Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  A market attendant saw Cooper and pointed towards a passageway between the sale rings. At the end of the passage, a pool of something dark and sticky was trickling across the concrete into the drainage channel.

  At first, Diane Fry felt no pain, just a strange kind of exposed feeling to her face as the flesh parted under the knife and cold air struck the tissues underneath. As she backed away, the stinging pain started and the blood began to run down her face.

  Maggie watched her. ‘That was your fault,’ she said. ‘Now you’ll be scarred, like me.’

  Fry tried to wipe the blood away from her eye with her hand, but it trickled down her jawline and on to her neck. Mentally, she had been prepared for it. But physically, the sudden laying open of the skin still jolted her body, and caused a shock to the nervous system that twisted her stomach and drained the strength from her limbs.

  Ben Cooper had reached the fatstock sale ring. He stopped at the end of the passageway, with the high steel bars of the ring between him and the two women.

  ‘Armed police!’ he shouted. ‘Drop the knife!’

  Both the women turned towards him, startled. Then Cooper saw Fry fall as her leg gave way. She hit the concrete, and her baton dropped out of her hand, rolling under the seats at the edge of the ring.

  Diane Fry could hear the panic in Cooper’s voice. Maggie looked towards Cooper and met his eye, defiant. It was then that Fry recognized something in Maggie’s face. It was the most dangerous look of all – the look of somebody whose life was already over. If you had lost everything that you ever cared about, it didn’t matter what else you did. It was all irrelevant. This was the way Maggie wanted it to go. She would not drop the knife – she wanted someone to shoot her.

  ‘Armed police! Drop the knife! Now!’

  With a great effort, Fry hoisted herself up on her left hand and kicked Maggie’s feet from under her with her good leg. Their limbs tangled together, and they both went tumbling down the tiers of seats.

  The two women lay in the sawdust, clutching each other like lovers. They sweated and gasped as they stared into each other’s eyes. Now she was so close, Fry could smell the cigarette smoke in Maggie’s hair, no longer masked by the perfume. She could picture the ashtray on Maggie’s desk, alongside the telephone and the letter opener, the only objects that had been important enough to earn space on that pristine surface. And Maggie Crew never had visitors to her apartment – so whose was the cigarette ash? It was a question Fry had never thought to ask.

  Other armed officers had joined Cooper outside the ring. They shouted more warnings. But they couldn’t fire now. They had no clear target – the women were too closely entwined.

  ‘This was how you felt, that night at the Cat Stones,’ said Fry. ‘I know you, Maggie.’

  Their faces were pressed against each other, Fry’s mouth touching Maggie’s disfigured cheek. But now she didn’t flinch away from the scars. Their breath mingled, and Fry felt their hearts beat hard against each other.

  ‘You’re going to have to give me the knife or kill me, Maggie.’

  Maggie’s hand moved, and Fry felt the touch of the steel blade, sharp and cold. Maggie’s grip on her neck tightened.

  It was a long moment, frightening yet exquisite, the feel of this person in her arms. Fry closed her eyes, unable to do anything to protect herself, or to prevent what might happen. She was waiting. Waiting for the knife to cut her again; waiting for it to enter her body.

  37

  Derwent Court still had much of its original Victorian guttering. The increasingly blustery winds that battered around Matlock had swirled heaps of wet leaves into the iron channels and downspouts, and now the rain was spilling over and cascading down the front of the building. Ben Cooper had to dodge a waterfall near the front door, wondering whether this was part of the water treatment that the Victorians had once flocked to the hydro to enjoy.

  When Cooper joined the team in Maggie Crew’s apartment, they had already emptied her desk, and papers littered the surface. DI Hitchens was working his way through them, and when he saw Cooper he offered him a heap.

  ‘We found a rucksack back there in one of the bedrooms with Ros Daniels’ clothes and a few belongings in. She was travelling light, by the looks of it.’

  Cooper began to look through some of the papers. Many of them were bills, bank statements, insurance policies, all carefully organized and filed. There were law books, a copy of Maggie’s partnership agreement, an address book packed with names. Who were all the people in the address book if Maggie Crew had been so alone? He turned over some leaflets about Hammond Hall, and showed Hitchens what he found underneath.

  ‘This looks like a diary of some kind,’ he said. ‘Or a journal.’

  ‘Is it Crew’s diary? We haven’t found one yet.’

  ‘No. It’s just some times and places, almost an itinerary. It’s from somebody called Eve. Who’s Eve?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Cooper stopped and stared at the page. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Grosvenor Avenue, Edendale. But that’s –’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘So who’s Eve?’ repeated Cooper.

  ‘No idea. A friend of hers?’

  ‘There’s a phone number, anyway. It’s a local number.’

  ‘Try it then,’ said Hitchens.

  Cooper looked uncertain. What he had read had thrown him. It wasn’t what he had been expecting. ‘What do I say?’

  ‘You can think of something, Cooper. Just ask for Eve and play it by ear.’

  Still he hesitated, reading and rereading the bit about Grosvenor Avenue. ‘Shall I, sir?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Cooper dialled. ‘I’ll tell her I’m selling something. Nobody thinks there’s anything unusual about that.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. So what are you selling?’ said Hitchens as the phone began to ring.

  ‘Soffits.’

  ‘What the hell are soffits?’

  ‘Exactly. Nobody knows. You can tell them any old rubbish.’

  Then the ringing stopped, and a voice answered. But Cooper was speechless. He seemed to have forgotten he was a salesperson. His opening line had gone right out of his head.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Wrong number.’ And he put the phone down.

  ‘Was it?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A wrong number?’

  ‘Not at all. Very much the right number, I think.’

  ‘You didn’t try to sell them any soffits.’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘They didn’t need any.’

  Maggie Crew seemed almost at home in the interview room. Its sparseness suited her. She was able to live with her own thoughts, staring at a blank wall as she tried to recapture the elusive memories. Ben Cooper listened, fascinated, as she talked about the triggers that had achieved what nothing else could do.

  ‘It was the sounds and the smells that suddenly brought it back to me,’ she said. ‘You could have sent people to talk to me endlessly and you would never have achieved that. The voices, the way the men smelled of animals. And there were dogs barking somewhere, but I couldn’t see them …’ Maggie shuddered. ‘And then somebody screamed. One of the animal rights women.’

  ‘And you’d just had it confirmed that Rosalind Daniels was dead,’ said DCI Tailby.

  She nodded. ‘It was like something physical hitting me. The memories poured over me. It was as if I was existing in two places at once, at two different moments. The sounds and the smells connected them. And I knew what had happened to Ros.’

  Maggie put her hands on the table and looked at them. Her long fingers were very still, her nails blunt and pale.

  ‘Ros had decided to trace me, you know,’ she said. ‘After all that time, my daughter decided to trace me. They allow adopted children to get access to information on their real parents, but not the other way round. It’s one of the provisions of the Adoption Rules. I don’t know what she hoped to achieve by it.’ Maggie paused and let ou
t her breath. ‘Yes, I do. She wanted to get whatever she could from me. Money. A convenient place to stay.’

  ‘When did she first contact you?’

  ‘Around the middle of September. She said she was in the area, but she didn’t tell me why or where she was living.’

  ‘It seems she was staying with Jenny Weston at Totley during that time.’

  ‘Yes, I found that out later. These animal rights groups have networks they communicate through. And when Ros arrived with nowhere to live, Jenny Weston offered to help. She had a spare bedroom in her house.’

  ‘You know a bit about Jenny Weston, after all,’ said Cooper, recalling the efforts Diane Fry said she had made to bring Jenny alive in Maggie’s mind.

  But Maggie ignored the comment. ‘Ros came on a mission – a mission against dog-fighting. She was following a link from the area she came from, somewhere in Cheshire. When one dog-fighting ring was closed down, some of the men began to travel to Derbyshire, to Ringham Edge Farm. Of course, the dog-fighting was much more important to Ros than finding her mother. I was just a side interest.’

  ‘That’s not what she told her adopted parents,’ said Tailby.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘I expect she resented them, too. No – she came with a purpose in mind; I was merely a useful accessory.’

  ‘But Jenny didn’t agree with what Ros wanted to do, did she?’

  ‘Apparently not. Ros was much more radical in her views than Jenny. She believed in direct action. In fact, she believed in violence.’

  ‘And that’s what led her into trouble in the end,’ said Tailby.

  Maggie dropped her head. ‘I suppose it has to be my fault.’

  ‘Does it? Why?’

  ‘Because there’s no doubt she would have been raised differently if I had kept her with me when she was a child. Well, that’s obvious,’ said Maggie. ‘She would never have reached that stage if I had brought her up myself.’

  ‘There’s no reason to believe that,’ said Cooper.

  Maggie just stared at them and didn’t trouble to discuss it. ‘Ros had an argument with Jenny Weston when she found out what Ros intended to do. There were angry words. And Ros walked out and came to me.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  ‘At first I thought it was the moment I’d always dreamed of,’ said Maggie. ‘My daughter had come back to me. But it wasn’t like that at all.’ She looked from Tailby to Cooper. ‘Nothing ever is how you hope it will be, is it? It’s best not to expect anything. It’s best not to hope for too much. Because the worst thing of all is when you have your hopes raised and then dashed again. That is very painful. That can be devastating.’

  They gave her a moment to recover, while the tapes recorded the silence.

  ‘What did Ros want exactly?’ asked Tailby.

  ‘My daughter saw that she might be able to make use of me.’

  ‘But in what way?’

  ‘She needed somewhere to stay, a handy base. That was the way she put it. And my home was much nearer to where she needed to be. Much nearer to Ringham Moor.’

  ‘Did she tell you what she planned to do?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘And what was your reaction to that?’

  ‘Ironically, I think I probably reacted the same way that Jenny Weston did, but more so. I told Ros she was mad, that what she planned to do was criminal and dangerous. We argued terribly. Of course, I said all the wrong things. A lot of stupid things. I expect it’s because I’ve never known how a mother is supposed to behave. I’ve never learned by my mistakes how to deal with a daughter – so I made all the mistakes at once, in one blazing row. I told her I wouldn’t allow her to do it.’

  ‘I expect she didn’t like you telling her what to do.’

  Maggie smiled. ‘That’s rather an understatement. It was obvious she was going to go to Ringham Moor, whatever I said. It became very personal, and all her bitterness poured out. Mine as well, I suppose. But Ros believed that I owed her a great deal. And I found I couldn’t argue with her any more. Because she was right, you see. I owed her more than I could say, for having let her down.’

  ‘So you allowed yourself to be persuaded …’

  ‘Yes, from that moment, I was lost. I should have stuck to my guns, locked her in the flat … anything. I can see that now. But she told me that if I was a real mother I would understand what she was trying to do, that I would support her in the one thing that was most important in her life. That if I was a real mother, I would go with her. She said I was the only one who could help to keep her out of danger. That it was what a mother would do.’

  ‘And so what did you do?’

  ‘What could I do?’ Maggie shrugged. ‘I went with her, of course.’

  Cooper looked at Tailby, but the DCI just nodded. He was a father himself. Cooper could only imagine how difficult it was to stand by and watch your child walk away from you into danger, when all your instincts were urging you to keep them by you and protect them. How much stronger must the feeling have been in Maggie, who had only just discovered it? She had finally found her child, only to face the prospect of losing her again. There was no way that she could have stood by and watched Ros walk off alone.

  ‘Yes, I drove her up to Ringham,’ said Maggie. ‘We were both so angry that we didn’t speak a word to each other in the car. I had driven right through Matlock before I even remembered to put the headlights on. When we got to Ringham, we parked above the village and walked up to the tower. Ros told me it was the meeting point, where I had to wait until she came back from the farm. I didn’t want to just sit and wait. Waiting was the worst thing. On the other hand …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, there are other instincts, too.’

  ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to be too closely involved in a criminal act?’ said Tailby. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘All my training was against it, you see. All my beliefs. How could I? I was taking such a risk already.’ Maggie’s face betrayed a moment of appeal, a deep uncertainty. ‘Do you understand?’

  Cooper looked away from the appeal. That was the crucial issue, in the end. Maggie Crew had waited at the Hammond Tower, torn between fear for the safety of her daughter and her horror at what Ros was doing out there on the dark moor. She hadn’t wanted to be there, but she couldn’t leave. Two powerful instincts had been battling inside her, and no doubt she had paced backwards and forwards at the foot of the tower, staring helplessly into the darkness, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Cooper could picture the unfinished butts tossed away, still glowing as they flew into the night. How many might Maggie have smoked during that time? Many of the cigarette ends would have landed among the trees on the slope, in the deep undergrowth. But not all. Some of them had landed on the ledge below the tower.

  ‘And what exactly was it Ros intended to do? Did she tell you?’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t just intend to do it. She actually did it,’ said Maggie. ‘She prepared her plan beforehand. She had two home-made petrol bombs hidden behind some loose stones in the wall of the tower. She had even collected some bits of rubbish and shoved them into the hole – empty drinks cans, chocolate wrappers, you know the sort of thing. She said nobody would bother to look in the hole when they saw the rubbish. I suppose she was right.’

  ‘Well, almost,’ said Cooper, thinking of Mark Roper and his preoccupation with clearing up after other people.

  ‘That makes me an accomplice,’ said Maggie. ‘I knew what she intended to do, and I helped her to do it. Technically, I’m guilty of conspiracy to cause an explosion.’

  Neither of the police officers said anything. At that moment, it seemed the least of her concerns.

  ‘Ros had put petrol in two Evian water bottles. I don’t know who taught her how to do that. But then, I don’t know how she was brought up. I don’t even know who her adopted parents were. I don’t know anything about her at all, even though she was my daughter. I might have been able to put that right, in ti
me. But they denied me the chance.’

  ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

  ‘The men at the farm. The dog-fighting people. They killed Ros.’

  ‘Are you sure? Did you see it happen?’

  ‘I didn’t see it. I heard it.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Something must have gone wrong at the farm. I heard the first fire bomb go off, then the second, though it wasn’t as loud. But for some reason Ros didn’t get away as quickly as she meant to. The men came out of the shed with their dogs and they chased her back up the hill towards the tower. She was coming back to meet me, and I was supposed to keep her safe. But she never stood a chance. Oh, she might have been able to outrun the men, to escape among the trees in the darkness. But there were the dogs.’

  ‘If Ros never made it to the tower …’

  ‘I remember hearing the voices of the men shouting. And the dogs barking and snarling in the dark somewhere. I didn’t know what was happening, and I couldn’t see anything. Then there was a scream –’ Maggie stumbled to a halt. ‘The only other thing I remember is the man running at me out of the darkness, and then the knife and the pain …’ She looked at Tailby. ‘What actually happened to her? Can you tell me?’

  ‘Your daughter fell off Ringham Edge, very near the tower. She ran off the top of one of the Cat Stones trying to escape from the dogs.’

  ‘I see,’ said Maggie. She took a few seconds to digest the idea, as if trying to fit it in with her mental picture. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? It was all because of the dogs. It was the dogs that she was trying to save.’

  ‘I’m afraid those particular dogs were trained to kill,’ said Tailby. ‘We seized six pit bull terriers from various addresses when we made our arrests. Now they will have to be destroyed anyway.’

  ‘So it was the fall that killed her.’ Maggie took a deep breath. ‘Will the CPS carry forward a prosecution on a murder charge? Or will the men plead guilty to manslaughter? I’m sorry, that’s a lawyer speaking again.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Tailby slowly, ‘we believe the fall didn’t kill her outright. Your daughter didn’t die straight away. The pathologist thinks she was still alive for a while as she lay on that ledge. She had dragged herself a foot or two. The debris under her fingernails included gritstone sand from where she had been lying.’