Dancing With the Virgins Read online

  Unlike Ben Cooper, Fry felt no desire to defend the underdogs – not when they were people like Eric Weston. But she was angry and embarrassed to find that Weston’s words had awakened a deep echo in her own mind. She was appalled that a couple of sentences he had uttered had matched so exactly her own feelings, from a period in her life that was not so very long ago.

  ‘It made me feel ashamed, although I knew I had done nothing wrong,’ he had said. ‘Everyone made me feel it was my fault. Everyone.’

  16

  ‘White vans and more white vans,’ said Chief Superintendent Jepson, waving a handful of report forms. ‘Do you know how many white vans there are? How many within two days’ drive of here? Millions?’

  ‘Quite a few thousand, certainly,’ said DCI Tailby.

  ‘Do you propose to check out every one? Are you going to send my officers out on a van-spotting tour of the country? Perhaps you could give them those little I-Spy books and tell them not to come back until they’ve ticked off one with a rusty wheel arch?’

  ‘We could ask local forces to do that for us, of course.’

  ‘Oh, of course. My colleagues in ACPO will love me. They’ll call me the White Van Man for the rest of my career.’

  ‘That would be rather unkind.’

  DCI Tailby had been reviewing the information for the Divisional Commander. There was plenty of it – an entire flood of it, rapidly filling up the megabytes on the computer. None of it pinned down any known persons actually in the vicinity of the Nine Virgins at the same time as Jenny Weston, with the exception of the Ranger, Mark Roper. The nearest locations of individuals identified were those of the farmworker, Victor McCauley, the two young men living in the quarry, and the Leach family, who had been going about their business at Ringham Edge.

  DI Hitchens had brought a map of Ringham Moor, with the locations marked by the incident room staff. The trouble was, there were too many paths winding their way across the moor. There could be other individuals that hadn’t been seen. The white van wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  ‘And what about Europe?’ said Jepson. ‘Two days’ drive? Do you realize this van of yours could be in any city in half the countries of the European Union by now? Are you planning some day-trips? Are you intending to besmirch my good name with Europol? I suppose they’ll start calling me Monsieur la Camionnette Blanche.’

  ‘We don’t think it’s a French make,’ said Hitchens. ‘More likely a Ford Transit.’

  Chief Superintendent Jepson sighed melodramatically. ‘If I start getting postcards from CID officers from all over the French Riviera, I’ll want to know why.’

  ‘I don’t think any of that will be necessary, sir,’ said Tailby.

  ‘If we don’t make any progress soon, it will be, Stewart. Does this Martin Stafford sound like somebody who’d drive a white Transit van, Hitchens?’

  ‘No, sir. But who knows?’

  ‘Who indeed? Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we the people who are supposed to find out things like that?’

  ‘We’re busy tracing Stafford right now.’

  ‘I’m also interested in the witness who said this van she saw was local. How does she know it was local?’

  ‘She thinks she’s seen it before, sir. She remembers that it was dirty, and has a rusted wheel arch. She notices things like that, she says. When pressed, she said she associates it with animals.’

  ‘We’re following it up, anyway,’ said Hitchens. ‘Checking out farmers, and so on. As it happens, it’s market day today in Edendale. Lots of vehicles in town. All we need is a bit of luck.’

  ‘We do deserve it,’ said Tailby.

  Jepson nodded. ‘And the witness saw this van in the entrance to Ringham Edge Farm. Visiting Warren Leach, then?’

  ‘Could have been,’ said Hitchens. ‘But, as Mr Leach himself says, the driver could have been using the roadway for some other purpose. Bear in mind there’s access to the moor there. It’s the same access that we’ve been using ourselves for the last two days.’

  ‘Obliterating any tyre tracks in the process, naturally,’ said Jepson.

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘Yes, we always like to wipe out a fair bit of forensic evidence right at the start, don’t we? We’re well known for it. One of our more outstanding talents, you might say.’

  ‘I think you’re exaggerating there, sir,’ said Tailby.

  ‘Am I?’ said Jepson. ‘I don’t think so. Has it ever occurred to you there might be a case for keeping police officers away from a crime scene completely when a body is found? We might actually get better results that way.’

  ‘It’s a thought, sir,’ said Hitchens. ‘We could suggest it as a special project group for the Operational Planning Department.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. It was also Leach’s wife who found the earlier victim, Crew, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘We mustn’t overlook any correlations that the computer throws up, Stewart.’

  ‘We’re not doing that, sir. I’m keeping Leach in mind until we can eliminate him.’

  ‘What about boyfriends of the victim?’

  ‘All accounted for, except for the one who wrote the note. All the others deny writing it, and their handwriting doesn’t match.’

  ‘And Stafford’s writing doesn’t seem to match, either.’

  ‘I’ve sent the samples to a handwriting expert. But at first glance, they’re quite unalike.’

  ‘So, a mystery boyfriend, then. I suppose that’s what you would call a start, is it?’

  ‘A mystery boyfriend who drives a white van?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘A mystery boyfriend who drives a white Transit van with a rusty wheel arch, who has something to do with animals and who possesses a sharp knife and a pair of boots that match our partial print. That would be ideal, I suppose,’ said Jepson. ‘Is that all you want for Christmas?’

  ‘If it’s Santa asking, I’d wish for Maggie Crew’s memories to come back as well,’ said Tailby.

  ‘Ah, yes. How’s Fry been getting on with her?’

  ‘It’s slow going, by all accounts. Crew is completely closed in on herself. Putting Fry on her was a bit of a last resort. But we can’t treat her with kid gloves for ever, not if women are going to start dying on us.’

  ‘Are you sure Fry’s the right person?’ said Jepson. ‘Where’s Ben Cooper today?’

  ‘Cooper’s on the white van team,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘I can’t help feeling somebody else might have been better than Fry. Cooper does at least try to understand people. He has a bit more empathy.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hitchens, ‘we’ve done empathy.’

  ‘And what about Sugden?’ asked Jepson. ‘It would be helpful to appear to be questioning a suspect. Politically helpful, I mean.’

  ‘We’re bringing him in now.’

  ‘Good. And the woman from Cheshire – Ros Daniels?’

  ‘Not a trace of her. It’ll take a damn sight more than empathy to find her, I’m afraid.’

  Wayne Sugden hadn’t wanted to come to the station to be interviewed. It was understandable. He had been out of prison only two weeks, and the cells in the detention suite at Edendale carried bad memories for him. But in the end, they had just put him in an interview room, where Diane Fry and DI Hitchens found him bubbling with fear and anger.

  ‘You can’t leave people alone, can you? Once you’ve got a downer on a bloke, that’s it. Am I going to get this for the rest of my life? I’d be better off back inside.’

  ‘Let’s just calm down, Mr Sugden,’ said Hitchens. ‘We only want a chat.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? I know your chats. I’m saying nothing. Not a word. Fetch me a solicitor.’

  Sugden could just about qualify as a match for the description given by Jenny’s neighbour. He was about five foot eight, a little overweight from his spell of prison food and lack of exercise, with pale eyes and hair the colour of Dettol. His accent was certainly local. May
be he could even dress respectably sometimes – when he finally put those jeans and the stained black sweatshirt in the wash.

  ‘I know my rights,’ he said. ‘It’s on the card. Here, you haven’t shown me the card. I can make a complaint, you know.’

  Fry couldn’t raise any sympathy for Sugden. Maybe if she had just been released from prison herself, the last person she would have wanted to see was a policeman, and the last place she would have wanted to be was Edendale police station. But then, she would have thought of that in the first place before she got herself sent down for burglary.

  ‘We’re trying to eliminate as many people as possible from a current enquiry, Mr Sugden,’ she said. ‘We just want to ask you a few simple questions.’

  Sugden smiled bitterly. ‘Nothing’s simple in this life. Your lot taught me that, at least. You made my life bloody complicated.’

  ‘Wednesday 22nd October, Mr Sugden,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Where were you that night?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘You were only just out of prison. You were released the previous day. If it were me, I’d remember exactly what I was doing in my first days of freedom.’

  ‘I expect I went for a drink,’ said Sugden. ‘To celebrate.’

  ‘Anywhere nice? I’m always open to recommendations.’

  ‘A couple of pubs I know in Edendale.’

  ‘On your own?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I met up with a few people, said hello. Come to think of it, they bought me a few drinks. They all knew I’d been set up something rotten.’

  ‘What it is to have friends,’ said Hitchens. ‘What time did you go to Sheffield?’

  ‘Eh? I never went to Sheffield. I told you – just the pubs in town.’

  ‘Do you know a place called Totley?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Sugden cautiously.

  ‘Ever been there?’

  ‘Couldn’t say.’

  ‘I’m asking you to say.’

  ‘Did some place get burgled? It wasn’t me. And if you’re saying it was, I want that solicitor now.’

  ‘Nothing like that, Mr Sugden. Take it easy.’

  ‘What then? What’s it all about? You try anything else on, and you’ll be in dead trouble. It’s my human rights.’

  ‘You learned a lot in prison, didn’t you, Mr Sugden?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘What we’re interested in is whether you were in Totley on the night of Wednesday 22nd October,’ said Fry.

  ‘Wednesday 22nd October. You said it before. The day after I came out.’

  There was a triumphant look on Sugden’s face. Fry had seen it on faces so often before. She could practically hear the dialogue that went with it. ‘I suppose you’re going to claim you were never there,’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’ said Sugden.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ said Fry. ‘ “I was never there.” We get sick of hearing it.’

  ‘That Wednesday I was in the pub. Two or three pubs. There’s people will tell you that. Alibis.’

  ‘Move forward to Friday 24th October, then. Were you in a car in Totley that night?’

  ‘A car?’ Sugden laughed. ‘My wife sold the car when I went inside. You’d have thought she was hoping I wouldn’t be coming out again.’

  ‘You might have hired a car.’

  ‘Never in my life. Friday night? I think I went to the pub again.’

  ‘A varied social life, then.’

  Sugden shrugged. He was gaining confidence.

  ‘That’s what you did both nights?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You weren’t selling stolen video recorders, by any chance?’

  ‘Hey,’ said Sugden, ‘I think that’s a “no comment”.’

  ‘We’d really like to eliminate you from our enquiries, Mr Sugden.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t like that. Right? And anyway …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was never there.’

  17

  The old cattle market was close to Edendale railway station. The overgrown tracks that ran alongside the market were where the cattle waggons had once been unloaded, in the days when animals were moved by train. These days, they came in by trailer and by huge cattle transporters that brought half of Edendale town centre to a halt on market days as they attempted to negotiate the narrow corners.

  The days of Pilkington & Son, Livestock Auctioneers, were numbered anyway. And not just because of their inconvenient location or the lengthening list of European Union regulations that became ever more difficult to comply with. The number of cattle markets was dwindling fast, even in rural counties like Derbyshire. And three years ago, the futuristic white sails of a new agricultural business centre that the farmers called ‘Nine Nipples’ had appeared fifteen miles away at Bakewell, part of a £12 million regeneration project. It had a vast parking area, modern penning, three sale rings, meeting rooms, an IT centre and conference facilities. Since it opened, Pilkington & Son had merely been counting the days.

  As a result, a bare minimum of maintenance had been done on the buildings in Edendale during the past ten years. There were gaps in the roof and missing sections of corrugated iron in the walls, rusty gates falling off their hinges, and pens whose steel bars had been bent out of shape by vandals. At night, youths rode their motorbikes through the aisles like rodeo cowboys. On the street side, the windows were full of jagged holes where the panes had been used for target practice.

  Outside, the open-air pens were surrounded by parked Land Rovers, muddy livestock trailers and transporters slewed on to the pavements. Ben Cooper and Todd Weenink had difficulty finding a space for their car, and ended up parking across the front bumper of a wagon owned by a haulier from Lincolnshire.

  The main building held cattle, and two smaller ones across the road were for pigs and sheep. Many of the sheep pens were empty, but there were some Derbyshire Gritstone ewes crammed together between wooden hurdles. A man was trying to drive a group of piglets up a strawed ramp into a lorry with nothing but a wooden board and a mouthful of curses. Once in the lorry, the pigs clattered and squealed hysterically, before emerging back down the ramp as the man dodged and screamed, rapidly losing his temper.

  A patrol car was blocking one of the side roads, with its hazard lights on and the stripes on its rear glowing bright red. A uniformed officer ran back to speak to them.

  ‘It’s bloody chaos here,’ he said. ‘No wonder Traffic have hysterics every time it’s market day.’

  ‘Where’s the van?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed to one of the cobbled areas crammed with vehicles of all kinds. ‘It’s right at the back, so I’d say it won’t be leaving for a while.’

  ‘Have you got the details?’

  ‘This is the registration.’ The officer passed him a page from his notebook. ‘It’s registered to a Mr Keith Teasdale. An Edendale address, as you can see.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘We’ve been told to hang around for a bit, in case you need us.’

  ‘OK. But don’t make yourselves too obvious. Hide your baboon’s bum, for a start.’

  ‘We’ll try. There’s just nowhere to park. The town centre bobby is here, too, by the way. They expect to see him on market day, so he’s no problem.’

  Cooper and Weenink wound their way through the parked vehicles. They passed a fifty-foot-long transporter that already had two decks of calves loaded. A lorry that had been washed and scrubbed inside drove off with dirty water pouring out under the hinges of the tailgate. A farmer was trying to negotiate a cattle trailer into a space that was obviously too small.

  When they found the Transit van, it was blocked in at the back of the parking area, with its bonnet against the wall and no way of reversing out past the trailer behind it.

  ‘I suppose it was white once,’ said Cooper, drawing his finger through the grime on the back doors.

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sp; Weenink had walked round the front, squeezing his bulk between the van and the wing mirror of a Daihatsu Fourtrak next to it.

  ‘Has it got a rusty wheel arch?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Two of them. Also a rusty passenger door and rusty sills all the way along this side. And look at all this crap hanging out of the side door.’

  Cooper peered along the van. Strands of yellow straw stuck out from under the bottom of the side-loading door like a badly trimmed fringe of hair.

  ‘It reminds me of a particularly hairy blonde I knew once,’ said Weenink. ‘She was a real goer. But stripped down to her knickers, she looked like Wurzel Gummidge.’

  ‘Let’s go and find Mr Keith Teasdale,’ said Cooper.

  A police constable and an RSPCA inspector stood chatting by the door, their uniforms almost identical but for the policeman’s helmet. The RSPCA man looked like a farmer himself and nodded amicably at the customers walking past. Above their heads were posters advertising fertilizers and animal feeds.

  Inside the building, market workers were channelling cattle through a complicated network of steel pens towards the sale ring. As Cooper and Weenink entered, a group of bullocks turned on each other and engaged in a shoving match in the passageway. Side by side, two of the animals completely filled the passage, and their flanks were squeezed against the five-foot high steel bars of the pens on either side. Yipping and shouting, the attendants flicked their backs with sticks until they went in the right direction. Then steel gates were shut along the passageways with a series of loud clangs.

  At the back was the sale ring itself, surrounded by tiers of wooden benches like a miniature amphitheatre. Rows of farmers lined the benches, while others pressed against the steel tubular sides of the ring, their boots resting on a wooden platform like men propping up the bar at their local pub. Above them, the low girders supporting the roof of the mart were covered with roosting starlings.

  In the ring were four men, booted and overalled, with sticks in their hands to keep the beasts moving through. The exits and entrances were just wide enough for men to squeeze through, but too narrow for animals desperate to escape from the claustrophobic confines of the ring and the circles of watching, predatory eyes.