Dancing With the Virgins Page 3

  Suddenly, Cooper’s mood plummeted. He felt as if he had just been jilted by a lover. If there was a job on, he wanted to be there. He wanted to be part of the team. He wondered why loyalty had to be so painful. And when would he learn to give his loyalty in the right direction? He ought to have learned that lesson from Diane Fry – their brief relationship had certainly been difficult enough to drive it home. Cooper shuddered at a premonition. He thought it likely that she could inflict more pain on him yet, given the chance.

  The police vehicles cluttering up the roadsides at the bottom of the main track on to Ringham Moor made Diane Fry frown in exasperation. The scene looked chaotic, as cars with beacons flashing arrived one after another in the gathering dusk and slewed across the narrow verge. A minibus carrying the Tactical Support Unit was unable to squeeze through the gap left by the parked cars until a uniformed sergeant yelled at someone to move. Figures in reflective yellow jackets were caught briefly in the headlights as they passed aimlessly backwards and forwards.

  Fry itched to take control of the situation, to bring order and a bit of sense to officers so charged with excitement and adrenalin that they were causing more trouble than they were worth. But, in fact, she shouldn’t even be here at all. She had thought she had got away from E Division, that her few weeks in Edendale had been a bad dream she could soon put behind her. But here she still was, answering the call. And before she knew what was happening, she had found herself out in the Peak District countryside again, where civilization seemed like a dim memory and the twenty-first century was reduced to the fantasy of a Victorian novelist.

  She stood with Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens on the rocks overlooking the road. A fine drizzle was settling on their clothes and in their hair, and turning the gritstone slab under their feet a shade darker. With Hitchens at her side, Fry felt as though she had taken another step closer in her ambitions. She was already ‘acting up’ as a detective sergeant, with a transfer to a permanent DS’s job in the offing when the imminent re-shuffle took place.

  A move couldn’t come too soon for Fry. At all costs, she must avoid the crazy distractions and misjudgements that had plagued her in a spell shortly after her arrival in E Division from West Midlands. The name of her biggest misjudgement was Ben Cooper.

  The thought of him immediately sparked the surge of anger that always bubbled somewhere deep in her stomach, churning thick and corrosive like an acid that flowed in her small intestines. It happened every time; it only took the mention of Cooper’s name, or even a burst of the wrong music. There were cassettes that she used to play often in her car which she had been forced to throw away – not just casually chucked on the back seat, but hurled into the nearest wheelie bin, with their spools of magnetic tape ripped out and shredded like the innards of a rat she had once seen killed and torn apart by a police Alsatian in a derelict warehouse back in Birmingham. If there had been an open fire in her flat, she would have burned the tapes; she would have happily watched their plastic cases crack and twist and bubble, as they melted into a greasy smear.

  Fry wiped a sheen of drizzle from her face, where it was starting to make her cheeks feel damp and uncomfortable. No, she hadn’t quite managed to erase Ben Cooper from her memory yet. But she was working on it.

  ‘We’ve arranged for you to see Maggie Crew at six o’clock,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘You’d better get going, as soon as this lot are out of our way.’

  ‘Was she willing to see me?’

  ‘Willing isn’t a word I’d use. She’s bloody hard work.’

  ‘She’s uncooperative? But why?’

  ‘You’ll see. Form your own impressions of her, Diane, that’s the best way. We want you to get to know her. Get under her skin. Be an irritant, if you like.’

  Fry knew she was being presented with a chance to do something different, to escape the routine chores that the Ben Coopers of the world would be allocated during this enquiry.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.

  Hitchens nodded in approval. ‘When are they going to stop messing about down there?’ he said.

  DI Hitchens was dressed casually, in denims and trainers, and he looked like a man who should have been doing something else. His cheeks were dark and unshaven, and there were specks of white paint in his hair.

  ‘We’ve got to keep the road open,’ said the sergeant importantly as he passed below them.

  ‘Yeah. You’re doing a great job. We can see that.’

  ‘Control reckons the cavalry’s on the way, Inspector. They tracked down a couple of your lot at the rugby match.’

  Fry knew exactly what that meant. The rugby match was where Ben Cooper would have been with his friend, Todd Weenink, and no doubt DS Dave Rennie, too. Cooper wasn’t a rugby-playing man himself. From her own experience, Fry reckoned he was more likely to be taking out the half-time oranges and cleaning the players’ boots, generally getting in the way and making helpful suggestions. But he would have been at the match to support his colleagues. Oh yes, Ben Cooper was a great one for supporting his friends.

  ‘Oh, and you’ll be pleased to know our lads won too!’ called the sergeant.

  Fry blew through her teeth and jammed her hands into the pockets of her coat, squaring her shoulders like someone bracing herself for a fight. Rennie, Cooper, and Weenink. The dream team. Just what E Division needed to stamp on a spate of attacks on women.

  At last it looked as though someone had located another place to park. Radios crackled, the sergeant shouted, and cars began to move off, flashing their headlights and spinning their wheels dramatically on the grass as they went. But as the patrols and vans made space, another car arrived. It was an unmarked Mondeo – a private car, not a police vehicle. The doors popped open and a warm fug seemed to ooze out into the evening chill. A voice was raised in complaint from the back seat.

  ‘I can’t believe we left those uniformed bastards with all the beer,’ it said.

  Fry recognized DC Weenink immediately. He was damp-haired and pink-faced, and his voice sounded petulant, like an overgrown child. She watched in disgust as he poked bare, muscular legs out of the car door and struggled to pull his trousers on over his jockey shorts. Parts of his anatomy bulged dangerously from his underclothes, and the buttons of his shirt were unfastened over his hairy chest. Even from several yards away, Fry knew that his breath smelled of alcohol.

  She watched DS Rennie get out of the driver’s seat. But no Ben Cooper. Suddenly, Fry felt more cheerful. Her shoulders relaxed, her lips formed a contemptuous smile.

  ‘Well, if that’s the cavalry,’ she said, ‘my money’s on the Indians.’

  DI Hitchens laughed. Weenink heard the laugh, and he looked around for its source. He grinned up at Fry, with his zip still open, his hands pressed round his crotch, the position of them emphasizing rather than concealing the bulge in his shorts.

  ‘Excuse me, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Can you use me at all?’

  Fry stared at him, but Weenink’s grin only grew broader, until it became a smirk. She turned to stride away from the road. She had no time to waste on petty irritations – not when a woman’s entire life had already been wasted up there on the moor. She had seen enough wasted lives, and her own had almost been one of them. But not any more.

  Ben Cooper took a swig from his bottle, conserving the beer carefully, anxious about drinking too much. He didn’t want to become a solitary drinker, though the temptation was strong.

  A few minutes ago, he had rung Control to find out what was happening. They said the body of a woman had been found on Ringham Moor, fifteen miles south of Edendale. A suspected murder. The control room operator didn’t need to mention the other attack that had taken place not a mile away from the same spot six weeks before. In that case, the victim had survived – just about.

  Now Cooper’s mind was no longer with him as he sat in the sweaty rugby club bar. It was elsewhere, drifting across the moors towards a flutter of tape and the flashing lights, the sound
of urgent voices, and the scents and the electric crackle in the air that never failed to give him a buzz of excitement. That sense of satisfaction from taking his place in the team was a thing that couldn’t be explained to someone who had never experienced it.

  Yet tomorrow morning, he knew he would be sitting in the monthly Crime Strategy Meeting for Edendale Section. He would be discussing the section’s annual local objectives, the implementation of liaison policies and the measurement of performance. Occasionally, in these meetings, they talked about crime. But they hardly ever talked about the victims.

  Cooper watched the rugby players reach the traditional highlight of the evening, when they began to pour pints of beer over each other’s heads. The bare wooden floor of the bar was already awash and turning sticky underfoot. Some of the students looked irritated at the way their clubhouse was being taken over by the more boisterous and more aggressive celebratory style of the police. Soon it would reach the point when it might be better not to have to witness a colleague committing a breach of the peace.

  It was time for Ben Cooper to leave. He needed to be awake and alert for the meeting in the morning, and he had a stack of burglaries to work on, as well as a serious assault on a bouncer at one of Edendale’s night clubs. With officers seconded to the murder enquiry, no doubt there would be someone else’s workload to take over as well. Besides, if he stayed any longer, he would drink too much. It was definitely time to go home.

  But home was Bridge End Farm, in the shadow of Camphill. Though he was close to his brother Matt, Matt’s young family were gradually making the house their own, until their video games and guinea pig cages left little room for Ben. So for a while he sat on in the bar, like an old man in the corner watching the youngsters enjoy themselves, and he thought about the body on Ringham Moor.

  With a bit of luck, the police team would find some obvious leads and get an early closure. There would be initial witness statements that pointed with clunking obviousness to a boyfriend or a spurned lover. Sometimes it was as if the perpetrator carried a giant, fluorescent arrow round with him and the word ‘guilty’ in bright red letters that were visible five miles away in poor light. All the team would need to do then was make sure they collected the forensic evidence at the scene without either contaminating it, losing it or sticking the wrong label on it so that no one could say afterwards where it had been found. It was amazing what could happen to evidence between the first report of a crime and the day a case came to court.

  Cooper fought his way to the bar, shouting to the barman to make himself heard above the din. It seemed as though no one else in here wanted to sit down – they were all up on their feet, shouting at each other. The police were singing triumphal songs, having a great time. The students were starting to look hostile.

  The American beer Cooper was drinking came in a brown bottle, with a black label and a faint wisp of vapour from its open neck. It was cold, and he closed both his hands round it, drawing a strange comfort from its chill for a moment before he turned and carried it away from the bar. Instead of returning to his corner, he slipped out of the door into the cooler air outside.

  For a while, he leaned against a rail near the changing rooms, gazing at the empty pitch, watching the starlings that had arrived in the dusk to pick over the divots in the turf, searching for worms exposed by the players’ studs. He became distantly aware of a more aggressive note to the shouting in the bar behind him, but decided it wasn’t his concern.

  Cooper continued to believe it was nothing to do with him right up until the moment that a six-foot six-inch student lock forward put a hand like a meat plate on his shoulder.

  3

  Diane Fry had never seen Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby quite so agitated. The DCI loomed over his group of officers like a head teacher with a class full of pupils in detention, and he was shouting at the Senior SOCO from the Scientific Support Unit. Tailby’s strangely two-tone hair was trembling in the wind as he turned and paced around the crime scene.

  ‘We’ve got to hit this area fast,’ he said. ‘We can’t possibly seal it off – we’d need every man in E Division. We need to get what we can before the public get up here and trample over everything.’

  ‘Well, we could do it in a rush, but it won’t be very selective,’ said the SOCO.

  ‘Sod being selective,’ said Tailby. ‘Take everything. We’ll worry about being selective later.’

  A few yards away, DI Hitchens manoeuvred to keep his senior officer within distance. Other officers ebbed and flowed awkwardly around them, like extras in a badly staged Gilbert and Sullivan opera, who had just realized that nobody had told them what to do with their hands.

  ‘The light’s failing fast,’ said Hitchens, gazing at the sky.

  ‘Well, thanks for that,’ snapped Tailby. ‘I thought I was going blind.’

  The DCI strode over to the side of the stone circle and looked down into the disused quarry beyond it. There was a barbed wire fence, but it was too low to keep anybody out. On the other side could be seen the last few yards of an access road, which ended on the lip of the quarry. Diane Fry stretched her neck to see what Tailby was looking at. Someone had been fly-tipping from the roadway. She could just make out tyre marks, and a heap of bulging black bin liners, some yellow plastic sheeting and a roll of carpet that had been heaved off the edge. The rubbish lay scattered on the slope like the debris of a plane crash.

  ‘Find out where the entrance to that quarry is,’ said Tailby. ‘And somebody will have to go down there. We need to find the rest of the clothes. Top priority.’

  Hitchens had to dodge as Tailby wheeled suddenly and strode back towards the stones, avoiding the lengths of blue tape twisted together between birch trees and metal stakes. In the centre of the circle, the pathologist, Mrs Van Doon, still crouched over the victim under makeshift lighting. Tailby’s face contorted. He seemed to find something outrageous and obscene in the posture of the body.

  ‘Where’s that tent?’ he called. ‘Get the tent over her before we have an audience.’

  He turned his back and walked on a few yards from the circle, where a single stone stood on its own. DI Hitchens trailed after him at a safe distance.

  ‘There’s an inscription carved on this stone,’ announced Tailby, with the air of Moses coming down from the mountain.

  ‘Yes. It looks like a name, sir.’

  ‘We’ll need a photographer over here. I want that name deciphering.’

  ‘It’s well away from the path,’ said Hitchens. ‘We think the assailant probably brought his victim from the other direction.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The inscription has probably been there for years.’

  ‘Do you know that? Are you familiar with these stones?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Ever seen them before in your life?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Tailby turned. ‘No point asking you, Fry, is there?’

  Fry shrugged, but the DCI wasn’t waiting for an answer. He looked around to see who else he could find. ‘You lot, there! Anyone seen these stones before? They’re a famous landmark, they tell me. A significant part of our ancient heritage. They’re an attraction. Visitors flock to see them. What about you?’

  The officers shook their heads. They were the sort of men who spent their free time in the pub or in front of the telly, doing a bit of DIY or visiting the garden centre. The ones with kids went to Alton Towers and Gulliver’s Kingdom. But this thing in front of them wasn’t a theme park. There were no white-knuckle rides or ice-cream vans. Tailby turned back to Hitchens.

  ‘OK, see? We know nothing about it. We’re all as ignorant as a lot of monkeys. This stone circle might as well be a Tibetan yak compound, for all we know about the place.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Just see that it’s done,’ snarled Tailby.

  Then the DCI looked back to where Mrs Van Doon was working. Fry could see that more inscriptions had been scratched
into the dirt in the centre of the circle, close to the body. The letters were big and bold, and they spelled out ‘STRIDE’. Whoever had made these was less interested in leaving a long-term record of his presence, though. The drizzle was hardly touching the marks, but a couple of heavy showers would wash them clean away.

  ‘What about those, then?’ said Tailby. ‘You’re not going to tell me those have been there for years?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Hitchens. ‘They’ve got to be more recent.’

  ‘When did it rain in this area last? Properly, I mean?’

  Tailby stared around him. The officers gathered nearby looked at each other, then up at the sky. Fry sympathized. They were detectives – they spent all their time buried in paperwork or making phone calls in windowless offices; occasionally they drove around in a car, shuttling from pub to crown court and back again. How were they supposed to know when it had rained?

  It was well known that DI Hitchens had just bought a new house in Chesterfield. Tailby himself had a ranch-style bungalow in a desirable part of Dronfield. Most of the other officers lived miles away, down in the lower valleys and the dormitory villages. Some of them were from the suburbs of Derby. It could be blowing a blizzard up here on the moor, piling up six-foot drifts of virgin snow, and all these men would see was a faint bit of sleet in the condensation on their kitchen windows.

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Hitchens.

  Tailby smiled like a fox with a rabbit. ‘It matters, Inspector, because we can’t say whether the inscriptions were written in the last twenty-four hours or the last two weeks.’

  ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  Teeth bared, Tailby glared round for another victim. There was a shuffling and looking away, a lot of thoughtful glances at the grey blanket of cloud.

  ‘You useless set of pillocks! Doesn’t anyone know? Then find me someone who does!’

  Mark Roper finally opened his eyes as Owen Fox parked the Land Rover behind the Partridge Cross briefing centre. The cycle hire staff had closed up for the night, but there were still a few visitors’ cars left outside. A couple were securing their bikes to a rack. It occurred to Mark Roper that one of the cars that still stood dark and unattended probably belonged to the woman whose body lay on the moor.