Читать книгу: «Dancing With the Virgins»
DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS
STEPHEN BOOTH
Contents
Cover
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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11
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13
14
15
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Acknowledgements
About the Author
Author’s Note
Praise
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Ancient sites in Derbyshire like the Nine Virgins stone circle are constantly under threat from vandalism, quarrying, erosion and abuse. They are also sacred sites, and are still actively used as places of worship. Please treat them with respect.
1
On the day the first woman died, Mark Roper had radio trouble. At the start of his shift, he had been patrolling in the valley, in the deep dead spot where the gritstone plateau blocked out the signal from the telephone interface point at Bradwell. The silence had been unnerving, even then. It had made him conscious of his isolation in the slowly dying landscape, and it had begun to undermine his confidence and stir up the old uncertainties. But Mark wasn’t frightened then. It was only later he had been frightened.
Normally, this was his favourite time of year – these few weeks of hesitation before the start of winter. He liked to watch the hills changing colour day by day, and the Peak District villages emptying of visitors. But he could tell that today wasn’t quite normal. There was a feeling about this particular Sunday that made him uncomfortable to be alone on Ringham Moor. There was something strained and uneasy in the way the trees stirred in the wind, in the way the dry bracken snapped underfoot and the birds fell silent in the middle of the afternoon.
As Mark climbed out of the dead spot, his horizon widened until he could see across to Hartington and the Staffordshire border. But even on his way back across the moor towards Partridge Cross, he could not raise his Area Ranger. Maybe the radio handset he had picked up from the briefing centre that morning was the one with the faulty battery connection. Little things like that could change your life forever.
‘Peakland Partridge Three to Peakland Zulu. Owen?’
No matter how many times he tried, his call sign went unanswered.
Earlier in the year, they had been burning the heather on this part of Ringham Moor. An acrid charcoal smell still clung to the vegetation, and it mingled with the sweet, fruity scent of the living flowers as it rose from the ground under Mark’s boots. In places, the stems had been left bare and white where the bark had been burned off completely. They showed up in the blackened carpet like tiny bones, like a thousand skeletal fingers poking from the earth.
Mark’s father had helped the gamekeepers many times with the swaling, the annual burning of the heather to encourage the growth of fresh shoots for red grouse to feed on. Conditions for burning had to be just right – the heather dry, but the ground wet enough to prevent the fire spreading down into the peat. You could get so hot controlling the flames that you thought your skin would be burned to a cinder, and if you were standing in the wrong place when the wind blew, you could end up black from head to toe. Sometimes, Mark recalled, his father had smelled like Bonfire Night for days.
The scent of the burned heather brought the presence of his father back to him now. It was a sensation so powerful that the tall figure might have been striding alongside him, swinging his huge, reddened hands, talking of working dogs and trout flies, and promising that he would take Mark and his brother on a shoot one day. But he had never carried out his promise. And he hadn’t walked with Mark again, not for a long time now.
The impression left as quickly as it had come, leaving Mark clutching desperately at a memory, reaching for an image that dissipated like a wisp of smoke in the wind.
Fumbling at the radio, he tried again. ‘Peakland Zulu. Can you hear me, Owen? Owen?’ But still there was nothing.
As he climbed to the plateau, the weight of Mark’s rucksack gradually increased, chafing his skin through the fabric of his red fleece, pulling down his shoulders and pressing on the muscles in his back. Despite the chill, his neck was wet with sweat, and he shivered as he came over a rise and the wind grabbed at him. The shadows of clouds were moving across the landscape below him. Brief patches of sunlight revealed a field dotted with sheep, a narrow stretch of tarmac road, an oak spinney, or the roof of a distant farmhouse. Yet the sight of human habitation only heightened his sense of being alone.
It was the environment, not the welfare of people and property, that had led Mark to volunteer as a Peak Park Ranger in the first place. Once, he had wanted to save the entire world, but in the end he had settled for helping to protect one little bit of it. He had not imagined that he would be called on to tolerate the actions of people who destroyed and defiled the environment, people who had no respect for nature and the lives of animals. It was the most difficult thing he had to learn. Maybe even Owen Fox would never be able to teach him that.
One thing Owen had taught Mark was the importance of good communication; he had told him to stay in touch, always. But this early November day had been the wrong time for Mark to choose for his first solo patrol. Entirely the wrong day to be on his own.
‘This is Peakland Partridge Three. Owen? Owen? Where are you?’
And, of course, it had been the wrong day for Jenny Weston, too.
Jenny had been riding a yellow six-gear Dawes Kokomo. It had one-inch tyres, and a wire basket bolted over the rear wheel. It was hired from the Peak Cycle centre at Partridge Cross on a three-hour ticket, and Jenny had already ridden nearly five miles to reach the plateau of Ringham Moor.
The moor was littered with prehistoric burial mounds, cairns and stone circles, some so small or so ruined and overgrown that they were barely visible in the heather and bracken. It was not as well used as the moors to the south and west, Stanton and Harthill, but its tracks were more accessible to a mountain bike, its open spaces more solitary, its face that bit closer to the sky.
Ringham had become one of Jenny’s favourite places. There were many reasons that brought her back, needs and compulsions that had worn a track for her bike tyres right to the base of the Hammond Tower on Ringham Edge. She carried an impression in her mind of the view down into the valley from the tower – that steep plummet through the trees on to a litter of rocks at the bottom.
It had been a blustery day, with showers that blew across the hills in squalls, bludgeoning the birches and scattering dead leaves into the heather. There seemed to be little life on the moor. But at the bottom of the track, Jenny had passed a youth wearing a red woollen cap pulled low on his forehead, with large ears that stuck out like table-tennis bats. He had been walking very quickly towards the road, and had refused to raise his head to meet her eye as she passed. Jenny had pressed down harder on the pedals, seeking to gain distance from the youth, so that she over-exerted herself on the slope and had to stop further on, gasping from painful lungs as she looked back. The youth had gone, and there was no one else to be seen – only a fistful of jackdaws drifting against the face of one of the abandoned quarries, and a herd of cattle lying restlessly in a field on the slope below the Virgins.
Jenny had always believed she was safer on a bike. Two wheels and the extra speed gave her the confidence that she could get out of trouble, if she needed to. A woman on her own, in a place like Ringham Moor, ought to think about being careful.
To get to the top of the moor, Jenny had to dismount and wheel the Kokomo up the steepest part of the path. She knew she was almost there when she reached the twisted Heart Stone, twelve feet high, with iron hand and foot holds driven into its sides.
At the top, the sandy track was cycleable, as long as you avoided the exposed rocks in the middle. It crossed a plateau of dark heather and whinberry, with patches of rhododendron on the southern slopes. There were old quarries on two sides, and sharp crags and edges on the east and south, where the plateau fell away into the valleys.
The crossing of the main paths was marked by a wooden sign scrawled with the name of the Nine Virgins and a yellow arrow. Around the sign was an area worn by many feet. Someone living in the valley had a peacock; its long drawn-out shriek drifted across the moor before dying away in the wind.
By the time she reached the Virgins, Jenny could feel the perspiration standing out on her forehead. Her Lycra cycling shorts were tighter on her hips and buttocks than they should have been, and the skin of her legs was pink and blotched from the exertion and the chafing of the wind.
She didn’t mind the wind, or the cold, or even the exertion. Up here on the moor they helped to blow away the thoughts that would sit in the corners of her mind all the rest of the week, dark and evil-eyed. Nowhere else could she do that; certainly nowhere in Sheffield, where the crowded streets and the traffic only fed her anxieties.
In early November, the weather kept most people off the moor. But she could see that someone was sitting against the trunk of a tree near the stone circle, playing a few notes on a flute, toying with a tune that was vaguely familiar. She couldn’t see the musician clearly, but she had an impression of long, fair hair and a multi-coloured sweater.
Jenny turned the handlebars of the bike away from the Nine Virgins and headed towards a path that ran down through deep bracken. The path turned into a stream bed later in the winter, and the ground was scoured to its sandy bottom. Tree roots ran close to the surface, bursting through to form ragged steps in the steepest parts. Beechnuts crunched underfoot and the bracken was head high. It pressed close around her, its brown, dead hands brushing against her legs and rattling on the spokes of her wheels.
Beyond the dip, the Hammond Tower stood at the top of the slope. It was prominent on the horizon, tall and built of grey stone, but serving no apparent purpose. A walled-up doorway faced a flight of roughly cut steps and a steep drop off Ringham Edge. Fallen leaves filled a wide hollow between the tower and the rock outcrops they called the Cat Stones.
Jenny sat for a while on a broken ledge at the base of the tower, staring at the view across the dale, waiting for her breathing to slow down, but feeling the chill begin to creep over her skin. She shouldn’t stay long, or her muscles would stiffen.
Down in the valley, she could see the farm, with a field full of cows, a cluster of gritstone buildings and a bigger, newer shed with a dark green steel roof. A track ran past the farm, and she studied it carefully for figures walking by the gate and heading up towards the tower. But there was no one today.
As she stood up to retrieve her bike, she noticed a crevice in the stones of the tower which had been crammed with crumpled drinks cans and cigarette packets. Jenny shook her head in irritation, but did nothing about the litter. It was a job for the Rangers who patrolled the moor.
A few minutes later, she had reached the stone circle again. The Nine Virgins were only about four feet high, and they stood in a clearing of flattened and eroded grass between clumps of birch and oaks. Fifteen yards from the circle was a single stone on its own, an outlier – the stone that they called the Fiddler. According to the legend, nine village maidens had been caught dancing on the Sabbath and had been turned to stone for their sin. The fiddler who played for them had suffered the same fate. Now the single stone looked lonely and isolated, condemned for ever to stand outside the circle.
Jenny stopped the bike and wiped her palms on a tissue. The hills were already misting into grey over the banks of bracken, but the clouds broke and allowed a trickle of sun on to the moor. There was no sound but for the wind whispering across the heather. There was no one to be seen now; she was alone. And it was perfectly safe on a bike – as long as you didn’t get a puncture.
‘Oh, damn!’
She dismounted and struggled to turn her bike upside down to inspect the back tyre. Immediately she saw the glitter of a sliver of glass. It had slit a gaping wound in the rubber tread and gone straight through to puncture the inner tube. She pulled the glass free, flinching at the sharp edges, and listened to the last gasp of escaping air. The tyre looked peculiarly lifeless as it hung from the wheel, the soft grey skin of its collapsed tube protruding under the rim.
Jenny knew what a hassle it was to get the tyre off the back wheel, repair and replace it, and she was already reaching that state of tiredness where everything felt like a major task. But there was nothing else for it. Sighing, she flipped the quick-release lever and dropped the wheel on the ground. The forks of the bike pointed into the air in an undignified posture, like a dead animal on its back.
She was reminded of a photograph that had been taken at the height of the panic over mad cow disease. It had shown a slaughtered British Holstein cow, a huge animal with its stomach bloated, its vast udder shiny and leaking a dribble of milk, and its four stiff legs pointing ludicrously to the sky. The cow had been waiting its turn to be rolled into an incinerator. Its photograph had been on the front of leaflets that Jenny had helped to distribute, and she had seen it so many times that the details had stayed with her ever since, along with other images of things that had been done to animals.
Automatically, she patted the pouch she wore round her waist, to make sure it was still there. Soon, she would have to decide what to do with what it contained.
Jenny shivered. The weather had changed, and the evening would be cold. The feathery stems of cotton grass created patches of golden mist close to the ground. They hovered just above the heather, moving in the wind like live creatures stirring in their nests.
It was the noise of the wind in Jenny’s ears that covered the soft sound of footsteps until the walker was only a few feet behind her.
In half an hour, Mark was due to go off duty. Owen had given him exact instructions for his first solo patrol – a pass across the face of Ringham and a descent into the valley on the far side, where the moor turned into farmland. There he was to take a look at the walls and stiles and signposts for recent damage, and have a scout around for the worst of the litter left by hikers.
On the way back, he should have a glance at the Nine Virgins to see that the ancient monument was no more scarred than usual; have a word, perhaps, with any campers foolhardy enough to have pitched their tents in the woods. Mark couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to camp on the moor at any time of the year, let alone in November. But still they did it. And they were breaking the law when they did.
Near the top of the track he noticed a crumpled Coke can, dropped by some careless visitor. Muttering angrily, he picked it up and slipped it under the flap of his rucksack, where it joined a small pile of chocolate bar wrappers, aluminium ring-pulls and an empty Marlboro packet and some cigarette ends he had found near the Hammond Tower, to be disposed of later. Mark couldn’t tolerate the attitude that made people think it was OK to scatter the environment with litter. They thought their own convenience was more important.
If he had his way, Mark would ban these people completely from the national park. He would put tollgates on all the entrance roads and issue passes for admission. It might come to it one day, too. The park couldn’t cope with the constantly rising numbers.
There were tyre tracks in the sandy soil here. That meant there had been a mountain biker this way recently. Mark knew his by-laws; he had read the regulations carefully, and he knew what was allowed and what wasn’t. The Peak District National Park Authority had prosecuted mountain bikers before.
He smiled in satisfaction, then immediately felt guilty. Owen said the main skills you needed as a Ranger were tact and diplomacy. Why get into an argument when you could achieve more with a friendly word of advice? Mark knew he had a lot to learn. Sometimes he couldn’t find the right things to say to people who appalled him with their stupidity and their disregard for their own safety, the property of others – and, above all, for the environment and its wildlife. That was their greatest crime, these people who desecrated the moors. The last thing they deserved was diplomacy.
Though it was only two o’clock, it would be starting to go dark in a couple of hours’ time. For a few days now, Mark had noticed that peculiar half-light, like full moonlight, that came at five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the colours seemed to change and glow for a few minutes before fading into the darkness. The turning back of the clocks at the end of British Summer Time always worried the Peak Park Rangers. Walkers were liable to miscalculate and still be on the hills when it went dark.
The afternoon was turning cold, but Mark didn’t feel the chill. The red fleece jacket he wore proudly, with its silver Peak Park insignia, kept him warm. It was also a reassuring sight for the visitors a Ranger came across – those who were lost and bewildered, exhausted or injured, or simply inadequately dressed and too poorly equipped for walking the moors. The sight of the red jacket was like a friendly beacon. It meant a Ranger approaching.
Jenny Weston had been in the act of smiling when she died. Her smile had stiffened and shattered, twisting into a grin of fear as the knife slipped under her ribs.
The blade was sharp, tungsten coated, and with a lethal tip. It slit the cotton of her T-shirt and sliced easily through her skin and a layer of subcutaneous fat as it thrust towards her heart. A small patch on the front of her T-shirt turned red and a single spurt of blood splashed on to the handlebars of the Kokomo.
As soon as the knife was withdrawn, the wound closed and ceased to bleed on the outside. Jenny looked down, astonished, and pressed her hand to the red patch. Inside her ribcage, her heart sac was already filling with leaking blood; the pressure of it squeezed her heart and constricted its movement. Then her left lung deflated and a gush of fluids filled the cavity. She began to feel light-headed; her hands and feet turned numb, and her legs lost the strength to hold her body upright.
She made no resistance as she was grasped under the armpits and dragged across the clearing, with her heels leaving trails in the sandy soil. As fresh blood failed to reach her brain and extremities, her skin turned a dirty white; her legs and belly looked like lumps of boiled fish as they were deliberately exposed to the light.
The blade of the knife left a red smear where it was wiped on the grass. From the handlebars of the bike, a small trickle of blood had run down on to the front wheel. It dripped slowly from spoke to spoke, already darkening and thickening in the air, until it was absorbed into the ground.
By the time her attacker had finished, or not long after, Jenny Weston was dead.
Mark knew it happened sometimes, but it was such a pointless thing to do. Mindless and irresponsible. Now and then the Ranger briefings mentioned a bike that had not been returned to the hire centre. Hirers had to give proof of their identity and leave a name and address, as well as a £20 deposit, so it was hardly worth trying to get away with a mountain bike, considering how easily you would get caught. But sometimes there was one who took the bike away with them. Occasionally, they simply abandoned it on one of the tracks, in a car park, or up here on the moor, like this one. None of it ever made sense to Mark.
The sight of the Kokomo under the gorse bush angered him unreasonably. Its presence was like a violation – the evidence of selfish humanity intruding into his world, like children pawing his most precious possessions with grubby fingers. The bike had been treated as just so much rubbish.
Then Mark looked more closely. A streak of red had stained the canary yellow paintwork of the front stem and left rust-like spots on the spokes. He shivered with misgiving and fingered the radio in his pocket. Suddenly he wished he hadn’t come out alone, after all. There was no reassuring presence alongside him, no Owen there to know exactly what to do.
With a shaking hand, Mark made a note of the colour, model and number of the bike, crumpling the pages of his notebook in his haste to get it out of his pocket. The act of writing made him feel better, more in control, as if the ink marks on the page had magically brought a familiar voice from the air: ‘Observe, keep a note, report back.’
‘Yes, Owen,’ whispered Mark.
Feeling the sweat drying on his forehead and the back of his neck, he forced himself to walk past the bike to where the stones were clustered among the spindly birches. Somebody had lit a fire here recently, leaving scorched earth and a pile of white ash. People were always lighting fires near the Virgins, as if they thought the flames might melt their stony hearts. At the midsummer solstice, there were hundreds of folk up here at night, and they did a lot more than light fires.
Mark stopped abruptly as he looked into the circle. The sensations that came reminded him of the terrors of his puberty, the physical sickness and the guilt. He tried to concentrate on studying the ground, to look for evidence of bike tracks or footprints. He tried to think about casting around for telltale objects that might have been dropped by someone who had been in the area. I’m observing, he told himself. I must observe. Be professional and calm, and don’t rush into anything.
But he couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. His eyes just wouldn’t focus on anything else. With shameful fascination, Mark found his attention drawn to the centre of the stone circle, where the white shape lay in such startling, rousing incongruity.
‘Oh, Jesus.’
The body of the woman sprawled obscenely among the stones. Her half-naked torso had been flung on the rough grass, her arms and legs twisted in provocative gestures. Her right knee was lifted high, to the level of her waist, and her left leg was stretched taut, as if she might be about to spring into the air.
Mark could see every detail of the muscles in her legs, the tendons rigid under the skin at the top of her thigh, the faint crinkling of cellulite on her hips. Her pose was a caricature of life, a cruel parody of flamboyance and movement. Her hands were tilted at the wrist, her toes pointed downwards, and her head nodded to silent music. She was spread against the ground in a final arabesque, in a fatal pirouette, or the last fling of an abandoned tango.
Mark wondered whether to write it down. But it sounded too strange, and his hand wouldn’t write any more, anyway. Instead, he repeated it to himself, over and over, in his head. A dead woman dancing. She looked like a dead woman, dancing.
2
Fifteen miles to the north, in the town of Edendale, the battle had been going on for an hour and a quarter already. The police officers in the front line were battered and breathing hard, their faces swollen with exertion, and their hair stuck to their foreheads with sweat. One or two had their shirts ripped. Another had blood trickling from a cut on his eye.
Detective Constable Ben Cooper could see his colleague, Todd Weenink, deep in the thick of it. Weenink had two PCs from the Tactical Support Unit close on either side of him, and there were more men coming in from behind to assist them. They looked exhausted, their expressions grim, but determined. They were struggling against the odds, fighting a battle of containment that they were constantly in danger of losing.
The students were charging forward in a solid mass, forcing the police to give ground under the onslaught. In the melee, close up, anything could be happening – a poke in the eye, a boot in the crutch, teeth sinking into an ear. The police had not been issued with riot shields or helmets today; there was no body armour, no snarling Alsatians or horses to keep the students at bay. There had been no authority given for the use of special weapons, no tear gas canisters held nervously in reserve.
In addition, the police had to face a ceaseless barrage of noise – chanted slogans, shouts of abuse and a constant stream of profanities from a hostile crowd.
Cooper pulled his hands out of his jeans pockets and turned his coat collar up to try to shut out the cacophony. If he could, he would have closed his eyes, too, to avoid seeing the slaughter, to stop himself from imagining the consequences if the police line collapsed. In another moment, the day could end in total humiliation for Derbyshire Constabulary E Division. And not a single arrest made so far.
‘What are we going to do, Sarge?’ he said.
Detective Sergeant Rennie was an old hand. He had seen it all before. He rubbed his jowls, pulled his anorak closer around his shoulders, and winced as a PC went down and was trampled underfoot.
‘Conduct a survey,’ he said. ‘We’ll send out a questionnaire.’
Cooper nodded. ‘I suppose so. But it’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘We’ll make sure there are lots of tick boxes to fill in.’
‘Even so …’
Rennie shrugged and sighed. ‘It’s all we can do, Ben. Otherwise, we just have to sit back and let it happen.’
The police formed a wall and turned to face their attackers again. Beyond the opposing lines, Cooper could see the main buildings of the High Peak College campus, set on the lower slopes of the hill. They looked down on Edendale like benign giants, the educational heights of the Eden Valley.
He began to search his pockets for a packet of mints to take the taste of nausea from his mouth. He had a lot of pockets – in his jeans, in his checked shirt, on the inside and the outside of his waxed jacket. But all he found was a scatter of cashpoint receipts, two empty shotgun cartridge cases and half a packet of dog biscuits.
Cooper knew there was more than just education that went on in those college buildings on the hill. He had been there himself, for long enough to collect the A-levels he needed to get into the police service. His fellow students had accused him of being single-minded, as if his determination made them guilty about their own pursuit of parties and casual sex. But there had been a demon driving Ben Cooper that his contemporaries would never have understood – a jealous God who would not have tolerated parties.
Dave Rennie sat back comfortably in his seat and unscrewed the top of a vacuum flask. He offered Cooper a plastic cup, which he refused as soon as he got a whiff of the metallic tang of the coffee. The sergeant’s expression was serious, his forehead creased with anxiety, like a man with a great responsibility on his mind.
‘You see, if they get rid of the kitchen and sack the canteen staff, that means they’ll put vending machines in instead,’ he said. ‘And then what would happen? I mean, would anybody use them? There’s no point in spending money on vending machines if they don’t get used. It would look bad in the budgets, wasting money at a time like this.’
Cooper watched Todd Weenink duck his head and drive his shoulders forward to meet a wiry-haired youth who’d been tormenting him all afternoon. There was a thud as their skulls connected and a scuffing as their feet lashed out.
The crowd behind Cooper began yelling. Then the police back-pedalled. Officers fell and were trampled as they lay on the ground. But Weenink broke away and looked around, bemused. His eyes were dazed, as if he might have taken a knock on the head. Then he looked up and caught sight of a student running past him, and made an instinctive grab. The student’s legs folded beneath him under the impact of Weenink’s sixteen stone, and they both sprawled in the mud, exhausted and gasping.
Cooper smiled. Quite by chance, it had been the right student Weenink had flattened. The High Peak College wing-threequarter happened to be in possession of the ball, and had been racing for the touchline, within seconds of scoring the winning try of the match. Even while the two opposing players were struggling to get up again from the tackle, the referee blew the final whistle. The match had been saved: 12–10 to Edendale Police.
‘Thank God for that,’ said Cooper.
‘Honour preserved, I suppose,’ said Rennie, putting away his flask.
‘I don’t know about that, Sarge. But our lot always trash the bar if they lose.’
Cooper left the touchline and headed for the clubhouse. In his early days in E Division, they had tried to recruit him to the rugby team. They had thought he looked tall and fit enough to be an asset, but had accused him of lacking ruthlessness in the ruck. Now his job was to order the jugs of beer for the changing-room celebrations. Loyalty to your colleagues meant doing such things on a Sunday afternoon, even when you would rather be at home watching videos with your nieces.
After ten years, Cooper was able to look back on his days at High Peak College with some nostalgia. His life had possessed a definite purpose then. Succeeding in his exams had been his role in life, and joining the police his destiny. The feeling had stayed with him through his time as a uniformed constable on the beat; it had followed him as he moved into CID and began to learn a different way of policing. His progress had been watched every inch of the way, and mostly approved of. Mostly. The times when he had made mistakes or expressed doubts were still imprinted in his memory.
Then, two years ago, everything had changed. With the violent death of his father, Police Sergeant Joe Cooper, a prop had been knocked from under him, and a great weight had been lifted from his back. His guiding hand had been taken away, and his life had been given back to him. But it had already been too late for Ben Cooper. He had become what his father made him.
‘So that’s why we have to do this Vending Machine Usage Survey,’ said Rennie, pronouncing the capital letters carefully as he walked at Cooper’s shoulder. ‘To get an idea of the possible take-up on the proposed new refreshment facilities. It’s so that somebody in Admin at HQ can make an informed decision. A decision supported by constructive feedback from the customer base.’
Cooper could practically see the internal memo that Rennie was quoting from. The sergeant had coffee soaking into his moustache. He was wearing knitted woollen gloves, for Heaven’s sake. He looked like somebody’s granddad on an off-season outing to Blackpool.
Cooper was conscious that his own thirtieth birthday was approaching next year. It loomed in the distance like a summer storm cloud, making him feel his youth was nearly over before he had got used to being in his twenties. One day, he could be another Dave Rennie.
‘I think Todd might have got a bit of concussion, Sarge.’
‘He always looks like that,’ said Rennie.
‘He got a knock on the head.’
‘Don’t worry – Weenink doesn’t let anybody mess with him. He always gets his revenge.’
Todd Weenink was different, of course. During the last couple of months Cooper had found himself thrown together with Weenink in the latest round of restructuring in the division. In these circumstances, the relationship became almost like a marriage. The issue of ‘them and us’ became focused on a single individual. But there were times when you needed another officer at your side.
Without the man or woman at your side, you could find yourself looking the wrong way at the wrong time. You had to have a person you could put your trust in. They supported you; and you supported them. Cooper knew it was a law written in invisible ink on the back of the warrant card they gave you when you were sworn in as a constable. It was sewn into your first uniform like an extra seam; it was the page that they always forgot to print in the Police Training Manual.
Only a couple of weeks earlier, Weenink had been the man at his side when they had raided a small-scale drugs factory in a converted warehouse on the outskirts of Edendale. One of the occupants had produced a pickaxe, but he had been too slow, and they had executed a takedown between them, with no one injured.
Cooper reassured himself by thinking of his date with Helen Milner later on. Within an hour, he would be out of the rugby club and away. He and Helen hadn’t decided where they would go yet. Probably it would be a walk to get the noise out of his head, then a drink or two at the Light House before a meal somewhere. The Light House was where they had gone the very first time they had gone out together. It was hardly more than two months ago that they had met again at Helen’s grandparents’ house in the village of Moorhay and resumed a relationship that had started when they were schoolfriends. But their new beginning had not been without difficulties. Nothing ever was.
The clubhouse corridor smelled of sweat and mud and disinfectant, with a permanent underlying essence of embrocation. Dave Rennie helped Cooper carry the jugs of beer to the players in the visitors’ changing room. Then the sergeant’s pager began to bleep.
‘Oh, God damn it. What now?’
Cooper watched Rennie go to the phone in the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder at the changing-room door, which swung open with the constant passing to and fro of players and supporters. Todd Weenink was out of the shower, towelling himself in the middle of a raucous mob, his naked bulk perfectly at home in a melee of pink male flesh and echoing laughter.
Weenink already had a beer in front of him. It was amazing that he could keep up the pace. He had arrived for the match only at the very last minute, when everyone else was changed and ready to go out on the pitch, thinking they were going to have to play a man short, and cursing him for letting them down. No doubt Weenink had been out on the booze the night before and had woken up in someone else’s bed many miles away, with rugby the last thing on his mind.
Cooper shook his head at the intrusive thoughts that came to him – the contrast between Weenink’s muscular, hairy nakedness and the picture he carried in his mind of the last colleague he had worked so closely with. Todd’s open, up-front, relaxed maleness was a world away from Detective Constable Diane Fry. Former Detective Constable, he should say. Now Acting Detective Sergeant.
It was a subject Cooper didn’t really want to think about. It brought with it painful memories, some of which he still didn’t understand but suspected might be his own fault.
After a few minutes, he realized Dave Rennie hadn’t come back into the bar. In the steamy atmosphere of the changing room, he couldn’t see Todd either. He had to shout to make himself heard, even when close enough to tap one of the players on the shoulder.
‘Have you seen Todd Weenink?’
‘He’s gone,’ said the player. ‘Control bleeped Dave Rennie, and Todd went off with him. They went off in a hurry, too. Todd hadn’t even managed to put his trousers on.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No, mate. I saw him myself, with his arse hanging out. Should you be with them?’
Cooper stared bleakly at the player. ‘I’m not on call. Control wouldn’t have asked for me.’
‘Right. You’re the lucky one, then. You can have a few beers.’
‘A few beers, yeah. What more could I ask for?’
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.
‘Come on, Mark. Let’s get you inside,’ said Owen.
For a moment, Mark didn’t move. Then, slowly, he unfolded his legs and got out. He felt stiff, like an old man with arthritis. His jacket was crumpled, there were grass stains on his knees and black marks on his hands. He couldn’t think where the marks had come from, but his hands felt unpleasant and greasy, as if there was something on his skin that would take a long time to remove.
He swayed and supported himself on the side of the Land Rover. Owen moved nearer, not touching him but hovering anxiously.
‘We have to wait while the police come to speak to you, Mark,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Are you up to it?’
‘I’m all right.’
Owen Fox was a large man, a little ungainly from carrying too much weight around his upper body. His curly hair and wiry beard were going grey, and his face was worn and creased, the sign of a man who spent his life outdoors, regardless of the weather. Mark wanted to draw reassurance from his presence, to lean on his comforting bulk, but an uncertainty held him back.
Owen finally took Mark by the arm. But the reassurance failed to come. The contact was safe and impersonal, Owen’s fingers meeting only the fabric of the young Ranger’s red fleece jacket. Mark shivered violently, as if his only source of warmth had suddenly been withdrawn.
‘Let’s get inside,’ said Owen. ‘It’s cold out here. You look to me as though you need a hot drink. A cup of my tea will bring some colour back to your cheeks, won’t it? Green, maybe – but at least it’ll be colour.’
Mark smiled weakly. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re probably suffering from shock. We ought to get a doctor to look at you.’
‘No. I’ll be all right, Owen.’
The briefing centre was empty, but warm. The blackboard on the far wall contained white chalk scrawl that gleamed in the sudden light. The words meant nothing to Mark now. In the corner, the assistant’s desk was scattered with papers – reports and forms, the encroaching paperwork of the modern Peak Park Ranger. Soon, a computer would arrive, even here.
Mark needed no encouragement to collapse into a chair near the electric heater. Owen watched him, his face creased with concern, then turned to switch on the kettle.
‘Plenty of sugar in your tea, for the shock.’
Sugar, and a reassuring voice, thought Mark. The things that people needed were simple, really – such as stability and their own part to play in life. But it was Owen he had learned to look to for stability. Now he had an inexplicable fear that it would be snatched from his life again.
‘The things people leave on the moor,’ said Owen. ‘Litter and rubbish. You’d think they’d at least take their dead bodies home with them.’
This time Mark couldn’t smile.
Owen looked at him. ‘I did tell you to keep in touch, Mark,’ he said.
‘I tried, Owen. But I couldn’t get an answer.’
Owen grimaced. ‘Those radios.’
I mustn’t make him feel guilty, thought Mark. Don’t make him take this burden on himself as well as everything else. Mark was aware that there were things he didn’t know about Owen, that in their relationship he only saw the surface of the older man. But there was one thing he did know. Owen needed no more burdens.
Ben Cooper jumped at the hand on his shoulder and tensed his body for trouble. He cursed himself for having allowed someone to find him on his own in a vulnerable position.
The hand felt like a great weight. The tall student was massively built, with a red, sweaty face and a squashed nose. He leaned down and spoke into Cooper’s ear with a voice that growled like a boulder in a landslide. At first, Cooper had no idea what he was saying. He thought the noise in the bar must have damaged his hearing permanently. He shook his head. The student leaned closer, breathing beer fumes on his neck.
‘You are Constable Cooper, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I said there’s someone on the phone for you. Some daft bastard who wants to know when it rained last.’
Ten minutes later, Cooper slid into the passenger seat of a Ford Mondeo as it scattered gravel on the sports ground car park.
‘It’s a what, Todd?’
‘A cyclist from Sheffield,’ said Weenink. ‘She was found in the middle of the stones on Ringham Moor.’
‘You mean the Nine Virgins?’
‘That’s the place. You got it in one. I can see why the DCI loves you.’
‘Everybody knows the Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.
‘I wish you’d introduce me, then. I can’t find even one virgin where I live.’
Cooper could detect the sweet smell of beer in the car. He wondered if Weenink was fit to drive. It would be ironic if they got stopped by a Traffic patrol. Todd could lose his job, if he was breathalysed.
‘Is Mr Tailby in charge up there?’
‘He’s SIO until they manage to pull a superintendent in from somewhere,’ said Weenink. ‘He’s not a happy man. He’s got a wide-open scene, public access, SOCOs scattered over a space as big as four football pitches. Also, he has a temper on him as foul as my breath on a Saturday night. But we have to report to DI Hitchens. And let me tell you, we’re bloody lucky Hitchens arrived.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Earlier on, it was DI Armstrong at the scene. The Wicked Witch of West Street.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘The Bitch of Buxton, then.’
‘Shut up, Todd.’
Weenink stopped at the junction of the A6, and seemed to spend a long time waiting for distant traffic to pass on the main road. Finally, he pulled out behind a tanker carrying milk for Hartington Stilton.
‘You don’t understand, Ben,’ he said. ‘That Kim Armstrong, she’s so scary. I’m frightened she’ll put a spell on me and turn me into a eunuch.’
‘Will you cut it out?’
‘No, seriously, Ben. They reckon she cursed Ossie Clarke in Traffic one day, and his balls shrivelled up like cashew nuts. The doctors are baffled. He’s been off sick for weeks.’
‘Todd –’
‘Well, he has, hasn’t he? Eh?’
‘Ossie Clarke is one of the bad-back brigade. He has a slipped disc.’
‘That’s the official line. Don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. Anyway, we’re in luck. They couldn’t spare Armstrong from this paedophile enquiry. Apparently it’s warming up for some arrests. There was the little girl that was killed –’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘So Hitchens has had to come in off leave. And you know he’s just moved into a new house with that redheaded nurse? So he’s not happy, either. It’s a barrel of laughs up there, all right. Couldn’t wait to get away for a bit, myself.’
Weenink was taking the back road past the fluorspar works to avoid the bottleneck in Bakewell. He took the bends gently, as if he was just one more pensioner on a Sunday afternoon outing.
‘Todd? Can’t we go a bit faster?’
‘Mmm, the roads are a bit slippery with all these leaves,’ said Weenink. ‘Can’t be too careful.’
The atmosphere on the moor was gloomy. It made Ben Cooper feel almost guilty about the buzz of anticipation that had stayed with him even in the car with Todd Weenink. The entire stone circle had been taped off, and lights were being set up to illuminate a small tent in the centre. More tape created a pathway as far as a gorse bush a few yards away. The tape twisted and rattled in the wind with a noise like a crowd of football supporters half-heartedly encouraging their team.
‘There was an inch or two of rain during Thursday night, but it had dried up by morning,’ said Cooper.
Several faces turned to stare at him. Hitchens raised an eyebrow, but Tailby nodded.
‘Well, the ground was fine for lifting the sugar beet that morning,’ explained Cooper. He drew a finger through a hollow on the top of one of the stones. ‘On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough sun since then to dry the moisture out where it’s sheltered from the wind.’
He became suddenly aware of the nature of the looks he was being given. ‘It’s what you asked me,’ he said.
Hitchens shrugged. He was wearing an old rugby jersey over his jeans, and might once have played for the divisional XV until he became senior enough to be more at risk of injury from his own side than from the opposition.
‘Could Stride be a name?’ he asked.
‘What kind of man would leave his name written in the dirt when he had committed a murder, anyway?’ said Tailby. ‘And these stones …’
‘The Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.
‘What are they all about?’
‘They’re the remains of a Bronze Age burial chamber. But local people call them the Virgins because of the legends …’
‘How old?’
‘Three and a half thousand years, give or take.’
‘The last virgins in Derbyshire, then,’ said Hitchens.
Cooper kept his mouth shut. He watched a SOCO scoop up a tiny patch of bloodstained earth where the body had lain, while he listened to the faint laughter drop hollowly into the wind and disappear with a scatter of dead leaves.
In a short while, no doubt, a detective superintendent would arrive from another division to take over as senior investigating officer. He would be grumbling about the continuing vacancy in E Division that meant he had to be dragged away from his own patch, where there would be several other major incidents to be dealt with as well.
But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.
Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.
Cooper had learned to keep quiet about his thoughts at times. Most senior officers, like DCI Tailby, prided themselves on being practical, logical men. Tailby was from Nottingham, raised in suburban streets and comprehensive schools. He preferred to leave it to people like Ben Cooper to be imaginative – he seemed to regard it as some kind of local idiosyncrasy, a queer characteristic inherited from the distant Celtic ancestors of the Derbyshire hill folk.
Cooper watched his fellow officers. Some of them certainly looked as though they felt disorientated and isolated from the realities of the twenty-first century up here. As if to emphasize the point, the sound of a steam train starting up seemed to reach them from the valley below.
‘There’s the train,’ said Cooper.
‘What?’ said Tailby.
‘It’s the Peak Rail line. They run restored steam engines on it. For the tourists, you know.’
A white plume hung across the lights in the bottom of the valley, drifting with the breeze back towards Matlock and vanishing into the darkness as the chug of the engine receded.
Tailby spun on his heel. ‘Time to talk to the Rangers,’ he said.
‘We’ll need to get proper lights set up here, you know,’ said the Senior SOCO, ‘if you really want photos of that inscription.’
‘Believe me,’ said Tailby, ‘I want everything.’
4
The young Ranger looked vaguely familiar to Ben Cooper. But then, he knew lots of Ropers – one of them had been his Maths teacher at school, another ran the garage on Buxton Road; and he had once arrested a Roper for indecency. They were all certain to be related.
Mark was a tall young man, with wide shoulders that didn’t quite fit the rest of his body. His muscles had some catching up to do, but he was wiry and fit. Cooper noticed he had a small streak of vomit staining the front of his red Peak Park Rangers jacket. Somebody at the Partridge Cross Ranger Centre had made him several cups of tea. The tea had done nothing for his pallor, but at least his kidneys were working at full capacity. He emerged from the loo just as the police arrived.
Mark sat down unsteadily when DCI Tailby introduced himself and opened the questioning.
‘I was patrolling the moor,’ said Mark. ‘Ringham Moor. I was on the path from the east, going towards the Virgins.’
‘That’s the stone circle.’
‘It’s just one of the stone circles. But it’s the one that everybody knows.’
‘All right.’
‘I was near the Virgins when I saw a bike.’
‘Hold on. Before that, did you see anyone else on the moor?’
‘Nobody at all. It was quiet.’
‘Nobody? Think right back to when you first left the centre.’
Mark looked automatically towards the window. Cooper followed his gaze. A silver Land Rover with a thin red stripe was parked outside. Beyond the Ranger Service sign on its roof, the dark hump of the moor was still visible against a pale sky.
‘There was a man working in a field on this side of the moor, mending gates. I’ve seen him before. There was no one else.’
‘OK. Describe this bike,’ said Tailby.
Now Mark seemed to regain a bit more confidence. He produced a small notebook from the pocket of his fleece and turned the pages. But he spoke without looking at his notes. The scene was still fresh enough in his mind.
‘It was a yellow Dawes. I recognized it as one of the hire bikes. It had been chucked into the bottom of a gorse bush, in the middle of some birch trees. One of the wheels was off too. I thought somebody had hired it and had an accident and just left it. They do things like that.’
‘Who do?’
‘Well, you know – the visitors. Tourists. They just leave a bike somewhere and say it’s been stolen or they’ve lost it or something. You wouldn’t believe the lies some of them tell.’
‘Did you touch the bike?’
‘No.’
‘You’re quite sure about that, Mark?’
‘Yeah. I just looked for the number. Because I thought it was one of the hire bikes. And it was, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was.’ Cooper could hear the gratification in the DCI’s voice. The fact it was a hire bike had made it so much easier to identify the victim. She had been obliged to leave her full name and address and proof of identity at the cycle hire centre when she took the bike out earlier that afternoon. So they had already established that her name was Jenny Weston, that she was thirty years old and divorced. She worked as a customer service manager in a large insurance office in Sheffield, and had taken a week’s holiday because she had several days’ leave to get in before the end of the year. By now, her parents had already been contacted, and her father was on his way to identify the body formally. If only it were always so easy.
‘Then I saw something lying in the middle of the Virgins,’ said Mark. ‘I went to have a look. Although –’
‘Yes?’
‘Well … I could already see what it was. I could tell, from a few yards away, from where I found the bike. It was a woman. And she was dead.’
Mark moved his hands restlessly, brushing the front of his fleece. Cooper thought at first that he was trying to rub off the vomit stain, but realized he was wrong. The young Ranger was stroking the badge stitched to the fabric, fondling as if it were the breast of a lover, tracing the silver letters and the stylized millstone symbol of the Peak Park.
‘Did you notice anything about the body?’ asked Tailby.
Mark hesitated. ‘Only that she was, you know …’ His hands made half-hearted gestures. ‘Her clothes …’
‘You mean her clothes had been interfered with?’
Mark nodded.
‘And did you notice anything else nearby? Anything unusual or out of place?’
‘No.’
‘So how close did you get to the body, Mark?’
‘I walked as far as the nearest stone. The flat one. I didn’t have to go any closer.’
‘You were quite sure she was dead?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mark. ‘Oh yes.’
Mark suddenly went a shade whiter. His hand went over his mouth, and he made a dash for the loo. A second later, the police officers heard the sound of vomiting.
DCI Tailby sat for a moment longer, as if still listening for elusive bits of information in the Ranger’s retching.
‘Cooper, find that Area Ranger,’ he said. ‘He knows the lie of the land round here, if anybody does. Tell him we need to arrange proper access to the moor. We need the owner of the land or whoever. And we need to get into that quarry, too. Get on to it.’
Ben Cooper found the Area Ranger waiting by his silver Land Rover outside the briefing centre. Owen Fox was in his early fifties, with grey hair and a thick beard that was going the same way. He was a comfortable badger of a man, with an even more comfortable smell of wool and earth.
‘Mr Fox?’
The Ranger turned, with a distracted air. Though Cooper was wearing his dark green waxed jacket over civilian clothes, he thought Owen would recognize him as a policeman. People always seemed able to tell. They said it was something to do with the look in your eyes.
‘Can I help?’
‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper. If you’ve got time, I’d like to call on your local knowledge.’
Cooper explained that he had been given the job of opening up access to the disused quarry and of securing the route for vehicles to get to the crime scene.
‘We need to see Warren Leach then,’ said Owen.
‘And he is …?’
‘Ringham Edge Farm. He owns most of the moor. The old quarry road runs across his land. We can go in the Land Rover, if you like.’
The farm was reached by a back road out of the village of Ringham Lees, an almost invisible turning by the corner of the Druid pub. A group of a dozen or so youngsters were hanging around in a bus shelter near the pub. When they saw the lights of the Land Rover coming, two teenage boys ran across the road directly in front of its bonnet and stood laughing and waving from the opposite pavement.
‘Some of these young people,’ said Owen. ‘Their common sense has left home before them. And it didn’t give a forwarding address.’
‘We get a lot like them in Edendale,’ said Cooper.
‘I bet you do.’
The Ranger had four radio sets in the cab of the Land Rover. The wide-band set under the dashboard was constantly scanning the channels for the Ranger Service and other local organizations. Another set was for the Mountain Rescue team. Behind the seats, fixed to a wire grille, were two battery-operated handsets on permanent charge for when they were needed. Cooper saw that there was also a satellite positioning device in a leather case. But the best-used piece of equipment seemed to be the vacuum flask. It was battered, but no doubt a welcome sight on a freezing day on the moors.
‘Some of this technology is all right,’ said Owen. ‘But we’ll be completely computerized one day. I only hope it’s after my time. I was brought up to think “online” meant your mum had just put the washing out.’
Cooper laughed. ‘Did you say this Leach owns the moor?’
‘Part of it. It’s all privately owned, one way or another. The PDNPA doesn’t own any land, you know. Being a national park doesn’t mean what people think it means.’
‘No, I know.’
‘But Ringham Moor is one of those places where the landowners have an access agreement with the national park, so Rangers are involved a lot. Especially with the attention the Nine Virgins get. They seem to have a special significance at the summer solstice – a bit like Stonehenge, you know? There can be two hundred or so people gathered up there – illegally, I might add, under the access agreement; not to mention the by-laws covering ancient monuments.’
‘But what do they get up to exactly?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. Music, jugglers, camp fires. Children and dogs running round. It’s a bit like a medieval fair. One year we had to call in a mountain rescue team to carry off a young lady who’d been dancing from stone to stone, but fell off and broke her leg. Every year I pray it will rain – it keeps things quiet for a change.’
‘So much for the peace and quiet of the Peak District.’
‘Peace and quiet? One of our biggest jobs is looking after the safety of visitors. None of them have any common sense. If we left the fences off the old mine shafts, half of them would throw themselves in, thinking it was a new visitor experience.’
Owen Fox had a direct gaze and a sly smile in his eyes when he made a joke, though his face hardly moved. It took a bit of careful listening to understand when he was joking.
‘I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else, though,’ said Owen. ‘I’ve even picked the exact stone where I want my ashes to be scattered.’
They passed a large field containing a herd of black and white cattle and approached Ringham Edge Farm down a steep, narrow lane constricted between stone walls. The farm buildings were built mostly of the dark local gritstone, and the house itself had small, deeply-set windows that must let in little light. An extra shadow was thrown on the house by a large modern shed some distance from the track. Close to the shed stood the burnt-out shell of what looked like a Mitsubishi pick-up, the paint stripped from its bodywork and the interior of the cab blackened. Many farmers had the habit of letting all sorts of junk accumulate around their farm buildings.
Owen glanced at Cooper. ‘Would it be best if I talked to him?’
‘Leach? Is he likely to be difficult?’
‘He can be. He needs handling right. Sometimes you have to let people think they’re getting their own way.’
‘Even when they aren’t?’
‘Well. Sometimes. You do know, don’t you …’
‘What?’
‘It was Warren Leach’s wife Yvonne who found that other woman a few weeks ago.’
‘Of course – Maggie Crew.’
‘She got as far as one of the fields at Ringham Edge. Yvonne Leach came across her lying unconscious under a wall. Leach himself just reckoned it was a nuisance, I think. It kept him away from his work for a bit. But this old quarry road is mainly used as a footpath now. It’s a public right of way, and it runs right through the farm. When you have strangers walking past your door all the time, you can soon get to see them as an irritation. Some visitors think farmers are there as a public service, for providing toilets and telephones, or for pulling their cars out of ditches with their tractors. I can’t blame Warren – not really.’
When Owen Fox and Ben Cooper pulled up in the Land Rover, they found two boys in a brightly lit byre. They were fussing over a Jersey heifer calf with huge eyes and long black lashes. The animal stood patiently, twitching her damp nostrils with pleasure as she was brushed on each flank until her red coat gleamed. One of the boys reached out to stroke the calf’s muzzle, and she responded with a rasp of a plump tongue across his hand which made the boy smile with pleasure. Behind them, a wooden board was decorated with red and blue rosettes with long ribbons.
‘Is this the calf that won at Bakewell Show?’ asked Owen.
The boys looked uncertain what to say. Maybe they had been told not to talk to strangers, thought Cooper. But the Ranger wasn’t really a stranger, was he? He had been to the farm before; he knew Warren Leach. It was part of the Area Ranger’s job to maintain good relations with the farmers and landowners on his patch.
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