Dancing With the Virgins

The woman walked away. Just like all the others did. Fry wanted to get her into a wrist hold, lock the kwik-cuffs, take her back to the station and question her until she found out what she wanted to know. But she was out of her territory here, in the position of begging for information. And she was taking enough risks as it was. In fact, she was a damned idiot. What had stirred up her need to follow this quest? It was a need she had tried to suppress for a long time, so why should it surface now? But she knew why. It was another thing that was the fault of Ben Cooper.

Fry considered how out of place Cooper would be here, in the city. He was chained like a prisoner to the area he came from. He would be completely lost in these streets; but he was never lost on the moors. Ben Cooper smelled his way around like a sheepdog – she had seen him do it, and it drove her mad.

But even Cooper would be indoors by now, probably at home among his relatives at that farm on the road towards Hucklow. He would be comfortably settled in his nest, just like the cattle lying in their straw in the sheds she had seen there once.

For Diane Fry, indoors was always the safest place to be. No one would choose to be out on the hills at night.

And now it was totally dark on the moor – a world of multiple shades of black that formed imaginary shapes and half-seen movements on the edge of his vision. The dancers weren’t afraid of the dark, and nor was he. He loved to go wandering at night above the quarry, his arms outstretched like a blind man, gently feeling his way through the darkness, caressing the skins of the thin birches, touching the leaves that appeared in front of his face, letting his feet whisper and sigh in the heather, navigating by the glint of a star on a fragment of quartz.

In the darkness, he was able to sense the world completely. Not just the little bit around him, but the entire breadth and stretch of it, the whole roll and curve of its body and the movement of its breath. He could feel the warmth of the earth underfoot and touch the great, empty reaches of the sky. With a still mind and total concentration on the rhythms of his body, he could lift himself off the ground and soar into the sky. He had learned to see the darkened landscape flying past below him, drawing away from him faster and faster, until he could see the whole of the valley down there, the whole of the Peak District, the whole of Derbyshire, with its towns and villages suddenly dwindling into insignificance among the black hills, and the long strings of streetlights turning as fragile as the strands of a cobweb.

It was all so tiny and unimportant down there. It was nothing but a film of human detritus on the face of the earth. All it would take was one last heave of the tectonic plates below the surface, and all those towns and villages would be gone for ever as the landscape rearranged itself, tucking away the evidence of civilization like a chambermaid tidying the bedclothes, like a housewife shaking out the sheets to toss away the dead skin and fluff, and straightening out the covers to hide the stains.

He liked to imagine this happening; he cherished the image like a comforting dream. It was not so long ago, after all, that the last volcano had splashed lava and red-hot ash over the valley of the Derwent, and the last glaciers had ground their way through the limestone to carve those scenic gorges. Five hundred thousand years or so? It was nothing in a couple of million. And man had been here only a few thousand of those years, electric light a hundred. Nature could shrug off the infestation of civilization with one gentle spasm, the irritated twitch of a shoulder to shake off a fly. Then new valleys and lakes would appear, and entirely different hills would rise up in between them. And the birches would begin the task of colonization all over again.

He had no doubt this would happen one day. But not in his lifetime. The time of the promised millennial cataclysms had long since passed, leaving just more of the same petty human pain and despair.

No, he didn’t fear the darkness; he liked it. But tonight there were people on the moor, policemen and lights. They were in the middle of the stone circle, like the occupants of an alien spacecraft, turning the night into a fairground, destroying the silence with the thump of their generator and their bored, meaningless chatter.

He knew their lights would make the shadows in the trees seem even darker, so that he was invisible to their unpractised eyes. It allowed him to get closer, until he was near enough to hear the Virgins sighing and singing in the wind, near enough to catch the faint fragments of the Fiddler’s tune, its notes tangling in the tops of the birches and dropping to the ground with the leaves as they died. There was no dance tonight, only a dirge. There was no hope in the music that he heard, no whispers of encouragement from the stones.

And he knew it wouldn’t happen for him now. He had thought his own world could be changed, that his life could be stripped and made afresh, the evidence of his past tucked away, the stains hidden from sight. But he had seen her face. And now it was too late.

7 (#ulink_45a7511b-663c-524a-a188-9679aae7acee)

Ben Cooper rubbed a hand across his eyes. There were too many bodies pressed close around him in the darkness. He could feel their heat, smell their sweat and their cotton shirts, hear their breathing and the scraping of their boots. But all he could see was a bright square and a few vague shapes, the outline of a head or shoulder here and there on the edge of the light.

Just before they vanished, the Virgins had seemed to move. They had shuffled right and left, faded in and out of focus, come closer and backed away, as if they had been caught for a moment in a celebratory dance. Then they had disappeared with a click and the whirr of a motor, flicking out of sight in a white glare, with tendrils of smoke left drifting in the beam.

Cooper shifted uneasily, frustrated by the inactivity. It was early in the morning, but his mind was already alert. In fact, his imagination was streaming ahead of the facts, and vivid images were flipping through his brain. Yesterday, he had stood on Ringham Moor himself. He had felt the bite of the wind up there, and listened to it hissing through the dying heather as the birch leaves crackled under his feet. And he had seen where all this started – with the stones.

One indistinct shape stood out from the others in the darkness. From the corner of his eye, a subtle change in the pattern of the shadows suggested a face had turned towards him for a second. Cooper felt the brief glance like a draught of air entering the room and stroking its fingers across his face. Suddenly, he felt self-conscious and conspicuous, afraid to move a muscle for fear of drawing attention to himself. He knew it was not in his interest to attract her attention. He wouldn’t know what on earth to say to her if he did.

A voice came out of the darkness. ‘Forty feet across, on a shallow, sandy floor. Drag marks nearly twenty feet into the centre. No signs of a struggle. However …’

The next slide appeared on the screen, bizarre and meaningless until the projector pulled it into focus. To Cooper, it looked as if an aerial shot had been taken from high above the earth, where the hull of an ancient boat lay half-buried in a desert. There was a ragged elliptical shape, dark red and scattered with black flecks. It was set in a strange, grainy yellow landscape like deep sand that blurred the edges of the shape and rolled away towards distant orange hills that cast no shadows.

He might have been looking at some kind of Noah’s Ark, stranded on a remote mountainside in Syria, the subject of endless arguments about its reality. The jagged black marks in the centre could have been the remains of a petrified wheelhouse, crumbled masts and decking, or rigging long since turned to dust. But there was no natural sunlight in this desert, only artificial colours.

Then a shadow moved in front of the screen, and a weary face was caught by the light of the projector.

‘You can all see what this is. It needs no explanation from me. Death would have occurred within minutes.’

Cooper had to shake himself out of his daydream. The police officers around him became solid shapes again, reverting to the familiar faces of a Derbyshire CID team. On the screen, they were being shown an enhanced postmortem image, a photograph taken on the mortuary slab. The red ellipse was the entry wound made by a sharp, single-bladed knife an inch below the bottom rib. A fatal stab wound to the heart. Those pale orange hills were human flesh – the slope of a woman’s abdomen and the lower edge of her ribcage. The grains of sand were her pores and skin cells, enlarged beyond recognition, distorted by lighting that drained all remnants of humanity from the corpse.

This yellow desert was the body of Jenny Weston. And no one was arguing the reality of her death. It was much too late for that.

‘And we found so many damn camp fires you’d think there had been a boy scout jamboree up there,’ said DCI Tailby, as the slide changed to a view of Ringham Moor. Cooper saw few smiles, and heard no laughter. It was too early in the morning, the subject was too lacking in the potential for a quick joke. The DCI tried again. ‘But the SOCOs tell us these were no boy scouts. Not unless they give badges for sex, drugs and animal sacrifice in the scouts these days.’

The briefing had been called early, while it was still dark. Many of the officers looked tired and bleary-eyed. They had gone to bed late last night and hadn’t got enough sleep. But they would wake up as the day went on, as the caffeine kicked in and they were forced to concentrate on their tasks.

The incident room at Edendale Divisional Headquarters was only half full. Ben Cooper had been expecting there would be hardly anywhere left to sit by the time he arrived, but he was surprised by the sparse attendance. Then he discovered that teams were already out at the scene, up on the moor waiting for first light to continue the careful sweep for delicate forensic traces that would vanish or be utterly contaminated at the first sign of heavy rain or the first set of feet to trample over the site.

Alongside Tailby sat the Divisional Commander, Colin Jepson. They had to call him Chief Superintendent Jepson now. Although the rank was supposed to have been abolished in the 1980s, Derbyshire Constabulary had restored the title for its divisional commanders, though without the salary level that went with it.

No detective superintendent had arrived yet, though Edendale was still without its own CID chief. For the time being, Tailby was being allowed to make the running. Cooper thought the DCI looked a little greyer at the temples than the day before, a little more stooped at the shoulders.

The slide show they had begun with was depressing enough. The photographer had captured a chill bleakness in his establishing shots of the moor, and an impressionistic arrangement of angles and perspective in his close-ups of the Virgins. The slides of the victim had silenced the room, except for an increased shuffling of boots on the floor. They showed in brutal clarity the curious position of the woman’s limbs, the absence of clothing on the lower half of her body, the red stain on her T-shirt. After the unsettling realism, the autopsy shots had concluded on a note of fantasy. As usual, they seemed divorced from the actual death, too clinical, and reeking too much of antiseptic to be human.

The most interesting result from the postmortem was that there had been no sign of sexual assault on Jenny Weston. So why had some of the victim’s clothes been removed? There were two main possibilities – either her killer had been interrupted, or the intention had been to mislead the police.

Now, with the lights on again, Tailby was forced to admit that all they knew so far about the circumstances of Jenny Weston’s death was the situation they had found on Ringham Moor, and a bewildering array of items recovered by the SOCOs.

‘These camp fires – are they recent, sir?’ asked someone.

‘Some are clearly quite old,’ said Tailby. ‘A couple of months anyway, dating from the summer, when there is most activity up there. But others are more recent, with ash still present – we would expect it to be washed away into the ground after a few spells of rainfall. But the Peak Park Rangers for that area tell us there are often people camping on Ringham Moor, even in September and October. Right through the middle of winter sometimes. Even in the snow.’

‘We’ve got some right little Sir Edmund Hillarys, haven’t we?’

It had to be Todd Weenink who couldn’t resist. He looked as crumpled as the rest, perhaps even more so. He had almost certainly had more to drink the night before than the average man could take. Casual flippancy seemed to seep out of him like sweat from a ripe Stilton. Cooper watched Tailby’s grey eyes warm as he glanced at Weenink, grateful for the response.

‘Of course, there’s no indication so far that anybody camping out on the moor is necessarily a suspect for the attack on our latest victim, or even a witness. However …’ Tailby pinned a photograph to a big cork board. ‘By a stroke of luck, we also have this.’

The photo showed a patch of grey ash, with a few black sticks of charred wood poking through it. The ash looked as though it had been roughly brushed over. And there, to one side, was the partial imprint of the sole of a boot or shoe.

‘It’s early days, yet,’ said the DCI. ‘But we’re hopeful of an identification on the footwear. There’s sufficient impression from the sole to get a match, we think.’

‘But was it made at the time, sir?’

‘Ah.’ Tailby pointed to a small, dark smudge on the photograph. ‘This is a trace of the victim’s blood. The significant thing about it is that the print was made on top of the blood stain while it was still fresh.’

He nodded with some degree of satisfaction. Early forensic evidence was exactly what everyone prayed for. A boot print that would connect its wearer to the scene at the time of the offence – what better could they ask for at such an early stage? Well, a suspect with footwear to compare the boot print to, that’s what.

‘Read the preliminary crime scene report,’ said Tailby.

There was another shuffling of papers. Cooper looked down at his file. There was a computer-printed list of items retrieved from the area around the Virgins, but it was a long one, difficult to take in. The SOCOs had taken samples of vegetation, including heather, whinberry, gorse and three types of grass. They had taken sections of bark from the trunks of the birches where they had been cut by a knife or splashed with an unknown substance. They had brought in stones, half-bricks, bags of ash and cinders, sheets of corrugated iron, a small metal grille like a fire grate, a burnt corner of the Sheffield Star where half a dozen screwed-up pages had been used to help light a fire, a British Midland Airways refresher tissue wrapper, a whole pile of aluminium ring-pulls, several cigarette butts, a Findus crispy pancake packet, and a selection of used condoms.

The forensic team had covered a wide area – all of the clearing around the stones, right into the birches and as far as the fence around the edge of the quarry. The SOCOs must have balked at the view to the east, towards the edge of the plateau. Cooper could remember a sea of bracken – damp, endless acres of it, stretching to the Hammond Tower and beyond, flowing over the edge of the cliff, dense and almost impenetrable. Beyond the bracken was a low wire fence with wooden posts, then beyond it a precipitous drop. From there, an object would plummet a thousand feet into the trees that grew at acute angles on the lower edges of the slope into the dale.

Scrapings had been taken from a pool of white wax that had solidified in the hollow of a rotten tree, while digging in what at first appeared to be a rubbish hole turned up the bones of an animal. There were latent prints collected from the handlebars, saddle, front wheel and crossbar of the Dawes Kokomo Jenny Weston had been riding, and more samples of blood had been scraped from the frame of the bike.

‘We think the names on the stones are just old graffiti. The inscription scraped on the ground is more recent. It looks like “STRIDE”. If it means anything at all to anybody, speak up.’

Nobody spoke. They were looking at two more photographs on the board behind Tailby. There were two women, alive and smiling at the camera, though the one on the left looked guarded, maybe a little bit haughty, as if the photographer were taking a liberty getting her in the shot.

‘Are we looking at the same assailant in both cases?’ said Tailby. ‘Someone who was practising, as it were, on the earlier victim, Maggie Crew? Are we looking at someone who has succeeded in perfecting his technique with Jenny Weston?’

It was a very strange idea of perfection. Ben Cooper looked to see whether the other officers were reacting the same way. But most of them showed no surprise at the irony of the thought. Then something made him glance towards the far side of the room. Leaning casually against a desk was Diane Fry. She’d had her fair hair cut even shorter, and it gave an angular look to her lean face. He was sure she had lost weight, too. She had been slim before, but now there was a suggestion of something taut and thinly-stretched.