Harry raised his eyebrows, knowing the opposite was always true. Alex never switched off. There was always something going on behind those dark eyes, even when she stoically refused to share it with anyone.
‘How was the body transported through the park to the river?’ Alex said, thinking aloud. ‘The victim was small, but no matter how easy she might have been to carry, how the hell would anyone get across that kind of distance without being seen?’
Harry ran a hand over his short greying hair, looking past her as he pondered the question. ‘How late does the park stay open?’
‘According to the council’s website, pretty late even through the winter.’ Alex gestured to another of the computers. The website was still up on the screen, left from where she had studied its details before addressing the team. ‘Someone must have had vehicle access to the park. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’
She gestured for Harry to join her at the computer.
‘The pathologist seems certain the young woman’s body was placed in the water at or very near the place where it resurfaced. The only plausible theory is that someone transported the woman to the river in some sort of vehicle. Yet according to this there’s no public access to the paths.’
‘What type of vehicles have access to the park?’ Harry asked, his attention still fixed on the website.
Alex slid from the desk and into a chair beside him, moving a fingertip across the keypad of the opened laptop. She typed the words ‘Cardiff Bute Park vehicle access’ into the search engine and a huge list of results was thrown up. It took little time for her to find a council file that was open to public viewing which documented a brief history of the park and assessed the suitability of its current access points.
‘Read this.’
The park had been open to the public since 1947, having previously been the private gardens of Cardiff Castle. Since being opened for public use, the park had gained only two additional access points. According to the council’s document, a need for additional vehicular access was justified by the volume of vehicles that required entry to the park for services such as supplying the nursery, setting up and dismantling equipment and staging for events, maintaining and managing the water flow in the Dock Feeder, maintaining the riverbanks, and for general upkeep of the gardens.
Cooper’s Field was the area of the park most often used for events. Alex had been there on several occasions. Back during her days in uniform she had worked at events such as Party in the Park: long, sticky hours when she would be grateful for the sighting of a drunken scuffle just for something to break up the monotony of the day. As a civilian she had stood in the field with an army of fellow numbered women, waiting to start Cancer Research’s now-famous Race for Life event that was held there every summer. Trying not to linger for too long on the tributes and photographs pinned to the backs of the pink T-shirts swarming the spaces in front of her, because running was difficult enough without a thick lump of sadness stuck in the throat.
Alex hated to run, but she hated bloody cancer with a far greater intensity.
She glanced at Superintendent Blake, who had recently made his return to work. She had missed his presence at the station. God, he could be cantankerous at times, but he was honest and he was fair, which were admirable traits in a world that often lacked these two seemingly uninspiring qualities. Eighteen months earlier he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. It had hit his family hard; in particular, his two children who were aged eleven and twelve at the time. Treatment had followed. His doctors reported an encouraging response to the radiotherapy, but had advised him to take it easy and allow his body time to recover.
With typical Harry Blake pig-headedness, he had decided to ignore them.
Alex smiled at the thought of Chloe’s first encounter with the superintendent after he’d returned to work. It hadn’t been obvious at the time whether it had been more embarrassing for Harry or for Chloe, but it had provided Alex with amusement for the rest of the day. Chloe had transferred to the department during his time off, and upon his return Harry had mistaken her for an A-level student there on work experience – and Harry didn’t have much time for work experience.
The reception Chloe had received was less than welcoming, but amusing for everyone else. Harry, feeling it necessary to acknowledge the girl’s presence, had asked if she had any relatives at the station. Chloe, having realised the error of judgement he’d made, deadpanned that her dad was locked up in cell number four. It was the only time Alex had ever seen Harry’s face redden, but Chloe’s had matched it when she’d found out who she’d been speaking with.
It was true that Chloe looked younger than her twenty-six years, but once Harry had got to know her, he quickly learned there was a lot more to the young woman than met the eye.
Alex had always thought there was more to be discovered, but Chloe kept her personal life just that. And Alex could understand that.
‘The North Gate entrance is right in the city centre,’ Harry said, snapping Alex from her thoughts. ‘That would mean someone drove along the main road and turned into the park whilst carrying a corpse in their vehicle.’
Alex felt sick at the thought. She had seen this poor girl only shortly after her body had been dragged up from the river. It was going to be a long time before she stopped seeing her.
She forced her thoughts back to the park. There were no events held in Cooper’s Field during the winter, so that eliminated one group of vehicles. The words ‘maintaining and managing water flow’ meant nothing to Alex, but she would need to find out exactly what was involved. As for the nursery and the gardens, were gardeners even employed during the winter months? It had always seemed to Alex to be a seasonal sort of job. She had planted daffodil bulbs in her front garden one year and had been rewarded the following spring with seven tiny flowers that had managed the course of a week before wilting and giving up. It really didn’t qualify her as an authority on the subject.
‘Let me find the street.’ Alex leaned across the desk and reached again for the keyboard. She searched for Boulevard de Nantes in Google Street View and located the place where a vehicle that might have transported the woman would have made its turn into the park. The access point was near a set of traffic lights, parallel with the pedestrianised top end of Queen Street, a popular shopping street in the middle of the city centre.
‘You’d think those traffic lights would have cameras,’ she said, ‘but possibly not. I’ll get on to it first thing in the morning, find out if they exist and whether the bloody things were actually turned on.’
And then what? she thought. The body had been in the water for anything up to two weeks, according to Helen Collier. Someone was going to have to sit through up to two weeks’ worth of CCTV footage in order to identify every vehicle that had entered the park during that time.