Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘I noticed the Land Rover wasn’t in the yard,’ he said.

‘Maybe he’s gone out, then.’

‘Do you know where, Mrs Leach?’

She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going. Why should he?’

Now Cooper registered the note of defiance, and assessed the woman more carefully. Although her clothes were old, they were clean and neatly pressed. Her hair, streaking to grey, had not seen a hairdresser for some time, but it was brushed and tied neatly back. Cooper realized she had even applied a touch of make-up this morning. Her lips showed two unsteady lines of red, her cheeks traces of powder.

‘If you see your husband, please tell him we’d like to speak to him again,’ he said.

Then Mrs Leach smiled. It was a strangely elated smile, escaping through lips that trembled slightly. Cooper wondered whether she was on the verge of hysteria, a step away from being tipped over the edge. He wanted to stay for a while and talk to her, to tell her to seek medical advice before it was too late. He wanted to tell her that those were the saddest words in the language: ‘too late’. But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t his job.

‘If I see him,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, I’ll tell him if I see him.’

‘And how are the boys?’

She looked surprised, almost unnerved, as if someone had just delivered bad news.

‘What?’

‘Will and Dougie, is that their names? I saw them the other day. A couple of grand lads.’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Leach took a handkerchief from her pocket and began to twist it as she watched Cooper’s face suspiciously.

‘They were tending to a fine-looking calf. They said her name was Doll.’

‘They showed her at Bakewell.’

‘And won a prize, too.’

‘They were that pleased,’ she said. Her voice rose suddenly on the last word, as if she had lost control of her pitch. She screwed up the handkerchief and began to dab at her lips.

‘I’m sure you must be very proud of them.’

Mrs Leach nodded.

‘I suppose they’re at school just now,’ said Cooper.

She made an indecipherable noise through the handkerchief that might have been agreement.

‘How old are they?’

‘Six and nine — no, ten.’

‘Both still at the primary school in Cargreave, then,’ he said.

She nodded again.

‘I suppose Will is going to be off to secondary school next year. Do they go to Matlock or Bakewell from here?’

‘I forget.’

Cooper looked back to where Diane Fry waited impatiently at the gate, eyeing the muck in the yard with distaste. It was only the mud left by the hooves of the cows as they passed through to the milking parlour from the wet fields. But it should have been cleaned up by now. Ringham Edge had the look of a well-maintained farm in other ways — the house and the buildings were in good condition, the tractor he could see in the shed was almost new. But there was the burnt-out pick-up standing abandoned by the shed, and the yard hadn’t been washed clean of mud for days.

‘Is everything all right, Mrs Leach? No problems?’

Yvonne Leach laughed, and then looked at him with astonishment. ‘What is it you want?’ she said.

‘We’re trying to trace the movements of the woman who was killed on the moor yesterday. We think she might have come this way.’

‘Oh?’ She ran her hand across her mouth again, and kept it there for a moment. To hide an inappropriate smile or some other expression; Cooper couldn’t tell. The woman’s eyes certainly weren’t smiling. He began to describe Jenny Weston. He showed Mrs Leach the photo. She took it in her hand and looked at it for a long time. When she handed it back, there was a smear of lipstick on the edge of the print.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I never saw her.’

‘Did you see anybody else come by this way? Yesterday afternoon?’

‘People are always coming by. It’s a right of way, the track there. We take no notice of them, as long as they don’t bother us.’

‘It must have been fairly quiet yesterday, I suppose. Not many walkers.’

‘Yes. Quiet.’

‘I just thought, if it was so quiet, you might have noticed somebody more.’

Yvonne Leach seemed to be losing interest, or was thinking about something else. ‘There was the other one, too. A few weeks ago.’

‘Yes. She was attacked near the Cat Stones, we think. Up by the tower somewhere.’

‘It was me that found her, you know. That time.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘She was in a terrible state. Who would do a thing like that?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t know.’

‘Is it the same man this time?’ she asked. And she covered her lips again. She used both hands this time, as if afraid her mouth was running out of control.

‘I’m afraid we just don’t know,’ said Cooper.

He saw that she had rubbed at her mouth so much that the lipstick had been removed completely, except for a small smudge in one corner of her lip. He turned to walk away. But as he crossed the yard, Cooper looked back and saw Yvonne Leach fold her handkerchief and begin to dab anxiously at her mouth all over again.

It was obvious the woman was in trouble, but what could he do? When he spoke to Warren Leach next, he could mention his wife’s condition, but he couldn’t hold out much hope that the man would listen. He could talk to the Social Services, and say he was concerned about the welfare of the two boys in the household. But he knew his concerns would be a low priority for them — they were overwhelmed with more urgent calls on their time. They were so stretched that they could only respond when something had already happened, when things had gone too far. They acted when it was already too late.

But Ben Cooper understood that. It was what the police did, too.

Diane Fry was relieved that Cooper was quiet for once. Privately, she had no doubt they were wasting their time. The leads would come from elsewhere than from wandering around the landscape. There had to be a link between Jenny Weston’s death and the previous assault — it was no more than half a mile away that Maggie Crew had been attacked among the boulders of the Cat Stones. Maggie and Jenny had been two women alone, unsuspecting. One was unable to describe her assailant; the second was dead. The worst scenario was that the victims had been chosen at random. Stranger murders meant no witness trail, and no motivation. The lack of relationship between victim and killer presented the investigator with a hopeless task.

That was why they needed Maggie Crew. Some day, in some way, she would provide them with an identification. Her memories had to come back.

At the top of the farm track, they met up with DCs Toni Gardner and Danny Boyle, who had been working their way backwards from the stone circle, via the Hammond Tower. They shook their heads at each other. A waste of time, they said. Then they walked back towards the Nine Virgins, where the group of uniformed officers guarded the taped-off scene.

Fry looked at the stones in incomprehension. What was all the fuss about? She could think of lots of better places to come to at night, even if what you wanted to do was take off your clothes and light fires and smoke a bit of cannabis.

‘Kind of small for Stonehenge, isn’t it?’ she said. But Cooper didn’t rise to the bait.

One stone had a flat top, and she found it was big enough to sit on comfortably. But then she remembered some of the traces that the SOCOs had collected from the stones and it occurred to her the flat stone had probably been used for other things than just sitting on. She looked around for Cooper again.

‘The Nine Virgins? You people round here really do have active imaginations, don’t you?’

Still he didn’t respond. After a moment, they headed southwards, to where there was a view down on to Ringham Lees village. Swathes of leaves lined the path, and tiny quartz crystals glittered in the sand like fragments of glass. The birches rattled their dry leaves, and a pair of jays darted at each other among the trees. They could see there were members of the public on the moor now, lots of them. A small, fat man in a green bubble jacket stood by the side of the path and waited for them to draw level. He looked at Fry eagerly.