Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  There were murmurs of speculation. But Ben Cooper wasn’t surprised. The cigarette stubs they had found under Ros Daniels’ body could never have belonged to Owen Fox. Cooper could think of three people directly connected with the enquiry who smoked cigarettes, and Owen wasn’t one of them. Forensics had found traces of saliva remaining on the filters of the cigarettes, which had been prevented from drying out by the girl’s body lying on top of them. There was a residue of moisture in the tobacco, too. The cigarettes had been smoked very shortly before Ros Daniels’ death. And the DNA from the saliva would identify the person who had smoked them.

  ‘And so far we have been unable to establish a direct link with Warren Leach,’ said Tailby. ‘Though he remains a suspect.’

  Leach hadn’t smoked, either. Not many farmers did, when they worked around hay and straw and agricultural fuel. Yet somebody had been smoking when Ros Daniels was attacked, and again when Jenny Weston was killed.

  Tailby’s head drooped slightly. His face was tired, and his eyes were sunk into dark sockets. ‘We’re still looking for leads,’ he said. ‘But where?’

  He spoke for the whole room. How was it possible that they could have two bodies and a third, surviving, victim, yet after ten days be further away than ever from identifying a suspect? A police officer had been injured by vigilantes, and no one had been arrested yet. Questions were being asked all the way up the line. And the newspaper headlines said: ‘How many more?’

  Tailby hung his head. ‘Let’s think positively. Apart from the fact that Daniels stayed with Weston for a while, the only link we have between them is that they were both animal lovers. Paul?’

  ‘OK,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘Examination of the shed at Ringham Edge Farm by ourselves and the RSPCA confirms the suspicion that it was being used for dog-fighting. We know that Jenny Weston saw what was going on there. She passed by there one evening when she had been late on the moor. She reported her information to the RSPCA, and she claimed to have photographic evidence. Whether she went any further than that, we don’t know. Whether Daniels did the same, we don’t know either. However, with the help of the RSPCA special investigations unit, we have drawn up a list of known or suspected participants in the dog-fighting ring. There are some pretty unsavoury characters among them, and one or two are known to us.’

  ‘Is one of them Keith Teasdale?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, his name is on the list. Today is Operation Muzzle. We’re going to make some arrests.’

  When Ben Cooper walked back into the CID room, DS Dave Rennie was there, looking relaxed, like a man at home in front of the TV watching Coronation Street. He should have had his slippers on. Cooper saw that there was a stack of paper on Rennie’s desk, forms filled with scrawled handwriting in ballpoint pen. Some of the writing looked almost illiterate.

  ‘What’s all that lot, Sarge? Witness statements?’

  ‘Questionnaires,’ said Rennie. ‘I’ve got all these back already from the early and day shifts. I’ve just collected them from the box in the canteen.’

  ‘Oh, the vending machines.’ Cooper picked up a couple of sheets. ‘What sort of things are they saying, then?’

  ‘I haven’t looked at them yet. But I dare say they’ll go for it, generally. We gave them a multiple choice, look – hot food, sandwiches, snacks or drinks. All they had to do was choose which they’d use. It makes it look as though the vending machines are a foregone conclusion, but actually we’re using their responses as evidence to push the idea through. Clever, isn’t it?’

  Cooper’s eyes widened as he read one of the questionnaires. ‘Amazing.’

  Rennie nodded. ‘It’s surprising what management will come up with.’

  ‘Sarge, the person who filled in this questionnaire here says they’d like hot food, but hot women would be even better.’

  Rennie sniffed. ‘Well, you know what it’s like, Ben. There are always some who have to take the piss, no matter what.’

  ‘And under “other suggestions” they’ve asked for condom machines and somewhere to dispose of their used hypodermic needles.’

  ‘I might have to take one or two out before I show them to the DCI in Admin,’ said Rennie.

  ‘Who wrote this one, then?’

  ‘They’re all anonymous, Ben.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘You know as well as I do, if people have to give their names, you don’t get anything from them. Coppers are dead suspicious of putting their names to something that looks official.’

  Cooper looked at the questionnaire again. ‘Look how this one’s spelled “fruit-flavoured”.’

  ‘I can’t believe they’re so ignorant. What happened to the education system?’

  ‘And the handwriting’s appalling. A graphologist would have a field day with this. He’d probably say it was written by some homicidal psychopath.’

  Rennie looked over Cooper’s shoulder and frowned. Then he began desperately flicking through the other questionnaires. Some of them were written in garish purple ink, some had obscene drawings scribbled in the margins. One had an insulting cartoon of the Chief Superintendent. Another had letters cut from newspaper headlines pasted on to it to form a message. It read: ‘You have ten minutes to evacuate the canteen before the steak and kidney pie explodes.’

  ‘Psychopath would describe just about everybody in this station,’ said Rennie sourly. ‘There isn’t a single one that’s been filled out properly.’

  Cooper didn’t respond. He was staring at the questionnaire form in his hand. He was holding it so tightly that the paper crumpled and almost tore between his fingers.

  ‘Er, Sarge?’ he said. ‘Can I keep this one?’

  Rennie shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. They’re no use to me at all.’

  Todd Weenink was going to the cattle market, too. He wasn’t making any preparations, though, except to eat a quick sandwich. Bits of tomato had slipped out of the bread and dropped on to his desk. Ben Cooper tapped him on the shoulder and signalled with his eyes. Neither of them spoke until they were in the corridor.

  ‘What’s up, Ben?’

  ‘Come across the road. We’re going for a coffee.’

  ‘What if I don’t want one?’

  Weenink tried to slow down, but Cooper gripped his elbow and kept moving. ‘You’re coming anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Ben, you’re getting a bit forceful all of a sudden. I’m not sure I like it, mate.’

  ‘We’ve got some talking to do.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Do you never get sick of talking?’

  May’s Cafe was off West Street, in a lane running steeply downhill to the Clappergate shopping centre. It was comfortable, without being too appealing to the tourists. A sign in the window said ‘Ristorante Italiano’, but it was hand-painted in a bit of white gloss left over from when the kitchen walls were last redecorated, and it didn’t look very convincing.

  Cooper had been coming to May’s for years. He remembered the sign in the window first being painted – it was just after May and her boyfriend, Frank, had come back from a fortnight’s holiday in Rome. In that fortnight, May had discovered pasta. She arrived back in Edendale full of stories of the most wonderful fettuccine and funghini. A whole range of pasta dishes had made an appearance on the menu, scrawled in blue ballpoint that had faded with time. Now you could search for Italian influences and find only a word that might have been ‘tagliatelle’ written sideways in the margin next to the steak and chips. But if you wanted to be in May’s good books, you could still ask for pasta.

  There was only a middle-aged couple in the cafe, drinking tea silently at a table near the counter. The woman had plastic carrier bags full of groceries from Somerfield’s; the man had a blank look, as if he wished he were far away. They stared briefly at the detectives, then looked away, embarrassed to be noticed.

  Cooper ordered a couple of coffees – black and strong, the way May always made it.

  ‘That bit of trouble of yours, Todd …’ he said.

/>   ‘I’d prefer it if you’d just keep your mouth shut, mate,’ said Weenink. ‘It’s an old story anyway. You’ve heard it all before.’

  ‘Did you fit somebody up?’

  ‘Just helped things along, Ben. Some would say it doesn’t matter if the suspect is guilty. We can’t have them getting away on some technicality, can we? You know what the courts are like – not to mention the bloody Criminal Preservation Society. You can see when a bloke is gearing up for a spell in Derby. So what’s the problem?’

  May herself was behind the counter. She was a big woman, well into her fifties, with a face permanently pink from the heat of the kitchen and large, widespread breasts like upturned soup tureens that had been pushed down the front of her blue apron. Her hair was dyed a pale strawy colour today that reminded Cooper of something.

  ‘Todd, there are people round here who have it in for you. They’d take any chance …’

  Weenink threw out his arms. ‘Oh, tell me about it. That’s why you need your friends to stand by you. Of course, I’m relying on you to keep this to yourself, Ben. As long as we stick together, they haven’t got anything.’

  ‘But why do it, Todd?’

  ‘Why? Can’t you see they’re all laughing at us? I even got bollocked for abusing a prisoner the other week. I called him a Scotch pillock and got my arse chewed off by the Super for racism. But he was a Scotch pillock, Ben.’

  ‘I know it’s difficult.’

  ‘Difficult? Have you seen the guidelines for interviews? Confrontation and intimidation are out. Exaggerating the evidence, emphasizing the seriousness of the crime. All out. What a load of crap. What do they think we are? A bunch of nannies?’

  ‘It’s only being realistic. A confession obtained like that will get thrown out by the court.’

  ‘Yeah, great. So we have to say, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, and we’ve hardly got anything on you, anyway.” That’ll make them confess, all right. I can see them rolling over on their backs and spilling their guts to help me out, just because I’m a really nice man.’

  ‘I think you’re over-reacting.’

  ‘No kidding? You were never one for over-reacting, were you, Ben? Take the shit and don’t complain, eh? Well, that’s a good boy. The management will love you. Maybe you’ll still be here putting in your thirty years for your pension when the rest of us have got out to start earning a clean living. Maybe you’ll still be stacking up the paperwork and processing the same old scumbags in and out of the custody suite while we’re all working as security guards in Woolworth’s or as private enquiry agents for that Eden Valley firm, doing nice little divorce cases. That’s if you last that long. But my bet is they’ll get to you in the end, too. Even you, Ben.’

  Cooper found himself staring at May’s hair. She smiled, and flushed a deeper pink. Her boyfriend, Frank, stuck his head round the kitchen door and eyed her suspiciously. He was wiry and black-haired, with a moustache and a dark stubble. He looked typically Italian, but he was a scrap merchant from Macclesfield.

  ‘I know which case it was,’ said Cooper.

  ‘OK,’ said Weenink. ‘So you figured it out. Go to the top of the class. Yes, it was the breakin at that little retirement cottage at Ashford. The Westons’ place.’

  ‘Wayne Sugden.’

  ‘Sorting Sugden out was easy,’ said Weenink. ‘There were some cotton fibres from an armchair that were the clincher. I sat in the chair myself when I went round to the cottage, and I noticed how easy the fibres came off. I had an informant who agreed he might have seen Sugden – and bingo. And he had a handy little motive, too – that business of old Weston’s with the nephew.’

  Cooper could hear the tea hissing in the urn and the wet rattle of Frank clearing his throat in the kitchen. May was humming behind the counter, the same snatch of ‘Nessun Dorma’ over and over again. He looked at Todd Weenink, but Weenink stared out of the window, as if his attention had been taken by a passing lorry. Cooper knew that his colleagues weren’t angels. Every one of them was human, prone to emotions and acts of folly. He had known officers driven to the most appalling stupidities by anger or fear, or by some desperation in their lives that undermined their self-control. But this was too cold, too calculated.

  ‘If they’re guilty, Ben,’ said Weenink, ‘what does it matter?’

  Cooper knew why it mattered. It mattered because the likes of Wayne Sugden were likely to focus their grievances not on the police, but on the people who testified against them. In this case, Sugden’s grievance had focused on the key-holder for that cottage at Ashford, who had listed the damage that Wayne said he had never done. If he needed a motive after the death of his nephew, Sugden’s resentment would have had an obvious target.

  ‘And Jenny Weston?’ he said. ‘How did she come into it?’

  ‘The fact is, I fancied Jenny something rotten right from the start, as soon as I clapped eyes on her at that cottage. I thought I’d be all right there. But she seemed to need a bit of encouragement, you know. She was a bit uptight about the burglary, about what her parents would say when they got back. She kept on about it ruining their holiday, so I reckoned what she needed was reassurance. A quick arrest.’ Weenink winked. ‘A hero on a white horse. It works a treat.’

  ‘How long did that last?’

  ‘Last? It never lasts. We had a few nights, that was all. We used the cottage, so her neighbours at Totley didn’t see me. It was a bit of fun. She wasn’t interested in anything else.’

  ‘In this day and age, don’t you know any better?’ said Cooper.

  Weenink scowled. ‘You’re not going to lecture me about AIDS and all that stuff, are you? You only live once, mate, and you’ve to take it when you can get it. If I die young, so what? Nobody will exactly be breaking their hearts, and at least I’ll have had a good time.’

  ‘So you didn’t see Jenny Weston after that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Like I said, it was just a quick in and out for her. Scratching an itch. She was quite honest about it. Besides … well, she wasn’t entirely walking the line, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She wasn’t a hundred per cent kosher. She had a leg either side of the fence. She swung both ways, Ben.’

  ‘Todd, are you telling me Jenny Weston was bisexual?’

  ‘That’s what they call it when you’ve been to college, I guess.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  Weenink stared at the muddy remains of his coffee. ‘To tell the truth, I reckon she was bored with blokes already by then. Doing it with me, it was kind of a last try sort of thing. “Never done it with a copper before – it might be different.” I was a bit surprised at first; I thought she was good for a few more nights. But then I realized why she had dumped me so quick – it was because she’d already got herself a girlfriend. That was a bit of a blow to the old pride for a while, I must admit.’

  Cooper stared at Weenink. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Ben, I made it my business to know.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that Ros Daniels was Jenny’s lover after all?’

  ‘I never heard Jenny mention her. But it’s pretty damn certain, I reckon.’

  ‘Todd, you’ve got to say something.’

  ‘You must be joking. My mouth is shut tight.’

  Weenink turned his stare on Cooper. But for once there was something missing in the stare; there was a shadow in his eyes, a doubt that dissipated the menace and exposed a naked appeal that contradicted the tone of his voice.

  ‘And what about you, Ben?’ he said. ‘Going to throw me to the lions, or what?’

  Cooper’s eyes were drawn back to May. She straightened her dress and patted that strange, pale hair whose colour he couldn’t name. Frank had emerged from the kitchen and was wiping a knife on his apron as he studied the two police officers. Cooper knew he would have to report what had been said. Surely Todd Weenink would understand that. But where did that leave the concept of loyalty to a colleague? Or the reluc
tance in his heart to see one more person destroyed?

  In a flash of insight, he had the answer. May’s hair was the colour of pasta.

  Back at the station, Ben Cooper managed to find Diane Fry in the CID room.

  ‘Some proper arrests at last, then,’ said Fry, rubbing her hands. ‘We should have done it before.’

  ‘Diane, have you looked at the file on the burglary at the Westons’ cottage?’

  ‘Of course. It was a fairly routine case.’

  Cooper knew she was right. The crime report was adequate, nothing startling, though it had generated the usual morass of paperwork. It wasn’t surprising that senior officers couldn’t be bothered wading through it all. The important thing was that the enquiry had been successful, and a conviction had resulted. Wayne Sugden had a record of similar offences, and even the Edendale magistrates had finally lost patience and given him a twelve-month sentence. The difference was that Sugden had pleaded not guilty to this one.

  ‘The evidence was fairly conclusive,’ said Fry. ‘Even the CPS were perfectly happy with the case. He had the video recorder in his possession at his flat. That was careless.’

  ‘He claimed he’d bought it in a pub car park,’ said Cooper, his memory of the details perfectly clear. ‘He seemed to expect a receiving charge. He still insists he didn’t nick the video himself.’

  ‘Videos are among his favourite items, according to his PNC record. And cotton fibres found on his jacket matched the cover of an armchair in the cottage.’

  Cooper noticed that Fry’s recollection of the details was good, too, though it was much longer since she had seen the file.

  ‘The video was on a stand next to one of the armchairs in the Weston house,’ she said. ‘The evidence indicated that Sugden had sat or kneeled on the chair, presumably while disconnecting the video from the telly.’

  ‘But all the other stuff?’ asked Cooper. ‘The cash and jewellery that was taken. None of that was ever found. Sugden couldn’t account for it. And then there’s the damage. The broken furniture, the smashed pictures, the Tabasco sauce on the carpets. You’d think he’d have got some Tabasco on his shoes, at least.’