Dancing With the Virgins Read online

  ‘You met him only a few months ago, at the summer solstice.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference. He’s my brother.’

  ‘I bet you don’t know anything about him. Where is he from?’

  ‘What does it matter? Who cares what he did or where he came from in another life? This is our life. This is what matters now.’

  ‘Do you go up on the moor sometimes?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘To the stone circle?’

  ‘Stride likes to talk to the Virgins. Nothing wrong with that. He’s not doing any harm.’

  ‘Do you go with him? Or does he go on his own?’

  Cal clamped his mouth shut. ‘I think I’ve talked to you enough.’

  ‘Does he go out on his own at night?’

  ‘You’re like all the others really, aren’t you? You sneak your way into the van, thinking you’ll get something on us. Well, just leave off Stride. He doesn’t do anyone any harm, not now.’

  ‘Not now?’ said Cooper gently.

  But Cal turned on his heel with a scowl and walked back to the van. Cooper looked at his watch. He had spent too long at Ringham Moor already. He had an appointment with another set of stones, and there would be trouble if he was late.

  Like most things in Edendale, the cemetery was built halfway up a hill. Over the bottom wall, beech trees ran down Mill Bank to an estate of new housing off Meadow Road, where white semis clustered round the back of the council highways depot. A squirrel foraged among the leaves and dead branches on the floor beneath the beeches.

  Sergeant Joe Cooper was buried in the new part of the cemetery, brought into use four or five years ago, when the old one became full. In the new cemetery, there were no visible graves, only rows of headstones, with the grass mowed smooth right up to them. The dead were no longer allowed to be untidy. These headstones would never loosen and tilt and grow moss with age. They were orderly, almost regimented, a picture of civic perfection. Sergeant Cooper was far tidier now than he had been at the moment of his dying, when his blood had run out on to the stone setts in Clappergate, leaving a stain that had taken council workmen weeks to remove. His killing had darkened the reputation of the town for months afterwards. No wonder they wanted to tidy him away.

  Occasionally, a jam-jar full of spring flowers or petunias appeared in front of the headstone. The Coopers never knew who they were from.

  The brothers had said nothing to each other as they drove to the cemetery. By the time they were out of the car and back in the open air, Ben was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the silence between them.

  ‘We went to see Warren Leach again yesterday,’ he said as they followed the path towards their father’s grave. ‘I just wondered if you found anything out …’

  Matt didn’t answer. His shoulders stiffened a bit, and his stride quickened.

  ‘There must be somebody who knows him, Matt.’

  ‘I dare say.’

  But Matt sounded so dismissive that Ben knew not to press it. The silence had grown even deeper by the time they reached the right spot. On every occasion they came, the row of graves had extended a little further, as if their father was somehow physically receding into the past.

  Ben and Matt left their flowers and found a bench under the hawthorn hedge, where they could see the headstone. The cemetery grass had been raked clear of leaves. It glittered an unnaturally bright green against the browns and oranges of the hillside behind it, and the grey of the stone houses piled on top of each other on the outskirts of the town.

  For a while, the brothers sat and watched each other’s breath drifting in small clouds, cold and formless, vanishing before it had even moved out of reach.

  ‘Two years, and it doesn’t seem a day,’ said Matt.

  His words couldn’t help but sound trite, but Ben was sure they were sincere. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘I still keep expecting him to appear. I think he’s going to come round the corner and tell me to stop idling around. It’s as if he’s just been on night shift for a while. Remember when we didn’t used to see him for a few days, then he would appear again, looking so tired? He always said it was short turn that was the real killer.’

  ‘He was already too old for night shifts by then.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t stop doing it. He always did his stint.’

  There was a new National Police Memorial being created in Staffordshire, with a commemorative avenue of trees known as ‘The Beat’ and a daily roll of honour showing details of the officers who had died on duty. The work would take several years to complete, and Ben Cooper had offered to help.

  Here in the cemetery, Sergeant Joe Cooper’s name was carved in stone. Eventually, it would be worn away by the rain driven down the Eden Valley, and the February frosts would crumble the surfaces. But now, just two years from his death, the letters were still crisp and clear, with sharply chiselled edges, cold and precise. Life might be brief and transient, scrawled in the sand. But death was written in a much harder alphabet.

  Ben had the names of the group of youths who had killed his father imprinted on his mind. Now and then, they cropped up in other enquiries, or in court cases he read about in the Eden Valley Times. Two of them were still serving ten-year sentences for manslaughter, but those who were free seemed to be following predictable careers. It wouldn’t be long before they, too, had a taste of prison. The thought gave Cooper no satisfaction. It would solve nothing.

  As always on these occasions, he found his brain spilling out memories like sour wine from an uncorked bottle; deeply stored images of his father that were preserved as if in vinegar. There were glimpses of a tall, strong man with wide shoulders and huge hands tossing bales of hay with a pitchfork, his face flushed and laughing. At other times he was frowning and angry, a terrifying figure in a dark uniform, opening his mouth to bring down the wrath of God on his sons. But among Ben’s memories was also a picture of his father lying dead and bleeding on the stone setts of Clappergate. It was a sight Ben hadn’t even seen, yet it was etched on his mind like a nail embedded in a tree – it was long grown over, but still there, hard and sharp, splitting the flesh that pressed too tightly around it.

  But Ben had to close the stopper tight on his thoughts. He couldn’t bear to taste those memories. The pain of them was too thick for him to swallow.

  ‘He always expected great things of you,’ said Matt.

  ‘He didn’t just expect great things – he demanded them.’

  ‘He demanded a lot, that’s true. But he was very proud of you. And you did exactly what he hoped for, always.’

  Ben looked at his brother. ‘Matt, he gave me an appalling time. He drove me like a maniac. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him. I always had to do better, to work a bit harder. But you were different. You were the favoured son.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘He never drove you like he did me. He left you alone to do whatever you wanted.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It shows that it was you that he cared about, Ben. He cared about you more than anything.’

  ‘It didn’t feel like it at the time.’

  ‘It was obvious to everybody else. Obvious to me, anyway. It didn’t matter to him what I did. It didn’t matter how hard I worked, how successful I was at what I chose to do. It meant nothing to him. He would just say, “That’s fine,” and he’d turn away to ask how your training was going, or how you’d dealt with an incident, and what your feelings were about it. Every last detail about you was important to him. But me, I could just do what I liked. I might as well not have been there.’

  Ben thought he and Matt had little in common physically, except perhaps a look of their father around the eyes and nose. Their mother was blue-eyed, but the eyes of both her sons were brown, their hair dark where she was fair. Though Cooper was five foot eleven, it was Matt who had inherited their father’s size, the wide shoul
ders, the enormous hands and the uncertain temper.

  ‘Matt, you’re the one who’s like him. Everyone says that. People always told me I took after Mum. But Dad and me, we were like chalk and cheese. It infuriated him every time he saw me reading a book. He nearly threw me out of the house when I got interested in music and joined the choir. For Heaven’s sake, I barely came up to his shoulder. I was a pigmy in his eyes.’

  Matt stood up. When he towered over him, with that exasperated frown, Matt looked more than ever like Sergeant Joe Cooper come back to life.

  ‘Maybe you never saw the similarity, Ben,’ he said. ‘But everybody else did. I can see him in you now, over this case you’re involved in, this woman who was killed on Ringham Moor.’

  ‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’

  ‘You stand here by his grave, today of all days, and you start asking me about this bloody Warren Leach. As if I cared about all that. But Dad would be proud of you, all right. Your head’s full of the same big ideas that his was, like justice and truth. You think you have to put the world right on your own. Just like him. You’re exactly like him.’

  Before his brother could reply, Matt walked away to stand over the grave, leaving Ben on the bench. Matt rearranged the flowers at the foot of the headstone and re-read the inscription.

  Ben stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Matt,’ he said.

  Matt half-turned his head. His eyes glistened, and he wiped the heel of his hand across his face. ‘You can’t help it, Ben,’ he said. ‘Neither of us can help it.’

  They walked in silence back through the cemetery, passing a workman sweeping up leaves. When they reached the car, Matt paused and looked back at the cemetery. Their father’s grave was no longer discernible from here. It had merged into anonymous rows of headstones, swallowed up among centuries of Edendale dead.

  ‘Ben … this Warren Leach,’ said Matt.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘They say his farm is in big trouble. Creditors are calling the debts in, the usual story. He’s very close to bankruptcy, they reckon, but he won’t admit it. Leach is the type who’ll try to pretend it’s not happening until it’s much too late. It’ll only take one small thing to be the last straw.’

  Cooper thought back to the two occasions he had met the farmer. ‘He isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But it can’t be much of a life up there.’

  ‘Those hill farmers are proud men. They think they don’t need anyone else; they want to believe they’re self-reliant, like their ancestors always were. It’s hard for men like that to admit any sort of weakness. Losing the farm would be the end of the world for Warren Leach. He must be close to the edge.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you, Ben? I’m not sure.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’d watch out for Warren Leach, if I were you. When a man is driven close to the edge, he might do anything. And, unlike you, Ben, some men can completely lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong.’

  20

  Each time Diane Fry emerged from Maggie Crew’s apartment, the rest of the world looked garish and unreal. It was like coming out of the cinema after a horror matinee. One minute it was all nightmare figures leaping out of the dark and blood splattering against the camera lens, and suddenly you found yourself standing at the traffic lights outside Mothercare with the sun in your eyes and an ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’.

  Today, Matlock looked like a badly designed Disney-World set. There were the mock turrets of Riber Castle on one side of the valley and the Heights of Abraham and Gulliver’s Kingdom on the other, with the River Derwent in the bottom and the old locomotives getting up steam at Matlock Bridge station. But in between, the design had gone wrong, with crowds wandering about searching in vain for Mickey Mouse and Pluto, and endless traffic choking the central square, where there ought to have been fountains and open-air restaurants, and children demanding Big Macs. And this was one of the quietest times of the year. During the summer, the chaos was mindless. Where were they all going? What were they looking for? What were they trying to escape?

  Fry had yet to understand what made twenty-five million people a year visit the Peak District. There were no shopping centres, no big sports arenas, no exhibition centres or concert halls, not even a decent football ground. All these people did was cause problems and pollution, going nowhere and doing nothing. So pointless.

  Today, though, Fry was glad of the crowds. Their aimless swarming was an antidote to the obsessive isolation of the apartment at Derwent Court. Maggie’s solitary martyrdom was too reminiscent of periods of her own life – so painful and bitter, yet somehow horribly alluring, like the temptation to give yourself up to drowning when you were too exhausted to swim any more.

  Fry knew how easy it was to reach that stage. She knew you could find yourself in a situation where a greeting from a stranger was a torture, and the words ‘good morning’ from the postman were as welcome as the plague. When somebody rang the door bell, you not only refused to answer it, you wanted to hide in another room, in case they saw you through the window and knew you were there.

  Once you allowed yourself to become a recluse, then the world began to seem a long way off, beyond your reach. It became a place where you would be an alien, if you ever found yourself there. And you knew the people from that world would see you as an alien, too. You were not like them. You were different. Disfigured.

  Fry supported herself against the side of her car and shuddered. Memory was such a physical thing. It was more physical than her own skin, than the clothes she wore, or the ground she stood on. A terrible, physical thing. And some memories never seemed to lose their power to hurt. They never weakened with age, nor dimmed as the years went by. They simply slipped behind a cloud of everyday concerns and trivial preoccupations, waiting until the right moment to emerge, more powerful than ever. And memories still hit hardest when they were most unexpected.

  There was no doubt Maggie Crew was a damaged woman. Fry had begun to dread going to see her. While she was there, in Maggie’s house, she felt somehow at home. Yet afterwards, within a few minutes of leaving, when she was sitting in the car with her hand on the ignition key, she would suddenly begin to shake. She realized now that she was sweating, her hands were trembling, and her legs felt weak, as if she hadn’t eaten for days. She had to wind down the window and let in the cold air to shock herself back into alertness.

  She wasn’t used to feeling so drained of energy as she was now. She was usually able to direct energy into her body at a moment’s notice. She had trained for years to feel it flow and channel it where it was needed. But an hour with Maggie Crew had sapped that vitality. So what was going wrong?

  There were things for her to do back at HQ, but nothing urgent – she had been given a free hand to spend as long as she needed to with Maggie. That meant she had time to call at her own flat in Edendale on the way. She decided a shower would help wash away the cold stickiness that was clinging to her skin.

  Yet Fry drove round town for a while, turning through the steep streets aimlessly, unwilling to arrive home until her energy had returned and her mood had dissipated.

  Of course, there was a physical reason for her frame of mind, too. Her body craved action, something to focus the pent-up tension, some target to hit out at. Her old shotokan master in Warley had taught her to recognize the feeling and use it. Very soon, she would have to find time to visit her new dojo in Sheffield to get that release, or the dark well of anger would boil over and the wrong target would be in the way.

  For Fry, each time she found herself back with Maggie Crew in that soulless apartment now it was like leaving the light to enter a tunnel. She recalled the tunnel on the High Peak Trail, with its dripping water and landslides of rock barely held back by the wooden roof. But she had been with Ben Cooper then, and that made a difference.

  Gradually, she felt her normal equilibrium coming back, and she turned the wheel towards Edendale. H
er flat in Grosvenor Avenue was depressing enough, but in a tangible sort of way. It was simply dismal and uncomfortable, not laden with painful emotions. That was what she had liked about the place when she had rented it – it held no memories, no associations, not even any significant possessions from her old life. She had thrown them all away, given them to charity shops or dumped them in recycling bins – books, clothes, the lot. So the flat was empty of feeling. A cold kind of comfort.

  Fry waited outside the flat until she was sure that the mood had gone. But even then, when she got inside and stared with glad contempt at the filthy walls, there was a niggle at the back of her mind, a lingering suspicion that she had brought something of Maggie Crew with her into the room. She cursed. She had learned to recognize emotional entanglement the moment it began to infect her. The first twinge of it indicated a lowering of her defences, a weakness in her immune system that had to be tackled. A course of antibiotics was what she needed, a period of isolation, perhaps.

  She looked at her diary. She had made an appointment with Maggie Crew for Friday. She would phone to cancel it in the morning. She took out her pen and put a thick, black line through the date. She immediately felt better.

  Stride had started measuring the days. When each one arrived, it was shorter than the last. And the moor was changing as he watched; it was dying slowly on itself, folding and shrivelling, transforming like a chameleon to adapt itself to the new season. As the days shortened, the green chlorophyll broke down in the leaves. Its gradual ebbing away revealed the underlying colours – the yellows, oranges and reds that had been masked all summer. Toxic waste products excreted into the dying leaves made the trees shrink away from their own foliage. They were rejecting parts of themselves as superfluous, recoiling as if from something alien and repulsive, so that their stems dried and loosened on the branch and the wind carried the unwanted leaves away.

  But Stride knew this wasn’t really death he was seeing. It wasn’t an ending, only the preparation for another beginning. The leaves that drifted to the ground in their millions would slowly decay and disintegrate, returning nutrients to the soil and into the tree roots, ready for growth to begin again next spring. The great recycling system had started up. Millions of organic systems would break down and be renewed on a scale far beyond anything that Derbyshire Dales District Council could dream of.