The clouds had closed down on the horizon and settled on the high tops to the north, where visibility would be pretty well zero, so close that you would be lucky to get a glimpse of your own boots in the heather. Cooper held the fungus gingerly towards Fry. She barely glanced at it, as if used to his peculiarities now. But she wrinkled her nose and turned her face away. Then he threw the fungus into the heather and wiped his fingers on a tissue. He was right – her sense of smell was perfectly good enough to detect cigarette smoke.
‘Have you heard of Eden Valley Enquiries?’ he said.
‘A firm of second-rate enquiry agents? Divorces and process-serving, that sort of thing. I think they have an office in one of those small business centres on Meadow Road.’
‘That’s right. Discreet confidential enquiries. No questions asked. I rang them the other day.’
‘Yeah? Looking for a new job, are you? Thinking of joining the private detective business?’
Cooper shook his head. ‘No. I was thinking of trying to sell them some soffits.’
Fry stared at him. ‘Ben, have you completely flipped?’
‘It was something we found at Maggie Crew’s place. It had the name “Eve” and a phone number. We thought it was some friend of hers. Only it wasn’t Eve, a person; it was EVE, in capitals. It stands for Eden Valley Enquiries.’
‘Yes? Is there a point?’
‘Well, there were some other details, a sort of journal.’
They had almost reached the Nine Virgins. The tape had gone now, and the public had been allowed back into the stone circle. Someone had laid a bunch of flowers against the base of one of the stones, where Jenny Weston had died.
Cooper took his notebook from his pocket. ‘Do you want to hear it?’ he said.
‘If it will make you feel better.’
‘It says: “Left place of residence in Grosvenor Avenue 21.10, travelled by car to Sheffield. Parked in multistorey car park in The Moor and proceeded on foot to railway arches near junction of Shrewsbury Road and Dixon Street.’ Cooper paused. ‘There’s a lot more. Do you want to hear it?’
‘No.’
‘It goes into quite some detail, on two separate occasions. And it ends with an unfortunate incident involving a confrontation with one of their operatives.’
‘So Maggie had me followed.’
‘The name of the subject isn’t actually mentioned,’ Cooper pointed out.
‘But why would she do that?’
Automatically, Cooper counted the stones. Some legends said that you could never count the Virgins, because they always moved before you got to the last one. But today there were definitely nine. Nine, plus the stone that stood away from the rest, on its own. The Fiddler.
‘It was how she traced Jenny Weston,’ he said. ‘EVE located Jenny’s home in Totley for her. Then they had an operative track Jenny’s movements – he was seen by at least two of the neighbours. He followed her, and recorded her habits. Unfortunately, Jenny made the mistake of going to the same place too often.’
‘Here. Ringham Moor.’
Cooper nodded. ‘So Maggie knew exactly where she would be going that day, and she set off to meet her on the moor.’
‘But surely it must have occurred to Eden Valley Enquiries after Jenny was killed –’
He shrugged. ‘Discreet and confidential. No questions asked.’
‘Jesus. I’d string them up and break every bone in their bodies.’
‘You did a decent job on one of their operatives, by all accounts. For someone with an injured leg.’
Diane Fry recalled the memories that Maggie Crew had eventually produced for her tape. She had thought at the time they seemed confused, a mingling of more than one memory dredged from the depths of her mind. Now it occurred to her that Maggie might have been producing them solely to please her interviewer. At the next meeting, perhaps, she would have reached the critical moment, a shared trauma that would have bonded them permanently. She would have told of the rape twenty years ago – the rape that had left her pregnant with a female child that she hadn’t wanted. Unlike Fry, Maggie’s beliefs hadn’t allowed her to take the abortion option. But Fry hadn’t let her reach that point. She hadn’t needed Maggie Crew any more, or so she had thought.
‘Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘what’s the secret of keeping your memories buried?’
Fry looked up. ‘Avoiding those triggers, I suppose. The ones that set off the memories. The only way is to avoid them.’
‘Maybe.’
Fry studied at him carefully. ‘Had you something particular in mind, Ben?’
‘I’m going to move out of Bridge End Farm, I think.’
‘Oh.’
‘I need to get away from the place. There are too many reminders of the past for me to be comfortable there any more.’
‘But your family are there.’
‘I can visit them. But there comes a time when you have to be on your own. I think it’s come rather late in my case. Anyway, I don’t think Matt and Kate will be sorry to see me move out. They must think I’m in the way, but they’re too polite to say so.’
‘Where will you go?’
For a fleeting moment, Fry had a picture of Ben Cooper living in one of the little flats in the house on Grosvenor Avenue, a flat next to her own.
‘Oh, I expect I’ll find somewhere.’
Fry nodded. The vision had passed instantly. Cooper just wouldn’t fit in among the peeling wallpaper and the grubby carpets.
At present, there were no cattle in the fields at Ringham Edge Farm. The implement sheds had been emptied, the barns cleared, the milking parlour dismantled. Three days ago, the last traces of the work of generations had been laid out in the paddock behind the house and sold off at knock-down prices to the highest bidder. Farmers had come to pick over the pieces – not to buy anything, necessarily, but to see what fragments of a life were left when a man went the way that Warren Leach had gone, and to wonder whose turn it might be next. The two boys, Will and Dougie, had gone back to their mother, and Social Services had found them a new home in the suburbs of Derby. They might never live in the countryside again.
Ben Cooper sensed Fry’s change of mood with some apprehension. He crouched to examine the flowers, which were covered in cellophane and had been tied to one of the stones with string. The writing on the card was faint, but he could see it was from Jenny Weston’s parents. Fry stood outside the circle and watched him.
‘So, Ben,’ she said, ‘if someone came along here after Maggie Crew and before Simon Bevington, who was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘We always thought it must have been someone Jenny trusted, didn’t we?’
‘Another woman seemed a possibility.’
‘Or a Ranger.’
‘Yes, Diane. But it wasn’t a Ranger.’
‘Are we quite sure? Jenny let somebody get too close to her. She would recognize the Ranger’s jacket and feel secure. She would trust a Ranger.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘No.’
Fry seemed to have something squeezed up inside her that was causing her discomfort and had to be released.
‘You know when I was here,’ she said, ‘that night in the quarry with Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington? We’ll never be able to prove who all of those people were.’
‘Not a hope.’
‘But one of them was familiar. The one who attacked me. For a moment, I thought I knew who that was. But unlike you, Ben, I don’t believe in relying on feelings, only on hard evidence. It makes life a lot simpler, sometimes.’
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ said Cooper.
Fry hesitated. Then, uncharacteristically, she seemed to wander off at a tangent again ‘The person who approached Jenny Weston might have been a Ranger, because she would trust him …’
‘But it wasn’t a Ranger,’ repeated Cooper.
‘… and she would trust a police officer too,’ said Fry.
Cooper stared at
her. ‘If the police officer was in uniform, of course,’ he said. But as he said it, he knew it sounded more like a question than a statement.
Fry met his eye for a moment, and he held his breath. He had a sudden fear that he understood her. Was it possible that he and Diane Fry might be close to the same, inevitable conclusion? The thought made Cooper shiver at a premonition of disaster, at a vision of a dark, grinning cloud hovering over his horizon. He could hear the wind in the heather and the rumble of machinery in the limestone quarry outside Cargreave. The sound of the cows munching the grass in the fields below the Virgins seemed very loud.
Uneasily, he watched Fry square her shoulders and push the collar of her jacket further up around her ears. She was staring at the stone circle without seeing it at all – neither the cold reality of its lumps of gritstone, nor the martyred maidens of local folklore.
‘The psychiatric reports said that Maggie Crew would probably never regain her memory for several hours either side of the assault, which is normal in trauma cases,’ she said. ‘Those files were readily available. If you knew that little detail, you might not worry too much about Maggie. Jenny Weston, on the other hand, knew all about Ringham Edge Farm and what went on there. It was Jenny who told the RSPCA what she had seen. Jenny had the photographs, too. She could identify people.’
‘Right.’
‘You’d think Jenny would have told the police, wouldn’t you? Even if it was only to ask advice from an officer she was friendly with.’
‘Maybe,’ said Cooper.
‘And yet there she was that afternoon, back on the moor, in the same vicinity. And she had those photographs with her – the ones she said she was going to hand over as evidence. Why did she have them with her, do you think?’
‘For safety?’
‘Safety? Or was she expecting to meet someone? Someone she could hand the photos to. And might that same someone have decided they couldn’t leave her alive any longer?’
‘But she was only ever a threat to the dog-fighting ring, no one else.’
‘Right. And did you not wonder why they were never raided, Ben?’
‘They stopped meeting at Ringham Edge,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes. Because they knew they were under observation. They knew exactly what was happening, all along.’
‘Did Teasdale say all this, Diane?’
‘Keith Teasdale is saying nothing more than necessary. The only person he’s prepared to implicate is Warren Leach. But we knew Leach was involved, anyway.’ She paused. ‘And, besides, Leach is already dead.’
‘So Teasdale is loyal, then,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes. But it’s a misplaced loyalty.’
Cooper felt Fry’s eyes on him, assessing him, seeing right through him to his innermost thoughts. Suddenly, there was contempt in her face, and her whole body seemed to draw away from him, as if she had seen something she could not bring herself to touch.
‘You’ve always been very big on loyalty yourself, haven’t you, Ben?’ she said.
The accusation made him think of the day of the rugby match, when Todd Weenink had arrived for the match at the last minute. What was it that had made him late the day that Jenny Weston had died?
Then Cooper’s mind slipped back to his room at Bridge End. In a drawer in that room was a vending machine questionnaire form, slipped under some large-scale OS maps and a Peak District caving guide that no one else would ever look at. Todd Weenink hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut about condoms. And he couldn’t spell ‘fruit-flavoured’ either.
But Jenny Weston’s killer was dead.
From South Quarry, the old VW Transporter had finally been winched on to the back of the low loader and delivered to a scrapyard in Edendale, where its radiator, back doors and starter motor had already been removed for spares.
Calvin Lawrence had taken a job as a forecourt attendant at the Fina garage on the Buxton Road, taking people’s money and handing out car-wash tokens. Simon Bevington had discharged himself from hospital and had not been heard of since. He had disappeared into the hills, blown away like a scrap of autumn debris, like another dead leaf hurled into the heather by the gales.
Yet a single wind chime still hung from the branches of the oak tree on the edge of the quarry. It had been left where it was because it was too high for anyone to reach. The chime was cracked and its edges were starting to fray. Its note was a strange, discordant clang. It no longer created peace and harmony. Instead, it tolled for the dead, the damaged, the destroyed and the defeated.
‘Was any of it worth it?’ said Cooper.
Fry laughed. ‘You what?’
‘Did we manage to protect anything that is important to us? Did we achieve justice?’
Fry gave him a cool look. It was the look of a woman who knew that she would forever have a weapon she could use against him, the look of a woman who held him in the palm of her hand.
‘Bear the answer to that in mind when you make your decision, Ben,’ she said.
Then she turned away. Her knowledge gave her power over him now, and there was nothing else she needed to say.
Cooper stroked the top of the nearest stone, drawing a peculiar comfort in the gritty texture, finding a surprising warmth beneath his hand, as if the stones might come back to life at any moment and resume their interrupted dance.
In the late afternoon light, the long shadows made the stones seem to tilt more than ever. They leaned inwards or outwards from the centre of the circle, dipping like a ring of dancers at the start of a barn dance or a Greek mazurka. They seemed to move slowly, almost imperceptibly, in time to the faint stirring of the hair grass and the continuous settling of the dead leaves.
Of course, it wasn’t possible. The stones weren’t moving at all. But if it wasn’t the stones, then it must be the moor itself that was turning around him, wheeling slowly against the sky.
If you wanted to know about justice, you might as well ask the Virgins. The stones had seen it all. They were the only witnesses to the murder of Jenny Weston. So what would their view of justice have been after three and a half thousand years? Would they see it as an irrelevance, a minor casualty of that confusing, pain-filled thing called human life? Had they thought about it deep and hard over the millennia, and had they come to any conclusion?
Ben Cooper would have liked to ask the stones. He wanted to be able to get down on his knees and persuade them to whisper their secrets. He wanted to tell them all about the doubts that lay in the bottom of his heart like a pound of lead shot, like a pocketful of wet rocks.
He would have liked to tell them everything, but he knew they wouldn’t answer. Because the Virgins had made their own mistake once. And now they were punished for ever.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Derbyshire Constabulary and the Peak Park Ranger Service for their willing help in the writing of this book. However, the characters portrayed in its pages are entirely imaginary, and their activities bear no relation to those of any members of the real organizations. I know that many Derbyshire police officers and rangers are heroes in their own way.
So many people have made contributions to the story that this is a real team effort. But in particular I owe thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, without whom none of it would have happened.
Author’s Note
Lines from ‘This is the Sea’ by The Waterboys reproduced by permission of Mike Scott and Edel Music.
About the Author
STEPHEN BOOTH was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He is well known as a breeder of Toggenburg goats and includes among his other interests folkore, the Internet, and walking in the hills of the Peak District, in which his crime novels are set. He lives with his wife, Lesley, in a former Georgian dower house in Nottinghamshire.
www.stephen-booth.com
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published in 2001 by Collins Crime, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS. Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Booth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Dancing With the Virgins Page 43