Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

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.