Dancing With the Virgins Page 11

  Of course, Ben Cooper realized that the black Peugeot was familiar. It was just that he hadn’t expected to see it here. Maybe it was destined to follow him around for ever, like a kind of ghostly hearse, with a phantom undertaker at the wheel.

  ‘It’s Diane Fry,’ he said.

  Todd Weenink cursed some more. ‘Oh great. First the Wicked Witch of West Street, DI Armstrong. Now the Frozen Bitch from the Black Country. God, we could do without this. Stand by for a laugh a minute.’

  ‘I thought she was already gone,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Fry? I wish.’

  They watched Fry get out of the Peugeot and look around the car park. To Cooper, she still seemed thin, despite a heavy woollen jacket with a hood against the cold. She had never looked healthy – too much in need of a few good meals, and with a strength that was all sinew and technique, rather than muscle. For a moment, he wondered how she spent her time now. No one else in Edendale had taken the trouble to befriend her since his own efforts had failed. Diane Fry carried something dark and immovable on her shoulder, something that had accompanied her from West Midlands when she transferred. Cooper felt a frisson of unease at the thought of what might happen to her eventually, if she was left entirely on her own.

  Finally, Fry saw them and walked directly towards Weenink. She took him aside and spoke to him quietly for a minute. Cooper could see that Todd looked unhappy. But then he walked to their car and drove away without a glance, his face set into a scowl.

  Cooper stood quite still, like a child reluctant to draw attention to himself. He wanted to shove his hands in his pockets to keep them warm, but was worried about how it might be interpreted.

  He found the officer safety techniques from the training manuals running through his mind – extracts from the sections on employing empathy. Don’t excite the suspect by sudden movements, they said. Show a willingness to resolve the situation by cooperation. That was fine. But there was one problem here. The manuals always recommended maintaining a verbal exchange with the suspect for as long as possible, if you were going to maintain empathy.

  Cooper watched her as she took her time reading the notices in the window of the cycle hire centre, as if she were totally fascinated by the weather forecast or the penalties for returning a bike after the deadline.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Wrong?’ Fry’s stare was capable of raising the temperature of his skin until he felt his face was glowing like a red traffic light. ‘DC Weenink is required back at Division, that’s all.’

  ‘Why?’ said Cooper. ‘What’s so important that they pull him off the job just like that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Can’t? Does that mean you do know why? Or haven’t they told you either?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you, OK?’

  Cooper opened his mouth, then realized it would be a waste of time trying to explain that Todd Weenink was his partner.

  ‘Right. OK. So now what?’

  ‘Well, we’re following Jenny Weston’s route, aren’t we?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Since I’ve deprived you of your friend, you’ll have to put up with me. Sorry. Is it this way?’

  She turned away from him towards the trail. Cooper felt as though she had reduced him to insignificance with a mere twitch of her narrow shoulder. He followed her, a step behind, staring at the back of her head, trying to figure out what exactly was going on in her mind.

  He knew their relationship had got off on the wrong foot. He had tried to be friends with her when she was the new girl in E Division and no one else had bothered. It had gone wrong, of course. But there was something in Fry’s manner, something about the way she held her body when she spoke to him, that told him it was more complicated than that. Things always were more complicated than they seemed.

  Throughout the drive to Partridge Cross, Diane Fry had been preparing herself for dealing with Ben Cooper by repeating a mantra to herself. ‘Just keep him at arm’s length. Don’t let him get under your skin.’ She knew the best thing was to concentrate on the job in hand and discourage conversation. But it had still taken her a few moments to bring herself under proper control when she found herself facing him, alone and with nothing to distract her attention. And as usual she found herself unable to deter him from making his infuriating small talk.

  ‘So has your transfer has been put back, then?’ said Cooper. ‘Did something go wrong?’

  ‘There’s been a delay, that’s all. Some kind of administrative hold-up. You’re stuck with me for a while longer.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  She looked at Cooper suspiciously. But, as always, he seemed to be saying only what he meant.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do.’

  Fry studied the cycle hire centre. With its collection of colourful bikes and the mist still hanging against the embankment, the stone building looked like a picture from a children’s story book. It typified the air of unreality about the area that she had yet to come to terms with. Back in Birmingham, they would have flattened this place long ago for a new motorway link road.

  ‘So this is Partridge Cross,’ she said. ‘I thought they were kidding me about the name. It sounds like something out of The Archers.’

  ‘It used to be a railway station on the High Peak line –’

  ‘I think you can keep that sort of stuff for the tourists.’ She waited for Cooper to take offence. But all he did was raise his eyebrows.

  ‘Diane, I know something went wrong between us before, but it shouldn’t stop us working together,’ he said.

  She hated it when he was tolerant and reasonable. She would have preferred him to show signs of resentment. She had got the promotion that everybody’s favourite detective constable had thought was owed to him by right, and surely it was inevitable that he would resent her.

  Fry sighed. ‘Have we got a map or anything?’ she said.

  They knew that Jenny Weston had set off from Partridge Cross an hour and a quarter before her death. She had headed eastwards on the High Peak Trail, where the strip of black compacted gravel provided easy going. Beech and elder trees overhung the trail, with nettles and brambles dying back on the verges. Jenny would have passed under the A515 before she left the trail and crossed the route of the old Roman road to begin the ascent to Ringham Moor.

  The mist began to break up as they climbed away from the hire centre. A jet liner went overhead towards East Midlands Airport, leaving a white streak in the sky. A farm dog barked half-heartedly in the distance. In between the noises, it was so unnaturally quiet that when a flock of pigeons passed overhead the noise of their wings sounded as loud as the jet.

  But a few people were already starting to arrive on the trail. A woman with iron grey hair jogged by. She was wearing purple Lycra and a clashing yellow bum-bag, and she had two large, shaggy dogs panting to keep up with her. Cooper stopped her and ran through the questions on his list. Had she been this way yesterday afternoon? Did she remember seeing this cyclist? He showed her the snapshot of Jenny Weston provided by her father, and described her bike and clothing. If not, who else had she seen? The woman did her best, but couldn’t help. She urged the dogs on as she crunched away again.

  Walkers began to appear in pairs, and once there was a small group of half a dozen. They all said ‘hello’ to the detectives, even before they were asked to stop and answer questions.

  ‘Is it obvious who we are?’ asked Fry uneasily.

  ‘No, it’s just the thing to do, if you’re walking out here. It’s a sign of comradeship.’

  Fry snorted. Then a lone man passed them, walking slowly, with his head down. He was wearing a worn anorak, and his hair was dark and greasy. Fry’s eyes hardened and her shoulders tensed. The man glanced at them nervously as he passed.

  ‘Morning,’ he said.

  Cooper started to go through the routine with him, but
he claimed not to have been in the area before. He let the man go, but Fry stopped when he was a few yards past them.

  ‘I didn’t like the look of him,’ she said. ‘We ought to check him out properly.’

  ‘Why? He’s probably just a bird-watcher or something.’

  There were views across open fields on either side and the low bankings you could easily walk over. But half a mile further on, the scenery changed. The trail entered a rocky gorge with sheer faces of crumbling limestone. The rock had been hacked into sharp angles by the crude blasting methods of the railway builders. The bramble-covered slopes above them would be impossible to scramble up, and there were lots of places to hide among the tumbled rocks and deep crevices.

  They were still some distance from the point where Jenny Weston had tackled the climb on to Ringham Moor. Ahead, there would be police tape and officers posted to prevent them approaching too near to the crime scene.

  ‘Aren’t we chasing hares?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘We have to go through the routine.’

  ‘We ought to be looking at Jenny’s life. Not where she was, but why she was here.’

  ‘It’s procedure.’

  Up ahead was a tunnel, a black shadow across the trail. The glimpse of light and greenery at the far end only emphasized the blackness they had to walk through to reach it. As they entered, the ground underfoot became softer and carved into ruts by bike tyres. In the middle, the walls and roof were panelled with curved planks and buttressed with iron. Water ran steadily down the wooden sides and dripped from the roof. They had to watch for the gleam and flicker of it in the weak light to avoid the splashes.

  ‘You’re dealing with the earlier victim, aren’t you?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, Maggie Crew.’

  ‘If it’s the same assailant, I suppose the main hope we’ve got is Crew herself. She’s the only witness.’

  ‘She’s crucial,’ said Fry. ‘If we’re ever going to get an identification, it will be from her.’

  ‘Only potentially crucial, I suppose.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She can’t remember anything. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ said Fry.

  The tunnel had been driven through the rock face at the centre of the gorge, where pink gneiss showed through the limestone. Ferns clung in patches, and a silver birch had tried to colonize a high ledge. The only sounds were the dripping and their own footsteps, until a hissing roar began behind them. They turned to see a racing cyclist, his head down, his face invisible behind an aerodynamic helmet and wraparound shades. He was well past before they could stop him.

  The original chunks of dressed stone in the tunnel walls had been filled in here and there with bricks. The number of small stones that had fallen at each side of the path looked a bit ominous, as if the tunnel was slowly crumbling around them. Behind the boarding, a mass of stone that had rolled down from the limestone face was prevented only by the damp boards and rusted iron from closing the trail completely.

  ‘What do you mean, it’s not as simple as that?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘What I mean is that she does have the memories. The current thinking is that she’s burying them, though. Her mind is suppressing them because they’re too upsetting. There’s a blank for several hours either side of the incident, caused by the trauma. But there might be certain triggers, certain circumstances in which the memories will surface. We need to find a trigger. It could just be a sound, a smell, the sight of something she recognizes. We don’t know.’

  ‘But how are we even going to hope for that – unless we can face her directly with her assailant? Isn’t there another way, Diane?’

  She shrugged. ‘The counsellors tried to help, but she got too distressed. So we’re not allowed to pressure her into seeing a psychiatrist to take it any further.’

  Now it was starting to get busier, with families out for the afternoon. Cooper and Fry crossed the road and began the ascent to the moor. They stopped to look at the field where the farmworker, Victor McCauley, had been working when he saw Jenny on her bike just after half past one.

  They emerged above the remains of the mist, and Cooper stared across the expanse of heather and whinberry that covered the plateau. He wasn’t quite sure about this Diane Fry who talked about triggers and the current thinking. It sounded wrong. He wondered if she had been on a training course recently.

  ‘Jenny ended up at the Nine Virgins, that way,’ he said. ‘But we don’t know which route she took across the moor.’

  ‘Whichever way she went, it took nearly threequarters of an hour from when McCauley saw her.’

  ‘Yes. So she probably took the long route. Towards the Cat Stones and the Hammond Tower. Then past the top of Ringham Edge Farm.’

  ‘Let’s go there, then.’

  There was no escape from the wind once they started to walk across the moor. The uniformity and lack of distraction in the landscape meant there was no escape from your thoughts, either. Or from the presence of the person you were with.

  As they approached the Cat Stones, the wind seemed to double in strength, battering at them from the rocky outcrops. Cooper shivered, and Fry pulled her collar up higher. There was no life on Ringham Moor, apart from the vegetation, itself already turning brown and brittle. The moor was empty right the way across to the outline of the tower, perched above the steep drop on its eastern edge.

  ‘Maybe it’s a test, Diane,’ said Cooper, after a while.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Putting you on to Maggie Crew. You’ve got the hardest job. Maybe they’re just putting you through the wringer. They want to see whether you come out the other side.’

  At first, he didn’t think she was going to answer. Fry walked on a few more yards, her eyes fixed ahead, concentrating on where she was going, oblivious to the fascinations of the landscape around her.

  ‘Which I will,’ she said. ‘I come through everything.’

  10

  Ben Cooper recognized the look of a martyr when he saw one. And Yvonne Leach had that look – the defeated air of a woman worn down by many years of battling against the odds.

  But it was more than that. She had an expression that Cooper had seen in the eyes of his own mother so many times. For some reason, there were women who slipped into the role of martyr as if it were their destiny. At one time, Cooper had found the tendency so frustrating in his mother that he had become angry with her, though she was not the person his anger should have been turned against. For years now, he had been drained of the anger. The sight of Mrs Leach brought it all back to him.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Leach. Is your husband around at the moment?’

  ‘No. I don’t know where he is,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps he’s about the farm somewhere?’

  ‘Perhaps he is.’

  She had kept Cooper standing in the yard, advancing from her doorstep so that he had to retreat to a point where he couldn’t see into the house. He noted her defensiveness without surprise. Many of these small hill farmers were used to making do on little money, especially when they had children to raise. But when things became too bad, it was often the women on whom the burden fell; the women were the first to suffer the internal fractures that could tear apart their families and their lives. They always tried to hide it. But there were inadvertent signs – little giveaways that you could learn to see, with practice.

  ‘I noticed the Land Rover wasn’t in the yard,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe he’s gone out, then.’

  ‘Do you know where, Mrs Leach?’

  She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going. Why should he?’

  Now Cooper registered the note of defiance, and assessed the woman more carefully. Although her clothes were old, they were clean and neatly pressed. Her hair, streaking to grey, had not seen a hairdresser for some time, but it was brushed and tied neatly back. Cooper realized she had even applied a touch of make-up this m
orning. Her lips showed two unsteady lines of red, her cheeks traces of powder.

  ‘If you see your husband, please tell him we’d like to speak to him again,’ he said.

  Then Mrs Leach smiled. It was a strangely elated smile, escaping through lips that trembled slightly. Cooper wondered whether she was on the verge of hysteria, a step away from being tipped over the edge. He wanted to stay for a while and talk to her, to tell her to seek medical advice before it was too late. He wanted to tell her that those were the saddest words in the language: ‘too late’. But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t his job.

  ‘If I see him,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, I’ll tell him if I see him.’

  ‘And how are the boys?’

  She looked surprised, almost unnerved, as if someone had just delivered bad news.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will and Dougie, is that their names? I saw them the other day. A couple of grand lads.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Leach took a handkerchief from her pocket and began to twist it as she watched Cooper’s face suspiciously.

  ‘They were tending to a fine-looking calf. They said her name was Doll.’

  ‘They showed her at Bakewell.’

  ‘And won a prize, too.’

  ‘They were that pleased,’ she said. Her voice rose suddenly on the last word, as if she had lost control of her pitch. She screwed up the handkerchief and began to dab at her lips.

  ‘I’m sure you must be very proud of them.’

  Mrs Leach nodded.

  ‘I suppose they’re at school just now,’ said Cooper.

  She made an indecipherable noise through the handkerchief that might have been agreement.

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Six and nine – no, ten.’

  ‘Both still at the primary school in Cargreave, then,’ he said.

  She nodded again.

  ‘I suppose Will is going to be off to secondary school next year. Do they go to Matlock or Bakewell from here?’

  ‘I forget.’

  Cooper looked back to where Diane Fry waited impatiently at the gate, eyeing the muck in the yard with distaste. It was only the mud left by the hooves of the cows as they passed through to the milking parlour from the wet fields. But it should have been cleaned up by now. Ringham Edge had the look of a well-maintained farm in other ways – the house and the buildings were in good condition, the tractor he could see in the shed was almost new. But there was the burnt-out pick-up standing abandoned by the shed, and the yard hadn’t been washed clean of mud for days.