Path of Needles (3 page)

There was no sound, none at all. Everything was silent, except in Angie’s mind, as she stared at the thing and
heard the silence and felt everything going on around her, the leaves outside continuing to grow, flowers pushing their heads up from the earth, and she wanted it all to stop; because this couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t possible, not possible at all.

There was a toe stoppering the bottle, pushed hard into the narrow neck so that the skin had folded back and wrinkled. It wasn’t a big toe, that wouldn’t have fitted, Angie thought, and she didn’t know why she thought that, why it even mattered. She knew whose toe it was; she recognised the pale orange of the nail polish, so carefully chosen, so carefully applied. It was too bright now, a ridiculous colour against the greyish, dying skin –
dead
, Angie told herself, the skin was
dead
, and the word wouldn’t register, wouldn’t connect with anything in her mind. She knew this was because she didn’t want it to, not yet: not ever.

It had been the cause of one of their little arguments, that colour. They had been in Leeds – they had travelled up there especially to buy the dress and the make-up (to save Chrissie stealing Angie’s – not that that had ever worked), and they’d stood for hours in the shop, trying this shade and that, and it took so long to choose and it was still orange. Angie had told Chrissie so, said it was hideous, but Chrissie insisted that it wasn’t orange at all, it was coral, and it matched her dress.

It doesn’t match your dead skin
, Angie thought, and laughter rose in a fat bubble. Her hand shot to her mouth
and she actually got hold of her lips, twisted them to keep that laugh inside.

The nail was almost crushed at one side. It looked as if it had been pinched in something: pliers, maybe.

Angie turned her head away. She felt tears on her cheeks, though she hadn’t felt them coming to her eyes.

She looked back at the thing on the table, the tissue paper scattered around it like handfuls of snow, the smooth sides of the box.
It was new
, she thought.
No traces
. And she wanted to laugh again. Suddenly her legs gave way and she found herself on the floor, clinging to the edge of the table. Then she
did
laugh but it came out in a weird sound,
hunh-hunh-hunh
, and Angie started to cry.

It’s not her
, she thought.

Someone only
hurt
her. It’s only a toe
. Anger rose, a sudden cold fury that someone would hurt her daughter, take thick metal snippers to her daughter’s soft skin. She was chilled right through. Her shoulders shook with it, a sudden cold that gripped tight and wouldn’t let her go. She was alone. She hoped for some kind of anger at that, the old, comfortable bitterness that might drive all of this away into some other place.

But she was
gone
. Chrissie was gone, and Angie didn’t know where, because she had left the dance, she had allowed her daughter to go off alone just as though she wasn’t Angie’s little girl, Angie’s
baby
. A pain shot right through her, ripping open the middle of her chest, and she leaned forward, wrapping her arms tight around her
body. She rocked herself and a moaning sound escaped her lips.
How odd
, she thought,
how odd to make such a noise, out loud, when I’m here on my own
. She knew the box was still above her, on the table. It couldn’t be real, and she didn’t want to look and
make
it real once more. Somewhere she could hear a bird singing and she half raised her head. Her eyes were blurry. She thought she might be sick, surely she had to be sick, but no, her stomach had settled. It was traitorously stable, when the rest of her was this empty, reeling thing.

She had to call the police.

She gripped the tabletop, making sure she didn’t touch the box – never again – and pulled herself up. It was her legs that were unsteady now, not her stomach. She crossed the room to the telephone, feeling like when Chrissie had persuaded her to go roller-skating, back when her daughter was small. It had been all right when they were out there, gliding around the rink with all the rest; it was when she’d taken off the skates that she’d started to wobble, as if the world had become an untrustworthy thing on which to put her weight.

She didn’t know what she said to them. She remembered having to repeat it three times, and wanting to scream when she was asked to say it again. ‘
Her toe
,’ she kept saying, ‘
it’s her toe
.’ She only thought about the blood when she came to explain; she hadn’t consciously recognised, before then, what was in the bottle. ‘
It’s blood
,’ she said, and that was when she started to cry, hard and out
of control.
Ugly crying
, she had always thought of it, but now she didn’t care. She could be ugly for ever if only Chrissie would come back, healthful and whole and smelling of peaches.

Angie found herself sitting by the telephone and shaking with sobs, the handset back on its rest, and she didn’t know whether she’d finished talking to them or simply hung up. She tried to remember giving her address and found she couldn’t. She
felt
like they were coming, though; they had to be, because if they didn’t she was just going to sit here until somebody did. She hoped –
hoped
– that person would be Chrissie.

The thought of her daughter made her stop shaking. She couldn’t sit here, she had to be strong, she had to find her little girl and bring her home, safe and sound as she had always been. Then she remembered Chrissie’s mobile and picked up the phone once more, hitting 1: the speed-dial number that would connect her to her only child, of course it would. She would be there, her tone casual and dismissive as ever, and this time Angie wouldn’t mind, not at all. If she didn’t answer – it would just be Chrissie ignoring her, probably pulling a face at her mobile and laughing with her friends as she let her voicemail pick it up, because she didn’t need her mother, she was with her friends, still having a good time. Still healthy; still
whole
.

It didn’t ring.

Angie sat with the phone in her hand and looked back
at the table. The box was still there, the clouds of tissue paper around it like a bad spell. She turned instead towards the window and was surprised to see everything was the same as always. Her neighbour’s hedge needed trimming. The shrubbery was hazed with pale green buds and the sky was a faint blue; it would be a clear day. Somewhere, a bird was still singing. She became aware of it slowly, heard it grow more forceful before dying away and starting up once more in a shrill chorus. The Fullers’ door needed painting; it was peeling right down to the wood and Angie had always wondered why they didn’t do something about it. Her own driveway was looking messy, the flagstones uneven. She traced the lines with her eyes, the places where the ground was pushing up from beneath. She tried not to think about anything, tried to remember to blink, to breathe.

Finally she heard a vehicle coming up the hill. It was still out of sight but she knew the car would be white, and that it would have neon stripes along its side. She watched the turning of the lane but it wasn’t a car she saw coming around the corner, not at first: it was the postman, his bag loose at his side, a clutch of letters in his hand. He turned in at the Sandersons’ gate. His lips were pursed, as if he was whistling, and Angie knew it was because he was mentally singing along to the tune playing on his iPod – he always did that.
He hadn’t even been
, she thought. The postman hadn’t delivered the package. Someone else had done that – someone she might
have seen, if she had only looked out, if she hadn’t been sitting at the table, hungover and feeling sorry for herself while her daughter suffered.

Hopefully
, she thought, and tried to block out the alternative.

The car rounded the corner and she saw it
was
white, that it did have a neon strip along its side. It had blue lights, too, and they were whirling, momentarily painting the Fullers’ door and the Sandersons’ gate, dappling her own chipped drive.

There were no sirens.
Too late
, she thought, and forced herself to move towards the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Sandal Magna was an odd place, PC Cate Corbin had reflected as she’d headed down the road towards it. They would go ‘into Sandal’, or ‘down Sandal’, never into ‘the town’ or ‘the village’. She knew this was because the place didn’t have a centre: there was no village green or high street or parade of shops or even a church to form a bull’s-eye on the target. It was prime commuter land, a place where people rested their heads between trips into Wakefield or Leeds or Sheffield or even, on the East Coast main line, as far as London.

Sandal was a few twining streets that slotted between a series of fields and landmarks, and it struck Cate that maybe it
did
have focal places, after all; it was just that they had been there for centuries, had lost the power and meaning they’d once had. Sandal Castle came up now, a snag-toothed ruin that always looked at its finest just after dawn, when the pink-and-blue sky was reflected in the
boating lake at the foot of the hill. At the other end of this stretch of road, if she took a right, was Newmillerdam, the country park that drew day-trippers from across the district. Hundreds of years ago it would have been used by huntsmen. Now most visitors simply skirted the lake, ‘doing the flat path’ as Cate thought of it, before heading to a choice of pubs for a reward in a pint glass. Few ventured into the dark green woodland beyond.

It was a quiet place, an easy patrol, the through-routes and housing clusters divided by long swathes of green. There would be the occasional opportunist burglary or vehicle break-in; car thieves would sometimes come and nick black Audis or BMWs off convenient driveways. Cate glanced at the traffic heading off in the other direction, towards the motorway; people heading to other places, bigger places, where things
happened
. In a couple of years that would be her, moving out of the small flat she’d rented on the edge of Wakefield, going to Manchester perhaps, or London. For now, it would have to do. It was the place she’d been raised, though since her parents had left, retiring somewhere greener still, she could feel how the ties keeping her here were thinning. Once she’d put in her time building a solid foundation in policing, she could think of moving on for good.

She was still thinking this shift wasn’t going to be any different when the radio burst into life. She acknowledged, flicked the blues on and pulled out to overtake.

*

Cate took a deep breath as she pulled up next to the house. She had driven quickly but forced herself to concentrate through the twists and turns coming onto the estate, glancing at road signs as she took each turn. It was a carefully cultivated habit.
Always know where you are
, her tutor constable, PC Len Stockdale, had said to her, and it still didn’t seem that long ago. He had sometimes tested her on it, stopping mid-conversation to ask the name of the street they were on. It was his way of teaching her, and it had stuck; if she ever needed to call for help, she would know exactly where she was. This time it wasn’t strictly necessary, since she knew back-up was already being despatched.

The house was set into a row of others towards the top of a hill. The whole place was lined with wooden gates and gardens that would be described as pleasant, the houses self-contained, neat, separate. Number 17 seemed as quiet as the rest. Cate glanced towards it; in the largest window, between wide-slatted blinds, a face looked back.

She paused to radio in her time of arrival before stepping out and reaching for the doorbell, wondering briefly if it would be better, after all, that she had got there first. PC Stockdale was an old hand, but his ‘don’t mess’ demeanour – possibly also carefully cultivated, more likely the product of his experience – was better suited to handling Saturday-night drunks than a woman in distress. She could already imagine the way he would look at her when she opened the door; no, the face she had seen at
the window didn’t need Stocky, not just now. Cate, on the other hand … she took another deep breath as the door opened.

The woman was older than Cate had first thought. Her skin was pale, even against her harshly bleached hair, and her hands claw-like as she grasped at the dressing gown she wore, a shining silk thing printed with brilliant purple bougainvillaea. She smelled of coffee, old perfume and perhaps, beneath, the taint of stale wine. Cate identified herself and the woman nodded, though she didn’t appear to understand the words. She stepped back and Cate followed her into the house.

The woman led the way into a spacious kitchen and indicated the table. There was a box on it. It was surrounded by the litter of white tissue paper, the remains of breakfast, and an empty wine glass. Cate looked at it, automatically noting the ring of lipstick around the rim. She wasn’t sure why she did this, only that she wanted to miss nothing.

‘There.’ The woman was crying, silently and without fuss, tears oozing from her eyes as if crying was something she always did.

Cate pulled a pen from her pocket. She reached out to use it to pull the box towards her, realised even that might disturb any evidence and instead leaned over the table, peering to see into it. Her eyes widened. She could smell it, a kitchen smell that made her think of knives. She could see the glass nestling inside the box, the light
catching the ridges on its surface. It floated across her mind that its texture would probably capture only fragmentary fingerprints on its surface; then she focused on what it held. She could see the toe. There had been trial cuts, she saw that at once; the skin was severed in a couple of places, crushed where the blade had pressed down. Either that or someone had failed to cut all the way through and started again. She looked away from it, moved her gaze to the crumpled paper scattered across the table.