‘Bamber Gascoigne was never on Mastermind,’ said Tailby wearily. ‘In fact, Mastermind hasn’t been on TV for years.’
‘So? Pick some other quiz. It doesn’t matter.’
‘These days contestants get to phone a friend or ask the audience.’
‘Well, we can’t ask our audience,’ said Jepson. ‘If we admit that we know sod all, they’d be down on us like vultures.’
‘And we haven’t got any friends either, have we?’
Jepson sighed deeply. ‘That’s true.’
Tailby stared at the files on Jenny Weston and Maggie Crew. He didn’t need to read them again. He knew them practically by heart. But he turned over the pages anyway.
In the Weston file was the report from the officer who had first responded to the call from the Rangers. The call had come from the Rangers’ TIP at Bradwell, not directly from Mark Roper, nor from Owen Fox at the Ranger centre at Partridge Cross. Maybe this was standard procedure – it was worth checking. There was a detailed witness statement from Roper himself, as well as further statements from the cycle hire centre manager, Don Marsden, and the farmworker, Victor McCauley, who seemed to have been the last people to see Jenny Weston alive. No one had come forward to say they had seen her once she had reached the moor.
The vast amount of forensic material that had been collected was confusing rather than helpful. Even Jenny’s pants and cycling shorts, found in the quarry by a SOCO who had been lowered down the rock face, had yielded no positive traces. The only item still missing was the pouch she had normally worn round her waist when cycling.
‘The injury to Bevington suggests punishment for a sexual assault,’ said Jepson. ‘But there was no such assault on Jenny Weston.’
‘There was no evidence of sexual intercourse, no body fluids or traces of DNA. But the profilers talk about a “disorganized” killer, and for that type the killing is a sexual act in itself. On the evidence, the profile was definitely that of the disorganized type, with a sudden attack, and no attempt being made to hide the body – on the contrary, it seems to have been put out on display. That might also explain the stripping of the lower half of the body. A symbolic sex act.’
‘That’s rather academic for the average vigilante to figure out, Stewart.’
Tailby sighed. ‘I know.’
‘Bevington does have a history, though. Can he be linked to Weston?’
‘It must have been Bevington who wrote his name on the ground in the stone circle. But that could have been days earlier. It means nothing.’
‘And what about Ros Daniels?’
‘Oh, she’s long gone from the area. That kind of person – she could be anywhere. Using a different name by now, probably.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Certainly,’ said Tailby. ‘Remember, the last time she was seen anywhere in the area was six weeks before Jenny Weston was killed.’
‘Yet an unknown man was seen hanging around Weston’s house and workplace. Someone made a phone call to her, claiming to be a police officer.’
‘We’ve ruled out the ex-husband, Martin Stafford. All the old boyfriends in Jenny’s address book have been eliminated. If there was a more recent one, she didn’t bother to put his number in the book. It would have been unlike her, though. She was well organized in other ways. And there’s the note we took from her house. “Buy some fruit-flavoured ones,” it said. That had to be a boyfriend, surely.’
‘Perhaps the man the neighbours saw wasn’t looking for Jenny Weston, but for Ros Daniels,’ said Jepson. ‘She had already disappeared by then.’
‘Whoever the killer was, he was very audacious,’ said Tailby. ‘And very lucky.’
There had been a number of public appeals during the past week. But no one had come forward to say they had seen a man on the moor at the right time.
‘We have a partial footprint and a smear of sweat on the bike frame. We have the shape of a knife blade. But it’s really nothing at all. Nothing – without evidence to place a suspect at the scene.’
Tailby paused, as if unsure how his next statement would be received. Jepson noticed the hesitation and fixed the DCI with his sharp blue eyes.
‘Yes, Stewart? What are you going to say? Is it something I don’t want to hear?’
‘Could be.’
Jepson sighed again. ‘I didn’t really think things could be worse. But go on.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Tailby, ‘I’d like to wait for Paul Hitchens and Diane Fry to join us at this stage.’
Diane Fry limped up the stairs towards the incident room. Earlier, she had been writing up her report on the attack on Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington the previous night, and her mind was still full of images from the moments immediately after the mob had scattered in the quarry. She saw the scene that PC Taylor’s headlights had illuminated. She saw the rain glittering like knives in the twin beams; she saw the bright, jagged holes in the windows of the VW van, and the walls of the quarry black outside the range of the lights. And she saw Stride sprawled half-naked in the mud on his face, with the broom handle still bloodily protruding, his body writhing like a worm cut into pieces.
She had been finding the task of reliving the night’s events painful and humiliating. She was in physical pain, too, from the bruises on her leg. But she wasn’t about to make that an excuse for anything. And then she had to run into Ben Cooper hovering near the top of the stairs. He was the last person she wanted to see; it was entirely because of Cooper and his stupid ideas that she had been in the quarry in the first place, listening to the ravings of those two travellers. But she couldn’t avoid him. He moved straight in on her, thrusting himself into her personal space.
‘You did your best, Diane,’ he said, with that infuriating habit of reading her mind.
‘Oh, sure I did.’
She turned away from him too suddenly. Her injured knee gave way and her foot slid off a step. Cooper grabbed her jacket to stop her falling back down the stairs and yanked her towards him. Fry found herself nose to nose with him. She felt his breath on her face and saw his eyes, big and brown and concerned, like the eyes of one of Warren Leach’s Jersey cows.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Cooper? Get your hands off me.’
‘Look, I know how you feel,’ he said.
‘No, you bloody don’t.’
‘Diane – even you couldn’t fight them all.’
‘They neutralized me in seconds,’ she said. ‘I hardly tried.’
Fry kept remembering that she hadn’t even drawn her ASP. It had been in her scabbard, readily to hand. But she had not used it.
Cooper held on to her for a moment longer than he needed to, steadying her with a hand on her back. She could feel his fingers against her spine through the cloth. He was pressing gently but insistently on her vertebrae, triggering a small nerve that sent sensations running down into her abdomen. For a second, it even seemed to ease the pain in her leg.
Then Fry yanked herself free and straightened her jacket. ‘Isn’t this supposed to be your rest day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what the hell are you doing in the station? Haven’t you got anything better to do?’
She watched Cooper’s face crumple and the flush start to creep up his neck. He was the only detective she knew who blushed when he was spoken to sharply.
‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Cooper.
‘Enjoy your day then. I’ve got a meeting with Mr Tailby and the Super.’
Chief Superintendent Jepson laid his hands flat on the desk and looked from one officer to the other. ‘OK, who’s going to start? Put me out of my misery. Let me know what this is all about.’
As Diane Fry expected, it was DI Hitchens who took the bull by the horns.
‘Chief, in the Weston case, the fact is that there is only one person we can place anywhere near the scene at the time.’
‘Ah, the old story,’ said Jepson. ‘The first person that comes under suspicion is always the f
inder. Is that it?’
Diane Fry leaned forward. ‘Mark Roper,’ she said. ‘But he was there.’
Fry felt her superiors watching her closely. The pain in her leg drove her on like a spur.
‘He had plenty of time to kill Jenny Weston and do whatever he wanted to do before he reported that he had found her body. And he had scouted the area first, quite legitimately, so he had no worries about being observed.’
‘Obviously,’ said Jepson. ‘But what would his motive be?’
‘Well, there’s nothing obvious that we can see,’ admitted Fry. ‘But we’ve had some discreet enquiries made into his family background.’
Jepson raised an eyebrow. ‘Have we indeed?’ He looked at Hitchens, then at Tailby, but Fry was determined to keep his attention.
‘Three years ago, Mark’s older brother died and his father went off the rails. He started drinking and became depressed and lost his job. Frank Roper eventually walked out of the family home when he found out that his wife was having an affair. According to the neighbours, he hasn’t been seen in the area since. Mrs Roper promptly moved the boyfriend into the house, and Mark still lives with them. But he was very close to his father.’
‘This is a story no different from a thousand others, Fry. What are you trying to tell me? That Mark Roper has a grudge against women?’
‘We’ve heard much more incredible motives,’ put in Hitchens. ‘But this is simply background on Roper for now.’
‘OK. Weapon, then? What would he have done with the knife?’
Fry shook her head. ‘We don’t know. But he’s very friendly with the other Ranger, Owen Fox. He’s got a bit of a surrogate father there, from all accounts. Fox could be covering up for him. They could have concocted their story together.’
The Chief Superintendent was looking more and more unhappy. ‘We have an excellent relationship with the Ranger Service. Excellent.’
‘I don’t like it myself,’ said Tailby. ‘But we can’t ignore it. We need to look at elimination.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Jepson. ‘Could Roper have been the man Jenny Weston’s neighbours reported? How would he know where she lived?’
‘Oh, that’s the easy part,’ said Fry. ‘Weston’s details are recorded in the book at the cycle hire centre. The Rangers are in and out of there all the time. Either one of them would have had no trouble getting her address.’
‘All right.’
‘Not to mention the correlations the computer has thrown up. If it was anyone else –’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘If we could show some inconsistencies in the stories of the two Rangers, it could be just the opening we need.’
Jepson said gently: ‘Don’t you think you’re getting a bit carried away here, Fry? What about Maggie Crew? Are you forgetting her? Besides, the Rangers have been helping us. Suddenly you’re suggesting they’re public enemy number one.’
‘But Roper was there. If only there was something …’
‘Stewart, have you spoken to Alistair Prince recently?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Tailby. ‘He suggested a re-enactment.’
‘But there was nobody there. You have no witnesses. The place was deserted.’
‘Superintendent Prince says it works very well in central Derby.’
Jepson chewed his lip. ‘So that’s it. You think we’re going to have to admit defeat on this one otherwise, Stewart?’
‘To be honest, I’m not very hopeful, sir. We thought we had a stroke of luck with Darren Howsley. But that was a poisoned chalice.’
Jepson folded his fingers together and stared at the ceiling for a while. The others waited expectantly. Fry knew only too well that what they were suggesting was a difficult thing, a politically sensitive issue. ‘Somebody had better talk to DI Armstrong, then,’ said Jepson.
Fry blinked and looked at Hitchens, who shrugged. It wasn’t what he had expected either.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Kim Armstrong is engaged on the paedophile enquiry. They’re about ready to make some arrests, aren’t they?’
While they waited for more, the Chief Superintendent tapped his pen on the desk and looked at the broken end of it sadly, like a man contemplating something particularly unpleasant.
‘Go and talk to her,’ he said. ‘And tell her I said it’s a need-to-know situation.’
Ben Cooper particularly liked the narrow lanes and arcades in the oldest part of Edendale, between Eyre Street and Market Square. There were shops that sold decorated wooden elephants and pencil boxes, pine furniture, chocolates and malt whisky; there was an Italian restaurant and several coffee shops. And halfway up Nick i’th Tor, the steep alley off Market Square, was the window of Larkin’s, a traditional bakery. During the day the window was full of pastries and cheeses – apricot white stilton, homity pies, pasties, and enormous high-baked pork pies. Cooper came down to Larkin’s as often as he could at lunchtimes if he was in town. He was happy to queue with the tourists and listen to the assistants explaining one more time that Bakewell tarts should be called Bakewell puddings.
But today the window of Larkin’s was completely empty. It might as well have been selling picture frames, like the shop next door. All the shops here had been cleaned and painted up, and the stone setts had been relaid into the footpaths, while new arcades had been created in what had once been warehouse yards. Now the coffee shops sold exotic coffees – Jamaican Blue Mountain, Monsoon Malabar Mysore and Yemeni Mocha Ismaili.
In the Market Square itself was Ferris’s, a butcher’s that was also a licensed game seller. Normally, a few brace of pheasant dangled their tails in front of the window, their necks stretched and tied with string. Often there would be a pair of pigeons or a mountain hare. Tourists had been known to take exception to this – to burst into the shop with allegations of animal cruelty and obscenity.
Ben Cooper had seized the chance of his leave day to take Helen Milner for lunch. Helen had been quiet during the meal. She was concerned about the progress his mother was making, and she always asked about Matt and Kate and the girls. But he couldn’t help being aware that she was interested in almost everything except him. She didn’t ask what he was doing at work at the moment. She didn’t want to know. Not today.
Cooper sat through lunch hardly eating. He watched Helen’s hair as she talked, remembering when he had been enchanted by the coppery sheen of it in the summer sun and had begun to hope that its glow symbolized a bit of light entering his life. It had been just when he needed it, too, when everything else had seemed to be going wrong – when his mother’s descent into schizophrenia had seemed unstoppable, and when Diane Fry had appeared on the scene to complicate his life like a tangle of briars that he couldn’t shake off. Helen had seemed to be the answer to all that.
But now August seemed a long way off. The leaves of the trees in the Eden Forest had taken on the colours of copper and gold, and the yellow of sunlight, too. And then they had died.
After lunch, they walked towards the river. In the side streets, the houses huddled together, like little groups of people gossiping. They stared into each other’s windows, and knew each other’s business. On the paved steps that ran down to the River Eden the rain had brought out all the colours in the Yorkshire stone, the browns and reds and greens. The steps were uneven, and some of them were slippery with wet leaves. At the bottom, leaves had collected in a drain, and dirty water had flooded the path.
Helen had been talking about school, telling Cooper about the children in her class. Cooper had been content to listen to her talk. He had come intending to make amends for standing her up at the rugby club the previous Sunday. He knew he had been neglecting her. Yet the lack of necessity for a response allowed his thoughts to drift occasionally. His mind kept returning to the reports of the attack on Cal and Stride in the quarry the previous night. The details had been shocking in themselves; but his imagination was able to provide much worse. Cal and Stride were the typical victims – a pair of innocents
who had found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had seen what they were, and he had been unable to do anything to protect them.
And now Cooper had something else on his mind. He had to decide what to do about Mark Roper and Owen Fox. Mark’s suspicions were insubstantial, yet Cooper would have to report them. Perversely, he felt he would have liked to be able to discuss the subject with Diane Fry. He would also have liked to have been part of the team that was trying to identify the vigilante group which had attacked her. They had the reports from Fry and PC Taylor, and Cal and Stride themselves were being interviewed. But the scene was a mess – the rain had left it a quagmire. An assault on a police officer had to be treated seriously, but all that had been achieved so far was to spread the division’s resources even thinner. It was enough to make Cooper feel guilty about taking time off. But there was no more money in the budget for overtime.
Helen dipped into her shoulder bag and produced a packet of photos. Cooper looked at them, puzzled.
‘The pictures of the children,’ she said.
‘Oh, right.’
On Sundays, the riverside was always busy with families feeding the ducks. From the river walk, the water seemed to be full of movement. Mallards and coot clustered anxiously round the bankside, darting for the tidbits. Flocks of black-headed gulls wheeled and screamed over the surface, landing and taking off again, noisy and bad-tempered.
They sat down on a bench next to an elderly couple. The photos were all badly composed and had a strange cast over them, a combination of artificial light and direct flash.
‘This is my little favourite, Carly,’ said Helen, pointing to a little girl of about six, with fair hair cut raggedly across her forehead and a selection of teeth and gaps like a half-demolished wall.
‘She’s really sweet. She likes to draw, and she insists on giving me her drawings as presents. Look at this.’
The picture she showed Cooper was crayoned with great care, but little subtlety. There were small children with stick arms and clothes of various colours, and there was a figure with a white beard and a red coat patting them on the head and offering them brightly coloured gifts. It was captioned ‘Fathr Chistmass.’
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