Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘Is it obvious who we are?’ asked Fry uneasily.

‘No, it’s just the thing to do, if you’re walking out here. It’s a sign of comradeship.’

Fry snorted. Then a lone man passed them, walking slowly, with his head down. He was wearing a worn anorak, and his hair was dark and greasy. Fry’s eyes hardened and her shoulders tensed. The man glanced at them nervously as he passed.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Cooper started to go through the routine with him, but he claimed not to have been in the area before. He let the man go, but Fry stopped when he was a few yards past them.

‘I didn’t like the look of him,’ she said. ‘We ought to check him out properly.’

‘Why? He’s probably just a bird-watcher or something.’

There were views across open fields on either side and the low bankings you could easily walk over. But half a mile further on, the scenery changed. The trail entered a rocky gorge with sheer faces of crumbling limestone. The rock had been hacked into sharp angles by the crude blasting methods of the railway builders. The bramble-covered slopes above them would be impossible to scramble up, and there were lots of places to hide among the tumbled rocks and deep crevices.

They were still some distance from the point where Jenny Weston had tackled the climb on to Ringham Moor. Ahead, there would be police tape and officers posted to prevent them approaching too near to the crime scene.

‘Aren’t we chasing hares?’ asked Cooper.

‘We have to go through the routine.’

‘We ought to be looking at Jenny’s life. Not where she was, but why she was here.’

‘It’s procedure.’

Up ahead was a tunnel, a black shadow across the trail. The glimpse of light and greenery at the far end only emphasized the blackness they had to walk through to reach it. As they entered, the ground underfoot became softer and carved into ruts by bike tyres. In the middle, the walls and roof were panelled with curved planks and buttressed with iron. Water ran steadily down the wooden sides and dripped from the roof. They had to watch for the gleam and flicker of it in the weak light to avoid the splashes.

‘You’re dealing with the earlier victim, aren’t you?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, Maggie Crew.’

‘If it’s the same assailant, I suppose the main hope we’ve got is Crew herself. She’s the only witness.’

‘She’s crucial,’ said Fry. ‘If we’re ever going to get an identification, it will be from her.’

‘Only potentially crucial, I suppose.’

‘Why?’

‘She can’t remember anything. Isn’t that right?’

‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ said Fry.

The tunnel had been driven through the rock face at the centre of the gorge, where pink gneiss showed through the limestone. Ferns clung in patches, and a silver birch had tried to colonize a high ledge. The only sounds were the dripping and their own footsteps, until a hissing roar began behind them. They turned to see a racing cyclist, his head down, his face invisible behind an aerodynamic helmet and wraparound shades. He was well past before they could stop him.

The original chunks of dressed stone in the tunnel walls had been filled in here and there with bricks. The number of small stones that had fallen at each side of the path looked a bit ominous, as if the tunnel was slowly crumbling around them. Behind the boarding, a mass of stone that had rolled down from the limestone face was prevented only by the damp boards and rusted iron from closing the trail completely.

‘What do you mean, it’s not as simple as that?’ asked Cooper.

‘What I mean is that she does have the memories. The current thinking is that she’s burying them, though. Her mind is suppressing them because they’re too upsetting. There’s a blank for several hours either side of the incident, caused by the trauma. But there might be certain triggers, certain circumstances in which the memories will surface. We need to find a trigger. It could just be a sound, a smell, the sight of something she recognizes. We don’t know.’

‘But how are we even going to hope for that — unless we can face her directly with her assailant? Isn’t there another way, Diane?’

She shrugged. ‘The counsellors tried to help, but she got too distressed. So we’re not allowed to pressure her into seeing a psychiatrist to take it any further.’

Now it was starting to get busier, with families out for the afternoon. Cooper and Fry crossed the road and began the ascent to the moor. They stopped to look at the field where the farmworker, Victor McCauley, had been working when he saw Jenny on her bike just after half past one.

They emerged above the remains of the mist, and Cooper stared across the expanse of heather and whinberry that covered the plateau. He wasn’t quite sure about this Diane Fry who talked about triggers and the current thinking. It sounded wrong. He wondered if she had been on a training course recently.

‘Jenny ended up at the Nine Virgins, that way,’ he said. ‘But we don’t know which route she took across the moor.’

‘Whichever way she went, it took nearly three-quarters of an hour from when McCauley saw her.’

‘Yes. So she probably took the long route. Towards the Cat Stones and the Hammond Tower. Then past the top of Ringham Edge Farm.’

‘Let’s go there, then.’

There was no escape from the wind once they started to walk across the moor. The uniformity and lack of distraction in the landscape meant there was no escape from your thoughts, either. Or from the presence of the person you were with.

As they approached the Cat Stones, the wind seemed to double in strength, battering at them from the rocky outcrops. Cooper shivered, and Fry pulled her collar up higher. There was no life on Ringham Moor, apart from the vegetation, itself already turning brown and brittle. The moor was empty right the way across to the outline of the tower, perched above the steep drop on its eastern edge.

‘Maybe it’s a test, Diane,’ said Cooper, after a while.

‘You what?’

‘Putting you on to Maggie Crew. You’ve got the hardest job. Maybe they’re just putting you through the wringer. They want to see whether you come out the other side.’

At first, he didn’t think she was going to answer. Fry walked on a few more yards, her eyes fixed ahead, concentrating on where she was going, oblivious to the fascinations of the landscape around her.

‘Which I will,’ she said. ‘I come through everything.’

Ben Cooper recognized the look of a martyr when he saw one. And Yvonne Leach had that look — the defeated air of a woman worn down by many years of battling against the odds.

But it was more than that. She had an expression that Cooper had seen in the eyes of his own mother so many times. For some reason, there were women who slipped into the role of martyr as if it were their destiny. At one time, Cooper had found the tendency so frustrating in his mother that he had become angry with her, though she was not the person his anger should have been turned against. For years now, he had been drained of the anger. The sight of Mrs Leach brought it all back to him.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Leach. Is your husband around at the moment?’

‘No. I don’t know where he is,’ she said.

‘Perhaps he’s about the farm somewhere?’

‘Perhaps he is.’

She had kept Cooper standing in the yard, advancing from her doorstep so that he had to retreat to a point where he couldn’t see into the house. He noted her defensiveness without surprise. Many of these small hill farmers were used to making do on little money, especially when they had children to raise. But when things became too bad, it was often the women on whom the burden fell; the women were the first to suffer the internal fractures that could tear apart their families and their lives. They always tried to hide it. But there were inadvertent signs — little giveaways that you could learn to see, with practice.