no sign even to show it had been used for fly-tipping except a well-trodden area scabbed with bare earth.
She got out of the car. This wasn’t like the woods, a place where she could almost sense the life running through the trees. Here they looked more like survivors, clinging to their sorry bit of ground.
She stepped off the path and onto the hard soil. She felt a little like Alice. The girl had been caught up in a fantasy, half lost in the stories she told, and now Cate was doing it too: she hadn’t even let anyone know where she was going. She reached for her mobile, brushed the smooth surface with her fingertips and let her hand fall. What on earth would she say, that she had come here following – what? A bird? She bit back a laugh.
The branches were still, the air calm, as if nature was holding its breath. There was nothing here except brambles spreading their tendrils across the spaces, their thin fingers meeting and clasping.
It was only when Cate turned back towards the car that she saw the flowers.
She couldn’t think how she’d failed to notice them before. They were massed together in a line, still wrapped in plastic, the contents damp and browned with recent
rain or dew. Some specks of colour held on, splashes of pink or blue or yellow amid the petals that had been washed colourless. There was a single bunch that were fresh, little yellow roses, and Cate thought of the photograph she’d seen, the girl in a yellow dress, her mother in white.
That couldn’t be all. There had to be something else.
She started to search, walking in as straight a line as she could to the far end of the clearing and into the trees, where undergrowth made progress impossible, and back again, a little to the side of her previous route. When she reached the car she repeated her actions, covering the whole area as best she could. There was nothing. Once she found a few feathers, fluffy and grey, but there was no bird; perhaps they had fallen from some nest, or been carried here on the wind.
There was no other place to look, except one. She went to the flowers, wrinkling her nose at the sour scent. She didn’t want to touch them, though another part of her wanted them gone, all signs removed, leaving this place to forget what could be forgotten and letting Chrissie be what she now was – a smiling girl in a picture. She picked up the first, the plastic crackling under her fingers, and replaced it a short distance away. Then the next. When she’d moved them all she crouched down and looked at the space she’d created. The flowers had been hiding nothing; there was no dead bird, nothing there at all. What had she expected? This area had been searched and
searched again, SOCOs crawling all over it. Of course they would have found a bird, if there was anything to be found.
But birds fly
.
Cate pushed herself up and went back towards the car, but instead of getting inside she went past it and into the lane. She started to walk the narrow, rutted path with trees growing along its edge. She caught glimpses of water between the trunks, a stretch of lakeside. The fishermen who had found the body might be there now, hunched over the water, staring into it and trying not to think of what they’d seen.
Down this lane and the next, if she kept going long enough, was the Heronry. How far
would
she go? How far before anything she discovered became meaningless? She sighed. She should go back. This was useless, and there was paperwork to be done; she could be helping Dan, learning from the team. She put a hand to her face and found it sheened with sweat, not from exertion but the frustration radiating from inside her. She turned into the cool air that was blowing off the water, and that was when she heard a low buzzing.
She stepped off the tarmac and onto uneven tussocks of grass and listened. Now she couldn’t hear it at all, but she thought she knew where it had come from. She went further in among the trees, stepping from hollow to hollow between their roots.
The bird was lying at the base of a large birch that was greened with moss. It was small, some kind of finch, she
guessed. Its feathers were damp and clinging to its body, its beak closed in a neat isosceles triangle. She took a bag from her pocket, and when she headed back to the car, she carried it with her.
*
The hill where Sandal Castle stood was brighter, but markedly cooler than the woods had been. Cate felt a sharp breeze on her arms, watched as it ruffled the field below and skimmed the lake with shades of dull zinc. She stood on the cropped grass at the far edge of the ruin. The castle was behind her, its withered fingers accusing the sky.
She had seen flowers here too, as soon as she stepped out of the car. They lay along the banking, a mass of plastic and dying leaves. She had walked past them and around the path that skirted the castle, glancing at the plaque that told of the adjacent battlefield and the death of Richard of York; she had wondered how long the memory of this girl’s death might last.
She could see the rest of the path from here, and it was empty. She retraced her route and turned, went deeper into the ruin itself, until she stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the motte. Even in daylight they looked steep, hard-going; in its day, with a stone keep rising from the top, this place must have been impossible to breach. There was little wonder Ellen Robertson hadn’t been carried to the summit. She had been slightly built, as had all the victims, but trying to get up there with her dead
weight … even if she’d still been alive, her body would have been paralysed by the hemlock. She started up the steps, looking back over her shoulder at the line of houses along Manygates Lane. Dumping a body at the castle was a huge risk to take, even without coming up here. Someone had been dogged, persistent: driven.