Dancing With the Virgins Read online

  Mr Weston was in the front garden of his house in Alfreton, raking leaves with an absorbed expression. He looked up sharply when he heard the police car pull into the drive. But DI Hitchens simply shook his head, and Weston turned back to his driveway and attacked the leaves with his rake as if he wanted to stab them into the ground.

  ‘Was there something else you wanted to ask?’ he said, when they reached him.

  ‘A few things, Mr Weston,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, I suppose. It’ll go on and on, won’t it?’

  The Westons’ house was a large semi in a style that might have been called 1920s mock Tudor, with stucco above and brick below. The Tudor effect was achieved by a few stray bits of black wood, which supported nothing, inserted into the walls.

  But the house was substantial and well cared for. The front door was of some oak-like wood, and through the bay window Fry caught a glimpse of a lounge with cast-iron wall lights in the shape of flaming torches, a wheel-shaped chandelier supporting electric candles and a log basket on a brick hearth.

  ‘I’ve taken compassionate leave for a few days,’ said Weston. ‘I need to look after Susan. The head of my school has been very understanding.’

  Fry became aware of Mrs Weston standing in the background, listening. She was pale and looked tired.

  ‘Have you found Martin Stafford?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet, Mrs Weston,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘So he’s got away.’

  ‘We’ll locate him, eventually.’

  ‘He always had a violent tendency.’

  ‘We want to eliminate him from the enquiry, obviously.’

  Mrs Weston stared at him as if she didn’t understand what he was saying.

  ‘Susan –’ said her husband.

  ‘I always said he was no good,’ she said. ‘I was always afraid it would come to this.’

  ‘I don’t think we know any more about Martin Stafford than we’ve told you already,’ said Mr Weston. ‘There might be something at the house in Totley, I suppose. I mean Jenny’s house. He might have written to her or something.’

  ‘Trying to creep back,’ said his wife.

  ‘We’ve already looked there,’ said Hitchens. ‘We found this –’

  The Westons examined the photocopy that he showed them. It was a note rather than a letter – just a few lines about an arrangement to meet somewhere. But it was addressed to Jenny, and it was written in terms that suggested a close relationship.

  Mrs Weston coloured faintly when she reached the line about fruit flavours. ‘There’s no name on it,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘That’s why we’re showing it to you. In case you recognize it.’

  ‘You think it might be from Stafford?’ asked Mr Weston. ‘There’s no date on it, either.’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘I can’t really remember what his writing was like. Susan?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘I mean, I don’t know. It could be.’

  ‘Did he ever write to you? Might you have something that we could compare it to?’

  The couple looked at each other. ‘Have we still got that postcard?’ said Mr Weston.

  His wife went to a mahogany dresser and opened a drawer. It was one of those drawers that were always full of things that you never wanted. But Mrs Weston soon located a plastic wallet of the kind that usually contained holiday snaps.

  ‘I don’t know why we kept it,’ she said. ‘But you can see what sort of man he is.’

  Fry studied the postcard. It showed a view on one side of a beach lined with tourist hotels.

  ‘Hawaii,’ she said. ‘Very nice.’ She turned the card over. It was addressed to the Westons and signed ‘Martin (your former son-in-law)’. The rest of it seemed fairly innocuous – a few lines about how hot the weather was, how luxurious the hotel, how stimulating the nightlife. ‘Spent nearly £2,000 already!’, it said, as if it was a boast.

  ‘I’m not sure what it tells me,’ said Fry. ‘This holiday was presumably after the divorce.’

  ‘Not only after the divorce – paid for by the divorce,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘He spent his share of the proceedings from the sale of their house in Derby. He never seemed to want for money, I don’t know why. While Jenny had to spend all of her share and borrow more to buy that little place in Totley, Stafford went on this holiday in Hawaii. The postcard was to rub it in. No other reason.’

  ‘Apart from Martin Stafford, we’d also want to try to trace any boyfriends that Jenny had recently,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘We’ve been asked that before,’ said Mr Weston. ‘I gave you some names that we knew. We didn’t know of anyone else. Not recently.’

  ‘She didn’t talk to us about things like that,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘Not since Stafford.’

  ‘Not even then,’ said her husband. ‘We had to work it all out for ourselves, what was going on. She didn’t want to say anything against him. Can you believe it?’

  ‘She was loyal,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘I tried to teach her always to be loyal to her husband. No matter what.’

  Mr Weston looked down at the teacups. His wife continued to stare straight ahead, past Fry’s shoulder. It was an aggressive and challenging stare, but it wasn’t directed at Fry at all. It was hitting the wall behind her and ricocheting with unerring accuracy into the back of the seat next to her, passing through Eric Weston’s heart on the way.

  ‘No matter what,’ repeated Mrs Weston.

  Diane Fry was always fascinated by those little secret means of communication that passed between couples without the need for explanation. You had to be very close to someone to be able to do it, very familiar with each other’s thoughts.

  ‘But she divorced him, in the end,’ said Hitchens.

  Mrs Weston nodded. ‘Young women are less tolerant. They have higher expectations of what marriage should be like. They come to a point where they can’t tolerate it any more. You can’t blame them, I suppose. But it isn’t something I could do. My generation was brought up differently. We always believed that we had to grin and bear it, to accept our lot in life. To accept life’s burdens.’

  Mr Weston was looking more and more uncomfortable in his seat. He rattled his teacup in its saucer and cleared his throat.

  ‘Can we take this postcard?’ asked Fry.

  ‘The writing doesn’t look anything like the note,’ said Mrs Weston.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ admitted Fry.

  ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

  Back in the car, Diane Fry called in for an update on the other lines of enquiry. The teams canvassing neighbours in Totley had found someone who remembered a man looking for Jenny two weeks’ previously, asking for her by name. The man was described as being of medium height and ordinary. He had been quite respectably dressed, and had spoken in a local accent. Very useful.

  A second neighbour, who lived nearly opposite Jenny’s house in The Quadrant, recalled a strange car parked in the road one night. A man had been sitting in it, but he had driven off at about the time that Jenny had left her house.

  A third witness reported a light-coloured van, possibly an old Ford Transit or something similar, which had passed slowly along the road twice. At the time, the neighbour had thought it might be gypsies – ‘totters’, he called them – looking for scrap, or anything they could steal.

  Several neighbours recalled female visitors to Jenny’s home, including a girl with dark dreadlocks who had attracted particular attention in The Quadrant for a while. Dreadlocks were rare in Totley.

  All the fragments of information had been passed to the officers interviewing Jenny’s colleagues at Global Assurance. But none of the colleagues could remember Jenny ever complaining of being harassed by a disgruntled boyfriend. If it had been her ex-husband trying to get back in touch, Jenny had not confided the fact to anyone. But the incident room staff would put the information into the HOLMES system. Correlations might be thrown up. Just one
detail could send the whole enquiry in a new direction.

  DI Hitchens had been on the mobile phone to the DCI back at Divisional Headquarters in West Street. When he finished the call, Hitchens turned to Fry and told her what they wanted her to do next.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. But he wasn’t.

  Mark Roper rattled a fork against the plastic bowl. Three cats appeared from the shrubbery at the end of the garden – a grey one and two tabbies. They ran with their tails in the air and brushed themselves against Mark’s legs until he put their bowls on the ground and they began to gnaw at their chunks of meat.

  While they ate, Mark went to clean out the bedding for the rabbits and freshen the water in their cages. The rabbits stared at him through the mesh, twitching their noses as they sniffed his familiar smell. For a while, Mark sat on an upturned milk crate to watch the cats feed.

  Normally, he would have been at work, but he had been told to take a day off. He couldn’t understand what they expected him to do at home, except to sit and think, to relive the moment he had found the body of the murdered woman, and to wonder about the events that had led up to her death among the Nine Virgins. Mark would have much preferred to be with Owen, to be busy with jobs that would take his mind off things. But he hadn’t wanted to argue, in case they thought his reaction was strange.

  He could think of nothing worse than sitting in the house all day, as some people did. He soon became claustrophobic and restless, and angry at the untidiness – the dirty clothes draped over chairs, the empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays left on the floor.

  In any case, the house contained nothing of his father any more. His clothes had gone, and so had his books, his walking stick and his stuffed Tawny Owl. The man who lived with Mark’s mother now had removed every remaining trace of her husband from the house. But he had never thought to bother with the garden. Here, Mark recognized every item that his father had collected over the years – every lump of wood, and every stone. This milk crate was one that his father had found by the roadside and had thought might be useful one day. Mark had helped his father make these rabbit cages; the frames still bore the marks made by a saw and a plane held in his father’s hands. Their relationship still lived on in these little things. These, and the nightmares that Mark suffered now and then, when he would wake up in the night, calling for his dad like a child.

  Mark sat on the crate for a while and thought about the woman on the moor; and then he thought about Owen Fox. He had started to get used to relying on Owen for an element of stability in his life. The fear that the stability might be taken from him once again made Mark swear abruptly, so that the cats were startled and scuttled away from their bowls. The rabbits lifted their ears and gazed at him with their strange pink eyes. Like Mark, they were suddenly terrified of the unknown things that might lie beyond their cages in the outside world.

  Todd Weenink looked up towards the road at the sound of a car approaching the cycle hire centre. Ben Cooper saw his partner stiffen, and heard him start to curse, low but vehemently. Spurts of Weenink’s breath were hitting the air, swirling ominously. Cooper could almost see the curses forming into dark, solid lumps in the mist.

  ‘Don’t look now, Ben, but the weather just got a few degrees colder round here,’ said Weenink.

  The car that splashed through the puddles and pulled up in front of the hire centre was a black Peugeot. When it stopped, the headlights were turned down to sidelights, but its doors remained closed and no one got out. It sat there with traces of steam rising from its bonnet and mingling with the mist. And with each tick of its cooling engine, Cooper felt his heart chill a little more.

  9

  It was only an hour or so after the morning news that the first visitors started to arrive on Ringham Moor. They parked up on all the roadside verges, filling the lay-bys and blocking the field gates. Within a few minutes, the first of them began to wander up the tracks that led on to the moor. They came in ones and twos mostly, but some had brought their children for a day out.

  ‘Look at them,’ said the uniformed sergeant in charge of containing the crime scene. ‘Can’t you hear the conversations over the cornflakes? “Nothing much on the telly today – why don’t we all go and see where the lady got herself murdered?”’

  These people had come wrapped up well, in their sweaters and anoraks and boots and hats. They brought their cameras, too, and their binoculars. They took photos of any policemen they saw, and of the crime scene tape rattling in the wind; they were excited by the sight of the small tent that the SOCOs had erected in the middle of the Nine Virgins, over the spot where Jenny Weston had lain.

  Officers had been posted to block the main paths. But they were too easily visible across the moor, and soon they found that people were simply cutting across the vast expanses of heather to avoid them. They shouted themselves hoarse and got the bottoms of their trouser legs soaking wet trying to intercept the stragglers. The sergeant called in for reinforcements, but found there were no more officers available. As always, the division was short of resources.

  ‘“Just do the best you can,”’ he reported. ‘That’s what they always say. “Just do the best you can.”’

  One young PC found himself being followed around by two old ladies who bombarded him with questions. They pulled at his sleeve and patted his arm and demanded to know whether there was a lot of blood, and how big the murderer’s knife had been, and whether the body was still inside the tent. The constable appealed to his sergeant to help him. But the sergeant was busy threatening to arrest a small, fat man in a fluorescent green bubble jacket who refused to move as he stared at the tent with feverish eyes and asked one question over and over again: ‘She was naked, wasn’t she? It said on the news she was naked.’

  Finally, the officers were forced to retreat, reducing the size of the area they were trying to protect. They clustered round the clearing, abandoning the heather and birches to the intruders, like a garrison under siege.

  ‘Haven’t they got anything else to do?’ complained the PC to the sergeant for the tenth time. ‘Can’t they go and pester the ducks in Bakewell or something?’

  ‘There’ll be more of them yet, Wragg. It’s still early,’ said the sergeant, watching the green jacket constantly circling the clearing like a bird of prey.

  ‘Early for what?’

  ‘Early for the real loonies.’

  ‘What do you call this lot, then?’

  The sergeant shrugged as PC Wragg shook off the grasping fingers of the old ladies. ‘These are just your normal, everyday members of the public. Wait till the pubs open. Then you’ll see a real circus.’

  ‘Christ, why don’t they leave us alone?’

  ‘It’s a bit of excitement for them, you see. Some of them probably think it’s a film set. They think we’re filming an episode of Peak Practice or something. In fact, I reckon those old dears have mistaken you for what’s his name, the heart-throb doctor.’

  ‘Let’s hope the forensics lot are finished soon over at the quarry.’

  ‘Shush. Don’t let on. The gongoozlers’ll be over that way too, if they hear you.’

  ‘I think it’s too late, Sarge.’

  The old ladies had spotted a police Range Rover and the Scientific Support Unit’s Maverick parking on the roadway above the abandoned quarry. The pair set off at a brisk pace, adjusting their hats and twirling their walking sticks. A family with three children and a Jack Russell terrier had settled down on the grass under the birch trees and had begun to unpack sandwiches and flasks. One of the children got out a kite and unfurled the line. Another threw a stick for the dog to chase.

  The sergeant looked around for the little man in the green jacket, and saw him crouched in the heather, his hands compulsively pulling up clumps of whinberry. He looked like a wild dog, eager and alert, sniffing the air for carrion.

  ‘I’m sure I know that one,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before.’

  �
��He looks as though he shouldn’t be out on his own,’ said PC Wragg. ‘I reckon there ought to be at least two male nurses with him, carrying a strait jacket and a bucket of tranquillizers.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve a feeling he’s a respectable member of society. A teacher or a lawyer, something like that. I can’t quite place him, but it’ll come.’

  Wragg held up his hand like a traffic policeman as he saw more walkers approaching. ‘I’m sorry, ladies. This is a crime scene. I’ll have to ask you to walk another way, please.’

  ‘Oh, but we always come this way.’

  There were four women, all in early middle age, with their hair tied back and their faces flushed and healthy. They were in bright cagoules and striped leggings, like a gaggle of multi-coloured sheep. They had probably left their husbands at home washing their cars or playing golf.

  ‘Not today, I’m afraid, ladies,’ said Wragg firmly. ‘Please take another route.’

  ‘He’s very polite,’ said one woman.

  ‘Have you the right to stop us walking along here?’ asked another in a different tone. ‘It’s a public right of way, after all.’

  ‘That’s right – it’s marked on the Ordnance Survey map.’ The third one produced the map as evidence and pointed at it triumphantly.

  ‘All the same …’ said Wragg.

  The women began to turn away. But the second one paused and glowered at Wragg.

  ‘You’d be better off making it safe for people to go about their business rather than stopping us using public rights of way. Get the man who’s attacking women, that’s the best thing you can do.’

  PC Wragg watched them go. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he said to their retreating backs.

  ‘You’ll have to get used to that,’ said his sergeant. ‘As far as the public are concerned, it’s all your fault.’

  The man in the green bubble jacket was still manoeuvring for a closer approach, watching the officers until they were distracted by something else, then creeping a few inches nearer.

  ‘So help me, I’m going to thump him if he gets in reach,’ said PC Wragg. ‘Just the sight of him makes my skin crawl.’